The Youth: Stephen Crane
I told a seemingly sane man that I got my artistic education on the Bowery, and he said “Oh, really? So they have a school of fine arts there?”
STEPHEN CRANE to JAMES HUNEKER
Stephen Crane, a young reporter of very good family from Newark—his father was a Methodist minister, his mother was a bulwark of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and he liked to boast that during the American Revolution “the Cranes were pretty hot people”—discovered in New York that “the sense of a city is war.” Of course he was carrying the sentiment of his class a bit further than it would have liked. This was his style. In his short life—he was not yet twenty-nine when he died in 1900—he saw much of war in the nineties, that decade of many wars, and he even entertained the brazen conviction that the city of New York behaved in a warlike manner toward many of its citizens. But to old-stock Americans, New York was the shocker. Henry Adams would concentrate all his brilliance in his attempt to describe New York in the new century.
As he came up the bay again, November 5, 1904,… he found the approach more striking than ever—wonderful—unlike anything man had ever seen—and like nothing he had ever much cared to see. The outline of the city became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning. Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its freedom. The cylinder had exploded, and thrown great masses of stone and steam against the sky. The city had the air and movement of hysteria, and the citizens were crying, in every accent of anger and alarm, that the new forces must at any cost be brought under control. Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid.
Henry James, revisiting his native city after an absence of nearly a quarter of a century, was affronted by its democratic vulgarity. He responded eagerly to the vigor of the great harbor—”the restless freedom of the bay … ‘coming’ at you, so to speak, bearing down on you with the full force of a thousand prows of steamers seen exactly on the line of their longitudinal axis.” In The American Scene, the record of his visit, New York was more exciting to write about than it had been in the pale days of “old” New York and Washington Square. “The subject was everywhere—that was the beauty, that was the advantage; it was thrilling, really, to find oneself in the presence of a theme to which everything directly contributed, leaving no touch of experience irrelevant.” But the excitement—to which every old association contributed—would also be harder to get into fiction, as James showed in the thin and even meretricious stories of the “new” New York, like “A Round of Visits.” James was floridly, impressionistically at his best as he described himself in The American Scene reeling about New York in alarm at people eating in the street, Jewish immigrants crowding the lower East Side, everywhere “the inconceivable alien” as “the agency of future ravage.” The organ tones of his late late style sounded out with sonority and wit when he described himself as, really, helpless before the air of “hard prosperity” that the newcomers showed in Central Park, and in the very streets “the consummate monotonous commonness of the pushing male crowd, moving in its dense mass—with the confusion carried to chaos for any intelligence, any perception; a welter of objects and sounds in which relief, detachment, dignity, meaning, perished utterly and lost all rights.”
The impact of New York on his prodigious sensibility made The American Scene a “travel book” like no other. But it was not the novel he had come too late to write. He had missed a whole chapter of American life. And since he had long given up any desire to be a “native” novelist—even of England!—it no longer matters that the author of The Golden Bowl would have found Sister Carrie too crude for comment. But since James as critic was all his life spellbound by the possibilities of fiction, there is a certain wistfulness in “The Lesson of Balzac,” which he read to lecture audiences on his American tour.
“Things” for him are francs and centimes more than any others, and I give up as inscrutable, unfathomable, the nature, the peculiar avidity of his interest in them.… The imagination, as we all know, may be employed up to a certain point in inventing uses for money; but its office beyond that point is surely to make us forget that anything so odious exists. This is what Balzac never forgot; his universe goes on expressing itself for him, to its furthest reaches, on its finest side, in terms of the market.
Nothing James said, or would have liked to say in the face of America’s money-mindedness, so revealed his predicament. In the preface to The Ambassadors for his collected New York edition, he bravely said of his pride in the book: “there is an ideal beauty of goodness the invoked action of which is to raise the artistic faith to its maximum.… The Ambassadors, I confess, wore this glow for me from the beginning to the end.”
The “cylinder” had indeed exploded in New York. New York was now the “environment”—a big new word for writers in the nineties, and one that young Stephen Crane virtually adopted as a talisman. William Dean Howells, who had been settled in New York since 1891 and was among the first to recognize that the professionally casual author of Maggie was a genius—he told his friends that Crane had “sprung into literature fully armed”—said that New York was Crane’s only inspiration.
New York was Crane’s introduction to “real life”—to the “angry class,” as Henry Adams’s distinguished friend John Hay called it. Unlike Dreiser in every respect but their common fascination with the social war, Crane chose to be negative about whatever his class took as gospel—especially the Gospels. He was a thoroughly well bred man, a natural sceptic and iconoclast, who as a reporter on the lower East Side quickly understood the misery and violence and then turned them, with many a colorful adjective, into exemplary tales of the tough new wisdom. “Environment is a tremendous thing in the world and frequently shapes lives regardless,” he wrote, inscribing Maggie to Hamlin Garland. He relished the picturesque colors of the great city as he did the stylistic swagger of the “clever school in literature” made famous by Kipling. He was to renounce this influence, but its irony and knowingness are all over his work. Just as he continually went slumming in order to alarm the summer crowd along the Jersey coast, so he liked above all things to look “bad” in the eyes of his class, to satirize authority, to defend prostitutes in New York’s Tenderloin district against persecution by the police.* As a novelist, he leaned just a little too heavily on the picturesque. As he said, the Bowery gave him his “artistic education.”
Mere sympathy for the miserable did not interest Crane, and certainly not the alternating roles of “success” and “failure” that dominated the uneasy soul of Theodore Dreiser. Crane’s perspective on the immigrant masses festering in New York was from the top looking down. Dreiser’s characters in Sister Carrie, all too much like Dreiser himself, may have reflected the distance stretching from their inarticulate selves to the towers that seemingly contained all the wealth, position, and “romance” in the world. Crane had the easy detachment of young men of good family growing up in the solidly comfortable worlds that once dominated Newark, Port Jervis, Asbury Park. No one else in his turbulent decade would alarm so many elders by his precocity, would to the end seem so irreverently young. At seventeen he was already mildly satiric in reporting “shore news” from the Jersey coast. He naturally saw things at a slant, life as an “episode,” people as humorous constructions. He was a prodigy who rushed through the disorder of his generation too quickly to make out its historic outlines.
The slums of New York announced the perpetual conflict that as a correspondent he pursued on the battlefields of Greece and Cuba. War would be the great news of “his” decade, promoted by press lords like Hearst and Pulitzer. But to the end his heart lay in the small towns (their serenity a façade) that with his sense of mortality he put into his Whilomville Stories, one of them the searing tale of a town’s moral collapse, “The Monster.” There were the porch-lined streets, the maples, the wistful street lamps. Whilomville is, in appearance, the dear little American town from which all decent people come, the overgrown village, leisurely and easy, on which all fables of innocence in America rest.
Crane did not particularly value the experience that led to his making his early reputation with sketches of the Bowery, “An Experiment in Misery,” Maggie, and George’s Mother. “Experiment” was indeed to be the key word to his New York sketches and stories, “episode” to the battle of Chancellorsville in The Red Badge of Courage—a book he thought slight by contrast with his “lines,” the poems he considered wholly innovative and which presented his totally agnostic outlook. The early works about New York were tryouts for a man who was always in a hurry to get down all “the pictures of his time.” Fortunately, he had a genius for rendering the intense succession of moods and effects, for the underlying logic of narrative. So little was he in sympathy with his slum characters that he emphasized their most lurid traits. Maggie displays his gift for spasmodic scenes and effects, but it is as much a cartoon as it is a story. Crane explained in a letter that “the root of Bowery life is a sort of cowardice. Perhaps I mean a lack of ambition or to be willingly knocked flat and accept the licking.”
Good Americans with Crane’s upbringing were unwilling to be knocked flat and accept a licking. Crane did not lend himself to the standard run of Asbury Park comfortableness, to the self-righteousness of the Methodist parsonage and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union conclaves of his childhood. He took a scornful pleasure in saying no. He was always young, for he was convinced that he would die young. He was even more of a fatalist about himself than he was about the misery and violence that he was paid by Pulitzer and Hearst to report. But unlike “the youth” of his most famous work, The Red Badge of Courage, Crane did not regard himself as a man things just happened to. He pitted his own youth against an America grown fat, hypocritical, and self-righteous, and he never doubted that the contest would go against him. He was “smart,” a young daredevil, smilingly defiant in the style of the nineties. He liked to remind people that he was a preacher’s son. Crane’s scorn for the American gods is awesome, for he had no urgent reason to disbelieve them. He just did. His career is the best possible proof that the 1890s—now so easy to prettify—had running through them simultaneous currents of irreverence toward God and the established order. Crane was more sensitive to secret disorder than he was to anything else. H. G. Wells, who bothered to understand Crane all the way as Crane’s solicitous countryman Henry James did not, said at Crane’s death, “He was the expression in literary art of certain enormous repudiations.… It is as if the racial thought and tradition had been razed from his mind and its site plowed and salted.”
Crane recognized the effect of “environment” on himself as well as on East Side paupers. But his real environment was the fin de siècle. Crane embodied its fascination with social breakdown, its naive scientism and belief in mechanism, and its scorn for sexual taboos, especially when intoned by politicians and enforced by corrupt policemen in New York’s Tenderloin district. Without being a willing part of bohemia in New York, he learned from the artists and newspaper illustrators who dominated the “artistic quarters” in New York’s Chelsea district. He was at home with independent-minded writers and illustrators (as he was not with newspaper stars of the period like Richard Harding Davis) who favored the “picturesque” side of city life.
Unlike most bohemians of his generation, unlike the pioneer realists Howells and Hamlin Garland, who befriended him in New York when he had to publish Maggie under a pseudonym and at his own expense, Crane was exceptional. He saw the tempest of his time in a fashion different from everyone else, and he stuck to the evidence of his eyes. He used his stabbing, colorful, thoroughly ironic and cool style as the primary element in which he thought and through which he saw anything at all. Style was primary with him, as it was to be with the Hemingway he often anticipates; Crane is the first of the American modernists in texture as well as thought. (He would have been approaching fifty as the 1920s began.) His self-reliance was absolute, cocky in the proverbial American style, but lightly expressed a sense of doom. He could not adjust himself to official views.
His genius was for dissidence. He naturally saw everything in contradiction to what he was supposed to say. “Of course I am admittedly a savage. I have been known as docile from time to time but only under great social pressure.” He enjoyed his singularity. In 1898 he wrote to a friend:
When I was the mark for every humorist in the country I went ahead; now, when I am the mark for only 50% of the humorists of the country, I go ahead, for I understand that a man is born into this world with his own pair of eyes, and that he is not at all responsible for his vision—he is merely responsible for his quality of personal honesty. To keep close to this personal honesty is my supreme ambition.
“Realism,” whether in eighteenth-century England or nineteenth-century America, was sure of its access to the matter-of-fact. The novel is the bright book of life, D. H. Lawrence was to say, the form nearest our broad human experience. The method is meticulous description of the external world. Dreiser certainly believed this. Crane parodied the “real” world; he did not ape it. He took it seriously only as an occasion for rebuttal. His mind was mordant, fatalistic, with a sense of the ominous running through his everyday perceptions that suggests not the realist’s usual interest in social truth—and sometimes social alleviation—but the difference between Stephen Crane and what the world is supposed to mean. Long before the next century’s chain of wars would prompt a mounting sense that the human will is absurd, Crane, rushing about his little world of war—bestial New York, primitive Mexico, oppressed Cuba, and rebellious Greece—felt a total sense of incongruity between himself and official assurances by state and church that all was well.
Crane was as independent an imagination as the first cubists in painting; he delighted in the conscious “distortion” of the external scene. The distortion was never aimed at correcting other people’s views; Crane sought a pattern harmonious with his instinct for the moment, the breakdown of life into clusters of colored sensations. The 1890s were full of social dissolution and “stormy” with anticipations of greater storms to come. When we consider how much less “free” they were than the 1920s, Crane’s insistence on total independence is all the more remarkable. Crane was the only major American in his time who was part of the symbolist movement, and this without knowing it. He constantly used symbols as absolutes representing the human state, not as merely descriptive terms. He was not even a “realist” in the conventional sense, for he did not credit anything outside himself with objective truth, and he acknowledged as necessity only the need to stick to his own memory. “An artist, I think, is nothing but a powerful memory that can move itself at will through certain experiences sideways and every artist must be in some things powerless as a dead snake.”
Yet Crane’s outlook was instinctively, above all biologically, what others speculatively played with as “determinism.” The old Henry Adams and Mark Twain, the young Theodore Dreiser, thought that their personal disenchantments were sanctioned by the mechanistic theories of the fin de siècle. Crane was more interested in behavior for its own sake. War fascinated him because it released energy, “demonstrated” the unpredictable and crazy-seeming correlation of the human animal to extreme situations. A routine word—or scene—is “altercation.” Behavior (he might have been reading William James’s epochal The Principles of Psychology [1890], but Crane never learned anything from books) is discontinuous. We may be caught like rats in a trap, but in the trap we do not think of ourselves as rats; the will to survive is as interesting to the man “caught” as it is to the storyteller because the human will is continuous with thought and rich in devices. We may be programmed; we do not act as if we were. To think is to imagine oneself free. Every wave in what William James called the stream of consciousness aims at a goal that we identify with ourselves.
Crane, distant from conventional America in everything else, was removed from ordinary realism as he was from the genteel tradition. He said in a letter, “There is nothing to respect in art save one’s own opinion of it.” He said, “I always want to be unmistakable. That to my mind is good writing.” By “unmistakable” he meant physical: “Art is a child of pain.” The writer is rooted in some mysterious disjunction and, basing himself entirely on the truth of his psychic impressions, renders experience in flashes. The subversion of all existing conventions is found first in oneself. Style is a form of subversion, and Crane’s style is as self-consciously personal and defiant as a style can be.
Dreiser was not yet thirty when he published Sister Carrie, but no one could have thought of him as a “young writer.” By the 1890s Henry Adams and Mark Twain were in their sixties, exhausted by family tragedy and every year growing steadily more embittered by the great change in America and the eclipse of what they aggrievedly mourned as their republic. A year after Crane died in the Black Forest, Mark Twain, outraged by the crushing of the Filipino revolt, bitterly wrote “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.”
Everything is prosperous now; everything is just as we should wish it. We have got the Archipelago, and we shall never give it up.… And as for a flag for the Philippine Province, it is easily managed. We can have a special one—our States do it: we can just have our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.
Mentally, Mark Twain had always merged into the American environment, and he was never easy criticizing it. His most despairing shots were reserved for the future to discover. Dreiser was not capable of separating himself from the system he protested.
Crane really stood outside. He went to all the wars, he lived the strenuous life that one of his many enemies, Theodore Roosevelt, preached with his usual bluster, but he laughed at every pretense of an American consensus.† One of his greatest stories, “The Monster,” was to show in the coolest possible terms the moral collapse of a small American town in the face of an extreme situation. Needless to say, the collapse, like the flight under fire he described in The Red Badge, interested him not as a fall from virtue but as mere behavior. So it was with the dangerous life he lived in Florida, where he attached himself to the remarkable woman who kept the “Hotel de Dream,” then joined the filibustering expedition that ended in shipwreck and the ordeal he described in “The Open Boat.” In Florida, in the Cuban fighting, in the Graeco-Turkish War, in England with the remarkable woman to whom he was not married, he was never remotely like anyone else. Dying at twenty-eight, worn out by the excessive turbulence of “his” decade, he was befriended by Henry James as a brilliant, ailing young countryman. Conrad and Wells recognized that the nature of his gift was as singular as his mental independence. He was a prodigy.
Crane’s achievement began so early—he was a reporter at seventeen—that he now seems an adolescent of genius. If in his more florid moments and his fascination with the military life he now reminds one of the young Winston Churchill (three years his junior and a soldier-correspondent in England’s imperial wars), he bears comparison in other respects with an adventurer and desperado of the intellect like Rimbaud. Crane was not so much against established authority as he was just in excess of it. One of his distinguishing traits was his impersonal intellect. His constant air of indifference covered a profound fatalism about the death awaiting not him but present civilization. His telegraphic little poems are syllogisms “demonstrating” over and again that God is really missing. Even his relaxed, surprisingly good-humored Western stories carry the refrain that everything in nature bears “a message—the inconsequence of individual tragedy.”
If I should cast off this tattered coat,
And go free into the mighty sky;
If I should find nothing there
But a vast blue,
Echoless, ignorant—
What then?
It was called the “clever” decade because clever journalists-turned-storytellers, like Kipling, favored a nervy, bantering, vaguely insolent way of calling attention to themselves. Crane wrote with the swagger that was Richard Harding Davis’s only distinction. Kipling the journalist in India always came up with exotic stories but carefully separated the novelties from the eternal verities. The latter were somehow incarnated in the stoicism and loyalty of the military. The English in India were a standing army; they were always fighting or preparing to fight.
Despite the Civil War and the many skirmishes with Indians in Crane’s brief lifetime, America lacked such military presence and tradition. It never confused the military with lasting authority. The middle nineties saw a period of war consciousness and war preparation that led straight to 1914–18 and the chain of wars that has crazed the twentieth century. There was a quarter-century’s peace after 1870–71, but the nineties and after saw nothing but war and preparations for war. Having nearly brought off a war with Great Britain over Venezuela, the United States made war on Spain and on the Filipinos. Greece and Italy fought Turkey, China fought Japan, Japan fought Russia, and the century ended with the British still fighting the Boers.
Crane as a correspondent in the Far West and Mexico observed force at first hand. He was never heard to protest America’s maneuverings against Spain in the name of Cuban “freedom.” He was just a reporter covering a story. What happened to him when he accompanied a filibustering expedition to Cuba at the end of 1896 went into his greatest story, “The Open Boat”; after his ship sank he spent thirty hours in that boat struggling with the waves. “Many a man ought to have a bathtub larger than the boat which here rode upon the sea.” Nothing in Washington’s pious professions about the war in Cuba, which Crane in a state of exhaustion half-heartedly covered less than two years before his death, could have surprised him. Crane’s formal bitterness was always directed at the self-righteousness in which he had been brought up. He would have laughed his head off when President McKinley justified the seizure of the Philippines:
I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance that one night. And one night late it came to me this way.… There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all and to educate the Filipinos and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died.
Crane would not have been overcome with surprise if he had read Henry Cabot Lodge’s exultation over the Spanish-American War: “What a wonderful war it has been. What a Navy we have got & what good fighters our soldiers are. Nothing but victory & at such small cost.” He would have been enchanted with John Hay’s letter from the American embassy in London on July 27, 1898, congratulating Theodore Roosevelt on the war that Roosevelt, as assistant secretary of the Navy, had helped to start: “It has been a splendid little war; begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and spirit, favored by that Fortune which loves the brave. It is now to be concluded, I hope, with that fine good nature, which is, after all, the distinguishing trait of the American character.”
Distinguished intellectuals led by William James formed an Anti-Imperialist League when America in the Philippines conducted what has been called “the bloodiest colonial war (in proportion to population) ever fought by a white power in Asia.” The league charged that “the real firing line is not in the suburbs of Manila. The foe is of our own household. The attempt of 1861 was to divide the country. That of 1899 is to destroy its fundamental principles and noblest ideals.” But James in a private letter admitted of the war against Spain that “the great passion undeniably now is the passion for adventure. We are in so little danger from Spain, that our interest in the war can only be called that in a peculiarly exciting kind of sport.”
Crane certainly believed this, just as he believed with Mark Twain that America, like any other great power, was playing “the great game.” He would have enjoyed Whistler’s flippancy from London: it was “a wonderful and beautiful war. The Spanish were gentlemen.” Although The Red Badge of Courage was published in 1895, before Crane saw war in Cuba and Greece, his novel could not have been written outside the warlike atmosphere and constant rumors of war in the nineties. The “long peace” of the nineteenth century, as it was to be called from the vantage point of the twentieth century, was felt to be over when Crane in ten nights composed his clinical and mocking succession of scenes reporting the responses to war of one youth.
Of course the Civil War was still fiercely remembered and debated when Crane wrote. He owed many details to the Century Company’s Battles and Leaders of the Civil War; a brother owned a set. But he was so objective about his undertaking that after observing action in Greece, he exclaimed that “The Red Badge is all right.” He had been worried enough. “I have spent ten nights writing a story of the war on my own responsibility but I am not sure that my facts are real and the books won’t tell me what I want to know so I must do it all over again, I guess.” Nothing so delighted him as the assurance of old soldiers that Stephen Crane had been in the Civil War himself.
No veteran could have been so coldly removed from the spirit in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes addressed a soldier’s reunion. “Our hearts were touched with fire.” Crane’s heart was touched by war as “the peculiarly exciting kind of sport” that William James called “our interest in the war.… But excitement! Shall we not worship excitement? And after all, what is life for, except for opportunities of excitement?” Although he surely never looked at James’s The Principles of Psychology, Crane submitted “the youth” to war as if war was another example of the scientific psychology just coming in during the nineties. “I got my sense of the rage of conflict on the football field,” he said. Some of the most graphic surprises in The Red Badge are images of war as athletic contest. “The two bodies of troops exchanged blows in the manner of a pair of boxers.” At another point the “contest” becomes a “scrimmage.”
The very title of the novel is a jeer. “He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage.” “The youth,” as he is usually named, is neither better nor worse than any other green soldier exposed to the boredom, the uncertainty, and (suddenly) the extreme peril of war. Henry Fleming enlists as hundreds of thousands of other farm boys enlisted, in order to see a war; he is wept over and prayed over by a mother of standard piety who would like to believe that her son is an exception (a standard mistake). Until he is caught up in hard fighting, the youth sees nothing and says nothing that is outside the general wisdom of the group. He is silly, boastful, ignorant like his mates, knows nothing except what is passed along by them. In his greenness and youthful ignorance he exists as a mockery of the hopes and delusions common to soldiers before battle.
“The youth” is paralleled by “a certain tall soldier”; in the opening pages there is remembered “a certain light-haired girl,” “another and darker girl.” These first epithets rob the characters of personality; they come at the reader as a sequence of dissociated traits. The style is vaguely unsettling. “She had had certain ways of expression that told that her statements on the subject came from a deep conviction.” “At last, however, he had made firm rebellion against this yellow light thrown upon the color of his ambitions.” What can Crane the nimble ironist be up to? The style has the same patronizing emphasis on ignorance, awkwardness, helplessness that one found in Maggie and George’s Mother. Does Crane mean to “position” his characters from such a distance? Does he see nothing more in these fighters for freedom and union than he saw in the wretches of the lower East Side? The answer is that Crane’s passion as an artist is to set up a “situation,” seemingly any situation, that can show people responding to it.
It is the intensity of the response that fascinates Crane; life is an explosion of movement quickly consumed. This requires the most patient and even stolid enumeration, an excruciating absorption in the moment fleeting by. The response to their “environment” on the part of Maggie’s parents, her brother, and her seducer is simply more of the same. Maggie is ultimately a form of pathos ending in suicide. But as the youth in The Red Badge is finally relieved of being part of a “blue demonstration” and thrown into the “furnace” of battle, his responses are alarmingly brought to scale. There is a crescendo of “effects.” The youth is hammered by blows that seem never to cease, and the key to this madness between men of the same country, of the same race, probably of the same opinions, is that everything seems specifically aimed at the youth. Understandably feeling himself guiltless, he cannot understand why the universe onto which he projects all his sensations seems indifferent to him.
The only lapse in Crane’s astonishingly sustained sequence of sensations in The Red Badge is a tendency to smirk at the youth for being astonished by this. But no one ever mimicked the pathetic fallacy with such witty understanding of a soldier’s frantic projections. “Tattered and eternally hungry men” fire “despondent powders”; guns are “surly”; the “battled flag … seemed to be struggling to free itself from an agony”; “the guns squatted in a row like savage chiefs. They argued with abrupt violence. It was a grim pow-wow.” “He could not conciliate the forest.”
Men in battle do transfer their emotions to the guns, the weather, the surrounding landscape. Stephen Crane seems to have been born with the awareness that Henry Adams and Mark Twain bitterly came to near the end of the century. Power has passed from men to their instruments. Of the hundreds of brilliantly unsettling sentences in The Red Badge, none is more characteristic of the 1890s than Crane’s observation in chapter 6 that “the slaves toiling in the temple of this god began to feel rebellion at his harsh tasks.” But of course this is a wholly literary observation, and one made not only in Crane’s highly stylized narrative voice but as a personal reflection. Henry Fleming would not have thought that, and he could not have said it. Crane’s knowing style dominates the novel, and there are only a few snatches of folksy dialogue in which the soldiers speak for themselves (invariably betraying their fear and ignorance). Once the fighting breaks out and the youth realizes to his horror that he is entirely on his own, the sense of fear and entrapment is so graphic, mounts so cruelly, that the youth in his sensations clearly speaks for Crane as much as Crane does for him. Fear not only maddens Henry Fleming, it occupies him. Everything else is blotted out as “bullets began to whistle among the branches and nip at the trees.… It was as if a thousand axes, wee and invisible, were being wielded.” “The fight was lost. The dragons were coming with invincible strides. The army, helpless in the matted thickets and blinded by the overhanging night, was going to be swallowed. War, the red animal, war, the blood-swollen god, would have bloated fill.”
What was Crane’s own “fear”? We know only that it was expressed in a certain militancy; he would never be at a loss for a retort to circumstances, and this, a persistent angle of dissidence, took the form of style. Never as in the nineties was style so obtrusive, so “clever,” so emphatic in marking the fatal distance between men’s concern for their lives and the universe.
From across the river the red eyes were still peering. In the eastern sky there was a yellow patch like a rug laid for the feet of the coming sun; and against it, black and patternlike, loomed the gigantic figure of the colonel on a gigantic horse.
The youth turned, with sudden, livid rage, toward the battlefield. He shook his fist. He seemed about to deliver a philippic.
“Hell—”
The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer.
Crane obviously drew from painting. His admirer Conrad was no doubt right to see Crane as an impressionist and “only an impressionist.” The reflex thinking behind Crane’s elaborate style is that war is just another situation in which human beings display themselves as objects to literary inquiry. What goes on in The Red Badge is a classic end-of-the-century behaviorism. Crane is genially “objective,” persistent in his irony. The youth is put through every possible test. In actual fighting he is shown, like his fellows, to have no control over his actions, and runs away. But he is finally able to rejoin his outfit, to have the minor head wound he receives in a scuffle with a retreating soldier of his own army accepted as a battle wound. He is convulsively brave at the side of his comrades and seizes the enemy’s flag in the final charge. His most significant experiences are of seeing other men dead or dying. His friend the “tall soldier” becomes the “spectral soldier” when, fatally wounded, he staggers in a spasmodic dance before he falls. In the forest “where the high, arching boughs made a chapel,” he stops, “horror-stricken at the sight of a thing.”
He was being looked at by a dead man who was seated with his back against a columnlike tree. The corpse was dressed in a uniform that once had been blue, but was now faded to a melancholy shade of green. The eyes, staring at the youth, had changed to the dull hue to be seen on the side of a dead fish. The mouth was open. Its red had changed to an appalling yellow. Over the gray skin of the face ran little ants. One was trundling some sort of a bundle along the upper lip.
The youth gave a shriek as he confronted the thing.
Every detail piled on the youth’s helpless soul anticipates what Wyndham Lewis said of the Hemingway hero. He is “the man things are done to.” But the youth has no personality, no history, no career outside his reflex responses. He is not only the subject of Crane’s mocking inquiry; he is all too much what Crane had come to think of as the average man caught up in a situation. Of course Crane, tossing the book off in ten nights, called it “an episode,” protesting that it did not express his total view of things as his poems did. He allowed the newspaper and book editor Ripley Hitchcock to cut the book. It was a “situation,” not the Civil War, that enlisted all his attention; although Chancellorsville has been established as the battle in the book, its name is never mentioned. Would historic references have taken The Red Badge out of Crane’s control? Control, in the form of his most picturesque and dominating prose, is clearly Crane’s own passion behind the book.
If the youth is “the man things are done to,” Crane is the man who knows what is being done. Even when the youth “felt carried along by a mob,” he found no support in others but was “exhausted and ill from the monotony of his suffering.” Crane’s similes likening the enraged contestants to reptiles and dragons mock the youth’s fear as much as Crane’s many clinical details pin him down. The individual caught up in the melee is credited with “the acute exasperation of a pestered animal, a well-meaning cow worried by dogs … the swirling battle phantoms … were choking him, stuffing their smoke robes down his parched throat.” Crane’s driving style alone lifts, in the unnerving crescendo of battle, the totally isolated and fear-maddened youth into primitive connection with his surroundings. And Crane’s language in the ecstasy of his genius takes over completely when, exactly halfway through the book, the battle goes mad.
He became aware that the furnace roar of the battle was growing louder.
The youth began to imagine that he had got into the center of the tremendous quarrel, and he could perceive no way out of it. From the mouths of the fleeing men came a thousand wild questions, but no one made answers.
The bugles called to each other like brazen gamecocks.
The orderly sergeant … made attempts to cry out. In his endeavor there was a dreadful earnestness, as if he conceived that one great shriek would make him well.
Crane’s grip on his “hero” does not relent in the famous passage in which the regiment’s charge has reestablished its reputation and the youth finds that he has survived to triumph over his great fear. “He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death.” We know now that Crane originally wrote “it was but the great death—for others.” His coolness about the youth, not unsympathetic but hardly respectful, persists to the end. It is not the youth but what happens to him that engrosses Crane, and we identify with the youth only when the terror of battle becomes our own. We can see why Crane thought of his novel as an “experiment,” since the seeming trivialization of death can only be provisional, a shock effect in Crane’s bantering style. As a novelist he did not have to say, as Crane the poet did, that war is man’s fate, that war is the great negative of freedom and hope. The American army in Cuba astonished Crane by its resemblance to “a well-oiled machine.” To Crane, any self at war, its possibilities mocked by war, must be a clinical experience, an ordeal, a subject for “inquiry.” War “the red animal, the blood-swollen god,” is in the exact nature of things, and just now, man’s definitive experience.
Crane, saying that a writer’s only duty was to “leave pictures of his time,” was a great anticipator. The omens of annihilation are everywhere in another masterpiece, “The Open Boat.” Though it is founded on an actual experience and retains some of the professional jocularity Crane put into his report to a New York newspaper, the story menaces all our easygoing ways by turning the discomfort and anxiety of four men in a ten-foot dinghy, and finally their terror in having to make it to the beach in the heavy surf, into something as concentrated as thirty hours in the dinghy itself. There is humor and fellowship between the oiler and the correspondent as they row together and, with desperate weariness, spell each other at the oars; the injured captain with his arm in a sling gives orders to the cook, who just as routinely repeats the order to bail. But, retaining traditional order even in a dinghy, the men are mocked at every moment by the waves, the birds, the land looming up before them—on which, until the very end, nothing and no one can be seen.
The usual burden of Crane’s poems is that man has nothing and no one in this baffling universe supposedly created and administered by an all-powerful deity. Man runs round and round the world, howling his defiance and despair at the empty sky. But Crane’s “lines,” as he called his poems, are just that; they breathe an air of satisfaction, they seem too easily satisfied with their contemptuous brevity. In “The Open Boat” the universe is not that easily dismissed. It surrounds the four men in the most annihilating expanse of indifference.
Not even in The Red Badge, where the adjectives are piled on to point up the contrast between the soldier’s terror and the unresponsiveness of “nature,” did Crane project so sharply onto surroundings the protest of man’s ultimate helplessness and loneliness in mortal situations.
There was a terrible grace in the move of the waves, and they came in silence, save for the snarling of the crests.
The crest of each of these waves was a hill, from the top of which the men surveyed for a moment a broad tumultuous expanse, shining and wind-riven. It was probably splendid, it was probably glorious, this play of the free sea, wild with lights of emerald and white and amber.
This tower was a giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants.
The sequence of such “ultimate”-sounding sentences is pitiless, crushing. Between sea and sky man knows only this enclosure and is caught. The friendliness between the men in the dinghy could not be more touching—and ultimately more useless. When they are finally pulled to the beach by the one man able and willing to come to their rescue, the rescuer cries, “What’s that?” The correspondent says, “Go.”
In the shallows, face downward, lay the oiler. His forehead touched sand that was periodically, between each wave, clear of the sea.
In his last years, far from home in the Brede Place manor in England where he could live with “Mrs. Stephen Crane” as he could not in God’s own country, Crane went back for material to the small American town, the once-upon-a-time world of the Whilomville Stories. Whilomville was not what we thought it was when we lived in it. The surface of the town (Port Jervis mostly, with a touch of Crane’s old Jersey hangouts) is the legendary routine and rightness of Tom Sawyer’s St. Petersburg and Tom Bailey’s Rivermouth. Although
Whilomville was in no sense a summer resort, the advent of the warm season meant much to it, for then came visitors from the city—people of considerable confidence—alighting upon their country cousins.… The town … drawled and drowsed through long months during which nothing was worse than the white dust which arose behind every vehicle at blinding noon, and nothing was finer than the cool sheen of the hose sprays over the cropped lawns under the many maples in the twilight.
In Whilomville, little Jimmie Trescott knows no greater sorrow than to discover that the Presbyterian Sunday school has decided not to have a tree this Christmas but will spend the money on the poor Chinese. He transfers to another Sunday school and discovers that the Christmas tree will be skipped there, too. How kind and protective are small-town Americans, the salt of the earth, to their less fortunate brothers! It is also made abundantly clear in the Whilomville Stories, and in a story that has no parallel in that collection, “The Monster,” that the dark-skinned people of the earth, who function only as handymen and stealers of watermelons, are charming but absurd. They are irresponsible, like children. But black Henry Johnson bursts into Dr. Trescott’s burning house to save little Jimmie, falls under a rain of chemicals exploding in Dr. Trescott’s laboratory, and loses his face. He becomes a “monster” whom no one would keep, whom everyone is afraid of—except Dr. Trescott, who stolidly repeats to the town’s elders urging him to jettison Henry that “he saved my boy’s life.”
The people in town finally boycott Dr. Trescott and will not come to Mrs. Trescott’s tea party. Once in the lovely summer evening they were a “crowd”; now they are a mob. As Mark Twain said in “The United States of Lyncherdom” (of course he had said it better, playing Colonel Sherburn facing down the mob), “O kind missionary, leave China! come home and convert these Christians!”
All this takes place not on the Bowery, with Maggie’s awful family, but in the perfect American small town, our old home, where once we lived with Tom and Huck. In Whilomville the newfangled electric arc lights throw ominous shadows. Crane the mighty wielder of epithets knows enough to describe the light for its own sake. Everything in this world on the verge of the new century is lighted brilliantly, but this light can show too much.
The wind waved the leaves of the maples, and, high in the air, the blue-burning globes of the arc lights caused the wonderful traceries of leaf shadows on the ground. When the light fell upon the upturned face of a girl, it caused it to glow with a wonderful pallor.… In the shivering light, which gave to the park an effect like a great vaulted hall, the throng swarmed, with a gentle murmur of dresses switching the turf, and with a steady hum of voices.
In this severe and terrible story, a child plays a classic role. A child is the human creature that must be saved at all costs. Henry Johnson, who on his day off strutted the town in lavender trousers, pays the cost and becomes a “monster.” The very word intones Crane’s posthumous world. The people thronging the park on gay summer nights under the electric arc lights look exactly alike. And they are. One Martha alone holds out against the gossip and the fear.
“They say he is perfectly terrible.”
“Oh, I don’t care what everybody says,” said Martha.
“Well, you can’t go against the whole town,” answered Carrie, in sudden sharp defiance.
*The district between Twenty-fourth and Fortieth streets, from Fifth Avenue to Seventh Avenue, was known as the Tenderloin after Captain (later Inspector) Alexander C. Williams, newly transferred there, was quoted as saying: “I’ve had nothing but chuck steak for a long time, and now I’m going to get a little of the tenderloin.”
† As police commissioner of New York, 1895–97, Roosevelt defended a corrupt and brutal policeman, Charles Becker (he was to be electrocuted in 1912 for instigating the murder of a gambler), whom Crane accused of persecuting a prostitute. Crane so angered the Police Department that an attempt was made to “bar” him from New York. Roosevelt the war lover of course admired The Red Badge of Courage. In 1896 he wrote Crane in reference to one of his Western stories, “A Man and Some Others,” “Some day I want you to write another story of the frontiersman and the Mexican Greaser in which the frontiersman shall come out on top; it is more normal that way!” But Roosevelt never forgave Crane for exposing police corruption, and of course the Rough Rider could not like what Crane as a reporter sent back from the Cuban fighting. “I did not see any sign among the fighting men, whether wounded or unwounded, of the very complicated emotions assigned to their kind by some of the realistic modern novelists who have written about battles.”