Complete Works of Stephen Crane

by Stephen Crane

  It is said by some of his friends that he scorns scholarship, and is proud of the fact that he has had little or no schooling. We shall not believe this till we hear it from his own lips, or until it is proved by a continuance of the grammatical errors that disfigure that little masterpiece, “The Red Badge.” The author’s most ardent admirer is The Saturday Review. Yet his book is not without honor in his own country, where we have known it to be read twice by one reader in a single week.

  Mr. Crane is small and slight, with a dark and rather sallow complexion and light hair, which the camera, it seems, is not always truthful in picturing. The portrait reproduced above is from a photograph taken by Mr. F. H. King of this city. It is regarded by Mr. Crane as a good likeness, and it has not hitherto been published.

  From: The Criterion, February 1901, p.26-27

  The Darkest Hour in the Life of Stephen Crane. (The Criterion, February 1901)

  The months following the sinking of the money inherited from his father’s estate in the unsuccessful publication of “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets,” marked the lowest ebb in the fortunes of Stephen Crane.

  When one firm after another had refused to publish the book, Crane finally invested his own money in the enterprise and lost it all. He then went to live in a boarding-house on East Fifty-seventh street, near Avenue A, and from there moved with the proprietor to West Fifteenth street. The Fifteenth-street undertaking was not a success, and when the house was given up Crane went to Lakeview, N. J., for a time. When he returned from Lakeview he was wearing rubber boots because he had no shoes, and he slept and lived at the studios of various artist friends until he was asked to become one of the proprietors of a studio at 145 East Twenty-third street.

  With Crane the studio had four occupants. He could contribute nothing to its maintenance, but he added very little to the expense, and the others were glad to have him. For seven or eight months, from one autumn until the following summer, the four men lived together. It was during that time that “The Red Badge of Courage” was written. At the time he came to live in the studio, Crane was reading over the descriptive articles on the Civil War published in the Century. War and fighting were always deeply interesting to him. The football articles in the newspapers were an especial pleasure. “Ah!” he would say after reading one of them, “that’s great, that’s bully, that’s like war!” And whenever there was a warship coming into the harbor, if he could get the ferry fare, he would go down to Fort Wadsworth and stand on the hill there to watch the vessel come in. He has stood for hours in a drenching rain to see a war vessel enter the harbor.

  The articles in the Century then were full of interest and fascination for Crane, and when he moved to the studio on Twenty-third street he borrowed the magazines and took them with him to read and study. All of his knowledge of the war and of the country depicted in “The Red Badge of Courage” was gathered from those articles and from the study of maps of that region.

  He always worked at night, generally beginning after 12 o’clock and working until 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning, then going to bed and sleeping the greater part of the day. Crane and two of the others slept in a large, old-fashioned double bed, taking turns at sleeping in the middle; the fourth man occupied a cot. They pooled their resources, and the first man up was usually the best dressed for the day, unless one of them had a particular reason for wishing to present a good appearance. ‘For men struggling as they were against poverty and privation to force themselves into recognition, there was little incentive to go out except in the search for work. On such occasions, when one of the four men had an idea for getting money, the most presentable combination of clothes that could be made was gotten together for him; and many a time one of them has gone out wearing his friend’s clothes bravely over a stomach that had missed more than one meal.

  Crane spent his afternoons and evenings studying the war and discussing his stories. Every incident and phase of character in “The Red Badge of Courage” was discussed and argued fully and completely before being incorporated into the story. In this he worked differently from the way in which his short stories were written.

  At the time of beginning “The Red Badge of Courage” he was writing sketches of East Side children, some of which have been published since; he could not sell them when they were written. These sketches were quite brief, and most of them were written in one night without previous discussion. After writing a story he would put it away for two or three weeks, and work on something else until his mind was thoroughly clear for a fresh consideration of it. When the story was taken out for revision it would be turned over to his friends for criticism, and Crane would argue with them about the objections they would make. He often accepted suggestions for changes, but it always seemed as though these changes were those he had already decided upon himself before they were mentioned by others. This was also characteristic of the discussions of “The Red Badge of Courage.” He convinced himself; others might help him, but he arrived at his own conclusions.

  In his work he always tried for individuality. His daring phrases and short, intense descriptions pleased him greatly. They were studied out with much care, and after they had been trimmed and turned and changed to the final form, he would repeat them aloud and dwell on them lovingly. Impressionism was his faith. Impressionism, he said, was truth, and no man could be great who was not an impressionist, for greatness consisted in knowing truth. He said that he did not expect to be great himself, but he hoped to get near the truth. Although he did not expect to be a great man, he often declared that he would be famous, and sometimes for hours in the intervals when he was not working he would sit writing his name – Stephen Crane — Stephen Crane — Stephen Crane — on the books, magazines and loose sheets of paper about the studio. There were plenty of them.

  His manuscripts were always scrupulously neat and clean, written in ink on legal cap paper without erasures and without interlineations. In revising his work he would rewrite a whole sheet when a correction was necessary rather than make an erasure, if only to change one word.

  The poems published under the title “Black Riders” were also written during this period. Crane himself had a very high opinion of these poems, in which he was confirmed by Hamlin Garland, who, besides William Dean Howells, was his greatest favorite among American authors. The friendship and encouragement of these two men gave him strength and courage in his struggle, and he often spoke of them with pride and gratitude. A critical article by Hamlin Garland, comparing Crane and Richard Harding Davis, which appeared in the Arena during that winter, was of immense value to him. The conclusion of the article was that Crane was far superior to Davis, and this opinion Crane often quoted when, under the burden of fresh disappointments, the future seemed to offer no hope. The hard and meager life — two poor meals a day, a bun or two for breakfast and a dinner of potato salad and sausages warmed over the little stove that heated the room, frequently eaten cold because there was no coal for the stove — could be borne if he were progressing towards his end.

  Just after “The Red Badge of Courage” was completed, and two or three months before a publisher was found, Crane received the only commission that he obtained during all of this period. The Wilson Syndicate gave him a commission to write a story about the New York lodging-houses. Crane and one of his friends in the studio spent a night and two days as tramps on the Bowery and East Side about the lodging-houses. This was the kind of work that pleased him best, for he said it was in such places human nature was to be seen and studied. Here it was open and plain, with nothing hidden. It was unvarnished human nature, he said.

  From: Thus to Revisit: Some Reminiscences, by Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford), E.P. Dutton, 1921, p.102-125

  Excerpts from: “Henry James, Stephen Crane and the Main Stream”

  …It was perhaps in 1896 — I am never very certain of my dates, but it was about then — that Mr. Garnett brought poor, dear, “Stevie” to call upon me. I was then living a very self-consciously Simple
Life at Limpsfield in a newly built cottage of huge lumps of rough stone. These Crane, fresh from the other side of the world, muddledly took to be the remains of an ancient fortification. He put in, I remember, a rose tree beside the immensely thick, oaken front door — for all the world like a king planting a memorial oak ! — and looking at an outside fire-place remarked:

  “That’s a bully ol’ battlement!”

  He told me afterwards that, although he did not, in the ordinary way set much store by corner lots and battle-fields I and my establishment had pretty well seen him for the jack-pot. But the literary point about the interview was this:

  At a given moment Mr. Garnett said that Crane — he was then the all-famous author of the Red Badge of Courage — must have read a great deal of French imaginative literature. Crane said defiantly that he had never read a word of French in his life. (I dare say the defiance was to my address far more than to Mr. Garnett’s.) He had been dragged up in the Bowery, he had, and he hadn’t any use for corner lots. When Mr. Garnett persisted and pointed out the great resemblance of his handling of a story to Maupassant’s, Crane said:

  “Oh well, I’ve read ol’ man James’s ...” I forget what it was he confessed to having read, but it was one of James’s French critical works.

  Later, I was requested — this will seem an improbable story — to go one evening to Crane’s house at Oxted, near by, to give Mrs. Crane a lesson in dressmaking. The request had been made by a local lady who liked to “bring people together,” I not having, out of shyness, I dare say, pursued the acquaintance with Crane. I found Mrs. Crane alone and she did not want a lesson in dressmaking — of the mediaeval variety. But she begged me to await Crane’s return: he had gone up to town on business and she expected he would be nervous and glad of distraction. I think this was the only unsolicited call I ever paid — and that was due to a misapprehension! — and I was nervous enough myself!

  He came back — nervous and distracted, truly, and very late — but extraordinarily glad. I have never again seen such gladness as was displayed on that Oxted-night by that great and elf-like writer. For me, Crane came nearer to the otherworldly being than any human soul I have ever encountered: he was indeed what Trelawny has made us believe Shelley was — the Author of emotionalised fiction.

  He kept it exaggeratedly beneath the surface. Superficially he was harsh and defiant enough: his small, tense figure and his normal vocabulary were those of the Man of Action of dime drama — very handy in a Far Western fashion, with a revolver. He loved, indeed, to sit about in breeches, leggings, and shirt-sleeves, with a huge Colt strapped to his belt. And he would demonstrate with quite sufficient skill how, on a hot day he could swat a fly on the wall with the bead foresight of his “ gun “ — all the while uttering Bowery variations on his theme of giving no fancy prices for antiquities. He meant by that that he was not a Poet.

  But he was! I will venture to say that no more poetic vision of humanity in our late Armageddon was ever written than the Red Badge of Courage — and that was written twenty years before Armageddon was upon us. I re-read it — one paid one’s minor re-visitations even then — along with Conrad’s Typhoon, France’s Histoire Comique and What Maisie Knew, in Becourt Wood during the first battle of the Somme. And, for the life of me, I can hardly tell which is to me the more real — the dawn appearing over a host just standing to in Crane’s book, or the dawns that we used to see, between the dusty thistle stalks, glimmering over those hammered, violently chiselled and blasted downs. That was the sheer instinct of the Poet who searches the hearts of man — that writing.

  What an admirable talent! You had Maggie; you had the Open Boat, the Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, the Three White Mice. And I remember with particular emotion the Third Violet, a book which Crane’s chief admirers did not care for and one which I have not been able to re-read, since it appears to be out of print and I have been able to find no copy.

  It is astonishing that any book of Stephen Crane’s should be out of print and that one should be able to find no copy. It is lamentable!

  He was glad, that night at Oxted; he was astonishingly glad, the joy shining out of him as heat glows sometimes through opaque substances — because his agent, Mr. Pinker, had given him a contract to sign which guaranteed him £20 per thousand words for everything that he chose to write and had advanced him a sum of money sufficient to pay his Oxted debts. So he could get away from Oxted. The motive may seem materialistic to the official-poetic amongst readers. But Crane had hated his suburban villa with a hatred comprehensible enough — and he hated debts with the hatred of a high-strung, nervous but realistic poet.

  With the falling from his shoulders of that intolerable load he desired, as Mrs. Crane had foreseen, to talk. And he talked. He kept me there listening, right through the night, until breakfast time. He had the most amazing eyes; large, like a horse’s; frowning usually with the gaze of one looking very intently — but shining astonishingly at times. And a deep voice. When he became excited — as that night he was — the studied Americanisms disappeared from his vocabulary, or nearly so, and he talked a rather classical English. He planned then, his glorious future.

  They were, his plans, not so much a matter of the world over which he intended to travel, flinging coins from the purse of Fortunatus that had been put by Mr. Pinker into his hands: it was a question, rather, of how he would render that world when he had roved all over it. He talked, in fact, about his technique.

  I do not flatter myself that it was to me that he talked; that night he would have talked like that to a broomstick. ... I had, I suppose, in those days a Pre-Raphaelite or aesthetic aspect and he seemed to make me responsible for the poems of Rossetti and the prose of Mr. Legallienne. So that, beginning by telling me, like Mr. Conrad, that I could not write and never should be able to write, he went on to tell me how writing should be done — and from time to time denouncing me.

  And his formulae were those of the Flaubert-Maupassant-Turgenev school. He had read, naturally, a great deal more French than he had chosen to acknowledge in my unsympathetic presence, to Mr. Garnett. I do not mean to say that his native talent and inspiration did not make him a peculiarly good subject for that contagion. He would no doubt have written simply and forcibly and in the most economical of forms if Maupassant had never written a line. But, under that stimulus he had arrived much more quickly at a “method” and he knew quite well “what he was doing.”

  And what particularly interested me was his projection before me, then, of a great series of heroic poems that he was planning to write — in Vers Libre. Of these he wrote only one volume — the Black Riders, and, if, in this verse he did not attain to the quietness and colloquialism, at which he aimed theoretically — and to which I fancy that even at that date I had attained — he certainly showed some of the way for a whole school. He hated both rhyme and formal metre and at one point he shouted at me — he had never seen a word of mine:

  “You ruin . . . ruin . . . ruin ... all your work by the extra words you drag in to fill up metres and by the digressions you make to get at rhymes!” He possessed, in fact, in a remarkable degree not only the Literary Gift but the Literary Sense — and a devouring passion for words.

  The contacts of Henry James and poor Stevie were peculiar. I do not remember to have heard the two of them discuss together anything of material interest. Indeed I only remember to have seen them together at large social functions like the flower shows that Crane and his family interested themselves in, at Brede in Sussex. But I heard the two men discuss each other, often enough.

  Crane’s attitude towards the Master — except for occasional lapses of irritation in which he would talk of James as Henrietta Maria — was boyishly respectful and enthusiastic. I dare say that, with his marvellous insight, he valued the great man very sufficiently, and when his defiant mood was off him and he was not riding about the country on one of his immense coach-horses, he would readily enough acknowledge himself to be, if not a disciple, a
t least an attentive scholar of the Old Man’s works.

  By that time he had taken Brede Place — an immense, haunted and unrestored Elizabethan manor house, lying, unhealthily beshadowed and low in a Sussex valley. I fancy I was responsible for introducing him to the Place; at any rate I had known it for many years before he came there. And, with characteristic enthusiasm, though he would still declare that he had no use for battle-fields — he led there the life of an Elizabethan baron. Rushes covered the floors; dogs lay beneath the table to gnaw the bones that fell; a baron of beef and a barrel of ale stood always ready near the back door for every tramp to consume. The house was filled with stray dogs, lost cats, and, as if in tides, indiscriminately chosen bands of irresponsible guests, would fill and recede from, the half-furnished rooms. . . . And in a small room over the great porch of the house Crane would sit writing, to keep it all going.

  It used to be terrible to see the words, in a tiny writing, slowly filling the immense sheet of white foolscap; falling from the pen that made that passionate pilgrimage, to keep going that immense house, that not so much riotous as uncalculated hospitality. It was the brave attempt of a gallant soul — and surely there was never soul more gallant than that of Stephen Crane. . . . But the end was tragic, as it must be in that haunted and foredooming hollow into which the very sunlight seemed to fall with the air of a blight.