My Acquaintance with Stephen Crane was brought about by Mr. Pawling, partner in the publishing firm of Mr. William Heinemann.
One day Mr. Pawling said to me: “Stephen Crane has arrived in England. I asked him if there was anybody he wanted to meet and he mentioned two names. One of them was yours.” I had then just been reading, like the rest of the world, Crane’s “Red Badge of Courage.” The subject of that story was war, from the point of view of an individual soldier’s emotions. That individual (he remains nameless throughout) was interesting enough in himself, but on turning over the pages of that little book which had for the moment secured such a noisy recognition I had been even more interested in the personality of the writer. The picture of a simple and untried youth becoming through the needs of his country part of a great fighting machine was presented with an earnestness of purpose, a sense of tragic issues, and an imaginative force of expression which struck me as quite uncommon and altogether worthy of admiration.
Apparently Stephen Crane had received a favourable impression from the reading of “The Nigger of the Narcissus” a book of mine which had also been published lately. I was truly pleased to hear this.
On my next visit to town we met at a lunch. I saw a young man of medium stature and slender build, with very steady, penetrating blue eyes, the eyes of a being who not only sees visions but can brood over them to some purpose.
He had indeed a wonderful power of vision, which he applied to the things of this earth and of our mortal humanity with a penetrating force that seemed to reach, within life’s appearances and forms, the very spirit of life’s truth. His ignorance of the world at large — he had seen very little of it — did not stand in the way of his imaginative grasp of facts, events, and picturesque men.
His manner was very quiet, his personality at first sight interesting, and he talked slowly with an intonation which on some people, mainly Americans, had, I believe, a jarring effect. But not on me. Whatever he said had a personal note, and he expressed himself with a graphic simplicity which was extremely engaging. He knew little of literature, either of his own country or of any other, but he was himself a wonderful artist in words whenever he took a pen into his hand. Then his gift came out — and it was seen then to be much more than mere felicity of language. His impressionism of phrase went really deeper than the surface. In his writing he was very sure of his effects. I don’t think he was ever in doubt about what he could do. Yet it often seemed to me that he was but half aware of the exceptional quality of his achievement.
This achievement was curtailed by his early death. It was a great loss to his friends, but perhaps not so much to literature. I think that he had given his measure fully in the few books he had the time to write. Let me not be misunderstood: the loss was great, but it was the loss of the delight his art could give, not the loss of any further possible revelation. As to himself, who can say how much he gained or lost by quitting so early this world of the living, which he knew how to set before us in the terms of his own artistic vision? Perhaps he did not lose a great deal. The recognition he was accorded was rather languid and given him grudgingly. The worthiest welcome he secured for his tales in this country was from Mr. W. Henley in the New Review and later, towards the end of his life, from the late Mr. William Blackwood in his magazine. For the rest I must say that during his sojourn in England he had the misfortune to be, as the French say, mal entoure. He was beset by people who understood not the quality of his genius and were antagonistic to the deeper fineness of his nature. Some of them have died since, but dead or alive they are not worth speaking about now. I don’t think he had any illusions about them himself: yet there was a strain of good-nature and perhaps of weakness in his character which prevented him from shaking himself free from their worthless and patronizing attentions, which in those days caused me much secret irritation whenever I stayed with him in either of his English homes. My wife and I like best to remember him riding to meet us at the gate of the Park at Brede. Born master of his sincere impressions, he was also a born horseman. He never appeared so happy or so much to advantage as on the back of a horse. He had formed the project of teaching my eldest boy to ride and meantime, when the child was about two years old, presented him with his first dog.
I saw Stephen Crane a few days after his arrival in London. I saw him for the last time on his last day in England. It was in Dover, in a big hotel, in a bedroom with a large window looking on to the sea. He had been very ill and Mrs. Crane was taking him to some place in Germany, but one glance at that wasted face was enough to tell me that it was the most forlorn of all hopes. The last words he breathed out to me were: “I am tired. Give my love to your wife and child.” When I stopped at the door for another look I saw that he had turned his head on the pillow and was staring wistfully out of the window at the sails of a cutter yacht that glided slowly across the frame, like a dim shadow against the grey sky.
Those who have read his little tale, “Horses,” and the story, “The Open Boat,” in the volume of that name, know with what fine understanding he loved horses and the sea. And his passage on this earth was like that of a horseman riding swiftly in the dawn of a day fated to be short and without sunshine.
From: The Saturday Evening Post V.73 No. 4, July 28, 1900, p.16-17
Stephen Crane – A Soldier of Fortune by Hamlin Garland
The death of Stephen Crane, far away in the mountains of Bavaria, seems to me at this moment a very sorrowful thing. He should have continued to be one of our most distinctive literary workers for many years to come. And yet I cannot say I am surprised. His was not the physical organization that runs to old age. He was old at twenty.
It happened that I knew Crane when he was a boy and have had some years exceptional opportunities for studying him. In the summer of 1888 or 1889 I was lecturing for a seaside assembly at Avon, New Jersey. The report of my first lecture (on “The Local Novelists,” by the way) was exceedingly well done in the “Tribune,” and I asked for the name of the reporter. “He is a mere boy,” was the reply of Mr. Albert, the manager of the assembly, “and his name is Stephen Crane.”
Crane came to see me the following evening, and turned out to be a reticent young fellow, with a big German pipe in his mouth. He was small, sallow and inclined to stoop, but sinewy and athletic for all that — for we fell to talk of sports, and he consented to practice baseball pitching with me. I considered him at this time a very good reporter, and a capital catcher of curved balls — no more, and I said goodby to him two weeks later with no expectation of ever seeing him again.
In the summer of ‘91, if I do not mistake, I was visiting Mr. and Mrs. Albert at their school in New York city, when a curious book came to me by mail. It was a small yellow- covered volume, hardly more than a pamphlet, without a publisher’s imprint. The author’s name was Johnston Smith. The story was called “Maggie, a Girl of the Streets,” and the first paragraph described the battle of some street urchins with so much insight and with such unusual and vivid use of English that I became very much excited about it. Next day I mailed the book to Mr. Howells, in order that he might share the discovery with me. The author had the genius which makes an old world new.
On that very afternoon Crane called upon me and confessed that he had written the book and had not been able to get any one to publish it. Even the firm of printers that put it together refused to place their imprint upon it. He said that the bulk of the edition remained unsold, and that he had sent the book to a number of critics and also to several ministers. On the cover of each copy (as on mine) was written, in diagonal lines, these words or their substance in Crane’s beautiful script: “The reader of this story must inevitably be shocked, but let him persist, and in the end he will find this story to be moral.” I cannot remember exactly the quaint terms of this admonition, but these words give the idea.
I said to him: “I hardly dare tell you how good that story is. I have sent it to Mr. Howells as a ‘find.’ Go and see him when he has read it.
I am sure he will like it.”
He then told me that he had been discharged from the staff of the “Tribune.” He seemed to be greatly encouraged by our conversation, and when he went away I talked with his friends about the book, which appealed to me with great power. I have it still. This desperate attempt of a young author to get a hearing is amusing to an outsider, but it was serious business with Crane then.
I did not see him again until the autumn of 1892, when I went to New York to spend the winter. He wrote occasionally, saying, “Things go pretty slow with me, but I manage to live.”
My brother Franklin was in Mr. Herne’s Shore Acres Company in those days, and as they were playing an all-season engagement at Daly’s theater we decided to take a little flat and camp together for the winter. Our fiat was on One Hundred and Fifth street, and there Crane visited us two or three times a week. He was always hungry and a little gloomy when he came, but my brother made a point of having an extra chop or steak ready for a visitor and Crane often chirped like a bird when he had finished dinner. We often smiled over it then, but it is a pleasure to us now to think we were able to cheer him when he needed it most.
He was living at this time with a group of artists—”Indians,” he called them — in the old studio building on East Twenty-third street. I never called to see him there, but he often set forth their doings with grim humor. Most of them slept on the floor and painted on towels, according to his report. Sometimes they ate, but they all smoked most villainous tobacco, for Crane smelled so powerfully of their “smoke-talks” that he filled our rooms with the odor. His fingers were yellow with cigarette reek, and he looked like a man badly nourished.
This crowd of artists, according to his story, spent their days in sleep and their nights in “powwows” around a big table where they beat and clamored and assaulted each other under a canopy of tobacco smoke. They hated the world. They were infuriated with all hanging committees and art editors, and each man believed religiously in his own genius. Linson was one of those Crane mentioned, and Vosburg and Green. Together they covenanted to go out some bleak day and slay a!’ the editors and art critics of the city.
Crane at this time wore a light check suit ant’ over it a long gray ulster which had seen much service. His habitual expression was a grim sort of smile. One day he appeared in my study with his outside pockets bulging with two rolls of manuscript. As he entered he turned ostentatiously to put down his hat, and so managed to convey to my mind an impression that he was concealing something. His manner was embarrassed, as if he had come to do a thing and was sorry about it.
“Come now, out with it,” I said. “What is the roll I see in your pocket?”
With a sheepish look he took out a fat roll of legal cap paper and handed it to me with a careless, boyish gesture.
“There’s another,” I insisted, and he still more abruptly delivered himself of another but smaller parcel.
I unrolled the first package, and found it to be a sheaf of poems. I can see the initial poem now, exactly as it was then written, without a blot or erasure — almost without punctuation — in blue ink. It was beautifully legible and clean of outline.
It was the poem which begins thus:
“God fashioned the ship of the world carefully.”
I read this with delight and amazement. I rushed through the others, some thirty in all, with growing wonder. I could not believe they were the work of the pale, reticent boy moving restlessly about the room.
“Have you any more?” I asked.
“I’ve got five or six all in a little row up here,” he quaintly replied, pointing to his temple. “That’s the way they come — in little rows, all made up, ready to be put down on paper.”
“When did you write these?”
“Oh! I’ve been writing five or six every day. I wrote nine yesterday. I wanted to write some more last night, but those ‘Indians’ wouldn’t let me do it. They howled over the other verses so loud they nearly cracked my ears. You see, we all live in a box together, and I’ve no place to write, except in the general squabble. They think my lines are funny. They make a circus of me.” All this with a note of exaggeration, of course.
“Never you mind,” I replied; “don’t you do a thing till you put all these verses down on paper.”
“I’ve got to eat,” he said, and his smile was not pleasant.
“Well, let’s consider. Can’t we get some work for you to do? Some of these press syndicate men have just been after me to do short stories for them. Can’t you do something there?”
“I’ll try,” he said, without much resolution. “I don’t seem to be the kind of writer they want. The newspapers can’t see me at all.”
“Well, now, let’s see what can be done. I’ll give you a letter to Mr. Flower, of the “Arena,” and one to Mr. Howells. And I want to take these poems to Mr. Howells to-morrow; I’m sure he’ll help you. H e’s kind to all who struggle.”
Later in the meal I said: “Why don’t you go down and do a study of this midnight bread distribution which the papers are making so much of? Mr. Howells suggested it to me, but it isn’t my field. It is yours. You could do it beyond anybody.”
“I might do that,” he said; “it interests me.”
“Come to — morrow to luncheon,” I said, as he went away visibly happier. “Perhaps I’ll have something to report.”
I must confess I took the lines seriously. If they were the direct output of this unaccountable boy, then America had produced another genius, singular as Poe. I went with them at once to Mr. Howells, whose wide reading I knew and relied upon. He read them with great interest, and immediately said:
“They do not seem to relate directly to the work of any other writer. They seem to be the work of a singularly creative mind. Of course they reflect the author’s reading and sympathies, but they are not imitations.”
When Crane came next day he brought the first part of a war story which was at that time without a name. The first page of this was as original as the verses, and it passed at once to the description of a great battle. Such mastery of details of war was sufficiently startling in a youth of twenty-one who had never smelled any more carnage than a firecracker holds, but the seeing was so keen, the phrases so graphic, so fresh, so newly coined, that I dared not express to the boy’s face my admiration. I asked him to leave the story with me. I said:
“Did you do any more ‘lines’?”
He looked away bashfully.
“Only six.”
“Let me see them.”
As he handed them to me he said: “Got three more waiting in line. I could do one now.”
“Sit down and try,” I said, glad of his offer, for I could not relate the man to his work.
He took a seat and began to write steadily, composedly, without hesitation or blot or interlineation, and so produced in my presence one of his most powerful verses. It flowed from his pen as smooth as oil.
The next day I asked for the other half of the novel. “We must get it published at once,” I said. “It is a wonderful study. A mysterious product for you to have in hand. Where is the other part?”
He looked very much embarrassed. “It’s in ‘hock,’ “ he said.
“To whom?”
“To the typewriter.”
We all laughed, but it was serious business to him. He could see the humor of the situation, but there was a bitter rebellion in his voice.
“How much is it ‘hung up’ for?”
“Fifteen dollars.”
I looked at my brother. I guess we can spare that, don’t you think?”
So Crane went away joyously and brought the last half of “The Red Badge of Courage,” still unnamed at the time. He told us that the coming of that story was just as mysterious as in the case of the verses, and I can believe it. It literally came of its own accord like sap flowing from a tree.
I gave him such words of encouragement as I could. “Your future is secure. A man who can write ‘The Red Badge of Co
urage’ can not be forever a lodger in a bare studio.”
He replied: “That may be, but if I had some money to buy a new suit of clothes I’d feel my grip tighten on the future.”
“You’ll laugh at all this — we all go through it,” said I.
“It’s ridiculous, but it doesn’t make me laugh,” he said, soberly.
My predictions of his immediate success did not come true. “The Red Badge of Courage” and “Maggie” were put through the Syndicate with very slight success. They left Crane almost as poor as before.
In one of his letters, in April, he wrote: “I have not been up to see you because of various strange conditions — notably my toes coming through one shoe, and I have not been going out into society as much as I might. 1 mail you last Sunday’s ‘Press.’ I’ve moved now — live in a flat. People can come to see me now. They come in shoals, and say I am a great writer. Counting five that are sold, four that are unsold and six that are mapped out, I have fifteen short stories in my head and out of it. They’ll make a book. The ‘Press’ people pied some of ‘Maggie,’ as you will note.”
I saw little of him during ‘93 and ‘94, but a letter written in May, ‘94, revealed his condition:
“I have not written you because there has been little to tell of late. I am plodding along on the ‘Press’ in a quiet and effective way. We now eat with charming regularity at least two times a day. I am content and am now writing another novel which is a bird. I am getting lots of free advertising. Everything is coming along nicely now. I have got the poetic spout so that I can turn
“I guess we can spare it on and off. I wrote a Decoration Day thing for the ‘Press’ which aroused them to enthusiasm. They said in about a minute, though, that I was firing over the heads of the soldiers. . .”
His allusion to free advertising means that the critics were wrangling over “The Black Riders” and “Maggie.” But the public was not interested. I had given him a letter to a Syndicate Press Company, and with them he had left the manuscript of his war novel. In a letter written in November, 1894, he makes sad mention of his lack of success:
Complete Works of Stephen Crane Page 183
