The Old Man — one called him that as if he had been the colonel of a regiment or the captain of a battleship — took his young compatriot very hardly — almost shudderingly, you might say. Brede was just within calling distance in a vehicle from Rye, and James certainly called on Crane often enough to show a decent cordiality to a young fellow-countryman in the neighbourhood. I had a great affection — as I hope I have made plain — for the younger man and, though I never “presumed “ to remonstrate with the Master when he used to groan over the necessity of going to Brede, I suppose I made this affection appear now and then in the tones of my voice. So that once he said:
“Figure to yourself, my dear H. . . what would be your feelings if being, as 1 hope I may phrase it, an honoured guest in Baltimore, or one of our friend Wister’s gentler Southern cities, you should find installed in a place of honour, but laughed at as a peculiar national representative of your own, some — gifted, I grant you: oh surely gifted — but, wholly atrocious for accent and mannerisms. . . . Cockney from the Mile End Road!” That was pretty exactly the beginning of his speech. And he went on to make it plain that what most appalled him was Crane’s life of the moment: his aping, so that he seemed to reduce to absurdity, the semi-feudal state of a Tudor lord — on the poor £20 per thousand.” It was as if the Old Man shuddered at seeing a mock made of a settled and august mode of European life; and shuddered all the more because that very mockery was the sincere expression of admiration by a compatriot. In much the same way he spoke with bitter hatred of Mark Twain’s Yankee at the Court of King Arthur…
… Stevie used to rail at English Literature, with its Stevenson and the interjected finger, as being one immense, petty, Parlour Game. Our books he used to say were written by men who never wanted to go out of drawing-rooms for people who wanted to live at perpetual tea-parties. Even our adventure stories, colonial fictions and tales of the boundless prairie were conducted in that spirit. The criticism was just enough. It was possible that James never wanted to live outside tea-parties — but the tea-parties that he wanted were debating circles of a splendid aloofness, of an immense human sympathy, and of a beauty that you do not find in Putney — or in Passy!
It was his tragedy that no such five-o’clock ever sounded for him on the timepieces of this world. And that is no doubt the real tragedy of all of us — of all societies — that we never find in our Spanish Castle our ideal friends living in an assured and permanent republic. Crane’s Utopia, but not his literary method, was different. He gave you the pattern in — and the reverse of — the carpet in physical life — in Wars, in slums, in Western saloons, in a world where the “gun” was the final argument. The life that Mr. Conrad gives you is somewhere halfway between the two: it is dominated — but less dominated — by the revolver than that of Stephen Crane, and dominated, but less dominated, by the moral scruple than that of James. But the approach to life is the same with all these three: they show you that disillusionment is to be found alike at the tea-table, in the slum and on the tented field. That is of great service to our Republic…
…When “poor dear Stevie” at Brede fell sick of his last, protracted illness, the personal concern that James showed was almost fantastic. He turned his days into long debates over this or that benevolence — and he lay all night awake fearing that he might have contemplated something that might wound the feelings or appear patronising to the sick boy. He would run the gamut of grapes, public subscriptions, cheques. He cabled to New York for sweet-corn and soft-shelled crabs for fear the boy might long for home-food. And, when they came he threw them away — for fear they should make him more home-sick!
From: The Critic, V. XXXVII, No. 1, July 1900, p.14-16
The Critic, V. XXXVII, No. 1, July 1900
In England the death of Stephen Crane is regarded as a blow to literary journalism, like that of G. W. Steevens, a few months ago, at the same early age — thirty years. Mr. Crane had served as war correspondent in Cuba and Greece, and was to have gone out to St. Helena for the London Morning Post. He was, perhaps, better fitted for journalistic work than anything else, for he could describe what he saw with a vividness that put him in the same group of war correspondents with Kipling, Steevens, and Davis. Ten books already bear his name, and four or five more are forthcoming (a singularly large output for the short period of his productivity), yet only one of them stands out clearly as a notable work. “The Red Badge of Courage” had power in plenty. Nothing of Mr. Crane’s had more of it. Yet the other qualities which the years might have been expected to bring had not come when he laid down his pen. His later work was clever and promising, but it was little more. It is something, though, to have produced in one’s early twenties a work which attracts the flattering attention that “The Red Badge” received — for the little book was decidedly the book of its day, and had the good fortune to be roundly abused as well as tremendously praised by military as well as civil critics.
Mr. Karl Edwin Harriman, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, who, last fall, spent several weeks with Mr. Crane in his English home, scouts the idea that the story-writer contracted tuberculosis in Cuba. “His home killed him,” writes Mr. Harriman. ‘‘ The old manor house, in which he lived for the past two years, was loaned him by Mr. Frewen, the owner, and was built in the thirteenth century of almost porous stone. The chill, damp, and draughts of the old house were terrible, believe me. The floors are of flagging, with great deceptive fireplaces, and the wind whistled through the casements every moment of the day and night. Crane’s study was in the tower, — the draughtiest of all.” Mr. Harriman caught severe colds every time he visited the place. Late in April last, before Mr. Crane was taken down with the illness which was the immediate cause of his death, Mr. Harriman had a long letter from him in which he told of his work. “I’ve finished 56,000 words on a romance of Ireland — George II.’s time; some folks call it ripping — but I don’t know; tell me what you think of it when you get your copy.” Mr. Harriman, judging from the way he worked, thinks that Mr Crane must have finished the story before his death. He would write ten or twelve thousand words at a stretch, then rest for a day or two and go at it again.
Mr. Crane estimated his work in this order: “An Old Man Goes a-Wooing,” “The Monster,” “George’s Mother,” “The Red Badge of Courage.” Mr. Harriman, who got his figures from the author, says that he received from Heinemann for all English rights in “The Red Badge” £20. From the syndicate that printed the story first in this country, — cut from 55,000 words to 18, 000, — $90. His profits came when Messrs. Appleton published the story in book form.
From: The Argonaut, V. XLVII, No. 1216, July 2, 1900, p.7
MEMORIES OF STEPHEN CRANE. (The Argonaut, V. XLVII, No. 1216, July 2, 1900)
A Novel and Drama which He Had Planned — Some Anecdotes of the Cuban War — His Fearlessness of Death and Recklessness of His Health.
There is something pathetic in the death of a young writer who has given a certain degree of promise but is not allowed opportunity for fulfillment. Such a one was Stephen Crane, who died at Badenweiler on June 5th, aged thirty years. His “Red Badge of Courage” brought him international fame, which he was unable to sustain. There were some, like Howells and Hamlin Garland, who predicted a brilliant future for him, while others saw in his genius only fitful flashings without a permanent life. Toward the last he himself frequently made light of his early style, in which he placed too much dependence upon adjectives of color, and in some of the “Whilomville Stories,” which have recently appeared, we find him trying for that finish and nicer use of language which his critics had said he lacked.
Had Crane lived, he would have given to the world an historical novel dealing with life in New Jersey before and during the Revolution:
“This fact came to light soon after his death, when a short note written by him to the New Jersey Historical Society was unearthed. The society’s rooms are in Newark, and the note reads as follows:
“To the Secretary of the Ne
w Jersey Historical Society — Dear Sir: I am about to attempt a novel upon Revolutionary times in the Province of New Jersey, and I would be very glad if you could tell me the titles of some of the books on the manners and customs of the times in the province. 1 am particularly interested in Elizabethtown, and I would be much obliged and gratified if you could give me the title of a good history of that city. Faithfully yours,
‘‘ Stephen Crane.’
“The Crane family, from which the young man sprang, was about as thoroughly a Jersey family as can be found anywhere in the State. His father and mother were both buried in Elizabeth, and many of his ancestors lived there. Elizabeth is a picturesque enough city in spots even to this day to have readily excited the imagination of Stephen Crane, who from his earliest childhood had heard of the deeds of his ancestors in one portion of the State or another. The above letter was written on August 26, 1899, from Brede, in Sussex, England, when the author was supposed to be recovering from a severe attack of malaria brought on by exposure during the campaign in Cuba. It is not probable that he got much further than to purchase the books whose name Miss Henrietta Palmer, librarian of the New Jersey Historical Society, was able to furnish him with.”
In the spring of 1896, when Crane’s “Red Badge of Courage” was being very widely read and the veterans of the Civil War were betting that the author was a veteran like themselves, a man in Newark wrote Stephen Crane at his residence, at that time 165 West Twenty-Third Street, New York City, asking to be informed concerning his ancestry. The following reply was promptly received:
“Dear Sir: I was born in Newark on the first of November, 1871. The house was No. 14 Mulberry Place. I understand the neighborhood is rather tough now, so that 1 am not too stringent on that point, although it makes no particular difference. My father was the Rev. J. T. Crane, D. D., presiding elder of the Newark district. The family moved from there to Bound Brook. My great great-great-grandfather was one of the seven men who solemnly founded Newark. He was Jasper Crane. His farm came into the south-west corner of Market and Broad Streets. His son, Stephen Crane, M. C, moved to Elizabeth, where my grandfather and my father were born. During the Revolution the Cranes were pretty hot people. The old man Stephen served in the Continental Congress (for New Jersey), while all four sons were in the army. William Crane was colonel of the Sixth Regiment of New Jersey Infantry. The Essex Militia also contained one of the sons.
“I am not much on this sort of thing or 1 could write more, but at any rate the family is founded deep in Jersey soil (since the birth of Newark), and I am about as much of a Jerseyman as you can find.
“Sincerely yours, Stephen Crane.”
Another of Crane’s fondest ambitions was to write a successful play, says a writer in the New York Sun:
“As far as is known this play has never been written, but the gist of its plot was thoroughly well established in his brain, as he used to prove to some of his fellow-correspondents in Cuba. No matter how extraordinary existing conditions might be — a storm might be turning his dispatch boat endways, Morro Castle and the American ships might be blazing away at each other like good fellows, or, as happened several times with the marines at Guantanamo, the bullets of the enemy might be whistling over him thick and fast — still Crane would always find time to discuss some new situation which had just crept into his brain. An exquisite bit of landscape or some quaint expression uttered by one of the deck-hands would arouse Crane as all the shooting on earth never could.”
A Boston correspondent of the New York Mail and Express, who spent some time with Crane in Cuba, first met him under extraordinary circumstances. He writes:
“I had landed, on the twenty-second of June, 1898, on the more than half-destroyed wharf at Daiquiri, Cuba, one of the first of the journalists with Shatter’s expedition to go ashore. Hundreds of American soldiers were being literally dashed upon that crazy wharf like human breakers; black Cubans were bending over and dragging them up by the collars and belts. They filed ashore in a single line, with heads erect and wondering eyes, making the little Cubans look by contrast like a drove of brown rabbits. A boyish-looking American, with a small blonde mustache, stood on the shore saturating himself with this spectacle. By his side was a correspondent whom I knew, who introduced me to him. The boyish-looking man was Stephen Crane. 1 shook his hand and looked into a very mild pair of light-colored eyes, which were nevertheless saying unutterable things, and the grip of his hand thanked me for understanding these things. Then an extraordinary roar burst forth — a roar of steam whistles, of soldier shouts, of acclaiming guns. Everybody pointed aloft to where, high above the little town, on the near and overhanging mountain-top, the Stars and Stripes had been broken out above the Spanish blockhouse. Crane and I did not shout — the shouts were stopped by lumps in our throats.”
They wandered about, and by and by Stephen Crane asked him if he had any grub:
‘‘I happened to have in my pockets some odds and ends of food that 1 had gathered up in the galley of the press-boat which had brought me off the transport, and we ate it together. While we were eating, Stephen Crane swore quite fluently and unnecessarily about a number of things, and talked roughly. It struck me that he was putting this on — that the gentle and tender manner was the real thing about him, and this a mask which he deemed it necessary to wear. 1 had known men before who did much the same thing. I rather pitied him for the profanity, as you pity a white negro minstrel for his burnt cork. We kept together for the rest of the day and evening, and then sought a Cuban shanty for the night. By this time I had found the gentle Stephen Crane again; I was the older man; he had a hammock, and I had shared my pocketful of food with him; I must sleep in the hammock, which lie had slung on the little veranda, while he lay on the hard floor. I refused, and he gently insisted. Finally he found a cot in the house to lie on, and I slept in the hammock, under the moon and the tropic stars, in a better place, waking often and listening to the roar of the Caribbean waves, the faint sounds of the songs of the Cubans chanting their country’s deliverance by these strange Goths of the north, the low, muted commands of the officers still moving men ashore down on the crazy wharf — and the grunting of the pig under the veranda. After that I saw Stephen Crane often, I always with that beautiful and effeminate smile on his face, that wholly spiritual and poetic expression of countenance which his bad teeth could not spoil, and oftener than otherwise with strange military oaths on his lips. There was still another queer inconsistency about him. One recognized him instantly as a thoroughly American product, yet he had already, I think through his sojourn abroad during and after his trip to Greece, acquired something of a London accent, in which he generally spoke. But such affectations as these did not set any one against him. We all felt that the real fellow was genuine.”
Crane never thought of danger. Death to him was nothing more than the next breath, or the next breakfast, or the next sleep. This was not affected; it was a distinct quality in the fellow. Says one of his Washington friends in the New York Evening Post:
“He was mixed more or less intimately with the Cuban war from the start to finish. He knew Jose Marti, had been with Maceo, Gomez, Garcia, Rabi, and the others. The whole thing to him was never anything more than a ‘ big story.’ He knew it just as a police head-quarters reporter knows all about a big case, with its star criminals, its essential witnesses, its lost clews, its great lawyers, its involved legal points, its ruined reputations, its death scenes, and its human miseries. Into this mass he was picking and picking for copy. As the editor would define it, he was looking for ‘ things of human interest.’ So far as I could note, courage was the only thing he admired. If he cared anything for the Cuban cause he never showed it, but he had a boundless admiration for the men who did the real fighting. The only time I ever saw him really enthusiastic was when he was trying to prove to a cafe crowd that the filibusters who landed on the enemy’s shore had the greatest kind of courage. Crane had seen all kinds of fighting. It had a fascinat
ion for him. Danger was his dissipation, as carousals or gambling might be for another.”
“A strong man could not help feeling sorry for Crane,” continues the writer:
“He seemed on the verge of collapse for lack of physical force. His arms were as thin as one who had been ill for a long time. In a dim light his face was handsome, to the point of being beautiful, but in the full light it had an anaemic and distressed look. His habits were atrocious. He did nothing regularly. He ate and slept when he could no longer do without these necessaries of life. He would remain in the streets and in the cafes until his companions were tired out. In Havana he lived with a former filibustering associate in a pair of rooms not far from the down-town hotels, to which he would go in the hope of finding some stragglers when other places were closed to him. If he did, he would sit and listen to their tales until they were exhausted. Then he would go to work. When I saw him, he was writing about six hundred words a day. This was the only thing he did with regularity. He wrote somewhat slowly, and was almost whimsical in his choice of words. He would spend a long time in trying to find out what suited him; and, since he had no books of reference, his search for the right word or the necessary information consisted in chewing his pencil and waiting until the inspiration came to him. When his six hundred words were written he would rouse some of his straggling guests, or possibly go to bed. To take care of his health never occurred to him. He had the Cuban fashion of taking light drinks and coffee, but he did not indulge to excess in alcohol, which was remarkable at a time and place of excessive drinking. This was two years ago, and his health then was wretched, although not hopeless, had he cared to mend his ways. But he simply refused to think about himself.”
Complete Works of Stephen Crane Page 188
