When the Graeco-Turkish war broke out he was in London. He went into the field as correspondent for The Westminster Gazette and The New York Journal. After that he started for Cuba with a filibustering expedition, which was wrecked off the American coast. He then went to Cuba as The Journal’s correspondent and witnessed the operations at Santiago and Havana and afterward in Porto Rico.
After this experience he came to this city, intending to engage here and in London in book writing. While looking in the Tenderloin for “color” for a story of the seamy side of life he was arrested and had an experience with the police. In court the following day he pleaded his case so well that the Magistrate released him, and also the young woman arrested with him. He wrote in 1898 ‘The Open Boat” and “The Eternal Patience.”
For the last eighteen months Mr. Crane lived in England, having made his home on an estate in Essex since last Fall. He wrote, after leaving here, two novels and a volume of verse called “War Is Kind,” all three books inspired by the Turkish war, and a volume of short stories entitled “The Monster.” His last work, “Whilomville Stores,” a series of tales of child life, is now in course of publication in American magazines.
Mr. Crane was born in Newark, N. J., in 1871, and was the son of the Rev. Dr. J. I. Crane. He attended Lafayette College and Syracuse University, but was not graduated from either.
From: The Library, June 23, 1900, p.17-18
“When I Knew Stephen Crane” by Willa Cather (under the pseudonym, Henry Nicklemann)
It was, I think, in the spring of ‘94 that a slender, narrow-chested fellow in a shabby grey suit, with a soft felt hat pulled low over his eyes, sauntered into the office of the managing editor of the Nebraska State Journal and introduced himself as Stephen Crane. He stated that he was going to Mexico to do some work for the Bacheller Syndicate and get rid of his cough, and that he would be stopping in Lincoln for a few days. Later he explained that he was out of money and would be compelled to wait until he got a check from the East before he went further. I was a Junior at the Nebraska State University at the time, and was doing some work for the State Journal in my leisure time, and I happened to be in the managing editor’s room when Mr. Crane introduced himself. I was just off the range; I knew a little Greek and something about cattle and a good horse when I saw one, and beyond horses and cattle I considered nothing of vital importance except good stories and the people who wrote them. This was the first man of letters I had ever met in the flesh, and when the young man announced who he was, I dropped into a chair behind the editor’s desk where I could stare at him without being too much in evidence.
Only a very youthful enthusiasm and a large propensity for hero worship could have found anything impressive in the young man who stood before the managing editor’s desk. He was thin to emaciation, his face was gaunt and unshaven, a thin dark moustache straggled on his upper lip, his black hair grew low on his forehead and was shaggy and unkempt. His grey clothes were much the worse for wear and fitted him so badly it seemed unlikely he had ever been measured for them. He wore a flannel shirt and a slovenly apology for a necktie, and his shoes were dusty and worn gray about the toes and were badly run over at the heel. I had seen many a tramp printer come up the Journal stairs to hunt a job, but never one who presented such a disreputable appearance as this story-maker man. He wore gloves, which seemed rather a contradiction to the general slovenliness of his attire, but when he took them off to search his pockets for his credentials, I noticed that his hands were singularly fine; long, white, and delicately shaped, with thin, nervous fingers. I have seen pictures of Aubrey Beardsley’s hands that recalled Crane’s very vividly.
At that time Crane was but twenty-four, and almost an unknown man. Hamlin Garland had seen some of his work and believed in him, and had introduced him to Mr. Howells, who recommended him to the Bacheller Syndicate. “The Red Badge of Courage” had been published in the State Journal that winter along with a lot of other syndicate matter, and the grammatical construction of the story was so faulty that the managing editor had several times called on me to edit the copy. In this way I had read it very carefully, and through the careless sentence-structure I saw the wonder of that remarkable performance. But the grammar certainly was bad. I remember one of the reporters who had corrected the phrase “it don’t” for the tenth time remarked savagely, “If I couldn’t write better English than this, I’d quit.”
Crane spent several days in the town, living from hand to mouth and waiting for his money. I think he borrowed a small amount from the managing editor. He lounged about the office most of the time, and I frequently encountered him going in and out of the cheap restaurants on Tenth Street. When he was at the office he talked a good deal in a wandering, absent-minded fashion, and his conversation was uniformly frivolous. If he could not evade a serious question by a joke, he bolted. I cut my classes to lie in wait for him, confident that in some unwary moment I could trap him into serious conversation, that if one burned incense long enough and ardently enough, the oracle would not be dumb. I was Maupassant mad at the time, a malady particularly unattractive in a Junior, and I made a frantic effort to get an expression of opinion from him on “Le Bonheur.” “Oh, you’re Moping, are you?” he remarked with a sarcastic grin, and went on reading a little volume of Poe that he carried in his pocket. At another time I cornered him in the Funny Man’s room and succeeded in getting a little out of him. We were taught literature by an exceedingly analytical method at the University, and we probably distorted the method, and I was busy trying to find the least common multiple of Hamlet and the greatest common divisor of Macbeth, and I began asking him whether stories were constructed by cabalistic formulae. At length he sighed wearily and shook his drooping shoulders, remarking:
“Where did you get all that rot? Yarns aren’t done by mathematics. You can’t do it by rule any more than you can dance by rule. You have to have the itch of the thing in your fingers, and if you haven’t, — well, you’re damned lucky, and you’ll live long and prosper, that’s all.” — And with that he yawned and went down the hall.
Crane was moody most of the time, his health was bad and he seemed profoundly discouraged. Even his jokes were exceedingly drastic. He went about with the tense, preoccupied, self-centered air of a man who is brooding over some impending disaster, and I conjectured vainly as to what it might be. Though he was seemingly entirely idle during the few days I knew him, his manner indicated that he was in the throes of work that told terribly on his nerves. His eyes I remember as the finest I have ever seen, large and dark and full of lustre and changing lights, but with a profound melancholy always lurking deep in them. They were eyes that seemed to be burning themselves out.
As he sat at the desk with his shoulders drooping forward, his head low, and his long, white fingers drumming on the sheets of copy paper, he was as nervous as a race horse fretting to be on the track. Always, as he came and went about the halls, he seemed like a man preparing for a sudden departure. Now that he is dead it occurs to me that all his life was a preparation for sudden departure. I remember once when he was writing a letter he stopped and asked me about the spelling of a word, saying carelessly, “I haven’t time to learn to spell.”
Then, glancing down at his attire, he added with an absent-minded smile, “I haven’t time to dress either; it takes an awful slice out of a fellow’s life.”
He said he was poor, and he certainly looked it, but four years later when he was in Cuba, drawing the largest salary ever paid a newspaper correspondent, he clung to this same untidy manner of dress, and his ragged overalls and buttonless shirt were eyesores to the immaculate Mr. Davis, in his spotless linen and neat khaki uniform, with his Gibson chin always freshly shaven. When I first heard of his serious illness, his old throat trouble aggravated into consumption by his reckless exposure in Cuba, I recalled a passage from Maeterlinck’s essay, “The Pre-Destined,” on those doomed to early death: “As children, life seems nearer to them than to other ch
ildren. They appear to know nothing, and yet there is in their eyes so profound a certainty that we feel they must know all. — In all haste, but wisely and with minute care do they prepare themselves to live, and this very haste is a sign upon which mothers can scarce bring themselves to look.” I remembered, too, the young man’s melancholy and his tenseness, his burning eyes, and his way of slurring over the less important things, as one whose time is short.
I have heard other people say how difficult it was to induce Crane to talk seriously about his work, and I suspect that he was particularly averse to discussions with literary men of wider education and better equipment than himself, yet he seemed to feel that this fuller culture was not for him. Perhaps the unreasoning instinct which lies deep in the roots of our lives, and which guides us all, told him that he had not time enough to acquire it.
Men will sometimes reveal themselves to children, or to people whom they think never to see again, more completely than they ever do to their confreres. From the wise we hold back alike our folly and our wisdom, and for the recipients of our deeper confidences we seldom select our equals. The soul has no message for the friends with whom we dine every week. It is silenced by custom and convention, and we play only in the shallows. It selects its listeners willfully, and seemingly delights to waste its best upon the chance wayfarer who meets us in the highway at a fated hour. There are moments too, when the tides run high or very low, when self-revelation is necessary to every man, if it be only to his valet or his gardener. At such a moment, I was with Mr. Crane.
The hoped for revelation came unexpectedly enough. It was on the last night he spent in Lincoln. I had come back from the theatre and was in the Journal office writing a notice of the play. It was eleven o’clock when Crane came in. He had expected his money to arrive on the night mail and it had not done so, and he was out of sorts and deeply despondent. He sat down on the ledge of the open window that faced on the street, and when I had finished my notice I went over and took a chair beside him. Quite without invitation on my part, Crane began to talk, began to curse his trade from the first throb of creative desire in a boy to the finished work of the master. The night was oppressively warm; one of those dry winds that are the curse of that country was blowing up from Kansas. The white, western moonlight threw sharp, blue shadows below us. The streets were silent at that hour, and we could hear the gurgle of the fountain in the Post Office square across the street, and the twang of banjos from the lower verandah of the Hotel Lincoln, where the colored waiters were serenading the guests. The drop lights in the office were dull under their green shades, and the telegraph sounder clicked faintly in the next room. In all his long tirade, Crane never raised his voice; he spoke slowly and monotonously and even calmly, but I have never known so bitter a heart in any man as he revealed to me that night. It was an arraignment of the wages of life, an invocation to the ministers of hate.
Incidentally he told me the sum he had received for “The Red Badge of Courage,” which I think was something like ninety dollars, and he repeated some lines from “The Black Riders,” which was then in preparation. He gave me to understand that he led a double literary life; writing in the first place the matter that pleased himself, and doing it very slowly; in the second place, any sort of stuff that would sell. And he remarked that his poor was just as bad as it could possibly be. He realized, he said, that his limitations were absolutely impassable. “What I can’t do, I can’t do at all, and I can’t acquire it. I only hold one trump.”
He had no settled plans at all. He was going to Mexico wholly uncertain of being able to do any successful work there, and he seemed to feel very insecure about the financial end of his venture. The thing that most interested me was what he said about his slow method of composition. He declared that there was little money in story-writing at best, and practically none in it for him, because of the time it took him to work up his detail. Other men, he said, could sit down and write up an experience while the physical effect of it, so to speak, was still upon them, and yesterday’s impressions made to-day’s “copy.” But when he came in from the streets to write up what he had seen there, his faculties were benumbed, and he sat twirling his pencil and hunting for words like a schoolboy.
I mentioned “The Red Badge of Courage,” which was written in nine days, and he replied that, though the writing took very little time, he had been unconsciously working the detail of the story out through most of his boyhood. His ancestors had been soldiers, and he had been imagining war stories ever since he was out of knickerbockers, and in writing his first war story he had simply gone over his imaginary campaigns and selected his favorite imaginary experiences. He declared that his imagination was hide bound; it was there, but it pulled hard. After he got a notion for a story, months passed before he could get any sort of personal contract with it, or feel any potency to handle it. “The detail of a thing has to filter through my blood, and then it comes out like a native product, but it takes forever,” he remarked. I distinctly remember the illustration, for it rather took hold of me.
I have often been astonished since to hear Crane spoken of as “the reporter in fiction,” for the reportorial faculty of superficial reception and quick transference was what he conspicuously lacked. His first newspaper account of his shipwreck on the filibuster “Commodore” off the Florida coast was as lifeless as the “copy” of a police court reporter. It was many months afterwards that the literary product of his terrible experience appeared in that marvellous sea story “The Open Boat,” unsurpassed in its vividness and constructive perfection.
At the close of our long conversation that night, when the copy boy came in to take me home, I suggested to Crane that in ten years he would probably laugh at all his temporary discomfort. Again his body took on that strenuous tension and he clenched his hands, saying, “I can’t wait ten years, I haven’t time.”
The ten years are not up yet, and he has done his work and gathered his reward and gone. Was ever so much experience and achievement crowded into so short a space of time? A great man dead at twenty-nine! That would have puzzled the ancients. Edward Garnett wrote of him in The Academy of December 17, 1899: “I cannot remember a parallel in the literary history of fiction. Maupassant, Meredith, Henry James, Mr. Howells and Tolstoy, were all learning their expression at an age where Crane had achieved his and achieved it triumphantly.” He had the precocity of those doomed to die in youth. I am convinced that when I met him he had a vague premonition of the shortness of his working day, and in the heart of the man there was that which said, “That thou doest, do quickly.”
At twenty-one this son of an obscure New Jersey rector, with but a scant reading knowledge of French and no training, had rivaled in technique the foremost craftsmen of the Latin races. In the six years since I met him, a stranded reporter, he stood in the firing line during two wars, knew hairbreadth ‘scapes on land and sea, and established himself as the first writer of his time in the picturing of episodic, fragmentary life. His friends have charged him with fickleness, but he was a man who was in the preoccupation of haste. He went from country to country, from man to man, absorbing all that was in them for him. He had no time to look backward. He had no leisure for camaraderie. He drank life to the lees, but at the banquet table where other men took their ease and jested over their wine, he stood a dark and silent figure, sombre as Poe himself, not wishing to be understood; and he took his portion in haste, with his loins girded, and his shoes on his feet, and his staff in his hand, like one who must depart quickly.
From: Harper’s Weekly, V. XLV, No. 2269, June 16, 1900, p.560
Harper’s Weekly, V. XLV, No. 2269, June 16, 1900
By the death of Stephen Crane, on June 5, at the age of thirty years, a career of brilliant promise is abruptly ended. His second book — the first to attract general attention — has been before the public for less than five years, yet ten printed volumes already stand to his credit, while two other works are in course of serial publication, and yet
another two are announced for publication in book form, one of the latter being a novel which will appear first serially.
This is an extraordinary record of literary productivity. To what extent it is a record of growth is another question. Literary force manifested itself in The Red Badge of Courage to such a degree as in scarcely any other book produced in America by an author so young. It cannot be said that greater power is disclosed in any of the eight books that followed it. The latest of these. The Monster — while it is strong in both matter and manner, is better than The Red Badge only by virtue of its greater reticence. The earlier book struck a note that sounded new in English literature. It expressed vividly the author’s personality, and this did not find more vivid expression in his later work, though it is fair to assume that the years might still have brought, not greater strength, which was unnecessary, but, without any sacrifice of power, a certain breadth and mellowness.
‘To predict how long Mr. Crane will be remembered would be rash, for all prophecy is rash, and most of it futile. But so long as his name does last — and I do not think it will be soon forgotten — he will be known as the author of The Red Badge of Courage. This little book has had a fate doubly happy: for not only have those who liked it at all liked it immensely, but to those whom it fails to appeal potently it is anathema maranatha. It challenged criticism, and did not escape it. The Saturday Review gushed over it. The Atlantic Monthly pronounced it “great enough to set a new fashion in literature.” The Critic carped at the author’s sui generic grammar, but called his work a “little masterpiece.” If there were voices less loud in praise or blame, they were drowned by the vociferations of the extremists.
The Red Badge was remarkable as the work of a civilian, and a very young one. The sensations of a raw recruit in battle were evolved, like the German professor’s giraffe, from the author’s inner consciousness. He did not pretend to describe the emotions of a cultivated officer like Lieutenant Hobson, calmly theorizing about bomb explosions while exposed to their effects, nor those of a less highly trained but intelligent young civilian, such as himself (and Mr. Crane is reported to have shown, as a correspondent, the utmost coolness on the battle-field), but, those of a young country bumpkin, who volunteered during the civil war principally to see what war was like. “The youth” is a crude sort of creature, and the record of his impressions abounds with crudities. One of its chief peculiarities is the assumption that the now craven now courageous young man hears colors as well as sees them. To his morbid apprehension cheers are red, roars crimson, and curses not loud but black. These, however, are details; and albeit The Red Badge was not quite as novel a contribution to the literature of fighting as many took it to be, and as it would have been had Tolstoy never written Sebastopol, it was yet novel enough, and strong and striking enough, to merit the regard it received.
Complete Works of Stephen Crane Page 190
