Burning boy, p.53
Burning Boy, page 53
“An Eloquence of Grief” also concerns a woman in trouble, a young woman this time, a servant girl who has been accused of stealing by her employers and is about to be crushed in the grindworks of the criminal justice system—one case among the many Crane observed during his visits to the court. He opens with an ironic description of the setting, comparing the courtroom to a church with its “high and saintly” windows and the policeman posted at the door—who tells all who enter, “Take off your hat”—to “a priest when the sanctity of a chapel is defied or forgotten.” He moves on to the various clusters of people in the courtroom, those involved in cases and those who have come to watch “for curiosity’s sake,” hoping to inject some thrill into their “jaded, world-weary nerves—wires that refused to vibrate for ordinary affairs.” Then, and only then, does he present the servant girl, who is standing in a corner under the guard of a plainclothes detective, weeping her heart out as the tears fall from her eyes and leave “fierce pink marks on her face.” From time to time, she looks across the room “where two well-dressed young women and a man stood waiting with the serenity of people who are not concerned as to the interior fittings of a jail.” These are her employers, and when the case is brought before the bench, the two women testify “calmly and moderately” that the girl stole fifty dollars’ worth of silk underwear from one of their rooms. By contrast, when the girl is given a chance to tell her story, she is so nervous and afraid that her lips have turned white. The lawyer for the plaintiffs questions her—“with the air,” Crane tells us, “of a man throwing flower-pots at a stone house”—and then the short hearing concludes with the judge declaring that the evidence is strong enough “to commit the girl for trial.”
Instantly the quick-eyed court officer began to clear the way for the next case. The well-dressed women and their escort turned one way and the girl turned another, toward a door with an austere arch leading into a stone-paved passage. Then it was that a great cry rang through the court-room, the cry of this girl who believed that she was lost.
The cry is so loud, so piercing, that it cuts through the crowd like a blade. The girl falls back into the arms of a court officer, and as “her wild heels clicked twice on the floor,” she bellows out in horror: “I am innocent! Oh, I am innocent!”
It is an extraordinary, wholly unexpected outburst, so outside the norms of conventional public behavior that Crane cuts away in the next paragraph to examine the scream itself and its effect on the people in the room—which is to say, finally, the effect it had on him.
People pity those who need none, and the guilty sob alone; but innocent or guilty, this girl’s scream described such a profound depth of woe—it was so graphic of grief, that it slit with a dagger’s sweep the curtain of common-place, and disclosed the gloom-shrouded spectre that sat in the young girl’s heart so plainly, in so universal a tone of the mind, that a man heard expressed some far-off midnight terror of his own thought.
It is a curiously bumpy passage for Crane at this point in the evolution of his prose, one that begins powerfully with its epigrammatic assertions, builds its argument with the sudden, compassionate turn into “a profound depth of woe” (not just the girl’s but the woe of everyone who has ever suffered greatly), and then loses its footing with the clumsy “graphic of grief” and the overblown “gloom-shrouded spectre,” only to right itself in the last phrases and end as powerfully as it began. Who knows how quickly these two pages were written and under what circumstances, but the small stylistic stumbles carry their own emotional weight, for they show the generally sure-handed, ever-articulate Crane beginning to stammer as he gropes for the words to convey the enormity of the girl’s scream—the transcendent force of a human soul laid bare in full view of others and, as a consequence, its deeply personal impact on those others, Crane himself above all.
Nevertheless, the true subject of the piece is not the girl or her agony or the decision rendered in her case but the court itself and how blind justice plods on in its execution of the law—rapidly, mechanically, with supreme indifference to the lives of the people it judges. No sooner does the girl’s case end than the next one begins, and Crane concludes his brief report by jumping into an entirely different register:
The cries died away down the stone-paved passage. A patrolman leaned one arm composedly on the railing, and down below him stood an aged, almost toothless wanderer, tottering and grinning.
“Please, yer honer,” said the old man as the time arrived for him to speak, “if ye’ll lave me go this time, I’ve nivver been dhrunk befoor, sir.”
A court officer lifted his hand to hide a smile.
Yes, it is funny, but more important than funny, it seethes with ironic disdain, even contempt. Just moments before, a servant girl had ripped apart the heavens with her howl of grief, but those cries have been forgotten now, and because the tragic and the comic are always indistinguishable from one another in a court of law, it is always business as usual there, and now that we’ve moved on to the next case, let’s see if we can stop ourselves from laughing at that funny Irish drunk.
* * *
In what must have been the fastest journey between conception and publication of any of his stories, the magazine Town Topics sent Crane’s newest little fiction out into the world on October first. Written just days after he had testified in court, “In the Tenderloin: A Duel Between an Alarm Clock and a Suicidal Purpose” followed fast on the heels of the already finished “Adventures of a Novelist,” and it is interesting to note that alarm clocks figure in both works. I doubt that Crane himself was aware of the repetition, but there they are, as bright as one-hundred-watt bulbs, and when we put the two of them together for a closer look, they turn out to be remarkably similar and yet wholly different, for the real alarm clock in Crane’s room allowed him to get up in time to go to court and save a Tenderloin prostitute from wrongful arrest, whereas the second one, the imaginary one, is used by a pimp to clunk a Tenderloin prostitute on the head. Was Crane voicing his exasperation with Clark for having dragged him into the compromising swirl of controversy and public attention that had put his name in dozens of headlines across the country? Such exasperation that a part of him wanted to bash in her skull with the clock that had summoned him to her defense? Possibly. And if so, a telling indicator of how torn he felt about having put his reputation on the line, but we should also remember that every work of fiction has an autobiographical component in it somewhere, however obscure or submerged or unknowable it might be, and with or without the shadowy presence of Dora Clark, this work happens to be a good one—rich, deeply complex, and strange, by far the best of the Tenderloin stories Crane wrote during those rough weeks prior to his twenty-fifth birthday.
He opens with a facetious, first-person prologue in which he complains that everyone already seems to know everything there is to know about the Tenderloin, from clergymen to police forces to his distant “friends from the stars,” but now that he is about to tell of the battle fought in the Tenderloin between an alarm clock and a suicidal purpose—“a matter of no consequence”—he feels that it could be the one Tenderloin incident not previously reported to every person in the world.
A tone has been quickly established—arch, playful, distant, and self-conscious—and Crane hews to it until the end of the story, which recounts a harrowing night-to-dawn episode that nearly undoes a pimp named Swift Doyer and his unnamed prostitute girlfriend but is also a commentary on storytelling itself and the contrast between life lived by real people and the lives of imaginary characters presented in stories.
Swift and his girl are quarreling in their small Tenderloin flat. He has caught her out in a lie, and now he is letting her have it because he is “jealous in the strange and devious way of his kind,” thundering forth accusations in a repetitive, unhinged tirade that gives the sobbing girl no chance to defend herself. Eventually, after calling her a liar a dozen times in twelve slightly different ways, he pauses, stands up from the table to light a cigarette, and orders her to stand up as well “and let me see you lie!”
There was a flurry of white in the darkness, which was no more definite to a man than the ice floes which your reeling ship passes in the night. Then, when the gas glared out suddenly, the girl stood before him. She was a wondrous white figure in a vestal-like robe. She resembled the priestess in paintings of long-gone Mediterranean religions. Her hair fell wildly on her shoulder. She threw out her arms and cried to Swift in a woe that seemed almost as real as the woe of good people.
“Oh, oh, my heart is broken! My heart is broken!”
But Swift knew as well as the rest of mankind that these girls have no hearts to be broken, and this act filled him with a new rage. He grabbed an alarm clock from the dresser and banged her heroically on the head with it.
That terminates the first sequence of events. After the clunking, the girl staggers off to the mirror. Swift assumes that she wants to inspect the damage to her head, but when he starts in with another verbal attack, she gazes at her own image and says, “I’ve taken morphine, Swift!”
The yelling stops, the anger stops, everything stops. Swift jumps over to “a little red pill box” and sees that it is empty. Eight quarter-gram doses are gone. It is enough to kill someone, and as Crane wryly notes in the next sentence, “The Suicidal Purpose was distinctly ahead of the Alarm Clock.” Then, “with great presence of mind,” that is, with no presence of mind, Swift throws the empty pill box out the window, as if that could do either one of them the least bit of good, since the pills that had previously been in the box are now in the girl’s stomach.
A furious struggle against time suddenly begins as Swift marshals his forces to save her, for in spite of his raging temper tantrum of just a moment ago, he loves the girl and cannot imagine his life without her. He pours whiskey down her throat in order to keep her awake, then starts punching her in order to keep her awake, and if punching seems an odd way to revive someone in danger of passing out, Crane defends the tactic by observing that “our decorous philosophy knows little of the love and despair that was in those caresses,” and as Swift goes on punching her and plying her with whiskey, he talks to her as well, calling “the light into her eyes” and “her soul back from the verge,” but for all his efforts, she slides “limply in her chair like a cloth figure.” Not knowing what else to do, he props her up in the chair and runs off to the kitchen to make coffee. A difficult task, in that his fingers seem reluctant to obey him, but eventually he manages to will them into completing the job. “When he lifted the girlish figure and carried her into the kitchen, he was as wild, haggard, gibbering, as a man of midnight murders.” A bit excessive, perhaps, but well in keeping with the hyperbolic tone maintained throughout (“Oh, oh, my heart is broken!”), and then Crane polishes off the sentence with this somewhat bizarre notion (made more bizarre by the fact that “juke” is probably a misprint of “duke”): “and it was only because he was not engaged in the respectable and literary assassination of a royal juke that almost any sensible writer would be ashamed of this story.”*
Why ashamed? Because respectable assassinations are literary ones committed against high-born jukes or dukes, and Doyer is a “man of midnight murders” (or looks like one, in any case) and therefore is not respectable, which means that any writer who chooses to tell his story ought to be ashamed of himself for scorning literary assassinations in favor of real ones. It is all a joke, of course. Again, Crane is making fun of the genteel pieties of standard contemporary fiction, but at the same time he is also defending himself (by reverse logic) for his interest in characters such as Swift Doyer, a preoccupation that was not always looked upon kindly by the arbiters of good taste. Later that month, for example, another one of his lowlife reports printed in the Journal, “The Tenderloin as It Really Is,” was attacked by a San Francisco newspaper as “the veriest filth,” so revolting that “we have yet to see even the ‘Police Gazette’ descend to such depths.”
After that sentence about respectable and unrespectable assassinations, the story leaps several hours ahead, and “when the steel-blue dawn came and distant chimneys were black against a rose sky, the girl sat at the dining-room table chattering insanely and gesturing.” She is still under the influence of the morphine, but she is still breathing as well, and as Swift watches her from the other side of the table, “he had to repeat to himself that he, worn-out, stupefied from his struggle, was sitting there awaiting the moment when the unseen hand should whirl this soul into the abyss, and that then he should be alone.”
At that point, something happens that turns the story around again, a most beautiful and unexpected something that makes this story the exceptional little work it is. In a stroke of pure inventive brilliance, Crane introduces a fly into the air around the table, a humble, ordinary housefly, the smallest of small insignificant creatures, and when the fly lands on a picture hanging from the wall, the girl’s attention is suddenly drawn to it. “Oh,” she says, “there’s a little fly.” She stands up, sticks out her finger, and leans forward to touch it. “Hello, little fly,” she says, but no sooner does her finger come into contact with it than the fly (“perhaps too cold to be alert”) drops to the floor. The girl cries out, sinks to her knees, and searches for her little friend, all the while “uttering tender apologies,” and once it is found, she picks up the fly and carries it over to the gas jet in order to revive it—a rescue operation similar to the one Doyer has just performed on her. Like a drugged Ophelia floating through a mental ward, she babbles to herself in a semidelirious monologue filled with both pity and remorse.
“Poor little fly,” she said, “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I wouldn’t hurt you for anything. There now—p’r’aps when you get warm you can fly away again. Did I crush the poor little bit of fly? I’m sorry—honest, I am. Poor little thing! Why I wouldn’t hurt you for the world, poor little fly—”
Swift is no longer a participant in the drama but merely an observer now, a stunned witness parked in his chair at the table watching what he imagines to be the death throes of his beloved. But something is off, he realizes, for death as he has seen it depicted in plays and stories is not supposed to happen as it appears to be happening now. Like Maggie Johnson with her fairy-tale dreams of love and Henry Fleming with his Homeric delusions about war, tough guy Swift Doyer has fallen prey to the snares of conventional storytelling about death. Humorous as the following passage might be, it is another sneak attack launched by Crane in the long and beautiful war he had been fighting for years.
Strange things invariably come into a man’s head at the wrong time, and Swift was aware that this scene was defying his preconceptions. His instruction had been that people when dying behaved in a certain manner. Why did this girl occupy herself with an accursed fly? Why in the name of the gods of drama did she not refer to her past? Why, by the shelves of the saints of literature, did she not clutch her brow and say: “Ah, once I was an innocent girl”? What was wrong with this death scene? At one time he thought that his sense of propriety was so scandalized that he was upon the point of interrupting the girl’s babble.
But here a new thought struck him. The girl was not going to die. How could she under these circumstances? The form was not correct.
Crane concludes this deft little piece of work with a morning tableau of his two exhausted characters and, at the very end, a final twist of his storyteller’s corkscrew:
For an hour the girl talked to the fly, the gas-jet, the walls, the distant chimneys. Finally she sat opposite the slumbering Swift and talked softly to herself.
When broad day came they were both asleep, and the girl’s fingers had gone across the table until they had found the locks on the man’s forehead. They were asleep, and this after all is a human action, which may safely be done by characters in the fiction of our time.
* * *
Swift Doyer reappears as a secondary character in another Tenderloin story published the following month, “Yen-Hock Bill and His Sweetheart,” a vigorously told black comedy about an opium-addict con man stricken with pneumonia, which also mentions another character from yet another story of the period, Jimmy the Mole in “Diamonds and Diamonds,” a concert tenor with “a Tenderloin voice” who doubles as a con man himself and whose game is swindling pompous, well-heeled marks into buying diamond rings that have no diamonds in them. “Yen-Hock Bill” came out in the Journal on November twenty-ninth, but “Diamonds and Diamonds” seems to have been lost in a muddle of Crane manuscripts and slept on unnoticed through two world wars until it was found and finally published in the Bulletin of the New York Public Library in 1956. Both stories can be considered minor works, but minor for Crane is nevertheless good or even very good, and either one of these brisk, hard-boiled miniatures would more than hold its own in an anthology of classic New York stories.
He also published two reports on the Tenderloin for Hearst, unremarkable but entertaining strings of real or imagined anecdotes about the night spots of the district. The better one, “The Tenderloin as It Really Is,” was provocative enough to inspire the “veriest filth” comment from the Wave in San Francisco, probably because it includes a blow-by-blow account of a fierce barroom brawl, but there is also this droll, deadpan vignette that strikes me as something that would fit comfortably into a mid-twentieth-century absurdist play:
