And upon the appearance of these books in England came what, in my present mood, I cannot but consider as the great blunder and misfortune of Crane’s life. It is a trait of the public we writers serve, that to please it is to run/’the gravest risk of, never writing again. Through a hundred channels and with a hundred varieties of seduction and compulsion, the public seeks
to induce its favorite to do something else — to act, to lecture, to travel, to jump down volcanoes or perform in music halls, to do anything, rather than to possess his soul in peace and to pursue the work he was meant to do. Indeed, this modern public is as violently experimental with its writers as a little child with a kitten. It is animated, above all things, by an insatiable desire to plunge its victim into novel surroundings, and watch how he feels. And since Crane had demonstrated, beyond all cavil, that he could sit at home and, with nothing but his wonderful brain and his wonderful induction from recorded things, build up the truest and most convincing picture of war; since he was a fastidious and careful worker, intensely subjective in his mental habit; since he was a man of fragile physique and of that unreasonable courage that will wreck the strongest physique; and Since, moreover, he was habitually a bad traveller, losing trains and luggage and missing connections even in the orderly circumstances of peace, it was clearly the most reasonable thing in the World to propose, it was received with the applause of two hemispheres as a most right and proper thing, that he should go as a War correspondent, first to Greece and then to Cuba. Thereby, and for nothing but disappointment and bitterness, he utterly Wrecked his health. He came into comparison with men as entirely his masters in this work as he was the master of all men in his own; and I read even in the most punctual of his obituary notices the admission of his journalistic failure. I have read, too, that he brought back nothing from these expeditions. But, indeed, even not counting his death, he brought back much. On his Way home from Cuba he was wrecked, and he wrote the story of the nights and days that followed the sinking of the ship with a Simplicity and vigor that even he cannot rival elsewhere.
“The Open Boat” is to my mind, beyond all question, the crown of all his work. It has all the stark power of the earlier stories, with a new element of restraint; the color is as full and strong as ever, fuller and stronger, indeed; but those chromatic splashes that at times deafen and confuse in “The Red Badge,” those images that astonish rather than enlighten, are disciplined and controlled. “That and ‘Flanagan’,” he told me, with a philosophical laugh, “was all I got out of Cuba.” I cannot say whether they were worth the price, but I am convinced that these two things are as immortal as any work of any living man. And the way “The Open Boat” begins, no stress, plain — even a little gray and flattish:
“None of them knew the color of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the color of the sea. The horizon narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose, and at all times its edge was jagged with waves that seemed thrust up in points like rocks.”
Many a man ought to have a bath-tub larger than the boat which here rode upon the sea. These waves were most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall, and each froth-top was a. problem in small-boat navigation.
“The cook squatted in the bottom, and looked with both eyes at the six inches of gunwale which separated him from the ocean. His sleeves were rolled over his fat forearms, and the two flaps of his unbuttoned vest dangled as he bent to bail out the boat. Often he said, ‘Gawd! That was a narrow clip.’ As he remarked it, he invariably gazed eastward over the broken sea. .
“The oiler, steering with one of the two oars in the boat, sometimes raised himself suddenly to keep clear of the water that swirled in over the stern. It was a thin little oar and it seemed often ready to snap.
“The correspondent, pulling at the other oar, watched the waves and wondered why he was there.”
From that beginning, the story mounts and mounts over the waves, wave frothing after wave, each wave a threat, and the men toil and toil and toil again; by insensible degrees the day lights the waves to green and olive, and the foam grows dazzling. Then as the long day draws out, they come toward the land.
“‘Look! There’s a man on the shore!’
“‘Where?’ ~
“‘There! See ‘im?’
“‘Yes, sure! He’s walking along.’
“‘Now he’s stopped. Look! He’s facing us!’
“‘So he is, by thunder!’
“‘Ah, now we’re all right! Now we’re all right! There’ll be a boat out here for us in half-an-hour.’
“‘He’s going on. He’s running. He’s going up to that house there.’
“The remote beach seemed lower than the sea, and it required a. searching glance to discern the little black figure. The captain saw a floating stick and they rowed to it. A bath-towel was by some weird chance in the boat, and, tying this on the stick, the captain waved it.
The oarsman did not dare turn his head, so he was obliged to ask questions.
“‘What’s he doing now?’
“‘He’s standing still again. He’s looking, I think. . . . There he goes again. Towards the house. Now he’s stopped again.’
“‘Is he waving at us?’
“‘No, not now! he was, though.’
“‘Look! There comes another man!’
“‘He’s running.’
“‘Well, I wish I could make something out of those signals. What do you suppose he means!’
“‘He don’t mean anything. He’s just playing.’
““Well, if he’d just signal us to try the surf again, or to go to sea and wait, or go north, or go south, or go to hell — there would be some reason in it. But look at him. He just stands there and keeps his coat revolving like a. wheel. The ass!’
“‘There come more people.’
“‘Now there’s quite a mob. Look! Isn’t that a boat?’
“‘Where? Oh, I see where you mean. No, that’s no boat.’
“‘That fellow is still waving his coat.’
“‘He must think we like to see him do that. Why don’t he quit it? It don’t mean anything.’
“‘I don’t know. I think he is trying to make us go north. It must be that there’s a life saving station there somewhere.’
“‘Say, he ain’t tired yet. Look at ‘im wave.’
“‘Holy smoke!’ said one, allowing his voice to express his impious mood. ‘If we keep on monkeying out here! If we’ve got to flounder out here all night!’
‘“Oh, we’ll never have to stay here all night! Don’t you worry. They’ve seen us now, and it won’t be long before they’ll come chasing out after us.’
“The shore grew dusky. The man waving a coat blended gradually into this gloom, and it swallowed in the same manner the omnibus and the group of people. The spray, when it dashed uproariously over the side, made the voyagers shrink and swear like men who were being branded.
“‘I’d like to catch the chump who waved the coat. I feel like soaking him one, Just for luck.’
“‘Why? What did he do?’
“In the meantime the oiler rowed, and then the correspondent rowed, and then the oiler rowed. Grey-faced and bowed forward, they mechanically, turn by turn, plied the leaden oars. The form of the lighthouse had vanished from the southern horizon, but finally a pale star appeared, just lifting from the sea. The streaked saffron in the west passed before the all-merging darkness, and the sea to the east was black. The land had vanished, and was expressed only by the low and dread thunder of the surf.”
“The Open Boat” gives its title to a volume containing, in addition to that and “Flanagan,” certain short pieces. One of these others, at least, is also to my mind a perfect thing, “The Wise Men.” It tells of the race between two bar-tenders in the city of Mexico, and I cannot imagine how it could possibly have been better told.
And in this volume, too, is that other masterpiece – the one I deny –”Death and the Child.”
Now I do not know how Crane took the reception of this book, for he was not the man to babble of his wrongs; but I cannot conceive how it could have been anything but a grave disappointment to him. To use the silly phrase of the literary shopman, “the vogue of the short story” was already over; rubbish, pure rubbish, provided only it was lengthy, had resumed its former precedence again in the reviews, in the publishers’ advertisements and on the library and book-sellers’ counters. The book was taken as a trivial by-product, its author was exhorted to abandon this production of “brilliant fragments” — anything less than fifty thousand words is a fragment to the writer of literary columns —— and to make that “sustained effort,” that architectural undertaking, that alone impresses the commercial mind. Of course, the man who can call “The Open Boat” a brilliant fragment would reproach Rodin for not completing the edifice his brilliant fragments of statuary are presumably intended to adorn, and would sigh, with the late Mr. Ruskin for the day when Mr. Whistler would “finish” his pictures. Moreover, he was strongly advised —— just as they have advised Mr. Kipling-to embark upon a novel. And from other quarters, where a finer wisdom might have been displayed, ‘ he learned that the things he had written were not “short stories” at all; they were “sketches” perhaps, “anecdotes” —— just as they call Mr. Kipling’s short stories “anecdotes ;” and it was insinuated that for him also the true,’ the ineffable “short story” was beyond his reach. I think it is indisputable that the quality of this reception, which a more self-satisfied or less sensitive man than Crane might have ignored, did react very unfavorably upon his work. They put him out of conceit with these brief intense efforts in which his peculiar strength was displayed.
It was probably such influence that led him to write “The Third Violet.” I do not know certainly, but I imagine, that the book was to be a demonstration, and it is not a successful demonstration, that Crane could write a charming love story. It is the very simple affair of an art student and a summer boarder, with the more superficial incidents of their petty encounters set forth in a forcible, objective manner that is curiously hard and unsympathetic. The characters act, and on reflection one admits they act, true, but the play of their emotions goes on behind the curtain of the style, and all the enrichments of imaginative appeal that make love beautiful are omitted. Yet, though the story as a Whole fails to satisfy, there are many isolated portions of altogether happy effectiveness, a certain ride behind an ox cart, for example. Much more surely is “On Active Service” an effort, and in places a. painful effort, to fit his peculiar gift to the uncongenial conditions of popular acceptance. It is the least capable and least satisfactory’ of all Crane’s work.
While these later books were appearing, and right up to his last fatal illness, Crane continued to produce fresh war pictures that show little or no falling off in vigor of imagination and handling; and in addition, he was experimenting with verse. In that little stone-blue volume, “War is Kind,” and in the earlier “Black Riders,” the reader will find a series of acute and vivid impressions and many of the finer qualities of Crane’s descriptive prose, but he will not find any novel delights of melody or cadence or any fresh aspects of Crane’s personality. There remain some children’s stories to be published and an unfinished romance. With that the tale of his published work ends, and the career of one of the most brilliant, most significant and most distinctively American of all English writers comes to its unanticipated finis.
It would be absurd, here and now, to attempt to apportion any relativity of importance to Crane, to say that he was greater than A. or less important than B. That class-list business is, indeed, best left forever to the newspaper plebiscite and the library statistician; among artists, whose sole, just claim to recognition and whose sole title to immortality must necessarily be the possession of unique qualities, that is to say, of unclassifiable factors, these gradations are absurd. Suffice it that, even before his death, Crane’s right to be counted in the hierarchy of those who have made 11 permanent addition to the great and growing fabric of English letters was not only assured, but conceded. To define his position in time, however, and in relation to periods and modes of writing will be a more reasonable undertaking; and it seems to me that, when at last the true proportions can be seen, Crane will be found to occupy a position singularly cardinal. He was a New Englander of Puritan lineage, and the son of a long tradition of literature. There had been many Cranes who wrote before him. He has shown me a shelf of books, for the most part the pious and theological works of various antecedent Stephen Cranes. He had been at some pains to gather together these alien products of his kin. For the most part they seemed little, insignificant books, and one opened them to read the beaten clichés, the battered outworn phrases, of a movement that has ebbed. Their very size and binding suggested a dying impulse, that very same impulse that m its prime had carried the magnificence of Milton’s imagery and the pomp and splendors of Milton’s prose. In Crane that impulse was altogether dead. He began stark – I find all through “this brief notice I have been repeating that in a dozen disguises, “freedom from tradition,” “absolute directness” and the like – as though he came into the world of letters without ever a predecessor. In style, in method and in all that is distinctively not found in his books, he is sharply defined, the expression in literary art of certain enormous repudiations. Was ever a man before who wrote of battles so abundantly as he has done, and never had a Word, never a word from first to last, of the purpose and justification of the war? And of the God of Battles, no more than the battered name; “Hully Gee!” — the lingering trace of the Deity! And of the sensuousness and tenderness of love, so much as one can find in “The Third Violet!” Any richness of allusion, any melody or balance of phrase, the half quotation that refracts and softens and enriches the statement, the momentary digression that opens like a window upon beautiful or distant things, are not merely absent, but obviously and sedulously avoided. It is as if the racial thought and tradition had been razed from his mind and its site ploughed and salted. He is more than himself in this; he is the first expression of the opening mind of a new period, or, at least, the early emphatic phase of a new initiative-beginning, as a growing mind must needs begin, with the record of impressions, a record of a vigor and intensity beyond all precedent.
From: Overland Monthly, V. XLVII, No. 2, February 1906, p.149
STEPHEN CRANE. Excerpted from “The Over-rated” by Ella Costillo Bennett
Now, Stephen Crane did not reach the pinnacle of fame attained by Kipling; perhaps he died too young. But he, too, received his share of undeserved praise. He wrote a very crude little novel (which was sold for a good price to a syndicate) entitled “Three Violets.” A “sweet girl graduate” could have written it just as well, perhaps better, but she could not have gotten the same published; but Crane, having written one fair story, “The Red Badge of Courage,” was pronounced a success; so, taking the tide at its flood, like a very wise young man, if he preferred money to posthumous recognition, proceeded to deluge the country with stories that were admirably fitted to fill space, but could not possibly, by any one who had the vaguest idea of literature, or even a skimming acquaintance with any of the old masters, or the works of one of the new disciples of novel-writing, be classed as literature. Yet his books sold. The magazines were eager for his stories, the few ignorant, whose bold conceit passes for knowledge, knelt before his shrine, and the rabble followed suit.
The “Detroit Free Press” once gave a synopsis of Stephen Crane’s book, which reads as follows. (It needs no comment):
“A la Stephen Crane.
A long, deep bay —
Under a yellow sun —
The crack of a report —
A frightened cry —
The chattering of death demons
in a tree-top —
Blood, red blood, upon the g
round.
Somebody had shot a snipe.’”
From: The Delta Upsilon Quarterly, V. XIX, No. 2, March 1, 1901, p.116-117
W. D. HOWELL’S APPRECIATION OF STEPHEN CRANE. (The Delta Upsilon Quarterly, V. XIX, No. 2, March 1, 1901)
Lafayette and Syracuse, ‘94 — Stephen Crane’s death drew forth many tributes to his genius, not the least of which was the statement by Richard Harding Davis that he was considered the most brilliant and the most fearless of the bright and courageous group of war correspondents in Cuba.
The London Academy has printed the following portion of a letter from Mr. W. D. Howells to Mrs. Crane:
Hamlin Garland first told me of “Maggie,” which your husband then sent me. I was slow in getting at it, and he wrote me a heartbreaking note to the effect that he saw I did not care for his book. On this I read it, and found that I did care for it immensely. I asked him to come and see me, and he came to tea and stayed far into the evening, talking about his work and the stress there was on him to put in the profanities which I thought would shock the public from him, and about the semi-savage poor, whose types he had studied in that book. He spoke wisely and kindly about them, and especially about the Tough, who was tough because, as he said, he felt that “everything was on him.” He came several times afterward, but not at all oftener than I wished, or half so often, and I knew he was holding off from modesty. He never came without leaving behind him some light on the poor, sad life he knew so well in New York, so that I saw it more truly than ever before. He had thought wisely and maturely about it, but he had no plan for it, perhaps not even any hope without a plan.
He was the great artist which he was because he was in nowise a sentimentalist. Of course I was struck almost as much by his presence as by his mind, and admired his strange, melancholy beauty, in which there was already the forecast of his early death. His voice charmed me, and the sensitive lips from which it came, with their intelligent and ironical smile, and his mystical, clouded eyes. Inevitably there was the barrier between his youth and my age that the years make, and I could not reach him where he lived as a young man might. I cannot boast that I understood him fully; a man of power, before he comes to its full expression, is hard to understand. It is doubtful if he is quite in the secret himself, but I was always aware of his power, and nothing good that he did surprised me. He came to see me last just before he sailed for England the last time, and then he showed the restlessness of the malarial fever that was preying on him; he spoke of having got it in Cuba. But even then, with the sense that we were getting at each other less than ever, I felt his rare quality. I do not think America has produced a more distinctive and vital talent.
Complete Works of Stephen Crane Page 195
