Burning boy, p.37
Burning Boy, page 37
The one thing that deeply pleases me in my literary life—brief and inglorious as it is—is the fact that men of sense believe me to be sincere. “Maggie,” published in paper covers, made me the friendship of Hamlin Garland and W. D. Howells, and the one thing that makes my life worth living in the midst of all this abuse and ridicule is the consciousness that never for an instant have those friendships at all diminished. Personally I am aware that my work does not amount to a string of dried beans—I always calmly admit it. But I also know that I do the best that is in me, without regard to cheers or damnation. When I was the mark for every humorist in the country I went ahead, and now, when I am the mark for only 50 per cent of the humorists in the country, I go ahead, for I understand that a man is born into the world with his own pair of eyes and he is not at all responsible for his quality of personal honesty. To keep close to my honesty is my supreme ambition. There is a sublime egotism in talking of honesty. I, however, do not say that I am honest. I merely say that I am as nearly honest as a weak mental machinery will allow. This aim in life struck me as being the only thing worth while. A man is sure to fail at it, but there is something in the failure.
Not responsible. At first glance, a puzzling statement—implying that a person is not accountable for his own behavior—but ultimately (I think) a defense of an inborn moral imperative to conduct one’s life as honestly as he can, which is not a trait granted to all men but only to some, himself included. We know that Crane wobbled from time to time, but we also know that in the face of “cheers or damnation,” he held his ground with steadfast equanimity, not allowing the cheers of praise to swell his ego with the poison of self-aggrandizement nor the howls of damnation to crush his spirit. He simply went ahead, and he continued going ahead with his eyes fixed on the road until death stopped him five years later.
22
As he reacclimated himself to New York City, Crane entered a fallow period in which his output dropped off for a while, at least in comparison to the frenetic pace he had kept up throughout 1894. No doubt he was exhausted, both mentally and physically, but in terms of his work, this period was less a slump or a falling off than a time for regrouping—the case of a young writer who has come to a crossroads and isn’t quite sure which path to follow next. After his return, the articles he had written about Mexico began appearing in various newspapers around the country, but Crane took on no more journalistic assignments, which must have meant that his purse was momentarily less empty than usual. That spring was important, however, for even if he left little behind to show for it, those months mark the beginning of a gradual turn toward the short story as the medium best suited to his inclinations and disposition as a writer. Until then, he had merely dabbled in stories, but bit by bit they became a serious enterprise for him, and before long they were the heart and substance of his work.
Still living under the spell of The Red Badge of Courage, he wrote two stories that spring, both of them set in the Civil War, in much the same way that the spell of Maggie had induced him to write the Baby Stories in the afterglow of that book’s publication. The first one, “A Grey Sleeve,” is something of a botch. Well written, yes, but given what the story is about—a Northern soldier and a young woman from the South begin to fall for each other, hinting at further romantic developments after the war is over—it is probably the most sentimental and conventional piece of fiction Crane ever wrote, which could have meant, after all, that the contents of his purse were dwindling. We do know that Crane struggled mightily to finish it, perhaps from physical and mental exhaustion, perhaps because he had trouble believing in the story itself, perhaps both. After coming to the end of the first part, he said to his roommate Greene, “Ned, I’m all written out, my mind’s a blank. I can’t write anymore. I don’t believe I’ll ever write again. I’m through.” Early the next year, after the story had been syndicated by Bacheller, Crane sent the printed newspaper version to Nellie Crouse but forewarned her: “It is not in any sense a good story.” When she wrote back telling him that she had liked it, he answered, “It is good that you like ‘A Grey Sleeve.’ Of course, they are a pair of idiots. But yet there is something charming in their childish faith in each other. That is all I intended to say.”
The second story, on the other hand, “A Mystery of Heroism,” represents a startling breakthrough. It was as if Crane had chanced upon a key, and when he discovered that the key slipped into the lock he had unconsciously designed for it, a door sprang open, and once he stepped inside, he found a new way of thinking about narrative, which in effect was no different from finding a new way to breathe. His lungs were compromised, after all, and the rigors of long-distance running put an undue strain on his body. The short burst was more in step with his impulses as a writer (lapidary, episodic, swift), creating a breath-rhythm that allowed him to release the full force of his spiritual and somatic energies, and from then on all of his best work would be accomplished in one of several lengths of sprint: the sixty-yard dash (under ten pages), the hundred-yard dash (ten to twenty pages), the two-hundred-yard dash (twenty to forty pages), and the longer quarter-mile run (forty to sixty pages), which he managed to pull off just twice—with the forty-two-page “War Memories” and the fifty-seven pages of The Monster.
In some respects, “A Mystery of Heroism” can be looked upon as a nine-page version of The Red Badge of Courage. There is a subtitle similar to the one Crane used for the novel, A Detail of an American Battle (just a hairsbreadth off from An Episode of the American Civil War), and a number of the tropes he employed earlier are used again with equal effect, as when the company is described as a “long animal-like thing” that turns its “four hundred eyes” on the protagonist, Fred Collins, or when the “gentle little meadow” where the skirmish is being fought is transformed into “the object of the red hate of the shells.” Most important—following the example of the novel—the action is set exclusively on the battlefield, in the midst of heavy combat.
Yet in many other ways, the story is markedly different from the novel. For one thing, the language is flatter and more concise, more propulsive and at the same time more restrained, and because the number of elements is even further reduced, each one stands out in sharp relief against the mayhem in the background, rotating from one to the other in the manner of a tautly composed fugue. What becomes abundantly clear in retrospect—but only in retrospect—is how slyly Crane introduces the main character of the story, who first appears in such a fleeting, offhanded manner that one assumes he is of little significance, but bit by bit, after being mentioned and then dropped a couple times as the battle rages on through the first three and a half pages, he begins to command center stage, and an actor with little more than a walk-on part emerges as the star of the show by the second act. In Red Badge, Henry Fleming makes his first appearance early in the first chapter and from then on dominates all the subsequent action, but in the shorter work Crane takes his time before letting us in on his secret, and by means of this unexpected delaying tactic he manages to convince us that his main character is a no one, the quintessential anyone, which is the ultimate point of the story, never announced as such but there for all to see—in retrospect.
Fred Collins is thirsty. In the second paragraph, even as shells are exploding around him, we hear him say, “Thunder, I wisht I had a drink. Ain’t there any water round here?” and then, after delivering those two sentences, Collins evaporates out of the scene as the noise and chaos roar on. A house in the meadow directly in front of A Company is “blown … to fragments,” there is loud scuffling in the woods with “the crashing of infantry volleys,” soldiers are shot, wounded, laid flat, killed, and an injured lieutenant on horseback holds “his right arm carefully in his left hand … as if this arm were not at all a part of him, but belonged to another man.” After two pages of hellish combat, Collins suddenly reappears: “Some comrades joked Collins about his thirst. ‘Well, if yeh want a drink so bad, why don’t yeh go get it?’” Collins replies, “Well, I will in a minnet if you don’t shut up,” and then he promptly vanishes from the text again. Another page goes by, during which the wounded lieutenant on horseback is hit again after riding into the meadow and can now be seen “lying face downward with a stirruped foot stretched across the body of his dead horse.” At that point, the movement of the story finally shifts over to Collins—first, engaged in an argument with his fellow soldiers, who are continuing to taunt him for not having the guts to risk his life by going off to look for water; second, approaching his commanding officers (a captain and a colonel) and requesting permission “to go git some water from that there well over yonder.” The officers try to discourage him, knowing how dangerous it would be to attempt such a thing, but Collins is adamant, and when they finally give in to his request, it still isn’t clear to them if he wants to go or not, which is also true of Collins himself by now, who has come to understand that he has no idea why he has chosen to embark on this absurd mission. As he is about to leave, the colonel calls after him and says: “Take some of the other boys’ canteens with you an’ hurry back now.”
So Collins begins his fraught and ridiculous journey toward the well that stands beside the destroyed house in the meadow, heading straight into the thick of ferocious artillery fire with half a dozen canteens dangling from his shoulders and clanking against his body. One of his comrades observes, “Well, sir, if that ain’t th’ dardnest thing. I never thought Fred Collins had the blood in him for that kind of business.”
The focus of the narrative turns inward at that point, and as the befuddled Collins advances toward his goal, he begins thinking about the subject announced in the title of the story, the same subject that had bedeviled the youth in The Red Badge of Courage, but here it is treated from an entirely different emotional perspective, for other than the fact that they are both soldiers, Fred Collins and Henry Fleming have nothing in common.
It seemed to him supernaturally strange that he had allowed his mind to maneuver his body into such a situation. He understood that it might be called dramatically great.
However, he had no full appreciation of anything excepting that he was actually conscious of being dazed. He could feel his dulled mind groping after the form and color of this incident.
Too, he wondered why he did not feel some keen agony of fear cutting his sense like a knife. He wondered at this because human expression had said loudly for centuries that men should feel afraid of certain things and that all men who did not feel this fear were phenomena, heroes.
He was then a hero. He suffered that disappointment which we would all have if we discovered that we were ourselves capable of those deeds which we most admire in history and legend. This, then, was a hero. After all, heroes were not much.
No, it could not be true. He was not a hero. Heroes had no shame in their lives and, as for him, he remembered borrowing fifteen dollars from a friend and promising to pay it back the next day, and then avoiding that friend for ten months. When at home his mother had aroused him for the early labor of his life on the farm, it had often been his fashion to be irritable, childish, diabolical, and his mother had died since he had come to war.
He saw that in this matter of the well, the canteens, the shells, he was an intruder in the land of fine deeds.
From then on, the story devolves into a grim comedy of mishaps, frustrations, and grotesque bungles, a tragic farce that strikes a new note in Crane’s work and by the last sentence leaves the reader suspended between an urge to laugh and a state of horrified wonder at the inanities of war—or perhaps just the inanities of life, for in Crane war is always a continuation of life (not politics) by other means.
With the noise of combat resounding in his head—as if “two demon fingers were pressed into his ears”—and the ground shaking underfoot from the impact of falling shells, Collins eventually reaches the house. When he lowers one of the canteens into the well, however, the water comes in “slowly … with an indolent gurgle,” and because that “maddening slowness” is putting him at ever greater risk, he abandons his efforts with the canteens and instead decides to fill up the bucket, which is attached to “a length of rusty chain,” but even then there are difficulties, and with the bucket knocking against the inner walls of the well as he hoists it up, some of the water spills out. Deeply terrified by now, Collins begins to make his way back to the A Company line, “anticipating a blow that would whirl him around and down. He would fall as he had seen other men fall, the life knocked out of them so suddenly that their knees were no more quick to touch the ground than their heads.” He runs for dear life, lugging the heavy bucket as he crosses the “terrible field … in the manner of a farmer chased out of a dairy by a bull,” but before he can get to the “impossible star” of the A Company line looming before him, he comes upon the fallen artillery officer lying in the meadow, whose groans are drowned out in “the tempest of sound” created by the bullets and exploding shells. Summoning all his strength, the officer asks Collins for a drink of water, and from that moment until the end of the story, Crane packs an entire universe of misadventures into a single page:
“I can’t,” he screamed, and in this reply was a full description of his quaking apprehension. His cap was gone and his hair was riotous. His clothes made it appear that he had been dragged over the ground by his heels. He ran on.
The officer’s head sank down and one elbow crooked. His foot in its brass-bound stirrup still stretched over the body of his horse and the other leg was under the steed.
But Collins turned. He came dashing back. His face had now turned grey and in his eyes was all terror. “Here it is! Here it is!”
The officer was as a man gone in drink. His arm bended like a twig. His head drooped as if his neck was of willow. He was sinking to the ground, to lie face downward.
Collins grabbed him by the shoulder. “Here it is. Here’s your drink. Turn over! Turn over, man, for God’s sake!”
With Collins hauling at his shoulder, the officer twisted his body and fell with his face turned toward that region where lived the unspeakable noises of the swirling missiles. There was the faintest shadow of a smile on his lips as he looked at Collins. He gave a sigh, a little primitive breath like that from a child.
Collins tried to hold the bucket steadily, but his shaking hands caused the water to splash all over the face of the dying man. Then he jerked it away and ran on.
The regiment gave him a welcoming roar. The grimed faces were wrinkled in laughter.
His captain waved the bucket away. “Give it to the men!”
The two genial, sky-larking young lieutenants were the first to gain possession of it. They played over it in their fashion.
When one tried to drink the other teasingly knocked his elbow. “Don’t, Billie! You’ll make me spill it,” said the one. The other laughed.
Suddenly there was an oath, the thud of wood on the ground, and a swift murmur of astonishment from the ranks. The two lieutenants glared at each other. The bucket lay on the ground empty.
Crane says not a word about it, but the added irony that emerges with the final sentence harks back to the beginning of the story. Fred Collins is half mad with thirst. He risks life and limb to fetch some water to appease that thirst, but even after he has found the water, events conspire against him, and not once does he manage to take a drink himself.
* * *
In mid-June, not long after he resettled in New York, Crane was finally offered a contract for The Red Badge of Courage from Appleton. It was a notably unfair agreement, but he was still a newcomer to the world of commercial publishing and did not raise any objections. A ten percent royalty to be paid once a year—as opposed to the standard twice a year—but not one penny would be turned over to him until the full production costs of the book had been covered. Beyond that, there was nothing about foreign rights, which meant that Appleton could make an arrangement with a British publisher, for example, and not have to give Crane anything. It is likely that Crane didn’t know enough to push any harder, but my guess would be that he had also lost interest in the book, which seems to have burned him out, and once he’d put the finishing touches on the manuscript in New Orleans, he was more than ready to leave it behind him. When Hitchcock wrote in August to announce that the proofs had arrived from the printer, Crane answered with a brief, two-sentence note, in the first one giving the address where they should be sent, and then, remarkably, in the second one reversing himself and telling Hitchcock, “As a matter of fact I don’t care much to see the page proof.” Chances are he did go over the proofs, but never before have I heard of a writer, whether young or old, so reluctant to read the galleys of his own book. Short as it was, the novel had been a long, painful slog for him, with multiple revisions, corrections, deletions, and changes of heart about the final version, and after the wrenching standoff with McClure and the further contortions that had gone into making the abridged, serialized version for Bacheller, he was probably sick and tired of the whole business and no longer wanted to think about it.
Also in June, tentative plans to bring out two more books with Copeland and Day rapidly fizzled into no books because Crane didn’t know where to find them. His Boston publishers had offered to reprint Maggie in a proper edition, but with roughly a thousand copies floating around New York and various points to the north, west, and south, Crane couldn’t track down a single one, a telling example of how indifferently he treated his own past work (no sooner written than forgotten), and then, when he proposed that they publish eight of the Sullivan County stories instead (“grotesque tales of the woods which I wrote when I was clever”), Lily, the one person he had ever given copies to, failed to send them, no doubt because they had been destroyed by her husband in one of his jealous rampages.
