Burning boy, p.30
Burning Boy, page 30
One afternoon it was demonstrated to me that, in spite of his slight appearance, Stephen was no weakling. We were playing baseball. He was behind the bat. I was legging out a home run past third base and somewhat in a hurry. By some inadvertence I had not seen the ball go in ahead of me by a bare second or two, but I found it at the end of Steve’s arm. The impact was like hitting the end of a wagon tongue. “Sorry, CK, you’re out.” Very casual, but effective. I was out, for the rest of the game.
The tradition among Twin Lakes campers was to produce a commemorative keepsake to mark the time they had spent there—a photograph, a funny poem, whatever struck their fancy. In 1894, with the help of his friend Louis Senger, Crane took on the ambitious task of creating a four-page newspaper, the Pike County Puzzle, which was run off on the presses of the Port Jervis Union after the camping party had left Twin Lakes. It isn’t clear if they worked on it over the course of the month or whipped it up in a frenzied burst of nonstop composition immediately after returning to Port Jervis, as Linson’s remarks would suggest: “Steve and Lou spent one hilarious night in Senger’s home editing this unique literature. In an adjoining room I might have slept two hours.”
However it was composed, the results are indeed hilarious. As a participant in the enterprise, the Union proudly took note of the one-off paper and commended Crane on his good work:
The “Puzzle” from beginning to end is the product of the prolific genius Mr. Crane and all that it contains, including editorials, advertisements, telegraphic dispatches, reading notices and puffs, were written by him.… The editor has clearly aimed to be clever, amusing, funny, satirical, ironical and witty at the expense of his associates (not even sparing himself) and has succeeded in producing a clever burlesque.
Printed in four columns across four maximum-width broadsheet pages and set in type small enough to be read most comfortably with a magnifying glass, the contents of the Puzzle, when reconfigured into book form for volume VIII of the collected works, stretch out over twenty-seven and a half pages. Dated August 28, 1894, the Pike County Puzzle masthead includes the paper’s inspirational motto (attributed to Senger), “HSTR WITH XZOASCVAR,” and in the numerous articles and squibs that follow nearly everyone is mocked, nearly everyone is given a nickname (Wicked Wickham, Stormy Tubbs, Ravenous Pierce), and the pancake-loving Crane, known as Pan-Cake Pete, is later transformed into Signor Pancako Peti in a report entitled “GRAND CONCERT”:
Signor Peti broke his voice across his knees, spliced it simply with a silk handkerchief and sang: “Give Me Back My Whiskey Slings,” with intense emotion and feeling. Next he held it between his thumb and finger in plain sight of the audience, when, presto, it was gone. The wondering multitude gaped when the Signor, passing down the centre aisle, laughed playfully and drew his voice from the left vest pocket of Ontario Bradfield’s sweater. The Signor passed from one feat to another in his dazzling Italian manner, and as the curtain fell for the last time, all united in declaring that they had spent one of the most pleasant, enjoyable, and disastrous evenings of their lives.
That gives a fair idea of the tone, which at its funniest achieves the kind of spirited nonsense found in Lewis Carroll and S. J. Perelman, at its wildest resembles the mashed-up yoking of incongruous elements found in Dada and the pages of Mad, and at its least inventive smacks of the winking sarcasm found in college humor magazines. In the aggregate, the Puzzle is a telling reminder of just how young Crane still was in the summer of 1894, for in spite of all he had accomplished in the past few years, if he had stuck with college and earned his degree at Syracuse, he would have graduated with the senior class just weeks before the summer holiday in Pike County.
What is most appealing about this flood of wacky exuberance are the moments when Crane pokes fun at himself—especially at his own seriousness. In a one-sentence morsel under the headline ACCIDENT, we learn that “As Stephen Crane was traversing the little rope ladder that ascends the right hand side of the cloud-capped pinnacle of his thoughts, he fell and was grievously injured.” Later on, in an advice column filled with questions such as “Do you recommend mixed drinks?,” “Have you ever seen anything of my table manners?,” and “Would you advise me to smile so freely?,” Stephen Crane writes in and asks, “What can I do with my voice?” The answer: “In the spring, Stephen, you can plough with it, but after corn ripens you will have to seek employment in the blue-stone works. We have seen voices like yours used very effectively as cider presses.”
As a rule, the more insane the writing becomes, the more pleasurable it is to read: “As Mr. S. Energetic Brinson was running a lawn mower lightly over his beard, a blade caught and interfered with his features so seriously that … his sister, Miss Charlotte Montague Brinson, the marvelous impersonator of activity, swooned and became paralysed in both arms. It is said that she will not be able to wash dishes for four years.”
And yet, at the same time (to use those words again), in the midst of such widespread merriment, Crane was also brooding about his poems. The manuscript of The Black Riders was sitting in the Boston offices of Copeland and Day, and whether it had been sent to them by Barry or by Crane at Barry’s suggestion, some time had passed, and Crane had received no word about whether they were intending to publish it or not. On or about August 23, while still at Twin Lakes, he sent off a worried note to Boston.
Dear sirs:——
I would like to hear from you concerning my poetry. I wish to have my out-bring all under way by early fall and I have not heard from you in some time. * I am in the dark in regard to your intentions.
Yours very truly
Stephen Crane
There must have been a quick reply, since Crane sent off another letter to them from Hartwood on September ninth, not the least bit pleased by what they had written. We must remember that McClure was now in his fifth month of torturing Crane with his refusal to commit himself on the war novel, and Crane’s frustration had been steadily mounting. The letter from Copeland and Day had demanded a number of changes and cuts, and Mr. Funny-Bones of the Pike County Puzzle, who was equally the author of The Black Riders, wrote back to them in a monumental snit.
Dear sirs:—–We disagree on a multitude of points. In the first place I should absolutely refuse to have my poems printed without many of those which you just as absolutely mark “No.” It seems to me that you cut all the ethical sense out of the book. All the anarchy, perhaps. It is the anarchy which I particularly insist upon. From the poems which you keep you could produce what might be termed a “nice little volume of verse by Stephen Crane” but for me there would be no satisfaction. The ones which refer to God, I believe you condemn altogether. I am obliged to have them in when my book is printed. There are some which I believe unworthy of print. These I herewith enclose. As for the others, I cannot give them up—in the book.
In the second matter, you wish I would write a few score more. It is utterly impossible to me. We would be obliged to come to an agreement upon those that are written.
If my position is impossible to you, I would not be offended at the sending of all the retained lines to the enclosed address. I beg to express my indebtedness to you and remain
Yours sincerely
Stephen Crane
He was still a no one at that point, but this magnificently vituperative letter in defense of his ethical and aesthetic position—the anarchy, the energy, the savage contempt for what is considered “nice”—demonstrates that however keen he was on having his work published, he was willing to forgo publication if the publisher dared to compromise his work. Good for him, but also good for Copeland and Day that they stuck with him and saw the project through to the end. Seven poems were eventually cut (with Crane’s approval), but their absence in no way diminishes the anarchy that courses through The Black Riders from the moment the riders emerge from the sea and begin their wild rush upon the world.
Crack twenty-seven and a half pages of jokes one day, and then, twelve days after that, when you feel yourself backed into a corner, put on your boxing gloves and start punching. For a person who rarely punched, the little man’s right was exceptionally strong.
19
We already know what happens next. Crane comes back to New York in mid-September and continues his freelance work for the Press. In October, Marshall puts him in contact with Irving Bacheller, and a truncated version of the war novel is accepted for serial publication. In November, he finishes George’s Mother. After the truncated version appears in eleven or twelve newspapers around the country in early December, he gives The Red Badge of Courage to Ripley Hitchcock, and eventually the book will be accepted for publication by D. Appleton and Company. Meanwhile, Bacheller has commissioned him to travel west, south, and down to Mexico on a lengthy tour as a newspaper-syndicate reporter, and as Crane packs his bags and prepares to leave for Nebraska by way of Philadelphia and St. Louis in late January 1895, I want to stop for a moment and begin to address some of the issues I raised earlier (here). To do that will require probing more deeply into who Crane was and, to whatever degree possible, discovering what he saw when he stepped back and looked at himself when no one else was in the room.
LOOKING AT OTHERS. The starting point is Crane’s 1892 letter to his friend Tommie Borland and the words “I—I think black is quite good—if—if its yellow and young.” An astonishing number of things are going on here at the same time. Not only does Crane sound guilty (“read these word in a whisper”), and not only is he giving his younger, worshipful friend the lowdown on the secrets of “the ways of a man with the maid,” he is exposing a racist attitude toward black people (black is fine as long as it isn’t too black) and in the same breath denigrating women by reducing them to nothing more than objects of male sexual desire. Crane was twenty when he wrote those words, and for all the adolescent bravura lurking behind them, they raise important questions about who he was and how he regarded those he perceived as different from himself, which encompasses not only black people but American Indians, Asian Indians, the Chinese, Mexicans, and all white European immigrants who were not English-speaking Protestants, in particular the ones who were most visible in 1890s New York: Irish people, Italians, and Jews. As an artist, Crane was a man ahead of his time, but as a man he was of his time as much as any other white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and in that era of Jim Crow and Plessy v. Ferguson, of the double-barreled Chinese Exclusion Act, of massive resistance to southern and eastern European immigration (as represented by the members of JOUAM), of universal anti-Semitism, and of the American cavalry’s final war against the Indians, Crane stands out as a mostly tolerant and egalitarian member of his class, but not even he was altogether immune to its prejudices and deep-in-the-bone tribal assumptions, and here and there those ethnic antagonisms crop up in his work, most blatantly in an early, unpublished piece that was probably written during his semester at Syracuse in 1891, “Greed Rampant,” which came as a shock to me the first time I read it.
A dramatic skit set in Paradise, N.J., and taking place at a time indicated as “the end of it,” the little work sports a cast that includes Mr. John P. St. Peter, a “Crowd of Gentiles,” and a “Mob of Jews.” Mr. St. Peter is dozing comfortably on a small box next to the turnstile at the central gate of his kingdom in Paradise, N.J. A roar of “loud voices raised in wrath, discussions, dissensions, quarrels, bickerings, and the noise of wildly scrambling feet” is heard from without, and in rushes the mob of Jews, comprised of “thirteen clothes dealers” and “two-score pawnbrokers” among various anonymous others. After much pushing, shoving, and fighting, they eventually sit down in the front seats. Next come the Gentiles, who “march in an orderly and modest manner,” and when they discover that all the good seats are occupied by Jews, that “the entire front is a wriggling mass of big noses and diamonds,” they are “grieved.” One of them, described as “thoughtful,” eventually comes up with a plan. Pulling a fountain pen from his pocket, he prints out a sign on a stray piece of cloth, mounts it on a walking stick, and then parades up and down the room with his banner: “JOB LOTS. JOB LOTS. DOWN IN SHEOL, CAPE MAY COUNTY, NEW JERSEY. Selling out at 2 per cent of cost.” The Jews jump at the deal, and as “an avalanche of bargain-hunters” goes pouring out of the room, the Gentiles move up and take over the good seats.
It is impossible to know what prompted Crane to write this three-page farce or what audience he was intending to amuse with it, but I am hard-pressed to imagine that anyone but the most locked-in anti-Semite would feel inclined to laugh. Crane was young, but not so young as to be unaware of what he was doing, yet he sat down and wrote this dismal nonsense, sufficiently pleased with the result to have the manuscript typed up by someone, perhaps with the thought of trying to publish it somewhere. The only positive thing I can say about “Greed Rampant” is how lucky it was for him that it never saw the light of day again until it landed in an archive at the University of Virginia seventy years later.
That was 1891. On July 26, 1896, an article by Howells appeared in the World comparing Crane’s Maggie to the recently published Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, by Jewish author Abraham Cahan, contending that “both of these writers persuade us that they have told the truth” and adding that “I cannot help thinking that we have in him [Cahan] a writer of foreign birth who will do honors to American letters.”* On August 15, Crane wrote to Howells. After thanking him for the kind remarks about his work, he begins the next paragraph by saying, “I would like to know Mr. Cahan. I am reading his book and I am wondering how in the name of Heaven he learned how to do it.” Hardly the words of a man who had an axe to grind against the Jews, and when Crane and Cahan met ten days later at Howells’s summer retreat in Far Rockaway, the encounter so impressed Cahan that he was moved to write about it in his memoirs thirty-two years later. Noting Crane’s thinness and “intelligent appearance,” he went on to observe that “rarely does the talent of a gifted person mirror itself in his face. With Crane, his talent was infused throughout his entire being.”
If nothing else, this tells us that Crane was not someone who shunned Jews as a matter of principle. He admired Cahan’s work, and not only did he welcome the chance to meet the author of Yekl, he initiated the meeting himself by contacting Howells and asking for Cahan’s address. Should we therefore look upon “Greed Rampant” as a youthful aberration and let the matter drop? Mostly yes, I think, but not entirely. Cahan stood out for Crane as a fellow writer of talent, a man worthy of respect, but on the rare occasions when Jewish characters flit through Crane’s work, not one of them stands out from the ethnic stereotypes of the era. Jews are either pawnbrokers or earn their living in the needle trade, just as Italians are either fruit vendors or musicians (e.g., Signor Pancako Peti). In Asbury Park, there are the “brown-skinned sons of India” and the “self-possessed Chinaman,” but in his New York writings the Chinese tend to be remote human blurs, and when they come into the foreground it is only briefly, as when Maggie’s brother is arrested “for assaulting a Chinaman.” The Irish of the tenements are consistently portrayed as drunks (Maggie’s parents), but when Crane traveled to Ireland in 1897, he started paying closer attention and his thinking changed, which led to a series of short, deeply sympathetic articles about life in small Irish villages along the southern coast. Which is to say, he mostly wasn’t paying attention, and unless he did start paying attention—for one reason or another—his reflex was to fall back on the standard biases that dominated the white Protestant view of the world. On the other hand, a thorough reading of his published writings and letters shows that he largely kept himself within the perimeters of that world, and the instances of what I would call lazy thinking about the ones who lived outside the perimeter are so infrequent as to be negligible, statistically irrelevant. Beyond his work, in the jostle and flow of his day-to-day life, he was not given to ranting about Jews, Italians, or anyone else. From all I can gather, he seldom even thought about them.
Ancestors of Crane’s had fought against the Indian allies of the British during the Revolutionary War, and given Crane’s attachment to his family’s history, Indians were of far greater concern to him than the immigrants he crossed paths with in New York. Three sketches from the Sullivan County cycle (1891–92) and three stories written during the last year of his life (“Tales of the Wyoming Valley,” 1899) take on the subject of Indians directly, but those works are all set in the past, most of them in the late eighteenth century, and they tell us little about Crane’s attitude toward Indians in his own lifetime.* At that late date in American history—following the massacre at Wounded Knee in December 1890—it is instructive to recall that the supposedly wise and open-hearted William Dean Howells, who first came to national prominence as the author of Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 campaign biography, could state in print just one month after Wounded Knee that the Sioux were “butchers,” the Cheyennes “idiotic murderers,” and that he longed for the day that the “Indians should have ever been treated otherwise than in severalty”—that is, kept apart from the rest of the American population. Such opinions were still common among whites throughout the country, embraced not only by the common folk but by intellectuals as well. Crane’s thinking was more nuanced and informed, perhaps, but it was also highly ambiguous.
