The tale of Mr. Crane’s brief life may be told in few words. The son of a Methodist clergyman of old New England preaching and fighting stock, he was born at Newark, New Jersey, November 1, 1870. After desultory studying at Lafayette College and Syracuse University, he turned to journalism, and eked out a more or less meagre living as a writer of newspaper sketches, some of which appeared in the New York Tribune. In December, 1894,
he offered some short stories to the Appletons, and when Mr. Hitchcock — the discoverer of David Harum — expressed a preference for long ones, he submitted The Red Badge, which he had written at the age of twenty-two, and published in a syndicate of newspapers. It was immediately accepted, but its appearance in book form was delayed until October, 1895 by the
author’s absence in Mexico. In the meantime certain “Lines” of his “The Black Riders,” and others, which, at a distance looked like poetry, had been gathered in a little volume and issued in Boston in May. And in the following year (June 1896) his first story, Maggie, a Girl of the
Streets, originally published in 1891 at the author’s expense, and highly commended by Mr. Howells, was reissued by his new publishers. At the same time another house brought out George’s Mother.
The Little Regiment took the field at the close of the year, and five months later The Third Violet threw its fragrance on the winds of May. The launching of The Open Boat occurred in April, 1898. This chronicled, in its opening story, the author’s extra-hazardous experience after the foundering of a filibustering steamer on which he had sailed for Cuba just before the Spanish war (which he reported for a New York journal). War is Kind a second collection of “Lines,” Active Service, recording in the form of a novel his impressions of Greece as a correspondent at the time of the Graeco-Turkish war of 1897, and The Monster, a powerful story, accompanied by two or three of slighter substance) were all products of the press of 1899. To Lippincott’s Magazine he was contributing at the time of his death descriptions of the world’s great battles; in Harper’s Monthly were appearing his droll “Whilomville Stories” of boys; and a series of similar stories of girls had been promised to the editor of Harper’s Bazar. The Stokes Company announces two posthumous volumes — Wounds in the Rain (stories of Cuba and the Spanish war), and a novel, The O’Ruddy.
It is not unnatural to suppose that this almost feverish activity of production had some share in the undermining of the author’s health.
It may be as well to recollect that, cordial and prompt as was Stephen Crane’s welcome by the critics of England, in which land he spent the last year or two of his life, his earliest recognition came from the press of his own country.
Joseph B. Gilder
From: The Academy, No. 1289, January 16, 1897, p.76
STEPHEN CRANE. (The Academy, No. 1289, January 16, 1897)
It is sincerely to be hoped that there is no truth in the report of Mr. Stephen Crane’s death in Cuba. He is — we are loth to write in the past tense — emphatically a young man with a future, and the new literature could ill afford to lose him.
About six years ago there appeared in New York a small book in paper covers, entitled Maggie: a Child of the Streets, by Johnston Smith. This very modest brochure, which was sold at fifty cents, bore no publisher’s imprint, and it may well be supposed that only a few copies were issued. The reason for this is not far to seek. Maggie is not a pleasant book, and in those days the public was not ripe for the reception of instantaneous literary photographs of slum life. No firm cared or dared to associate its name with such a publication. But we have changed all that. One man stood out alone from the mass of unsympathetic reviewers. Mr. Hamlin Garland, perhaps the most genuine of American critics, read Maggie with intense interest, and loudly proclaimed the advent of an author “to be reckoned with.” But the public refused to be interested, and Maggie was forgotten by all but a chosen few, who still treasure the little book in paper covers.
Stephen Crane — for “Johnston Smith” and Stephen Crane are, of course, one and the same — is now about twenty-six years old. At the age of sixteen he was writing for several New York papers. He has been writing ever since, and journalism still claims him as one of her most devoted children. At the time of the publication of Maggie ho had been working for some time for the Bachelor Syndicate, and it was for them that he wrote his next book, The Red Badge of Courage. This proved very successful as a serial, but the publication in book form was for some reason delayed. Mr. Crane next attracted attention by a small volume of “lines” — he does not call them poems — entitled The Black Rider, which has recently been published in this country. Like so many American authors, he owes his success to British enthusiasm. It was not until The Red Badge of Courage was brought out in this country, in the autumn of 1895, that America “found” its author. Mr. Crane would be the first to acknowledge his indebtedness to the English critics and the English public, who, with one accord, forced his name into well-deserved prominence.
Such, then, in brief, is the history of his short career. Apart from the mass of journalistic work, his literary baggage consists of three slender volumes. Maggie is one of the most downright earnestly-written books over published. The gruesome tragedy of environment, with all its sordidness of detail, is hammered in with brief, pitiless sentences. Mr. Crane’s command of language is remarkable: he does not spare his readers one jot or tittle of the horror of New York slum life. The Black Riders strikes a note of fearless novelty and eccentricity. The “lines” were hurriedly dashed off in a moment of inspiration. They are essentially pessimistic, often cynical. Of The Red Badge of Courage little need be said. That such a photograph of the American “War should be produced by a young man of twenty-four is little short of marvellous. Every page reads like the confessions of a veteran, every line reeks of battle smoke, and in every sentence we hear the booming of countless cannon and the ping of the merciless bullets.
Mr. Crane has at least four new volumes in the hands of the publishers. The Little Regiment, a war story, will appear almost immediately; followed by A Woman without Weapons. The Third Violet, and another novel of slum life may be expected very shortly.
Criticism and Commentary
Introduction by Vincent Starrett, to Crane’s Men, Women and Boats, Boni and Liveright, 1921 p. 9-20
STEPHEN CRANE: AN ESTIMATE by Vincent Starrett
It hardly profits us to conjecture what Stephen Crane might have written about the World War had he lived. Certainly, he would have been in it, in one capacity or another. No man had a greater talent for war and personal adventure, nor a finer art in describing it. Few writers of recent times could so well describe the poetry of motion as manifested in the surge and flow of battle, or so well depict the isolated deed of heroism in its stark simplicity and terror.
To such an undertaking as Henri Barbusse’s “Under Fire,” that powerful, brutal book, Crane would have brought an analytical genius almost clairvoyant. He possessed an uncanny vision; a descriptive ability photographic in its clarity and its care for minutiae — yet unphotographic in that the big central thing often is omitted, to be felt rather than seen in the occult suggestion of detail. Crane would have seen and depicted the grisly horror of it all, as did Barbusse, but also he would have seen the glory and the ecstasy and the wonder of it, and over that his poetry would have been spread.
While Stephen Crane was an excellent psychologist, he was also a true poet. Frequently his prose was finer poetry than his deliberate essays in poesy. His most famous book, “The Red Badge of Courage,” is essentially a psychological study, a delicate clinical dissection of the soul of a recruit, but it is also a tour de force of the imagination. When he wrote the book he had never seen a battle: he had to place himself in the situation of another. Years later, when he came out of the Greco-Turkish fracas, he remarked to a friend: “‘The Red Badge’ is all right.”
Written by a youth who had scarcely passed his majority, this book has been compared with Tolstoy’s “Sebastopol” and Zola�
��s “La Debacle,” and with some of the short stories of Ambrose Bierce. The comparison with Bierce’s work is legitimate; with the other books, I think, less so. Tolstoy and Zola see none of the traditional beauty of battle; they apply themselves to a devoted — almost obscene — study of corpses and carnage generally; and they lack the American’s instinct for the rowdy commonplace, the natural, the irreverent, which so materially aids his realism. In “The Red Badge of Courage” invariably the tone is kept down where one expects a height: the most heroic deeds are accomplished with studied awkwardness.
Crane was an obscure free-lance when he wrote this book. The effort, he says, somewhere, “was born of pain — despair, almost.” It was a better piece of work, however, for that very reason, as Crane knew. It is far from flawless. It has been remarked .that it bristles with as many grammatical errors as with bayonets; but it is a big canvas, and I am certain that many of Crane’s deviations from the rules of polite rhetoric were deliberate experiments, looking to effect — effect which, frequently, he gained.
Stephen Crane “arrived” with this book. There are, of course, many who never have heard of him, to this day, but there was a time when he was very much talked of. That was in the middle nineties, following publication of “The Red Badge of Courage,” although even before that he had occasioned a brief flurry with his weird collection of poems called “The Black Riders and Other Lines.” He was highly praised, and highly abused and laughed at; but he seemed to be “made.” We have largely forgotten since. It is a way we have.
Personally, I prefer his short stories to his novels and his poems; those, for instance, contained in “The Open Boat,” in “Wounds in the Rain,” and in “The Monster.” The title story in that first collection is perhaps his finest piece of work. Yet what is it? A truthful record of an adventure of his own in the filibustering days that preceded our war with Spain; the faithful narrative of the voyage of an open boat, manned by a handful of shipwrecked men. But Captain Bligh’s account of his small boat journey, after he had been sent adrift by the mutineers of the Bounty, seems tame in comparison, although of the two the English sailor’s voyage was the more perilous.
In “The Open Boat” Crane again gains his effects by keeping down the tone where another writer might have attempted “fine writing” and have been lost. In it perhaps is most strikingly evident the poetic cadences of his prose: its rhythmic, monotonous flow is the flow of the gray water that laps at the sides of the boat, that rises and recedes in cruel waves, “like little pointed rocks.” It is a desolate picture, and the tale is one of our greatest short stories. In the other tales that go to make up the volume are wild, exotic glimpses of Latin-America. I doubt whether the color and spirit of that region have been better rendered than in Stephen Crane’s curious, distorted, staccato sentences.
“War Stories” is the laconic sub-title of “Wounds in the Rain.” It was not war on a grand scale that Crane saw in the Spanish-American complication, in which he participated as a war correspondent; no such war as the recent horror. But the occasions for personal heroism were no fewer than always, and the opportunities for the exercise of such powers of trained and appreciative understanding and sympathy as Crane possessed, were abundant. For the most part, these tales are episodic, reports of isolated instances — the profanely humorous experiences of correspondents, the magnificent courage of signalmen under fire, the forgotten adventure of a converted yacht — but all are instinct with the red fever of war, and are backgrounded with the choking smoke of battle. Never again did Crane attempt the large canvas of “The Red Badge of Courage.” Before he had seen war, he imagined its immensity and painted it with the fury and fidelity of a Verestchagin; when he was its familiar, he singled out its minor, crimson passages for briefer but no less careful delineation.
In this book, again, his sense of the poetry of motion is vividly evident. We see men going into action, wave on wave, or in scattering charges; we hear the clink of their accoutrements and their breath whistling through their teeth. They are not men going into action at all, but men going about their business, which at the moment happens to be the capture of a trench. They are neither heroes nor cowards. Their faces reflect no particular emotion save, perhaps, a desire to get somewhere. They are a line of men running for a train, or following a fire engine, or charging a trench. It is a relentless picture, ever changing, ever the same. But it contains poetry, too, in rich, memorable passages.
In “The Monster and Other Stories,” there is a tale called “The Blue Hotel.” A Swede, its central figure, toward the end manages to get himself murdered. Crane’s description of it is just as casual as that. The story fills a dozen pages of the book; but the social injustice of the whole world is hinted in that space; the upside-downness of creation, right prostrate, wrong triumphant, — a mad, crazy world. The incident of the murdered Swede is just part of the backwash of it all, but it is an illuminating fragment. The Swede was slain, not by the gambler whose knife pierced his thick hide: he was the victim of a condition for which he was no more to blame than the man who stabbed him. Stephen Crane thus speaks through the lips of one of the characters: —
“We are all in it! This poor gambler isn’t even a noun. He is a kind of an adverb. Every sin is the result of a collaboration. We, five of us, have collaborated in the murder of this Swede. Usually there are from a dozen to forty women really involved in every murder, but in this case it seems to be only five men — you, I, Johnnie, old Scully, and that fool of an unfortunate gambler came merely as a culmination, the apex of a human movement, and gets all the punishment.”
And then this typical and arresting piece of irony: —
“The corpse of the Swede, alone in the saloon, had its eyes fixed upon a dreadful legend that dwelt atop of the cash-machine: ‘This registers the amount of your purchase.’”
In “The Monster,” the ignorance, prejudice and cruelty of an entire community are sharply focussed. The realism is painful; one blushes for mankind. But while this story really belongs in the volume called “Whilomville Stories,” it is properly left out of that series. The Whilomville stories are pure comedy, and “The Monster” is a hideous tragedy.
Whilomville is any obscure little village one may happen to think of. To write of it with such sympathy and understanding, Crane must have done some remarkable listening in Boyville. The truth is, of course, he was a boy himself—”a wonderful boy,” somebody called him — and was possessed of the boy mind. These tales are chiefly funny because they are so true — boy stories written for adults; a child, I suppose, would find them dull. In none of his tales is his curious understanding of human moods and emotions better shown.
A stupid critic once pointed out that Crane, in his search for striking effects, had been led into “frequent neglect of the time-hallowed rights of certain words,” and that in his pursuit of color he “falls occasionally into almost ludicrous mishap.” The smug pedantry of the quoted lines is sufficient answer to the charges, but in support of these assertions the critic quoted certain passages and phrases. He objected to cheeks “scarred” by tears, to “dauntless” statues, and to “terror-stricken” wagons. The very touches of poetic impressionism that largely make for Crane’s greatness, are cited to prove him an ignoramus. There is the finest of poetic imagery in the suggestions subtly conveyed by Crane’s tricky adjectives, the use of which was as deliberate with him as his choice of a subject. But Crane was an imagist before our modern imagists were known.
This unconventional use of adjectives is marked in the Whilomville tales. In one of them Crane refers to the “solemn odor of burning turnips.” It is the most nearly perfect characterization of burning turnips conceivable: can anyone improve upon that “solemn odor”?
Stephen Crane’s first venture was “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.” It was, I believe, the first hint of naturalism in American letters. It was not a best-seller; it offers no solution of life; it is an episodic bit of slum fiction, ending with the tragic finality
of a Greek drama. It is a skeleton of a novel rather than a novel, but it is a powerful outline, written about a life Crane had learned to know as a newspaper reporter in New York. It is a singularly fine piece of analysis, or a bit of extraordinarily faithful reporting, as one may prefer; but not a few French and Russian writers have failed to accomplish in two volumes what Crane achieved in two hundred pages. In the same category is “George’s Mother,” a triumph of inconsequential detail piling up with a cumulative effect quite overwhelming.
Crane published two volumes of poetry—”The Black Riders” and “War is Kind.” Their appearance in print was jeeringly hailed; yet Crane was only pioneering in the free verse that is to-day, if not definitely accepted, at least more than tolerated. I like the following love poem as well as any rhymed and conventionally metrical ballad that I know: —
Complete Works of Stephen Crane Page 191
