Burning boy, p.90
Burning Boy, page 90
The story has gone missing, and chances are that it will never be found, for many believe that after Crane proved his point, he crumpled up his little work and destroyed it—no doubt by throwing it into the fireplace, blue ribbon and all.
3
In one of the jottings for her never written biography of Crane, Cora remembers the sole instance of angry discord between them. “I said to him, ‘Why not write a popular novel for money something that everyone will read?’ He turned on me and said: ‘I will write for one man & banging his fist on writing table & that man shall be myself etc etc——’”
Crane defending his honor as an artist, stiffening his resolve and refusing to cave in to the demands of commerce, but his back was pinned to the wall during that year at Brede, and the truth was that he did cave in and try to write a novel that would conform to popular taste. He had started it in the final months of 1897 when he interrupted the writing of “The Blue Hotel” to crank out the long narrative his publishers had been urging him to write (no more accursed short stories, please), and now he returned to it in a whole-hog effort to generate a windfall that would rescue the household from bankruptcy. It turned out to be the longest novel he ever published—and also the worst, the one substantial piece of work he ever wrote that qualifies as bad.
The early parts of Active Service from 1897 are promising, but they amount to just three chapters in a thirty-one-chapter potboiler, and however brilliant the third chapter might have been, with its multifaceted look at the operations of a New York City yellow-press daily (a subject Crane knew well), the subsequent material quickly devolves into a bullshit love story–adventure story set during the Greco-Turkish War as the intrepid newsman hero, torn between a wily temptress and the beautiful, highly principled daughter of a university professor, saves the day through his resourcefulness and courage—a nonsense frolic similar to a host of MGM films from the 1930s starring Clark Gable. The book was written in a surge of rapid, unreflecting composition—between late January and the middle of May—and immediately after he finished it, Crane sent off a note to Clara Frewen:
Dear Mrs. Frewen: I am an honest man above all and—according to promise—I must confess to you that on Saturday morning at 11:15—after dismal sorrow and travail—there was born into an unsuspecting world a certain novel called “Active Service,” full and complete in all its shame—79000 words—which same is now being sent forth to the world to undermine whatever reputation for excellence I may have achieved up to this time and may heaven forgive it for being so bad.
Surprisingly, the book found some enthusiastic critics and readers. Not enough to produce a windfall, perhaps, but Active Service nevertheless managed to do some modest business, even as other voices dismissed it as a sellout and a failure, none more cruelly (and ignorantly) than Crane’s old Nebraska friend Willa Cather, who wrote that “every page is like the next morning taste of a champagne supper and is heavy with the smell of stale cigarettes.… It is a grave matter for a man with good health and with a bank account to have written a book so coarse and dull and charmless as Active Service.”
Good health and a bank account. If only she had known what she was talking about …
* * *
The myth about Crane in the final year of his life is that he degenerated into hackwork to pay the bills and produced nothing of any value, but apart from the unfortunate and admittedly bungled Active Service, there is little evidence to support that idea. Yes, he was writing too much, and he was pushing himself too hard, and he was mostly working to make money to fend off the bailiffs barking at his door, but in spite of recurring bouts of malarial fever and his misdiagnosed, steadily weakening lungs, most of the things he wrote from early 1899 to early 1900 are good, often better than good, and, in at least two instances, sublimely good, as good as any of his best works from the past.
Before he returned to the bad novel, and while he was in the middle of it, and long after he had finished it, he was working on two collections of stories, both of which were completed before his final collapse in early spring 1900 and published shortly after his death in June—Whilomville Stories (August) and Wounds in the Rain (September). Not only is each one an essential title in his list of works, but both volumes contain elements that suggest a turn in a new direction, offering a tantalizing glimpse of some of the territories Crane might have explored in his future work—if he had managed to live.
“His New Mittens” wound up being published in the same book as The Monster and “The Blue Hotel,” but that was Crane’s first step back into the world of childhood since the Baby Stories of 1893. Within two weeks of his return to England he wrote another story with a child protagonist set in Whilomville (dispatched to Reynolds on January twenty-seventh), then another (January thirty-first), and still another (February seventh). From then until the fall, he composed an even dozen of them, which Harper’s Magazine began publishing every month starting in August. As with “His New Mittens,” the stories are about children but not necessarily for children, although it seems that the young Ernest Hemingway, who was born in 1899 and overlapped with Crane for close to a year, read the Whilomville stories or had them read to him while he was growing up in Oak Park, Illinois, which began his lifelong admiration of S.C., whose work strongly marked his own progress as a writer. Strip it to the bone was the message—and say as much as you can by saying as little as you can. Think of Dr. Trescott counting his wife’s teacups at the end of The Monster, and then think of Krebs in “Soldier’s Home” looking down at the bacon fat hardening on his plate.
None of the twelve new stories quite measures up to the first story about the little fugitive and his wet mittens, but a number of them stand out as exceptional, and all of them, even the most comical ones, lack the cloying sentimentality that mars so much writing about children. The central figure in the new cycle is Jimmie Trescott, the doctor’s son from The Monster, but in this incarnation of Whilomville the town has been thrust back into an earlier stage of its existence. It is no longer a small, expanding city from the mid-nineties but an Arcadian village of the post–Civil War seventies or eighties, the time of Crane’s own boyhood, and to show how thoroughly he has wiped the slate clean, he resurrects both an unburned Jimmie and an unburned Henry Fleming for the first of them, “Lynx-Hunting,” in which the little boy takes aim at a chipmunk and inadvertently fires the bullet into a cow. Unlike most of the other stories, which are set in town and feature a cast of both boys and girls, this one is about boys in the wild, boys at play in the woods. On the second page, Crane contrasts the sharp difference between their world and the world of adults, which establishes the mental and social framework for all the stories that follow.
They passed along a maple-lined avenue, a highway common to boys bound for that freeland of hills and woods in which they lived in some part their romance of the moment—whether it was of Indians, miners, smugglers, soldiers or outlaws. The paths were their paths and much was known to them of the secrets of the dark-green hemlock thickets, the wastes of sweet-fern and huckleberry, the cliffs of gaunt blue-stone with the sumac burning red at their feet. Each boy had, I am sure, a conviction that some day the wilderness was to give forth to them a marvelous secret.… The grown folk seemed to regard these wastes merely as so much distance between one place and another place or as rabbit cover, or as a district to be judged according to the value of the timber.…
In the meantime, [the boys] lived there, in season, lives of ringing adventure—by dint of imagination.
In town, Crane creates a closed world of recurring child characters who appear in one story after another, forming a linked collection similar to the one Sherwood Anderson put together twenty years later in Winesburg, Ohio. The boy half of that Whilomville world is regulated by a clearly defined pecking order, with the bossy, imaginative Willie Dalzel standing at the head as undisputed chieftain, the mischievous, ever-game Jimmie Trescott serving as an upper-level subordinate, the dim-bulbed Homer Phelps wallowing in the depths of eternal serfdom, and various spear-carriers such as the Margate twins and Dan Earl, who go along with whatever the group decides. Crane, ever alert to the dynamics of groupthink, handles the interactions among the boys with spectacular precision, whether lightheartedly (in “Making an Orator” and “A Little Pilgrim”) or with more serious intentions (“Shame,” “The Carriage-Lamps,” and “The Trial, Execution, and Burial of Homer Phelps”). When all is said and done, however, the most effective stories are the ones in which a child from another place comes to Whilomville and disturbs the balance of that closed-off world, as Crane does to great comic effect in “The Angel Child” and “The Stove” and then, with little or no comedy at all, in the somber depictions of struggle in “The Fight” and “The City Urchin and the Chaste Villagers.”
The funny ones chart the adventures of little Cora, Jimmie’s cousin from New York, “the brave bandit … and outlaw” known as the Angel Child. Her pranks begin one summer when she arrives for a visit at the Trescott house with her indulgent, fashionable mother and absentminded painter father, and when that out-to-lunch male parent casually hands her a five-dollar bill for her birthday, the blond-haired devil swings into action. Leading an army of small local kids into a well-supplied candy shop, she foots the bill for a massive gorgefest of ice cream and cake and “chocolate mice, butter-scotch, ‘ever-lastings,’ chocolate cigars, taffy-on-a-stick, taffy-on-a-slate-pencil, and many semi-transparent devices resembling lions, tigers, elephants, horses, cats, dogs, cows, sheep, tables, chairs, engines (both railway and for the fighting of fire), soldiers, fine ladies, odd-looking men, clocks, watches, revolvers, rabbits, and bedsteads,” and once the sated, overstuffed children are too bloated to stand up anymore, the clerk hands the Angel Child her change. Two dollars and twenty-seven cents. Shocked to discover that she has made only a partial dent in the original amount, she rallies her exhausted troops with the magic words “We must think up some way of spending more money” (how the author must have grinned when he wrote that line), and off they go to flush away the rest of the cash at Neltje’s barbershop, where one by one they have their beautiful children’s locks shorn off by the man with the unpronounceable name, which causes no end of grief and howling consternation among the parents of the precious victims.
That same little Cora appears in the next story as well, “The Lover and the Tell-Tale,” for Jimmie has lost his heart to her and is now pining for his absent cousin, who has gone back to New York with her parents. One day during recess at school, he remains in the classroom to write a letter to his beloved: “My dear Cora I love thee with all my hart oh come bac again, bac, bac gain for I love thee best of all oh come bac again When the spring come again we’l fly and we’l fly like a brid.” The act of writing that letter will drag the pipsqueak suitor into a cyclone of mayhem and trouble, but by the time Cora returns to Whilomville for the Christmas holidays, he has largely recovered from his passion—or so he thinks. The Angel has arrived in the country with what has now become her favorite possession, a toy stove, which “turned out to be an affair of cast-iron, as big as a portmanteau, and, as the stage people say, practicable.” Perversely, Cora insists on having it with her at all times, and since it is too heavy for her to carry herself, her poor father, in humble obedience to her commands, lugs it around for her from room to room and floor to floor of the house. When Dr. Trescott asks why they don’t simply park it in one place and let her play with it there, her mother replies, “If it makes her happy to have the stove with her, why shouldn’t she have it?”
It is an altogether bizarre situation, but Jimmie is beyond caring about bizarre, and he soon falls under Cora’s spell again, happily turning himself into her “accomplice,” or, more accurately, the slave of her whims, for “when the mind blazed within the small body, the angel-child was pure force.” On the afternoon of the grand tea party to be held at the Trescotts’, the children are admonished to “behave correctly,” so they carry the stove out into the garden to play with it there as the house fills up with a crowd of visiting women. Unlike the other eleven stories, in which the adults are largely absent or hovering around the edges to maintain order and dole out punishments when necessary, Jimmie’s and Cora’s parents are central players in “The Stove,” which gives Crane the narrative license to spend two full pages delving into the custom of provincial tea parties, and soon enough he is on the attack against the strangling hypocrisies of middle-class life, the same pinched environment that drove him to act so rudely at his brother William’s dinner parties in Port Jervis. Two examples:
On the fatal afternoon, a small picked company of latent enemies would meet. There would be a fanfare of affectionate greetings during which everybody would measure to an inch the importance of what everybody else was wearing. Those who wore old dresses would wish they had not come and those who saw that, in the company, they were well-clad would be pleased or exalted or filled with the joys of cruelty. Then they had tea which was a habit and a delight with none of them, their usual beverage being coffee with milk.
Or, more specifically, on the teacups themselves:
These collections so differed in style and the obvious amount paid for them that nobody could be happy. The poorer ones envied; the richer ones feared; the poorer ones continually striving to over-take the leaders; the leaders always with their heads turned back to hear over-taking footsteps. And none of these things here written did they know. Instead of seeing that they were very stupid they thought they were very fine. And they gave and took heart bruises—fierce deep heart bruises—under the clear impression that of such kind of rubbish was the kingdom of nice people.
Meanwhile, it has been snowing outside, and the fire in the children’s stove has gone out. Their first thought is to start it up again in the stable, but Peter Washington (glancingly mentioned as a friend of Henry Johnson’s in The Monster) is now working as the Trescotts’ hostler—almost as a duplicate of Johnson—and he forbids them to rekindle that pretend-but-real thing in his combustible domain, which leaves them with no option but to carry the cast-iron toy through an open outside cellar door, down a flight of steps, and into the underbelly of the house, a warm, dry enclosure in which “two huge cylindrical furnaces were humming away.” As the beams overhead bounce with “the different emotions which agitated the tea-party,” Jimmie relights the stove. Casting about for something to cook, they decide to raid the Trescotts’ store of turnips and feed these dirt-encrusted roots to the flames, but when Cora announces that they own a hotel and the turnips are in fact the puddings they are preparing for thousands of guests, the toy stove becomes too small for their purposes. Jimmie begins shoveling batch after batch of turnip-puddings into one of the furnaces, and when the smell of the roasting tubers begins wafting up into the realm of the adults, the two fathers, who have been hiding out in the doctor’s office to avoid the tea party, go downstairs to investigate. Once they discover what is going on, the doctor sends Jimmie upstairs and the phlegmatic painter pretends to be angry with his daughter. He takes hold of her arm in “an imitation of wrath,” but after a couple of vigorous shakes, she starts screaming and he abruptly stops. “I’ve hurt her,” he says to Trescott. The doctor thinks about it for a moment and then replies: “You’ve hurt her, have you? Well, hurt her again. Spank her! Spank her, confound you, man! She needs it. Here’s your chance. Spank her and spank her good. Spank her!” And the girl’s father does it. However ineptly he goes about the job, he does it.
The other outsider who invades the walled-off territory of Whilomville is a boy named Johnnie Hedge, who moves from Jersey City with his widowed mother and younger brother into the house next door to the Trescotts, the one formerly owned by the Hannigans, who had put it up for sale in The Monster when they understood that the ruined, disfigured thing that had once been Henry Johnson was living with the Trescotts again. “The Fight” begins on the day the unknowns cart in their belongings and join the Whilomville community, events Jimmie has already witnessed, and a couple of minutes after Willie Dalzel and other members of the gang come around to check out the newcomers, Johnnie Hedge makes his first appearance,
