“Wounded in the Rain,” a book of war stories, by Stephen Crane, has been issued by Frederick A Stokes Co.
As a member of the newest school of impressionism, Mr. Stephen Crane finds his remarkable distinction. You may tell of the flash of lightning in a purely scientific manner as would Lord Kelvin, or you might perhaps write of it as did Victor Hugo, and feel the blinding spurt of fire and hear the terrible swish of it. Mr. Stephen Crane is a painter of words and imbued with a marvelous skill. The ordinary war correspondent gives the dry epitome of facts. The impressionist tries to record, as would a phonograph, not so much action, as the sounds of the small arms and the boom of the big guns. But the author of “Wounded in the Rain” goes very much further than the mere interpretation of sound. He is filled with the spirit of battle. Eschewing all the false glitter of glory, or the French idea of it, as you read his wonderful pages you know that he is telling of men who are imbued with true patriotism, who fight to the last gasp, urged to their death by a stern sense of duty. Nature even in the man shot beyond all chance of recovery, and who knows that his last moment is nigh, may see the end of his days in an entirely different light from another, fatally stricken. There is Nolan, who has a bullet through the lungs. He is lying weltering in a pool of his own blood. Certainly he is not aware of the terrible character of his hurt, for he insists that it is only water he is being soaked in, for all he says is, “This hillside holds water like a swamp.”
Very smart we may be, but during our troubles with Spain we were singularly unprepared in the munitions of war. In a half comic manner Mr. Stephen Crane describes an action between certain improvised American gunboats and the Spaniards. The Chicken and the Holy Moses get within range of a Spanish field gun which threw three-inch shells, and the Chicken was winged.
The eagerness of the newspapers for any rumor from the seat of war is amusingly described. As for the war correspondents, “managing editors fought us tooth and nail, and we were all sent boxes of medals inscribed ‘Incompetency.’ We became furious with ourselves. Why couldn’t we send hair - raising dispatches? Why couldn’t we inflame the wires? All this we did. It a first-class armored cruiser, which had once been a towboat, fired a six-pounder shot from her thirteen-inch gun turret, the world heard of it, you bet.” The merits of the last story in the volume, “The Second Generation,” is incontestable. There is no pomp of war in what Mr. Stephen Crane writes. You see the horrors of it, lightened here and there by heroism, and it is the matter-of-fact heroism which is most to the author’s liking. — New York Times, Nov. 10, 1900.
From: Current Opinion, V. LXII, No. 3, March 1917, p.202-203
STEPHEN CRANE AS THE AMERICAN PIONEER OF THE FREE VERSE ARMY. (Current Opinion, V. LXII, No. 3, March 1917)
He was our most original genius since Poe, with the single exception of Frank Norris. He anticipated most of the things which the more attractive wing of the Free Verse army, Miss Amy Lowell’s wing, is striving after.” Such is the claim put forward in the N. Y. Evening Sun by Harry Esty Dounce, for the somewhat eclipsed genius of Stephen Crane. In calling our attention to Crane as a verse libre pioneer, Mr. Dounce takes care to characterize Crane’s own experiments in free verse as “commonplace.” He refers to Stephen Crane’s prose, however, in laudatory terms. “The descriptive portions even of his failures,” we are told, “would well repay the study of Greenwich Village. He had the accurate impressionism, and (so far as the eye was concerned) the transcendent command of words’ remoter values. And he had a manneristic individuality, in him entirely natural and sincere, which might give ‘emancipated’ amateurs a cue for the bizar of a kind more telling than the kinds they venture, in their anxiety to be salable.”
Crane, continues Mr. Dounce, was leagues ahead of our present-day Imagists in the ability to present definite, concrete pictures to his readers. “You could draw them. I have never made the experiment; but for all our natural differences I think it likely your drawing and mine, and one Crane himself might have made, would be far closer together than three such drawings of the Templar by Scott and two enthusiasts of his day — to mention an eminent depictor by the old inventory method.”
“Crane really paints, with an impressionistic treatment which gives the essentials additional force, partly by systematic exaggeration, partly by discarding the Scott detail. Instead of putting a spell upon your picture-making faculty and compelling it to do wonders for him at seemingly inadequate words of command, he throttles it helpless and imposes his own faculty upon you. You shall, by heaven, see just what he saw — or he will die in the attempt. And you do see it — and this is his art.
“Even when Crane’s brush goes false the result is still inescapable. He tries at things that would be stunning for sheer impudence, except that impudence is pose, and he never poses. Their weakness becomes strength, their badness merit. Look at this close to one chapter:
“‘The red sun was pasted on the sky like a wafer.’
“Ruskin would stamp such a fallacy underfoot. Crane had not seen a wafer of the kind to which he refers. He had read about them in historical novels, probably. Wafers were gone before the Civil War. No reader of his generation would be struck by a homely familiar comparison. The sun cannot conceivably look pasted in the sky. One never gets that idea. The simile is an immoral one, under all the canons. And yet — this red sun was pasted on the sky, like a wafer (immediately you know what a wafer is, as he does), and they felt it so, the raw recruits, as Wellington may have felt it, waiting for night. Hardly a Cambridge tutor could be ass enough to correct the sentence.”
The real magician, Mr. Dounce proceeds, is he who can stretch the old medium — can make it, so to speak, work overtime for him. Crane could. It has been specified that his independence of dictionary limits was confined to his eye sense. “But this is almost equally true of Miss Amy Lowell, tho she has a lot to say about the rhythms in her subtle work. I am sorry for a reader who cannot enjoy Miss Lowell, but I am sorrier for one who tries to enjoy her by ear.”
“Crane got recognition for being a describer, and he was little else — and we could stand a few more of his caliber. He was able to do the thing because he loved doing it better than anything else. No one has taken a keener pleasure in the mere practice of writing. . . .
“I often think how well Crane might have painted and how fully paint would have satisfied his powers and conformed to his limitations. But an impecunious youngster, painting as he would have painted in the America of his day, would certainly have starved to the end or followed Blakelock into the asylum... There was no wise and big-hearted Howells to reach down a hand to a foundering painter as Howells did to Stephen Crane. . . .
“His nature, which was repressed and disciplined like an Iroquois brave’s or a highly similar New England Puritan’s, produced the characteristic feeling-tone of his work. He scorned to feel, to take sides, to be sentimental. He loathed affectations and abominated ‘scenes.’ He shut down grimly on anything like effusion. Consequently his dreams come oozing out to his pen under the iron thumb of his psychic censor — come as remote symbols, vividly colored.”
The present war has produced a whole literature of “documents” of open-boat survivors. But the classic upon this theme, the masterpiece (and Stephen Crane’s masterpiece as well), Mr. Dounce claims, is “The Open Boat.” It is not a story at all, but a document, for Crane was in the boat.
“Returning on a filibuster’s tramp steamer from Cuba, he was shipwrecked off the Florida east coast, and after he and three of the crew in a tiny dinghy had kept her for many hours outside the breakers, always by day in sight of the white sand and the low green scrub, wondering why the crowd they could see so plainly did nothing for their rescue, they were swept in to the beach. One man, an oiler, was drowned.
“That is the story. That is the plot. Crane’s plots would never do with the O. Henry school. But those who have read ‘The Open Boat’ will forget every technical feat of construction before they forget the long, heart-
breaking mockery of the day, with land so near, the bailing, the egg-shell changes of seats, the terrible, steady cheerfulness and brotherhood of the queer little human group, or the blue, brooding horror of the night, when the shifts off the oars slept like dead men in the swash on the dinghy’s bottom, and a fin streaked the phosphorescent water close astern.
“If you say of a man, ‘He can write,’ you do not mean rondels or philosophies or plots. You mean what flowers in ‘The Open Boat,’ which to those who know it, is almost worth Crane’s life; tuberculosis brought him down at 29, and they say it was his rough adventures, and this adventure especially, which left him an easy quarry.
“It is hard to say how much further he could have gone had he lived, or rather had he lived with his vitality unimpaired. His was a young man’s gift, and after recognition it made little if any progress.”
From: The New Fiction and Other Essays on Literary Subjects, by H. D. Traill, London: Hurst and Blackett, Limited, 1897, p.1-9
THE NEW FICTION (excerpt) by H. D. Traill
Not to be ‘new’ is, in these days, to be nothing, and in seeking as impartial and as uncommitting a title as possible for the work of the latest recruits to the army of successful novelists, I have not thought myself justified in withholding the indispensable certificate of novelty. They object, or at least the ablest and most popular of them has objected, it appears, to being described as a ‘realist;’ so I am no longer permitted to label his art as the ‘New Realism.’ But I am not at all sure that I shall be anymore fortunate in my emendation. For it would not surprise me if the writer to whom I have referred were to protest against my describing his books even as ‘ fiction;’ so insistent is he, I understand, on their literal and historical accuracy, so earnest is he in assuring us that every character whom he pourtrays has had a real existence, and every incident he relates, an actual occurrence, so artless, in short, is his confidence in a justification which has no sort of relevancy to the defence of a work of art. Still, in the hope that he will pass the word ‘ fiction ‘ as indicating the product of an inventor, and not insist upon some other description of it which shall denote the historian, I will let it stand at the head of this paper in order to avoid giving a controversial, or at any rate a controverted, title to the whole volume. But for convenience sake I shall still crave leave to discuss the narrative and descriptive method with which these pages deal under the name bestowed upon it by its more ardent admirers: that namely of the New Realism.
If that description is disclaimed by both, as it has been by one, of the two novelists whose novels I am about to consider, we can yet understand what it means in the mouths of those who use it. It would naturally come pat to their lips. Nothing, indeed, should surprise us less than that in a day when the spurious is everywhere supposed to be successfully disguised and sufficiently recommended to the public by merely being described as new, we should find our attention solicited by a New Realism, of which the two most obvious things to be said are that it is unreal with the falsity of the half truth, and as old as the habit of exaggeration. One of the latest professors of this doubtful form of art is the very young American writer, Mr. Stephen Crane, who first attracted notice in this country by a novel entitled The Red Badge of Courage. Whether this •work was or was not described by its admirers as an achievement in realism, I am not aware. As a matter of fact, and as the antecedents, and indeed the age, of the writer showed, it was not a record of actual observation. Mr. Crane had evidently been an industrious investigator and collator of the emotional experiences of soldiers, and had evolved from them a picture of the mental state of a recruit going into action. It was artistically done and obtained a not undeserved success; but no method, of course, could be less realistic in the sense on which the professors of the New Realism insist, than the process which resulted in this elaborate study of the emotions of the battlefield from the pen of a young man who has never himself smelt powder.
Since then, however, Mr. Crane has given us two small volumes, which are presumably realistic or nothing. If circumstances have prevented the author from writing about soldiers in action ‘ with his eye on the object,’ there are no such obstacles to his studying the Bowery and ‘Bowery boys’ from the life. We may take it, therefore, that Maggie and George’s Mother are the products of such study. According to Mr. Howells’s effusive ‘Appreciation,’ which prefaces it, Maggie is a remarkable story, having ‘that quality of fatal necessity which dominates ‘Greek tragedy.’ Let us see then what this Sophoclean work is like.
The story of Maggie opens with a fight between the boys of Hum Alley and those of Devil’s Row. Jimmie, the heroine’s brother, is a boy of Rum Alley, aged nine, and when the curtain draws up he is the centre of a circle of urchins who are pelting him with stones.
‘Howls of wrath went up from them. On their small convulsed faces shone the grins of true assassins. As they charged, they threw stones and cursed in shrill chorus . . . Jimmie’s coat had been torn to shreds in a scuffle, and his hat was gone. He had bruises on twenty parts of his body, and blood was dripping from a cut in his head. His wan features looked like those of a tiny insane demon . . . The little boys ran to and fro hurling stones and swearing in barbaric trebles ... A stone had smashed in Jimmie’s mouth. Blood was bubbling over his chin and down upon his ragged shirt. Tears made furrows on his dirt-stained cheeks. His thin legs had begun to tremble and turn weak, causing his small body to reel. His roaring curses of the first part of the fight had changed to a blasphemous chatter. In the yells of the whirling mob of Devil’s Row children there were notes of joy like songs of triumphant savagery. The little boys seemed to leer gloatingly at the blood on the other child’s face.’
A lad of sixteen, afterwards destined to play an important part in the story, then approaches. He smites one of the Devil’s Row children on the back of the head, and the little boy falls to the ground and gives a tremendous howl. A reinforcement of the Rum Alley children then arrives, and there is a momentary pause in the fight, during which Jimmie becomes involved in a quarrel with Blue Billie, one of his own side.
‘They struck at each other, clinched, and rolled over on the cobble-stones.
‘“Smash ‘im, Jimmie, kick d’ face off ‘im,” yelled Pete, in tones of delight.
‘The small combatants pounded and kicked, scratched and tore. They began to weep, and their curses struggled in their throats with sobs. The other little boys clasped their hands and wriggled their legs in excitement. They formed a bobbing circle round the pair.’
At this juncture Jimmie’s father arrives on the scene, and endeavours to separate the combatants with a view of ‘belting’ his son. To this end he begins to kick into the chaotic mass on the ground. ‘The boy Billie felt a heavy boot strike his head. He made a furious effort and disentangled himself from Jimmie. He tottered away. Jimmie arose painfully from the ground and confronting his father began to curse him.’ His parent kicked him. ‘Come home, now,’ he cried,’ an’ stop yer jawin’, or I’ll lam the everlasting head off yer.’ Upon this they go home, the boy swearing ‘luridly,’ for ‘ he felt that it was a degradation for one who aimed to be some vague kind of a soldier or a man of blood, with a sort of sublime licence, to be taken home by a father.’
This is the first chapter much condensed. In the original there are eight pages of it. Is it art? If so, is the making of mud-pies an artistic occupation, and are the neglected brats who are to be found rolling in the gutters of every great city unconscious artists? In the next chapter Jimmie pummels his little sister and his mother quarrels with and rates her husband till she drives him to the public-house, remaining at home to get drunk herself. In the third chapter, Jimmie, •who has stopped out to avoid an outbreak of her intoxicated fury, steals home again late at night, listens outside the door to a fight going on within between his father and mother, and at last creeps in with his little sister to find both parents prostrate on the floor in a drunken stupor, and to huddle in a corner until daybreak, cowering wi
th terror lest they should awaken. For when you are a ‘realist’s’ little boy, you have to be very handy and adaptable, and do exactly what that realist requires of you: so that, though you may have been defying and cursing your father at one moment, like the daring little imp you have been described as being, you may at the next moment, and for the purpose of another sort of painful picture, have to behave like a cowed and broken-spirited child of a totally different type.
These opening scenes take up about one-fifth of the short book, and those that follow are like unto them. There is a little less fighting, but a good deal more drinking. Jimmie becomes a truck driver, and fights constantly with other drivers, but the fights are not described at length. His father dies, probably of drink, and his mother takes to drinking harder than ever. Maggie is seduced and deserted by Pete, the youth who appeared on the scene during the opening fight and hit one of the infant fighters on the back of the head. Jimmie resents the proceedings of the Bowery Lovelace as a breach of good manners, and, going with a friend to the tavern where Pete acts as ‘bar-tender,’ the two set upon him, and there ensues a fight, in the course of which the lips of the combatants ‘curl back and stretch tightly over the gums in ghoul-like grins.’ It lasts for four pages, and is brought to a close by the intervention of the police, and the escape of Jimmie ‘with his face drenched in blood.’ How this story continues, how Maggie falls lower and lower and finally dies, and how after her death her gin-sodden mother is passionately entreated to forgive her, and at last graciously consents to do so — all this may be read in Mr. Crane’s pages, and shall not here be summarised from them. Is it necessary to do so? Or to give a precis of the companion volume, George’s Mother, the story of a ‘little old woman’ actually of sober and industrious habits, and of her actually not vicious though weak son, of whose back-slidings she dies? Need I give specimen extracts from it? I hope not — I think not. The extracts which have been already given are perfectly fair samples of Mr. Crane’s work. I can honestly affirm that anyone who is willing to accept my assurance that to read these two books through would be to wade through some three hundred and thirty pages of substantially the same stuff as the above extracts, will do Mr. Crane no injustice. So I will pass from him to a novelist of considerably larger calibre.
Complete Works of Stephen Crane Page 196
