Complete Works of Stephen Crane

by Stephen Crane

  “The O’Ruddy”

  As confession will now do no harm, and cannot be regarded as an attempt on my part to ward off merited castigation, I shall tell how it all came about. Stephen Crane was a great-hearted genius, and so generous in his friendship that he was completely blinded to his friend’s deficiencies. There was nothing more incongruous than to suppose that I was able to complete a novel he had begun, yet no one was able to make him see this. If he had accepted the recommendation I strongly urged upon him, “The O’Ruddy” would have been finished by a man much more nearly his own equal than I. But Stephen would not listen to this suggestion, and I found myself forced by circumstances to make a promise which I knew I could not acceptably perform.

  I received a letter from his Sussex home saying that he was ill, and was anxious to have me complete a half-finished novel if anything should happen to him. My reply was an endeavour to cheer him up, not thinking the case was really serious. I then received a telegram urging me to accept the task, and to this I replied that I was going down to see him as soon as possible. The next telegram came from Dover, saying that Stephen was on his way to the Black Forest, urging me to came at once, and stating that Mr. Crane would not rest until I had given my promise.

  I had staying with me at that time a young man in whose literary future I had every confidence. He was then completely unknown, nothing of his having been published. I showed him the telegram from Dover, and invited him to come with me. His name is Stewart Edward White, and to-day he stands in the very front rank of American literary men, and McClure’s Magazine for November, announcing his latest serial, says that he has inherited the place of Cooper and of Bret Harte as the delineator of native types and frontier conditions. His book, “The Blazed Trail,” is now in its twentieth edition, and the volumes he has written since the day I speak of have been printed by the hundred thousand, and, in spite of this popularity, he deserves it. He will be as well-known in England to-morrow as he is in America to-day.

  Stewart Edward White

  Stewart Edward White and I went down to Dover together, and put up at the Lord Warden Hotel, where Stephen Crane was stopping, awaiting a calm day in which to cross the Channel. The doctor would not allow us to see him that night, and Stewart Edward White and I spent the evening reading “The O’Ruddy” in Crane’s beautiful fine handwriting. The jollity of the tale, combined with the fact that its writer lay near us hopelessly ill, made that evening one which neither the young American author nor myself are likely to forget. Next day I was urged by both Mrs. Crane and the physician to agree to anything Stephen asked, and this was not a request one could refuse. White and I were shown into the room where the sick man lay by an open window overlooking the blue Channel. Stephen was as humorous as ever, and joked in a whisper. He said I did not look natural, not having a cigarette in my mouth, and begged me to light one so that he might have a whiff of it and confound his physician. He made me hand him his pipe, so that he might caress the bowl of it. All that he could tell me of the story was that he intended it to end at Brede Place, in Sussex, where it had been written, an ancient manor house which I knew well. I agreed to finish the book, but told him he could not have made a worse choice. He whispered that he was well acquainted with my self-conceit, and did not credit in the least my assumption of incapacity. He said I was merely trying to cloak my cowardice; I was afraid of the critics, so he suggested the splitting of the last sentence he had written, and advised me to begin with that.

  “They’ll all think you began with a new chapter, so you can defy them to point out the junction.”

  Once outside I held to my promise, but made it a proviso that none should know I had been the person to attempt the completion. It was agreed that the book should be published as being “By Stephen Crane and Another.” I do not know to this day who gave away the secret to the Press, but some time later it was announced in most of the papers, both in this country and America, that I had undertaken to complete the novel, whereupon I refused to have anything to do with it. For more than two years “The O’Ruddy” called at the residences of various distinguished authors, begging them to chart out his course. In some of those residences he remained for six months, and in others for a shorter period. Now, this was rather hard lines on the publishers of the book in London and New York, both of whom had purchased and partly paid for it, while in its unfinished state it was absolutely valueless as a money-making proposition. It happened that each firm published my own books, and that the members of each firm were personal friends of mine. It was the American house that undertook the task of convincing me that my reputation was so bad, anyhow, that it did not matter in the least what the critics said of me; they could make it no worse. As soon as this fact was borne home on me, I cheerfully undertook the task, and with the result readers of The Idler are already familiar.

  Various guesses were made, especially in the United States, regarding the point at which I began the final part of the book. No one made a correct surmise so far as I am aware. As I have myself forgotten the exact word I wrote first, the question can never be settled. Roughly speaking, I began with Chapter XXVI. on page 228 of the book, or Chapter XXI. of the story as published in The Idler on page 86 of the April number.

  From: Book and Heart: Essays on Literature and Life, by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Harper & Brothers, 1897, p.41-46

  A BIT OF WAR PHOTOGRAPHY

  After the applause won by Mr. Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, a little reaction is not strange; and this has already taken, in some quarters, a form quite unjust and unfair. Certainly any one who spent so much as a week or two in camp, thirty years ago, must be struck with the extraordinary freshness and vigor of the book. No one except Tolstoi, within my knowledge, has brought out the daily life of war so well; it may be said of these sentences, in Emerson’s phrase, “Cut these and they bleed.” The breathlessness, the hurry, the confusion, the seeming aimlessness, as of a whole family of disturbed ants, running to and fro, yet somehow accomplishing something at last; all these aspects, which might seem the most elementary and the easiest to depict, are yet those surest to be omitted, not merely by the novelists, but by the regimental histories themselves.

  I know that when I first read Tolstoi’s War and Peace, The Cossacks and Sevastopol, it seemed as if all other so-called military novels must become at once superannuated and go out of print. All others assumed, in comparison, that bandbox aspect which may be seen in most military or naval pictures; as in the well-known engraving of the death of Nelson, where the hero is sinking on the deck in perfect toilette, at the height of a bloody conflict, while every soldier or sailor is grouped around him, each in heroic attitude and spotless garments. It is this Tolstoi quality — the real tumult and tatters of the thing itself — which amazes the reader of Crane’s novel. Moreover, Tolstoi had been through it all in person; whereas this author is a youth of twenty-four, it seems, born since the very last shot fired in the Civil War. How did he hit upon his point of view?

  Yet this very point of view, strange to say, has been called a defect. Remember that he is telling the tale, not of a commanding general, but of a common soldier — a pawn in the game; a man who sees only what is going on immediately around him, and, for the most part, has the key to nothing beyond. This he himself knows well at the time. Afterward, perhaps, when the affair is discussed at the camp-fire, and his view compared with what others say, it begins to take shape, often mixed with all sorts of errors; and when it has reached the Grand Army Post and been talked over afterward for thirty years, the narrator has not a doubt of it all. It has become a perfectly ordered affair, a neat and well-arranged game of chess, often with himself as a leading figure. Such is the result of too much perspective. The wonder is that this young writer, who had no way of getting at the facts except through the gossip — printed or written — of these very old soldiers, should be able to go behind them all, and give an account of their life, not only more vivid than they themselves have ever given, but
more accurate. It really seems a touch of that marvellous intuitive quality which for want of a better name we call genius.

  Now is it a correct criticism of the book to complain, as one writer has done, that it does not dwell studiously on the higher aspects of the war? Let the picture only be well drawn, and the moral will take care of itself; never fear. The book is not a patriotic tract, but a delineation; a cross section of the daily existence of the raw enlisted-man. In other respects it is reticent because it is truthful. Does any one suppose that in the daily routine of the camp there was room for much fine talk about motives and results — that men were constantly appealing, like Carlyle’s Frenchman, “to posterity and the immortal Gods?” Fortunately or unfortunately, the Anglo-Saxon is not built that way; he errs on the other side; habitually understates instead of overstating his emotions; and while he is making the most heroic sacrifices of his life, usually prefers to scold about rations or grumble at orders. He is to be judged by results; not by what he says, which is often ungracious and unornamental, but by what he does.

  The very merit of this book is that in dealing with his men the author offers, within this general range, all the essential types of character — the man who boasts and the man who is humble — the man who thinks he may be frightened and is not, and the man who does not expect to be, but is. For his main character he selects a type to be found in every regiment — the young man who does not know himself, who first stumbles into cowardice, to his own amazement, and then is equally amazed at stumbling into courage; who begins with skulking, and ends by taking a flag. In Doyle’s Micah Clarke the old Roundhead soldier tells his grandchildren how he felt inclined to bob his head when he first heard bullets whistle, and adds, “If any soldier ever told you that he did not, the first time that he was under fire, then that soldier is not a man to trust.” This is putting it too strongly, for some men are born more stolid, others more nervous; but the nervous man is quite as likely to have the firmer grain, and to come out the more heroic in the end. In my own limited experience, the only young officer whom I ever saw thoroughly and confessedly frightened, when first under fire, was the only one of his regiment who afterwards chose the regular army for his profession, and fought Indians for the rest of his life.

  As for The Red Badge of Courage, the test of the book is in the way it holds you. I only know that whenever I take it up I find myself reading it over and over, as I do Tolstoi’s Cossacks, and find it as hard to put down. None of Doyle’s or Weyman’s books bear re-reading, in the same way; you must wait till you have forgotten their plots. Even the slipshod grammar seems a part of the breathless life and action. How much promise it gives, it is hard to say. Goethe says that as soon as a man has done one good thing, the world conspires against him to keep him from doing another. Mr. Crane has done one good thing, not to say two; but the conspiracy of admiration may yet be too much for him. (1896.)

  From: Punch, March 21, 1896, p.142

  Roundabout Readings. “The Red Badge of Courage”

  This book by Mr. Stephen Crane, has been praised in the most extravagant manner by all sorts of critics. I have no wish to detract from such credit as may attach to Mr. Crake for having taken a subject outside of the ordinary ruck of subjects, and for having treated it in an unconventional manner. I venture, however, to suggest that the book does fall short — very far short — of the high level to which most of the critics assign it, and that it falls short for very obvious reasons, which cannot fail to suggest themselves to anyone who reads it with a desire to estimate it impartially according to those standards which are generally accepted amongst students of literature.

  The book professes to be the story of a youth enrolled in one of the Northern regiments during the American Civil War. I said “story,” but, as a matter of fact, there is no story in the usual acceptation of the word. The youth — he is scarcely ever called anything but “the youth, “the expression occurring with dismal iteration on every page — the youth, as I say, appears vaguely as in a cloud, he commits dialogue and perpetrates a chaotic series of self-analysis, he flies from the battlefield, returns to it, analyses himself over and over again, is understood to behave heroically, and finally vanishes back into a thick mist of impressionism. Of story, in truth, there is absolutely nothing; not a single character is dearly defined, scarcely an incident is described in such a way as to force upon the reader (upon one reader, at any rate,) that over-mastering sense of its necessary truth which is the mark of really great fiction.

  In the second edition of The Red Badge of Courage are to be found excerpts from some of the Press notices which hailed the first edition. In one I read that “Mr. Stephen Crane’s picture of the effect of actual fighting on a raw regiment is simply unapproached in intimate knowledge and sustained imaginative strength. . . . This extraordinary book will appeal strongly to the insatiable desire to know the psychology of war — how the sights and sounds, the terrible details of the drama of battle, affect the senses and the soul of man.” “The reader,” says another, “sees the battle not from afar, but from the inside.” This, we feel instinctively, is something like the reality of war.” These are samples of the eulogies which have been liberally showered upon The Red Badge of Courage.

  It will have been noticed that the common note struck by the reviewer is the masterly analysis of the reality of war. This is curious, for it turns out that Mr. Crane is a young man of the age of 24, who, being an American, has presumably no personal knowledge whatever of the emotions he undertakes to describe. And it may further be assumed that nine out of ten of his critics are in a similar case. These, therefore, who are ignorant of war and its emotions testify to the absolute reality of war-pictures, painted by one who has himself never been near a battle. I am conscious of the retort that may be made, and I am prepared to admit at once that I myself have never fought through a battle or been near one; nor have I ever occupied the position of referee at a football match. All I say is, that this very confused and disjointed account of warfare does not impress me as being anything like what the real thing ought to be; and I may go further, and add that, written, as it is, by a young American of 24, it cannot possibly possess the quality of “intimate knowledge” with which it has been almost universally credited by those who have reviewed it.

  I have read many stories of war, some imaginative, some written by men who had borne a share in the fighting. I have spoken to many men who have fought — modest, manly fellows, for the most part, and by no meat s inclined to exaggerate either their own heroism or that of their companions. And, putting aside all the tawdry nonsense of romancers, who give you merely the tinsel glitter of war, I much doubt if “the youth” whose heart-searchings are described in The Red Badge of Courage is at all a common type. The mass of men may not be brave to desperation; but they are braver, I take it, than this poor, sickly, sentimental, hysterical fool, who is constantly engaged in probing his own sensations when he ought to be loading and firing his rifle. The great battles of the world have all been fought by common men, and common men in the mass are brave and not cowardly. Michael Hardy, who is commemorated in Sir Evelyn Wood’s book on the Crimea, was a common man; the heroes of the 14th Regiment of the French army who perished almost to a man at Eylau, were common men; so were the sergeant and his men to whose memory Sir Francis Hastings Doyle has dedicated The Red Thread of Honour; one of the noblest and most stirring battle-poems in our language. And for myself, I prefer the heroes of The Red Thread of Honour to the miserable creature who is dimly revealed to us in The Red Badge of Courage.

  I have said nothing of the literary and grammatical style of the book. Here are two examples.

  “Buried in the smoke of many rifles, his anger was directed not so much against the men whom he knew were rushing towards him, as against the swirling battle phantoms which were choking him.”

  “A lad whose face had borne an expression of exalted courage, the majesty of he who dares give his life, was, at an instant, smitten abject.” On
the whole, I cannot in the least agree with the reviewer who declares that, “as a work of art, The Red Badge of Courage deserves high praise. As a moral lesson that mankind still needs, the praise it deserves is higher still.”

  From: Book Notes, New Series, V. 1, No. 1, June 1898, p.58

  The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure by Stephen Crane

  Author of “The Red Badge of Courage.” 12mo. cloth. Price 75 cents. By mail 85 cents.

  The publication of Mr. Crane’s book was postponed twice, greatly to the benefit of the volume as the author has added several tales of a most noteworthy character, making a collection quite unique and more satisfying than any of his earlier work notwithstanding its great promise.

  The opening chapter recounts the author’s own experience off the coast of Florida, and is a most vivid and dramatic presentation of the behavior of a company of castaways righting to the last limit of endurance against a destruction that seemed inevitable. The whole book, the contents of which follow, shows the hand of a new and powerful observer. The Open Boat, A Man and Some Others, One-Dash Horse, Flanagan, The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, The Wise Men, Death and the Child, The Five White Mice.