The Complete Short Stories and Sketches of Stephen Crane
Page 1
Portions of this book are reprinted by special permission
from Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 63–20507
Copyright © 1963 by Doubleday & Company, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
eISBN: 978-0-307-81658-0
v3.1
For BETTY and EDWARD
PREFACE
Stephen Crane is as glamorous a figure as ever. He is still fondly remembered as the “genius” of his generation, and the “wonder boy” of American literature. But mainly because of his bizarre life, and Thomas Beer’s impressionistic interpretation of it in Stephen Crane (1923), the critical emphasis—in fact, the craze—has been on his biography. John Berryman’s Stephen Crane (1950), Stephen Crane: Letters (1960), and Lillian Gilkes’ Cora Crane (1960) have stimulated further speculations into the nature and color of Crane’s soul, so that at least two new biographies are now in preparation.
Far less attention has been paid to Crane as a creative artist. Only his poetry has been carefully studied by Daniel Hoffman in The Poetry of Stephen Crane (1957); and only in the last dozen years has there been a concerted effort to study his fiction. Even here, many critics—rightly awed by the fact that Crane wrote brilliantly about the Civil War without having seen it—have been lost in source studies and backgrounds to the war tales, especially The Red Badge of Courage. While all these studies are of value, Crane’s place in American letters, whether as a short story writer or as a novelist, is still really insecure, because it has not been amply studied.
There is another, more major reason for Crane’s literary neglect: simply, the unavailability of his complete works. Though a handsome twelve-volume edition of Crane’s output was collected, The Work of Stephen Crane (1925–27), it was published in a limited edition of 750 copies. Besides this, the collection was far from complete. Most students of Crane, then, have had to depend on the anthologies, some of them now out of print, which selected only the best of Crane, like “The Open Boat,” “The Blue Hotel,” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” The Red Badge has always been easily obtainable; and recently Maggie has appeared in several editions.
But the bulk of Crane is still to be found only in the twelve-volume Work. The Work forsakes a chronological approach in order to present Crane in as attractive a manner as possible—namely, by the technique of contrast. For example, the first volume includes The Red Badge and “The Veteran,” to show Henry Fleming during and after the Civil War. The second volume, Tales of Two Wars, contrasts Crane’s prewar stories, like “The Little Regiment,” with his Cuban war sketches, like “The Second Generation.” In the third volume, The Third Violet is contrasted with “The Monster,” when the latter story, because of its setting, characters, and themes more properly belongs with Whilomville Stories (volume five). In the ninth volume, Wounds in the Rain, Cuban sketches are placed alongside non-Cuban ones, like “ ‘Ol’ Bennet’ and the Indians,” with the result that Crane’s unity and purpose is destroyed; originally, in 1900, Crane published only Cuban sketches in Wounds. His last novels, Active Service and The O’Ruddy, are in volumes four, seven, and eight; his earliest novel, Maggie, is found in volume ten. While the principle of contrast does dramatize and heighten differences in the fiction, it baffles the reader, for he is never sure of any development or any clear and significant changes in Crane’s art.
This dilemma appears in the work of many authors. Recently, Edmund Wilson complained about Constance Garnett’s collection of Chekhov’s stories, and its lack of chronology. Chekhov’s earliest stories were placed alongside his later, more serious ones; the result, says Mr. Wilson: “… garbling of Chekhov’s development is one of the causes for the frequent complaints on the part of English-speaking critics that they cannot make out what he is driving at.” The case with Crane may not be this serious, but Crane certainly was “driving at” far more than the war theme (which includes the psychology of fear, courage, and cowardice); yet this is the dominant image we have of his fiction.
In this collection, I have tried to fix the Crane chronology as accurately as possible. One will probably come to a long-standing conclusion: that “The Open Boat,” “The Blue Hotel,” “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” “The Monster,” and “Death and the Child” are his best work. But with chronology one can get a surer insight into the workings of Crane’s art and his subjects, and the puzzles in one story may be solved by what preceded it or followed it. With biographical aid—vigorously debunked by many “new critics” and vigorously defended by Leon Edel in his Literary Biography—one can more clearly explain Crane’s rapid development as an artist, his erratic performances, and his major successes.
There are some hazards in attempting a chronological as well as a complete approach to a writer’s art. The best of Crane becomes dwarfed, for his frequent potboilers cheapen the significance of his rich talent. On the other hand, there is always the fascination of watching a writer groping, experimenting, questing for his best self—or his “one good tune,” as Alberto Moravia puts it. When the final accounting of Crane’s output is made, one realizes that he has only a handful of masterpieces; the same is true of many others, like Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, and William Faulkner. Crane also has—and this fact is often ignored—a goodly number of above average stories: “The Pace of Youth,” “A Desertion,” “An Experiment in Misery,” “A Dark Brown Dog,” “The Men in the Storm,” “A Mystery of Heroism,” “One Dash—Horses,” “The Little Regiment,” “His New Mittens,” “The Price of the Harness,” “Virtue in War,” “An Episode of War,” “Shame,” “The Upturned Face,” and “The Knife.” Furthermore, one is amazed at the modernity of Crane’s art—a comparative study of “The Blue Hotel” with Hemingway’s “The Killers” shows this—and it can be seen even more clearly by comparing Crane’s stories with those by his contemporaries: Mark Twain, Frank Norris, Hamlin Garland, and William Dean Howells.
There are various other problems in compiling a volume of this type. Dating stories can be a simple, mechanical matter, but some of Crane’s stories were unpublished and therefore undated. Crane’s existing letters do not supply enough clues. In such cases, one is forced to depend on style and subject matter to determine the period in which these stories were written. A larger confusion becomes apparent when one realizes that Crane often published a story in several newspapers and magazines (not necessarily in the same year) before collecting it, sometimes, into a book. To locate the first appearance of a story becomes a calculated risk, especially since some of them were published in such unlikely places as The Plumbers’ Trade Journal; here I have relied mainly on the painstaking bibliographical work of Ames Williams and Vincent Starrett. Moreover, Crane wrote some stories as part of a continuing series, and though they were not published in the same year or period, I have often kept them as one unit within that year or period and forsaken chronology temporarily. I did not always group them closely, for this would have destroyed the general chronology. Tales gathered (sometimes by myself) as The Little Regiment, The Sullivan County Sketches, Midnight Sketches, Whilomville Stories, the Tommie series, and Wounds in the Rain can be read individually. But Spitzbergen Tales (“The Kicking Twelfth,” “The Shrapnel of Their Friends,” “And If He Wills, We Must Die,” “The Upturned Face”) and Wyoming Valley Tales (“The Battle of Forty Fort,” “The Surrender of Forty Fort,” “ ‘Ol’ Bennet’ and the Indians”) do have closer connections, and Crane’s purpose and design would be destroyed if they were not read as self-contained units. Further biographical facts may call for some revisions in my present dating. C
rane, or his editors, also changed the titles of some of the stories; wherever necessary, I have presented one alternate title, though one story, “A Freight Car Incident,” has four different titles.
The fate of Last Words (1902) suggests that extreme caution must be used with regard to dating. For years, most critics presumed that this post-humous collection was Crane’s last work, when in reality it included much of his earliest. Recently a story in that collection, “Why Did the Young Clerk Swear?,” was located in Truth (March 18, 1893). Another story, “The Reluctant Voyagers,” first published in February 1900, in the New York Press, belongs to an earlier period; Corwin Linson saw the completed manuscript in 1893. There are other examples of this problem. Thomas Beer and a recent critic, Hans Arnold, are sure that the Wyoming Valley Tales were written in 1892. In his letters, however, Crane mentions readying these tales for his agent in 1899; here I have kept the later date. Even though “An Eloquence of Grief,” “The Auction,” “A Poker Game,” and others were not published until 1898 and later, they belong with Crane’s New York sketches, most of which were written between 1893 and 1896. Crane said in November, 1896: “There are some 15 or 20 short sketches of New York street life and so on which I intended to have published in book form under the title of Midnight Sketches.” Two other stories seem to belong to the period of the New York sketches; but Cora Crane completed “The Man from Duluth,” and she may have revised “A Man by the Name of Mud.” Whenever I had definite evidences, I have sometimes ignored publishing dates in order to get the “real” chronology.
Usually when more than a year elapsed between completion and publication, I have used the “completion” date. This “completion” date approach has its dangers, especially with Crane. For example, he was trying to sell “The Blue Hotel” in February 1898, but this was probably the shortened version and not the complete tale that was published in November and December 1898. Though “The Revenge of the Adolphus” was completed in February 1899, and sent to his agent (and not published until September 1899), Crane was asking for advice in regard to nautical terms used in the tale as late as May 1899. “A Man and Some Others” was completed in the fall of 1896, but Crane probably had to make some changes before Gilder would publish it in February 1897. “The Monster” was “completed” in September 1897, but it was hard to sell because of its subject, and Crane may have had to make some changes before it was published in August 1898.
Following each story, I have presented the initial publishing or completion date. Several times, I have included more than one date because some stories appeared in installments in the newspapers. In some instances, I have used a question mark after the date to show that the story was never published and/or that I have relied on biographical evidences, letters, style, and subject to fix the real time of writing. In other instances, I have two different sets of dates, one of which is in brackets. This means that though the story was published later—a few of The Sullivan County Sketches, several of the New York sketches, and so on—it was completed at an earlier date; here again, I have relied on biography, letters, and subject and style.
In the bracketed materials, following the date, I have listed the first-known publication history of each story. However, many of the first appearances of Crane’s stories, in the newspapers, are abridgments; the complete texts are often found in volume form only. In a few cases I did not list page references, because the magazines or newspapers could not be traced; but the dates are authoritative. Only in one case, “Dan Emmonds,” I have bracketed the month and the year in which the story was first mentioned in a letter; Crane said that he wrote the story earlier than 1896. At the beginning of two stories—“The Man from Duluth” and “The Squire’s Madness”—I have indicated that Cora Crane finished them; she may have changed or completed other materials in Last Words. At the beginning of others, I have indicated stories that were written as part of a series or group and often collected under one title, like Whilomville Stories.
Another task was to separate fact from fiction, for Crane was a practicing journalist who wrote for many American and English newspapers. Last Words includes much non-fiction: “London Impressions,” “Minetta Lane,” “Roof Gardens,” “The Assassins in Modern Battles,” “In the Broadway Cars,” “Ballydehob,” and “The Royal Irish Constabulary.” The Work repeats several of these—“London Impressions,” “Ballydehob,” “The Royal Irish Constabulary”—and adds at least one more, “The Scotch Express.” Two others, “A Prologue” (Work) and “At Clancy’s Wake” (Last Words), are really playlets. There are several borderline cases. These include, among others, the autobiographical reminiscences “War Memories” and “Marines Signaling Under Fire at Guantanamo,” both of which convey the atmosphere of Wounds but lack the movement of a real short story. Then others seem to be feature articles and human interest stories, which have been dressed up by Crane’s fictional method. Many of these are clearly non-fiction: “Nebraska’s Bitter Fight for Life,” “The Devil’s Acre,” “Ghosts on the Jersey Coast,” “The Ghostly Sphinx of Metedeconk,” “The Wreck of the New Era,” “Yellow Undersized Dog,” and others. Still others have passed into the realm of fiction: “In a Park Row Restaurant,” “Mr. Binks’ Day Off,” “A Lovely Jag in a Crowded Car,” and more. In these newspaper sketches one can see Crane using the news medium to test his fictional craft. He creates characters, usually a “stranger” with Crane himself as reporter; much dialogue is used, along with an impressionistic and dramatic style. What results is Crane’s own inimitable subjective manner of arriving at journalism’s objective demands: Who? What? When? Where? How? Why? Sometimes, then, his fictional approach so buries the facts that a special feature article can pass for a sketch or story.
Besides feature articles, Crane also wrote many war dispatches (now being collected), and historical sketches gathered as Great Battles of the World (1901). The wonder of all this is how Crane could find time for serious fiction when he was continually involved in hack work. Yet somehow these transitory pieces—news features, travel sketches, war dispatches—became exercises in fictional style and subject; many a seed idea or source for a Crane story can be found in these non-fictions.
The collating of texts was probably the most demanding job. Many of Crane’s original manuscripts are not available, and even when they are, they differ in wording and punctuation from the published versions. Though Crane was never as bad as Balzac—who changed his materials endlessly—he made brief yet constant alterations in a story as it went through several appearances in newspapers, magazines, and finally into a volume. All the stories in this collection have been checked against the first printings and, in some cases, against manuscripts in Crane’s or Cora Crane’s handwriting. Most often I have used the last printed version (during Crane’s lifetime) of the stories. The early version of “The Price of the Harness” (Cosmopolitan), reprinted in some anthologies, includes an overstated ending; Crane eliminated this when he reprinted the story in Wounds. I have kept Crane’s profanity, his dialect patterns (ses for says, ’ain’t for ain’t), and his sentence lengths, all of which were altered or eliminated by various editors.
Some interesting discoveries become apparent in the collating of texts. “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” in its original appearance in McClure’s Magazine (1898), has (in places) the typical Hemingway style: short, staccato sentences. Some modern editors have resorted to commas and semicolons to lengthen these sentences. By doing this, they have sometimes destroyed Crane’s understated effects. Other stories show similar alterations in sentence length.
Though one cannot always be certain that some changes—from newspaper and magazine to book—were made by Crane, they suggest his style, so that one realizes that at times Crane was a careful student of revision. In one of his earliest stories, “An Ominous Baby,” he shortened “swallowing cavern” to “cavern” for better effect. The same is true of “The Men in the Storm,” where its original opening in the Arena “At about three o’clock of th
e February afternoon.…” was deleted, and the story subsequently began: “The blizzard began to swirl great clouds of snow along the streets.…” Often in succeeding appearances of a story, Crane deleted words and phrases that blurred his usually taut design. A case in point is “An Experiment in Misery.” In its original appearance (April 22, 1894), it had an opening aimed specifically for a newspaper audience; for it read like a feature article. When he trimmed the opening (and made the ending briefer) for its reappearance in The Open Boat and Other Stories (London, 1898), it became all story. Crane probably would have trimmed “An Experiment in Luxury” too if he had reprinted it in a volume. The reverse is true of some stories, like “The Upturned Face.” Its version in Ainslee’s Magazine (March 1900) is briefer than its later appearance in Last Words. Probably Crane (or Cora?) realized that his earlier version was too cryptic, and so some additions, sometimes sentences, were made to show further ironic and emotional responses in the story.
Some revisions were the work of editors. And these reveal Crane’s lifelong war with censorship and with his genteel world. In “The Price of the Harness” (Cosmopolitan) Crane’s intended “Jesus” became “Hell”; a whole sentence, “He laid his face to his rifle as if it were his mistress,” was dropped out, and later it was included in Wounds. In “A Man and Some Others” (Century Magazine), the word “Hell” was deleted, and the delicate “g——” replaced Crane’s intended “Gawd!” In “The Second Generation” (The Saturday Evening Post), “damned” was deleted. There were many other cases of this to indicate the pressures on Crane, which may have temporarily frustrated his natural style and his modern subjects.
English editors, supposedly much more liberal in the 1890s, were also toying with Crane’s language, sometimes with comic results. In “Twelve O’Clock” (Pall Mall Magazine) “spittoons” became “receptacles,” and “God-damn” became “——.” In “And If He Wills, We Must Die” (Illustrated London News) “damned” became “darned,” “damn it” became “curse it.” In “The Revenge of the Adolphus” (Strand Magazine) “Gawd” became “Jove,” “damned” became “blessed” and “damn,” “hang.”