Burning boy, p.94
Burning Boy, page 94
Yours,
S.C.
5
Life at Brede bumped along by fits and starts as the Cranes continued to perform their sloppy, improvised duo act, which somehow held together until the end of the year. There were numerous small and large headaches in 1899, but no major catastrophes, and nothing more serious than the standard problems that would have come up in any household as chaotic as theirs. A fire accidentally started in Crane’s study by the drunken servant Mack. A thirty-five-shilling fine for failing to procure licenses for the dogs. Or a dispute with a neighboring sheep farmer about those same dogs, who were allowed to roam free and had taken to killing the man’s sheep. Jessie Conrad:
One day when we were returning from a long drive (we had been absent for two days) we all gasped and held our noses as soon as the horses turned into the drive.
A sheep’s carcass hung from each of the four or five biggest trees bordering the drive in the park. Stephen’s face turned deathly pale with anger while he muttered curses under his breath. The horses shied violently at the ghastly objects swinging on a level with their heads. Next morning when I went out the carcasses had all disappeared, and I never heard that Stephen did more than roundly curse the shepherd.
More headaches followed. Not long after the genial specter known as Mrs. Ruedy took herself back to Ohio in early June, another visitor showed up from America—Crane’s niece Helen, the oldest of William’s five daughters—who had been shipped to England in exchange for the five-hundred-dollar loan the wayward brother had finally wheedled out of the tightwad brother after months of polite but persistent badgering.* On March sixteenth, Crane had written, “In the spring, when all England is green and flowering how would you like to send Helen to us?” and by the end of the month William had sent the money. Crane couldn’t have known what he was getting himself into. In the past, Helen had been his favorite niece, a pleasant little girl with a precocious gift for drawing, but now she had turned into an angry, troubled eighteen-year-old girl-woman, and her harsh skinflint father, who had been embroiled in countless discipline battles with her over the past couple of years, was more than happy to dump the problem into his little brother’s lap.
Cora took charge, and for the first little while William reciprocated with some longish letters to her about Helen—addressing his new sister-in-law as “My dear Cora” and signing off “affectionately” or “your affectionate brother”—and also made nice with his own brother by offering to send him unobtainable American goodies such as maple syrup and canned corn. Clumsy gestures, perhaps, but an earnest effort to show his gratitude to them, or so it seemed at the time. The judge was especially worried about the “undesirable people” his daughter tended to associate with in Port Jervis (“she is at an age now where she cannot afford to be too democratic”), but he did not get around to sharing those worries with his brother until Helen was already on the ship to England. Not long after her arrival, the Cranes were introduced to Kate Lyon’s sister and nineteen-year-old niece Edith, and because the two nieces seemed to hit it off, the Duke and his lady promptly invited the well-mannered, wholly desirable young Miss Ritchie to camp out at Brede with them and serve as a sort of unofficial companion to Helen. In her 1954 article about the months she spent there, Ritchie skirts the issue of Helen’s conduct with the evasive remark that “Helen was sophisticated in some ways, childish in others, and Stephen thought she needed more education.” The truth was that Stephen wanted to banish her from the house for stealing. What she stole, or why she stole, or how she was found out are three more blanks in the story, but after complex negotiations with William (who was scandalized by the incident and fully backed their plan), Helen was sent abroad in September to further her education at the Rosemont-Dézaley School in Lausanne, Switzerland, the same finishing school Ritchie had graduated from that spring. Crane took her there himself, and when Helen’s larcenous habits continued with various unpaid loans from her classmates and a preposterous scheme to extort money from the headmistress by convincing her it was a loan for her uncle Stephen, life in Lausanne became so ugly for her that she quit the school on the last day of March 1900, well before the term was over. With nowhere else to put her, the Cranes buried the hatchet and reinstalled Helen at Brede. She stayed on with them for another two months, accompanying her aunt and uncle to Dover, Calais, and Badenweiler, the only person from the family who was with them at the end, but for all the things she must have said and done while she was in those places, not one word or action has been recorded in any of the chronicles of Crane’s life. A shadow who was there but not fully there, the silent niece went back to America with Cora and her uncle’s body, attended the funeral in Manhattan, and then slipped off into the shadows again. She was apparently married twice (circumstances unknown) and committed suicide in 1922 at age forty or forty-one.
* * *
Dead sheep, accidental fires, and a damaged girl who was sent away and brought back, but the principal headache of 1899 was money, the same headache that had started in S.C.’s earliest days as a writer and was now intensifying into a full-bore migraine, which brings with it the pain of a nail that is hammered continuously through the side of your skull and deep into the folds of your brain. For want of a miracle cure, the challenge was one of stark necessity: How to earn enough by writing enough to become solvent enough to pull the nail out of your head? Pinker was the man Crane had entrusted to perform the operation, the inordinately kind, hardworking agent who floated out cash for stories not yet written, for projects not yet conceived, and in the frenzy of composition that followed in the months they worked together, Pinker was inundated by so many thousands of words to sell here and sell there that he often struggled to keep up with the flow. Crane was expecting to become rich, or at least to get on top of his debts, but as the squandering of nonexistent money continued to increase, his debts increased as well, and he found himself worse off than when he had started. Hence the migraine—and the everlasting nail embedded in his skull.
To Pinker on August sixth, in a typical letter from those months:
I am mailing you at this time a whacking good Whilomville story—4000 words—and I am agitatedly wiring you at the same time. You are possibly able to forgive me by this time for the way I put upon you. I must have altogether within the next ten days £150—no less, as the Irish say. But, by the same token, I am going to earn it—mainly, in Whilomville Stories for they are sure and quick money. £40 of my £150 have I done yesterday and today, but for all your gods, help me or I perish.
The concluding paragraph of a letter mailed to Pinker the next week:
If you can stick to your end, all will go finely and I will bombard you so hard with ms that you will think you are living in Paris during the siege.
Cora to Pinker on August thirty-first:
In the mean time he is going to run very short. He has a wine dealer who threatens to serve papers tomorrow, if his bill for £35 is not paid at once.…
This has nothing to do with my former request for £20—to enable Mr. Crane to take a few days holiday [to accompany his niece to Lausanne].… The wine man must be satisfied and Mr. Crane must have a change or I fear he will break down & we cant have that.
Cora to Pinker on September thirtieth:
I am so glad you wrote to him not to go to the Transvaal. His health is not fit for it. He had a return of Cuban fever while we were in Paris and he is in no physical condition to stand a campaign no matter how short it may be.…
P.S. Please don’t let Mr. Crane know I’ve said a word against the Transvaal.*
After a bitter contretemps with Stokes, his new American publisher, Crane received some words of advice from Robert Barr:
You are all right when you stick to the pen, and are apt to be all wrong when you meddle in business.…
You have got things on exactly the right basis now, in leaving Pinker to deal with editors and publishers. Write, write, write, anything but business letters.
After receiving a panicked communication from Cora begging for more money, Pinker responded directly to Crane on October twenty-fourth. It was the first and only time the besieged, put-upon agent expressed the smallest sign of irritation.
I confess that you are becoming most alarming. You telegraphed on Friday for £20; Mrs. Crane, on Monday, makes it £50; today comes your letter making it £150, and I very much fear that your agent must be a millionaire if he is to satisfy your necessities a week hence, at this rate. Seriously, you pinch me rather tightly. Mrs. Crane says I have “probably advanced money to Mr. Crane that I have not myself yet collected.” As a matter of fact, this sum, at present, is £230. I mention this to impress you less with an obligation to me than to yourself. There is a risk of spoiling the market if we have to dump too many short stories on it at once.…
… I will do my best to try and manage something during the next ten days or a fortnight.
Cora shot back with a semi-delusional harangue on the twenty-sixth. The fourth paragraph:
Now Mr. Pinker, how could you say to Mr. Crane not to dump too many short stories upon the market for fear of spoiling it? This is a fatal thing to say to a writing man. Particularly to Stephen Crane. And how can you think so with an utterly unspoiled and vast American market? Harpers and the Saturday Evening Post and one story to McClures are the only things sold in America now and you could sell a thousand short stories of Mr. Crane there if you had them.
That was the worst it ever got. Two days later, Cora wrote Pinker a subdued, perfectly cordial letter, and just five days after that, Crane sent him the “double extra special good thing,” which was the last great story he ever wrote, “The Upturned Face.”
Pinker continued to stand solidly behind them, and the couple forged on, smiling, always smiling through their troubles, even as their duet of mutual pretend inched toward the final moments of the fourth act.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
* * *
There was going to be a party. There had to be a party because Edith Ritchie was going away, and how could they let her go without a proper sendoff? “For a long time my family had been clamoring for me to come home,” she remembered, “but the Cranes would say they needed me—they would be all alone (alone! with endless guests) in the country, miles from anywhere. Finally, Christmas was in the offing and I must go home. ‘No,’ said Stephen. ‘Let’s have a real party. We’ll have all your family here and your friends and our friends. It will be your party. We’ll have a ball and a play.’”
The party would be a three-day, end-of-the-century bash with as many guests as possible, all of them to be housed at Brede for the duration, and the play would be something called The Ghost, a collaborative farce engineered by the Cranes with contributions (if only a line or a word) from Henry James, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, Robert Barr, A. E. W. Mason, Edwin Pugh, George Gissing, Rider Haggard, and H. B. Marriott Watson, with musical numbers stolen from the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan. The ghost, of course, was Sir Goddard Oxenbridge, the child-eating nobleman who had once ruled over the house where the guests would be gathered.
It was Crane’s last prank. He had just finished “The Upturned Face” and was about to launch into a series of articles about the Boer War (about which he had strong opinions) but in the same way he had interrupted the writing of George’s Mother to whip up the japeries of the Pike County Puzzle, he now turned his head in the opposite direction to become the guiding spirit and master of ceremonies for a Carnival of Craziness.
A dying Puck pulls on his boots for a last romp in the woods.
Or, to put it another way: Back against the prison-yard wall, a condemned man looks at the firing squad lined up against him, calmly smokes his last cigarette, and then, rejecting the blindfold they offer him, laughs at his executioners as they lift their rifles and take aim.
There is no doubt that our hero did some dumb things in his short and reckless life, but throwing that party was not one of them. The only problem was that he had miscalculated the distance between the conception of the plan and its execution. Crane’s body was giving out on him more quickly than he had thought it would, and when the big moment finally rolled around just after Christmas, three days and three nights of nonstop merriment proved to be more than his system could handle.
Ritchie:
Cora and I worked like dogs before the party—sending out invitations, hiring extra servants from London. The play had to be written out and typed, each of us typing with two fingers. Music had to be copied and new words written for each song. I painted the scenery: the huge fireplace in the hall was the backdrop. Guest rooms had to be arranged for married couples. Erstwhile big empty rooms fixed up as dormitories, one for men, one for women. An orchestra had to be engaged, cots hired from a local hospital. Cora got the village blacksmith to make dozens of iron brackets, each holding two candles, to hang around the oak-paneled walls of the hall. We made long ropes of holly and greenery and festooned them around the walls. We wrote on cards who-should-take-in-whom to dinner every evening, and put them near each guest’s bed.
The cast came a day before the other guests. After a sketchy performance at home, we gave a trial performance of “The Ghost” that afternoon in the village schoolhouse for the school children. When the other guests arrived the next day, we numbered about fifty. We had the real performance that night.
The Conrads and the Wellses were among the fifty, but Mason was the only co-author who took part in the performance. As an experienced actor, he held center stage as the Ghost, and in spite of the harsh winter weather, the auditorium in the Brede village schoolhouse was nearly full. Among the many lines delivered to the audience were Conrad’s “This is a jolly cold world,” Gissing’s “He died of an indignity caught in running after his hat down Piccadilly,” and Pugh’s “A bird in the hand may be worth two in the bush, but the birds in the bush don’t think so.” The orchestra mentioned by Ritchie must have been hired to perform at the ball only, since a local paper mentions that “the songs, most of which were encored, were tastefully accompanied on the piano by Mrs. H. G. Wells” and then adds: “At the close of the performance … the audience sang, ‘For they are jolly good people,’ the original word being changed in consideration of the ladies among those acting.” Another paper remarked, “The inhabitants of Brede have every reason to be thankful to Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Crane, of Brede Place, for providing them with such a treat.… No other charge was made for admission, the whole of the expenses being defrayed by Mr. Stephen Crane, including an addition to the stage, which he has since presented to the School.”
Truckloads of money must have been spent to pull off that seventy-two-hour extravaganza—the hired servants, the hired musicians, the rented beds, the dinners for fifty, the breakfasts for fifty—but that was what Puck had asked for, and that was what Puck’s wife gave him, and for the first two days and nights he seems to have been in reasonably good form, holding his own, in any case, but then there was the ball on December twenty-ninth, the last late-night frolic, and as the evening dragged on with waltzes, quadrilles, and an old-fashioned American square dance, with the orchestra clanging out its numbers and Wells romping around the hall on a broomstick horse, the host began to withdraw into a sullen, edgy silence. In an effort to break his foul mood and force himself back into the spirit of the party, he offered to teach some of his British guests how to play poker, but the men kept talking about other things as he tried to explain the rules, and he finally stood up and said, “In any decent saloon in America, you’d be shot for talking like that at poker.” Then he stomped off.
Wells: “He was profoundly weary and ill, if I had been wise enough to see it, but I thought him sulky and reserved. He was essentially the helpless artist; he wasn’t the master of his party; he wasn’t the master of his home; his life was altogether out of control; he was being carried along.”
Perhaps. But the first point was surely correct. Crane was profoundly weary and ill, and late that night, after the musicians had gone home, as he sat downstairs plucking at his guitar, he suddenly passed out. His head fell against the shoulder of the person sitting beside him, and seconds after that blood was pouring from his mouth.
When he regained consciousness, his first thought was to hide what had happened from Cora. She was already upstairs in bed, but someone must have woken her, and no sooner did she come down than Wells was on a bicycle, pedaling through the rain to fetch a doctor.
* * *
Not all hemorrhages are fatal. This one turned out to have been a warning, a sign of the troubles that lay ahead, but for the time being the doctor was cautiously optimistic, and by January second Crane was writing a letter to Moreton Frewen’s son about The Ghost (“a mere idle string of rubbish made to entertain the villagers”) and Cora was writing to Pinker that “Mr. Crane is ill again—in bed but is still keeping at his work.”
Before he was called away on other business, his current business was the same as it had always been, and to the degree that he was up to it, he kept on writing. The O’Ruddy had taken shape by then and was already out of the starting block (a letter from Pinker on January fifteenth confirmed that he had just received the third and fourth chapters), and wedged in among the political articles and short stories Crane knocked out in the early part of the year, he was also working on a nonfiction money project that Pinker had lined up for him with Lippincott’s Magazine in America, which entailed writing a series of long articles under the heading “Great Battles of the World.” Crane had no time to do the research himself, so the job was handed over to Kate Lyon, who was living in London with her daughter and in need of work. As much out of gratitude to her friends as for the work itself, she passed her days at the British Museum compiling extensive notes on bygone military engagements at New Orleans, Badajoz, Plevna, Solferino, and the Burkersdorf Heights, which Crane would edit and put into final form, but as time went on and the task became too much for him, Lyon wrote the final versions herself. Parallel to all that, and on top of all her other responsibilities, Cora was working with a young engineer named Frederick Bowen on an invention she had been tinkering with since her return from the Greco-Turkish War: a filter for army canteens that would actually work. Other filters had been manufactured before, and every one of them had proved ineffective, but by all accounts Cora’s device did what it was supposed to do in all circumstances. If she had been able to carry through with it, perhaps the invention would have brought in enough ready cash to pull out the nail, but time was running short by then, and she never pursued it beyond the earliest stages of the process.
