Burning boy, p.9
Burning Boy, page 9
The second and third things are the articles he wrote during that six-month interval. The piece from January concerns two seven-year-old boys and a thirteen-year-old boy who were charged with filching some brushes and a can of corn from a street stand on lower Broadway. A petty crime of little consequence, which Crane duly reports, but what stands out in the short text is his effort to capture the speech of one of the boys, to learn the language of the New York slums and put it down correctly on the page. It is the language spoken by the characters in Maggie, and here we see Crane beginning to master it. The dialogue in the Sullivan County stories is unliterary, colloquial, and direct—but nothing quite like this:
“Yer see,” said little Alstrumpt, the leader of the gang, to Justice Divver, “we was doin’ notten but playen tag in der street when a blokie wat’s called ‘Petey’ come along and says, ‘Hi, fellers, lets go a swipen.’ We went wid him—see? Youse wants ‘Petey,’ youse do. He did der swipen—not me nor de kids.”
“Who’s Petey?” asked Justice Divver.
“Why he’s ‘Petey’ Larkin, a mug wot lives in Thompson street.”
Whenever it might have been written, “The Broken-Down Van” represents a step forward for Crane and is superior to anything he had written so far. About twenty-five hundred words in length, it tells in exacting detail the story of a traffic jam on an unspecified street in lower Manhattan as two large furniture vans pulled by four horses each are rumbling down the narrow thoroughfare when a wheel on the second van falls off, causing an ever mounting number of cars to come to a halt behind it. In other words, as with much of his early work, it is a story about almost nothing—a banal and fleeting episode of city life—but Crane’s telling is so energetic, borne along by a flood of such marvelously turned sentences, that one reads on with astonished delight, in the same way one listens to a singer blast forth a well-executed aria in an otherwise mundane opera. The long second paragraph, which includes some of the longest sentences Crane ever wrote, deserves to be presented in full—to show what the rapidly developing young writer was now capable of:
They tossed and pitched and proceeded slowly, and a horse car with a red light came up behind. The car was red, and the bullseye light was red, and the driver’s hair was red. He blew his whistle shrilly and slapped the horse’s lines impatiently. Then he whistled again. Then he pounded on the red dash board with his car-hook till the red light trembled. Then a car with a green light crept up behind the car with the red light; and the green driver blew his whistle and pounded on his dash board; and the conductor of the red car seized his strap from his position on the rear platform and rang such a rattling tattoo on the gong over the red driver’s head that the red driver became frantic and stood up on his toes and puffed out his cheeks as if he were playing the trombone in a German street-band and blew his whistle till an imaginative person could see slivers flying from it, and pounded his red dash board till the metal was dented in and the car-hook was bent. And just as the driver of the newly-come car with a blue light began to blow his whistle and pound his dash board and the green conductor began to ring his bell like a demon which drove the green driver mad and made him rise up and blow and pound as no man ever blew or pounded before, which made the red conductor lose the last vestige of control of himself and cause him to bounce up and down on his bell strap as he grasped it with both hands in a wild, maniacal dance, which of course served to drive uncertain Reason from her tottering throne in the red driver, who dropped his whistle and his hook and began to yell, and ki-yi, and whoop harder than the worst personal devil encountered by the sternest of Scotch Presbyterians ever yelled and ki-yied and whooped on the darkest night after the good man had drunk the most hot Scotch whiskey; just then the left-hand forward wheel on the rear van fell off and the axle went down. The van gave a mighty lurch and then swayed and rolled and rocked and stopped; the red driver applied his brake with a jerk and his horses turned out to keep from being crushed between car and van; the other drivers applied their brakes with a jerk and their horses turned out; the two cliff-dwelling men on the shelf half-way up the front of the stranded van began to shout loudly to their brother cliff-dwellers on the forward van; a girl, six years old, with a pail of beer crossed under the red horses’ necks; a boy, eight years old, mounted the red car with the sporting extras of the evening papers; a girl, ten years old, went in front of the van horses with two pails of beer; an unclassified boy poked his finger in the black grease in the hub of the right-hand hind van wheel and began to paint his name on the red landscape on the van’s side; a boy with a little head and big ears examined the white rings on the martingales of the van leaders with a view of stealing them in the confusion; a sixteen-year-old girl without any hat and with a roll of half-finished vests under her arm crossed the front platform of the green car. As she stepped up on to the sidewalk a barber from a ten-cent shop said “Ah! there!” and she answered “smarty!” with withering scorn and went down a side street. A few drops of warm summer rain began to fall.
The point of view is that of a camera mounted on a tripod. The position is fixed, and only what enters the frame of the camera is included in the sketch. First the vans and the men who drive them, followed by the horsecars behind the vans, and when the second van breaks down and traffic stalls, children begin to march into and out of the frame, each one introduced by his or her sex and age—girl, boy, girl, six, eight, ten—but just when a pattern seems to have been established, the author breaks it by introducing the next child as an “unclassified boy” and the one after as a boy with a “little head and big ears,” in that way keeping the reader off-balance and therefore more alert to what is going on, for there are at least two things going on here at the same time: the visual depiction of whatever can be seen within the frame as well as the rhythmic, highly charged language used by the author to convey the images he is showing us. The language is the heartbeat of the text, and it turns what could have been a dull and limited account of a commonplace event—almost a non-event—into a rollicking piece of work. As the text advances, more and more people crowd into the frame, more and more things keep happening, and more and more traffic piles up, leading to sentences such as this one, which could have been inserted by Samuel Beckett into the pages of Watt, written fifty years later: “A car with a white light, a car with a white and red light, a car with a white light and a green bar across it, a car with a blue light and a white circle around it, another car with a red bullseye light and one with a red flat light had come up and stopped.” As frantic efforts are made to repair the wheel, we see the ten-cent barber ogle another young woman, who also draws the amorous attentions of a policeman, but the policeman is on duty and must maintain order, since there are more than a hundred people gathered on the sidewalk by now, so he “left the girl … and made the truckman give over his warlike movement, much to the disgust of the crowd. Then he punched the suspender man in the back with the end of his club and went back to the girl.”
Note that Crane never judges the actions of the people who fall within his view. The larcenous boy who covets the martingales, the lecherous barber who covets the girls, and the over-zealous cop who slugs the suspender man are not subjected to the right-thinking, sermonizing impulses of the period. Crane means to be cool and dispassionate, to keep his distance and not insinuate himself into the actions he is describing, to let the facts speak for themselves. It is a rigorous, third-person stance, and with few exceptions he maintained that stance to the end of his writing life. Combined with the innate lyricism and metaphorical richness of his prose, it produces a curious, destabilizing effect on the reader—a strange effect. In “The Broken-Down Van,” he was beginning to discover that strangeness in himself and, in the process, inching ever closer to establishing his style.
The fourth thing did not happen directly to Crane but to his brother William, a most terrible thing that proved what the citizens of a Yankee town like Port Jervis were capable of, dispelling the myth that acts of racial violence were committed only in the South. On June 2, 1892, four days after Crane left for Asbury Park, Robert Lewis, a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, was pulled from a police wagon and strung up from a maple tree by a mob of two thousand people in front of the Reformed Church in the center of town. William’s house was just opposite, and when he heard the shouting voices across the way, he rushed outside and did what he could to stop the lynching, cutting through the crowd and grabbing hold of the rope just as “the body was going up” (Port Jervis Evening Gazette). Lewis was still alive at that point, and William had apparently saved him, but the crowd was unstoppable and began crying out in unison, “Hang him,” “Hang all the niggers,” at which point William was thrust aside and Lewis was strung up again and hanged until he was well and truly dead. William’s actions had only delayed the inevitable, but he had acted nobly, with an almost impossible heroism, for not many men would have the courage to do what he did: risk his own life to prevent another man’s death by standing up to a frenzied, hate-filled mob. His youngest brother didn’t witness the scene, but there is no question that he heard about it and didn’t forget what he heard. Five years later, he wrote The Monster, which is set in a town modeled on Port Jervis and features a black man as the central character. While there is no outright lynching in the novella, the citizens of Whilomville display an attitude toward justice scarcely different from the one shown by the citizens of Port Jervis on the evening of June 2, 1892. In that same town thirteen years earlier, a black man’s face had been burned off his bones by a backfiring cannon. Now there was this.
4
That summer in Asbury Park, the twenty-year-old Crane fell in love for the first time, not “in the headlong way of seventeen,” as he wrote about one of his boarding school crushes, but in the earnest, passionate way of a young man of twenty in search of a soul mate and companion for the long road ahead. Twenty is not seventeen, but it is still a precariously young age, and however experienced or inexperienced Crane might have been in carnal matters, he was a novice when it came to the protocols of bourgeois courtship, a jittery and awkward suitor, somewhat out of his depth, it would seem, but intense and adoring, a conundrum of tongue-tied reserve and sudden bursts of playfulness. Fortunately for him, his feelings were reciprocated. While nothing came of the romance in the end, Crane’s love was not some momentary delusion or summer fling, and he didn’t abandon his hope of making Lily Brandon Munroe his wife until 1898, six years after they first met.
She was one year older than he was and already married, but unhappily married and already estranged from her husband, Hersey Munroe, a geologist employed as a topographer by the U.S. Geological Survey who was frequently absent from home because of his work. A young woman born into wealth, she had been educated in England and New York City and was spending the summer at the Lake Avenue Hotel in Asbury Park with her mother-in-law and young sister, Dottie. Townley’s office was in the same hotel, and that was where she and Crane met. For the next two months they often went out together in public, riding the carousel at the Hippodrome and walking along the beach and the boardwalk, but what they did together when alone in private is anyone’s guess. I assume that a disappointed and frustrated married woman would have been less coy about physical intimacy than a young, unmarried virgin, but that is only a general observation and tells us nothing about this particular case. Sex is the great blank that sits at the heart of nearly all biographies, and because nothing has been uncovered about Crane’s erotic appetites (except that he frequented prostitutes, as did millions of other men) nor anything about Lily Brandon Munroe’s appetites, one can just as easily imagine that the young Crane stifled his impulses in order to present himself as an honorable gentleman, a man worthy of her love. I somehow doubt it, but that doesn’t mean my doubts aren’t wrong. Speculation aside, what is known for certain is this: that Crane asked Lily to elope with him and that she weighed her decision carefully before rejecting his offer. What is also known is that both families disapproved of a potential marriage between them.
Most of what has come down to us about that summer was recorded in 1948, fifty-six years after the fact, when Lily was no longer Mrs. Munroe but Mrs. George F. Smillie, a seventy-eight-year-old matron who agreed to be questioned by the bibliographer and scholar Ames Williams about her long-ago affair with Crane. Unfortunately, Williams does not quote her directly but only summarizes her remarks, which puts an even greater distance between the then of 1892 and the now of 1948. The account is necessarily one-sided (based on her memories, told from her point of view), but it appears to be honest, or at least not untruthful as set forth within the limits she has imposed on her story, which is a story that resolutely sticks to the surface of things and does not delve into her innermost feelings. But who can blame her for her reticence? She was an old woman by then, and why would she divulge long-guarded personal secrets to a stranger? It is a decorous account, then, but nevertheless an informative one. Among her memories, as reported by Williams:
… not a handsome man, but had remarkable almond-shaped gray eyes … appeared to be frail … a hacking cough … smoked incessantly and usually had a cigarette dangling from his lower lip … drank very little … abjectly poor and undernourished … indifferent to dress … would use his cuffs for making notes … was rather prudish … would comment on the bathing suits worn by the women … did not care for dancing, although he danced several times with Lily. Lily had a good voice and would attract a group of admirers when she sang; Crane discouraged this practice … [they] spent happy hours riding the merry-go-round and pulling the rings, going to Day’s for ice cream (Crane never ate any and Lily felt guilty about squandering his meager income), walking the board walk and observing people. Steve … enjoyed watching the surf with Lily … told her that whenever she saw the ocean she would think of him … [he] hated the gossiping porch-sitters at the hotels … and delighted in shocking them. Steve was very much in love with Lily and she with him, but he seemed to have no concrete plans for the future and was melancholy and anxious in that respect … a troubled spirit seeking happiness which always seemed beyond reach … he once told her that he would not live long. All he wanted was a few years of real happiness. Crane begged Lily to elope with him and she considered the proposal seriously before declining …
Much of what she says turns Crane into a haughty, unappealing character, at once priggish (the women’s bathing suits), jealous (about her singing in front of others), and morose (brooding over his early death), as if, fifty-six years later, she were still rehearsing the various reasons why she had turned down his proposal, and yet how to reconcile her misgivings with this baldly stated fact: Steve was very much in love with Lily and she with him? Why would she fall in love with a glum prude unless he was only occasionally a glum prude and the rest of the time a different, more lovable sort of man? If not, why would she have considered running away with him? Something is missing here, something about who they were together isn’t being told, and more than seventy years after she sat down and talked to Williams, with Lily Brandon Munroe Smillie now long dead, whatever that untold story might have been lies buried in her grave.
More verifiable bits from that summer and beyond. Crane got along well with Lily’s kid sister, Dottie, in the jesting, genial manner that came naturally to him as an uncle of numerous girls (William alone had five daughters), once betting her a necklace that his brother Townley wouldn’t marry for a third time (she won, he lost). On August seventh, about six weeks after meeting Lily, Crane published a humorous sketch in the New York Tribune entitled “The Captain,” which had nothing to do with the Asbury Park reporting he was engaged in that summer. Undoubtedly inspired by his romance with Lily, the piece is written in the present tense, a rare if not unique tactic for Crane in his fictional work, which only underscores how fully he was living in the present at the time—all filled up with it, in thrall to it. The Captain, “a most marvelous and mysterious wit,” is both a member of the village fire department and the skipper of a catboat, which enables him to earn a living by shepherding tourists across the waters of the Sound (not a particular sound, just the Sound). In the sketch, there are four passengers on board that day, a young woman from Baltimore, a young woman from Philadelphia, a young woman from New York, and “‘a smart young man’ from nowhere.” All of the women are Lily in one guise or another. The one from Baltimore (Lily and her husband lived in nearby Washington) speaks “with a soft voice and the slightest Southern accent,” and as she looks up and surveys the sky, she asks the Captain if “a squall” is coming (the first sexual innuendo). The one from Philadelphia banters with him about putting out and starting fires (the second innuendo), and when the hair of the one from New York is drenched in a spray of water, she unfastens it and puts it down. As it “tumbles about her shoulders,” she asks the Captain how she looks. “Looks like the gypsies that camps in the woods back of our house,” he says. “They’re wild, you know” (the third wink). Finally, when the Baltimore girl tries her hand at fishing, she gives the Captain a “bewildering smile” and asks him what he thinks she will catch. “‘Well,’ he answers in a low voice … ‘you might catch some of those men. Ain’t any of them heavy enough to break your line.’” Wishful thinking, perhaps, but when Crane wrote this airy little creampuff he hadn’t yet been turned down by Lily and still had hope.
It is also known that he gave her copies of a number of his stories along with the manuscript of Maggie, that his artist friend David Ericson agreed to paint her portrait but did not finish it for reasons that have never been explained (perhaps Lily had to return to Washington, perhaps Ericson was too busy, perhaps something else), and that Crane was asked to dine at the Brandons’ house in the city. Lily’s well-heeled businessman father had no interest in allowing his married daughter to entangle herself with a lowlife bohemian vagabond, and when Crane began speaking French at the table, having learned that Mr. Brandon was fluent in several languages, Lily’s father cut him down with a blunt, humorless response: “My daughter does not speak French, Mr. Crane.”
