Part 1 (1/2)

The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Short Fiction.

by Stephen Crane.

INTRODUCTION.

STEPHEN CRANE SAID TO THE UNIVERSE.

I.

Sometimes, the most profound of awakenings come wrapped in the quietest of moments.

Early in April 1893, a struggling young writer embarked on a strange journey to tend to an uncomfortable task. He had been invited to an uptown party. He hoped to cultivate the patronage of its host, whose prominence in American letters was something he admired, envied, and feared. The young man's career thus far had been so unprofitable that it had brought him to the brink of starvation on several recent occasions. An endors.e.m.e.nt could reopen many of the doors to publis.h.i.+ng venues that had been slammed in his face.

The aspirant was a curious man to look at. Although he was barely twenty-one years old, his face and body were already showing signs of wear and abuse. He stood at 5 feet 6 inches, average for a man of his day. A few years previously, during two unsuccessful semesters at two different colleges, he weighed in at a taut 125 pounds, muscular and agile enough to stand out on a college baseball team. By 1893, however, his strapped diet and unrestrained smoking had taken their toll on the body and abilities that had once attracted the serious notice of a professional baseball club. His complexion had turned sallow. His shoulders on his emaciated frame had begun to droop. Several friends detected an increasing dullness in his blue-gray eyes. Cigarettes and cigars had stained his fingers and teeth with nicotine. He coughed deeply and regularly from the habit. That, plus his poor diet would beset him with a variety of dental problems for the rest of his life. His custom of writing late into the night frequently created dark circles under his eyes during the following day. To those around him, he often looked ill.

Although he preferred a more bohemian lifestyle, especially in the clothes he wore, the young writer did try to spruce up his appearance for the party. These people inhabited a very different social circle than the one he was accustomed to. His usually disheveled hair had been hastily groomed. He did not own a suit suitable for the occasion, so he borrowed a friend's best outfit. It obviously did not fit him very well, which reinforced his uncomfortable thought that he would be very out of place at such a gathering. On a subconscious level, he feared that this opportunity fitted him as poorly as his suit did. He wanted to be a writer on his own terms; he should control his public persona, not tailor it to acquiesce to the refined expectations of a social circ.u.mstance. As much as he admired his host and needed his help, the young man had misgivings about how playing the patronage game might compromise his art.

The journey to his host's home on the south side of Central Park was a study of the contrast between the haves and the have-nots in turn-of-the-century New York City. His starting point was fraught with failure. Ever since he had moved to the city to pursue his chosen vocation, he had lived in a succession of cheap boarding houses on the East Side. Such environs had provided the backdrop for his early fiction. He particularly liked to disguise himself as a derelict in order to mingle with the denizens of the infamous Bowery district. He had recently finished Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a short novel about how poverty enslaves a woman to a prost.i.tute's life. When no publisher would touch it (one had called it too ”cruel”) , he sold his last bit of patrimony-some stock his late father had bequeathed to him-and used the money to have the story privately printed. In 1893 few people took note of a short novel about how poverty enslaves a woman to a prost.i.tute's life. When no publisher would touch it (one had called it too ”cruel”) , he sold his last bit of patrimony-some stock his late father had bequeathed to him-and used the money to have the story privately printed. In 1893 few people took note of Maggie. Maggie. Eventually, the young writer gave away a hundred copies and used the remainder as kindling. Friend and fellow writer Hamlin Garland brought the book to the host's notice. Thus, the aspirant's ”calling card” had been presented. Eventually, the young writer gave away a hundred copies and used the remainder as kindling. Friend and fellow writer Hamlin Garland brought the book to the host's notice. Thus, the aspirant's ”calling card” had been presented.

In contrast, at the other end of his journey on that April day, his destination was distinguished by success. The home of his host was not outlandishly opulent but tasteful and understatedly elegant, befitting his status as America's most influential man of letters. Unlike the squalor omnipresent on the East Side, this house had a pleasant panorama of a lake situated at the south entrance to Central Park. Every item modestly bespoke eminence and success. The host's novels attracted immediate interest and financial reward. Only a few years ago, he had published to much acclaim A Hazard of New Fortunes, A Hazard of New Fortunes, the most ambitious project of his career. His insights as a columnist in several stalwart literary magazines carried great weight in public opinion, which he used to promote his literary values and, with regal benevolence, to champion new writers who held similar beliefs. To the literati in America, he mattered. And the young writer wanted to matter too. the most ambitious project of his career. His insights as a columnist in several stalwart literary magazines carried great weight in public opinion, which he used to promote his literary values and, with regal benevolence, to champion new writers who held similar beliefs. To the literati in America, he mattered. And the young writer wanted to matter too.

A twentieth-century biographer unearthed an interview with a New York newspaper that detailed the host's appearance around that time. Although approximately the same height as the young writer, the host was more ”stout, round, and contented looking,” but this excess weight visually enhanced his aura of confidence, refinement, and sagac ity. His ”iron-gray” hair and mustache were meticulously groomed. His pleasant voice hinted that he was ”satisfied with his career and with the success he had made in life.” The carefully tailored host greeting the awkwardly clad young guest would have made an interesting snapshot.

Despite the opportunity, despite the good wishes of his host, the young writer felt ill at ease for most of the dinner party. True, when a moment for a private conversation with his famous mentor arrived, it went well. The host later complimented the young man before his guests by p.r.o.nouncing that Maggie Maggie accomplished ”things that [Mark Twain] can't.” But keeping his manners and language in check before polite company greatly taxed the young man's composure. He would not feel relaxed until long after the party when he kibitzed at a back-room poker game among black New Yorkers later that night. accomplished ”things that [Mark Twain] can't.” But keeping his manners and language in check before polite company greatly taxed the young man's composure. He would not feel relaxed until long after the party when he kibitzed at a back-room poker game among black New Yorkers later that night.

During the course of this tedious rite of pa.s.sage in the career of a young writer, however, a wonderful event occurred in a casual moment. The host had fetched a volume of poetry. He wanted to read selections from it to his guests. The author of this book had been dead for seven years. During her life, only a few of her poems saw the light of print. Few of them had been published with her consent. After her death, her family recovered among her possessions one of the great treasures of American literature-more than 1,700 brilliant poems, a.s.sorted and neatly sewn into many small bundles. Her family decided to do something that the poet could never bring herself to do-publish them.

A first selection was issued in 1890; a second in 1891. In 1893, both series had been combined into one volume. One of the editors was the host's professional friend, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who was himself well respected for his publis.h.i.+ng endeavors and for his command of a black regiment during the Civil War. Thirty years previously, the poet had sent him four poems, and he had not been very encouraging then. He found them ”spasmodic,” ”uncontrolled,” and, at times, incomprehensible. Thus, his a.s.signment as her posthumous editor was not without the distaste of irony. Unable to fathom the true intent that underscored her genius, Higginson and his coeditor selected from among her safer poems for inclusion in the first volume. They manhandled many poems in their editing, replacing her idiosyncratic use of the dash with more conventional punctuation and ghost rewriting lines to create the traditional scansion and rhyme that a nineteenth-century audience expected. But despite all the ham-handedness of the editors, the publication of these poems propagated a revolution in American poetry.

The host had a pleasing voice and an ingratiating demeanor, which made him an excellent reciter. The poet had adapted the cadences of church hymns in her poetry, and so the host spoke at a rhythmic pace that his guests were very familiar with. With his devout Methodist upbringing, the young writer had heard such hymns all his life.

What poems were read that day are not known, but I think it likely that the host performed the first poem of the 1890 volume: Success is counted sweetest By those who ne'er succeed.

To comprehend a nectar Requires sorest need.Not one of all the purple host Who took the flag to-day Can tell the definition, So clear, of victory,As he, defeated, dying, On whose forbidden ear The distant strains of triumph Break, agonized and clear.

The aspiring writer was astounded. He had just experienced a revela tory moment equivalent to John Keats's first reading of George Chapman's translations of the Homeric epics or Charles Baudelaire's walking into a salon and first seeing a painting by Eugene Delacroix. Both the English and the French poets did not abandon what they believed in order to embrace something new; instead, they found artistic works that crystallized their own conceptions of art. This first contact permitted them to a.n.a.lyze what they already practiced in their own poetry and to speculate why they did so. During the 1890s in America, most good writers found such a muse by encountering the work of an earlier artist. In Saint Louis, for example, another writer also struggling to find her place and voice, Kate Chopin, used the fiction of Guy de Maupa.s.sant for such a purpose.

The recitation had multiple effects upon the young writer. He em pathized with the pained failure described in the poem. More importantly, he saw aspects of his own emerging voice in the woman poet's surgical concision of language. In his recent novel about the ”girl of the streets,” for example, he had crafted intensely imagistic sentences: ”The girl, Maggie, blossomed in a mud puddle.” Inspired by the reading, the young writer soon began to compose poems of his own, rattling off a great many in a short s.p.a.ce of time: Black riders came from the sea.

There was clang and clang of spear and s.h.i.+eld, And clash and clash of hoof and heel, Wild shouts and the wave of hair In the rush upon the wind: Thus the ride of sin.

Even in the heavily edited versions the host read that day, the young writer could hear the liberties the dead poet had taken with the hymnal form, and he would accelerate her a.s.sault against the conventions of poetry by abandoning rhyme and traditional cadences altogether. He called his efforts not poems but ”lines.” When he bragged that he usually had several poems configured in his mind ready to be put on paper, his friend Hamlin Garland challenged him to do so. The young writer immediately wrote out one without fumbling a word. His ”lines” allowed him to distill his fatalistic notions, almost to the point of becoming epigrams regarding individual impotence: I saw a man pursuing the horizon; Round and round they sped.

I was disturbed at this; I accosted the man.

”It is futile,” I said, ”You can never-””You lie,” he cried, And ran on.

The poems the host read that April day excited another level of response in the young writer. The woman poet had composed much of her work in an intense spurt of inspiration during the American Civil War; consequently, many of her poems were populated with images and metaphors of battle. In his desperation to earn money, the young writer had been researching and writing a new ma.n.u.script that he hoped might exploit the curiosity by the American public during the 1890s about the Civil War. He first considered turning the novel into a romantic ”potboiler” so as to ensure its financial success. But the embattled insights into the human heart contained in the poems he heard that day and his own evolving artistic ambitions turned the project into something finer. The host did not realize it then, but he had given his young guest the necessary ammunition to rebel against the literary values he had championed for a lifetime.

The host was William Dean Howells, the nexus of American Realism; the poet, Emily d.i.c.kinson, the private genius of Amherst; the aspiring writer, Stephen Crane, the self-consuming literary meteor of the 1890s; and the novel, The Red Badge of Courage, The Red Badge of Courage, his most enduring and influential work. If you have made it thus far in this essay, I thank you for your patience and indulgence. In addition to recreating a brief but pregnant moment in Crane's emerging talent, I wanted to mimic (I hope not too poorly) his prose style and, in particular, one of his fictional devices. At a crucial stage in one of the drafts of his most enduring and influential work. If you have made it thus far in this essay, I thank you for your patience and indulgence. In addition to recreating a brief but pregnant moment in Crane's emerging talent, I wanted to mimic (I hope not too poorly) his prose style and, in particular, one of his fictional devices. At a crucial stage in one of the drafts of Red Badge, Red Badge, Crane went through his ma.n.u.script and greatly reduced the number of times he employed character names, instead replacing them with epithets such as ”the youth”; ”the tall soldier,” who becomes ”the spectral soldier”; and ”the loud soldier,” who becomes ”the friend.” Later, in a newspaper account, Crane faithfully reported all facts regarding his near-death experience at sea in 1897, but he subsequently avoided naming his characters in the fictional story he composed based on the incident-”The Open Boat.” Instead of names, he chose to emphasize occupations and their symbolic a.s.sociations: ”the captain,” ”the cook,” ”the oilman,” and ”the correspondent.” (Only ”Billy,” the nickname of the oilman who was killed, was occasionally used in ”The Open Boat.”) Crane went through his ma.n.u.script and greatly reduced the number of times he employed character names, instead replacing them with epithets such as ”the youth”; ”the tall soldier,” who becomes ”the spectral soldier”; and ”the loud soldier,” who becomes ”the friend.” Later, in a newspaper account, Crane faithfully reported all facts regarding his near-death experience at sea in 1897, but he subsequently avoided naming his characters in the fictional story he composed based on the incident-”The Open Boat.” Instead of names, he chose to emphasize occupations and their symbolic a.s.sociations: ”the captain,” ”the cook,” ”the oilman,” and ”the correspondent.” (Only ”Billy,” the nickname of the oilman who was killed, was occasionally used in ”The Open Boat.”) In these and in other stories, Crane emphasized the potential of all individual experiences to have universal implications. A ”youth” struggling to find a physical, intellectual, and spiritual path through the horrors of war parallels the road every human must travel in coping with crisis. Four men in a flimsy boat on a storm-tossed ocean become metaphors for every individual scrambling to survive the whims of an uncaring universe. An aspiring writer first encountering the inspiring poetry of a misunderstood poet becomes the archetype for all artistic epiphanies.

Like most other consequential writers before him and since, young Stephen Crane was blessed with a good number of experiences and encounters that shaped and clarified his artistic path. While it is tempting for a modern reader to reduce these influences to just a manageable few, the truth of the matter is that the genius of Crane resides in his ability to blend so many different biographical experiences, philosophical and theological a.s.sumptions, previous and contemporary literary traditions and techniques, and political ideals in a deceptively simple prose style. In Red Badge, Red Badge, for instance, he has the wherewithal to juxtapose a stark account of a war incident drawn according to the precepts of Realism with a scene in which the protagonist, Henry Fleming, reverts to his animal instincts, as befits the tenets of literary Naturalism. Crane sews these two episodes with such a fine st.i.tch that readers seldom see the seams. The possibility that both disparate aesthetic perspectives can appear simultaneously valid in close textual proximity begins to reveal how complex Crane's vision of the human experience was. Everything Crane was, everything he believed, every meaningful book that he read, every indelible memory from his life, every interesting idea he had ever heard went into the construction of the novel. In the rest of this introduction, I will touch upon a number of these shaping encounters, focusing especially upon those that manifested themselves in both open and disguised ways in for instance, he has the wherewithal to juxtapose a stark account of a war incident drawn according to the precepts of Realism with a scene in which the protagonist, Henry Fleming, reverts to his animal instincts, as befits the tenets of literary Naturalism. Crane sews these two episodes with such a fine st.i.tch that readers seldom see the seams. The possibility that both disparate aesthetic perspectives can appear simultaneously valid in close textual proximity begins to reveal how complex Crane's vision of the human experience was. Everything Crane was, everything he believed, every meaningful book that he read, every indelible memory from his life, every interesting idea he had ever heard went into the construction of the novel. In the rest of this introduction, I will touch upon a number of these shaping encounters, focusing especially upon those that manifested themselves in both open and disguised ways in Red Badge, Red Badge, taking great advantage in the process of insights by the many astute academic critics Crane's work has attracted during the past eighty years. taking great advantage in the process of insights by the many astute academic critics Crane's work has attracted during the past eighty years.

II.

As one might suspect, Stephen Crane's family and childhood appear in Red Badge Red Badge in covert and private ways. He was born in a parsonage in Newark, New Jersey, on November 1, 1871. He was his forty-five-year-old mother's fourteenth child, but none of her previous four babies had survived beyond their first year. Thus, among the Crane children who survived to adulthood, Stephen became the most indulged, a circ.u.mstance encouraged by the age gap between him and his nearest older sibling. in covert and private ways. He was born in a parsonage in Newark, New Jersey, on November 1, 1871. He was his forty-five-year-old mother's fourteenth child, but none of her previous four babies had survived beyond their first year. Thus, among the Crane children who survived to adulthood, Stephen became the most indulged, a circ.u.mstance encouraged by the age gap between him and his nearest older sibling.

His father, the Reverend Jonathan Townley Crane, named his child after the first Crane to migrate to North America during the seventeenth century and also after a prominent New Jersey ancestor who had been active during the Revolutionary War. (Dr. Crane erroneously thought that the latter had signed the Declaration of Independence.) As biographer Edwin Cady has pointed out, young Stephen grew up as a ”preacher's kid,” a label that immediately defined his relations.h.i.+p with his schoolhouse peers and that definitely set up his subsequent rebellion against religious dogma. At the time of his son's birth, Dr. Crane served as the presiding elder for a group of Methodist churches in and surrounding Newark. Wanting to preach more, he gave up his adrninis trative duties and moved his family to his new clerical position in Paterson, New Jersey, by 1876. When a dispute arose over his salary, he accepted another post in Port Jervis, New York, in 1878.

When Stephen was barely eight, his father died unexpectedly from heart complications arising from a viral attack. Stephen's most vivid memories of his father were likely of him at work in his profession, sermonizing before his flock. As a young man, Dr. Crane had embraced Methodism, in part as a rebellion against his own Presbyterian heritage. He had been studying for the Presbyterian ministry at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) when he began to question that faith's more strident doctrines, especially the notion of infant d.a.m.nation, the belief that children who died unbaptized would be consigned to the fires of h.e.l.l. While concepts such as d.a.m.nation figured prominently in his sermons, Dr. Crane believed that G.o.d tempered His wrath with mercy and divinely discriminating judgment. He converted to Methodism because he saw it as a way to preach a more hopeful and nurturing view of G.o.d and salvation. At weekly prayer meetings his son undoubtedly heard his father stress his faith in a merciful G.o.d, one who lovingly embraced all. d.a.m.nation remained an omnipresent possibility, but Dr. Crane's G.o.d was more interested in saving than in condemning.

Stephen's mother came from a different religious tradition. Mary Helen Peck Crane was a woman capable of great kindnesses, such as the time she cared for an unwed mother despite the open misgivings of her neighbors. Nevertheless, she piously spouted the caustic Methodism long advocated by her family. The Pecks, according to Stephen Crane, produced Methodist clergymen ”of the ambling-nag, saddle bag, exhorting kind.” She pa.s.sionately focused upon G.o.d's function as avenger of sins committed against His name. As an adult, Stephen fondly remembered his mother's intelligence, but he often winced at the memory of her religious fervor. Given the obvious difference between the conceptions of husband and wife, Sunday suppers in the Crane household must have produced interesting and, for young Stephen, confusing debates at the table.

These competing views of G.o.d appear throughout Crane's literary efforts, often at allegorical levels in his fiction but at more conspicuous ones in his poetry: The livid lightnings flashed in the clouds; The leaden thunders crashed.