Burning boy, p.12
Burning Boy, page 12
The narrow cross-streets around us were filled with squalid habitations whose denizens almost filled the roadways, and here was material hitherto little used. Crane observed it all with keen and sympathetic, if detached vision. To a certain extent he could enter into an understanding of this submerged populace, and he made it his task to peer beneath the surface. One day he came in, his usually somber face alight, and queried abruptly: “Did you ever see a stone-fight?” When I replied in the negative, he launched into a glowing description of one that he had just seen. A little later that same day the description had been set down on paper, and the first chapter of Maggie was written. As the story, a sordid tale of life in the tenements and the under-world took shape in Crane’s mind, he became enthusiastic, I with him, and we sallied forth into the mean streets and dangerous neighborhoods in search of the local color that would give life to the great work.
Lawrence was the privileged witness of the book’s composition—and of Crane’s composition methods as well. Already during their semester together at Syracuse, he had watched his friend at work, had been able to watch because unlike most writers Crane had little trouble working when other people were in the room with him, a testament to his powers of concentration, which allowed him to carve out a solitary space to hide in even when surrounded by others. As Lawrence tells it:
For a long time he would sit wrapt in thought, devising his next sentence. Not until it had been completely formulated would he put pen to paper. Then he wrote slowly, carefully, in that legible round hand, with every punctuation mark accentuated, that always characterized his manuscripts. Rarely if ever did a word or mark require correction. That sentence completed, he would rise, relight his pipe, ramble around the room or look fixedly out of the windows. Usually he remained silent, wrapt in deep thought, but sometimes he would break into some popular song or bacchanalian ditty and sing a single bar of it over and over again while he waited for his inspiration to come.… Often a single page represented a day’s work and rarely did the output exceed two or three pages. Sometimes he did not dip pen in ink for days at a time. Yet slowly and surely the manuscript grew, and thus Maggie: A Girl of the Streets came into being.
The novelette, or novella, or short novel of seventy-two pages in the Library of America edition could not have been anticipated by anything Crane had written up to that point—nor by anyone else for that matter. The setting would have been familiar to readers of the time (the New York slums) and to a certain degree the bare-bones plot would have been recognized as following the conventions of late-nineteenth-century melodrama (without the uplift of a happy ending), but stylistically the book is a declaration of war, and the effect it creates is that of a tumultuous fever dream, a mental combat zone of violent, mutating grotesques locked in perpetual combat with one another. In the most turbulent passages of the story, those characters are not characters in a novel so much as latter-day incarnations of the seething figures from the bloodiest Icelandic sagas, mythological beings decked out in 1890s costumes, archetypal forces who exist outside of time. Consequently, no addresses are given in the book, no dates are specified, and even the section of town where the protagonists live, Rum Alley, never existed on any map of New York. Scholars and critics have spent more than a century trying to squeeze Maggie into various boxes labeled “realism,” “naturalism,” “impressionism,” and “determinism,” but Crane’s slender book eludes all fixed categories. It is a weird visionary poem, a projection of a young man’s inner life thrust onto an imagined landscape that happens to coincide with a sharply observed New York City which in fact is not New York but a place that exists only in the head of the writer and the reader. That is why the book feels new and modern and why it failed to conform to what was deemed possible in 1893 America. Most people who read Maggie at the time were repulsed by it, including some of the more pious members of Crane’s family, who stashed their copies in the attics of their houses and eventually burned them because they felt the book was offensive, immoral, and beyond the bounds of Christian decency.
To those who are unfamiliar with the contents of the novel, I would suggest a few minutes of homework before opening to the first page. First, have a look at photographs from the period, the numerous surviving images of New York from the 1890s, beginning with How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis’s investigative report on the city’s downtrodden population that appeared at the start of the decade, with its pictures of homeless, ragged boys sleeping in alleyways and secluded corners, young and old female sweatshop workers stitching garments together with needles and thread, the “girl of the tenements” standing alone in the rubble of a vacant lot (a plausible representation of Crane’s Maggie as a child), the woman sitting at a table with six small children “making artificial flowers,” the drunks sprawled out on the dirty floors of police stations, the “seven-cent lodging house” on Pell Street, the outdoor shots of Bottle Alley, Mulberry Bend, and Bandits’ Roost, along with varied glimpses of Chinatown, Jewtown, and the Italian quarter, and after digesting Riis’s photographs of urban poverty, move on to the work of Alice Austen from 1896, with her candid shots of a young bicycle messenger, a postman with a large leather pouch over his shoulder pulling letters out of a mailbox, a street sweeper in his white uniform holding a broom in his hands and wearing a regulation white pith helmet on his head, and a burly policeman in a long overcoat with his hands behind his back, standing alone on a cobbled street. Then turn to Alfred Stieglitz’s 1892 photograph “The Terminal,” which presents the cluttered, teeming vigor of a city thoroughfare with a horse-drawn streetcar in the center, the same kind of vehicle that figures in “The Broken-Down Van” and surfaced again in Maggie. Push on to the night spots, theaters, and dime museums of the Bowery, the Equitable Life Building, the New York Tribune Building, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the famous image of ice-skaters in Central Park with the immense, castle-like Dakota apartment building looming behind them. These pictures are the documentary evidence, the visual reality of the world depicted in Crane’s book, and it helps to look at them in order to attain some tangible understanding of that world, but knowing the historical setting is not enough to prepare oneself for the shock of Maggie. Photographs have their uses, but when it comes to the evocative power of images, the spirit of Crane’s first book can best be found in the nightmare canvases and etchings of the deaf and aging Goya, in particular the Black Paintings (Fight with Cudgels, Women Laughing, Witches’ Sabbath, Two Old Men Eating Soup, Saturn Devouring His Son) and the human horrors and fantasies captured in Los Caprichos and The Disasters of War. One can be sure that Crane himself never thought of it, but whenever I look at the forty-third Capricho, I can’t help seeing it as a portrait of his state of mind while he was working on his novel. A man sitting alone at a table has fallen asleep with his head resting in his arms as a cohort of ghoulish specters gathers behind him. The caption says: “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.”
The first monster we meet is a boy named Jimmie, who holds center stage as the book begins:
A very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honor of Rum Alley. He was throwing stones at howling urchins from Devil’s Row who were circling madly about the heap and pelting at him.
His infantile countenance was livid with fury. His small body was writhing in the delivery of great crimson oaths.
“Run, Jimmie, run! Deh’ll get yehs,” screamed a retreating Rum Alley child.
“Naw,” responded Jimmie with a valiant roar, “dese micks can’t make me run.”
Howls of renewed wrath went up from Devil’s Row throats. Tattered gamins on the right made a furious assault on the gravel heap. On their small, convulsed faces there shone the grins of true assassins. As they charged, they threw stones and cursed in shrill chorus.
The little champion of Rum Alley stumbled precipitately down the other side. His coat had been torn to shreds in a scuffle, and his hat was gone. He had bruises on twenty parts of his body, and blood was dripping from a cut in his head. His wan features wore a look of a tiny, insane demon.
The entire project of the book is contained in these opening sentences. The savage fight between the two camps of warring boys is simultaneously told through the rhetorical inflations used to describe their combat (chivalric epithets such as “honor,” “valiant,” and “champion,” coupled with bristling, amped-up verbs, adjectives, and tropes such as “great crimson oaths,” “renewed wrath,” “convulsed faces,” “the grins of true assassins,” “cursed in shrill chorus,” “tiny, insane demon”) and the rhetorical deflations of the gutter slang used by the combatants (“Naw … dese micks can’t make me run”), which merge into an authorial stance of ironic detachment, the same distancing effect to be found in the early stories of Joyce and Hemingway, the novels of Camus, and the work of countless other writers of the next century. Crane was the first to establish that tone. He surveys the carnage wrought by his characters with the steady eye of a war correspondent, turning a potentially hysterical, out-of-control scene into a starkly delineated portrait of human actions, and because he doesn’t flinch at any point in the nineteen chapters of the narrative, his book breaks new ground, departing from both the plodding, exhaustive naturalism of Zola and the mild-mannered realism of Howells to establish a literature of pure telling, with no social analysis, no calls for reform, and no psychological reflections to explain why the characters do what they do. They simply act, and Crane tells. For the first time in American fiction, the reader is not told what to think—only to experience what happens in the book and then to draw his or her own conclusions.*
The Goya-like mayhem continues to the end of the first chapter and then goes on, unrelenting, through the second and third. The stone fight devolves into a painful rout as Jimmie’s allies back off from the superior forces of the Devil’s Row children, abandoning Jimmie to battle on alone, surrounded by his enemies at the top of the gravel heap. A stone is smashed into his mouth, blood flows, tears fall down his face, his legs “tremble and turn weak,” and his “roaring curses” subside to “blasphemous chatter,” but just when he is about to be pummeled into submission, along comes an older boy named Pete, “a lad of sixteen years, although the chronic sneer of an ideal manhood already sat upon his lips.” Pete apparently knows Jimmie, and when he sees what is happening to his little friend, he says, “Ah, what deh hell” and clobbers one of the Devil’s Row boys on the back of the head. The boy falls down, lets out a “hoarse, tremendous howl,” and then runs off to a safe distance, followed by the other members of his gang. The Rum Alley boys step forward again, and no sooner does one of them start bragging that “we blokies kin lick deh hull damn Row” than Jimmie turns on his comrade for having left him to carry on the fight by himself. “Youse kids makes me tired,” he says, and a moment later he and the other boy (Billie) begin a fresh fight of their own. Pete yells out some words of encouragement, “Smash ’im, Jimmie, kick de damn guts out of ’im,” as he watches “the two little boys fighting in the modes of four thousand years ago”—a pointed remark, signaling that even if the book is set in 1890s New York, it is also set in the ancient, buried realm of eternal human conflict. As the fight between Jimmie and Billie rages on, everyone suddenly scatters because Jimmie’s father has been seen walking down the street in their direction, but the young battlers are too absorbed in trying to kill each other to have noticed. The “man with sullen eyes” approaches, “carrying a dinner pail and smoking an apple-wood pipe,” and when he sees the scuffle, and then sees that his son is one of the scufflers rolling around on the ground, he bellows forth a harsh reprimand, “Here, you Jim, git up now, while I belt yer life out, you damned disorderly brat,” and then proceeds “to kick the chaotic mass on the ground.” Billie, booted in the head, painfully disentangles himself from Jimmie and totters off, “damning.” When Jimmie climbs to his feet, he doesn’t apologize to his father but begins “to curse him.” His father responds by delivering a fierce kick and tells the boy in a loud, belligerent voice to “stop yer jawin’, or I’ll lam the everlasting head off yehs.” They walk home, with Jimmie trailing a dozen feet behind, swearing to himself because “he felt that it was a degradation for one who aimed to be some vague soldier, or a man of blood with some sort of sublime license, to be taken home by a father.”
The second chapter begins with father and son approaching their neighborhood, which is described not in the language of nineteenth-century novels but in the allegorical tones of a medieval mystery play as “a dark region,” and an instant later Crane’s eye zeroes in on a single part of that region, the building where the boy and the man and the other members of the Johnson family live, which is strangely and metaphorically referred to as “a careening building,” as if the bricks were alive and drunkenly on the move, and again as a quasi-animate structure in the final sentence of the chapter’s first paragraph: “The building quivered and creaked from the weight of humanity stamping about in its bowels.” Between those first and last sentences, the author’s roving eye stops to observe assorted particulars: “In the street infants played or fought with other infants or sat stupidly in the way of vehicles. Formidable women, with uncombed hair and disordered dress, gossiped while leaning on railings, or screamed in frantic quarrels. Withered persons, in curious postures of submission to something, sat smoking pipes in obscure corners.” One can see the sentence-by-sentence method of composition that Frederic Lawrence referred to while watching Crane write. The prose doesn’t rush forward in a steady flow of narrative incident but rather starts up, stops with the period, and starts up again, as if each sentence were a small work in itself, a separate photograph or drawing to be contemplated for a moment before the next one replaces it—what one might call a cinematic style before the language of movies had been invented. “Curious postures of submission to something” is memorable. “Sat stupidly in the way of vehicles” is more ambiguous, since it is hard to tell if Crane means “in the path of vehicles” or “in the manner of vehicles,” but if his earlier title “The Way in Sullivan County” offers any sign of his intentions, then the altogether surprising “manner of” would be the correct reading, though even if it isn’t, “path of” is still a potent image, and it contributes significantly to the world presented in this paragraph, the “dark region” that resembles nothing so much as the world of the Black Paintings.
In the next paragraph, we meet Maggie for the first time, “a small ragged girl” who happens to be Jimmie’s younger sister and the daughter of the brute with the lunch pail and the apple-wood pipe. She is out on the street in front of the building dragging along her squirming, recalcitrant little brother, Tommie, and when “she jerked the baby’s arm impatiently,” he falls on his face and howls. She yanks him back to his feet and a moment later catches sight of her father and Jimmie approaching. Alarmed by the condition of “the blood-covered boy,” she lashes out at her brother.
“Youse allus fightin’, Jimmie, an’ yeh knows it puts mudder out when yehs come home half dead, an’ it’s like we’ll all get a poundin’.”
She began to weep. The babe threw back his head and roared at his prospects.
“Ah, what deh hell!” cried Jimmie. “Shut up er I’ll smack yer mout’. See?”
As his sister continued her lamentations, he suddenly swore and struck her. The little girl reeled and, recovering herself, burst into tears and quaveringly cursed him. As she slowly retreated her brother advanced dealing her cuffs. The father heard and turned about.
“Stop that, Jim, d’yeh hear? Leave yer sister alone on the street. It’s like I can never beat any sense into yer damn wooden head.”
The implication being that it’s all right for Jimmie to knock around his sister indoors, but he mustn’t do it in public, where other people can see him. Five pages into the book, we have already encountered the violence of the world Crane has imagined. Now, for the first time, we have seen its hypocrisy. In the next pages, we will be exposed to its self-pity as elaborated in the person of Maggie and Jimmie’s mother. It is a deadly combination—violence, hypocrisy, and self-pity—and it conspires in the end to crush the soul and turn supposedly evolved human beings into savages. But such are the precepts that sustain the inhabitants of Rum Alley from one generation to the next, and the most chilling thing about it is that it is driven by its own irrefutable logic.
The father and the three children go inside, mount the dark stairway, and walk “along cold, gloomy halls” until the father “pushed open the door and they entered a lighted room in which a large woman was rampant.”
Rampant, as defined in the American Heritage Dictionary: “1. Extending unchecked; unrestrained. 2. Characterized by uncontrolled violence, extravagance, or lack of restraint.”
In the hundreds of thousands if not millions of pages I have read over the course of my life, not once outside of Crane’s book have I ever come across a man, a woman, or a character in a novel referred to as “rampant.” Odd as that word might be, however, it fits the person it describes.
Of all the human savages in Maggie, the mother is the most savage, the most unstoppable, the most fearsome. The moment she sees Jimmie’s battered face and understands that he has been fighting again, she goes after him, in the process accidentally knocking down baby Tommie, who flies into a table leg and bangs his shins. She grabs hold of Jimmie, shakes him “until he rattled,” and drags him to “an unholy sink,” where she scrubs his wounds with such force that the boy screams in pain. The father, annoyed by Jimmie’s cries, tells her to ease up. She ignores him, goes on scrubbing the boy’s face with accelerated vigor and cruelty, finishes the job, and then tosses the twice-battered Jimmie into a corner. At that point: “The wife put her immense hands on her hips and with a chieftain-like stride approached her husband.”
