Burning boy, p.80
Burning Boy, page 80
The Young Personage was wearing a pair of duck trousers grimed and fouled with all manner of pitch and grease and oil. His shirt was guiltless of collar or scarf, and was unbuttoned at the throat. His hair hung in ragged fringes over his eyes, his dress-suit case was across his lap and answered him for a desk. Between his heels he held a bottle of beer against the rolling of the boat, and when he drank was royally independent of a glass. While he was composing his descriptive dispatches which some ten thousand people would read in the morning from the bulletins in New York, I wondered what the fifty thousand who have read his war novel and have held him, no doubt rightly, to be a great genius, would have said and thought could they have seen him at the moment.
Later on, after his apparent recovery in Virginia, Crane returned to active duty to report on the invasion of Puerto Rico and found himself on a dispatch boat with fellow correspondent Charles Michelson. According to his sharp-eyed friend,
Crane on his way to war was one of the most unprepossessing figures that ever served as a nucleus for apocryphal romances; shambling, with hair too long, usually lacking a shave, dressed like any of the deck hands, hollow-cheeked, sallow, destitute of small talk, critical if not fastidious, marked with ill-health—the very antithesis of the conquering male.
… There was a head-wind most of the way, and the nose of the boat was under water with every wave, and somebody discovered that by standing far forward with a tight grip on the stays the Atlantic Ocean could be turned into an acceptable shower-bath. Crane revealed the wreck of an athlete’s frame—once square shoulders crowded forward by the concavity of a collapsed chest; legs like pipestems—he looked like a frayed white ribbon, seen through the veil of green as the seas washed over him.
It would come to that after just three months, and deep down Crane probably understood that he was headed for some personal catastrophe when he ran off from England—the beginning of the end—but at the same time he was determined to confront that end and refused to allow his wife or Conrad or anyone else to talk him out of it. His white-faced excitement frightened me, and as he swam across the ocean on his ten-day journey to New York, it seems that Crane was thinking as much about his American past as the immediate future awaiting him in the jungles of Cuba. He had not set foot in his own country for more than a year, and the prospect sent him reeling back into the mythological town of his childhood, Whilomville, which became the site of a new story he began sketching out somewhere in mid-ocean and then finished in the early days of the war on a dispatch boat as he and other American correspondents cruised around in hostile waters patrolled by Spanish gunboats and battleships. One asks how he managed to detach himself so thoroughly from his surroundings that he could concentrate on a story about a young boy at such a perilous time, but once we take a closer look at the story, it becomes clear that Crane—whether he knew it or not—was in fact writing about himself and his torn feelings about his current situation.
The Whilomville of “His New Mittens” is a different place from the one depicted in The Monster. No fires, no burnt-off flesh, no fear-crazed citizens in this version—just the placid little town where Crane had spent the first fully remembered years of his childhood, the lost paradise that was stolen from him after his father’s sudden, unexpected death. It was the single most traumatizing event of his young life—the axe blow that splintered apart his world and taught him that God was a cruel and capricious force who could not, under any circumstances, be trusted.
And there he was now at twenty-six, alone in the middle of the Atlantic, a runaway steaming forward into whatever unknown thing was about to happen to him next, a situation not unlike that of the little boy in his story, who also decides to run away from home, in his case to California, which in his imagination is as far from where he lives as the dark side of the moon. Or, to put it in another context, roughly the same distance from New York State as Cuba was from Oxted.
His name is Horace, and he seems to be around eight years old (Crane’s age when his father died), and he, too, is a fatherless boy, and while Crane was not an only child as Horace is, for all practical purposes he was a boy without brothers or sisters, given the vast age difference between him and his older siblings. Horace lives with his mother and maiden aunt, and although nothing is said about the father’s death, the fact that the mother walks around in “widow’s weeds” would suggest it was fairly recent. The result is that the boy is now trapped within a female-run household, and he feels suffocated by the nervous, hovering presences of his two captors, who have imposed so many strictures and prohibitions on him that he is continually running afoul of their laws. The parallels are not exact, but Crane, too, had begun to squirm under the constraints of his life in England, and when the pressure became too much to bear, he, too, wound up escaping to the dark side of the moon.
Nor is it an accident that the crucial event of the story hinges on the boy’s desire to take part in a “battle,” which was the same impulse that took hold of Crane and sent him rushing off to Cuba. For little Horace, the guns of the American and Spanish military forces have been replaced by snowballs, but a battle is a battle, and as the story begins he is walking home from school one afternoon when he comes upon a large group of his friends engaged in a snowball fight, with one half of the gang pretending to be soldiers and the other half pretending to be Indians. Horace is desperate to join in, but two impediments are standing in his way. First, his mother has instructed him to “come straight home as soon as school is out,” and second, he is wearing a new pair of red mittens, and she has sternly warned him not to “get them nice new mittens all wet, either. Do you hear?” So even as Horace’s friends ask him to join the battle, the boy hesitates, which prompts the other boys to mock him with a stinging taunt:
“A-fray-ed of his mit-tens! A-fray-ed of his mit-tens!” They sang these lines to cruel and monotonous music which is as old perhaps as American childhood and which it is the privilege of the emancipated adult to completely forget. “A-fray-ed of his mit-tens!”
Rare among emancipated adults, Crane had not forgotten his American childhood, and in an impressively intricate passage that extends over the first four pages of the thirteen-page story, he delves into the hierarchies, fluctuating alliances, and psychological factors animating the snowball war as Horace gradually succumbs to the temptations of battle over obedience, responsibility, and home. Before long, his mother comes walking down the street and drags him off with her, a public humiliation that will surely lower his standing among the other boys, and then, after he stuffs the soaking-wet mittens into his pockets and claims not to know where they are, his mother reaches into the pockets, pulls out the mittens, and punishes him. Horace breaks down and cries.
He is banished to the kitchen while his mother and aunt eat their supper in the dining room, and now that Horace is alone Crane begins to travel deep into the little boy’s head, embarking on a journey similar to the ones he had taken into the heads of Henry Fleming, George Kelcey, and the New York Kid: the mind in conversation with itself as it loops and spins through an incessant rush of arguments and counter-arguments, gyrating into and out of a number of conflicting thoughts as it struggles to come up with a plan of action, which in the mind of the cruelly treated young Horace will be how best to exact a fitting revenge on his oppressors.
His aunt has carried in a plate of food and left it on the chair beside him, and although Horace is sorely tempted by the pickle lying next to the cold ham and bread, he decides that he must make his stand now and, therefore, merely touches the pickle but does not dare to lift it off the plate and eat it. Because:
His heart was black with hatred. He painted in his mind scenes of deadly retribution. His mother would be taught that he was not one to endure persecution meekly, without raising an arm in his defense. And so his dreams were of a slaughter of feelings, and near the end of them his mother was pictured as coming, bowed with pain, to his feet. Weeping, she implored his charity. Would he forgive her? No; his once tender heart had been turned to stone by her injustice. He could not forgive her. She must pay the inexorable penalty.
The first item in this horrible plan was the refusal of the food. This he knew by experience would work havoc in his mother’s heart. And so he grimly waited.
But suddenly it occurred to him that the first part of his revenge was in danger of failing.
His mother is taking too long, since normally she would have come into the kitchen by now to ask if he was ill, and by telling her to leave so he could “suffer in silence,” he would invariably soften her heart and wriggle himself back into her good graces. As S.C. drolly comments: “He had known such maneuvering to result even in pie.”
But his mother is taking too long this time, the surefire tactic isn’t working, and “as the truth sank into his mind, he supremely loathed life, the world, his mother. His heart was beating back the besiegers; he was a defeated child.” So much for Plan A, but no sooner is he vanquished on that front than he comes up with the far more dramatic Plan B—to slip out of the house and run away.
Note how crude and exaggerated his thoughts are throughout the business that follows and—to compare his thinking to some of Crane’s previous excursions into the minds of his characters—how great the difference is between Horace’s inner world and that of Henry Fleming, for example, who is not a boy but an adolescent, and the even greater difference between him and the New York Kid, who is not an adolescent but a young man, which tells us much about Crane’s method and accounts for why his characters stand distinctly apart from one another as fully individuated beings. At his best, Crane doesn’t write about his creations so much as inhabit them. With little Horace in “His New Mittens,” he is inhabiting the mind of a boy, and as he himself deeply understood—and deeply remembered—an eight-year-old’s mind is capable of just so much and no more.
In a remote corner of the world he would become some sort of bloody-handed person driven to a life of crime by the barbarity of his mother. She should never know his fate. He would torture her for years with doubts and doubts and drive her implacably to an unrepentant grave.
He puts on his coat and cap, and off he goes, casting one backward glance at the pickle, which he is tempted to take along with him but then decides not to, for if the plate is left untouched, “his mother would feel even worse.” To make matters worse for him, however, it is snowing heavily outside, and because he isn’t sure whether the journey to California should begin by walking down Niagara Avenue or Hogan Street, he ducks into the woodshed to think things over and ruminate “miserably upon his martyrdom.” It is frightfully cold in there, but he is somewhat comforted when he looks over at the house and sees a lamp moving “rapidly from window to window. Then the kitchen door slammed and a shawled figure [his Aunt Martha] sped toward the gate. At last he was making them feel his power.” They know that he has disappeared now, and for a little while he exults in “the terror he is causing,” but then he realizes that sooner or later someone will come looking for him in the woodshed.
He knew that it would not be manful to be caught so soon. He was not positive now that he was going to remain away forever, but at any rate he was bound to inflict some more damage before showing himself to be captured. If he merely succeeded in making his mother angry, she would thrash him on sight. He must prolong the time in order to be safe. If he held out properly, he was sure of a welcome of love, even though he should drip with crimes.
Crane couldn’t have known how prescient the last two sentences of this passage would turn out to be, but weirdly enough that was more or less what happened during the eight and a half months he and Cora spent apart, for even though the fighting stopped when Spain capitulated on August twelfth, Crane prolonged the time of his absence by sneaking back into Havana and staying there for another four months, doing such a good job of disappearing from her and nearly everyone else that many assumed he was either dead or in prison. He tortured her with his long silences (aggravated by the fact that nearly every one of the few letters he wrote to her was lost, delayed, or tossed out by the boardinghouse cleaning woman who was supposed to mail them for him), but when he was finally tracked down and funds were raised to cover his passage back to England, he boarded the ship, crossed the ocean, and contentedly resumed his life with Cora, for even though he was dripping with crimes, he had stayed away long enough to receive a welcome of love, and all was forgiven.
As for the young hero of his story, Horace reluctantly abandons the woodshed and steps back into the storm to avoid immediate capture, but by now the storm has grown into a blizzard that swings him “violently with its rough and merciless strength. Panting, stung, half-blinded with the driving flakes, he was now a waif, exiled, friendless, and poor.”
No doubt, Crane was also thinking about himself when he wrote the final words of that sentence. After his failure to make a go of it in England, he was headed back to America feeling “exiled, friendless, and poor,” for at that point he hadn’t secured his correspondent’s job and war between Spain and America would not be officially declared until the day of his arrival, and therefore nothing was certain yet, but even as he floundered in that nothing he still had hope that the situation would somehow resolve itself, as it does for little Horace in the last chapter of the story.
The boy, adrift and pummeled by the snow, blames his mother for having “thrust him into this wild storm.” At the same time, in utter opposition to that surly resentment, he wants nothing more than to go back into the house and cancel the trip to California—but he won’t give in, he can’t give in, he must forge on and stick to the plan out of his “enigmatical childish ideal of form.” He stumbles onto Niagara Avenue and finds himself looking into the brightly lit windows of Stickney’s butcher shop. The butcher, who had been a close friend of Horace’s father, is standing in his cluttered emporium surrounded by “rows of pigs hung head downward … [and] clumps of attenuated turkeys” suspended from the ceiling. One customer is inside, a woman with “a monster basket on her arm,” and once she leaves the shop, Horace summons his courage and goes in himself. From then on, the warmhearted Stickney takes over, and in a rapidly unfolding denouement the story charges on to its complex but richly satisfying conclusion as mother and son find each other again—just as Crane and Cora would eventually find each other again as well.
Stickney had placed his two fat hands palms downward and wide apart on the table, in the attitude of a butcher facing a customer, but now he straightened.
“Here,” he said, “what’s wrong? What’s wrong, kid?”
“Nothin’,” answered Horace huskily. He labored for a moment with something in his throat, and afterward added, “O’ny—I’ve—I’ve run away, and—”
“Run away!” shouted Stickney. “Run away from what? Who?”
“From—home,” answered Horace. “I don’t like it there any more. I—” He had arranged an oration to win the sympathy of the butcher; he had prepared a table setting forth the merits of his case in the most logical fashion, but it was as if the wind had been knocked out of his mind. “I’ve run away. I—”
Stickney reached an enormous hand over the array of beef and firmly grappled the emigrant. Then he swung himself to Horace’s side. His face was stretched with laughter, and he playfully shook his prisoner. “Come—come—come. What dashed nonsense is this? Run away, hey? Run away?” Whereupon the child’s long-tried spirit found vent in howls.
“Come, come,” said Stickney busily. “Never mind, now, never mind. You just come along with me. It’ll be all right. I’ll fix it. Never you mind.”
Five minutes later the butcher, with a great ulster over his apron, was leading the boy homeward.
At the very threshold Horace raised his last flag of pride. “No—no,” he sobbed. “I don’t want to. I don’t want to go in there.” He braced his foot against the step, and made a very respectable resistance.
“Now, Horace,” cried the butcher. He thrust open the door with a bang. “Hello there!” Across the dark kitchen the door to the living room opened and Aunt Martha appeared. “You’ve found him!” she screamed.
“We’ve come to make a call,” roared the butcher.
At the entrance to the living room a silence fell upon them all. Upon a couch Horace saw his mother lying limp, pale as death, her eyes shining with pain. There was an electric pulse before she swung a waxen hand toward Horace. “My child,” she murmured tremulously. Whereupon the sinister person addressed, with a prolonged wail of grief and joy, ran to her with speed. “Ma—ma! Oh, ma-ma!” She was not able to speak in a known tongue as she folded him in her weak arms.
Aunt Martha turned defiantly upon the butcher because her face betrayed her. She was crying. She made a gesture half military, half feminine. “Won’t you have a glass of our root-beer, Mr. Stickney? We make it ourselves.”
And with that gesture from Aunt Martha—half military, half feminine—Crane encapsulates the tangled ambiguities of his departure from England, the decision to quit the home front and set out for the battlefront, which was finally an impossible choice for him and would have left him in a state of conflict no matter what he had chosen to do or not to do. Hence this beautiful little story, which is at once a signal of inner distress and a wish-fulfillment fantasy in which the decision to leave home comes out right in the end. The wonder is that “His New Mittens,” which surpasses any episode in Twain’s Tom Sawyer (in my opinion) and stands as one of the great short works about boyhood in American literature, should have been composed under such odd and trying circumstances, on the way to war and in the midst of war, but just as the correspondent and the oiler in “The Open Boat” rowed … and then they rowed, Crane wrote … and then he wrote, and wherever he was and whatever was happening around him in any given circumstance, writing was the one unwavering thing he did throughout his brief, often wavering life. If that life is worth examining now, it is only because of the work that came out of it.
