The Red Badge of Courage

by Stephen Crane

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE - AN EPISODE OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  THE VETERAN

  THE BRIDE COMES TO YELLOW SKY

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  THE BLUE HOTEL

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  A SELF-MADE MAN - AN EXAMPLE OF SUCCESS THAT ANYONE CAN FOLLOW

  THE OPEN BOAT - A TALE INTENDED TO BE AFTER THE FACT: BEING THE EXPERIENCE OF ...

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  SELECTED POETRY

  Explanatory Notes

  PENGUINCLASSICS

  THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE AND OTHER STORIES

  STEPHEN CRANE was born in 1871 in Newark, New Jersey, the youngest of a family of fourteen children. His father was a prominent Methodist minister and his mother, niece of a Methodist bishop, was a leading churchwoman. After brief attendances at Lafayette College and then Syracuse University, Crane joined his brother’s news agency in New Jersey and, while continuing to pursue freelance journalism, drifted into the bohemia of lower Manhattan. His first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), failed to find a reading public but was enthusiastically received by Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells, who encouraged his literary career. With his next novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), he became an instant, international celebrity. As a journalist Crane reported from the American West, Mexico, Greece, and Cuba, as well as New York, and also converted a number of his experiences into fiction. The stories and sketches he wrote following the composition of The Red Badge of Courage are among the finest short works in all of American literature. In 1899, Crane and his wife, Cora, settled in England, where his tubercular condition was aggravated by the relentless work schedule he undertook in order to meet his debts. He died in a sanitarium in Germany in June 1900.

  GARY SCHARNHORST is editor of American Literary Realism and editor in alternating years of the research annual American Literary Scholarship. He has held Fulbright fellowships to Germany and at present is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of New Mexico. He has published books on Mark Twain, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, W. D. Howells, Bret Harte, Horatio Alger Jr., Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau.

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  The Red Badge of Courage first published in the United States of America

  by D. Appleton and Company 1895

  The Red Badge of Courage and Other Stories published in Penguin Books 1991

  The edition with an introduction and notes by Gary Scharnhorst published in Penguin Books 2005

  Introduction and notes copyright © Gary Scharnhorst, 2005

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Crane, Stephen, 1871-1900.

  The red badge of courage and other stories / Stephen Crane ; edited with an introduction and notes

  by Gary Scharnhorst.

  p. cm.

  Contents: The red badge of courage—The veteran—The bride comes to Yellow Sky—The blue hotel—

  A self-made man—The open boat. Selected poetry. The black riders—Do not weep, maiden, for war

  is kind—A newspaper is a collection of half-injustices—The trees in the garden rained flowers.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-09835-6

  1. Chancellorsville, Battle of, Chancellorsville, Va., 1863—Fiction. 2. Virginia—History—

  Civil War, 1861-1865—Fiction. 3. United States—Social life and customs—Fiction.

  I. Scharnhorst, Gary. II. Title.

  PS1449.C85A6 2005

  813’.4—dc22 2005050900

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  Introduction

  Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was a supernova in the American literary firmament in the 1890s, bursting upon the scene and burning with intense energy for several years before dying prematurely. Yet so prolific was he during his brief career—a period that coincided with the most severe economic crisis in America before the Great Depression of the 1930s—that the standard edition of his complete writings contains ten thick volumes of fiction, poetry, and reportage. Like other authors of realistic tales, including W. D. Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Hamlin Garland, and Willa Cather, Crane was trained as a journalist. But in his best writings he pushed beyond realism to irony, parody, and impressionism. Crane was both an apprentice and a pioneer, simultaneously learning his craft as he changed the course of American literary history. Who knows how much more he might have accomplished had he lived? At his death he was eleven years younger than Mark Twain had been when he published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, exactly the same age as Theodore Dreiser when he published his first novel Sister Carrie, eleven years younger than Willa Cather would be when she published her first novel in 1913. Yet the brevity of his life is part of the legend of the hard-drinking, hard-living bohemian. “Before ‘The Red Badge of Courage’ was published, I found it difficult to make both ends meet,” he once admitted. “It was an effort born of pain. . . . It seems a pity that this should be so—that art should be a child of suffering, and yet such seems to be the case.”1I

  Born to a teetotaling Methodist minister and his wife in Newark in 1871, Stephen Crane moved with his family to Port Jervis, New York, in 1878. Between 1888 and 1891 he attended Claverack and Lafayette Colleges and Syracuse University, where he seems to have majored in baseba
ll. “I began the battle of life with no talent, no equipment, but with an ardent admiration and desire,” he reminisced shortly before the publication of The Red Badge of Courage. “I did little work at school, but confined my abilities, such as they were, to the diamond. Not that I disliked books, but the cut-and-dried curriculum of the college did not appeal to me. . . . And my chiefest desire was to write plainly and unmistakably.”2 While still at college he published his first articles in New York-area newspapers, and in 1893 he self-published his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, under a pseudonym. Though hailed by such critics as W. D. Howells (“perhaps the best tough dialect which has yet found its way into print”) and Hamlin Garland (“the most truthful and unhackneyed study of the slums I have yet read”), the novel sold virtually no copies.3

  In June 1893, after reading a series in Century magazine on “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War,” Crane began to write The Red Badge of Courage. As he later explained to his friend Louis Senger, “I deliberately started in to do a pot-boiler . . . something that would take the boarding-school element—you know the kind. Well, I got interested in the thing in spite of myself, and I couldn’t, I couldn’t. I had to do it my own way.”4 Crane completed a draft of the story in early April 1894 while living in the Art Students’ League building in New York. He was only twenty-two years old. After Garland read the story in manuscript and suggested a few changes, Crane submitted it to S. S. McClure to consider for publication in McClure’s Magazine or by his newspaper syndicate. After receiving a noncommittal response from McClure, however, Crane retrieved the manuscript in October and submitted it to Irving Bacheller, whose syndicate serialized a truncated version of the story in several major newspapers, including the Philadelphia Press, the following December. On the basis of this serialization, Ripley Hitchcock, the chief editor of D. Appleton and Co., accepted the novel in February 1895 for book publication. Meanwhile, Crane was traveling in the West and Mexico, and after his return to New York in May he signed a contract with Appleton that provided for a standard 10 percent royalty on all sales of the novel. After Current Literature excerpted part of a chapter in its August issue, The Red Badge of Courage, only the second novel by a virtually unknown young writer, was formally published on September 27.

  It was an immediate sales success, with two or three printings in 1895 and as many as fourteen printings the following year. Its critical reception was more mixed, however. On the one hand, many reviewers, especially in England, were impressed by the realism of its battle scenes, ranking The Red Badge of Courage with Tolstoi’s War and Peace and Zola’s La Débâcle. Edward Marshall averred in the New York Press, for example, that only Tolstoi had described as vividly as Crane “the curious petty details of personal conduct and feeling when the fight is thickest.” In the New Review, George Wyndham, the British Undersecretary for War, opined that Crane realized “by his singleness of purpose a truer and completer picture of war” than either Tolstoi or Zola. Harold Frederic, the London correspondent of the New York Times, insisted that the novel “impels the feeling that the actual truth about a battle has never been guessed before” and compared Crane with Tolstoi, Balzac, Hugo, Mérimée, and Zola.5 Rudyard Kipling reportedly traveled with a copy of the novel in his pocket; the New York Commissioner of Police, Theodore Roosevelt, wrote Crane a congratulatory letter; and Crane was told that a copy was filed in the archives of the War Department in Washington. 6 John W. De Forest, a Civil War veteran and the author of Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), thought Red Badge was “a really clever book, with a good deal of really first-class work in it. His battle scenes are excellent, though I never saw a battery that could charge at full speed across a meadow” as happens in chapter IV.7 Though Crane was not born until six years after the armistice, he was famously credited with serving in the Union Army. As he explained, many reviewers “insist that I am a veteran of the civil war, whereas . . . I never smelled even the powder of a sham battle.” He speculated that he had “got my sense of the rage of conflict on the football field”8—and, indeed, he describes in chapter XIX how his protagonist Henry Fleming runs for cover with “his head low, like a football player.”

  On the other hand, some readers objected to Crane’s ostensible failures of verisimilitude in the novel. A. C. McClurg, a Civil War general, dismissed it as nothing more than “a vicious satire upon American soldiers and American armies” and “a mere work of diseased imagination” which ignored entirely “the quiet, manly, self-respecting, and patriotic men, influenced by the highest sense of duty, who in reality fought our battles.” William M. Payne, editor of the Dial, scorned what he considered Crane’s nondescript method: “There is almost no story to Mr. Crane’s production, but merely an account, in roughshod descriptive style, of the thoughts and feelings of a young soldier during his first days of active fighting.” The reviewer for the New York Independent, in sharp contrast to the favorable notices of the novel, claimed it was merely “a raw lump of pseudo-realism wherein a man, who clearly has no first-hand knowledge of war, attempts to present an American picture in Tolstoi’s manner. It is, in fact, not true to life, and as a romance it is supremely disgusting.” 9 Many other critics negotiated a middle ground between these extremes. A. C. Sedgwick in the Nation, for example, thought Crane “a rather promising writer of the animalistic school,”10 a form of praising with faint damns. In all, The Red Badge of Courage made him famous and, but for his profligate spending, it might have made him rich.

  Instead, he continued to work at a furious pace. In November 1896, Crane accepted an assignment from the Bacheller syndicate to report on the political situation in Cuba. While waiting to sail from Jacksonville he met Cora Taylor, madam of a fashionable brothel, who soon becomes his common-law wife. On New Year’s Eve he sailed for Cuba on the filibustering steamer Commodore, which foundered off the coast of Florida on 2 January 1897 after the boiler exploded. With three other men he drifted in a small dinghy for thirty hours before they reached shore near Daytona Beach. The experience would inspire one of his most famous stories, “The Open Boat.” In March he accepted an assignment with the Hearst papers and the McClure syndicate to cover the month-long Greco-Turkish war in the spring. Accompanied by Cora, Crane spent the next several weeks on the continent before settling in England. There he met Joseph Conrad and wrote “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” and “The Blue Hotel,” both based on his trip to the West in early 1895. Accepting an assignment from the New York World to cover the Spanish-American War in Cuba, he landed with the U.S. Marines at Guantánamo in June 1898 and lived in Havana from August until December, filing occasional dispatches. In December he returned to England deep in debt and spent the entire next year vainly trying to earn enough money by writing to appease his creditors. Crane suffered a tubercular hemorrhage in December 1899 and his health rapidly failed. He died six months later in a Black Forest village in southern Germany. In The Green Hills of Africa (1935) Ernest Hemingway expressed his admiration for Crane’s writing and when asked “what happened to him?” he replied, “He died. That’s simple. He was dying from the start.”11

  One of the most rapidly maturing authors in American literary history, Crane refined the crude brand of naturalism evident in his first novel Maggie in his masterwork The Red Badge of Courage. He broadly modeled the battle in the novel on the battle of Chancellorsville in early May 1863, with Fleming’s regiment, the 304 th New York, based on the 124th New York, a unit raised around Port Jervis. Still, the novel invokes the names of no officers associated with the fight because, as Crane explained later, “it was essential that I should make my battle a type” so as not to raise the ire of any generals in the field.12 Instead, Crane’s characters were archetypes—e.g., “the tall soldier,” “the youth,” “the loud soldier,” “the cheery soldier,” “the tattered soldier”—for the same reason the four characters in “The Open Boat” are identified simply as the cook, the captain, the oiler, and the correspondent. Much as Crane’s s
oldiers in Red Badge are given names (e.g., Jim Conklin, Henry Fleming, Wilson) only in dialogue, the single character given a name in “The Open Boat” (Billie) is so distinguished in dialogue as well.

  The novel is often regarded as an initiation story in the grand American tradition of Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineaux,” Melville’s Redburn, and Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The director John Huston endorsed this interpretation when he cast Audie Murphy, the most decorated American combat soldier in World War II, as the hero of the film version released in 1951. But, in truth, Crane’s novel confounds the critics who try to read it as a Bildungsroman. Henry Fleming never really grows or learns anything. Or as Charles C. Walcutt insists, “Increasingly, Crane makes us see Henry Fleming as an emotional puppet controlled by whatever sight he sees at the moment. . . . If there is any one point that has been made it is that Henry has never been able to evaluate his conduct. . . . Crane seems plainly to be showing that he has not achieved a lasting wisdom or self-knowledge.”13 Put another way, the tall soldier (Jim Conklin) is a responsible adult when the novel opens; the loud soldier (Wilson) becomes an adult after his first day in battle; but “the youth” (Fleming) does not change at all. He remains a dupe to his illusions to the final page.

  In fact, he has been conditioned to harbor his illusions from an early age. His ideas about war have been gleaned from reading classical Greek authors, Homer’s Iliad in particular. “He had read of marches, sieges, conflicts, and he had longed to see it all,” but Fleming now despairs that “Greeklike struggles would be no more.” Modern warfare would be neither as noble nor as savage as it was for the Greeks. Henry fears he will run in battle, moreover, and he conceives of war (as would a good Darwinian) as a crucible for testing character: “He tried to mathematically prove to himself that he would not run from a battle.” On the eve of his first skirmish, he rationalizes that he has been coerced to volunteer in the army, that he has not enlisted of his own free will, that he is a mere will of the wisp in a naturalistic universe. “He was in a moving box” of “tradition and law.” The army and the war are consistently described with animal metaphors—as “two serpents crawling from the cavern of the night,” “the red animal,” a “brown swarm of running men,” a “red and green monster”—and the individual soldier is but an impersonal cog in a war machine, a “part of a vast blue demonstration,” “not a man but a member” of his unit who is “welded into a common personality” and “dominated by a single desire.” At first, confident he will “become another thing in battle,” Fleming stands his ground in a condition of “battle sleep.” But during a second charge, Fleming does run when he thinks his entire regiment is retreating: “A man near him . . . ran with howls. . . . He, too, threw down his gun and fled. There was no shame in his face. He ran like a rabbit.” Fleming rationalizes his fear and trepidation in naturalistic terms: “He had fled, he told himself, because annihilation approached.” Wandering through the woods, Fleming throws a pinecone at a squirrel who “ran with chattering fear,” which he considers a sign from Nature. He had run from danger exactly like the squirrel in a personal “struggle for existence.” (Obviously, animal metaphors appeared in literature before Darwin, but it is fair to say they had a different resonance in the late nineteenth century, after the publication of The Origin of Species.) Fleming soon detects a second sign from Nature that reinforces the lesson of the first. He sees a small animal catch a fish from a pool of standing water, and then in a type of chapel in the woods he comes across the decaying body of a Union soldier whose eyes resemble those of “a dead fish.” The implication is clear, at least to Henry: Had he not fled the battle, he would have been prey to the enemy, killed like the fish. In brief, as Milne Holton concludes, “Confronting Henry is a Darwinian Nature, a Nature red in tooth and claw.”14