Stephen Crane: From Parody to Realism [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674864696, 9780674864672

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Stephen Crane FROM

PARODY

TO

REALISM

Stephen Crane F R O M P A R O D Y TO

REALISM

Eric Solomon

HARVARD UNIVERSITY Cambridge, Massachusetts

PRESS

© Copyright 1966 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Fourth Printing, 1971

Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, London Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Ford Foundation Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 66-21347 SBN 674-83806-8 Printed in the United States of America

TO

IRENE

Acknowledgments My appreciation goes to the Library of Congress and to the Johns Hopkins Library for their resources, to the hospitality of the English Department of Johns Hopkins University, and particularly to the Hopkins Physics Department and its chairman, Leon Madansky, who kindly provided me with an office in which to write this book. I also thank the Ohio State University for a research quarter. Quotations from Crane material still in copyright are by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. The Purdue Research Foundation and the University of Texas have permitted me to reprint in chapters three and four some material that appeared in different form in Modern Fiction Studies and in Texas Studies in Language and Literature respectively. Any critical work on Stephen Crane owes a debt to the dedicated bibliographical researches of Robert W. Stallman and of Olov W. Fryckstedt. My special gratitude goes to my colleagues John Muste, Julian Markels, Gordon Grigsby, John Gardner, and Claude Simpson, who worked far beyond the call of friendship to remove some of the flaws from my manuscript. Maurice Bassan and Daniel Weiss have generously shared their deep knowledge of Stephen Crane with me. To Homer Brown for his supportive and enriching discussions of my ideas at the commencement of the writing of this book I have a particular debt. E. S. San Francisco August 1966

Contents Introduction: Parody and Realism I. 11. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X.

1

Love and Death in the Slums

19

The Failure on the Barroom Floor

45

A Definition of the War Novel

68

The Bitterness of Battle

99

The Romances That Failed

129

The Destructive Element

145

The Village Virus

177

The Crucible of Childhood

201

The Gunfighters

229

Death on the Plains

257

Notes

285

Index

295

Introduction

Parody and Realism Tradition, thou art for suckling children, Thou art the enlivening milk for babes; But no meat for men is in thee. Then— But, alas, we are all babes. — C r a n e , The Black Riders, XLV

S T E P H E N CRANE started as a comic writer. Among his earliest published pieces were the ten short hunting tales that make up the Sullivan County Sketches. Written for the most part in 1892, these outdoor stories are negligible except for certain bits of remarkable prose and a few examples of techniques that later characterized his major fiction. One of these techniques, which informs almost all Stephen Crane's best stories and novels, is parody. Most of the sketches are heavily ironic, and the situations follow a familiar pattern. Two characters, a little man and a fat man, make too much of a commonplace situation, and the denouement undercuts their romantic or melodramatic conceptions. The young author's first forays into the art of fiction lean for their best effects on the method of travesty, employing overblown and pretentious language and emotions to delineate

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quite simple events. In Crane's words, these stories were "little grotesque tales of the woods which I wrote when I was clever."1 The very titles illuminate the parodic strategy: "A Ghoul's Accountant," "The Black Dog" (subtitled "A Night of Spectral Terror"), "A Tent in Agony." In handling a meeting with an old hermit in the manner of Edgar Allan Poe, or in describing an argument between two old men over a matter of arithmetic in terms appropriate to the forest melodramas of Robert Montgomery Bird or William Gilmore Simms, Crane is trying his hand at literary parody. These stories resound with melodramatic dialogue ("Poor, painted man, you are afraid"; "Villain! Dastard! Cur! I have four queens, miscreant"), lurid settings ("Things that hung seemed to be on the wet, uneven ceiling, ready to drop upon the men's bare necks. Under their hand the clammy floor seemed alive and writhing"), and horrible descriptions ("His skin was fiercely red and his whiskers infinitely black. He . . . smiled a smile that curled his lips and showed yellow, disordered teeth"). 2 Crane's four silly hunters (an echo perhaps of the four Welshmen of the nursery rhyme) constantly overrate the importance of natural events that take place in the woods, and their delusions bear some resemblance to those of Don Quixote. An angry mother becomes a giantess, a bear caught in the folds of a canvas tent a white-robed phantom. The calm endings ironically comment on the overblown prose used earlier in the stories, prose that at times reminds the reader of Ambrose Bierce or Sheridan Le Fanu. Two examples of Crane's early parody may indicate his approach. In the first story, "Four Men in a Cave," each hunter responds to the sight of a hermit: "A vampire . . . A g h o u l . . . A Druid before the sacrifice . . . The shade of an Aztec witch doctor" (pp. a8f). Whether Mary Shelley or H. Rider Haggard is 2

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the object of the brief parodic thrust, the tone of literary ridicule is caught. And in one of the last sketches, "The Cry of a Huckleberry Pudding," Crane runs through the entire range of romantic fiction in order to describe the howl of a little man with a bellyache. "Its tones told of death and fear and unpaid debts. It clamored like a song of forgotten war, and died away to the scream of a maiden. The pleadings of fire-surrounded children mingled with the calls of wavethreatened sailors. Two barbaric tribes clashed together on a sunburnt plain; a score of barekneed clansmen crossed claymores amid gray rocks; a woman saw a lover fall; a dog was stabbed in an alley; a steel knight bit dust with bloody mouth; a savage saw a burning home" (pp. 6gf). The years since Stephen Crane's death in 1900 at the age of twenty-nine have seen a constantly shifting pattern in his reputation. Until the 1920's, when the publication by Alfred Knopf of Crane's Work in twelve volumes and Thomas Beer's biography reawakened interest in the American author, the memory of his literary achievement was mainly kept alive by loyal English friends like Edward Garnett, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford. Little attention was paid to their protests that Crane was not, as he had been considered in his lifetime, merely a gifted boy, fortunate enough to strike the proper amalgam of exciting subjects and startling style. Even after publication of the Work, Crane's literary position depended on his great war novel, The Red Badge of Courage; his slum novel Maggie merely seemed to be an interesting document, particularly in the socially conscious thirties. Literary historians have always had difficulty in classifying Stephen Crane. For one he was a realist, for another a naturalist—or an impressionist, or, as in his poetry, an im3 •

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agist. In the last decade or so, however, critics of fiction have discovered in a certain corpus of Stephen Crane's stories— The Red Badge of Courage, "The Open Boat," and "The Blue Hotel" in particular—symbolism, ambiguities that deserved explication, poetic techniques of style and formal structure that called for close and sensitive reading. But Crane has been regarded, generally speaking, as a fortunate stumbler upon artistic sublimities in a few of his pieces, a journalist who managed to create certain excellent and fairly difficult works of fiction. In order to put the nature of Stephen Crane's achievement into proper focus, I tried in my monograph Stephen Crane in England: A Portrait of the Artist to establish that in the eyes of his contemporaries, Henry James and H. G. Wells in addition to Garnett, Conrad, and Ford, Crane was a highly selfconscious artist, interested in the theory of fiction. Rather than classify Crane as impressionist or naturalist, I prefer to view him as an eclectic novelist, capable of a wide range of effects; he often wrote of violent men in action, to be sure, but style, theme, and setting were carefully manipulated for very specific purposes. Far from being a reporter, or a war novelist, or an uneducated genius, Stephen Crane was, I contend, that most conscious of literary artificers, a parodist. In the fullest sense of the term, Crane parodied the familiar themes of fiction, but not always, nor even primarily, for comic effect. Harry Levin well defines this type of serious parody: "Fiction approximates truth, not by concealing art, but by exposing artifice. The novelist finds it harder to introduce fresh observations than to adapt the conventions of other novelists, easier to imitate literature than to imitate life. But a true novel imitates critically, not conventionally; hence it becomes a parody of other novels . . ."3 The finest parody can retain the 4 •

I N T R O D U C T I O N

force of the original while criticizing it. Rosemary Freeman calls this a kind of parody that is not primarily directed toward satire even though using some satiric techniques; it is "parody based upon literary samples in which the aim is creating a meaning that is positive and constructive, not absurd."4 We should recall that in its seventeenth-century sense parody was a neutral term for simple substitution of new words to familiar music, without any satiric implications. For an early novelist like Henry Fielding, parody is "like a burlesca movement in music, with brilliantly exaggerated cliches of meretricious style followed by extended movements which rework the themes, no longer merely cliché or parody, but something new: passionate, sympathetic, wise, and always willing to be as ridiculous as life itself."5 Crane worked in many traditional or contemporary genres: the slum novel, the war novel, the fiction of childhood, the sea story, the Western tale, the small-town novel, the love story. In all these forms, he came to grips, and in some cases to grief, with modes of fiction that were familiar to a literate public, and he made of each something different—"made it new," in Ezra Pound's phrase. As James Agee understood when he wrote movie scenarios of "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" and "The Blue Hotel," Crane accepted the tradition of the Western tale, in the first story comically deflating the cliché of the duel in the streets, familiar in Western fiction from The Virginian to High Noon, and in the latter story both deepening and excoriating the Western myth by showing how it could destroy one who believed in it too much—or not enough. In Thomas Beer's phrase, Crane refuted Western melodrama in melodrama's terms.® The Red 9 Thomas Beer, The Mauve Decade (New York, 1 9 6 1 ) , p. 70. Crane's technique often resembles that of James Joyce as displayed in his version of the sermon in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Like Joyce, Crane

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C R A N E

Badge of Courage helped, along with the work of Stendhal, Zola, and Tolstoy, to supply a counter to the tradition of dashing, courageous heroes in war fiction. Because they eschew buffoonery and irreverence, Crane's parodies of romantic and sensational fiction differ from the usual parodies produced by such vigorous antiromantics as Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and Frank Norris—for parody was a major form of nineteenth-century American humor, a taut attack on flaccid and obsessive writing. Crane sliced away the traditional excrescences, and reclaimed what was of artistic value in the familiar genres by applying his own stark techniques of style and setting to such overwrought themes as heroism in battle or such sentimental themes as loss of innocence in the big city. Crane, as Erich Auerbach has said of a much greater parodist, Cervantes, was not simply a destructive critic but the continuer of literary tradition. Thus, just as Mark Twain parodied some aspects of the official culture while taking others seriously, Crane throughout his work combined the comic with the serious. He often used a vocabulary of cliches that he restored to their original force, as he found new and deeper uses for the idiom, by refracting a serious view of life through traditional plots. Like Henry James and William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane concentrated on character and motivation; yet by dealing with the stuff of romance— the physical activities of strong men—and at the same time avoiding excesses by means of intense selectivity, Crane will employ and parody the convention in a single passage, both raising and lowering the model. Compare John Loofbourow, Thackeray and the Form of Fiction (Princeton, 1 9 6 4 ) , p. 2 0 5 : " T h e analytic requirements of parody trained Thackeray to recognize convention and to treat it with intense awareness; as a result, his synthesis of the literary heritage is purposeful and controlled, his expressive formulations experimental and creative rather than traditional." 6

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INTRODUCTION

wrote subtle adventure tales. The parodist's pen selected, the adventurer's spirit vivified, and the artist's intelligence discovered the serious view. In the midst of his pastiches, moreover, often appeared the finest passages ever produced in the traditional form. These passages showed Crane moving forward from the parodic base as he discovered the aesthetic potential in the familiar. As we shall see, Stephen Crane wrote parodies of every genre in which he worked, scoffing at the formulae of each while retaining its emotive power. Sometimes he was satisfied with simple burlesque. One of his very earliest satiric pieces, "The Camel" (1891), caricatures travel literature; Crane describes the adventures of a traveler who gorges a camel with whiskey in order to smuggle the liquor into the dry state of Maine. Duels, romantic love, millionaires' clubs, and excessively tall stories also come under Crane's ironic view, for he was always a humorist, even in his early journalism; but his best short parodies take aim at the French novel, the stage melodrama, and the mystery story. In "Why Did the Young Clerk Swear? Or, The Unsatisfactory French" (1893) a bored clerk in a haberdashery store seeks excitement by reading a "French novel with a picture on the cover."6 The reading is interrupted by a series of customers—a man seeking a hand laundry, an elderly gentleman who wants a nightshirt that opens front and back, a woman who must have a certain brand of shirt, a tough in search of a barroom—none of whom the clerk can satisfy. But neither can he find satisfaction in the French novel that Crane lampoons. The book is in part a story of heated romantic passion. Silvere swoons with love for the "fresh, fair, innocent" Heloise. "Silvere burst into tears. T love her! I love her! I shall die.'" Crane derides the rarely fulfilled prurient expectations of this type of vaguely pornographic fic7

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tion. With one hand Heloise lifts her skirts, and, "Silvere leaning forward, saw her"—the clerk's salacious thoughts are interrupted by a customer and disappointed by the author— "handkerchief fall in a puddle" (p. n o ) . Crane's distortion of naturalism, quite clearly in this instance Emile Zola's brand, is acute. "A baker opposite was quarreling over two sous with an old woman. A grey-haired veteran with a medal upon his breast and a butcher's boy were watching a dogfight. The smell of dead animals came from adjacent slaughterhouses. The letters on the sign over the tinsmith's shop on the corner shone redly like great clots of blood" (p. 110—a dash of self-mockery in the last phrase?). Crane pinpoints the naturalist's technique of editorializing by juxtaposition — a technique he often employed himself: the veteran and the butcher's boy, the baker and the dead animals, the medal and the dogfight. The parody of the scientific brutality of Zola's prose is combined with a mimicry of Balzac's passion for detail as the clerk skips "some seventeen chapters descriptive of a number of intricate money transactions, the moles on the neck of a Parisian dress-maker, the process of making brandy, the milk-leg of Silvere's aunt, life in the coalpits, and scenes in the Chamber of Deputies" (p. 1 1 1 ) . The sensual passages of the burlesqued novel are full of images of nature and animal life, but the novel ends, to the clerk's disappointment, with Heloise's virginity intact. The short parody ticks off, with accuracy and wit, the fraudulent aspects of popular, teasingly lurid fiction. In his later work Crane would learn how to join the realistic interruptions and the parodied readings, which here he splits asunder. But he would never lose his contempt for the "tiresome platitudes," "commonplace narratives," and "mildewed phrases" that a friend of this period remembers Crane castigating.7 Crane's fiction is dappled by ironic thrusts against stage 8

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melodrama; he insists upon the distance between a real-life poker game and a theatrical one, finds in real situations of stress "none of that magnificent fortitude, that gorgeous tranquility amid upheavals and perils which is the attribute of people in plays."8 In "Some Hints for Haymakers" (1894) Crane lampoons the kinds of popular drama that offend him: the romantic melodrama, the society play, the foreclosedmortgage play, and the musical that has to contort the story to make room for songs. The cast of Crane's society play, which looks forward to the best nonsense plays of Robert Benchley or Ring Lardner, consists of "The Duchess; Her Niece; A Nice Man; and Intriguing, Spiteful, Contemptible, Malicious, Well-bred, and Devilish Men and Women." The play ends when the niece and the young man come together (" 'Lucy!' 'Albert!'") as she finishes reading a note and says, "Oh! then, he is really the pink of perfection, and not an odious pig, as I thought. Dottie Hightights, at the Tinsel Theatre, is his own grandmamma, and not a bad, wicked woman, as I thought."9 One wishes that Crane had given us the words to one of the numbers in his musical, entitled "In the Wrong Room, or, When She Turned Up the Gas, He Jumped from an Eighth-story Window" (p. 39). Many of Crane's dark sketches, like "Manacled" (1900), impugn stage melodrama. Here the hero, in prison garb and handcuffs because of the cruel machinations of his enemies, responds to the villain's sneers, " 'Tis well, Aubrey Pettingill. . . . You have so far succeeded; but, mark you, there will come a time—."10 The mood of this sketch shifts quickly, however, from humor to horror as the stage burlesque gives way to the realization that an actual roaring fire is engulfing the theater, trapping the speaker, who is deserted by the other actors. In miniature, this piece exemplifies Crane's best technique; what starts as caustic humor shades into black reality. 9 •

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"A Tale of Mere Chance" (1896) takes off the Poe school of mystery, horror, and detection. Told in the first person, the story reviews the ghastly career of an insane murderer. The narrative method is a burlesque of "The Cask of Amontillado" as the speaker addresses the reader in a reasonable tone, and of "The Tell-Tale Heart" when the murderer believes that he is followed through the streets by a crowd of bloodstained white tiles that advertise his guilt. One other element of Poe's mysteries, the ingenious detective Dupin, is ridiculed when the narrator explains that a detective need not be particularly clever to discover a man in a spotted orange coat followed by shrieking, bloody tiles. Stephen Crane clearly enjoyed the practice of parody. He indulged in this rather parasitic form of literary criticism, however, most often as a prelude to literary creation where he carried his art far beyond the immediate occasion. Thus his best parodies are encapsulated in his novels and stories. According to T. S. Eliot, immature poets imitate, mature poets steal; Crane wrote parodic imitations, then took over, annexed the forms, and created what parody meant to the Greeks: parallel song. In his major fiction, as we shall see, Stephen Crane worked in familiar genres and transmuted them into the products of his special sensibility, forming in his best works at once incisive criticisms of traditional styles and entirely fresh fictional creations.* No matter what Crane's particular setting happened to be, whether his story took place in an open boat on a wild sea or in the quiet streets of a small * H a n y Levin has set forth the reader's obligations when dealing with this kind of writer: w e must reread the conventional works and reconstruct their patterns; then " w e can relate them to our comparatively realistic book and specify its new departures more precisely. W e can define realism b y its context." The Gates of Hom ( N e w York, 1 9 6 3 ) , p. 66.

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town, whether he was portraying toughs or innocents, mothers or children, grotesques or victims, he worked from certain basic assumptions about man and society. For Crane the chain of being was only too clear: at the top was a harsh, uncaring, Hardyesque god; at the bottom was a basically good, weak, striving man. Somewhere in the middle, both dominating man and on occasion being conquered by him, was society. Crane's poetry, for the most part, was dedicated to the metaphysical problems raised by man's relation to his god. His fiction, on the other hand, portrayed man struggling to survive in his society. All fiction of course is a re-forming of life, a differentiating of raw, chaotic experience according to the author's particular vision (as Crane said, an author "is not at all responsible for his vision—he is merely responsible for his quality of personal honesty"), 11 and in Crane's work we find a thoughtful and often angry view of man as a social animal. We must not look to Stephen Crane, however, for polemics or manifestoes in the manner of his earliest mentors, Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells. For Crane, immediacy obviated the need for explanations. In the hard and exact diction of ordinary speech, in particulars instead of generalizations, his clear, concentrated prose (self-indulgent only in his literary overuse of metaphor) established an ironic stance. As a parodist, Crane did not need the kind of fully developed philosophy with which some recent interpreters have sought to supply him. According to David Worcester, the writer of parody poses as a passive agent, letting the condemnation come by analogy so that the reader seems to be drawing his own independent conclusions.12 The controlling tone in Crane's fiction was humorous, ironic, darkly serious, experiential, self-conscious. Employing either mocking overstatement or grim under11 •

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statement, Crane criticized traditional views of life and art. If w e should seek an archetypal plot for Stephen Crane's fiction, the plot would be something like this: a youth, innocent and contemplative (in the later work, a man, nervous and apprehensive), ventures into a world of violence and rage (unleashed by war, by external nature, and by society itself); he is buffeted, and his existence is jeopardized; he runs, and perhaps he escapes, probably losing something of value. He doesn't really grow, but ends with a whimper. Yet he has looked upon evil, and survived. Some development of this basic formula occurred in the eight years of Crane's writing life. For example, his concepts about the nature of courage changed and became more complex. Maggie and Georges Mother are largely studies in cowardice; The Red Badge of Courage draws the narrow line between fear and bravery; "A Mystery of Heroism" portrays the enigma of a brave action; and the later war stories reflect the stolid acceptance of danger displayed by the professional. In "The Open Boat" courage is a necessity; in "The Five White Mice" it is foolish; in "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" it has become comic; and in The Monster true courage appears as moral strength. The question of Stephen Crane's development is a difficult one. His most famous and in some ways his best work came early, which has been the case with many—perhaps most—American authors. Indeed, Howells remained convinced that Crane's earliest work, Maggie, was his finest. Although there is always some justification for a chronological study of an author's work, in Crane's case a thematic study seems more rewarding. By a close reading of his fiction, we may discover that what might appear to be generally loose and perverse in Crane's work is actually an artful pattern of burlesque, a reinterpretation of action in 12 •

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the perspective of past fiction. We will examine his writings consecutively within each genre in order to discover how he polished and complicated the form, but it does not seem fruitful to move year by year through Crane's career. As man and artist he was too inconsistent to fit into an easy pattern of development from youthful brilliance to mature competence. When an author dies before thirty, his work is still plastic, in flux. One approach to Stephen Crane's fiction of parody, as I call it, is the consideration of his work in connection with the methods of two of his near-contemporaries, Ezra Pound and T. E. Hulme. As they aimed to "desuetize" poetry, Crane in his fiction stripped bare the bones of the traditional genres, anatomized the skeletons, and then presented what seemed a defense of realism. Like Hulme, Crane believed in a dry hardness of art, and mocked the vague and eloquent. In the short, almost elliptical quality of his best prose, Crane echoed the imagist concept that one perfect image might be better than a lengthy work. To be sure, Crane was inconsistent. He padded some of his work because he needed money to support his establishment at Brede Place in Surrey. Yet even his hack work—with the exception of Great Battles of the World—retained the parodic vision. At the end of his life—literally on his deathbed—Stephen Crane returned to straight parody. In the unfinished The O'Ruddy (completed by Robert Barr, published 1903), Crane sought to write an extended burlesque of the romantic novel as it was practiced by Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Crane's own friends Arthur Quiller-Couch, H. B. Marriot-Watson, and A. E. W. Mason—or, since The O'Ruddy has a wild Irishman as the hero, of the kind of high-spirited adventure novels produced by Charles Lever 13 •

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earlier in the century. Many of the conventions of a Lever novel such as Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon (1840) are mocked in Crane's pages as the O'Ruddy pursues his love through duels, dangerous night journeys, thickly plotted mysteries.13 Whatever Stephen Crane was attempting, The O'Ruddy is a botch. Only rarely can parody extend for four hundred pages. And Crane knew this well, for in his major works he shifted at the proper moment from burlesque to realism. The O'Ruddy makes no such shift, and as a consequence its pages proliferate with repetitive accounts of the hero's adventurous sallies and brave confrontations. As one of his friends asserted, Crane "had begun it, scoffing at some of us who were writing that sort of romantic tale, but, as he went on with it, he got bitten by the theme and the treatment and the period, and was enjoying himself wnting it."14 This enjoyment precluded sensitivity. Where in his serious stories the parodie humor sets in sharp relief the often grim core, here the humor is rambling and overdone. A few bits in The O'Ruddy nevertheless remind us of what brilliant travesty Crane could invent at his best. The novel has some wickedly effective scenes. There is a fine slapstick rendering of code duello punctiliousness, and a delightful portrait of a mock highwayman who is a coward and only in the business because his venal mother insists: "I would be thinking only of the ballads, and how honourable it is that a gallant and dashing life should be celebrated in song" (VII, 51). O'Ruddy's Irish servant—a staple in Lever's novels—bewails, in another fine passage, the caste assumptions of romantic fiction: "What? A servant dead? Pah! Send it down the back staircase at once and get rid of it. . . . I have only heard of great fighters, blackguards, and beautiful ladies, 14 •

INTRODUCTION

but . . . there must be plenty of quiet decent people somewhere" (p. 150). As Stephen Crane commenced with burlesques of hunting tales, he closed with a lampoon of adventure novels. Although his first parodies were crude and his final one showed a sick man's failure of intensity, the start and finish of Crane's short writing career were given over to the parody form. (Indeed, it could be argued that his trenchant, black poems were also parodies.) Marcel Proust once insisted that the novelist must first make intentional pastiche in order to avoid later writing involuntary pastiche. The possibility that parody would lead into realism was inherent in Crane's fiction, whatever the setting. As readers, we must remain conscious of what Crane sought to parody, of the forms to which he gave a distorted image. We must understand the place of Crane's tales within the historical continuity of American fiction in order to grasp what his work meant to himself and to his contemporaries. The realistic movement generally attempted to undercut traditional, sentimental, romantic clichés that marked most popular nineteenth-century American fiction. From early realists like Joseph Kirkland and Edward Eggleston to grim naturalists like Theodore Dreiser, novelists tried to avoid what was stereotyped and false in the general run of fiction. The operative term here is, it seems to me, "avoid." They avoided the unreal by concentrating on details and aspects of life foreign to, say, the pages of domestic love novels. Stephen Crane, however, did not avoid. He met the stereotyped plot and character head on, as it were, laughed at it, and at the same time universalized it by re-creating it according to his stark and anguished view of the human condition. To clarify this point, one might consider Zury, Joseph Kirkland's early realistic novel chronicling the success story 15 •

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of a miserly Midwestern dirt farmer, in which the author calls attention to the fact that he is not writing the usual kind of success story. He quotes a piece of newspaper fiction: "A boy, 'born of poor but respectable parents in the little town of B.' was good and strong and willing and ambitious . . T h e boy runs away to sea, saves the whole ship's company in a wreck, wins the hand of the captain's daughter: " 'For a full account of his shrewd doings and his ingenious contrivances on the island, the rescue of all hands, his education, his marriage, and the glorious height from which he looked back on his early discouragements, the reader must look to our next.'" 15 Having proposed the cliché, Kirkland then declined the gambit and wrote about the way things really were—a totally different kind of story. So also Howells' Silas Lapham and Dreiser's Carrie Meeber served to repudiate the usual success novel because their stories were different: more true, surely, but different from the false or sentimental stereotype. Stephen Crane, in his novel George's Mother, an anti-success story, followed another, more subtle strategy. Most aspects of the traditional success story—poverty, a mother's love, a first job, a romantic interlude, the temptations of drink—are present in the novel; no cliché is avoided. Rather, the tradition is shown up in all its weakness by Crane's characterization of his antihero and by the fact that his plot turns the novel into a story of absolute, unqualified failure. Crane simultaneously discriminated and assimilated the conventions. Again, J. W. De Forest's battle scenes in Miss RaveneTs Conversion from Secession to Loyalty, a war novel that preceded Crane's The Red Badge of Courage by more than two decades, have received deserved praise because of their realism. De Forest evoked accurate, observed details of combat—such as a resting soldier being shot through a 16 •

INTRODUCTION

newspaper that he was reading. Stephen Crane's battle scenes, however, were realistic in a different way. Crane's hero goes through all the traditional actions involved in that hoary commonplace of war fiction, the baptism of fire. Yet the author altered the conventional pattern and revitalized the form by making his hero afraid. And after The RedBadge of Courage, gay, high-spirited war fiction seemed absurd.16 Crane's method, then, was to parody the traditional and at the same time, through his deeply serious prose style and shadowy characterizations, to universalize the familiar situations of fiction. The realist chose the best parts of earlier literature and, through the addition of observed detail, made them better; the parodist chose the worst parts and, through irony, transmuted them. Crane's comic vision enabled him, paradoxically, to be less compromising, more savage—more painful perhaps—than the realists who often sold out, at the end, to the romantic conventions of character and plot. Crane frequently managed to extract from the subliterary forms he parodied the archetypal or mythical story that underlay the stereotype. He reached below surface realism toward a view of man's comic and terrible freedom of choice. Such an approach to Stephen Crane's fiction may make him appear to be a negative artist, a critic rather than a creator. I believe, on the contrary, that Crane's very refusal to accept the traditional and his insistence on remaking it qualify him as a modern artist, along the lines of the current tradition of black humor as exemplified in the work of John Barth, Joseph Heller, or Vladimir Nabokov. Perhaps it would not be pretentious to apply to Stephen Crane some of Erich Auerbach's words on Montaigne. "In him . . . man's life—the random personal life as a whole—becomes problematic in the modern sense. That is all one dares to say. 17 •

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His irony, his dislike of big words, prevent him from pushing on beyond the limits of the problematic and into the realms of the tragic."17 The fictional approach of Stephen Crane precluded high tragedy but insisted upon an honest appraisal of life's ironic obscurities. And once or twice Crane came very close to the tragic. We should attempt to keep Stephen Crane's achievement in proper perspective, and to avoid overreading or assuming more than appears in the work. Indeed, early in his writings, Crane himself supplied a warning for the overzealous literary critic. This is Crane's parodic description of a sign painter's art: "His work has an air of philosophic thought about it which is very taking to any one of a literary turn of mind. He usually starts off with an abstract truth, an axiom, not foreign nor irrelevant, but bearing somewhat upon a hidden meaning in the sign—'Keep off the grass,' or something of that sort. . . . He also shows genius of an advanced type and the qualities of authorship in his work. . . . He has those powers of condensation which are so much admired at this day. For instance: 'Modesty of apparel is as becoming to a lady in a bathing suit as to a lady dressed in silks and satins.' There are some very sweet thoughts in that declaration. It is really a beautiful expression of sentiment. It is modest and delicate."18 Yet, without overinterpreting, we may enhance our enjoyment of Crane's fiction by considering the traditions he inverted and recreated, and the manner in which he employed parody to this end.

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I

Love and Death in the Slums With eye and with gesture You say you are holy. I say you lie; For I did see you Draw away your coats From the sin upon the hands Of a little child. Liar! —Crane, The Black Riders, LVII

. . . one makes room in Heaven for all sorts of souls (notably an occasional street girl) who are not confidently expected to be there by many excellent people. — C r a n e to Hamlin Garland, March? 1893 1

I N a little-known story published in Town Topics in 1896

Stephen Crane set forth, indirectly but in more detail than was his custom, some of his critical credos. The story—"In the Tenderloin"—is one of Crane's best. It displays nearperfect control and selectivity, remarkably fresh dialogue, and psychological insight. Subtitled "A Duel Between an 19 •

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Alarm Clock and a Suicidal Purpose," the tale shows a thin slice of underworld life: a young man—probably a pimp— named Swift Doyer is represented brutally attacking his girl for having lied to him. After he strikes her with an alarm clock, she says quietly, "I've taken morphine, Swift," 2 and the rest of the plot concerns his rough but successful attempts to save her. The story ends as the two fall asleep. "In the Tenderloin" attacks the conventions of contemporary popular fiction in three ways: in the lack of formal plot, in social attitude, and in the absence of melodrama. We never discover who the characters really are, how they live, or what the girl lied about—if, indeed, she did. We only know that these two people, of marginal social position at best, have a stormy love-hate relationship. And we know that they are living in a tiny flat in the Tenderloin, that area of bars and restaurants, theaters and opium dens, vice and prostitution, that Crane had studied closely in the fall of

1896.*

The social implications of Crane's sketch are clear; he adopts neither the reformer's pity and anger nor the naturalist's acceptance and defeat. His couple are simply human beings having a difficult passage, and they manage to survive. Neither a supporter nor an attacker of the Tenderloin way of life—seeking neither to display local color nor to arouse indignation—Crane accepts man's nature as anguished and fallible. An ironic opening differentiates Crane's narrative from traditional slum reportage. "Everybody knows all about the Tenderloin district of New York. . . . It is wonderful—this amount of truth which the world's * See Olov W . Fryckstedt, "Stephen Crane in the Tenderloin," Studia Neophilologica, 3 4 ( 1 9 6 2 ) , 1 3 5 - 6 3 , for a fine study of Crane's experiences in the slums, particularly his relationship with the prostitute Dora Clark, whom he attempted to protect from the police. The girl in Crane's story seems to have elements of Dora's nature.

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clergy and police forces have collected concerning the Tenderloin. My friends from the stars obtain all this information, if possible, and then go into the wilderness and apply it" (p. 200). Here, as in most of his fiction of social comment, Crane eschews direct protest. Unlike other writers, he does not express outrage; he simply exhibits how human beings live under certain conditions. That their lives are impoverished and violent, marked by illicit sex, whiskey, beatings, and suicide attempts, is far less important than that they are struggling people, doing the best they can. "When broad day came they were both asleep, and the girl's fingers had gone across the table until they had found the locks on the man's forehead. They were asleep, and this after all is a human action, which may safely be done by characters in the fiction of our time" (p. 203). Stephen Crane uses the whole tale as a commentary on contemporary modes of fiction and as an argument for his kind of honesty and objectivity. Despite his allusion to the "indifferent people whose windows opened on the air-shaft," Crane shows that a whore need not be drawn as totally different from the rest of mankind. He remarks ironically on her "woe that seemed almost as real as the woe of good people," and comments that Swift Doyer knows "as well as the rest of mankind that these girls have no hearts to be broken" (p. 201). But Crane proves that a Tenderloin whore can kill herself for love—just as William Faulkner in The Bear shows that a Negro has the capacity for suicide. Swift's methods of saving the girl are ugly: he forces whiskey down her throat, hits her furiously—out of a love and despair that "our decorous philosophy" cannot understand. When Swift carries her to the kitchen for coffee, the narrator takes the opportunity to make a comment on the art of fiction. "He was as wild, haggard, gibbering, as a man of midnight 21

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murders, and it is only because he was not engaged in the respectable and literary assassination of a royal duke that almost any sensible writer would be ashamed of this story" (p. 201). Romanticism, then, is ruled out. And melodrama. In the story's finest passage, the girl does not, as might be expected from the narrative's heady diction, whirl her soul into the abyss. "The girl saw a fly alight on a picture. 'Oh,' she said, 'there's a little fly.' She arose and thrust out her finger. 'Hello, little fly!' she said, and touched the fly." Full of remorse because her touch fells the fly, she finds it and tries to bring it back to life by warming it at the gas jet. " 'Poor little fly,' she said, 'I didn't mean to hurt you. I wouldn't hurt you for anything . . . " ' (p. 202).* The realism of the scene and of the dialogue is in itself a commentary on the ordinary modes of describing a recovery from near death, but the author moves into Swift Doyer's mind in order to hammer home the point that "this scene was defying his preconceptions," and the preconceptions of much nineteenth-century fiction. "His instruction had been that people when dying behaved in a certain manner. Why did this girl occupy herself with an accursed fly? Why in the names of the gods of the drama did she not refer to her past? [So much for stage melodrama.] Why, by the shelves of the saints of literature, did she not clutch her brow and say: 'Ah, once I was an innocent girl ? [the fallen woman of Victorian literature]" (p. 202). Crane scoffs at the protagonist's "scandalized" sense of propriety, and, while parodying the traditional, he also uses the scene to prove to the hero that the girl could not die, for the "form was not correct." In The Red Badge of Courage Crane employs real war to * The fly passage brings to mind a similar incident in Dostoevsky's Idiot, which Crane almost certainly had not read.

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shatter the hero's romantic dreams of battle, and in so doing creates a new and finer form of war fiction; in "The Open Boat" his correspondent comments on the way matters should be, and in the process of the narration Crane rejects the familiar conception of the confrontation of man against nature on the sea and also writes a marvelous sea adventure. Similarly in the novels Maggie and George s Mother he parodies the accepted forms of slum fiction and, with the same materials, makes fresh and powerful slum novels. The critical and creative method exemplified in "In the Tenderloin" is operative throughout his fiction. In Maggie, his earliest novel (1893), Crane reacts sharply to some familiar modes of popular fiction. Maggie is about novels, as well as being a novel, and, as Frank Kermode has said about another writer's book, this technique is simply part of the work's "perfectly serious way of life." 3 Maggie involves a complete reversal of the sentimental themes of the nineteenth-century best sellers that dealt with the life of a young girl. These novels, from such active pens as those of Susan Warner, Maria Cummins, E. D. E. N. Southworth, and E. P. Roe, displayed a manifest religious bias; Maggie is scorned by a clergyman and Jimmie finds organized religion abhorrent. The conventional novels treated romantic love and the salvation of female honor; Crane's heroine is sexually betrayed and falls to the lower depths. A key scene in the sentimental novel was the slow, beautiful death of the heroine's mother; here Maggie herself dies, off stage, and her drunken, blaspheming mother survives. The villain in the sentimental novel was generally regenerated by the heroine's good influence; Crane's Pete the bartender becomes increasingly degraded and ends in a drunken stupor, mocked by thieving streetwalkers. The essential lesson of the sentimental novel was that happiness 23 •

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(and wealth) came from submission to suffering; suffer Maggie does, but the result of her pangs is only further misery, poverty, and death.4 The sentimentalist's approach extended into the slum novel itself. In Walter F. Taylor's words, "In 1890 appeared the key-book of the entire anti-slum movement, Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives . . . . Thence-forward—and especially for the next five years—the slum was in effect a fresh literary field . . . and both writers and readers appear to have explored the new area with an intense curiosity in which were mingled compassion, morbid fascination, and something akin to horror."5 While there were many writers who saw life in the big city as full of charm and adventure —Richard Harding Davis, Bayard Taylor, and H. C. Bunner, for example—others with more active social consciences, like Howells or H. H. Boyesen, were aware of the city's dangers but treated the slum dwellers only in passing. The life of the poor, according to Bunner, writing in 1896, was enjoyable because of the "pitiful petty schemes for the gaining of daily bread that make up for them ["Bohemians"] the game and comedy of life." Bunner could view casually "the daily march of the mob of drunks, detectives, butcher's boys, washerwomen, priests, drunken women . . ."6 because he never probed beneath the surface of these lives. And for the writers of melodrama the slum girl was a creature of romance, sure to rise above her situation, as did the dime novel heroines of Orphan Nell, the Orange Girl; or the Lost Heir (1880) and The Detective's Ward; or The Fortunes of a Bowery Girl (1871). Whatever stresses life might present to the slum heroine, she was proof against temptation: "I am but a poor shop-girl; my present life is a struggle for a scanty existence; my future a life of toil; but over my present life of suffering there extends a rainbow of hope . . . Life 24 •

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is short, eternity endless—the grave is but the entrance to eternity. And you, villain, ask me to change my present peace for a life of horror with you. No, monster, rather may I die at once!"7 The same combinations of humor, melodrama, and sentiment marked the novels of Edward Townsend, who invented Chimmie Fadden, one of the early vernacular heroes. In his A Daughter of the Tenements (1895) the life of the poor was shown in some detail—more than exists in Crane's Maggie, just as De Forest included more combat reality than Crane did in his war novel—and there was liberal irony directed toward people of other classes who could not understand that the poor might have feelings. But the heroine rises from her slum background of sweatshops and fruitstands to become a ballet dancer, the hero becomes a newspaper illustrator, and they live happily ever after—on Long Island. Only a minor character is permitted to be ruined by drink and opium, and even he manages to perform a shining good deed before he dies. Crane's remark is worth noting: "My good friend Edward Townsend—have you read his 'Daughter of the Tenements'?—has another opinion of the Bowery, and it is certain to be better than mine."8 The slums in these novels were grim and dangerous, but hard work finally conquered thtem, and the basic passage was from rags to riches. For those trapped there, the authors sustained a tone of pity and humor that reminds one of a famous Life cartoon of the period that showed two ragged tots staring at the sky and remarking that the stars were as thick as bedbugs. From these studies of the depths of the city came the work of O. Henry and Damon Runyon, not of Theodore Dreiser, James Farrell, and Nelson Algren. Perhaps closest to Maggie in theme and texture was Edgar Fawcett's tale of a poor girl's betrayal and destruction, 25 •

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The Evil That Men Do (1889). The miseries of the working girl, the loathsomeness of drunken, fighting parents, the assumption that innocence is only temporary, get the novel off to a serious start. But the confrontations of the heroine and her would-be seducers are hysterical, and the sufferings of the working girl at the hands of the rich are overdone. * Fawcett created a world of corruption, venality, and weakness, true; and his heroine is not saved at the end — rather she declines from housemaid to kept woman to drunken whore and dies in an alley at the hands of her equally degraded working-class lover. But two hundred sixty-two pages of bombast must pass before she finally gives in to her seducer, and much of the novel is given over to the depiction of wealthy cardboard villains.9 I believe that Stephen Crane's Maggie is in part a reaction to these "realistic" city novels that were as sentimental and melodramatic, finally, as was the other traditional popular fiction of Crane's time.10 Critics have tried to show the influence on Crane of Riis's slum studies, Zola's L'Assommoir, various tracts and sermons; but Crane did not write Maggie either to bring about reforms or, as the city novel often does, to offer "an interpretation and a judgment of the city." 11 Unlike Upton Sinclair, Stephen Crane did not call for social action. He was of course aware — even in 1893, before he wrote his severe reports of city poverty — that, as an earlier reporter had said, "a little more than half the population of New York are living un0

The novel fits into the category called by Friedrich Engels the "old, old story of the proletarian girl seduced by a man of the middle class." Letter to Margaret Harkness, April 1 8 8 8 , quoted in Documents of Modern Literary Realism, ed. George F . Becker (Princeton, 1 9 6 3 ) , p. 4 8 3 . Crane avoids, as Fawcett did not, the trap that Engels noticed in such fiction: " a mediocre writer would have attempted to disguise the trite character of the plot under a heap of artificial details and embellishment." 26

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der conditions which murder the children, degrade and ruin the young, corrupt every aspiration and stifle every hope." 12 Yet Crane wrote only as an observer. To be sure, his inscriptions in presentation copies of Maggie often call attention to the novel's social viewpoint (" 'And the wealth of the few shall be built on the patience of the poor' — Prophesy not made B.C. 1090"), 13 but Crane always dodged the kind of direct attack that marked Sinclair's reform novels or would characterize the proletarian novels of the thirties.14 He was unwilling to editorialize in his fiction.15 In his nonfiction, the well-known "Experiment in Misery," or the less famous "Experiment in Luxury," Crane's criticism of society is manifest. In the latter piece, written for the New York Press a year after Maggie first appeared, Crane tells how "the eternal mystery of social condition exasperated him at this time. He wondered if incomprehensible justice were the sister of open wrong." Here Crane is willing openly to attack organized religion, at which his fiction includes only a passing glance. "When a wail of despair or rage had come from the night of the slums they [theologians] had stuffed this epigram ["The rich are made miserable by their wealth"] down the throat of he who cried out and told him that he was a lucky fellow. They did this because they feared."" Indeed, the very absence of • "An Experiment in Luxury" (1894), in Stephen Crane: Uncollected Writings, ed. OIov W. Fryckstedt (Uppsala, 1963), pp. 47, 51. Also in 1894 Crane wrote bitterly of the contrast between the "resort of wealth and leisure" (Asbury Park) and the plodding, tired laboring men who paraded there. ("On the Jersey Coast," ibid., p. 19). Although he avoids direct comment in his savage vignette of a tramp's treatment at the hands of railroad brakemen who kick him, pour icy water on him, and hurl him off a train, Crane's sympathies break through his ironies. "Billie boarded trains and got thrown off on his head, on his left shoulder, on his right shoulder, on his hands and knees. He struck the ground slanting, straight from above and full sideways. . . . His skin was tattooed with bloody lines, crosses, triangles" ("Billie Atkins Went to Omaha," ibid., pp. 56-57).

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any sense of class warfare or economic motivation on Crane's part may be emphasized by a certain vagueness of setting. Crane does not state that Rum Alley is in the Bowery any more than he indicates that The Red Badge of Courage treats Chancellorsville. The lack of joy and release in Crane's slum characters comes not from any political position on the author's part but from a sense of reportorial honesty, fidelity to the real emotions of his characters, and understanding of the nightmare of the city. 0 Stephen Crane cut a few passages in revising for the 1896 edition of Maggie, in addition to toning down some of the language. It has been persuasively argued that these cuts were made to avoid any "false and melodramatic" tones.16 The entire production of Maggie seems to me to be an emendation, a cutting, as it were, of traditional slum fiction. Crane sliced away the false humor, the sentiment, the melodrama, and the social editorializing. What is left makes the stereotypes seem flatulent in comparison to the harsh, controlled, bare fiction of Maggie. That Crane would not directly preach does not mean that his novel is amoral. In 1896 he published in the Bookman a fable — a parody of a fable, actually — that explains his attitude toward the "message" of his fiction: A beggar crept wailing through the streets of a city. A certain man came to him there and gave him bread, saying: "I give you this loaf, because of God's word." Another came to the beggar and gave him bread, saying: "Take this loaf; I give it because you are hungry." 9 See Arthur Bartlett Maurice, The New York of the Novelists (New York, 1 9 1 6 ) , p. 107. " 'Where are Rum Alley and Devil's Row?' the present scribe asked him many years ago. . . . But Crane did not know. He had seen them. They were somewhere in the city. They had haunted him and still haunted him. . . . Stephen Crane explained that he could not have written the tale otherwise than he did. He had never been able to find in his types sunshine and sentiment and humour."

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Now there was a continual rivalry among the citizens of this town as to who should appear to be the most pious man, and the event of the gifts to the beggar made discussion. People gathered in knots and argued furiously to no particular purpose. They appealed to the beggar, but he bowed humbly to the ground, as befitted one of his condition, and answered: "It is a singular circumstance that the loaves were of one size and of the same quality. How, then, can I decide which of these men gave bread more piously?" The people heard of a philosopher who travelled through their countiy, and one said: "Behold, we who give not bread to beggars are not capable of judging those who have given bread to beggars. Let us, then, consult this wise man." "But," said some, "mayhap this philosopher, according to your rule that one must have given bread before judging they who give bread, will not be capable." "That is an indifferent matter to all truly great philosophers." So they made search for the wise man, and in time they came upon him, strolling along at his ease in the manner of philosophers. "Oh, most illustrious sage," they cried. "Yes," said the philosopher promptly. "Oh, most illustrious sage, there are two men in our city, and one gave bread to a beggar, saying: 'Because of God's word.' And the other gave bread to the beggar, saying: 'Because you are hungry.' Now, which of these, oh, most illustrious sage, is the more pious man?" "Eh?" said the philosopher. "Which of these, oh, most illustrious sage, is the more pious man?" "My friends," said the philosopher suavely addressing the concourse, '1 see that you mistake me for an illustrious sage. I am not he whom you seek. However, I saw a man answering my description pass here some time ago. With speed you may overtake him. Adieu."17 The philosopher wrote Maggie, but, refusing the role of illustrious sage, he left it to the citizens to derive the novel's meaning. 29 •

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It is true that Stephen Crane includes more indirect, unstated social comment in Maggie than in any of his other works except, possibly, The Monster. The story that traces the fall of the beautiful girl who "blossomed in a mud puddle" (X, 156), the chronicle that has the subtitle "A Girl of the Streets," tries, in Crane's words, "to show that environment is a tremendous thing in the world and frequently shapes life regardless."18 The streets, the mud puddle, the brutal environment, suggest excessive editorial comment, despite Crane's desire to present without preaching. In this early work Crane is not yet in control of his gift for hinting and foreshortening. For example, the concept that life in the slums is a war — an obvious naturalistic idea — is hammered into the reader's consciousness by heavy repetition of metaphor and situation. In the opening scene Maggie's brother is doing battle with the urchins of Devil's Row, and the chapter resounds with battle imagery — "valiant roar," "the fury of battle," "small warriors," "one who aimed to be some vague kind of soldier, or a man of blood" (pp. 137-41). The novel is a collection of battle scenes. Chapter 1 shows Jimmie at war with other children; chapter 11 recounts the violent beating administered to Maggie by her mother; in provides a kind of climax to the domestic warfare in a savage, chair-splintering fight between the Johnson parents. Actually, one of the flashes of humor in this early section comes from an old neighbor's comment on the fighting: "Eh, child, what is it dis time? Is yer fader beatin' yer mudder, or yer mudder beatin' ye fader?" (p. 146). Chapter iv is given over to Jimmie's battles, as a truck driver, against the street-dwellers. "He was continually storming at them from his throne" (p. 154). Pete wins Maggie's admiration by his accounts of his prowess in bar brawls: "Dey knows I kin wipe up d' street wid any t'ree 30 •

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of dem" (p. 159). Chapter ix centers on a fist fight between Jimmie and his mother: "The mother and the son began to sway and struggle like gladiators" (p. 175). Chapter xi provides a climax of battle in the long, detailed report of the fight between Pete and Jimmie and his friend, when Pete's bar is wrecked by Jimmie's attempts to avenge his sister's seduction. Maggie, the reader notes, takes no part in this warfare. She is passive, a victim — her role in the novel. Yet Crane's satiric point is far too obvious. The amount of mock warfare is much greater than is necessary to indicate that Maggie is the loser in a battle with the slum. Other aspects of social commentary, though indirect, are also blunt. Crane disapproves of the hypocrisy of the double standard that allows a man to philander but turns a woman's sexual involvement into utter corruption. In order to indict the society that insists upon such hypocritical standards, Crane counterpoints the sexual athleticism of Maggie's brother Jimmie to her one affair with Pete — an affair that is forced upon her by the callous brutality of Jimmie and his mother. Again and again, Crane reminds us that two women are seeking Jimmie's support for their children whom he fathered; just before Jimmie and his mother exchange shocked views of Maggie's behavior, his ex-mistress begs him for help, and he roughly evades her. "Jimmie thought he had a great idea of woman's frailty, but he could not understand why any of his kin should be victims." And, in case we haven't grasped Crane's ideas, "Again he wondered vaguely if some of the women of his acquaintance had brothers." To leave not a trace of doubt, Crane ends, "Nevertheless his mind did not for an instant confuse himself with those brothers nor his sister with theirs" (p. 193). 31 •

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Some of the author's interpretation is more restrained. The antireligious bias is limited to a few carefully assimilated vignettes: the profane old lady who can don an expression of virtue when begging and can modulate her collection of "God bless yeh's" in assorted keys; a beautifully rendered scene of the mission church where the preacher composes his sermons of "you's," and the listeners only want soup tickets; the mother's alternations of curses and prayers directed at Maggie. When Crane brings the fallen Maggie, in her moment of greatest need, into contact with "a stout gentleman in a silk hat and a chaste black coat, whose decorous row of buttons reached from his chin to his knees," and the man preserves his respectability by side-stepping her, we are not completely sure that he is a clergyman. Maggie "had heard of the grace of God," Crane remarks, but the man still may be only a well-dressed business man (p. 207). Crane makes no judgments about the sources of the slum mud puddle. Indeed, economic determinism is absent from Maggie since in it, unlike most slum novels, poverty per se is not a salient issue, and even when Maggie takes to the streets it is because of her rejection by Pete and her family rather than her need for money. Surely the best indication of Crane's method of oblique comment is his treatment of Maggie's job in a sweatshop. Working conditions, grimly described, were clichés of contemporary slum fiction, as in the pathetic descriptions of A Daughter of the Tenements (or Sister Carrie); here Crane simply hints at Maggie's work in an establishment where they make collars and cuffs. "She received a stool and a machine in a room where sat twenty girls of various shades of yellow discontent. She perched on the stool and treadled at her machine all day, turning out collars with a name which might have been noted for its irrelevancy to anything connected 32 •

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with collars" (p. 156). Later Crane shows Maggie at work, afraid that she will shrivel in "the hot, stuffy room." The author glances at the traditional "heavy" of this scene, the fat foreigner who owns the shop: "He was a detestable creature. He wore white socks with low shoes. He sat all day delivering orations in the depths of a cushioned chair. His pocket book deprived them of the power of retort. 'What do you sink I pay fife dolla a week for? Play? No, py tamn!'" (p. 169). And this is all. The reference to the socks and shoes casts doubt on Maggie's authority for criticizing her boss, and Crane's view of the conditions in the shop is deliberately ambiguous — a far cry from, say, Sinclair's Jungle. Stephen Crane's social view in Maggie might be summed up in the phrase that echoes throughout the novel and appears on the lips of every major character except the heroine. "What d' Hell!" At once a cry of profanity, despair, disengagement, and unreason, the phrase may exculpate society from direct blame. Unlike the usual run of slum novels, Maggie finds no cause — not religion, nor class stratification, nor poverty, nor even those naturalistic staples, coincidence and dark natural forces. Maggie's destruction is as obscure as her creation and her survival. Her little brother Tommie dies; Maggie lives, for a while. "Ah, what d' Hell." Many aspects of Maggie reflect generic traditions of the city novel. As Jean Cocteau once said about two works, they are alike save in everything. As in most slum novels, Crane uses dialect to an excess to characterize his slum dwellers and to indicate the paucity of their linguistic, intellectual, and emotional resources. The author's prose, on the other hand, is rich in metaphor and wit when he 33 •

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speaks in his own voice. The novel is packed with evocations of the streets, jammed with wagons and trolleys, the crumbling, crowded tenements, the barrooms and music halls, dime museums, menageries.* Crane's penchant for rapid successions of sharply outlined pictures is given full release in Maggie. The city itself takes on a personality, as in Dreiser's pages, threatening, uncaring, jostling, fastmoving. Nevertheless, despite the novel's realistic details, the special quality of Maggie comes from its parodic nature, which finally controls the novel's characterizations and structure. In chapter VIII Crane presents an extremely full parody of traditional melodrama, of everything that Maggie is not. Pete often takes Maggie to plays "in which the dazzling heroine was rescued from the palatial home of her treacherous guardian by the hero with the beautiful sentiments." W e recall that Maggie first thought of Pete as a knight who would rescue her from her cruel mother. The play shows the hero "out at soak in pale-green snow-storms, busy with a nickel-plated revolver rescuing aged strangers from villains." Maggie and the audience — and, Crane would indicate, the reading public of 1893 — accept all this, with sympathy, as "transcendental realism"; the gallery cheer on the struggling hero and jeer the villain, "hooting and calling attention to his whiskers." But Crane's fiction does not lead his readers to hiss vice and applaud virtue. His villains are not bearded, his heroes not exposed in snowstorms. Nor do * One of Crane's earliest newspaper articles, "Travels in New York: The Broken Down Van" (1892), provides a version of the streets which Maggie walks and young Jimmie travels through on his way for beer and later traverses as a van driver: " . . . a girl, ten years old, went in front of the van horses with two pails of beer . . . a sixteen-year-old girl without any hat and with a roll of half-finished vests under her arm crossed the front platform of the green car." Uncollected Writings, p. 12.

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Crane's heroes "march from poverty in the first act to wealth and triumph in the final one," as happens in the play and in the contemporary fiction that Maggie parodies. Crane's novel remains faithful to the conventions of the genre lampooned in his play — a poor heroine, a grim environment — but he breaks down the formal assumptions within the body of his novel. Maggie "rejoiced at the way in which the poor and virtuous eventually overcame the wealthy and wicked" (pp. i 7 i f ) . This description of the play should provide us with the key to Crane's strategy in his first novel. The characters and events of the novel counter the traditional elements of slum melodrama; they also transcend this disintegration of an accepted prototype and rise to a renewal and revitalization of the form. The comic melts into the serious. The parody of itself that is contained within the novel heightens the sense of reality that surrounds the parodic passages, reality that constitutes the bulk of the novel. This mock melodrama is reflexive, not referential; the counterpointing of "literature" and life makes Maggie's real role more convincing, for the conventions parodied are not only parts of slum fiction in general, but are also at work as life expectations in the consciousnesses of Crane's characters. The structure of the novel itself is that of a three-act drama with an appended conclusion; the technique is that of ironic counterpoint. A further parodic element appears in the characterization of the heroine, who is barely sketched and has only the faintest of emotions, in contrast to the stock heroine's catalogue of fading charms and hysterical passages. To be sure, Crane's controlling idea enforces this method. Maggie is a victim, bearing the brunt of others' lusts and hypocrisies. Everyone else seems to swirl around her. They are always in motion, while she is passively 35 •

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dragged in their currents until, at the end, she floats along the gutters of the city streets, impelled by the force of others' vigor — and then slips quietly into the waters of the East River, her stillness at last become permanent obscurity. The first act encompasses three chapters and establishes the detail and color of slum life. Street urchins war against a stolid background: "From the window of an apartment house that uprose from amid squat ignorant stables . . . labourers, unloading a scow at a dock at the river . . . The engineer of a passive tugboat . . . Over on the island a worm of yellow convicts came from the shadow of a grey ominous building and crawled slowly along the river's bank" (p. 138). Here are all the strands of the novel — the river, the indifferent observers, the street battles, the squalor of a great city. All the important characters are introduced in these first pages, the brawling Jimmie, the swaggering sixteen-year-old Pete (already muttering "Ah, what d' Hell"), the sullen, brutal, drunken father, and the savage, hysterical, massive mother. Maggie, "the heroine," is barely present. She is a product of the others' emotions, a tiny recipient of their blows, "a small pursued tigress" (p. 145). Her attempts to care for her infant brother, to soothe the mauled Jimmie, to help her intoxicated mother, all meet with the curses and cuffs of the hostile world that will eventually destroy her. The stereotypes of parental or brotherly love are ruthlessly reversed; emotions are as crude as the environment. "Long streamers of garments fluttered from fireescapes. In all unhandy places there were buckets, brooms, rags and bottles. . . . A thousand odours of cooking food came forth to the street. The building quivered and creaked from the weight of humanity stamping about in its bowels" (p. i 4 i f ) . Crane carries the ugliness of his scene to natural36 •

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istic limits. The various fights are overdone, as is the passage where Jimmie, sent out for a can of beer by the mendacious old lady beggar who serves as a Hardyesque choral figure, is set upon by his father, robbed of the beer, and then hit on the head with the empty can. Yet the first act ends on a note of peace, Maggie quivering with fear, watching the prostrate, heaving body of her drunken mother. "Out at the window a florid moon was peering over dark roofs, and in the distance the waters of a river glimmered pallidly" (p. 150). Act II starts with a chapter completely given over to a careful and fairly interesting character study of Jimmie, who is analyzed much more acutely than Maggie. Crane explains the brother's cynical temperament, his motivation, and indicates that, despite his sins, he is not totally depraved. "Nevertheless, he had, on a certain star-lit evening, said wonderingly and quite reverently, 'Deh moon looks like hell, don't it?'" (p. 156). All we learn of Maggie appears in a short paragraph saying that by some rare chance of alchemy, she grew up to be a pretty girl. Crane seems to be more interested in describing the mother's rise to fame in the police courts. The relationship between Maggie and Pete, the slum flower and the uncouth bartender, is ironic, too heavily so. Here Crane's parody gets out of hand. After Pete describes his brawls in filthy language, "Maggie perceived that here was the ideal man. Her dim thoughts were often searching for far-away lands where the little hills sing together in the morning. Under the trees of her dream-gardens there had always walked a lover" (p. 159). The counterpoint is thunderous, as in the next line where Pete responds to the girl: "Say, Mag, I'm stuck on yer shape. It's outa sight." To Maggie, "He was a knight" (p. 1 6 1 ) . The only motivation for Maggie's perverse ro37 •

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manticizing of this oaf, quixotically converting him from a brute into a knight, is the ugliness of her dark, dusty home that clouds her vision. Pete represents a way of escape to a world of finer quality, at least in her estimation, and when he does take her out, it is from a home once more crumbled by her mother. "The curtain at the window had been pulled by a heavy hand and hung by one tack, dangling to and fro in the draught through the cracks at the sash. . . . The remnants of a meal, ghastly, lay in a corner. Maggie's mother, stretched on the floor, blasphemed, and gave her daughter a bad name" (p. 163). Pete takes Maggie to a dance hall that seems to her, in contrast to her home, to be the height of elegance. Crane lovingly describes this Bowery institution, the first of three to which Pete will take Maggie. This establishment is bourgeois, numbers only a very few tipsy men among the customers, and presents fairly wholesome entertainment. While Crane views the crowd with some irony, particularly during their warm response to an anti-British song, his description is mixed with affection. And from this respectable place Maggie emerges a respectable girl, refusing to kiss Pete. The second act of Maggie's little drama ends with an emphasis on her honesty and goodness. She seems impervious to her lover's temptations, even that of a life filled with visits to theaters and museums. The final act commences immediately after the melodramatic play discussed earlier. In contrast to the events of the play, Maggie's descent into sin is casual. There is no villain and no heroine. Driven out of her home by a vilely intoxicated mother, accused of sin while still virginal, forced, as it were, into Pete's arms, Maggie goes — "falls." " 'Git th' devil outa here.' Maggie went" (p. 177). Her "ruin," of 38 •

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course, must be handled obliquely, and Crane treats this problem of Victorian reticence with great skill. The old beggarwoman with relish tells Jimmie of Maggie's tears and pleas for the assurances of Pete's love, as if these were uproariously funny. " 'Oh, gee, yes,' she called after him. She laughed a laugh that was like a prophetic croak" (p. 178). Crane's comedy is effective here; so much so that the pathos inherent in this traditional situation catches the reader unawares. The reader familiar with sentimental fiction must be amused at Jimmie's commonplace responses to the hackneyed situation of the fall from grace of the innocent daughter and sister — but with laughter comes also a measure of real pity for Maggie. This pathetic parody, this travesty of the mother and the son — far more sinful themselves than Maggie — lamenting over her damnation, calls to mind a similar mockery of parental affection in John Gay's The Beggars Opera. The parody of bourgeois standards is superb. " 'May she be cursed for ever!' she shrieked. 'May she eat nothin' but stones and deh dirt in deh street. May she sleep in deh gutter an' never see the sun shine again. D' bloomin' — ' " (p. 179). Their mutual hypocrisy and self-congratulation is as harrowing as it is comic, so that the scene that starts in parody ends in seriousness. This response, Crane says, is the blindness and hypocrisy of society — and he underlines the terrible lack of insight on the part of Maggie's relatives by calling forth the same rapid, unjust condemnation of the girl's character from the other slum dwellers who accuse Maggie of years of licentious behavior. The reader not only feels a sense of pity for Maggie, who, as usual, is not on the scene, but also attains a genuine sense of the absurdity of moral pretension. That these reprobates should judge Maggie on the 39 •

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basis of their loss of "respectability" because of her love affair is a cruel commentary on the ways of the social animal. Later Jimmie will be embarrassed because Maggie's new role "queers" him and his mother. As for the mother, she rapidly learns how to use her daughter's fall to excuse her own drinking habits. Yet the words of a cynical police judge help to sustain the needed antisentimental tone: "Mary, the records of this and other courts show that you are the mother "of forty-two daughters who have been ruined" (pp. i g 3 f ) . Jimmie, finally, is not as bad as his mother. He does have a brief flash of' insight, as he did on the night when he noticed the moon's beauty. He is able to understand, for a moment, that Maggie might have been better had she known how. "However, he felt that he could not hold such a view. He threw it hastily aside" (p. 194). A second dance-hall scene establishes the distance Maggie has fallen, although this device seems rather strained. Now the singer wears a scarlet gown and does a strip tease; more drinking takes place; Maggie is totally submissive and the object of stares, as if she were not a person, but a thing. "Grey-headed men, wonderfully pathetic in their dissipation, stared at her through clouds. Smooth-cheeked boys, some of them with faces of stone and mouths of sin, not nearly so pathetic as the grey heads, tried to find the girl's eyes in the smoke wreaths. Maggie considered she was not what they thought her" (p. 190). She is not, for she is merely a cipher, a victim; Maggie is not now, and she never has been, an identity. In a passage at the end of this section she shrinks from two painted women, harbingers of her future in which she must become what people — parents, brothers, lovers, society — make of her. The most delicate aspect of Crane's achievement in the novel is this facelessness of his heroine that at once makes his point 40 •

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about her victimization and allows him to crush her pitilessly without falling into sentiment or bathos. The ironic mode prevails. The third dance-hall scene transpires three weeks after Maggie has left home. It is a wild scene, a Walpurgisnacht of noise, alcohol, savage music. Maggie loses Pete to Nellie, an old flame, a more sophisticated woman of the (under) world. Pete goes off with Nellie as if Maggie does not exist. Nellie's date, "a mere boy," discusses this unfair action as if Maggie does not exist. He even condescends to offer to sleep with her: "You look bad longsider her, but by y'self ain't so bad. Have to do anyhow. Nell gone. O'ny you left" (p. 200) — as if Maggie does not exist. * And she does not exist. There are no persons or places available for her to use as a mirror for her identity. Her attempt to return home is thwarted by her mother's cruel and indignant rebuff, "Look ut her! Ain' she a dandy? An' she was so good as to come home teh her mudder, she was!" Jimmie echoes the mother's jeers. "Radiant virtue sat upon his brow, and his repelling hands expressed horror of contamination." The neighbors who rescue their children from Maggie's path echo again the taunts. Only the old beggar realizes that Maggie, if not a human, is at least a thing: "Well, come in an' stay wid me t'-night. I ain' got no moral standin'" (pp. 203f). Since her family and her lover have failed to recognize her identity, Maggie must assume the only role available, the traditional role of fallen woman in which they have " Crane often remarks on the difficult position of the woman who is loyal, whom the more brutal male often deserts. In " T h e 'Tenderloin' As It Really I s " ( 1 8 9 6 ) , he depicts a girl gallantly helping her man in a barroom brawl; in "Yen-Nock Bill and His Sweetheart" ( 1 8 9 6 ) , the faithful girl helps an opium-wrecked, pneumonia-wracked wretch back to health, and he later bullies, abuses, and rages at her.

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cast her. The third act ends with one of the finest passages of sustained power and restraint in all of Crane's writing, the chapter (XVH) that indirectly treats Maggie's death. Crane showed his realization of the importance of this chapter by paying more attention to it than to any other section of the novel when he revised his privately printed 1893 version for commercial publication in 1896. He describes a wet evening several months later; the Tenderloin aglow with lights and people as the theaters empty; an atmosphere of pleasure and prosperity, of misery and horror. Then: "A girl of the painted cohorts of the city went along the street." She has no name, no identity, for, as we have seen, whatever individuality she had possessed was denied her by those who should have cared. Now the uncaring men whom she meets, in the cleverly foreshortened series of encounters that represents the complete pattern of her decline and fall, merely repeat the rejections by Maggie's clan. Down the chain of being she goes. A handsome young man in evening dress scorns her because she is neither new, Parisian, nor theatrical. A stout gentleman, a businessman, a city tough in a derby hat, a laboring man, a nervous boy — down the path of whoredom Maggie hurries. A drunk without cash, a man with blotched features (who, in a cut passage, says that he has another date), complete her attempts at assignations. (In the earlier version she meets one more, a revolting, obese pig of a man who follows her, chuckling. Crane probably removed this character because, no matter how disgusting, he at least sees Maggie, in order to follow her, and for Crane's purposes she is, metaphorically, invisible.) The section ends, and Maggie's life ends, as was inevitable from the beginning, and Crane returns to the water images of the novel's start. "At the feet of the tall buildings appeared 42 •

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the deathly black hue of the river. Some hidden factoiy sent up a yellow glare, that lit for a moment the waters lapping oilily against timbers. The varied sound of life, made joyous by distance and seeming unapproachableness, came faintly and died away to a silence" (p. 2 1 1 ) . 0 The novel does not end yet, even though Maggie's life is played out. Since she has never been a subject, only an object, the final section of the book rightfully concentrates on the responses to her death. Chapter xvm is a long treatment of Pete's degradation. He is slobbering, incoherent, maudlin. He mumbles about his pure motives while a gang of whores, led by Nellie, hover about, only waiting for him to pass out so they can roll him. Too much like a woodcut of "The Corrupter Corrupted," the barroom scene is anticlimactic. The final section is also pictorial — "a woman sat at a table eating like a fat monk in a picture" (p. 216) — but wretchedly effective. To Jimmie's remark, "Mag's dead," her mother responds, " 'Deh blazes she is!' . . . She continued her meal." Fitting as this sentence is as an obituary for Maggie, Crane must end the novel on the parodic note that has informed most of the work. The faked sentimentality of the mother's subsequent hysterical sobbing and her maudlin emphasis on the memory of Maggie's wearing worsted boots is an obscene — if pitiful — parody of mother love, of the familiar excesses of the fiction of domestic sentiment. With vocabulary "derived from mission churches" the mourners join the mother's laments. For all the satire, 0

See Crane's bitter little "Legends," ii, Bookman (New York), 3 (1896), 206: "When the suicide arrived at the sky, the people there asked him, 'Why?' He replied: 'Because no one admired m e . ' " The water image often stands for Crane's idea of city death. In "A Street Scene in New York" (1894) a body on the pavement is like "a bit of debris sunk in this human ocean," a "human bit of wreckage at the bottom of the sea of men" (XI, 191-92).

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Crane's wake is effective in its own right. When the mother begs Jimmie to go and get Maggie so they can put the little boots on her feet, the narration transcends parody — without turning away from the form — and touches upon genuine anguish. And the book closes to the choir of old ladies begging the mother to forgive Maggie her sins. The final words highlight the novel's terms, as the mother weeps and screams in real pain. The parody remains operative; this version of mourning is grotesque. The ironic tone is still present — she should be begging Maggie's forgiveness. Somehow, through Stephen Crane's art, the scene attains a fine fictional effect: the Maggie who never existed as a person in her own self, when alive, is passively made into a figure to justify the society that has ignored her. "Oh, yes, I'll fergive her! I'll fergive her!" (p. 218). As he rejects the society's cheap lies, Crane's sympathy, controlled by his irony, becomes ours.

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The Failure on the Barroom Floor Once when I was fourteen an organ grinder . . . gave me a nice long drink out of a nice red bottle . . . I had been sulky all morning and now I was perfectly willing to go to a prayer meeting and Mother was tickled to death ... I have frequently wondered how much mothers ever know about their sons, after all. — C r a n e to Willis B. Clarke, November 1899 1

D U R I N G the year after he had his first slum novel privately printed, Stephen Crane continued his researches into the vagaries of slum existence. In 1894 he published four powerful reports on how the other half lives. In these newspaper articles documenting the wretchedness of the poor, Crane indulges in the direct social comment that he avoids in his fiction. In "An Experiment in Misery," a self-conscious study of flophouse life and character, Crane makes quite clear that in New York City there are two nations, and he portrays "the wail of a whole section, a class, a people"; the reporter describes the novelist's approach as he lies "carving the biographies for these men from his meagre experi45 •

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ence" (XI, 28). Just as he would follow wars in Greece and Cuba after he had imaginatively constructed the fiction of war in The Red Badge of Courage, so Crane studied the facets of slum life after he had dramatized that life in Maggie. His writing career was to be a strange combination of imagination and observation, and as he grew older he was to lean more and more on his earlier experiences, his memories of his New York childhood, his early days as a rather Bohemian reporter, his Western journeys. His observations of the slums awoke his sense of the city's dramatic potential and his feeling of outrage at class distinctions. "And in the background a multitude of buildings, of pitiless hues and sternly high, were to him emblematic of a nation forcing its regal head into the clouds, throwing no downward glances; in the sublimity of its aspirations ignoring the wretches who may flounder at its feet. The roar of the city in his ear was to him the confusion of strange tongues, babbling heedlessly; it was the clink of coin, the voice of the city's hopes, which were to him no hopes" (XI, 34)Although Crane would occasionally glance at sublime aspirations, as in "An Experiment in Luxury," and at times report the color and roar of the city ("In the Broadway Cars," "Roof Gardens"), he was much more drawn to the wretches floundering in the lower depths of the metropolis. A panoramic study of trolley cars on the Broadway line is sympathetic toward those caught in the jungle of men and vehicles. A view of plush roof-garden restaurants calls up contrasting impressions of the poor who are always with us: "Down in the slums necessity forces a solution of problems. It drives the people to the roofs. An evening upon a tenement roof with the great golden march of the stars across the sky and Johnnie gone for a pail of beer, is not 46 •

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so bad if you have never seen the mountains nor heard, to your heart, the slow, sad song of the pines" (XI, 172). Only rarely did Crane compose exercises in nostalgia, as in "Minetta Lane/' where, in the vein of A. J. Liebling, he warmly recalls the lost days of complete corruption and violence. Usually the tone of his slum nonfiction is somber. In "A Street Scene in New York" he shows the brutality of a crowd that cares only for sensation. "The Men in the Storm," one of his most accurately observed articles, carefully catches the detailed reactions of men waiting in a violent snowstorm for a shelter to open. He renders without comment the pain, patience, and humor of bums and jobless men somehow vanquished in the race for success. As a reporter, Crane understood that he was not telling the public what it wanted to hear. He was breaking the traditions — such as the jolly, Dickensian Christmas panorama of the crowd in a snowstorm heading home to hot dinners and warm fires. "It is a matter of tradition; it is from the tales of childhood" (XI, 38). Like other journalists of the time — George Ade or Finley Peter Dunne, for example, or, later, Don Marquis or Heywood Broun — when writing fiction Crane covered his sense of outrage with a sheen of humor that often makes his pieces verge on parody. As we have seen by the example of "In the Tenderloin," however, Crane's distortion of slum fiction has an underpinning of potential tragedy. Many of his short, cutting slum stories are humorous only in a macabre sense. From 1894 until his death, Crane returned again and again to the slum setting for his fiction. Some of his pieces simply provide humorous or pitiful pendants to the tenement world of Maggie and Georges Mother, and others seem to involve glosses on the rather open-ended conclusions of the two novels. "An Ominous Baby" (I894) tells 47 •

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of Maggie's younger brother, a little toddler who steals the toy wagon of a rich child; the imagery, like that of the novels, is drawn from war. Another sketch of the tiny child, "A Great Mistake" (1896), displays Crane's method of travesty. In this tale of a child who tries to steal a piece of fruit, Crane parodies the diction of melodramatic detective fiction, speaking of grandiose plans, careful plots: "Then tumultuous desires began to shake him. His dreams were of conquest" (XI, 1 1 2 ) . Only in "A Dark Brown Dog" (published posthumously, probably written late) does Crane's humor totally desert him, and this story of a child and his dog does try to jerk tears. Two tales especially recall the scene of Maggie. "An Eloquence of Grief" (1898) is set in a police court where the agonized cry of a young girl accused of stealing contrasts with the whining brogue of an old drunk who (like Maggie's mother) protests his innocence. "A Desertion" (1900) recreates the tenement setting of Maggie, even to the bitter old gossips who insist on the innocent girl's guilt long before she is driven to the streets. The tale itself is an overwrought story of a girl who thinks her too protective father is sulking when she comes home late — and who eventually discovers that he is a corpse. Despite the excessive shock effect that makes for an unintentionally macabre humor, the girl's depiction of life in a shop, the advances of the foreman, the sense of tenement life, combine in a sketch of considerable force and reality. The best of Crane's slum pieces are the shortest. One of Howells' favorites, "A Detail" (1896), is a beautifully controlled vignette of a little old lady who asks two girls how she can find work. Like a Chekhovian vignette, the story works through hints and indirections so that what might have been only a pathetic portrait of an old lady becomes an objective view of life's 48 •

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pain. In the same year, Crane extended this sketch into the characterization of George's mother, who shows similar pathetic courage. The novel, like the sketch, manages to escape sentiment and achieve a tone of wry humor mixed with despair. "The Duel That Was Not Fought" (1894) is a bit of slapstick comedy that depends for its humor on the contrasting attitudes toward fighting held by a Cuban swordsman and an Irish street brawler. The background of drinking and bar fights looks ahead to Georges Mother, as does the parody of the stereotyped figure of the man who will do battle to defend his sense of honor. Crane's slum stories show drinkers and working girls, old ladies and confidence men, grimy babies and cocky laborers. A sense of the ugliness and the absurdity of life in the bowels of a big city maintains the dualism of humor and despair that informs all the stories. When Stephen Crane approached the slum surroundings in a novel for a second time, in 1896, he combined in George's Mother a more extensive humor of parody with the grimness of an unpleasant setting filled with degraded characters. One of Stephen Crane's late short stories, "A Self-Made Man" (1899), provides a clue to his method in George's Mother. The story is a pure parody of the American success story best illustrated by the books of Horatio Alger. Their titles illustrate the novels' approach: Brave and Bold, Pluck and Luck, Work and Win; and they are, in Kenneth Lynn's words, about "adolescent boys who, beginning in poverty and obscurity, took the fabulous city of New York by storm."2 The success novels usually showed how a poor but honest, chaste, bright, and hard-working boy from the country, through a combination of hairbreadth adventures, good luck, and sustained effort, conquers the dangers of 49 •

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vice and sloth endemic to city life and wins through to great wealth, the hand of the banker's daughter, and a vine-covered cottage for his aged mother. The struggle was always upward, as the title of an 1886 dime novel indicates: John Armstrong, Mechanic; or From the Bottom to the Top of the Ladder. A Story of How a Man Can Rise in America. "A Self-Made Man" scoffs at the Alger stereotype; it derides, although in a gentle manner compared to Nathanael West's savage lampoon, A Cool Million, the absurdities of the genre. The story opens upon Tom in poverty, studying a hole in his shoe that he patches with playing cards. He has not much pluck and less luck — the day he puts four aces in his shoes he is still refused work. Tom does have self-assurance, however. He reads for an illiterate old man a letter saying that his son has been robbing him; then Tom pretends to be a lawyer in order to face down the embezzler, who has a diamond in his shirt front and a bit of egg on his cuff. By looking impressive and saying, "Ah," Tom frightens the villain into returning the old man's money, and Tom "came near being happy ever after" (XI, 259). Getting to know a man who knows another man helps Tom thereafter to become Thomas G. Somebody in Crane's cynical version of the rags to riches story. The object of his parody is made clear toward the tale's close. Tom's fame has spread through the land as a man who carved his way to fortune with no help but his undaunted pluck, his tireless energy, and his sterling integrity. Newspapers apply to him now, and he writes long signed articles to struggling young men, in which he gives "the best possible advice as to how to become wealthy" (XI, 259). When we consider the bare plot of George's Mother we can understand Crane's parodic approach that reverses 50 •

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the American type of success saga. Like the Alger hero, George is strong, has a job, is recently from the country, and provides sole support for his widowed mother. There the resemblance ends. Where the Alger hero is usually "longing for the time when he can relieve his mother from work and surround her old age with comfort,"3 George resents his mother and supports her largely because she worships him and labors unceasingly for his comfort. The Alger hero has acumen and luck; George is a fool and unlucky. Where the stereotype abstains from temptation, George hastens to succumb — to drink and sloth and, finally, violence. Where Alger sustains the Protestant ethic, Crane burlesques organized religion. An Alger hero wins, George loses the girl. (An additional ironic twist here: the girl is Maggie, and George loses her to Pete.) Most important, the traditional success novel, naturally, recounts the rise in fortune of the young hero; Crane's failure novel tells of the fall of the young antihero. The plot, then, is plainly parodic. Within the context of the novel, moreover, Crane seems to laugh at another genre, the temperance novel. George Kelcey's mother is an active and devoted member of the W.C.T.U., and George's revolt and downfall to a large extent result from his drinking habits. While the temperance novel always showed the evil, degrading effects of drink, the novels were marked by turgid passages of moralizing as well as overwhelming sentimental melodrama. The author of a temperance novel leaned heavily on generalization; for instance, Walt Whitman's Franklin Evans or The Inebriate (1842) tells us, "The truth is that habits of drunkenness in the head of a family are like an evil influence — a great dark cloud, overhanging all, and spreading its gloom around every department of the business of that family, and poisoning their peace, at the same time that it debars them from 51

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any chance of rising in the world."4 In these novels or, more properly, tracts, the victim takes to drink, destroys his prospects, and ruins his wife and children or his parents, or both, who die of shame or starvation. In Three Years in a Man Trap (1872), T. S. Arthur's sequel to his famous Ten Nights in a Barroom, a son's drinking causes bitter and protracted death scenes. The taverns themselves in these works are settings of devilish vileness and shame. "A wretched scene!" wrote Whitman. "Half-a-dozen men, just entering the busy scenes of life, not one of us over twentyfive years, and there we were, benumbing our faculties, and confirming ourselves in practices which ever too surely bring the scorn of the world and deserved disgrace to their miserable victims!"5 The protagonists, though entrapped by their appetites for alcohol, loudly bewail their fates; thus, the hero of Edgar Fawcett's A Mans Will (1888): "He thought of his mother, and the tears rushed to his eyes. Crouched on the floor, he wept passionately. 'How can I look on her face again?'" Why the outburst? "He had been drunk; he had broken his pledge."6 Most temperance novels, after ringing the last changes on the themes of drunken bestiality, maudlin self-pity, and agonized failure, recount the hero's salvation through the power of the church or, more properly, religion combined with the "glorious temperance pledge."* Although a tract with no pretensions as fiction, the book written by Stephen Crane's father is worthy of mention * Mark Twain, incidentally, wrote but never published a parody, William. Baxter, the Reformed Inebriate, or Saved by Fire, in which the drunken protagonist murders his wife and children, repents, remarries, does the killing again—three times, before his final reforml "But see what perseverance may accomplish. Thoroughly reformed at last, he now traverses the land a brand plucked from the burning and delivers temperance lectures and organizes Sunday Schools." Franklin Rogers, Mark Twain's Burlesque Patterns (Dallas, i960), pp. 99-100.

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here. Jonathan Townley Crane's Arts of Intoxication, The Aim and the Results (1870) exhorts readers to help those engaged in combat with the deadly enemies, smoking and drinking. The book is generally calm in tone, historical and scientific, logical and argumentative, but it finally works up to an analysis of drunkenness that is similar to the party scene in George's Mother. "When a company of men are drinking together they tend, at least for a time, to be talkative and merry, and the feeblest attempt at a jest is greeted with unlimited laughter. . . . So if one of the company takes it into his bewildered head to try to reason about something, he is, in his own eyes, a veritable Solomon . . ." "When he is so far gone as to stammer in his speech and totter in his gait, and be helpless in mind and body, his sense of his wisdom, his strength, his greatness, and his goodness is at its highest point."7 George's Mother follows some of the traditions of temperance fiction but ridicules most aspects." George does drink and fall from grace; but he never moralizes, and he is not "saved." His mother's W.C.T.U. rigidity is as absurd as George's drinking. Crane's novel opens in a bar where George, having met an old friend from the country, drinks beer to his friend's whiskey. The saloon, as in the temperance novels, is an evil place of temptation — but Crane's diction impugns the familiar descriptions: "a little glassfronted saloon that sat blinking jovially at the crowds. It engulfed them with a gleeful motion of its two widely smiling lips."f George's drinking, even the "one more drink," " As a matter of fact, Crane usually enjoyed writing with warm humor s about drinking and drunks. See, in addition to his Western tales, "J°y of Pulque Down in Mexico" ( 1 8 9 5 ) or " A Lovely Jag in a Crowded Car" ( 1 8 9 5 ) . In Maggie, however, the treatment of drinking is thoroughly negative. f X, 20. Crane uses the same image in "An Experiment in Misery." "The

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does not instantly unman him, and he is able to deceive his mother quite easily. Actually, the section describing George's mother at her housework is quite funny when considered in reference to the problem of drink. As she works she sings a hymn in defiance of the drunken curses of a neighbor with a red, mottled face who hurls a bottle crashing down to the courtyard. And as she fights dirt and dust in the tenement, her son is in a bar, and a really ludicrous image comments on this irony. "In the distance an enormous brewery towered over the other buildings. Great gilt letters advertised a brand of beer. Thick smoke came from funnels and spread near it like vast and powerful wings. The structure seemed a great bird, flying. The letters of the sign made a chain of gold hanging from its neck. The old woman looked at the brewery. It vaguely interested her, for a moment, as a stupendous affair, a machine of mighty strength" (pp. 25f). Thus the brewery, symbolizing the enemy of temperance, looms over the tenement much as the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg hover over the valley of ashes in The Great Gatsby. Despite his mother's warnings about his new friend ("He drinks"), George refuses her plea to go to a prayer meeting and instead returns to the little smiling saloon. As Maggie charts the movement of the heroine down to the depths through changing descriptions of the beer halls she frequents, so George's first binge takes place in an elegant saloon, all polished wood and gleaming furniture. Crane very effectively describes the process of intoxication. The men gradually become ridiculously jovial, sentimentally tender, bitterly egoistic. "Each man explained, in his way, that he was totally out of place in the . . . world. They were posswing doors, snapping to and fro like ravenous lips, made gratified smacks as the saloon gorged itself with plump men." XI, 22.

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sessed of various virtues which were unappreciated by those with whom they were commonly obliged to mingle; they were fitted for a tree-shaded land where everything was peace" (p. 35). This passage — indeed, the whole treatment of drinking in George's Mother — brilliantly exemplifies Crane's parodic technique. As is clear from his language, which is incongruously overblown, Crane is mocking the pretensions of the drinkers — and, by extension, the genre of temperance fiction that was nothing if not utterly serious. Yet while Crane laughs at his protagonists, he also understands their rather pathetic motivations and the needs to which alcohol ministers. The novel provides both a comic view of the drinking-temperance clash and a serious insight into those who drink. As always, Crane refuses to moralize. He presents George's opinion that his evening of drinking was delightful, shows him staggering on legs "like willow-twigs," describes his hangover, his "baked eyes," and a mouth that seems to have been sucking a wooden spoon. But the victim of his debauch, his mother, is such a whining paragon that the reader is unable to identify with her. The second major drinking bout takes place after George has been crushed by his failure to attract a girl. In an adolescent urge for "the delicious revenge of a partial selfdestruction" (p. 49 — an example of Crane's discrimination of motives in contrast to the absolutes of temperance melodrama), George takes part in a stag affair. Again Crane overwrites, I think consciously. The drinking is a bacchic rite, "a festival of a religion"; the host sits "like a fat, jolly god" (pp. 53f). The party moves from dialect jokes to dancing to fisticuffs. The rich, almost fruity, prose parodies the traditional drunk scenes, as George considers his inebriation to be immense, mighty. Crane treats the awfulness of 55 •

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the morning after with derision, and he deliberately avoids the expected confrontation scene between the drunken youth and his aged mother by letting George deceive her about his activities. But he does go to prayer meeting, only to find this usually climactic event in the rake's progress to be hateful and hypocritical. While the author does not take George's drinking too seriously, Crane does use the fact of George's increasing alcoholism as a device for the portrayal of his weak, selfjustifying character. Crane analyzes George Kelcey's drinking habits with great acumen and irony. "He understood that drink was an essential to joy, to the coveted position of a man of the world and of the streets. The saloons contained the mystery of a street for him." (This passage follows directly upon the narration of the church service's unmysterious lack of appeal.) "Drink and its surroundings were the eyes of a superb green dragon to him. He followed a fascinating glitter, and the glitter required no explanation" (p. 68). George continues to drink, even after his mother discovers his flaw. He slips down the ladder of failure another rung when he takes up with the streetcorner society of a gang of tough, cynical young hoodlums, all jobless delinquents. "Their feeling for contemporaneous life was one of contempt. Their philosophy taught that in a large part the whole thing was idle and a great bore. With fine scorn they sneered at the futility of it. Work was done by men who had not the courage to stand still and let the skies clap together if they willed" (p. 73). This creed — directly opposed to that of the Alger hero — is attractive to George, who wants to run with these anarchic brawlers. His chance comes when, in still another mockery of the Alger code of sportsmanship, George helps one of the gang to beat up 56 •

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another man and is thus accepted into their fellowship. Once in the group, George lets his native sloth prevail, and he loses his job. His mother immediately has a stroke. Crane handles this scene with some sympathetic tenderness, but the irony of the plot device is manifest. And when his mother suffers a second, fatal attack, George is engaged in his crudest binge yet, a jostling, brawling struggle for gulps at a great pail of beer. Intemperance wins, the W.C.T.U. heroine dies, and her son is left to meld into the "endless roar, the eternal tramping of the marching city" (p. 90). If we consider the novel from its success-story source, it is a parodic reversal; from its temperance source, it is a burlesque parallel. The two traditions provide a double perspective, and Crane plays them off against each other in order to make the character of George psychologically valid. There is another element of parody in the verbal texture of Georges Mother. Here, as in the first section of Maggie, Crane leans heavily on war imagery. To be sure, battle metaphors recur in Crane's work from his earliest Sullivan County Sketches, and are a basic vehicle for expressing his sense of the naturalistic struggle for existence. In George's Mother, however, there seems to be a crucial difference in Crane's employment of these images, and we may conjecture that he is parodying himself, the author of The Red Badge of Courage. The use of war images in the passages dealing with the mother's fight against dirt in the tenement falls into Crane's customary naturalistic verbal pattern. She wields broom and dustpan like weapons, and there is a flurry of battle in the room as the old woman poises the broom like a lance, shows indomitable courage, and raises a "war-chant, a shout of battle and defiance." Even when resting she plans "skirmishes, charges, campaigns," and after her rest, "the battle was again in full swing. Terrific blows 57 •

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were given and received" (pp. 25f). As "a little intent warrior," Mrs. Kelcey later in the novel fights to get George off to work; "She was like a soldier . . . she remained at her post, imperturbable and unyielding" (p. 77). When her slothful, alcoholic son wins the "critical battle" between them, her defeat leads quickly to her death. Crane's treatment of George's debauches, however, contains enough echoes of the war novel's diction to hint at self-parody. As George muses upon his drinking companions, "He looked upon the beaming faces and knew that if at that instant there should come a time for a great sacrifice he would blissfully make it" (p. 35). This reminds us of Henry Fleming's pretentious attitude toward his comrades-in-arms. Later George considers the start of an evening party in language remarkably similar to the phrases applied to Henry's romantic visions of war. "He felt that there was something fine and thrilling in this affair. . . . He was capable of heroisms" (pp. 53f). The drinkers inhabit a "strange land," the wrecked room resembles "a decaying battlefield," and the passed-out inebriates are ghastly as corpses (p. 58). And after his gay dreams of heroism, George now perceives "all the futility of a red existence" (pp. 58f). Just to frost the cake of his parody, Crane gives George a red badge; he falls drunkenly and smashes his head on the floor during the party, and later presents to his mother and to his employer an involved lie about a street accident and gains from them the sympathy due such a wounded victim. The scene and the language help to establish the satire. In addition, the echoes from Maggie reinforce the belief that Crane may be laughing at his own work. By gratuitously making Maggie and Pete the actual embodiments of George's daydreams of romantic love, Crane calls attention to his 58 •

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previous fiction. This self-parody is, I think, a gratuitous indulgence on Crane's part, almost a parody of parody.8 Another parallel to the parodie technique used in Maggie appears in the later slum novel. Crane repeats the device of immersing his characters in daydreams that are absurd but that also reflect the conventions of popular fiction or drama. George's mother makes him into a hero of melodrama; her imagination transforms his hangover into a malignant internal disease of lungs or kidneys, and George, in the best fictional tradition, into a stoic, heroic sufferer. Elsewhere, she dreams the familiar success fantasy that the plot of the novel reverses. In her mind George is "a white and looming king among men" (p. 42), one certain to reach the heights, to be an enormous man who will give charity to the poor. In this way Georges Mother pays notice to the popular domestic novel in which close family relationships, sincere spiritual struggles, and great triumphs provide the framework for the characters' dreams. Within the privacy of his own mind, George also holds a version of the success dream. But he has a nearer dream, a sexual fantasy founded on the clichés of popular fiction and its illustrations. "In scenes which he took mainly from pictures, this vision conducted a courtship, strutting, posing, and lying through a drama which was magnificient from glow of purple. [A reference to Edgar Saltus' The Imperial Purple?] In it he was icy, self-possessed; but she, the dreamgirl, was consumed by wild, torrential passion. . . . She was to him as beseeching for affection as a pet animal, but still he controlled appearances, and none knew of his deep abiding love. . . . In these long dreams there were accessories of castle-like houses, wide lands, servants, horses, clothes" (p. 44). His adolescent dreams form George's self-image as 59 •

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a stern general, a perfect lover for whom his goddess must pine pathetically. George's fantasy of heroism, of fate making him an enormous figure, of "a chariot of pink clouds" (p. 45) that would come for him, while similar to his mother's hopeful dreams, is predicated on romantic fiction, as Crane makes clear. "Later, when he had read some books, it all achieved clearer expression. He was told in them that there was a goddess in the world whose business it was to wait until he should exchange a glance with her" (p. 44). That George's dream should be realized in the Maggie whose reality the reader well knows, increases the irony. The world of Maggie and Pete (and of Mrs. Kelcey, who assumes that George's moonstruck expression indicates distaste for her beef stew) destroys his "grand dramas." Once again, Crane follows contemporary fictional cliche and destroys it by the realism of his own plot and characterization. For all the many elements of parody that mark the structure and tone of Georges Mother, the novel goes far beyond the parody it encompasses, and the work touches upon tragicomedy. If the little parody "A Self-Made Man'7 might be called Stephen Crane's Shamela, George's Mother is his Joseph Andrews. The elements of parody still inform the major work, but the novel goes beyond the parody principle and stands also as a serious character study. The title of the novel is fitting if we consider the overtones. George is the leading figure, not his mother, but Crane carefully delineates both characters, and it is the relationship between the mother and the son that makes George's Mother Stephen Crane's most penetrating psychological novel. The book shows the two characters as similar in their fantasies and their egos yet seriously in conflict in their views of the proper life. The love-hate relation60

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ship between the Kelceys is hinted at in terms that show remarkable psychological control for an author whose reputation is for only one area of psychological competence, an understanding of the psychology of fear. George's Mother touches upon a variety of sexual themes: the Oedipal relationship, adolescent fantasies, and sublimation of sexual drives through alcohol.9 Crane characterizes George Kelcey with more care than any other of his characters. Young, strong, egocentric, George dwells in the light of his mother's love and his position as breadwinner in a fatherless household. We learn early in the novel that he is the only male survivor in a family of five sons. His mother idolizes and protects her son, yet is also, naturally, too protective and quick to criticize. With great restraint, Crane evokes the tension between the pair; the fact that the mother is a religious member of the W.C.T.U. and George is a backsliding drunk only makes concrete the more fundamental conflict. In a superb passage the undercurrent of love and resentment is brought to the surface. George is suffering from his first hangover, and his mother is remonstrating with him for his swearing. His harsh demeanor quickly reduces her to a conciliatory state. " 'George, dear, won't yeh bring some sugar home t'-night?' It could be seen that she was asking for a crown of gold." When he, the "injured monarch," prepares to leave without responding to her woeful request for a kiss, she addresses him in lover's tones: "'George — George — ain't yeh goin' t' kiss me good-bye?' When he moved he found that she was hanging to his coat-tails." And he turns "with a murmur of a sort of tenderness"; after the kiss she looks at him with "reproach and gratitude and affection" (p. 39). After this scene, Crane analyzes in some detail the emo61

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tions of his two protagonists. Both, as we have seen, have active fantasy lives — she dreams of a heroic, loving, successful son, he of a heroic, charming lover — that focus in quite similar ways on George's future. While different in almost every detail of their lives, they have the same sense of pride. "It seemed to her that she must be a model mother to have such a son." In her fantasy, which is completely at variance with reality, she sees him as the perfect son of a perfect mother. There seems something a bit perverse about the love light that comes into her eyes. "The wrinkled, yellow face frequently warmed into a smile of the kind that a maiden bestows upon him who to her is first and perhaps last" (p. 41). The conflicts between mother and son take place because of her fear that he will become too proud and therefore fail to accomplish the wonders she wants for him — and for herself. For his part, George bitterly resents her carping criticism, which takes in such minutiae as his failure to hang up his coat, yet he understands her pride in him and the resulting power he has over her. While agreeing with her estimate of his worth — and Crane's ironic stance as narrator here is more subtle than in his account of Henry Fleming's ego — George's dreams are less worldly than those of his mother. The fantasies of mother and son are different in objectives but similar in tone. She can show others her pride in her marvelous son but must drive him along the road of perfection because he is to accomplish all that her dead husband and other sons could not. "Upon the dead altars of her life she had builded the little fires of hope for another" (p. 43). For all his delight in her appreciation of his wit and charm, George has other romantic dream objects. These localize on Maggie, and his bumbling attempts to make con62

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tact with her are in pitiful contrast to his dashing fancies. Maggie with her pail of beer and her barkeeper demon lover are too real for George's fantasy world. Pete actually does what George can only ineffectually dream of, and his fantasies explode as Pete "rescues" Maggie from a tenement squabble. His dream in pieces, George turns on his mother "a face red, seamed, hard with rage. They stared a moment in silence. Then she turned and staggered toward her room. Her hip struck violently against a corner of the table during this blind passage" (p. 48). The mother becomes the victim of his frustrations, and his ensuing drunken spree serves both to punish her and to sublimate his thwarted desires. The relationship Crane outlines between the Kelceys is intense and painful. Each can hurt the other, yet each is full of love. When George returns home after his debauch, his mother kisses him with a smile reminiscent of her girlhood, but then must force him to accompany her to chapel. The tension between them is extreme. "The waves of her desires were puny against the rocks of his indolence. She had a great wish to beat him" (p. 64). She ends in defeat, "but withered grass," in their duel — "He thrust out his legs in the easy scorn of a rapier bravo" — but he is capable of shame and some kindness. His agony of embarrassment from her actions at the chapel service, however, increases the distance between them. Crane writes of chapel in the same images of war used earlier, but here the imagery is pompous in its religiosity: "the presence of the army of the unknown," the "dull-hued banners" (p. 67) of his mother's world. George opts for the "superb green dragon" of drink (a play on the lack of sainthood of this George), and the struggle between mother and son, personal and intimate, is objectified in the terms of the novel by the clash between 63 •

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chapel and tavern. She makes attendance at chapel a test of his affection; he makes an evening of drinking a proof of his manliness. Although her pride leads her to defend her son's wild ways before the tenement jury of gossips, she shrinks away from his rowdy drinking mates. His alcoholism destroys her hopes, and he is impervious to her criticisms. The two generations are light-years apart. "She never understood the advanced things in life. He felt the hopelessness of ever making her comprehend. His mother was not modern" (p. 76). The conflict worsens until the two are openly at war. Crane describes their savage arguments with attention to intimate detail and also with compassion. Driven to say terrible things, they speak "in tones dark with dislike." Crane sensitively analyzes George's motivations when he is cruel to his parent. "He brooded upon his mother's agony and felt a singular joy in it. As opportunity offered, he did little despicable things. He was going to make her abject." Again we are reminded of a duel between lovers, but Crane portrays the workings of compensatory actions with a complexity and control that bring to mind the relationship of Paul Morel to his mother in D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. "Her suffering was all a sort of compensation for his own dire pains" (p. 78). To punish her, George harms himself, and his loss of employment seems to be her final blow. Her dreams are gone, "torn from her" by the son who has lost his own dreams, and she is bereft. He snarls at her and storms away, leaving Mrs. Kelcey in a pose that reverses the traditional sentimental cameo of the beloved mother. No Whistler portrait, this: "A pale flood of sunlight, imperturbable at its vocation, streamed upon the little old woman, bowed with pain, forlorn in her chair" (p. 79). 64 •

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Crane then moves outside the consciousnesses of his two characters and reports a brief staccato dialogue between a boy and George to establish the fact of Mrs. Kelcey's illness. Crane emphasizes George's dread sense of doom to indicate his actual dependence upon his mother. Moved by what passes for love, he promises to reform, to get a job, to endear himself to her. Crane lets the reader decide George's motives for this kind treatment of his mother. Through a combination of fear, guilt, and affection, he shows warmth to the old lady, and the end of this section reverses the mood of the previous one. The two sit together by the window. "Her hand rested upon his hair" (p. 82). This idyll is the last gasp of sentiment in the book. Sharply foreshortening, Crane next shows George attempting to borrow money, drinking beer with his cronies. The reader must assume that George's words about reform were just words. Again a messenger tells George of his mother's attack, and he reluctantly leaves his corrupt pleasures and attends her deathbed. Here all their illusions fail. Her religion does not sustain her in the delirium, and she is in terror of death. Although this scene might have been maudlin, Crane, through toughness of spirit, makes the events dramatic, even tragic. The old woman fights death, is oblivious of her son's whining cries for Mother. She dies hard; her demise is nearly a replica of Jim Conklin's death in the war novel. There is an emotional moment in which, although unable to be reached by the present George, she hallucinates about the child George. "She was at a kitchen door with a dish-cloth in her hand. Within there had just been a clatter of crockery. Down through the trees of the orchard she could see a man in a field ploughing. 'Bill . . . have yeh seen Georgie? Is he out there with you? Georgie! Georgie! Come right here this minnet. Right — this — min65 •

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n e t ' " (p. 89). The immediacy and reality of her grudging death forestalls whatever pathos might develop. She becomes querulous and tries to drive away people whose presence in the room she imagines. "Her voice became peevish. 'Go away!'" As tightly confined as a Dickinson poem, the death scene ends in bitter restraint. In the presence of a plump, condescending clergyman and a morbidly cheerful neighbor, George stares at the brown roses on the wallpaper that seem like hideous crabs crawling upon his brain. The conflict is over, and neither side has won. The dreams have failed, and love has died. In a novel that contains many elements of burlesque, the powerful yet tender, violent yet touching relationship between a weak boy-man and his equally weak ambitious mother gives genuine distinction to the narrative. The novel ends like a motion picture as the narrative camera eye focuses on George sitting, staring at the wallpaper, then catches an oilcloth table cover, the blue sky outside the window, the chimneys and roofs of the ever-present city that has provided the harsh setting for the story. The sound of a boy and his mother arguing over a trip to the store counterpoints the ending of the long argument between George and his mother. These tenement voices recapitulate the whole impossible conflict; the only affirmative note comes from the reader's (and author's) partisanship for life itself — indicated tautly by the shift to the outside world where the struggle between generations continues. The novel starts and ends with the voice of the city sounding, and the future fortunes of the protagonist are not indicated. Georges Mother is, like Nathanael West's work, a strange mixture of comedy and misery. The novel is not as brilliant an achievement as The Red Badge of Courage; the slum book has a narrower theme, more limited implication, and less marvelous prose. George's 66

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Mother, however, is Stephen Crane's most interesting study of personal conflict influenced by social and literary norms. The book shows how ideals, colored by the sentiments of weak fiction and corrupt society, lead to self-destruction and the destruction of others. Crane's novel renders the nexus of love and hate in moving and powerful terms. The pain of the mother-son conflict darkens Crane's ironic humor, while at the same time his parodic frame preserves the conflict from sentimentality. Thus parody and passion engage in this novel and reinforce each other.

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A Definition of the War Novel A man said to the universe: "Sir, I exist!" "However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation." —Crane, War Is Kind, xxi

HE RED BADGE OF COURAGE (1895) stands by itself in nineteenth-century English and American war fiction. Indeed, it is still the masterwork in English among the abundance of war novels that two world conflicts and dozens of smaller wars have produced. Stephen Crane's novel is the first work of any length in English fiction purely dedicated to an artistic reproduction of war, and it has rarely been approached in craft or intensity. The novel became part of the literary heritage of the twentieth century, and whether or not a modern war writer consciously recalls Crane's performance in the genre, The Red Badge of Courage remains, in Matthew Arnold's term, a touchstone for modern war fiction. Crane gave the war novel its classic form. Of course, in writing about war, Crane drew on a form 68

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of fiction that was more traditional than any of the other genres in which he worked.* In the nineteenth century, war novels of one kind or another appeared from such authors of historical romances as Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Gilmore Simms, whose books resounded with battle scenes, thrilling chases, valiant heroes. All these novelists had in common a predilection for abstract terminology and a custom of interspersing the combat scenes among Gothic or other domestic plot episodes. Other writers like the Englishman George Gleig or the Irishman Charles Lever wrote of battle as a rollicking adventure. William Makepeace Thackeray dealt with war only obliquely while avoiding combat scenes — but did savagely mock the concept of military heroism — and later in the century Rudyard Kipling, in a rather embarrassed manner, glorified the joys and brutalities of military life. 1 By the time American novelists began writing about the Civil War, a European tradition of irony and realism, and a motif of the development, through war, from innocence to maturity, had been established through the war fiction of De Vigny, Stendhal, Zola, and Tolstoy. For the most part, however, American war fiction was hardly realistic. There were some fine individual scenes of combat imbedded among the sentimental and dashing effusions of George Cary Eggleston, George Washington Cable, Harold Fred4 According to Harry Levin, "War is the test-case for realistic fiction. No other subject can be so obscured by the ivy of tradition, the crystallization of legend, the conventions of epic and romance." Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn (New York, 1963), p. 137. Crane establishes a new type of war fiction through criticism of these traditions and conventions. In the same manner as Thackeray, Crane exposes the delusions expressed in the artistic conventions themselves, "the sequence of idealized poses or poeticized fantasies, the literary modes associated with social or psychological artifice." See John Loofbourow, Thackeray and the Form of Fiction (Princeton, 1964), p. 15.

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eric, Charles King, and Thomas Nelson Page, among many others, but generally all these authors wrote what can be roughly categorized as war adventure or romance. The Civil War was usually a background for a stirring love story often complicated by the Northern versus Southern brother theme. One of Charles King's novels describes its hero as "an ardent patriot, an enthusiastic soldier, a born cavalryman."2 These three phrases might delineate the viewpoint of the great mass of Civil War potboilers, romances, and dime novels: the patriotic element provided the controlling theme, battle was spirited and chivalric, and the hero was a born soldier who needed to undergo no tempering process through war. The battle settings appeared in heightened or rhetorical terms. Even a realist like Harold Frederic leans on heavily overwrought description: "The clouds hung thick and close above, as if to keep the stars from beholding this repellent sample of earth's titanic beast, Man, at his worst. An Egyptian blackness was over it all. At intervals a lightning flash from the crest of the uttermost knoll tore this evil pall of darkness asunder, and then, with a roar and a scream, a spluttering line of vivid flame would arch its sinister way across the sky . . ."3 Occasionally these novelists sketched the war background in a more realistic manner, but then the romantic posturing of the hero seemed to clash with the grim mood of war, and the adventures did not seem appropriate to the background of death and misery. The war novels of John Esten Cooke provide perhaps the best examples of this mélange of carefully documented battle plans, maneuvers, mass combats with darkly picturesque figures, evil intrigues, solitary horsemen, suspense, multitudes of secret sins, and themes of love, honor, revenge. In Mohun ( 1869 ), war as history mixes with melodrama and elegy, nostalgia for the dear days of cavalry 70 •

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glamor and the lost cause. Sidney Lanier's Tiger-Lilies (1867) has a few bits of irony and realism, but the novel as a whole is poetic and philosophic rant. Throughout the nineteenth century war was, in popular fiction — with some exceptions — not a serious metaphor for life. If there was a norm for war fiction, it was the flashing-sword and magnolia-blossom novels of Cooke and his followers. Perhaps the plot of an anonymous tale that appeared in the New York Daily Tribune on July 19, 1891, will exemplify the traditions against which Stephen Crane was reacting when he conceived his war novel. "Thompson of Ours" is the jolly account of a noble young officer who saves his comrades by riding like the wind to bring aid, though concealing a serious wound. Among his many heroics, this generous act of hiding his wound earns the lovable daredevil the Victoria Cross. Crane, by writing of a hero who reverses the romantic ideal and pretends to have a wound where he actually received none, parodied the heroic and set a pattern of antiheroics. It should be stressed that Stephen Crane was not the first to write realistically about the Civil War. Three predecessors, Joseph Kirkland, John William De Forest, and Ambrose Bierce, expressed in a realistic, ironic mode the emotional impact of combat. Despite its heavy overlay of genteel love story, Kirkland's The Captain of Company K (1891) is a genuine antiwar polemic, with many realistic touches and descriptions of infantry engagements. And the novel displays a hero who runs in panic during his baptism of fire, and later lies about a wound received while in flight.4 While J. W. De Forest's Miss RaveneTs Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867) is similar to the work of Scott and Thackeray in its main plot, the combat scenes are without doubt more realistic in grim detail than are the 71 •

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comparatively impressionistic renderings in Crane's novel. Unfortunately, De Forest never fully integrates these combat descriptions, drawn from his own experiences as he recorded them in his notebooks, letters, and articles, into the development of character; the novel is both real and improbable. Surely the finest war fiction before The Red Badge of Courage appears in the vignettes of cosmic irony brought together in Ambrose Bierce's very short stories of war, in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians ( 1 8 9 1 ) . Despite flat characters, Bierce expertly invokes, by superb selection of detail and response, war's paradoxes and enigmatic agonies. More than any other writer, Bierce resembles Crane in technique— in the treatment of time, nature, religion, and the theme of growth through combat. And Bierce's best tale, "Chickamauga," parodies reality by reflecting war through the mimicking actions of a small boy, just as Crane would do in one of his finest war stories, "Death and the Child." But Stephen Crane's more ambitious fiction surpasses Bierce's bitter portraits of combat.6 The contribution of Crane to the genre of war fiction was twofold. First, he defined in his novel the form that deals with war and its effect upon the sensitive individual who is inextricably involved; he uses war as a fictional test of mind and spirit in a situation of great tension. Also he constructed a book that still stands as the technical masterpiece in the field. Crane accomplishes in the longer form of the novel what Bierce attained in the short story. The Red Badge of Courage creates a single world, a unique atmosphere where war is the background and the foreground. Without resorting to the props of counterplots dealing with romance and intrigue employed by every novelist who wrote of war from 72 •

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Scott to Kipling (with the possible exception of the Tolstoy of Sebastopol — but not of the Crane of Active Service), Crane works within a tightly restricted area. He writes a kind of grammar in which war is the subject, the verb, and the object of every sentence. Like the painters of the Italian Renaissance who conceived the tondo, a form that forced the artist to choose and manipulate his subject matter to fit a small circular canvas, Crane chose to restrict his novel to war and its impact upon his hero. There is no mention of the causes or motives of the war or of any battle; Crane's war is universal, extricated from any specific historical situation. We may gain an impression of how a literary artist makes a tondo of war by an analysis of the structure of The Red Badge of Courage. For Crane approached the subject of war as an artist, picking his materials for their fictional value. He was not reliving an experience but creating one. As for the conception of the novel, "It was an effort born of pain," states the author.0 The Red Badge of Courage employs previous assumptions about heroic soldiers that informed almost all popular Civil War fiction before the rise of realism in the i8go's in order to reject them. He parodies, then, an approach to war rather than a body of war fiction; thus his book survives long after the immediate occasion for its germination is forgotten, survives as creative art, not as critical comment.6 Crane synthesizes parody with reality, * Crane, letter to an editor of Leslie's Weekly, about Nov. 1895, in Stephen Crane: Letters, ed. R. W . Stallman and Lillian Gilkes ( N e w York: N e w York University Press, i 9 6 0 ) , p. 78. Crane goes on to mention his admiration for Tolstoy. Impressive as Crane's achievement in war fiction is, his novel does not approach War and Peace. If Crane created a tondo, then Tolstoy fashioned a fresco. T o shift the metaphor, the one wrote a lyric, the other a symphony. Crane does not attempt to deal with Tolstoy's vast theme of war and peace. Women, politics, history, even logistics and strategy, are outside of Crane's stark realm. War and Peace might best be called a synthesis, an epic rather than a war novel.

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integrates parodie, realistic, and, of course, imaginative visions into a unity. He subtly distorts the traditions rather than creating a new inverted form; his method is allusive satire rather than direct travesty. Unlike many of his other novels where Crane starts with direct burlesque of a traditional form, The Red Badge of Courage uses parody obliquely. By making his hero anonymous for much of the novel and by investing him with cowardly instincts, Crane does away with the traditional cliché of war fiction, the bravery of the hero. As we have noticed, earlier nineteenth-century war fiction, with the exception of Bierce's short pieces, leaned on either a love story or a historical framework. Crane glances at this custom by having Henry immediately imagine a briefly seen dark-haired girl to be in love with his heroic person. This tiny scene, early in the novel, is Crane's deliberately brief bow to the usual materials of war fiction, for the girl is never spoken of again. Only war can define Crane's protagonist: "He finally concluded that the only way to prove himself was to go into the blaze . . ."7 From start to finish Crane's war novel is shot through with mockery of the common views of war that marked the bulk of the century's war fiction. Like Henry Fleming himself, Crane commits many "crimes against the gods of tradition" (p. 239). Most obviously, his hero is no familiar hero: he is a coward, a deserter, a liar. And, like Cervantes' mocked knight, Henry has rooted his warlike dreams in reading about "vague and bloody conflicts that had thrilled him with their sweep and fire . . . a Greeklike struggle . . . distinctly Homeric. . . . He had read of marches, sieges, conflicts. . . . His busy mind had drawn for him large pictures extravagant in color, lurid with breathless deeds" (p. 229). 74 •

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Crane parodies war fiction in three ways: through direct depiction of the reversal of Henry's romantic stereotypes; through the indirect characterization of Henry as a fallible, egocentric antihero; and, as always in Crane's best fiction, through the sense of reality — which by its denial of romantic illusions convinced many contemporary reviewers that the author must have been himself a war veteran. The three approaches are not distinct. They reflect back on each other and often work together. For example, when Henry overhears a general, he expects a Napoleonic phrase, but the reality refers to a box of cigars (p. 240). Later he expects another general to request information from the private — for that is the way it is in dime novels. And the lesson that fictional generalizations are invalid is one element of the youth's wartime education. Those men are absurd who "supposed that they were cutting the letters of their names deep into the everlasting tablets of brass" (p. 277). As we shall see, Henry's dreams of sublime heroism are slow to die; halfway through the novel he sees himself as a hero out of Scott or Cooke, "a blue desperate figure leading lurid charges with one knee forward and a broken blade high . . . getting calmly killed on a high place before the eyes of all" (p. 294). The fact that his dreams come true in part, that he does stand out heroically in the regiment's final charge, keeps the novel from any rigid, black and white contrast between dream and reality. When Henry earns his red badge, it is in an episode that travesties heroic action. But Crane's artistic and moral vision allows him to move through travesty and mock heroics to reality and genuine courage. Yet the clichés of war fiction — the past flashing before the eyes of a dying man, the return to the regiment, the educational process of the baptism of fire — are alternately mocked and used in The Red Badge of Courage, 75 •

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while the realities of combat blast literary preconceptions, the "vague feminine formula for beloved ones doing brave deeds on the field of battle without risk of life" (p. 322). Although Crane clearly admires Henry's ultimate combat heroism, the parodic insight protects the author from hero worship. For all his eventual success as a warrior, Henry rejects the romantic tradition. He cannot (because of his bodily aches) "persist in flying high with the wings of war; they rendered it almost impossible for him to see himself in a heroic light" (p. 295). Perhaps The Red Badge of Courage should be termed an impressionistic-naturalistic novel. Certainly Crane uses both manners throughout. The combining of a vivid, swift montage of combat impressions with a harsh, overwhelming naturalistic view of the individuals trapped in the war machine is Crane's method of fitting the combat world into fiction. The seminal character of Crane's novel is evident when one considers that Barbusse, Remarque, Aldington, and many other portrayers of the incredible butchery of World War I turn to a similar use of impressionism for the overall battlefield picture and naturalism for the detail and characterizations. The form of The Red Badge of Courage represents Crane's fundamental parodic strategy. While many readers have noted the double movement of the plot, few have accepted the second half of the novel as other than repetition or a sellout to expected standards of heroism. Yet his war novel is not broken-backed. The first half focuses in a parodic manner on Henry Fleming, the antihero, isolated in his romantic literary fancies of what war should be. The second half portrays in a realistic mode the experiences of the larger body of men who muddle through. Henry is as egocentric and emotional in his bravery as in his cowardice, but Crane 76 •

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shows the young soldier's later action in the context of the regiment's dogged behavior. Thus the rhythm of the novel's two parts reflects the author's basic approach to fiction: the movement from parody to realism. And Henry's later heroism is not inconsistent with the first part's parodic mode; reality is not only the reverse of romance but in some ways a verification of the truths that lie behind the idealized conventions. Although Stephen Crane follows war's own pattern in his alternations between action and inaction in The Red Badge of Courage, there is evidence of tight control in his war novel. Like the careful symmetry of The Scarlet Letter — which has scenes on the scaffold in chapters one, twelve, and twenty-four — in the twenty-four chapters of The Red Badge of Courage there is an equally careful unfolding of plot. The first section of the novel treats the dilemma of the youthful hero who feels, then actually becomes, isolated from the group in war. Crane illumines the psychological journey of Henry Fleming from a foolish romantic pride, through the depths of fear, the first qualms of conscience, to a realization of his place in the military scheme — marked by his return to the regiment following the climactic wound he receives in chapter twelve. The same cycle is repeated, once he has rejoined his comrades. Now he interacts with the group as the regiment undergoes its test of fear and recaptures its confidence in combat. Henry becomes the flagbearer; he both observes and takes part in this second progression. Finally, the regiment and Henry act as veterans in a successful skirmish. The novel ends, on the scaffold, as it were, with the hero altered and matured by war, but still an ambiguous figure who has 77 •

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managed to come to terms with the exigencies of combat existence. As the ship served Melville's Ishmael, so for Crane's Henry the battlefield is his Harvard or Yale. The theme of the innocent hero who gains experience and maturity through his encounters with the world is as old as the novel itself. From Lazarillo de Tormes, Gil Bias, Tom Jones, and Roderick Random to Julien Sorel, Huckleberry Finn, and Stephen Dedalus, the young man from the provinces has made his picaresque way to knowledge in novels that mix wide-ranging realism with self-conscious parody. In the Bildungsroman the nature of the world through which the hero moves on his usually mock-heroic journey from apprenticeship to mastery largely decides the measure of his growth. The Red Badge of Courage falls into such a category of fiction. And since Crane's book, most war novels have been more or less an account of mental and physical change, with the combat background standing for such abstractions as the harsh reality of life or the difficulty of survival, and the young soldier representing the tyro who must learn to cope with reality. Crane seizes upon war as the perfect setting for his technique of compression in fiction. The intense pace of battle speeds up the whole process of maturing, and eases the task of the novelist who must provide sufficient experience to account for the hero's change in character without lengthening the novel to Tom Jones proportions. The war novel, says Crane, can condense experience because of "the number of emotions and events that. . . can be . . . crowded into such little spaces" (p. 350). The loud soldier matures so rapidly in battle that he thinks of a day's passage as "a lapse of years" (p. 315). Henry Fleming's progression is from fear to courage. Crane also brings the meaning of war and its impact upon 78 •

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the hero to a more involved moral experience. As we have seen, before he joins the army Henry is a romantic dreamer, filled with visions of a chivalric type of warfare in which he becomes a mighty hero. The immediate shock of training ruins any Homeric view of war, but Crane insists, in the book's sole flashback from the immediate war situation, on the prewar dreams of the youth brought up on books and pictures of war.* Crane fixes the pattern of the aesthetic young man off to the wars — a figure that was to become a stereotype in the fiction of two world wars. Henry enlists in a haze of glorious aspiration that is undercut only by his mother's sober, sad advice. Through Henry's posturing, his ability to conjure a vague smile into an idealized vision of the girl he left behind him, Crane establishes the somewhat absurd character of a sensitive, highly imaginative youth — like Stendhal's Fabrizio. "All wars are boyish and are fought by boys," wrote Herman Melville in his poem "The March into Virginia." It is to be expected that Henry's boyish illusions, parodies of reality as they are, will die hard in war. When the rumor of impending action reaches the waiting army, Henry withdraws to worry about the necessity of proving his courage, since he knows nothing about himself as a fighter. He must discover himself in battle. As Stein says of Lord Jim, "The way [to be saved] is to the destruc" Charles Dudley Warner has given a fine rendition of what a nineteenthcentury boy's views of war were likely to be: " H e liked to read of war . . . of any kind of wholesale killing in glittering uniform, to the noise of the terribly exciting fife and drum . . . In his future he saw himself a soldier with plume and sword and snug-fitting decorated clothes . . . going where glory awaited him. In his observation of pictures . . . the officer stood unharmed in the storm of bullets and waved his sword in a heroic attitude." Charles Dudley Warner, Being A Boy (Boston, 1 8 7 7 ) , pp. 204-5. Crane's use of Henry's reading is similar to Flaubert's parodic descriptions of Emma Bovary's childhood books or Joyce's view of Stephen Dedalus letting his imagination create dramatic situations from fragments of his reading.

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tive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up."8 Just before the first engagement, Henry gives way to pure hysteria, believing that he is in a trap and being led to certain death. A wild, animal rage replaces his feeling of persecution once the actual combat commences; when the first lull comes, Henry is convinced that he has passed his test. The mercurial youth is in an ecstasy of self-satisfaction. "So it was all over at lastl Thé supreme trial had been passed. The red, formidable difficulties of war had been vanquished" (p. 265). The author, however, equates war with life, and makes the reality of battle parallel the reality of human existence, where the mere passing of one test does not remove the possibility of other tests. In war the process speeds up. Under the shock of the enemy's rapid second attack, Henry protests, gives in to panic, and finally flees in fear. He reaches his low point of cowardice here. Now his emotional movement will be upward to a rebirth of courage. After his communion with nature in the forest, Henry starts back toward the destructive element, fully cognizant of the irony implicit in such a return to danger. He still retains his vague romantic dreams of leading gallant charges, but once he has come back to his regiment — halfway through the novel — the fear motif of The Red Badge of Courage is completed. For the remainder of the book, the hero is sure of himself, even overconfident, and contemptuous of others who might appear to have misgivings. By the end of the story, Henry has become a war devil, exulting in action, capturing a flag, and receiving praise from his superiors. Taken as simply a "psychological portrayal of fear,"9 the novel is not only ironic and parodie, it is amoral. The 80

D E F I N I T I O N OF T H E WAR N O V E L successful hero has merely learned that he is not particularly cowardly. Incisive as his probing of the hero's neurotic flight is, Stephen Crane has much more to say about the influence of military combat upon the inexperienced participant. The essential quality of Crane's novel cannot derive simply from the portrayal of one man's response to war. War has been a social phenomenon ever since the days of individual combat were over. The gradation of the army system and its rigid chain of command combine with the massive troop movements of modern warfare to make the army a special society with its own rules of conformity. As Mark Schorer has stated, any novel must find a form that will encompass both the individual and social experiences. "The two together must be there and the form must provide for their presence. . . . Isolate the individual consciousness and we will have pure lyric or pure philosophy; isolate the social being and we will have pure narrative or chronicle or history." 10 It may not be immediately obvious that The Red Badge of Courage is more than the story of the young soldier who is Crane's hero. The author does not try to describe his individuals fully. We do not even know the youth's full name until chapter twelve. This holding back, an afterthought on Crane's part, is typical of his mature style. Taking Crane's novel on its own terms, we need not expect rounded figures, fully described; neither should we overlook Henry Fleming's comrades in the war setting. (Before battle the men are Henry's "companions," after, his "comrades.") Henry comes into close contact with five other soldiers in his passage from weakness to strength. The tall soldier, Jim Conklin, is most fully drawn. Henry admires Conklin's 81 •

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calm attitude in the face of combat and attempts to accept his steadying advice. The death of Conklin has particular meaning to the hero; as in "The Open Boat," the stronger individual fails to survive the test. The loud soldier, Wilson, a foil to Henry's fears at the start, undergoes a similar, and even more rapid, growth to manhood through the ordeal. The attitude of the pseudo-anonymous lieutenant, Hasbrouck, reflects the hero's status in the military society. When Henry is a coward, the officer strikes at him with a sword, but when the youth is fighting well, he and the fireeating lieutenant are filled with mutual admiration. The officer's blame or praise represents failure or success to the youth in the classroom of war. Two more figures, shadowy ones to be sure, but still vividly realized, provide commentaries on the soldier's progress. Direct opposites, the tattered soldier whom Henry leaves wandering blindly in a field, and the cheery stranger who guides Henry back to his regiment, signify respectively betrayal and comradeship. The interaction of the hero with these five characters and with the regiment as a whole furnishes the fundamental theme of The Red Badge of Courage. The standards by which Henry's development is measured are those of group loyalty rather than fear and courage. Crane's typological secondary characters contribute to the novel's breadth. The novel opens on the large picture of the entire fighting force. "The cold passed reluctantly from the earth and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting" (p. 226). Reversing the cinematic device that ends George's Mother, here the scene gradually focuses on a particular group of soldiers — Conklin doing his washing, Wilson arguing violently — and then on Henry in a solitude of self-mistrust. 82

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The key to Henry's development, and to the essential meaning of war for him, comes in the flashback to his parting from home. The importance of this scene lies not in the mother's adjuration to do his duty bravely, nor in the general antiromantic atmosphere of cows and socks, but in her words that seek to remind the youth of his own insignificance in the larger scheme. "Yer jest one little feller amongst a hull lot of others, and yeh've got to keep quiet an' do what they tell yeh. I know how you are, Henry" (p. 231). She knows, but he must learn in battle what kind of man he is. Henry's vanity does not allow him to be a little fellow among a whole lot of others except in the rare moments of rationalization when he comforts himself with the thought that he is, after all, part of a vast blue demonstration. But because abstract judgment fails him in his terror, he becomes an isolé. Crane stresses Henry's feeling of solitude. He has no one with whom to compare suspicions; he is different, "alone in space," "a mental outcast" (p. 245). Both the calm competence of the tall soldier and the brash assurance of the loud soldier convince Henry of his unique weakness. When the regiment advances for its baptism of fire, Henry is a part of the group, albeit unwillingly. He feels himself carried along by a mob. The image Crane employs to signify Henry's attitude of helplessness is important. "There were iron laws of tradition and law on four sides. He was in a moving box" (p. 248). Without pursuing Freudian implications in the language, we can see that Henry is childishly reverting to the behavior his mother warned him against, considering himself the important individual. He hates the lieutenant and believes that only he, Henry, knows that the entire regiment is being betrayed. In other words, the 83 •

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youth is in revolt against the iron laws of the war world, the traditions of obedience and humility in the ranks. Crane plays off Henry's rage against Jim Conklin's placid faith in, and acceptance of, the new environment. The other soldiers are shadowy figures to Henry's mind, since his ego has denied him the comforts of military friendships. He is too wrapped up in himself to realize that others are in the same condition of doubt and fear. A sudden shift in emphasis occurs when the battle commences, as Henry rapidly adjusts to reality. Losing concern with himself for the moment, he becomes "not a man but a member," a part of a "common personality," a "mysterious fraternity" (p. 261). Whereas in his isolation and misgivings he was trapped in a moving box, now, by sinking his personality into the larger personality of the group, he regains control of himself. Crane uses the same box image as before to describe Henry's combat activity, but there is one important difference. Henry is now in charge. "He was like a carpenter who has made many boxes, making still another box . . ." (p. 261). Crane at this juncture transfers the point of view from Henry to the regiment. In the impressionistic battle scene, the focus is on "the men," "they," "a soldier" (p. 263), while the regiment goes about its grim business. An integral part of Henry's development is the realization that even the regiment, his regiment, is not the only important participant in the battle. He realizes that the fighting involves many regiments and momentarily grasps the idea of his own relative unimportance. But Crane is too acute a psychologist to conceive such a rapid character change — despite the speeded-up process of battle — and to let Henry learn the soldier's hardest lesson easily. When the break in the combat comes, Henry reverts to his pride and considers the 84 •

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magnificence of his rather petty action. He must undergo a much more serious and less fleeting test before he can reap the full benefits of his war experience. The second attack is too much for him. Henry cannot comprehend rules of war that are so irrational as to impose another test so soon. In the romantic world of most war fiction, there do exist "opportunities for contemplative repose" (p. 328). He deserts the group, and by this act he defies all the rigid rules of war. The sight of the lieutenant, angrily dabbing at Henry with a sword, becomes for him an emblem of his new role as an outcast. The youth is no longer, in the Conradian sense, one of them. He asks himself, "What manner of men were they anyhow?" (p. 270), those fools who stayed behind to meet certain death. The Red Badge of Courage is not merely a portrait of fear; it is the portrait of a mind that learns to come to terms with itself and to live down an act of cowardice. Henry Fleming, if he is to survive, must become a man according to the rules war lays down, whether they seem logical to him or not. Therefore he must cast off the egoism that made him run, and gain a truer perspective on his importance. The novel is often ironic, since Henry's growth is not particularly moral nor is it without fluctuations. His failures and successes in war are those of a hero manqué, if we are to judge them by the usual Christian ethic. But The Red Badge of Courage is a war novel, and Henry Fleming should be judged by the ideals of a war world. If Henry's flaws include momentary cowardice and more lasting hypocrisy, these sins highlight the unexpressed but implicit social and moral sin that makes up the obscene parody of society that is war. In Edward Sackville-West's words, "The inexorable sadness of any great soldier's face proceeds from the knowledge that, in war, fraternity, good will and justice 85

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do not suffice. When the sticking-point comes, the military machine must surpass the human will, if the day is to be won." 11 The lesson Henry must learn is basic to combat. The individual cannot depend on his personal reasoning powers. Henry's mind has seen the danger, and he has fled, while his stupid comrades have stayed and displayed courage. The beginning of wisdom comes with the comprehension that his own judgment is insufficient. He is in the position of a criminal because he has heeded his enlightened intellect. Crane ironically shows that Henry "had fled because of his superior perceptions and knowledge. He felt a great anger against his comrades. He knew it could be proved that they had been fools" (p. 273). Henry feels the bitterness and rage of an outcast, a sensitive dreamer who, wandering between the two worlds of romance and reality, can make the best of neither world. Caught in a box of his own making, Henry faces the age-old problem of the individual at odds with society. He has not only indulged in an act of self-betrayal, he has thrown over his responsibilities to and for the others. He does not yet understand that his own salvation (physical and spiritual) must be the product of his dedication to universal salvation, even though war's terrible irony insists that the group must be saved by killing its enemies. Henry's story is not tragic because, unlike Lord Jim, the young soldier manages to compensate for his antisocial action and work his way back to the fellowship of men that, in the world of war, is represented by the regiment. But the road back is not easy. After his dark night of anguish, passed in the forest where nature appears to second war's cruelty, Henry commences his return to the battle — to life or death instead of the death-in-life to which he has condemned himself. He sees the huge scope of the combat and once again considers the 86

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unimportance of himself and his regiment. Crane avoids oversimplification, however. His hero realizes that the illusion of importance is necessary as a crutch for men in battle." Illusion and reality are becoming clarified in his mind. The physical isolation of the youth ends when he meets a line of wounded soldiers staggering toward the rear, soldiers coming out of the active world from which Henry has fled. War controls everything in the novel; even the nursery rhyme distortion to which the procession limps is put into a military context: Sing a song 'a vic'try, A pocketful a bullets, Five an' twenty dead men Baked in a—pie. Although Henry joins the crowd, he remains an outsider, for he has no wound. Crane turns around the symbolism of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter or "The Minister's Black Veil." The lack of any mark distinguishes Henry. "He was continually casting sidelong glances to see if the men were contemplating the letters of guilt he felt burned into his brow. . . . He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage" (p. 282). Ironically enough, he now desires to be marked by the red death he had feared. Honor, or the appearance of honor, is his new goal. 0 One of the great philosophical difficulties broached by war is the conflict between the belief in one's own importance and the realization that the life of a single infantryman may be worthless in comparison to the overall battle plan. It may be that such a consideration prevents Crane from showing nis hero as cleansed of egoism at the end of the novel. His self-interest and pride are not obliterated but transformed as he identifies himself as a member of his group. The concept of the soldier's joint duty to himself and to the group was pictorialized in Bill Mauldin's famous cartoon of a GI in a foxhole reading of the world situation in Stars and Stripes and remarking, "Th' hell this ain't th' most important hole in the world. I'm in it." See BiU Mauldin's Army ( N e w York, 1 9 5 1 ) , p. 169.

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As if to emphasize his sin, Henry remains with the denizens of the strange world of the wounded. He meets the tattered man, one of Crane's most successful portraits of a nameless figure. In the half-light of this section of the novel, we learn nothing about the tattered man except that he is wounded and is a rather naive and gentle soul. He is the antithesis of the young soldier in every way. The tattered man has been hit; he talks proudly of his regiment and its performance; he is humble and loves the army. In other words, he stands for the simple man who has done his duty and received his mark of honor. The tattered man represents society, and to the conscience-stricken Henry the wounded soldier is a reminder of guilt. Henry cannot remain with the tattered man when he asks the probing, overwhelming question, "Where yeh hit, ol' boy?" (p. 281), that emphasizes the youth's isolation. A greater shock is in store for Henry Fleming. After he leaves his tattered companion behind, he meets the spectral soldier — the tall soldier, Jim Conklin, transformed by a fatal wound. Henry's feeble wish for a little wound, a red badge, pales into bathos in comparison to Conklin's passion. The dying man's expression of sympathy and concern for Henry adds to the acute discomfort of the youth's position. In his walk through the valley of the shadow of death at Conklin's side, Henry's education advances. Conklin's death" brings home to Henry the true nature of war, brutal, forbidding, more than had the sight of an unknown corpse in the forest. With the body of his friend stretched out before him, Henry curses the universe that allows such things to be. He shakes his fist at the battlefield and swears, but his 0 This extended death scene is one of the great set pieces of its type, worthy of comparison with Tolstoy's death of Ivan Ilyitch or Mann's death of Aschenbach.

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insignificance in the larger scheme is indicated by Crane's most famous line, "The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer" (p. 287). Despite his genuine grief at Conklin's death, Henry is unable to accept responsibility for the tattered man who has returned to pry at Henry's guilty secret, the crime "concealed in his bosom" (p. 290). He deserts the tattered man a second time, and in denying him the young soldier commits his real sin. He breaks both a Christian and a military ethical rule ("Greater love hath no man . . ."). Like his original act of cowardice, this desertion is not atoned for within the pages of The Red Badge of Courage. (As we shall see, however, Crane in "The Veteran" depicts Henry Fleming, when an old and honored man, as laying down his life to rescue another.) If we are to read the novel only as a study in irony, a parody of military heroism, there is no confusion; Henry is a sinner who succeeds in war without ever changing his ways, a kind of Good Soldier Schweik. Crane's attitude toward his hero remains ambiguous throughout the novel, however, and the betrayal of the tattered man is essential to Henry's growth to maturity. Although the tattered man himself says that "a man's first allegiance is to number one" (p. 287), Henry realizes what he has done. His later heroism marks a successful attempt to wipe out his cowardice. Although he eventually manages to rationalize his betrayal, the memory of the tattered man — a memory that brings to mind Hawthorne's "Roger Malvin's Burial" — blocks any return to the egocentric immaturity that marked his character at the outset of the novel. He heads back into the "furnace" (p. 292) of combat, since the heat of that purgatory is clearly more desirable than the icy chill of solitude. His progress is halting. Henry is unable to slough off his romantic visions; he imagines his 89 •

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new self in a picturesque and sublime role as a leader of lurid charges. Once again the reality of war breaks his dreams apart, reality in the form of physical exhaustion, thirst, and the memory of his cowardice. No longer a visionary, Henry can now see his way through the war world. He understands that he must resolve his predicament in war's own terms. Thus either death or the army's defeat could save him, because in a total rout he would be like everyone else. No religious act of contrition — even the confession of his sins — will profit Henry in his position. Crane's irony comes to the surface in this part of the novel. Henry is really worried about appearance. How can he pretend to be something he is not — a hero? It is when the self-centered youth is concerned with the difficulty of fabricating a lie sufficiently effective to account for his disappearance that the author gives the boy's full name. The young soldier mentions it in apprehension that his name, Henry Fleming, will become a synonym for coward. Names and appearances are his sole concern. We must judge Henry Fleming's subsequent actions by the standards of war. While he is planning his lie (another sin, from an ordinary ethical viewpoint), fate, in the form of a hysterical fleeing soldier who clubs Henry out of the path, provides the wound that not only preserves the appearance of his integrity but also opens the way for his attainment of genuine honor. It is ironic for war to help Henry after he has broken the rules, and it is an absurd event in an absurd universe for the coward to pass as a hero. Two other points must be kept in mind, however. Crane constantly refers to his hero as "the youth," and despite all his transgressions Henry is still an innocent fumbling for the correct path, not a hardened sinner. The original manuscript of the novel stresses this idea and indicates 90

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that war itself is a travesty. "Much cruelty lay in the fact that he was a babe. . . . He remembered hiding once in an empty flour-barrel that sat in his mother's pantry. His playmates, hunting the bandit chief, had thundered on the barrel with their fierce sticks . . ,"12 Furthermore, he does not receive his wound in flight, but in the performance of an act of courage. Henry is struck down (by a coward) while inarticulately striving "to make a rallying speech, to sing a battle hymn" (p. 300). Though he is wounded because in his stammering excitement he cannot communicate with his comrades, and though he is in a position to suffer such a wound because he has originally fled from his regiment, now he is going against the current of retreating infantry, toward the battle, when he gains the red badge. The wound, then, may be seen as the result of an honorable, not a cowardly, action, and the irony is moderated. Henry has made his own escape from his nightmare of weakness before he is wounded. His own efforts to sustain himself in the destructive element have proved him not completely unworthy of the saving grace granted him by the fate of war. The wounded Henry is again part of the fellowship of armed men. "The owner of the cheery voice" (p. 304), who plays Mr. Strongheart in Henry's progress, guides the dazed youth through the forest wasteland back to the regiment. The gratuitous support of the cheery man is, ironically, in direct contrast to Henry's earlier refusal to accompany the tattered man. The first twelve chapters of the novel come to an end as Henry is outlined in the reflection of his regiment's campfires. The return to the company, which in war fiction has stood for homecoming from Kipling's "The Man Who Was" to Jones's From Here to Eternity, marks the completion of Henry Fleming's isolation and the start of the pursuit of glory for himself and the regiment. 91

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The hero of Crane's war novel has not yet learned what the author in a later story calls "virtue in war." Henry's response to the solicitude of his friend Wilson shows that the youth has been taught by his war experiences how to protect himself and his reputation by wary lies and halftruths. His relief at the arrival back into the "low-arched hall" (p. 310) of the forest (like the meadhall of the old English epic, symbol of the fellowship of strong warriors) is intense. He is able to view the sleeping company with complacency because to all appearances he is one of them, since he made his mistakes in the dark. In the second part of the novel, Henry will come to understand war and his own nature. For the present, it is enough to go to sleep with his fellows. "He gave a long sigh, snuggled down into his blanket, and in a moment was like his comrades" (p. 3 1 2 ) . Joseph Conrad remarked on the basic duality of The Red Badge of Courage. He seemed to realize that Henry Fleming and the regiment shared the same position. "In order that the revelation should be complete, the young soldier has to be deprived of the moral support which he would have found in a tried body of men matured in achievement to the consciousness of its worth." 13 Conrad pinpointed the idea that the maturation process does not affect the hero alone. "Apart from the imaginative analysis of his own temperament tried by the emotions of a battlefield, Stephen Crane dealt in his book with the psychology of the mass . . . " u The remainder of the novel treats the group that Henry has rejoined. Although Crane's narrative technique still enforces the use of Henry as the informing consciousness, the youth is now attentive to the points of view of others as well as himself. The regiment is more than a mass of foils for Henry's 92 •

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personality. Crane cleverly works in anecdotes about characters whom we never see in order to supply individuality to the regiment. The name of Bill Smithers, the soldier whose hand is stepped on before the first engagement, is a case in point. He is intermittently brought up in conversation as the men discuss his observations about the aid station or their desire to exchange places with him. The same method applies to a Jimmie Rogers who swears to fight Wilson after the battle and is last mentioned as lying wounded on the field. Crane, by the way, does not comment further on the absurdity of soldiers' desiring to fight among themselves when they all face the mortal challenge of combat. Wilson, the former loud soldier, has been altered by his day of combat from a blatant, overconfident youth to a calm, quietly self-reliant soldier who is proud of the regiment rather than of himself. In order to perfect his relationship with Wilson and the other soldiers, Henry must try to understand their sources of fear and courage. When the regiment goes into action on the second day, Crane focuses on the whole body, giving equal space to anonymous soldiers' complaints, the lieutenant's anger, and the serious determination of Wilson and Henry. The young soldier immerses himself completely in the business of battle and transforms his doubts and dreams into a savage hate of the enemy. Just as Crane earlier indicated the importance of Henry's wound by giving his full name for the first time, here the author emphasizes the youth's continuing growth as a human being by describing him physically. As Henry thinks less about himself, he becomes more of an individual in the pages of the novel. He fights well in this battle, too well — he continues to fire at the enemy long after they have withdrawn, such is his concentration on his rifle. He earns the lieutenant's praise in contrast to the curses that 93 •

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resulted from his cowardice the previous day. Henry becomes a hero in the eyes of the regiment. The sense of personal insignificance that Henry experienced in the first section of the novel now appears to apply to the regiment. In a scene that recalls Henry's earlier realization of his own unimportance in comparison to the great scale of war, now he and Wilson, on their way to get water, learn that even their entire regiment is but a minor element in the battle. They overhear the commanding officer refer to the regiment's personnel as mule drivers, and they experience an angry sense of shame for the group, not only for themselves. Before the charge, Crane describes the regiment in terms similar to those he earlier utilized for the young soldier. "The world was fully interested in other matters. Apparently, the regiment had its small affair to itself" (p. 337). Thus their combats appear as a series of jokes: the confusions of war's actuality mock traditional heroics. Henry and the regiment undergo another severe exposure to fire in their first charge. Crane brilliantly depicts the mass movement, transferring the attention from the youth to the men, and back. The crucial episode is the same for all of them, "a temporary but sublime absence of selfishness" (p. 339). The regiment falters in the confusion of the attack; the men go through Henry's former mental turmoil. "Here, crouching and cowering behind some trees, the men clung with desperation . . . the whole affair seemed incomprehensible to many of them" (pp. 340-41). The courage and leadership of three men, the lieutenant, Wilson, and Henry, save the advance. They lead the regiment forward, and, symbolically, Henry takes over as flagbearer, participating in the combat in the absolute center of the group, the one position that more than any other represents the mass spirit. 94 •

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When the regiment is forced to retreat under fire, Henry feels their shame as acutely as he felt his earlier. (We recall that formerly he was selfish enough to pray for the army's defeat so that his cowardice might go unnoticed.) At this point he harangues his comrades, in an attempt to preserve the regiment's reputation. The regiment turns. It drives the enemy back and passes its test. Henry is free from doubt and fear because he has committed himself to the larger unit. By losing himself in the mass, he has found himself. To the same extent, the regiment has conquered its panic and irresolution. "The impetus of enthusiasm was theirs again. They gazed about them with looks of uplifted pride, feeling new trust in the grim, always confident, weapons in their hands. And they were men" (p. 348). The final stage of the development in war for Henry and the regiment involves the learning of the veteran's virtues — calmness and workmanlike efficiency. The young soldier is an observer in the last attack, a tiny player in a huge, impressionistic drama. Before, as a coward, he was the main actor on a tiny stage; now, as a good soldier, he is absorbed into the regimental chorus. Henry loses all sense of individuality. "He did not know that he breathed; that the flag hung silently over him, so absorbed was he" (P- 357)Crane makes much of the fact that when the regiment is pinned down by enemy fire, Henry — the veteran — knows by correct instinct that they must return to the attack. To hang back would mean annihilation; to retreat would build up the enemy's spirit. Henry has assimilated the rules of war. Now his thoughts and emotional responses are the proper ones, forgetful of self in the face of duty. His companions, too, respond automatically to the results 95 •

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of training, the necessities of battle, the facts of military life. The climax of The Red Badge of Courage comes as the regiment and its flagbearer, without regard to vanities, charge once more and successfully overrun the enemy's position. They have all passed the test. The last chapter of the novel, as is often the case in Crane's longer stories, is an artfully contrived anticlimax. The author's attention returns to his hero alone. Henry has proved his courage; he has even been singled out for praise by the colonel. "He had dwelt in a land of strange, squalling upheavals and had come forth. He had been where there was red of blood and black of passion, and he was escaped" (p. 365). Were the novel to end on this note of victorious rejoicing and pride, an ironic reading of the book would be justified. Henry would be a mock hero, a Jonathan Wild who does everything wrong and still gains material success, and the novel would be primarily parody throughout rather than Crane's characteristic combination of crisp parody and compassionate realism. But The Red Badge of Courage remains ambiguous and speculative. Henry cannot forget the tattered soldier, whom Crane now treats in lyrically sentimental language: ". . . he who, gored by bullets and faint for blood, had fretted concerning an imagined wound in another . . . he who, blind with weariness and pain, had been deserted in the field" (p. 367). Again Henry considers himself a moral leper. He is filled with concern lest his comrades realize his secret sin. Crane canceled the passage that explains Henry's final rationalization of the betrayal, but these omitted words help to clarify the moral construction of the book. "At last, he concluded that he saw in it quaint uses. He exclaimed that its importance in the aftertime would be great to him if it even succeeded in hindering the workings of his ego96 •

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tism. . . . He would have upon him often the consciousness of a great mistake. And he would be taught to deal gently and with care. He would be a man" (p. 369). Therefore, he is both a parodic scapegoat and a realistic hero — "He would be a man." These last words, a repetition of those applied earlier to the regiment, show that Henry has matured as an individual and as a member of society. Henry has learned the nature of fear and battle. "He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death" (p. 369). More important, he has learned the essence of man's duty to man, as well as the fact that life (like war) is not a romantic dream governed by absolutes, but a matter of compromises. Perhaps there is an element of irony, since he has not become a "good" man. (But he has done a "good" act — in the terms of the war world — by displaying courage and self-abnegation in the final skirmish.) At least war has shown the young soldier his true self, and the acquisition of self-knowledge is no small accomplishment. Crane reveals and accepts his hero; that Henry is censured does not mean he is condemned. He has become a new man who views life in a fresh framework, not as an opportunity for glory but as a job to be done. Glory is pleasant but irrelevant; the dreams that are parodied in the first part of the novel become the responsibilities that are realistically drawn in the second. In the final scenes of The Red Badge of Courage, Henry takes full responsibility for his life; he is no longer an automaton. His properly disciplined ego comprehends the nature of obedience and action. And the development of his inner life finds a parallel in the growth of the regiment to veteran status. Crane's short story "The Veteran" (i8g6) is important in this connection, providing as it does the author's own re97 •

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assessment of the value of Henry Fleming's war ordeal. In the story, the aged veteran (who, we learn, rose to the rank of orderly sergeant during the war) admits that he was terrified in his first battle: "The trouble was . . . I thought they were all shooting at me. Yes sir, I thought every man in the other army was aiming at me in particular, and only me. And it seemed so darned unreasonable, you know." 18 The old man admits that he ran — to the shock and disappointment of his hero-worshiping grandson. The little boy, like young Henry, has a romantic illusion of war. The old man, however, is the same Henry Fleming who has come through the horror described in the novel to learn that a man may run and run and yet in the end be a good soldier, and that war is neither heroic nor pretty, but a duty and grim. He acts out this conception in the last hours of his life when he plunges many times into a burning barn to rescue a drunken Swede and the animals. The veteran dies as a calm, unheroic individual doing his best for society. The last words of the story indicate that quiet devotion to duty leads to the real glory and that selflessness raises one above the mass of men. "The smoke was tinted rose-hue from the flames, and perhaps the unutterable midnights of the universe will have no power to daunt the colour of this soul" (I, 209). The Red Badge of Courage itself ends with a long, lyric peroration, hailing Henry as a part of the procession of weary soldiers, a part of the regiment that has proved itself worthy of the army just as he has proved himself an individual worthy of inclusion in the group. They have all succeeded in the war that telescopes a tremendous amount of experience into a brief moment. "Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds." 98 •

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The Bitterness of Battle I don't know why. I shall never know why . . . . A year hasn't diminished by one my respect for the men. I shall never see another war. . .. The men were all right. —Crane, letter to an unknown recipient, summer 1899 1

T H E RED BADGE OF COURAGE represents only one segment of Stephen Crane's war fiction. Crane steadily refined his attitude toward war as a subject for fiction throughout his writing career. This development has been obscured because, after their original publication, Crane's short stories dealing with war were arranged in unchronological patterns when republished.2 The war stories fall into three distinct periods. Those written while the author was still relatively unfamiliar with war, published in The Little Regiment (1896) and The Open Boat (1898), either treat war with the traditional genteel techniques — and include an occasional parodic backlash — or continue the studies of fear and isolation that Crane commenced in the novel. Wounds in the Rain (1900) con99 •

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tains the bulk of Crane's war fiction, written in 1897-98. By this time he had reported the Greco-Turkish and the Spanish-American wars and had come to consider himself something of an expert on the subject. He knew now that the technical details of combat that he had imagined for the novel were accurate and true to the facts of war. The stories reflect Crane's admiration for the hardened, professional veteran, rather than his previous interest in the amateur, inexperienced soldier, and, as a result, many of the tales are tough and shallow. Finally, Crane, who had constructed the Civil War from imagination and written of the Spanish war from memory, created an ideal war within his mythical kingdom of Spitzbergen. The four stories dealing with the Kicking Twelfth, written during the last year of his life for magazine publication and posthumously collected in Last Words (1902), sum up Crane's final evaluation of war. As the author drew near death, he combined the attitudes of disgust and admiration that had marked his earlier war fiction. His last view of war provides a perspective that is like life itself, a mixture of positive and negative elements. Crane followed up the success of The Red Badge of Courage with the four war stories of The Little Regiment. Two of them, "Three Miraculous Soldiers" and "A Grey Sleeve," are sentimental and popularized, like the work of Thomas Nelson Page or George Cary Eggleston. There are a few parodie notes sounded in these traditional stories, as if Crane were conscious of (and a bit embarrassed by) his hackneyed plots. In "Three Miraculous Soldiers," the heroine considers Union troops to be "men of legend and colossal tale" (II, 60). She feels it her duty to be a heroine, for "In all the stories she had read when at boarding-school in Pennsylvania, the girl characters . . . invariably did hairbreadth things. . . . they were usually bent upon rescuing 100 •

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and recovering their lovers . . ." (pp. 72f). But in this case the girl is simply an onlooker because "she saw the gorgeous contrivances and expedients of fiction fall before the plain, homely difficulties of this situation" (p. 73). So the author avers, but in this story, as in "A Grey Sleeve," the expedients of fiction control the Blue-Gray love plots. Crane does handle these plots with some humor, as he shows his heroines attempting to sever the hero's bonds, or crying dramatic sentences, or standing between the hero and his enemies; nevertheless the stories are basically sentimental. Elsewhere in his war fiction, Crane designs plots that are travesties of the conventions. In "An Indiana Campaign" (1896) an old veteran of the Mexican campaigns defends a village from Southern guerrillas — who turn out to be merely the noises made by a harmless drunk stumbling through cornfields. "The Lone Charge of William B. Perkins" (1899) parodies military efficiency through a caricature of an absurd correspondent who wanders on a battlefield as if he were a slapstick comedian. And, as we shall see, both "A Mystery of Heroism" and "Death and the Child," two of Crane's finest works, have distinct burlesque overtones. As Crane remarks in "Virtue in War," nothing turns out to be as books describe it; the details of combat turn war into a "highly tedious burlesque" (II, 186) of romantic expectations. Therefore the occasional preliminary burlesque tone makes the essentially mad world of his realistic war stories even more convincing. "The Little Regiment" itself gives slight evidence of The Red Badge of Courage's imaginative power. War is in the background, providing a natural heightening of tension for this story of two brothers who serve in the same regiment and are in constant conflict with each other, but the battle scenes are of secondary importance. We do notice, how101

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ever, Crane's increasing mastery of the problems of depicting large military actions. His picture of a fog-bound battle, where troops suddenly appear to confront the enemy and then disappear into the swirling mysteries of darkness while the guns boom their deadly chorus, is an extremely evocative passage. Here, in truth, ignorant armies clash by night. The story includes Crane's usual stylistic flourishes — animating the guns and dehumanizing the soldiers. There is a sense of war's splendor and glory that Crane repressed to a great extent in his novel, or at least treated ironically. Now the author sees war's terrible beauty: "Some building was on fire, and its reflection upon the clouds was an oval of delicate pink" (II, 36). The regimental feeling is idealized; . . the new men perhaps felt the devotion which the drops may feel for the wave; they were of its power and glory" (p. 47). As in the longer work, nature is disinterested; the battle is watched by "the red round eye of the sun" (p. 5 1 ) . The story exemplifies Crane's view that war is beneficial for the combatant. Although one brother is reported dead, he suffers only a scalp wound, and all ends cheerfully. Indeed, very f e w of Crane's war stories deal direcdy with the death of the protagonist (four — all late tales — out of sixteen). Usually he manipulates his materials to bring about a positive ending; Crane believes that war has a certain logical inevitability that is not always negatively deterministic. Although his first attempts to romanticize war lead him into superficiality, fortunately many of his subsequent studies of men at war take up the themes started in his novel. "A Mystery of Heroism" is perhaps Crane's most highly intellectualized war story. As the title suggests, the tale is an enigma of violence, a study of the nature and quality of courage in battle. The irony of the story is the irony inher102 •

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ent in any gratuitous act — the deed itself has meaning only for the doer. "What is bravery in war?" asks Crane, and, like jesting Pilate, he does not wait for an answer. This story displays Crane's impressionistic technique at its height. Impressionism provides the ideal means for depicting the confusion of war and for showing the casual interaction of men and events that is the point of the story. Like The Red Badge of Courage, the story opens upon a view of the massed army; here it is already involved in the heat of combat. The regiment is in the foreground, and a typical nondescript character, Fred Collins of Company A, is complaining of his thirst. One sentence is given to Collins, and then the narrative swings back to the larger picture to give a rapid tableau of a horse receiving its death wound, a farmhouse being blown to pieces by shells, the gunners hard at work, and two privates, Smith and Ferguson by name (Crane abandons his penchant for anonymity here), arguing violently about politics. Crane makes no effort to single out Collins at this stage of the story. The narration of the typical events of a day of combat continues: a colonel moves a company out of the line of fire; a wounded officer, no more carefully portrayed than any other figure, rides slowly by the company. Again Collins complains of his thirst. Two more pages of generalizations pass. The enemy's fire becomes more vicious, the house is hit by another shell, the wounded lieutenant rides on, someone laughs at Collins' thirst — apparently this undifferentiated representation can go on forever. In a very few pages Crane has created not a single mood but an entire scheme of existence. Everything is in its place — the field, the men, the thirsty soldier, the wounded officer. Unobtrusively, Crane counterpoints the lieutenant with Collins. Shortly before the point of view becomes that of Collins 103 •

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rather than that of the omniscient, invisible author, the officer is hit by a shell and stretched out on the field. Crane uses sharp, rapid exchanges of dialogue at this stage. Goaded by the jeers of his comrades, Collins gains permission to go after water — through the withering enemy fire. The statements of the colonel and the men — the chorus — underline Crane's point that Collins' act is gratuitous; no one is dying of thirst. The soldier, the workings of whose mind we have yet to comprehend, is setting up his own test. As Collins starts across the field, the narration changes from an impressionistic panorama of battle to a psychological portrait of the wellsprings of courage and fear. Pride and shame are his motives. "He had blindly been led by quaint emotions, and laid himself under an obligation to walk squarely up to the face of death" (p. 102). Collins cannot understand why he is in this situation. Since he is not afraid, he reasons, he must be a hero. Then Crane, in a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek passage, lays forever the ghost of the romantic war hero. "He was not a hero. Heroes had no shames in their lives, and, as for him, he remembered borrowing fifteen dollars from a friend and promising to pay it back the next day, and then avoiding that friend for ten months. . . . He saw that, in this matter of the well, the canteens, the shells, he was an intruder in the land of fine deeds."3 The disparity between the actuality of Collins' background and his belief in history and legend burlesques the traditional conception of heroism. Crane's hero undergoes what has become for the author the classic sequence of war panic. Collins is terrified by the sight of the enemy in the distance and allows his imagination (that fatal faculty!) to unman him. He becomes conscious of his own importance and impotence. "The sky was 104 •

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full of fiends who directed all their wild rage at his head" (p. 104). He is in terror and, like Henry Fleming, in isolation. Like Fleming, too, Collins has only one aim, to return to "the long blue line of the regiment . . . [where] his comrades were standing looking at him from the edge of an impossible star" (p. 105). Prodded by his pride into carrying a bucket of water across the field, Collins runs right past the wounded officer whose existence has been connected in the tale with his, just as Aschenbach and the death's-head figure are yoked together in Mann's Death in Venice. Again repeating the action of Fleming, who deserted the tattered man, Collins ignores the officer's pleas for water. Up to this point, the story is relatively simple — a tale of bravado, fear, and pride, made intense by the violence of battle. But Collins doubles back on his tracks, though still fearful for his life, and with shaking hands gives the lieutenant a drink. Only a faint smile and a sigh reward Collins for his Gunga Din act. Collins' original motive for seeking the water was obscure; his return to aid the wounded man is more truly courageous. Still, the outcome of his bravery is dubious. He does not help the lieutenant, who dies. He does not even help his comrades, because when he brings the bucket of water to the company, two genial officers scuffle and accidentally spill it. What price heroism? "The bucket lay on the ground, empty" (p. 107). The water of life drains away on the wasteland of war. A Biercean irony prevails here, a certain nihilism, without the tragic note that Bierce often sounds. Crane calls attention to the absurdity of any emotion in war. Collins is originally driven by pride, and a sense of duty makes him help the officer, but neither act has any meaning. War, according to Crane, is savage; nevertheless, it has its rules, 105 •

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and any gratuitous act, be it motivated by fear or courage, is doomed to failure. The "heroism" of the title is parodic; the "mystery" is realistic. We feel that if Collins were reincarnated in the First World War novels, he would be familiar with the sense of futility that haunts the heroes of Aldington, Dos Passos, March, Boyd, Barbusse, or Remarque. According to his friend Ford Madox Ford, Stephen Crane's great accomplishment in war fiction is the presentation of the way in which a civilian, without special courage of knowledge of the struggle, reacts to war.4 Crane's war novel has a sensitive youth for its hero; despite, not through, his imagination, he manages to succeed in battle. As a matter of fact, in nineteenth-century war fiction, with the exception of War and Peace, Bierce's "One Officer, One Man," and a few of Bierce's sketches of cowardice, individual failure in war is almost never a theme. There is one rather extensive view of timidity in war, Mark Twain's "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed" (1885). This comic sketch parodies, through a coward's recollections, guerrilla "warfare." In this antimasque, Twain sees war as a fraud. He reaches the serious, if ironic, conclusion that the world of war is not for the dreamer. As the men hide in the pelting rain from the danger of an actual fight, the narrator remarks, "A death of this shameful sort had not occurred to us as being among the possibilities of war. It took the romance all out of the campaign and turned our dreams of glory into a repulsive nightmare."5 Twain asserts that to be a proper soldier a man must learn to react like a machine. The narrator bids farewell to the military life after the panic-stricken irregulars shoot down an innocent stranger. "And it seemed an epitome of war; that all war 106 •

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must be just that — the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity." 6 In a manner similar to that of Twain, Stephen Crane writes about failure of nerve in combat in his greatest war story, "Death and the Child." Written in 1898 after the author had seen some military action in Greece, the story is at once a study of fear, in the mood of The Red Badge of Courage and "A Mystery of Heroism," and a mocking denunciation of the intellectual. None of Crane's war stories, even his novel, shows any interest in the ideas, values, and causes of war. "Death and the Child" represents the final rejection, the ultimate burlesque of the sensitive hero who in the world of war searches for the life of reason. Henry Fleming and Private Collins falter because they think; the hero of this story fails because he is a man of intellect, emotion, and culture. "Death and the Child" combines two themes from Bierce, that of the innocent who gets sucked in and battered by the maelstrom of combat, and that of the young child who observes it all without comprehension, parodying the horror in his innocent imitations. As is his custom, even in a somewhat symbolic tale like this, Crane avoids abstractions. The war is real and ugly. The hero, a newspaper reporter named Peza, falls into the familiar role of the neophyte who goes to view war with the expectation of reinforcing his romantic preconceptions. Crane opens his story with a mass picture, not of an army this time, but of peasants fleeing the battle. Peza is watching this stream of humanity with pity and wonder. The physical setting of the story is important. The peasants flee from the plain where the battle is taking place, and Peza sees them from his vantage point on a mountain. 107 •

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Eventually he descends into the inferno of war, receives his initiation, and escapes back to the height. On the mountain top, Crane states, "one felt the existence of the universe scornfully defining the pain in ten thousand minds" (XII, 242). The story takes the form of a series of counterpoints. Crane analyzes Peza's character more extensively than is his custom in his war stories. Peza is described physically — at least Crane mentions the "flash of eyes and sensitive movements of his flexible mouth" (p. 243). By vocation a student, by nature sensitive and given to a kind of dramatic posturing that is a travesty of genuine commitment to a cause, by heredity Greek, by provenance Italian, Peza is temperamentally soft, unsteady, and passionate. He is contrasted to an officer who listens to Peza's eager explanation of his desire to fight for Greece. The officer, also young, is bronzed and steady, with "a profile stern, quiet and confident, respecting fate, fearing only opinion" (p. 244). The contrast is too markedly black and white, of course. It is important, however, because throughout the remainder of Crane's war fiction the officer, not the reporter, will be the archetype of the hero. These two men, one covered with dust, the other outfitted with shiny new boots, move down to the combat area together. The gruff officer has difficulty concealing his contempt for Peza's romantic declarations of high purpose, but the professional accepts the role of Virgil to Peza's Dante and guides the reporter through the hellfire of the battlefield. War viewed from afar, from the top of the mountain (as in much previous nineteenth-century war fiction), seems triumphant and majestic to Peza when he looks at the tiny black figures crawling through the smoke. The pageantry of war begins to fade when he gets a closer view and sees 108 •

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the wounded. Like Henry Fleming, Peza starts to question his own importance. War teaches its usual lesson. "This theatre for slaughter, built by the inscrutable needs of the earth, was an enormous affair, and he reflected that the accidental destruction of an individual, Peza by name, would perhaps be nothing at all" (p. 248). Crane is not interested in bringing his hero through the war trauma to a better manhood. "Death and the Child" is a study of contrasts, and the hero is a completely mocked personage, a parody of the military hero. Stephen Crane is mocking the intellectual, the youth whom the universities have not taught the fundamentals of the active life. Peza is unable to comprehend the attitude of men who can carry on the daily business of living in the muddy trenches under the threat of imminent attack. This story is not another depiction of the learning process; it is the fable of war's rejection of the sensitive observer and acceptance of the tough regular. The opening section of the story ends with Peza's first sight of a shell and the consequent destruction of his romantic illusions. "It brought machinery immediately into his mind. He thought that if he was killed there at that time, it would be as romantic to the old standards as death by a bit of falling iron in a factory" (p. 250). Crane now shifts back to the mountain where a little child, a true innocent, left behind in the rush of his parents' departure, is happily playing, insensible to the carnage on the plain. That Crane equates the child with nature is evident at once. "His tranquillity in regard to the death on the plain was as invincible as that of the mountain on which he stood" (p. 250). Eventually he notices the battle and parodies it. When the men charge across a field, he races after his toy sheep. He thinks that he is reproducing the 109 •

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actions of men, which, in his limited experience, do not go beyond herding sheep. In other words, Crane uses the child, a genuine innocent, as a foil to Peza, the sophisticated pseudo-innocent. Peza tries to understand war from the store of knowledge he has accumulated out of his experience as a lover and a student; the child tries to comprehend war from the only viewpoint he has of life — that of sheep herding. If, Crane implies, the child is ridiculous, so is the reporter who has "remembered the pageants of carnage that had marched through the dreams of his childhood" (p. 246). To the extent that the child is unblemished by intellectual pretensions, he is better qualified to survive in war. After this peaceful interlude, the story takes up combat once more. Peza's enlightenment continues. He learns that poppies still live on a battlefield, that the vast extent of the carnage dulls pity. Unlike Crane's previous heroes, Peza finds that egoism and fear become more intense the more he sees of battle. Crane's phrasing recalls the profound tone of The Red Badge of Courage. Peza and the officer part company, and "The stranger to battles uttered thanks to his chaperon, the one who had presented him" (p. 254). By this inflated diction, Crane is clearly indicating another test situation, another immersion in the destructive element. Like Stendhal's Fabrizio, Peza's great mistake is that he wants to know. The soldiers from whom he asks directions know only that war is hard work. Peza's ability to conceive war as a kind of barbaric deity watching him disqualifies him for the role of unthinking soldier. He grows angry because some artillery officers will not echo his exalted declarations. Crane differentiates between talkers and actors. "Palaver of the particular kind had subsided before their 110 •

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intense preoccupation in war as a craft. Moreover, many men had talked in that manner, and only talked" (p. 260). The first wave of fear hits Peza when he has another of his fateful meetings with a temperamental opposite, this time a wounded soldier whose jaw is half shot away. The wounded man transfixes Peza with a "mystic gaze" (p. 260). The horrified reporter scrambles away, only to regain his confidence when he meets an officer with good manners. Eventually Peza is accepted as a volunteer and armed with the bandoleer and rifle of a dead soldier. Here, when the hero is ready to take part in combat, Crane chooses to destroy completely the concept of the intellectual — again through counterpoint. In a grotesque caricature of courage, Peza imagines the bandoleer to be the dead man's arms flung around him; he muses on bloody death, mutilation. In a scene that Crane took from his own war dispatches, Peza sees the calm peasant-soldiers and draws an invidious comparison. "One bearded man sat munching a great bit of hard bread. Fat, greasy, squat, he was like an idol made of tallow. Peza felt dimly that there was a distinction between this man and a young student who could write sonnets and play the piano quite well. This old blockhead was coolly gnawing at the bread, while he — Peza — was being throttled by a dead man's arms" (p. 266). The peasant, in his unthinking stolidity, is a success in war; the reporter, in his overactive imaginative state, is a failure. Crane carefully follows the two men, symbols of courage and fear. Peza catches sight of a corpse, blanches, and runs wildly for the rear. The soldier with the bread quietly watches the youth's flight. The enemy charges, and we lose sight of Peza, presumably still rushing away in panic. And the greasy peasant? The epitome of crudity? Ill

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"The soldier with the bread placed it carefully on a bit of paper beside him as he turned to kneel in the trench" (p. 267). Crane has made his point successfully; once again war has provided the setting for an intense, foreshortened emotional experience. But here, as in the novel, Crane cannot quite bring himself to end his story at the climactic moment. Crane returns to the child on the mountain, and the end of the story overextends the conceptual framework into an unnecessary symbolic and parodic antiqlimax. The child is still watching the battle. Suddenly he begins to weep. "If the men struggling on the plain had had time, and greater vision, they could have seen this strange, tiny figure seated on a boulder, surveying them while the tears streamed. It was as simple as some powerful symbol" (p. 267). Crane means the innocent creature ("A chiel's amang ye takin' notes . . .") to reflect the sympathy of nature that is directed toward man's tragic, mortal folly — a bit of philosophizing that seems to distract from the central theme of the war story. When the dirty, animal-like Peza manages to drag himself up to the crest of the mountain, the child, with eyes "large and inscrutably wise and sad," directs a seemingly simple question to him, "Are you a man?" (p. 268). There is a triple irony implicit in this question that the child repeats while the exhausted Peza can only gasp like a fish. First, he has become brutalized by his war-induced panic — is he man or animal? Then, is he a man — a warrior — or a craven coward? Finally, is he a man — an adult — or even less mature than the child who has not been spoiled by society and the university and retains the primitive courage of "the brother of the mountains, the sky, and the sea" (p. 268)? The child is Peza's last confrontation, and here too he loses his dignity. Crane no longer finds any place for the 112 •

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innocent in war. There is no trace of the sympathy that marked his treatment of contemplative men like the sensitive dreamer, Fleming, or the thoughtful fool, Collins. Only a child, far above war's reality — literally on a mountain peak — can have innocence and not be ridiculous. Peza is an intellectual perverted by animal fear; the bearded peasant is a simple soul whose innocence has turned into a brutal — and to the author acceptable — phlegmatic attitude of calm. Since war is a suitable occupation for neither the intellectual nor the innocent, who is to inherit the mantle of heroism? Crane creates another type of war hero in the remainder of his fiction, a professional soldier similar to the officer who repudiates Peza at the start of "Death and the Child." From now on, Crane's ideal soldier is a regular, a veteran. " 'But to get the real thing!' cried Vernall, the war correspondent. 'It seems impossible! It is because war is neither magnificent nor squalid; it is simply life, and an expression of life can always evade us. We can never tell life, one to another, although sometimes we think we can.' " 7 Stephen Crane went off to war again in 1898, this time to Cuba. He had to see the real thing for himself, to test himself by taking absurd chances and coming as close to the red death as he had taken his fictional heroes. What all this flirting with danger meant in Crane's psychological makeup I do not know; but we can see what his transformation from an artist who only imagined war to a reporter who has taken part in combat meant to his war fiction. The desire for actual experience is an integral part of the American writer's consciousness. From Francis Parkman forcing his weak frame along the Oregon Trail to Ernest Hemingway entering the African jungle, a significant percentage of American authors have refused to rely on imagi113 •

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nation or research. The result of this "bedazzlement of sheer experience," 8 as Philip Rahv terms it, is often an indifference to ideas and theories of value. Characters and style may become hard and clipped. Stephen Crane was always a firm believer in experience, although his great war novel may seem to belie the fact. W e recall that Crane was capable of standing out all night in a snowstorm to get the feel of misery; one of his finest stories is the result of his survival of a shipwreck. In the case of his war fiction, however, once Crane felt that he had really gained for himself the experience that his earlier heroes lacked, he lost the power of sympathetic projection that accounts for the brilliant portraits of bewildered and disengaged soldiers. The bulk of the war stories published in Wounds in the Rain (1900) are grim, inflexible sketches, often lacking the tension and emotional complexity of Crane's previous war fiction. These stories do not lack sympathy. Indeed, the author often verges on pathos as he deals with the tragedies of death in battle or the neglected virtues of regular soldiers. If in his earlier war stories he manages to retain the proper objective distance from his protagonists, here he seems at once objective — too objective in cold character portrayals — and subjective — too subjective in his angry or sad editorial comments. At the end of "The Price of the Harness," Crane describes a soldier as having a humor tinctured with bitterness and ferocity and love (IX, 41). Clearly, Crane feels for his protagonists with bitterness, ferocity, and love, but his characters themselves do not feel anything. Crane refuses to apply any further analysis to motives or to the meaning of courage and fear in war. War is still a way of life, a good life, a life of action, but without any rationale. Crane idolizes the private soldier's strength and bravery, but will not expand upon them. He states in "War 114 •

T H E B I T T E R N E S S OF B A T T L E Memories," his recollections of the Spanish conflict, "The fine thing about 'the men is that you can't explain them. I mean when you take them collectively. They do a thing, and afterward you find that they have done it because they have done it" (IX, 21 if). We cannot argue the truth of the statement. The nature of war itself has an essential lack of logic, particularly when studied from the enlisted man's point of view. The British Tommie's song duplicates Crane's statement: "We're here because we're here . . ." Crane's recognition of the unreasoned antiheroic essence of war is valid and admirable. Because war is illogical and businesslike, because the best soldiers are the unemotional regulars, Crane now feels that he must cut down severely on character portrayal in his war fiction, whereas in The Red Badge of Courage he looked at war through character and character through war, organizing, not merely copying, experience. Crane provides his "good soldiers" with minimal emotional responses in these later stories. He worships at the altar of experience so devoutly that action becomes allimportant and emotion is simply of the kind seen on the face of a man at work (p. 215). Crane's war novel is the work of a deliberate artist who seeks to present war as idea, not as autobiography nor as journalism, and his parodie vision adds a certain astringency to his conception. Crane's later stories often remind us that he was a practicing journalist for most of his career." The good reporter must be primarily interested in fact, speci* Crane's central character in Active Service is a newspaperman who looks on war with an attitude of clinical objectivity. "The English are the only people who can pull off wars on schedule time, and they have to do it in odd corners of the globe" (IV, 7 7 ) . The war correspondent should be cynical and detached, Crane indicates. He should provide an audience for the acts of violence and heroism that take place on the battlefield. "It is merely that a man doing his best in the middle of a sea of war longs to have people see him doing his best" (p. 98).

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ficity, accurate detail. His approach is objective and clear. Characters are ordinarily viewed from the outside, since the stuff of the newspaper column is usually action. The spirit of journalism is "the effective exposure of social and cultural conditions."9 Obviously, fiction, realistic fiction in general and Crane's fiction in particular, partakes of much of the journalistic approach, in matter and manner. Nevertheless, realistic fiction — and The Red Badge of Courage is a prime example — need not shy away from complexity. On the other hand, the journalist, like Peza, must know. We have seen how the symbolic framework of Crane's war novel removes his battlefield narration from any danger of the dull reportage or melodramatic excess often found in earlier war fiction. And we have seen the fictional value of a central intelligence who is deeply involved in the war dilemma. In Henry James's words, "I never see the leading interest of any human hazard but in a consciousness (on the part of the moved and moving creature) subject to fine intensification and wide enlargement."10 It is worth noting that many of the stories in Wounds in the Rain are filtered through the consciousness of a journalist, the war correspondent "Little Nell." Crane supplies his most extensive apology for the mechanical fiction of this volume in a passage from "War Memories" that well describes the type of men he employs as subjects for his war tales: "There wasn't a high heroic face among them. They were all men intent on business. That was all. It may seem to you that I am trying to make everything a squalor. That would be wrong. I feel that things were often sublime. But they were differently sublime. They were not of our shallow and preposterous fictions. [This by way of comment on The Red Badge of Courage?] They stood out in a simple, majestic commonplace. It was the 116 •

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behavior of men on the street. . . . It was that in the flat and obvious way" (p. 238). The final sentence might stand as an apt critique of the ten war stories included in Wounds in the Rain. Crane deliberately underplays in order to convey the antiheroic aspect of war and warriors. W e may feel, however, that the omission of characters who have minds and emotions leaves us with a fiction too close to reportage. These stories lack the human element that enriches his earlier war fiction. Crane's use of a symbol may indicate how he dehumanizes these later works. Whereas in The Red Badge of Courage the war machine is a monster, in "The Price of the Harness" the machine is a necessity and a reminder of benign force. "It reminds one always of a loom, a great grand steel loom, clinking, clanking, plunking, plinking, to weave a woof of thin red threads [the last six words were Crane's alternate title for the story], the cloth of death" (IX, 36). When Crane destroys the intellectual, emotional Peza as a worthwhile human being in "Death and the Child," the author leaves the way open for the "real thing," war as it is; but he lacks any protagonist to convey to the reader, by his immersion and acceptance or conflict and rejection, the meaning, in human terms, of the war world. The sensitive soul in these stories may be a ridiculous figure like the hero of "The Lone Charge of William B. Perkins," who blunders out into no-man's-land and spends an uncomfortable hour cowering in a bullet-spattered iron boiler. Or the thinking man may be a cowardly wastrel who has become an officer through his father's political influence and who cannot win the respect of his stolidly brave and generous comrades, as in "The Second Generation."* 0 Crane detested the Rough Rider type, whom he mocked in a dispatch as "Reginald Marmaduke Maurice Montmorenci Sturtevant" ("Regulars Get No Glory" [1898], Stephen Crane: Uncollected Writings, ed. Olov W .

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Too much imagination leads to insanity; the chief character of "The Sergeant's Private Madhouse" sets off a night attack by his hallucinations. Who are Crane's heroes in the stories of the SpanishAmerican War? They are the quiet workmen who "went because they went" (II, 241). Crane hails a grizzled captain in "God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen." The officer is one of those regulars for whom the war comes too late since he has already spent his military life on lonely Indian outposts; he is (ironically) killed on his first charge after having waited thirty-five years for this chance. What are his motives? They cannot be articulated. He "loved it [war] for itself — the thing itself — the whirl, the unknown" (IX, 67). The hero of "Virtue in War" is a regular army officer, a stern and harsh disciplinarian whose sole aim in life is to lead the 307th to honor. That he is killed in the attempt, that a volunteer soldier who hated the officer comes to realize the value of professional leadership, does not lift the story beyond an illustrative anecdote of war; the characters are too woefully flat. "The Clan of No Name" reflects the author's new attitude toward characterization, and the story indicates Crane's artistic weakening. Set in a wry romantic framework — the hero is loved by a beautiful señorita who marries a rich civilian after she hears of her fiancé's death — the story traces the familiar pattern of a young soldier's introduction to war. The officer is on a patrol that must fight a holding action until some supplies are transported into the jungle. The lieutenant accepts the dangers of war without flinchFryckstedt [Uppsala, 1963], p. 3 7 1 ) . In "The Second Generation" Crane shows his contempt for the influence peddlers back in Washington by mockingly applying military metaphors to their actions; the lobbyists retreat in disorder, storm high officials who are only assistant battery-horses, and rake them with broadsides (II, 245, 247, 2 5 2 ) .

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ing, "because it was his duty" (II, 162). True, Crane's realistic touch does not desert him. There is nothing shallow in his treatment of the savage guerrilla warfare where men are "raving mad with it, babbling, tearful, almost frothing at the mouth" (p. 166). The young officer sees five wounded men cowering in a shellhole, and he gratuitously joins them, although he knowingly dooms himself by this move, since the enemy is advancing rapidly. He dies, in a particularly horrible way — under the flashing machete of a guerrilla — while fighting to protect the wounded. The remarkable aspect of the story is the motivation Crane supplies for the officer's sacrifice, which is instinctive and irrational, the deed of a mechanical man. The author comes forth with a burst of turgid rhetoric that sounds like unconscious parody, a bad pastiche of Kipling. "He was of a kind . . . and the men of his kind, on peak or plain, from the dark northern ice-fields to the hot wet jungles, through all wine and want, through all lies and unfamiliar truth, dark or light — the men of his kind were governed by their gods, and each man knew the law and yet could not give tongue to it, but it was the law . . . and always with the law there is only one way" (p. 167). Thus, to paraphrase Melville, soldiers, all over the world, stand hand in hand, and one shock of muteness runs the whole circle round. Even the innocent youth has become mute and professionalized in Crane's pages. The descriptions of war may be authentic, but there can be no emotional impact in a work of fiction that recounts the death of a hero who, as far as the reader is concerned, was never alive in the first place." • Active Service supplies Crane's apology for the loss of emotion. Speaking of war correspondents in general, he states: "Still, when batteries had fought each other savagely . . . it was difficult, he could see, to stir men to

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The most successful story of the Wounds in the Rain collection, "The Price of the Harness," is Crane's paean, his idealization of the private soldier. The author praises the capable, gruff workman who does his dangerous job without the slightest hint of heroics, accepts his wounds quietly, his death silently. It is difficult to conceive of a hero more diametrically opposed to Henry Fleming than Private Nolan, the "indifferent, almost stolid" (IX, 19) soldier who is the central figure of the short story. In a letter to his agent, written in 1898, Crane explains the meaning of the title. "The name of the story is 'The Price of the Harness' because it is the price of the harness, the price the men paid for wearing the military harness, Uncle Sam's military harness; and they paid blood, hunger, and fever." 11 Crane's insistence on the title is revealing; he conceives of his characters as animals in harness. The century did not produce a more realistic fictional account of the ordinary business of war. Most authors told the reader how war was carried out; Crane shows the reader. He writes of the soldier's simple needs — food, sleep, and ammunition." He shows the digging and the sweat that go think and feel out of the present zone of action. . . . Of course they were men who when at home manifested the most gentle and wide-reaching feelings . . . and yet all of them who had seen an unknown man shot through the head in battle had little more to think of it than if the man had been a rag-baby. Tender they might be; poets they might be; but they were all horned with a provisional, temporary, but absolutely essential callous which was formed by their existence amid war, with its quality of making them always think of the sights and sounds concealed in their own direct future" (IV, 108). Frederick Hoffman finds this factuality a necessary concomitant of war's violence; examining the prose of World War I novels, he asserts, "The passages all do violence to their human subjects, by neglecting their humanity, or purposely ignoring it; in doing so, they simply report the violence done them by the war." Frederick J. Hoffman, The Mortal No (Princeton, 1964), p. 216. * The characters in Crane's late war fiction are all, in Hemingway's phrase, men without women—a sharp contrast to the conventional war fiction of the period.

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T H E B I T T E R N E S S OF B A T T L E into every battle. The deliberation of a rifleman taking aim and the quick impatience of a surgeon bandaging a wound are clearly etched. The chief figures of "The Price of the Harness" are four tough regulars, Nolan, Watkins, Martin, and Grierson. The only differentiation is in their names. They are all of a type: "the bland white light of the end of the day feebly touched each hard bronze profile" (p. 20). Crane worships these men and raises them to symbols of military virtue. "There was something distinctive in the way they carried their rifles. There was the grace of an old hunter somewhere in it, the grace of a man whose rifle has become absolutely a part of himself. Furthermore, almost every blue shirt-sleeve was rolled to the elbow, disclosing forearms of almost incredible brawn" (p. 23). Like the civil servant Kipling, the newspaperman Crane has succumbed to the glamour of the soldier. Note the diction of this passage: "grace," "incredible strength" — the men represent a breed apart, a race of heroes, a far cry from the civilian-soldiers with whose emotions Ford Madox Ford could identify his own. These men are all action. They possess no emotions, rather a "marvelous impassivity" (p. 24). The author has the emotion, we should add, for Crane editorializes shamelessly, talking about the traditions of fidelity and courage handed down to the regular soldier by military generations and preserved despite legislators and civilians. Indeed, he first conceived the character of Nolan in an editorial. Crane's 1898 dispatch "Regulars Get No Glory" contrasts to a socially prominent volunteer in whom the public is interested the inconsequential "Just plain Private Nolan." "The ungodly Nolan, the sweating, swearing, overloaded, hungry, thirsty, sleepless Nolan, tearing his breeches on the barbed wire entanglements, wallowing through the muddy fords, pursuing his way through the stilletto-pointed thickets, climbing 121 •

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the fire-crowned hill" — Nolan gets shot. Nolan here is a generic name, but the fact that we know more about the universal Nolan of the dispatch than about the supposedly individualized Nolan of the short story casts an interesting light on Crane's fictional technique. In the dispatch Nolan has a sister, a chambermaid in an Omaha hotel, and a foxterrier in the Reno barracks. The dispatch also voices more social protest as Crane blames the public who forget Nolan. "Here's three volleys and taps to one Nolan, of this regiment or that regiment, and maybe some day, in a fairer, squarer land, he'll get his picture in the paper, too." 12 The story itself follows the four enlisted men into combat, focusing first on Nolan, who exults in the dangerous situation, then on Martin's dazed progress to the aid station to get his wound dressed. Shifting back to Nolan, Crane shows us the perfect soldier in action. Nolan fires with care; he loves his rifle like a mistress. When he gets the order to charge, he leaps forward, the compleat warrior. "He had loved the regiment, the army, because the regiment, the army, was his life — he had no other outlook" (p. 37). The story comes to a sudden — and most effective — denouement. Nolan is cut down by a bullet that feels to him like nothing more serious than a punch in the stomach. The death of Nolan, watched over by his two friends, is nearly as well done as that of Jim Conklin. There is a genuinely pathetic note to the peaceful demise of the regular, secure in his simple belief that his faculties are as sharp as ever since he knows that he has fallen on a wet patch of earth. With admirable restraint, Crane avoids the melodrama implicit in the circumstances. Nolan dies, never realizing that he is lying in his own blood, and Grierson speaks the epitaph, "Cover his face" (p. 39). Our eyes do not dazzle, 122 •

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though Nolan died young. Had Crane been able to individualize Nolan, this death in combat might be truly tragic. As it stands, although Crane tells us this is tragedy (p. 34), it has the pathos of a death reported in the morning paper. "The Price of the Harness" might have been a tragic view of men in war, and there is some reason for thinking that Crane had this in mind, but as it stands the tale is a series of elegiac portraits; the tone of pity for "the men" comes perilously close to self-pity. On the other hand, perhaps Crane means the story to affect the reader as it does, because if Nolan's death is not tragic, then neither is war. The story closes on a rush of sentimentality. Grierson and Martin recognize each other in the gloom of a fever tent, and, with a wounded man singing the "Star-Spangled Banner" in the background, Grierson imparts the news of Nolan's death. And "Somewhere in the valley an engine's bell was ringing, and it sounded of peace and home as if it hung on a cow's neck" (p. 41). The hopeful mood does not prevail, however. Grierson mentions that Watkins, too, has been badly wounded, and the reader realizes that the price of the harness must be paid by all soldiers, since life is cheap in war. There is something distasteful about the sudden effusion of sentiment at the end. Crane's emotional view of life and death in war does not ring true to the logic of his story. He seems to condemn the unreason of war at the same time that he recognizes the virtue of the particular kind of courage evoked by battle. A confusion of thought rather than a tension of polarities seems to inform many of these stories. The author is too close to his war and his soldiers to see them plain. The parodist's intelligence and the realist's honesty have given way, to some extent, to the apologist's commitment. Crane's last group of war stories, 123 •

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however, strikes a certain balance between the sympathetic understanding of The Red Badge of Courage and die stiffupper-lip jingoism of Wounds in the Rain. Among Stephen Crane's posthumously published writings first collected in 1902 as Last Words are five war stories. "An Episode of War," a sardonic little anecdote of a wounded officer who has his arm amputated, contains one of the most remarkable war hymns in all Crane's work. He rises to a lyricism that recalls Hopkins' "The Windhover" in intensity of phrase. The sheer beauty of war moves Crane. "The battery swept in curves that stirred the heart; it made halts as dramatic as the crash of a wave on the rocks, and when it fled onward this aggregation of wheels, levers, motors had a beautiful unity, as if it were a missile. The sound of it was a war-chorus that reached into the depths of man's emotion" (IX, 132). This passage is nostalgic emotion recollected in tranquillity. Yet when Crane views war from a certain aesthetic distance once more, near the end of his short life, he breaks away from the florid approach that, in its admiration for the craft and beauty of war, still reflected the Rudyard Kipling influence Crane thought he had renounced early in his career.13 Crane's last words on war represent a matured judgment, a realization of the positive and the negative aspects of war, in other words, a return to the position held by the young novelist before he experienced war for himself. The four stories written in Crane's last year that make up "The Kicking Twelfth: Four Regimental Episodes" reflect the attitude that produced The Red Badge of Courage. Once again, Crane creates his own picture of war, this time without even the restraint of historical fact.* Therefore, we * Crane does employ here, however, events observed in battle and re124 •

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may expect to discover in "The Kicking Twelfth" war fiction as Crane believed it should be presented. Crane shows an ideal war that displays the Spitzbergen army set apart from history or society. The army's sole field of endeavor is the battlefield — everything else is extraneous. Crane attempts to indicate the universality of all wars, be they civil, guerrilla, offensive or defensive, just or unjust. The baptism of fire, fear, death, courage, horror, are qualities of all war. The characters of the young lieutenant, the veteran sergeant, and the grizzled colonel recur. Crane drew two portraits of the artist as a young soldier. Henry Fleming (with his successors, Collins and Peza) was the soldier Crane feared he might become, and Timothy Lean, the hero of these final stories, is the officer Crane would have hoped to be. Just as in the novel, both the regiment— "the Kickers" — and the young lieutenant are innocent of any knowledge of war's realities. Lean is eager for combat, being endowed with a romantic spirit that "dreamed of blood" (IX, 139). The first story, "Kim Up, The Kickers," tells of the regiment's initial taste of combat. They charge up a hill, then carry out a second assault that ends l i e battle successfully. Everyone is happy; the general congratulates the colonel, who in turn congratulates Lean, the first man in the assault. The entire episode is underwritten in Crane's antiheroic style and filled with realistic touches drawn from his own combat observations. Crane does echo, where we might wish him to parody, ported in his dispatches and, in some cases, already worked into his earlier fiction. The action described in the first Spitzbergen tale, a charge up a hill, for example, appears in an 1898 dispatch about the battle of San Juan Hill—"Yes, they were going up the hill, up the hill. It was the best moment of anybody's life' (Uncollected Writings, p. 360); and the charge appears again in "God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen"—where a boy lieutenant, "his commission hardly dry," arrives on the hill's crest in "blissful contentment" (IX, 68).

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Kipling's rather pompous characteristic show of erudition. We are informed, condescendingly, that battles are not fought on a chess board. The men love their colonel, despite his age and girth, because he leads them bravely, and "this is the way of soldiers" (p. 145). Nevertheless, Crane is quick to emphasize the unromantic aspect of the charge. Although they gain "glory," the men are out of breath. But this is the way war should be: the hero unafraid, the attack a success, the enemy defeated. Every attack should be led by a Timothy Lean, accompanied by "an old grizzled sergeant who would have gone to hell for the honour of the regiment and a pie-faced lad who had been obliged to lie about his age in order to get into the army" (p. 149). But "Kim Up, The Kickers" is only the first part of this war tetralogy. Timothy Lean's progress is marked by his comprehension of the nature of responsibility as he gains his first command. In "The Shrapnel of Their Friends," war becomes slightly less fun for the Kicking Twelfth. They break and run when faced with the terrible illogic of being caught in the fire of their own artillery. Although all turns out well, and the commanding officer honors them again, war appears to be less of a game. The third episode, "And If He Wills, We Must Die," is in sharp contrast to the earlier tales of the series. Timothy Lean does not take part in the grim story of a sergeant and fifteen men who obey their orders and are wiped out after a savage and foredoomed defense of a farmhouse. Taken by itself, the story may seem to lack a point, but as a part of Crane's final view of war, the narrative represents the ugly side, the reality of violent, painful death. Despite Lean's absence from the scene, it seems clear that the reader is supposed to consider the episode as part of the lieutenant's 126 •

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increasing store of knowledge about war. The sergeant in command is a perfect soldier who obeys his impossible orders in the best tradition of the service. Crane hints at the injustice of such a situation, as the title indicates. The irony is not made explicit; rather, it is inevitable. The sergeant is a good noncommissioned officer, the orders are clear, the men must die. This is the way war is. It is not a matter of irony that the messenger bringing the awaited new orders to withdraw has been killed on the way. War abounds in such chances. The sergeant falls with a bullet in his throat, and he dies while gasping the regimental battle cry. War is not kind. We might apply the words Humphrey Hare uses in reference to Alfred de Vigny's war fiction; in similar fashion Stephen Crane "analyzes the tragedy of the fighting man with a clear objective brilliance, annihilating the romance of war without denying his exquisite compassion to the man who fights. He knows the harsh exactions of the military machine, compelling its victims to the limit of their endurance and beyond . . ." u Crane's final commentary on war brings forth one of the great set-pieces of horror in nineteenth-century literature. Beautifully simple in conception, "The Upturned Face" shows the Adjutant and Lieutenant Timothy Lean of the Kicking Twelfth faced with the task of supervising the burial of a fellow officer. The macabre details of the scene are unforgettable. The bullets of the enemy supply the background music while two aggrieved privates hurriedly scrape away the earth. A mumbled religious service, and the soldiers start to bury the body. When one of the privates is wounded, Lean sends them back to cover, and he and the Adjutant must complete the job. The natural tension of combat heightens the horror inherent in shoveling dirt on the corpse's face. With perfect 127 •

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control, Crane evokes the disgust endemic to the tiny burial scene and implies the repugnance of war itself. Timothy Lean, the perfect soldier, has seen that war is not a thing of beauty and high resolve. The war has lasted too long for that. Symbolically, Lean lifts the dirt of the battlefield and covers the debris of combat. When the Adjutant begins to falter, Lean breaks the rules of war, which had seemed sacrosanct even in the previous tale. " 'Damn you,' said Lean, 'shut your mouth.' He was not the senior officer" (p. 1 7 1 ) . Pale, stuttering, miserable, the young officer completes his task. "Lean swung back the shovel. It went forward in a pendulum curve. When the earth landed it made a sound — plop" (p. 1 7 1 ) . What has been the result of Lean's war experience? Without the sensitivity of Crane's earlier heroes, but equally without the callousness of his later protagonists, Lean is a success in war. Yet he learns, as Stephen Crane learned, that war is all things to all men — beauty, a test, a muscular way of life, and, finally, a horror. Crane's last word on war ends his progression from The Red Badge of Courage and its great, if at times ironic, care for human values, through the relative insensitivity of Wounds in the Rain, back to a middle way that conceives of war, like life, as both a glory and an obscenity. Whereas the moods of Crane's predecessors in the genre of war fiction — evasion, flippancy, anger, embarrassment, melodrama, bitterness — were to fade from memory as the next century grew familiar with the phenomenon of total war, Stephen Crane's war fiction ends on a universal and permanent note of calm despair that is at once realism and parody, a summing-up and a criticism of war — plop.

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The Romances That Failed For my part I had concluded that I had outgrown Ouida. I thought that I recognized the fact that her tears were carefully moulded globules of the best Cornish tin and that her splendors were really of the substance of shadows on a garden wall. —Crane, "Ouida's Masterpiece," Book Buyer 13 (1896-97), 968

S TEPHEN CRANE's two longest completed novels deal with romantic love, and both are failures. It is important to understand why The Third Violet (1896) and Active Service (1899) are such unimpressive performances. There are obvious reasons, of course. Crane was not at his best when dealing with relations between the sexes; indeed, after Maggie, his best work treats almost exclusively masculine subjects. Occasionally a short piece reflects a spark of humor or a bit of realism when treating a love affair. "The Pace of Youth" (1895) is an amusing parable of the struggle between the generations; a posthumously published piece, "A Man by the Name of Mud," has a cynical bite in its descrip129 •

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tion of woman's fickleness. For the most part, however, Stephen Crane was uncomfortable when writing about even the most innocent sexual relationships. He could not obscure or write around the problems of sexual love in the manner of Henry James or William Dean Howells. On the other hand, Crane fully understood that the great reading public hungered after love stories. Thus a second reason for the comparative weakness of these two novels is that Crane wrote them for popular success, and as hack work they accept rather than reject the clichés of romantic fiction. These novels are also, for Crane, much too long. While the 231 pages of The Third Violet are largely unredeemable, about one third of the 309 pages of Active Service are quite realistic and witty. But when we consider that Crane worked most often and most effectively in the short story, and that his best novels average 110 to 130 pages, we are not surprised that these two books, written in his prime, are flaccid and rambling. I would submit that there is a further reason for the weaknesses of The Third Violet and Active Service: the failure of Crane to apply the parodie approach that sustains his major fiction. Although each novel shows some parody and some realism, for the most part quite hackneyed traditions of romantic fiction control the books. Usually, as we have seen, Crane's fiction commences in a burlesque mood, scoffing at the "bad" romantic stereotypes, and then moves on to a "good" realism. These love novels may have some parodie elements, but they move on to "bad" romantic stereotypes. Crane's major fiction establishes a dialogue between the parodied tradition and his new realism. In Active Service especially the dialogue breaks down, and the novel circles back upon itself, allowing the excesses of sentimental romance to damage what starts out as a potentially very 130 •

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funny and realistic work. Northrop Frye states very clearly what should happen in this kind of novel: "An important theme in the more bourgeois novel should be the parody of the romance and its ideals. The tradition established by Don Quixote continues in a type of novel which looks at a romantic situation from its own point of view, so that the conventions of the two forms make up an ironic compound instead of a sentimental mixture."1 Stephen Crane's love stories are a sentimental mixture because he abandons the ironic compound that served to make his finest fiction both parody and realism. Instead of shifting to realism from romanticism, he romanticizes reality.2 Crane had an artist's need for distance from his material — just as his characters need to gain some physical distance from their struggles so as to understand them; in these novels he loses the objective stance. The Third Violet is a love story. Hawker, an artist, is smitten, while on vacation, with the charms of Miss Fanhall. The novel recounts his painful efforts to declare his love, in settings from summer hotels and forest picnics to New York studioi and brownstone mansions. Crane's willingness to work within the tired genre dear to readers of ladies' magazines produces a commonplace plot, stiff characters, a cloying theme. Some pleasant bits of local color, an occasional flash of ironic humor, and, buried in the masses of flabby dialogue, a few genuinely witty lines of banter provide the novel with some interest. Nevertheless, for all Crane's painstaking delineations of nasty ladies gossiping on hotel porches, sketches of gay young things on the tennis courts, and a charming picture of a dog — which the English reviewers, eager to praise, leaped on as the best part of the book — The Third Violet comes only briefly 131

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alive in a relatively short section (a major part of the last quarter of the book) that deals with studio life. It is revealing that Crane once described the book as "a story of life among the younger and poorer artists in New York."3 It was not, but it should have been. Crane evokes the seedy charm of Bohemian artists' environments in his swift sketches of the studios where Hawker and his raffish companions, "Wrinkles," "Great Grief," and Pennoyer, think up schemes to cadge a meal, forestall the landlord, work up some hack commercial pieces — all the while remaining sensitive to what is true art. They, their hangers-on, and a beautiful young model named Florinda, nicknamed Splutter, provide a counterpoint of color and humor to Hawker's glum courtship. The gaiety has a bittersweet note, to be sure, because the charming and amoral Splutter (her amorality only very obliquely hinted by the presence of a red lamp outside her door) is deeply in love with Hawker, who remains unconscious of her loyal admiration. Reflections of "Bohemian" artist life were familiar adjuncts to the fiction of some of Crane's contemporaries. H. C. Bunner, Henry Harland, and Thomas Janvier described studio courtships; Richard Harding Davis in "A Patron of Art" (1892) sketched the menage of a poor artist, as did Robert W. Chambers in his In the Quarter ( 1894); Howells in A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) and more fully in The Coast of Bohemia ( 1893) showed a mild, upperclass version of art schools and famous studios. All these books, of course, derived from the two classic versions of nineteenth-century Bohemia: Henry Murger's Scènes de la vie de Bohème (1848), a witty, amoral, and often sentimental evocation of young artists and their women, their wandering impecunious lives in garrets and cheap restau132 •

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rants; and George Du Maurier's paler and more melodramatic novel Trilby (1894). Crane's contemporaries saw reflections of Trilby in The Third Violet: the model with a heart of gold and a slanging, tough exterior, in love with the artist who spurns her, the young men who live together and are kind to the girl — the entire setting seems to be taken directly into Crane's novel.® But to take directly does not mean to parody, and for all the liveliness of this section in comparison with the rest of the novel, Crane's Bohemia is simply one more version of the clichés of artist life. He copies the stereotypes rather than transforming them — either by heightening or lowering — as he does in his more trenchant fiction. Nevertheless, part of Crane's view of Bohemia came from his knowledge of artists and the New York art world of the nineties. Many of his close friends were artists; he ate, drank, played poker with them, and was very familiar with the studios of his friends Corwin Knapp Linson, Thomas Masson, and R. G. Vosburgh, as well as the Art Students' League and the Lanthorn Club. If the setting of this section of The Third Violet seems a rather slavish copy of previous literary projections, it also copies life. Compare the studio of Pennoyer, Wrinkles, and Grief to that of Crane's acquaintance Albert Pinkham Ryder. Crane's artists dwell among "dull walls lined with sketches, the tousled • That Crane was at least familiar with Trilby is shown by a reference in an early piece reprinted by R. W . Stallman, "Stephen Crane: Some New Stories," Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 60 ( 1 9 5 6 ) , 459: "The Parisian custom, exhaustively recounted in 'Trilby' of requiring each new member of a class to make a spread for his companions was faithfully followed. Usually it consisted of beer, crackers and brie cheese." Trilby was serialized in Harper's Monthly, January-August 1894, and published as a book in September. It was a huge popular success, was put on the stage, into concerts; there were Trilby shoes, sausages, even a town in Florida. See Albert Parry, Garrets and Pretenders (New York, i960), p. 103: "the whole country seemed to take to sighs over poor Trilby."

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bed in one corner, the masses of boxes and trunks in another, a little dead stove, and the wonderful table. Moreover, there were wine-coloured draperies flung in some places, and on a shelf, high up, there were plaster casts, with dust in the creases . . . . There were some elaborate cobwebs on the ceiling" (III, 176). Lewis Mumford describes Ryder's studio: "A mere litter of tables, chairs, trunks, packing boxes, old magazines and newspapers, dirty cups and dishes on the floor, with stale food still left on them, the long streamers of paper hanging from the ceiling, dust and cobwebs everywhere." 4 Two years earlier Crane published the bulk of the background material of this section in a story called "Great Grief's Holiday Dinner." The characters and dialogue dealing with the efforts of the artists to raise enough money for a meal were carried over virtually unchanged into the novel, except for the book's omission of a sentimental twist at the end of the story where Pennoyer gives his last crumbs to an old model. Among Crane's posthumously published writings is a brilliant vignette, probably written in 1894. "The Silver Pageant" presents Wrinkles and Grief trying to understand the art of a painter named Gaunt who cannot transfer to canvas the pictures that he has in his eyes. The dreaming artist can never tell the others what he sees, for he dies, with a gray mist before his eyes, his painting undone; and Wrinkles' epitaph is a reminder d? the fate of the frustrated artist: "He couldn't have had pictures in his eyes."5 The Third Violet touches on some of the wellsprings of artistic creativity: "Hawker seemed attacking with this picture something fair and beautiful of his own life, a possession of his mind, and he did it fiercely, mercilessly, formidably" (p. 204). Crane seems to be setting up the Bohemian section of the 134 •

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book for a burlesque treatment that will shift into realism and contrast with the novel's earlier love-in-the-country idyll. After a short parody of an Indian love legend — "Once upon a time there was a beautiful Indian maiden, of course. And she was, of course, beloved by a youth from another tribe who was very handsome and stalwart and a mighty hunter, of course" (p. 127)—Crane's hero realistically slashes away at the heroine's romantic conception of the studios, a conception drawn from Murger and Du Maurier. She talks dreamily of studio life, while Hawker argues the reality, six men smoking, playing cards on credit, and painting designs for tomato cans. She repeats, "But still, the life of the studios — " to his insistence that the artists despised themselves for being poor in New York. The young lady remains faithful to the romantic myth, "Well, after a while something happened—" and Hawker insists on veracity, "Oh no it didn't. Something impended always, but it never happened" (pp. i 3 i f ) . When the novel actually takes up the artistic environment, however, there is no parody and only a patina of realism. As for the argument between the unseeing Hawker, in love with his upper-class Gibson girl, and the devoted Splutter, this conflict is neither comic nor genuine.* A kind of vacuous nostalgia covers this section, just as a mist of romantic sentiment makes the entire The Third Violet a commonplace love novel despite a few glances toward humorous realism. Stephen Crane's more ambitious novel Active Service, written after his return from the Greco-Turkish wars, attains * A Freudian biographer would find many revealing overtones in the plot of this section: the young Stephen Crane romantically desired a lady like Miss Fanhall (Nellie Crouse?) but feared that he would end up with a drifter like Splutter.

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much more realism and much more parodic comedy than The Third Violet — almost a third of the later novel is very promising — but then it too sinks into a bathetic acceptance of the rules of romantic fiction, the fiction that Crane seems, sporadically, to be mocking in the first part of the novel. As we have seen, in The O'Ruddy Crane was to express his contempt for the Scott-Lever-Stevenson-Haggard school of fiction that mixes romantic love with stirring adventure, wooing with warring, as it were. The personification of the dashing, daring newspaperman owed much to the life and works of Crane's acquaintance and rival, Richard Harding Davis. In Davis's Soldiers of Fortune (1897), for example, the hero defeats his enemies with courageous ease, and saves and wins the heroine, all without dirtying his white ducks. Although Active Service would seem to start out as a full-scale parody of this type of adventure novel, when the entire novel comes into focus, it conforms to all the conventions of the love-and-adventure story. The plot is absurd. A newspaperman, Rufas Coleman, follows an archaeological expedition to Greece in order to overcome the prejudices of Professor and Mrs. Wainwright, who refuse to allow Coleman to marry their daughter Marjorie. Defeating both the machinations of Nora Black, a musical comedy star who pursues him, and the obstructions of the war between the Greeks and the Turks, Coleman finds the lost Wainwright party, leads them to safety, gains the undying admiration of the professor and a gaggle of undergraduates, and woos and marries Marjorie. At the start, the parodic sense is very strong. Crane scoffs at the romantic tradition of the newspaper business in a marvelously sardonic passage that looks forward to Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts. Throughout Crane's description of life on the New York Eclipse runs the news story of 136 •

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a baby born with no arms, the pictures of which child make superior Eclipse fare, "a morsel to be flung to a ravenous public whose wolf-like appetite could only satisfy itself upon mental entrails, abominations" (IV, 40). The tasks of an assistant editor cast further mocking light upon the newspaper trade; he must read a contribution from a widow in Little Rock, a humorous essay on trolley cars (a selfdirected joke, for Crane once wrote just such an essay), while his artist labors to "draw a picture of an awful wreck with ghastly-faced sailors frozen in the rigging" (p. 37). A view of Coleman's publisher is surely a caricature of William Randolph Hearst. The wealthy publisher, Sturgeon, sets forth a great scheme: "The Eclipse enlists a battalion of men to go to Cuba and fight the Spaniards under its own flag — the Eclipse flag. Collect trained officers from here and there — enlist every young devil we see — drill 'em — best rifles — loads of ammunition — provisions — staff of doctors and nurses — a couple of dynamite guns — everything complete — best in the world. Now, isn't that great?" (p. 61 — perhaps Mr. Hearst's war was a case of life following art). This-passing glance at Sturgeon, a figure who might well fit into The Front Page, shows what Crane might have accomplished in the novel. Sturgeon is a kind of poet who spends millions wildly because of momentary sentiments, who enjoys being expansively generous to his editor, and who is at the same time a tyrant, "behind the curtain of sentiment" (p. 65). Elsewhere in the novel Crane does refer in passing to the school of war correspondents Kipling produced in The Light That Failed (1890). Wars, says the London correspondent of the Eclipse, are getting dull. "There is sorrow in the lodges of the lone wolves, the war correspondents" (p. 77). Yet later Crane seems wryly to accept these Kipling types, veterans of journalism in the 137 •

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Sudan, India, South Africa, for they all share a spirit of adventure in the "extraordinary business of seeing how men kill each other" (p. 106). Crane also derides American newspaper readers; they turn the Wainwright affair into romance and even buy in great quantities a new puzzle game called Find the Wainwright Party (p. 270). These journalistic humors, unfortunately, are nearly lost amid the verbiage devoted to Coleman's romantic quests. Crane indicates in two ways his awareness that the love scenes are ridiculous. First, Professor Wainwright understands that the situation of an obdurate father and a rebellious daughter comes straight out of books and plays, and he tries to refrain from acting the part of "an exceedingly dense gentleman with white whiskers, who does all the unintelligent things in the plot" (p. 48). Despite his and Coleman's "cynical knowledge of drama" (p. 170), the professor, by the novel's end, is filling the traditional, sentimental role of a bereaved father, desperately worried that his beloved daughter will languish and die from the loss of her loved one. "If one of his hands' loss could have spared her, there would have been a sacrifice of his hand, but he was potent for nothing. He could only groan and stare at the wall" (p. 253). The second indication that Crane comprehends the absurdity of his plot comes from Coleman's consciousness of his own role-playing. For the first third of the novel, he is an antihero, scoffing at his every move, explaining how his actions are a conscious travesty of romance. When Marjorie rejects him, he becomes the model of understanding, fraternal, generous patronage, smiles fondly, and renounces her. Later, when he really does feel the self-pity of a rejected lover, he tries to get drunk because "I understand on good authority that in old times lovers used to languish" 138 •

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(p. 58). Coleman will not languish, because he casts off such medieval ideas, yet he plays the chivalric role for all it is worth. He is "a knight impatient and savage at being kept for a time out of the saddle" (p. 78); on a great quest, he expects "even as in the theatre" music to accompany his heroic progress (p. 86). He will rescue his lady fair, even though his movement through the war-infested Greek hills — while he is dressed in new khaki and accompanied by a venal and cowardly dragoman as squire — is not quite the usual way for a knight to go "out to recover a lost love" (p. 91). But for all his mocking self-consciousness, Coleman eventually comes to believe in his role. He calls his search modern chivalry, and sees the event as "romantic, romantic . . . . It was from another age, and even the actors could not deface the purity of the picture." Despite the reality of wet matches, Coleman takes "a solemn and knightly joy of this adventure, and there were as many portraits of his lady envisioning before him as ever held the heart of an armour-encased young gentleman of mediaeval poetry" (pp. 93, 94). He enjoys the fate that endows him with proper knightly appearance — armed, on horse, and in danger. Crane's problem, and the novel's, is that no matter how conscious the author and the hero are of the parody of medieval romance inherent in the story, and no matter how often the hero undercuts his pomposity by references to his role as knightly lover, still both Coleman and Crane allow the plot to become that which it started out to parody. Coleman's sentimental journey is a shining affair, and his romance defines the course of the plot. The key passage that explains the title is only faintly, too faintly, ironic. "He was on active service, an active service of the heart, and he felt that he was a strong man ready to conquer difficulty even as the olden heroes conquered difficulty. He imagined himself in a way 139 •

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like them. He, too, had come out to fight for love with giants, dragons, and witches. He had never known that he could be so pleased with that kind of parallel" (p. 1 1 9 ) . To be sure, reality does slice through the romantic posturings in places. As we shall see, the novel includes many sensitive and shattering views of men at war. And when Coleman awaits an attack by Albanian mercenaries, he is "no longer a hero going to rescue his love" (p. 124). He understands that his role-playing is juvenile and not really "adventure." His fear is realistic, his quavering mimicry of a soldier shouting "Halt, who's there?" at an unknown enemy most effective. But at this point the comic plot betrays us all, reader, writer, and hero. The "enemy" here is the Wainwright party, and the adventurous love plot begins to be taken seriously. True, just as this recognition scene has burlesque qualities, so Coleman will continue occasionally to assume mock-heroic stances, to pretend to be cool; to act out theatrically the part of "cold, masterful, enigmatic man" (p. 1 3 1 ) ; to stand guard like a stage hero — "Then he whispered the conventional words 'Go to sleep if you can. You'll need your strength in the morning. I and this man here will keep watch'" (p. 1 3 3 ) . Nevertheless, the romance ruins the reality. The professor says later, " I feel in this radiant atmosphere that there could be no such thing as war" (p. 249); and he is correct. The radiant atmosphere of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl destroys both parody and reality. As one of the students remarks when Coleman and Marjorie, after a few hundred pages of offagain, on-again relations, announce their engagement, this is "plumb romance" (p. 292). Indeed. For all Coleman's guilty acknowledgments that he is playing with skill his part as a Richard Harding Davis adventurer, the selfdirected irony only slightly vitiates the sentimental aura. 140 •

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When he and Marjorie declare their love, he remembers what a stage hero should do — and does it. The lovers embrace in a scene common to a thousand magazine stories; and while the author, almost as a reflex, refers flippantly to "the immortal sentence, a sentence which, curiously enough, is common to the drama, to the novel and to life" (p. 281), the flippancy is forced, an embarrassed recognition of how far he has let his story take him. It is revealing that Crane here yokes drama, novel, and life, whereas in his better fiction he remains acutely conscious of the sharp line that separates the last item from the previous two. Crane loses any realization of cliché when he allows such lines to be presented without irony: " 'But you are mine, remember,' he said fiercely and sternly. 'You are mine — for ever — as I am yours — remember.' Her eyes half closed. She made intensely solemn answer. 'Yes.' He released her and was gone" (p. 220). Shades of Graustarkl That Crane should descend into such unconscious self-parody represents a real fall from parodie grace, a fall which I think was dictated by Crane's desire to write a popular novel. And, as was not the case with The Red Badge of Courage, here Crane did not resist the urge to write a potboiler. Perhaps we would not strongly feel Crane's betrayal of his own best technique — a treachery that leads the novel into melodramatic seduction scenes, musical comedy triangles, conventional, heavily padded, frothy silliness — were it not for the fact that, in addition to the early parody, the novel commences with some superbly realistic war passages and a rather witty and honest love story. Within this fat romantic novel, a slim book about war and Shavian sexual combat is struggling to get out. Unfortunately, the trivial adventures of the Wainwright party drown out the war passages, and the bathos of the foolish love scenes between the 141 •

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blonde, simpering Marjorie and the distraught Coleman evade the long logic beneath the novel, which calls for the carrying out to its conclusion of the relationship between the dark, passionate Nora and the casual, tough-minded Coleman. * As in all Crane's writing, good or bad, intimately observed details brighten the prose. Crane renders in his best realistic mode the narrow streets of New York, the warm wind blowing off the Queenstown shore, a newspapermen's poker game, 6 the smoky passages of London, and, particularly, the battlefields of Greece. Also dealt with realistically, within Victorian conventions, is the bitter love-hate struggle between Coleman and Nora Black. There is a powerful mutual attraction between the actress and the reporter, as well as a hint of a previous liaison, and their meetings flash with ironic dialogue. In a restaurant scene Nora, knowing Coleman can overhear, tells a hoard of admirers what kind of man really attracts her; the clever indirection of the dialogue is wickedly funny, and after hearing it Coleman goes to bed and thinks of war (p. 80). The conjunction of the terms bed and war reflects, I think, the story that Crane wanted to write but could never quite bring himself to. While Nora's appearances, even her heavily uncharacteristic attempt to seduce Coleman, add interest to a tedious story, the nervous author seems only too willing to let his sentimental love story replace any truly passionate affair. * This, too, would interest the Freudian critic, for in Crane's life the Nora Black figure was Cora Crane, who did catch the correspondent. The fantasy life revealed in this novel parallels that of The Third Violet: Crane dreams of the American girl, pristine in purity, and rejects the scarlet woman—the reverse of his real relationships. Here Crane also gains a measure of psychic revenge for whatever indignities were visited upon him during his short college career, in the scenes where Professor Wainwright is reduced to begging humbly for Coleman's help.

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And so it is with the war that he starts to handle with intense power and detailed immediacy. Nowhere in Crane's works are certain descriptive passages from Active Service surpassed. Soldiers under artillery fire, hospital corps men burying a dead Turk, the sense of being under rifle fire, provide a genuinely realistic vein of iron underneath the novel's romantic flabbiness. The Crane who wrote such brilliant dispatches as "A Fragment of Velestino" (1897) draws from his reportorial notebooks set pieces like one that shows how the author tested The Red Badge of Courage and found it to be all right — Stephen Crane's avowed purpose in going to Greece. Rejecting his Napoleonic visions of cavalry glory, just as Henry Fleming cast off his visions of a Greeklike struggle, Coleman comes to an understanding of the shock effects of war upon the mind, the terror brought on by the first spitting of the guns, the humiliation of the noncombatant in relation to the regular soldier. Crane reworks many of the events of "Death and the Child" in Active Service, but only momentarily. Again, he seems tempted to tell the real story of the young reporter, resplendent in his new uniform, who sees the meaningless, dehumanizing brutality of combat. And again, Crane's nerve fails him; this story too must give way to jolly picnics that remind us of the historical romances of Charles Lever, and to the comic opera plot that is at once rambling, conventional, and a species of self-travesty. When Nora Black ironically calls Coleman Lochinvar, she calls attention to the romanticizing that betrays the novel Crane might have written, not about a lovelorn Lochinvar, but about the reporter's mission in war, where "common men, and many uncommon men, when they go away to the fighting ground, out of the sight, out of the hearing of the world known to them, and are eager to perform feats of war in this new place, feel an absolute long143 •

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ing for a spectator. . . . The war correspondent arises, then, to become a sort of cheap telescope for the people at home" (pp. g8f). Briefly, Crane attains marvels as in the scene that displays a pitiful group of one officer, one dragoman, and Coleman being hailed as a conquering army by delighted Greek villagers and pelted with flowers in a burlesque of a triumphal military procession. Unfortunately, the written novel is what must concern us, not the buried, hinted novel. And Active Service, which begins in parody, concludes as just another example of the genre that the work should have parodied, sentimental romance. The prolix rhetoric is wasted on the flimsy plot that is allowed to dominate the novel rather than being made to give way to realism. Love, for a certainty, conquers all in Active Service as in The Third Violet. Furthermore, Stephen Crane knew quite well that these novels possessed no moral content. In his other studies of men at war with environment or with other men, Crane allowed his characters to work out their destinies according to the demands of some standard of moral commitment. Only sentimental tradition orders the worlds of The Third Violet and Active Service. In an interesting manner, Crane's most obvious artistic lapses dovetail. His later war stories fail because they are too realistic; his love stories fail because they are too romantic. In both cases, irony is absent.

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The Destructive Element To the maiden The sea was blue meadow, Alive with little froth-people Singing. To the sailor, wrecked, The sea was dead grey walls Superlative in vacancy, Upon which nevertheless at fateful time Was written The grim hatred of nature. —Crane, War Is Kind, m

1 HE OPEN BOAT" is one of the great sea tales of world literature, and the story has the power and tragic import attained by only a few of the vast number of writers — particularly in the nineteenth century — who have told of man's struggles against the wind and waves. Only in the works of Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad are there passages that surpass Crane's achievement in this particular kind of short story, although novelists from Defoe through Scott and Cooper to Stevenson and Kipling used the sea as a setting for accounts of man's voyage through life. Contrary to the practice of his war fiction, however, Crane 145 •

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limited his writing about the sea to a very few pieces, most of which were journalistic. "The Open Boat" is a sport in the Crane canon, not only because the short story has a setting that Crane rarely employed, but also because the tale is not, in the fullest sense of the term as we have applied it to Crane's other work, essentially parodic. It is instructive to seek an understanding of why, in this particular work of fiction, the parodic effects are very faint. Most of Crane's sea writing, small in bulk though it is, seems to be parodic, heavily so. These parodies, however, were all youthful jeux d'esprit. After Crane's own shattering experience in an open boat, he seemed unable to jest about the hackneyed — so far as literature is concerned — convention of men in open boats or on rafts struggling for survival. For the first time in his life he had been a participant in such a struggle, not a voluntary and temporary observer, and in the two stories that followed his newspaper report of his own toil against the sea ("Stephen Crane's Own Story" [1897]) the experience led Crane far beyond the parodic principle. Although both "The Open Boat" and "Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure" scoff at some traditions of sea fiction, the humor is sporadic and strained. It seems clear that the sea provided a superb objective correlative for Crane's vision of life. Here was nature's force, violent and indifferent, laid against man's endeavors, puny and tragicomic. The parodic tone became muted partly because of the excessive shaping power of his own awesome experience at sea and partly because of the tensions that were as natural to life at sea (and in battle) as to his literary technique. In The Red Badge of Courage Crane chose to destroy romantic visions by the realities of war, and the parody in that novel is indirect; "The Open Boat," 146 •

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like Conrad's Lord Jim, opposes to the familiar heroic picture of the sailor a realistic view of the awful yet petty war with the huge ocean.® There were a number of traditional patterns in nineteenth-century sea fiction, some as old as Homer, others more recent. Writers such as James Fenimore Cooper and Richard Henry Dana, as well as the Herman Melville of White-Jacket, concentrated on the idea, popularized by Smollett, of the ship as a microcosm of society. Thus Captain Marryatt was primarily interested in naval institutions, Dana in naval reforms, Cooper in naval battles. The sea was usually sublime, free, challenging, limitless — a frontier. For these authors, as for later writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling, the ship provided, in Thomas Philbrick's formula, either "an escape from the corrupting distortions and oppressive restrictions of civilized society or . . . an epic weapon . . . with which the seaman could do battle with his elemental antagonist."1 To be sure, Melville and Conrad reverted to an older tradition of wonder at the power not of men and ships, but of nature and waves. In his later fiction Cooper also envisioned the voyage as an ordeal that put men "in confrontation with the ultimate realities of life, realities that at once display man's capacity for nobility and lay bare his essential frailty."2 I think that Stephen Crane, for a brief moment a sailor like Cooper, Melville, and Conrad, shared this view. As the sea serves Melville (and the river provides a symbolic reference • Conrad and Crane admired each other's sea writing; Conrad praised "The Open Boat" highly, and Crane originally sought Conrad's friendship because of an admiration for The Nigger of the "Narcissus." One of Crane s rare literary pronouncements refers to this story. Conrad, said Crane, came nearer to an ownership of the mysterious life on the ocean than anyone else who wrote during the nineteenth century. See "Concerning the English "Academy"' ( 1 8 9 8 ) , Stephen Crane: Uncollected Writings, ed. Olov W. Fryckstedt (Uppsala, 1963), P- 3°4-

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for Twain and Hemingway), for Crane the great waters both destroy and revivify. Most sea fiction, however, was not particularly serious. Seamen were usually drawn as clear-eyed, simple, and supremely strong. The general run of sea fiction was luridly melodramatic, concentrating on battles with pirates, wild sea chases,* the salvation of fair maidens from the clutches of villainous captains (even such a naturalist as Jack London swallowed this convention whole), terrible storms, and miraculous rescues. Characters were stereotypes: gentleman sailors, Byronic outcasts, wise old salts (Melville rang changes on all these types), innocent cabin boys. The titles of the spate of dime novels that appeared during the latter decades of the nineteenth century reveal something of the flavor of popular sea stories: The Sea Siren; or, The Fugitive Privateer: A Romance of Ocean Trails (1886); The Fleet Scourge; or, The Sea Wings of Salem: A Romance of Whalers and Sea Rovers (1889). As for the convention that "The Open Boat" most nearly approaches, that of the wreck and the subsequent ordeal in the ship's boats — a tradition of survival harking back to Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson — such works as A. F. Holt's The Ocean Drift; or, The Fight for Two Lives: A Sea and Shore Romance (1889) or Mayne Reid's The Ocean Waifs (1864) indicate that whatever ordeals men suffered on the sea, they triumphed over nature, usually by incredible fortitude and virtue. William Clark Russell's The Wreck of the Grosvener (1877) is explicit in assigning the rescue of the beautiful heroine to the individual bravery and nobility of her para* Crane laughed at this tradition (and at himself) in an 1898 dispatch "Chased by a Big 'Spanish—Man O'—War'" in which the "enemy" turns out to be an American ship. " A stern chase! Shades of Marryatt and Cooper."

Uncollected Writings, p. 332.

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mour, who single-handed defeats the sea.3 In general, nineteenth-century sea fiction stressed adventure, battle, or criticism of naval customs. Melville and Conrad, and in one story Stephen Crane, raised the level of this genre from the specialized to the universal. One of Stephen Crane's sketches (date unknown), "Dan Emmonds," is a wild spoof of many aspects of sea fiction. Crane called the piece "strong in satire, but rather easy writing."4 Dan Emmonds reverses every characteristic of the ordinary seafaring hero. The drunken son of an Irish saloonkeeper, Dan is such a failure that his father finally sends him to sea — on the ship Susan L. Terwilleger. Crane's narrative is fashioned out of clichés. "I discovered that I was afloat on what has always been called the deep blue sea."5 Dan and the captain drink and philosophize while the ship goes to ruin; naturally they run into a terrible storm, the worst "since Robinson Crusoe's ships used to sail up and down mountains" (p. 62). The antihero remains near the captain's rum and prays for land. Crane hits at the literary tradition of sea yarns in his portraits of the frightened officers and crew who "could only console themselves with thinking of what they might tell of it afterward" (p. 62). Crane undercuts all views of naval heroics. The officers drink themselves into a stupor; the second mate, as the ship nears destruction, speaks civilly to some of the men — and, Crane adds with heavy irony, since the mate is an old naval officer, this civility must mean that death is near. So much for the kind of editorializing about discipline that marks Two Years Before the Mast. Next Crane laughs at the shipwreck tradition, using both exaggeration and travesty. The ship flies into a thousand pieces, the hero sinks "over two hundred feet in the sea" (p. 63). He manages to seize that 149 •

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omnipresent prop in wrecks, a hencoop, and to last out the storm. To make the survival myth seem more ridiculous, the author adds another bit of flotsam to the hencoop, a dead pig named Bartholomew. The remainder of the sketch deals with the customs of rescue, a lovely South Sea island, fierce natives. Having read Mayne Reid or his followers, Dan is quite able to treat with the natives. "First of all, I pay my respects to your old venerable king if you have one; if not, to your beautiful maiden queen and to the aged high priest with the long whiskers . . . ," (p. 64). While Crane's other early sea pieces are not as directly parodic as "Dan Emmonds," they are equally light-hearted. In "The Captain" (1892), a mocking profile of an excursion boat pilot on Long Island Sound, Crane burlesques nautical language. "His wit just runs slowly before the wind, comes into collision with you in a dull, heavy fashion, swings clear and drifts away until the sails fill again. . . . You have to take in sail generally to meet it. . . ."6 The sea here is sparkling, clear, and refreshing, and in "The Reluctant Voyagers" (1893), a humorous anecdote of two men in bathing suits whose raft drifts out to sea, the ocean is also benign. The only somber note in Crane's early sea writing sounds in a couple of newspaper columns dealing with renowned New Jersey ghost stories. "Ghosts on the Jersey Coast" (1894), retelling a legend of pirates who would lure ships close to the rocky shore in order to plunder them, describes a shipwreck in grim tones that would be echoed in Stephen Crane's own adventure two years later. In this story, men cling to the rigging and look yearningly toward the shore. "They clung in bunches, lines, irregular groups, reminding one of some kind of insects. Sometimes a monstrous white wave would thunder over the ship, bearing off perhaps two or three sailors whose grasp it had torn away 150 •

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and tumbling the bodies into the wide swirl of foam that covered the sea."7 Just as Crane's war novel anticipated the actualities he would discover in Greece and Cuba, so these sea sketches set the scene for the climax of "The Open Boat." In "The Ghostly Sphinx of Metedeconck" (1895), during a night of tremendous breakers, bodies from the foam arrive on the beach. "No boat could live in such a sea. . . . Bodies began to wash up and the fishermen . . . devoted their attention to trying to recall the life in these limp, pale things that the sea cast up one by one."8 "Stephen Crane's Own Story," the news report he filed about his personal adventure, appeared on the front page of the New York Press on January 7, 1897. Crane gives a clear report of his filibustering expedition, from the first moments aboard the Commodore — the ship that is to take Cuban insurrectionists and ammunition from Jacksonville to the island of Cuba — until the ship finally sinks in a storm and the crew take to the boats and eventually reach shore. A sense of personal excitement keeps breaking through the unadorned, measured prose of the newspaper story. Crane seems to be exulting in the details of an event in which he has actually participated; no longer the imagination, but the memory, informs the violent events. The news story describes the Commodore only vaguely. At first the ship seems powerful and placid, but the sound of its whistle is a sad wail. For the reporter, however, there is a feeling of exhilaration because of the danger, even though custom insists that he hide his emotions. Crane allows the unromantic facts to stand out; the ship rams into a mud bank, and they "were men on a ship stuck in the mud. A certain mental somersault was made once more necessary."9 The characters who reappear in "The Open Boat" 151 •

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are first described in the newspaper article— the portly cook, the tough captain, and a "certain young oiler named Billy Higgins" (p. 238), who leads the engine-room bailers. The reporter and these three end up in a boat together after the ship goes down. The emphasis of Crane's report is on the first moments of the wreck — the attempts at towing rafts, the seemingly gratuitous death of the first mate, who hurls himself into the sea with a look that shows "it was rage, rage, rage unspeakable that was in his heart at the time" (p. 241). Crane is tight-lipped throughout the whole open boat part of the report, as if he had already conceived the fiction to be formed from these facts and wished to reserve his essential story. "The history of life in an open boat for thirty hours would no doubt be instructive for the young, but none is to be told here and now" (p. 242). Crane the reporter insists that he would like to tell this story at once in order to make evident the "splendid manhood" of Captain Edward Murphy, who gave orders in the wild waves as if he were on a battleship, and of Billy Higgins, who, according to the dispatch's closing lines, was found "lying with his forehead on sand that was clear of the water, and he was dead" (p. 243). Crane the artist, however, reserved the story of Captain Murphy for "Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure" (published in August 1897); in "The Open Boat" (published in June 1897) Crane told the story of Billy Higgins, and of the correspondent — and of man versus the sea. The profundity of Crane's personal experience obviously is important to the fiction, for, as he says in the news story, "Here was death, but here also was a most singular and indefinable kind of fortitude" (p. 241). The documentary article sticks to the facts that can be related without the distortion or heightening that marks the dis152 •

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tinction between reportage and art — even realistic art. And Crane's sea fiction also probes the meaning of death by water as well as the nature of life in a small boat. For the rendering of these complex events — as disturbing, intellectually, to Crane as was the death of the nuns at sea to Gerard Manley Hopkins — Crane's own sense of involvement as a participant insists upon a mood of irony charged with compassion.* "Stephen Crane's Own Story," and even "Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure," might have been the work of the traditional cynical newsman; "The Open Boat" towers above these works largely because of its urgency and pain. One is reminded of Malcolm Cowley's defense of American naturalists: "The sense of moral fitness is strong in them; they believe in their hearts that nature should be kind, that virtue should be rewarded on earth, that men should control their own destinies. More than other writers, they are wounded by ugliness and injustice, but they will not close their eyes to either . . ."10 Crane's fiction adds details and rhetoric to his true story, adornments that an early realist aesthetician has described as permissible if these accessories are effective in "making the characters harmonize more with the events in which they take part." 11 It is noteworthy that Crane concentrates in his sea fiction on materials that he held out of a news story. Although "Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure" is not one of Stephen Crane's finest stories, it is of interest as a version of the events that take place before * According to W . H. Auden, writers such as Melville and Hopkins— and, I would add, Crane—have a more difficult time than authors who describe purely imaginary voyages, for with the former "there is the extra complication of the relation of objective reality to subjective meaning." Auden, The EnchafSd Flood ( N e w York, 1950), pp. 74-75.

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the men find themselves in the open boat, and as a different and more diffuse reworking of the author's sea experience. The story has much more breadth than "The Open Boat" and much less depth. "Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure" starts slowly with a disquisition on filibustering and the type of man most fit for the occupation. Men of silence are better than men of mere bravery, for the filibustering industry characteristically involves smuggling. After these generalizations about the technique and history of using ships to transfer men and arms illegally to Cuba, Crane focuses on an interview between a shrewd lawyer ("who knew one side of a fence from the other side when he looked sharply") and an inarticulate captain who cannot answer the overwhelming question, "Why do you want to go?" (XII, 181). Like Crane's later military heroes, the captain is silent about his motives. Neither glory, nor pay, nor the prospect of a land grant attracts the captain; he will go just for fun. And this reason, according to the filibustering ethic, is sufficient. The story is not, however, really about filibustering. It is about the eternal triangle made up of a man, his ship, and the sea — three parts of an impossible affair. The captain, Flanagan, is a different man once aboard his ship. "His shore meekness and uncertainty were gone. He was cleareyed and strong, aroused like a mastiff at night" (p. 182). The object of his devotion, his steamer, is but a parody of a ship, a seaworthy icehouse that splashes through the water "as genially as an old wooden clock" (p. 182). Flanagan's love for the sea surpasses any love for a woman and makes the vessel that enables him to be at sea a worthy love object, no matter how ridiculous in appearance. Although Flanagan had in the past been captain of (or, in Crane's term, had for a sweetheart) a great tanker, Thunder Voice, 154 •

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he is happier on the tiny Foundling, which can cater to his "ant of desire-to-see-what-it's-like" (p. 182). The crew of frank, bold men share a delight in the prospect of danger and in their recognition of the risks involved in a ship whose gleaming engine is as whimsical as a gas meter. When the engine fails, the crew become conscious of the third point of the triangle, the sea. The ocean is wide, and a ship provides little room for one's feet. When the men grow sullen over their predicament, the captain proves his authority by dealing a broken jaw to a recalcitrant stoker. Crane's prose grows fairly arch over this incident, and his report of fate's ironies is equally coy: "The first mate was a fine officer, and so a wave crashed him into the deck-house and broke his arm. The cook was a good cook, and so the heave of the ship flung him heels over head with a pot of boiling water and caused him to lose interest in everything save his legs" (p. 185). Despite engine trouble and a surly and injured crew, the filibustering work advances. The ship connects with the gunrunners (in a scene that reminds one of Hemingway's To Have and Have Not) and Flanagan, chomping on his cigar, loads on the guns, ammunition, and thirty-nine seasick Cubans. Once again the stokers fail to live up to the austere requirements of the captain's love affair with his ship; they get drunk on Cuban whiskey and are battered in the ensuing brawl. And since the captain has himself battered one of them, they are all responsible for the precarious situation of sailing with the "crew in a sling" (p. 189). Nevertheless, matters seem to go well; Flanagan feels pride in the ease with which he unloads the cargo, and his clever seamanship averts the threat of a warship that is speeding to arrest them. Despite the greater power of his adversary, Flanagan brilliantly maneuvers his little craft 155 •

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around the great guns, rams the Spanish gunboat, and comfortably steams away. His victory seems complete. He has overcome the weaknesses of his engines and of his own crew, and he has outfoxed the enemy. But these antagonists were men or man-made, and therefore conquerable. Flanagan congratulates himself: "We've had a great deal of a time, and we've come through it all right, and thank Heaven it is all over" (p. 195). The irony of the captain's hubris is underlined by the author's juxtaposition of "thank Heaven" to "The sky in the north-east was of a dull brick-red in tone, shaded here and there by black masses that billowed out in some fashion from the flat heavens" (p. 195). The heavens — nature — can do to the Foundling what neither men's own weak natures nor the enemy's malevolence have accomplished. The battered ship rises to meet another and yet another wave, and the crew prepare to launch the boats. The events follow the outline of Crane's newspaper report. The old chief engineer tearfully announces the ultimate failure of his engine, and the jealous mistress, the sea, wrecks the love affair between Flanagan and his ship. Despite his years of service to the sea, the captain sees in the engineroom a novel sight: water strangles the machinery, the fires are dying, the stokers moodily lie around as if dying themselves. In an effective moralizing passage, Crane supplies the rationale for the sea tragedy. "Now the way of a good ship on the sea is finer than swordplay; but this is when she is alive. If a time comes that the ship dies, then her way is the way of a floating old glove . . . a corpse" (p. 197). The ship, in accordance with Crane's customary way of handling inanimate objects, is personified; it groans and struggles. Flanagan remains in control of himself, if not of the sea, and counters its force with the strength of his commanding personality; and the men, "precisely as they had submitted 156 •

THE D E S T R U C T I V E E L E M E N T to the sea . . . submitted to Flanagan" (p. 198). In these last moments, the captain grows in stature as the men diminish. They are stunned, while Flanagan begins to understand some of the great questions posed by the sea — "doom and its weight and complexion" (p. 198). Yet he is only too human. When the Foundling sinks to a quiet death like an animal curling down in the grass, the captain rages at his fate, whirls, and knocks his head against the gunwhale of the small boat. Crane narrates no more of the sea adventure, and the tale ends, faithful to the facts of the news report, with the men in the boats, the captain sobbing and cursing. Here, however, Crane diverges from fact and appends a version of subsequent events that differs both from actuality and from the fictional account given in "The Open Boat." In "Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure" Crane chooses to stress the vapid stupidity of those on the shore, those untempered by a sea journey. While the more famous story hints at the foolishness and ineffectuality of those not in the open boat, the point of view remains essentially that of the angrily despairing men, and is thus suspect — hardly objective — and subject to revision when help does come from the shore. But in the earlier narrative the author's heavy irony directs the quite detailed description of a dance at the Imperial Inn, a "charming dance" where the revelers refuse to believe any report of trouble at sea. Crane displays the fountain in the courtyard softly splashing, couples promenading through isles of palms, a band playing sleepy waltzes, a mockingbird singing; and when the dancers finally believe that there has been a shipwreck, they are delighted to have an object to awaken their jaded interest. A tone of levity prevails, for, although the women seem about to sympathize, the men 157 •

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are sure that no drowning at sea can take place while they are at a dance. Crane sounds a note of parody here as he looks askance at the tradition of the brave women awaiting the news from the sea. His female watcher complains querulously of the damp sand. Crane's narrative strategy is sure. By satirizing the shore-bound inanities, he indirectly sympathizes with the undescribed terrors of the shipwrecked. The two worlds — of the shore with its lawyers, hotels, dances, and women, and of the sea with its sailors, ships, wrecks, and men — can never meet. Which world is actually dead and which is alive, Crane does not testify. Perhaps, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, the sea world is dead, once having lived, having found the vitality of the strenuous life, while the shore world is powerless to be born, being trivial. And Flanagan? "Save for the white glare of the breakers, the sea was a great wind-crossed void. From the throng of charming women floated the perfume of many flowers. Later there floated to them a body with a calm face of an Irish type" (p. 200).* As in "Dover Beach," the waves bring only a message of human misery, an eternal note of sadness. Stephen Crane ends his story with a disclaimer, "The expedition of the Foundling will never be historic" (p. 200). Still, Crane created in "Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure" a short story that for all its uncertainty of tone and looseness of plot and language is an interesting paragraph in the literature of the sea. "The Open Boat," on the other hand, is a fascinating chapter in American sea literature. "The Open Boat" is a story of human behavior under extreme pressure, of the eternal conflict between man and nature, of the individual's night sea journey to self-knowl* I assume that this is Flanagan, according to the logic of the story, although the oiler, unmentioned here, is also Irish.

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edge. The setting is incidental; Crane is not interested in nautical details, the exotic color of sea life. Yet the sea and the actions of four men in an open boat do provide a metaphorical framework for Crane's story. The boat, throughout Western literature, has been a key symbol. According to W. H. Auden, there are two views of a ship: as a vessel isolated in the ocean — thus a microcosm of society — and as a vehicle of escape from the shore — thus an image of freedom. The boat in which the correspondent comes to some kind of terms with external nature and with his own nature fits simultaneously both of Auden's categories. "If thought of as isolated in the midst of the ocean, a ship can stand for mankind and human society moving through time and struggling with its destiny. If thought of as leaving the land for the ocean, it stands for a particular kind of man and society as contrasted with the average land dwelling kind." 12 The correspondent's ordeal at sea will be at once an escape from and an immersion in society. The impact of Crane's sea story on the reader comes from the sense of human engagement that permeates the traditional apparatus of sea fiction and transforms the tightly wrought prose into a richly symbolic narrative. Characters, events, scene, dialogue, plot, extension of time, all the elements of the short story are selected with care in "The Open Boat," selected from the diffuse observation that went into Crane's two other treatments of his shipwreck experience. In "The Open Boat," as in The Red Badge of Courage and The Monster, Crane simplifies his material and attempts to reduce his setting to the barest essentials, in order to approach the ultimate meaning and value implicit in the events. While the philosophy behind this tale may seem naturalistic, even nihilistic, and Crane's view of nature is undoubtedly harsh, the technique is real159 •

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istic, although at times it borders on the surrealistic. Selection, individuation, analysis, stylizing, sardonic humor, and immense control mark the substance of "The Open Boat," just as spareness and ruggedness characterize a prose that often in the past was almost too rich. Indeed, if one were to make a case for "The Open Boat" as parody, one might argue that Crane is ridiculing the excesses of an absolutist, naturalistic prose and a rigid, deterministic philosophy. For the fittest does not survive here; yet human eifort does, for most of the men, defeat nature, albeit quixotically. I think that the force of Crane's own involvement in these events extends his realistic range further than anywhere else in his fiction. Since the action at sea was his best and truest (and last) engagement with the elemental forces that always amazed him, he must set the record straight, as a realist. Whatever parodic elements are present in "The Open Boat" are there in passing. Crane's commitment was too subjective to allow for the full exercise of wit that marks the openings of most of his works of parodic realism; the burlesque element is eliminated. For "The Open Boat" is itself the story of Stephen Crane's short life, a constant battle with the stormy elements that led to both victory (his permanent art) and defeat (his early death). And in his deathbed hallucinations, it is reported, Crane was still trying to change places in the boat. 13 In his subtitle to "The Open Boat" Crane calls it "A Tale Intended to be After the Fact" (XII, 27), an ambiguous statement perhaps referring to the idea that factual events control the fiction; or that the "Experience of Four Men from the Sunk Steamer Commodore" takes place after the fact of the sinking itself, treated elsewhere; or, indeed, that fiction must be written after the occurrence of the factual happenings and is inevitably after — at a remove from — 160

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the fact. Even before the story proper begins, Crane's prose has its uncertainties. The story is paradoxical in form and idea, and ends as it begins — in doubt. The polarities set up by the struggle of four men to guide an open boat through a wild sea to land are threefold: man is helpless, yet the individual ego is all-engrossing; nature is indifferent, yet its opposition is overwhelming; the shore (safety, life) is within sight, yet the sea (danger, death) makes the land seem far away. In spare prose and terse dialogue "The Open Boat" treats the existential dilemma of the absurdity of man's immersion in the destructive element. The story's opening sentence seemed to many of Crane's contemporaries to be one of the great lines in English prose fiction. "None of them knew the colour of the sky." The simple phrase is packed with meaning. The reader infers the isolation of the men, their unity in the ordeal, the indifference — colorlessness — of nature, the men's limited viewpoint, the monotony and boredom of their lot. Crane will use the phrase as a leitmotiv to emphasize these concepts, and the emphasis seems all the heavier to the reader accustomed to Crane's full, often too full, splashing of color. Here is language coming through the narrator, not the narrator expressing himself through language.14 This opening line indicates the enigmatic quality of nature and life, as well as the narrowness of men's understanding. For even in a dark coal mine, men know the color of the sky: "Overhead stretched a sky of imperial blue, incredibly far away from the sombre land."15 And even in the crew's extremity in "The Ancient Mariner," the sun "right up above the mast,/Had fixed her to the ocean."16 Often in sea fiction the degree of visibility is an emblem for the degree of conscious knowledge, and fog often stands for self-delusion.17 Therefore the opening line suggests the limits of man's self-knowledge and 161 •

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understanding of heaven and earth. Some knowledge, however, they do have, for "all of the men knew the colours of the sea" (p. 29); they do comprehend their immediate situation. The four characters in the boat are, in some ways, caricatures of conventional shipwreck survivors. The correspondent, through whose consciousness most of the narration passes, is at the start pretentious, querulous, filled with selfi r o n y — hardly a heroic figure. His language is mocking, turning the boat into a bathtub and the waves into wrongful and barbaric heights. He watches the waves and wonders why he is there, like all uncommitted, born observers, or correspondents. The cook, as in the previous tale, is fat and comic. The injured captain is morose and indifferent — a realistic characterization but, again, the reverse of heroic. At this point Crane analyzes the captain's feelings more fully than those of the others. Even the bravest and most enduring must mourn when "the firm fails, the army loses, the ship goes down" (p. 30). The captain recalls seven upturned faces (three remain), the stump of the ship's topmast. He is the man of responsibility who at sea, in war, in business — in the world, in other words — must bear the burden of failure, a pang "beyond oration or tears" (p. 30). He rarely comments on their situation, only issues brief orders when necessary. The oiler, the fourth man in the open boat, is scarcely individualized. Our knowledge of him accrues gradually throughout the story, as if Crane were deliberately underplaying the description so that the reader may come to know the oiler by his actions, for he is the man who does, not contemplates. Although his end is, therefore, all the less expected, Crane does prepare us for it in this first section, as many readers have noticed. The oiler, physically in charge as usual, is steering with one oar. "It was a thin little 162 •

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oar, and it seemed often ready to snap" (p. 29). Although, like Conrad's Singleton in The Nigger of the "Narcissus," the oiler steers with care, his hold on life is also thin and ready to snap — the human condition. This first section sets the scene for their test. As in The Red Badge of Courage, but much earlier in the game, the men must ascertain a fundamental fact about life, that a danger passed only means that another danger is on its way. For Henry Fleming, another enemy attack was an indignity; for the men in the boat, scrambling over the walls of water like bucking bronchos, the "next menace" (p. 30) already seems inevitable. In his irony Crane terms this need to surmount another wave a singular disadvantage of the sea, but there is nothing singular about it, and the sea, like war, represents life. What the men learn about the resources of the sea and its waves seems unique, of course, and "not probable to the average experience which is never at sea in a dinghy" (p. 3 1 ) ; but as Crane insists throughout his tale, and throughout his fiction, we are all at sea. (Life, said Melville, is a ship on a passage out.) The waves display the "terrible grace" of life itself. A parodic hint comes from Crane's understanding of the mechanics of point of view in fiction. The author, and the reader, can see the absurdity of these weak, futile men. "Viewed from a balcony, the whole thing would doubtless have been weirdly picturesque" (p. 3 1 ) ; most nineteenthcentury sea fiction is seen from afar and is shown to be picturesque. Crane's comment reveals remarkable insight into the problems of narration, for the concrete situation of men in a wave-surrounded boat in contrast to the position of author and reader — above and beyond — can be abstracted into the familiar fictional difficulty where the characters must not know as much as the author and his listener. We 163 •

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know the colors, but the characters cannot. They must infer, by light reflecting from the sky to the surface of the ocean, the time of day, while we, on our balcony, see daybreak. "They were aware only of this effect upon the colour of the waves that rolled toward them" (p. 31). The introductory section closes on a note of hope. The cook is sure that they are nearing a house of refuge or a lifesaving station; this hope fascinates the correspondent. The oiler, in the stern, facing the shore and in a position to see, is realistic and repeats, "We're not there yet" (p. 32). The second of the seven sections explains the tensions of sea against land and man against nature that dominate the tale. The sea, as in Moby Dick, is both splendid and treacherous. Gulls exist complacently in this ocean that poses a threat to human existence. To them, "the wrath of the sea was no more . . . than it was to a covey of prairie chickens a thousand miles inland" (p. 33). Nature's benignity or malevolence is not absolute; it all depends on the viewpoint. To the men, the birds resemble Coleridgean albatrosses, "uncanny and sinister," ugly, gruesome, ominous — and free. Crane employs a familiar ballad technique, incremental repetition, throughout this story to stress the dull redundancy of life at sea. This iteration is ironic in its overemphasis. "In the meantime the oiler and the correspondent rowed. And also they rowed. They sat together in the same seat, and each rowed an oar. . . . They rowed and they rowed" (p. 34). A lighthouse is sighted, tiny, as puny as all man's creations, and the captain is sardonic on the question of free will. " 'Think we'll make it, Captain?' 'If this wind holds and the boat don't swamp, we can't do much else'" (P- 35)The third section is crucial to an understanding of the 164 •

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story's conclusion. The men are optimistic, hopeful that rescue is near, that their existential ordeal ("Shipwrecks are apropos of nothing" [p. 37]) is drawing to close. They no longer have to "slave" at the oars, the sky has "almost assumed colour." These sea creatures that once were men are nearly human again. Nature itself starts to serve them w h e n they manage to rig a sail from the captain's overcoat. Whatever torment their situation has involved, it has been the same for all of them. Although w e gain our understanding of this experience through the correspondent's thoughts, there is here no division between his statements and the beliefs of the author. Crane is lyrical in telling of the "subtle brotherhood of man" established at sea. Too subtle for analysis — "No one mentioned it" — the relationship is simply there. "But it dwelt in the boat, and each man felt it warm him" (p. 36). They were friends, in a "curiously iron-bound degree." The correspondent, or w e may dare the biographical fallacy in this case to say the Stephen Crane w h o had finally experienced what he sought in battle and life, comprehends the personal quality of comradeship, what Henry Fleming, b y the end of the war novel, had ascertained for himself. The correspondent, "who had been taught to be cynical of men," knows at once that his devotion to his fellows in the boat will make up "the best experience of his life" (p. 36). H e has learned, in the sea (where better?), that no man is an island. As the boat draws ever nearer the shore, the men consider their situations, the correspondent's weariness, the oiler's tired muscles — for he had worked a double watch in the engine room before the ship sank. But the sea is not yet ready to give up its victims. There is no response from the lighthouse, and the men infer that the other boats have not reached land. The men are proud of themselves, almost 165 •

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cocky in their certainty that salvation impends, despite the force of the surf. Crane returns the point of view to the balcony as the men light four cigars; "the four waifs rode impudently in their little boat and, with an assurance of an impending rescue shining in their eyes, puffed at the big cigars, and judged well and ill of all men" (p. 39). A dash of hubris here, certainly, yet the tone is light, reminiscent of "The Reluctant Voyagers." They are puny but confident. "Everybody took a drink of water" (p. 39).* The fourth section, the story's longest, is the most emotional. The men rail at the inconsiderate shore and its myopic denizens, groan at their exhaustion, revolt against fate or life or whatever controls their destinies. Crane draws out the section to indicate the sense of anticlimax that the weary, shore-hungry men feel. Their limited viewpoint makes them frustrated, and they are bitter toward the land and its people, because the men do not share the knowledge the author imparts to the reader — in one of the rare passages where Crane's shift to an overview is awkward and obtrusive — that no populated lifesaving station exists near their position. At this juncture the consciousness of the correspondent becomes more crucial and, as Crane makes explicit, the narrator's ruminations represent the thoughts of the other three men as well. Five times in "The Open Boat" these thoughts recur; each subsequent articulation is progressively shortened, as the tempo of the narration speeds up. Here, in the most languid part, man's tense rage gets its fullest formulation. "If I am going to be drowned — if I am going to be • Perhaps an eager symbol hunter could find importance in the fact that this is the first mention of anyone's drinking water. Could this act refer to more jousting with the gods, an attempt to show man's dominance over water?

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drowned — if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees? Was I brought here merely to have my nose dragged away as I was about to nibble the sacred cheese of life? It is preposterous." At this stage of the castaway's complaint, a sort of humility compounds with the rage. The gods may be mad, but man exists only in his inglorious rathood, seeking to nibble life's cheese. The complainer goes on to ask why life should tempt man with any visions of happiness. "If this old ninny-woman, Fate, cannot do better than this, she should be deprived of the management of men's fortunes. She is an old hen who knows not her intention. If she has decided to drown me, why did she not do it in the beginning and save me all this trouble?" The antihero concludes that "The whole affair is absurd" (p. 41). Once again a whiff of parody is noticeable. How unlike traditional seafarers' complaints this passage is! Usually the hero is either stoic in his acceptance or devout in his prayers. Here man's egoistic reason attacks the perversity of nature and fate. Trapped in the human situation — too far out to swim, too near to live in the surf — the boat must be steered by the "quick miracles" of the oiler, a "wily surfman," and returned to sea. After much more rowing, the men finally bring the boat within sight of an inhabited beach, but they cannot understand the frantic signals of the man on the shore, just as he is unable to hear their shouts. In the human predicament, communication fails. Now a new misery must be endured, a night sea journey in the open boat. Again the correspondent poses the overwhelming question: "Was I brought here merely to have my nose dragged away . . . ?" (p. 47). The fourth section melts into the fifth. In their isolation — "A night on the 167

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sea in an open boat is a long night" (p. 47) — t h e sense of fellowship grows even stronger. The men huddle together for warmth; even the rower shoves his legs under the bodies of his companions. And the oiler and the correspondent, prime movers, men of action, draw particularly close as they alternately row and sleep. Out of a sense of honor they are careful to spell each other without shirking. The comic cook sleeps, clumsy in his life preserver, yet he too fulfills a function since he is "almost stove-like" when an exhausted and chilled rower drops down to sleep. The captain, this "iron man," remains awake. As the correspondent rows, he realizes both the beauty of their fellowship and the grotesqueness of this parody of sea adventure. "The cook's arm was around the oiler's shoulders, and, with their fragmentary clothing and haggard faces, they were the babes of the sea — a grotesque rendering of the old babes in the wood" (p. 49). Despite the presence of his three companions, the correspondent is morbidly aware of man's essential loneliness as, in a phrase from "Dover Beach," the breath of the night wind comes "down the vast edges drear/and naked shingles of the world." In Crane's terms, "The wind had a voice as it came over the waves, and it was sadder than the end" (p. 50). Nature bestows not only isolation but also fear. The swishing sound and sparkling streak of a shark's fin are monstrous. Still, a man in extremis can withstand such terrors; his emotions dulled, he merely swears and, as section six opens, repeats a clipped version of the query to the seven mad gods. At this juncture Crane makes explicit that the reader must no longer fully accept the correspondent's views. He is callow, egocentric. The author casts a cool eye on the correspondent's realization that other people had drowned at sea since the time men sailed in galleys, but 168

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. . . Any strictly naturalistic interpretation of the story is qualified by the irony of Crane's rather pitiless, if wryly humorous, analysis of the correspondent's romantic ego. He becomes childish in his self-pity. "When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples" (p. 5 1 ) . Like the mocked protagonist of many of Crane's poems, the correspondent wants to confront some personage, some god, and explain, "Yes, but I love myself" (p- 5 1 ) . One aspect of the knowledge that slowly comes to him during the silent, hopeless, long night makes up the philosophical core of "The Open Boat." Man is not important. Nevertheless, while the correspondent realizes the dehumanizing pathos of his situation, he also learns that in his wretched isolation he becomes a part of mankind. If each member of the open boat must, according to Crane, reflect upon these matters as the individual mind leads, then the correspondent — the writer, the intellectual, the reader-surrogate' — ponders the imponderable by referring to a poem learned long ago in school: A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers; There was lack of woman's nursing, there was dearth of woman's tears; But a comrade stood beside him, and he took that comrade's hand, And he said, "I never more shall see my own, my native land." (P- 52) One readily sees the aptness of the poem, which, incidentally, the correspondent misquotes.* The youthful mem0

The lines come from "Bingen on the Rhine" by Lady Caroline Norton, 169 •

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ory returns when the immediate concrete situation makes relevant what had seemed mere poetic abstraction. Although he and his classmates had memorized the verse, he had been indifferent to the soldier's plight; lonely death and the need for comradeship had been unimportant. " H e had never considered it his affair that a soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers, nor had it appeared to him as a matter for sorrow. It was less to him than the breaking of a pencil's point" (p. 52; the image is an apt one for a schoolboy and might also refer to the approaching death of the oiler, whose thin little oar seemed ready to snap). While the correspondent is alone and embittered by nature's indifference, he is also developing, growing through his ordeal to an understanding of other men's sorrows, lives, and deaths. Matured, he can now feel the impact of the poem to which as a schoolboy he was impervious. The inclusion of the poem in Crane's story typifies the parodic approach used more pervasively elsewhere in his work; the conventional verse is bathetic and worth mocking, but when the convention comes under the pressure of terribly real events, it releases its underlying truth. Now because of his extended range of experience, the cora rather sentimental nineteenth-century lyric that recounts a dying soldier's memories of youth and love in Germany. He dies in a foreign land while the moon shines calmly down, as indifferent as is Crane's nature. The correspondent quotes correctly the first two lines and the first phrase of line three, then omits the remainder of that line, "while his life-blood ebbed away," skips line four and the start of line five, "And bent, with pitying glances, to hear what he might say./The dying soldier faltered . . . ," then cuts into the rest of line five and then six. The poem must have represented for a generation of American schoolboys a set piece with reference to death. On his deathbed, John Jay Chapman kept murmuring, " A soldier lay dying, a soldier lay dying," and he added just before he died, "But there is lack of nothing here.' Richard B. Hovey, John Jay Chapman—An American Mind (New York, 1959), p. 347. Chapman apparently took the poem at face value as a hymn to heroism. See his " A Soldier of the Legion," Vanity Fair, December 1918, p. 23.

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respondent can envision the soldier, stretched out on the sand, blood seeping through his fingers. The correspondent is moved by "perfectly impersonal comprehension" and is sorry for the dying soldier. This is why the experience is the finest of the correspondent's life. In "The Open Boat" he does suffer a sea change that makes him at once a better and a more sensitive man, capable of understanding his isolation in the face of nature and of reading, in the faces of men, the signs of comradeship. Having realized that he is not spiritually alone, he comprehends that he has not actually been alone, for the captain has been awake all along and has also seen the shark. The oiler and the correspondent, welded together by their shared efforts at the oars, continue to help each other, and their comrades, to survive. The seventh and final section gives the climax to their efforts. Action and idea coalesce in a conclusion that is powerful and ironic, but that fits both the form (the striving for land) and the theme (nature's indifference) of "The Open Boat." At the start of this section Crane indicates that the experience in the open boat has taught the men something. Now they know the color of the sky, "a sky of pure blue, and the sunlight flamed on the tips of the waves" (p. 55). One bit of new knowledge is the perception of nature's serenity amid the individual's struggles. A long-standing belief of Crane, this view has mellowed since his early works. In 1894 he characterized the war between man and nature thus: "Sometimes their enemy becomes exasperated and snuffs out ten, twenty, thirty lives. Usually she remains calm, and takes one at a time with method and precision. . . . Man is in the implacable grasp of nature."18 In "The Open Boat" nature is neither cruel nor treacherous, beneficent nor wise. Crane no longer retains any trace of the natur171 •

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alistic fallacy. "But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent" (P- 56). The real danger of their situation heightens the men's perceptions. The captain warns that when the boat swamps, they must be calm. The oiler, still the most capable, suggests that he bring the boat about and back it in — thus he is the only one who sees where they are going, who contemplates their fate. They show no fear, but there is some shrouded meaning in their glances. It is just this shrouded meaning that supplies the final part of wisdom. There is no more time for rhetoric, and the correspondent's motto is stripped of all superfluous words; no more seven mad gods or cheese of life. He is exhausted in body, and his phrase gives a measure of this fatigue. "It merely occurred to him that if he should drown it would be a shame" (p. 57). When the boat finally swamps, the correspondent, shocked by the water's coldness, considers the situation sad and "tragic." This egocentric view of what constitutes tragedy dissipates when he comes to the surface. Then he is most conscious of his companions. And this is the fundamental lesson of the open boat — comradeship, fellowship; his rebirth after immersion has made him cast off the last vestiges of his crippling ego. The disposition of the four men in the sea is crucial. "Afterward he saw his companions in the sea. The oiler was ahead in the race. He was swimming strongly and rapidly" (p. 58). The cook comically floats in his life jacket, lying on his back, and at the captain's order paddles himself as if he were a canoe. The captain hangs on to the overturned boat with his one good arm. And the correspondent holds on to a piece of life belt he had seized as he went overboard. Each of these three, the captain, cook, and correspondent, has, grasped tightly to his person, a part of the boat, a relic of their fellowship (just as Melville's Ish172 •

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mael finds salvation through hanging on to the symbol of his friendship — and a part of the Pequod — Queequeg's coffin). Only the oiler goes it alone, secure in his own strength. This is not to say that man in a group loses all self-interest; the correspondent does not forgo his coda, "Can it be possible?" Can man die — is such a phenomenon of nature possible? Now, however, the correspondent himself can shift his point of view from his immediate situation, as the author had done previously, and look down upon himself from a balcony. His balcony, his angle of vision, reflects what he has learned about human solidarity since his days of youthful poetry reading. ". . . he was impressed as one who, in a gallery, looks at a scene from Brittany or Algiers" (p. 59). His captain, a true leader, reinforces this truth. Calling the correspondent by name, the captain literally turns his face from the shore, toward his comrade, and reminds him of their experience and their best hope. "Come to the boat! Come to the boat!" (p. 60). Rejoin us (come back to the raft, Huck), trust not yourself but your fellows. Only at this stage of the story does Crane indulge in any openly religious diction. In his return to the group, the correspondent receives help from the sea; a wave flings him toward the shore, and "this little marvel of the voyage" is "a true miracle of the sea" (p. 60). The man from the beach who drags the cook ashore is a saint with a halo — an exaggeration to express the correspondent's relief at their salvation. And the captain once more stresses self-abnegation and care for the group by waving off this savior and sending him after the correspondent. Only the oiler, the proud, the strong, the man alone, is drowned. For the others, those who retained solidarity and trusted in each other rather than in themselves, "The welcome of the land to the men from the sea was warm and 173

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generous; but a still and dripping shape was carried slowly up the beach, and the land's welcome for it could only be the different and sinister hospitality of the grave" (p. 6 1 ) . Ironic? Certainly. The oiler seems to be the best, and he comes off the worst. Nature is indifferent to virtue. The desperately sought land is found, but the hopefully anticipated earth is that of the grave. Yet I read this story positively— not negatively, not ironically. The oiler dies because he did not retain the lesson of the sea that he learned while in the boat — the value of group action — and because, obeying his own hubris, he deserted the group at the end. Auden has described this prideful hero who thinks "that his superior qualities are not given him by the gods [the seven mad gods], or fate, or nature, but earned by him . . ," 19 Nor do I believe that this ending calls for interpretation in religious terms, although such an interpretation is possible. The land is a haven (heaven) that man seeks through his struggle on the surface of the water (life) filled with sharks (devils) in the depths (death); land is reached by following the captain's (prophet's) directions about the brotherhood of man, and the savior complete with halo drags one ashore, while the prodigal is lost. But we should not insist upon the oiler as any kind of Christ figure, even though it could be argued that by his exertions he has sacrificed himself, that by his death the truth has been revealed to the survivors, and that he can perform miracles with the oars — although he cannot walk on water. As in the case of the profane Jim Conklin in The Red Badge of Courage, who also has a few similarities to Christ, the reader cannot identify the whole man by a number of Christ echoes; the oiler is no Christ figure. Is the conclusion of the story 174 •

THE DESTRUCTIVE E L E M E N T paradoxical? He who fights hardest is killed, but nature is indifferent to such virtue; this indifference would seem to be the basic argument of the tale, if the oiler's self-imposed isolation is ignored. What the correspondent learns is, to be sure, that man's ambitions are limited. There is no such conclusion as total victory over environment. Three out of four is pretty fair success. Although the correspondent is no hero, he can learn from the dead hero's error. The oiler showed the correspondent how to row, but the latter realizes the importance of men, not just a man. The oiler, if we may borrow one of W. H. Auden's formulations again, succumbs to the "inner danger to treat the situation as an aesthetic relation between them [here, the art of getting to the shore] and forget or deny their relation to the truth [that men must help each other, all through the long voyage home] which is the important thing."20 Therefore, there is no irony in the fact that the oiler is the only one to die; the ending is imaginatively appropriate. Unlike the Ancient Mariner who learned to repent and thus survived the crew, unlike Ishmael who gave up his love of self by loving Queequeg and was alone saved, the oiler, in his self-trusting refusal to stick with the boat, loses his life. That, I think, is the message sounded by "the great sea's voice to the men on the shore"; that is why they finally feel "they could then be interpreters" (p. 6 1 ) . Some of Crane's skepticism breaks through here, for they can only interpret nothingness — perhaps a note of parody of traditional endings that stress the deep understanding attained by survivors. Now they truly know the color of the sky, some truth about the interdependence of men — and nature. The youthful Marlow in The Nigger of the "Narcissus" also learned this lesson, in the book written by 175 •

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Stephen Crane's friend in the same year as "The Open Boat." "Haven't we," asks the narrator, "together and upon the immortal sea, wrung out a meaning from our sinful lives?"21

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The Village Virus Once there was a man— Oh, so wise! In all drink He detected the bitter, And in all touch He found the sting. At last he cried thus: "There is nothing— No life, No joy, No pain— There is nothing save opinion, And opinion be damned." —Crane, The Black Riders, XLvm

I N Stephen Crane's own judgment, The Monster was his best novel.1 Without the exotic setting of most of Crane's fiction, The Monster is, in essence, a study of prejudice, hypocrisy, and fear in a small town. Using a plot as simple and straightforward as those he employed in his slum and war novels, Crane anatomizes the complexities of smalltown society, rejects the traditional concept of rural neighborliness, and lays bare the savage heart that beats under the thick skin of the American villager. Crane's Whilomville, 177 •

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modeled on Port Jervis in the upper New York State of his childhood, bears only surface resemblances to the pastoral towns of James Whitcomb Riley or Booth Tarkington. Even when he wrote two years later in a somewhat warmer vein his book of childhood tales, Whilomville Stories, Crane, as we shall see, concentrated on the horror rather than on the beauty. Stephen Crane was not an innovator in the realm of small-town satire. Although his Whilomville anticipated the Starkfield of Edith Wharton, the Tilbury Town of E. A. Robinson, the Spoon River of Edgar Lee Masters, the Winesburg of Sherwood Anderson, the Gopher Prairie of Sinclair Lewis, a number of realists and local colorists had earlier shown their unwillingness to accept the idea of the village idyl. Hamlin Garland's harsh views of the struggle for existence on the Middle Border, William Dean Howells' stifling New England towns like Equity and Hatboro, and Mark Twain's various studies of Hannibal, Missouri, as Dawson's Landing, as Hadleyburg, as Eseldorf — all combined with an evocation of the physical beauty of the environment an understanding of the darker difficulties of village life, the sinister drives and repressions that marked the local inhabitants, the emptiness and lack of ambition or culture. Generally speaking, the local colorists, for all their revulsion against the lonely tragedies of quiet and desperate lives — as shown, for example, in the decay and impoverishment of Sara Orne Jewett's Deephaven or the humdrum tragedies of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's New England nuns — usually found a viability under the gracelessness of village life. Miss Jewett's characters do accept their lot; they survive. Mrs. Freeman's stories ordinarily end on a sentimental note as the inherent goodness of humanity finally breaks through the natives' harsh visages. 178 •

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Perhaps closest to the view of the American town held by Stephen Crane were the attitudes of the Midwestern realists who denied the sentimental idealization of the village that authors such as Thomas Nelson Page or Joel Chandler Harris sought to establish as ante-bellum reality. To Edward Eggleston, whose The Hoosier Schoolmaster appeared in 1871, or Joseph Kirkland, who produced Zury: The Meanest Man in Spring County in 1887, or E. W. Howe, who published The Story of a Country Town in 1883, the realities left no room for praise of simple village virtues, of warm humor, or of the democratic, heroic, happy pioneer spirit. These writers were angry and gloomy. Kirkland's Zury is a hard-bitten miser; mob prejudice constantly threatens Eggleston's schoolmaster; and Howe's characters fight grim religiosity, backbreaking labor, petty but rigid social conventions. Certainly these authors and their followers did not accept what Carl Van Doren has defined as the stereotype of the village in American fiction: "the village seemed too cosy a microcosm to be disturbed. . . . neat, compact, organized, traditional; the white church with tapering spire, the sober schoolhouse, the smithy of ringing anvil, the corner grocery, the cluster of friendly houses, the venerable parson, the wise physician, the canny squire, the grasping landlord softened or outwitted at the end, the village belle, gossip, atheist, idiot, jovial fathers, gentle mothers, merry children, spacious barns, lavish gardens, fragrant summer dawns and comfortable winter evenings."2 The bitter realities of the poorhouse and the foreclosure predominated in the work of these Midwestern authors; nevertheless, in each case, I would submit, there was a final acceptance of the values implicit in Van Doren's catalogue. Kirkland's hero does find happiness in Wayback, Eggleston's schoolmaster wins a wife and defeats the villains — within the framework of small179 •

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town life. Although there is more explicit misery in Howe's novel, it is individual neurosis rather than the social pressure of Twin Mounds that wrecks the characters, and the narrator survives to gain a loving hearth. Basically, all these writers made the same uneasy truce with their towns that Carol Kennicott did with Gopher Prairie, and for the same reasons. Fundamentally, the authors were not moral revolutionaries. The plot resolutions of their novels undercut their rage, and the reader is left with the sense of mingled pain and nostalgia, frustration and admiration, that has distinguished most American fictional evocations of small-town life from Nathaniel Hawthorne's Salem, through Harold Frederic's Octavius, to William Faulkner's Jefferson. Stephen Crane's Whilomville reflects both versions of the small town, but The Monster makes no compromise with nostalgia. There is no happy ending; there are only victims of man's inhumanity. Crane's novel follows the physical details of Van Doren's formula but casts an air of dark parody over all. The houses become unfriendly, the canny squire finally betrays his protégé, the physician is quite unwise, the gentle mothers and merry children turn into viragos and tormenters, the seasons reflect the growing chill of social ostracism — and the idiot becomes a monster. In other words, Crane, like the realists and local colorists, saw the unpleasant aspects of small-town existence; unlike them, he stuck to his vision and made it stand for the universal dilemma. It has been said that once an artist solves a problem the solution becomes a part of all his subsequent work, which is often a redaction of the first solution. In The Red Badge of Courage Stephen Crane solved the problem of how to present the conflict between an individual and the forces of social convention and of uncaring nature. Crane often re180 •

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turned to these conflicts; in "The Open Boat" he pitted men against nature, in "The Blue Hotel" a man against his fellow men. In The Monster (1898) Crane refined the problems presented bitterly in his slum novels Maggie and George's Mother, by using an idyllic small-town setting as a background for the hypocrisies and inevitable cruelties encompassed by his social vision, which was earlier drawn to the squalid tenements. His parodic sense called for an anti-idyl. The plot of the novel is a typically careful, marvelously controlled and organized, simply and clearly constructed form. As in his war novel, Crane employs twenty-four sections. Here each is quite short, and each part ends with a line that is at once climactic and brutally ironic. There are three major characters: Dr. Trescott, the leading physician of the pleasant town of Whilomville; his little son, Jimmie, probably eight years of age; and the family coachman, Henry Johnson, a handsome, proud, warm Negro who is a friend and advisor to the little boy, a pretentious dude in the eyes of the citizens who view the town from the vantage point of the barber shop, and a figure of romance and impeccable manners to the Negro community of Watermelon Alley. Although Crane alternates his narrative point of view from one to the other seemingly at will, it is the author's voice that controls the narration, becoming in Wayne Booth's term "a rich and provocative chorus."3 In brief outline what happens is this: a fire breaks out in the Trescott home, and Henry manages to save little Jimmie; but in the process the Negro is so badly burned that there is no hope for his survival. Dr. Trescott saves Henry's life, however, and the Negro lives to become an object of horror to the townspeople, since the flames have totally destroyed his face and his reason, and his grotesqueness frightens chil181

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dren. Despite the doctor's efforts to provide a refuge for the victim, his benevolent act backfires as the citizenry turn more and more of their wrath upon the doctor and his wife, finally refusing to patronize him and ostracizing her. The story ends with nothing resolved. A careful examination of Crane's narrative strategy in this novel will show his masterfully quiet irony and subtle parody. From the title on, the tale is rich in multiple meanings. Whatever the source of the plot, a childhood memory or, less probably, an attempt to provide a parallel to his own situation of exile following his purported marriage to Cora,° the title seems to be deliberately ambiguous. Is Henry, the deformed Negro, the monster? Or is Dr. Trescott, the Frankenstein who brought Henry back from the dead, the ultimate monster? Or is society itself, in its hypocrisy and cruelty, the genuine monster? The meanings of the novel are implicit in the plot and adumbrated in the metaphor. The Monster opens on an idyllic setting familiar to novels of small-town life. Little Jim is playing railroad engine and accidentally destroys a peony stalk. Dr. Trescott, busily cutting the lawn, cannot understand Jimmie's request for attention to his crime, but finally comprehends and warns * According to Crane's niece, the basic idea came from Port Jervis. "A certain man there had his face eaten by a cancer. He used to haul ashes, and we children often met him with his cart . . . He was an object of horror to us, for it could be truthfully said of him, 'He had no face.' One day I mentioned him to my father [Crane's brother William] and he told me that there is where the idea of the monster originated." Edna Crane Sidbury, "My Uncle, Stephen Crane, As I Knew Him," Literary Digest International Book Review, 4 (1926), 248. See Lillian Gilkes, Cora Crane ( Bloomington, 1 9 6 1 ) , p. 134, for the dubious idea that The Monster was an analogue for Stephen and Cora Crane's position vis-à-vis American society; and John Berryman, Stephen Crane (New York, 1950), P- 307, for the even more dubious Freudian interpretation that connects a mother fixation with a fear of the Negro.

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him not to play any more that day. Upon closer reading, we may see that the diction foreshadows the controlling idea of the novel. Jimmie goes back to the cut flower and tries "to stand it on its pins, resuscitated, but the spine of it was hurt, and it would only hang limply from his hand. Jim could do no reparation. He looked again toward his father" (III, 25). Jimmie is but a boy; he cannot accomplish the godlike act of restoring the dead to life. His godlike father, however, who is shaving the lawn as if it were a priest's chin, cannot understand what Jimmie has learned about nature, in this garden full of robins and cherry trees. The doctor continues to ask, "What? What?" "I don't understand what you mean, Jimmie," as the child keeps on pointing to the flower. Dr. Trescott "could make nothing of it" (p. 26). The lesson is lost on him, and he will later challenge this law of nature. Crane's repetition of the doctor's questions immediately calls into doubt the value of the doctor's narrative authority; and the child is inarticulate. Therefore neither Trescott is prepared to deal with the monstrous events that lurk in the shadows of their Eden. The introduction of motifs continues in the second section as Jimmie goes to the stables to receive solace from his friend Henry, who also considers the doctor to be a deity — in Crane's terms, the moon in whose shadow the boy and the coachman are sinners. References to "the doctor's creed," the "saintly" sublimity that the proud Henry feels that he possesses, and to the "sackcloth" that he must sometimes wear underline the mock-religious motif (pp. 28-30). The scene remains happy, and the details of wagon washing, with the splashing of water that this "ceremony" involves, fascinate the boy. All is serene, and Henry playfully protects Jimmie from the splattering liquid. Henry is dignified in this role, which looks forward to the more horrible duty 183 •

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he must undertake when he will protect Jimmie from fire, not water. The next, somewhat longer portion efficiently completes the introductory material by setting Henry in the smalltown context. If the story is in part the mock tragedy of Henry Johnson, here both his high position and his hubris are established. He dresses with as much care as a court belle or, says the narrator, more as "a priest arraying himself for some parade of the church" (p. 30). The reference to religion indicates that in his world Henry is as important a figure as Dr. Trescott is in his; and both will fall from eminence in their respective, counterpointed societies. Just as the doctor's fellow citizens look up to him, other Negroes admire Henry's beauty and bearing. The nostalgic sense of a small town on an evening in early summer is called forth by Henry's walk through the streets, under the shimmering blue electric arc lamps, past the shrill streetcar, past the crowd at the little theater where that archetype of sentimental small-town melodrama, East Lynne, is playing. Walking past the barbershop, Henry becomes the butt of the pleasantries of a lawyer and a German barber, among others. With great excitement these male town gossips debate Henry's identity, again a foreshadowing of the time when he will be only too well known. The barber-shop, replete with loafers who crack petty jokes with all the unfeeling harshness of the characters in Ring Lardner's "Haircut," provides a point of reference for town opinion, and Crane's rustics are a chorus much like the figures in Thomas Hardy's rural tragedies. Henry's subsequent arrival in the Negro district and his reception by a caricature of a small-town belle, the calico-frocked Bella Farragut, explain his social superiority, his position as leader and arbiter in the sub-world of the small town's slum. If The 184 •

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Monster travesties the conventions of small-town fiction in general, the portrayal of the inhabitants of Watermelon Alley provides an internal parody of the social activities of Whilomville's white people. "They bowed and smiled and ignored and imitated until a late hour, and if they had been the occupants of the most gorgeous salon in the world they could not have been more like three monkeys" (p. 35). Similarly in Whilomville Stories the children's world lampoons that of their elders. The segment ends on an ironic phrase, bringing up once more an absurd religious connotation as Bella refers to the "complacent" and "superior" Negro, "Oh, ma, isn't he divine?" (p. 35). The dramatic center of the novel is in the next six sections, which encompass the main action, the fire and the rescue — narrated in Crane's vigorous, at times lean, at times richly fleshed, prose. He approaches the event from three different narrative angles. The fact that the main physical action of the novel ends less than halfway through the book shows that the ethical center is of greater importance. It is not the making of the monster that is of the essence, but what the monster makes of the town. Part four presents more local color, an evening band concert. Young men stand around commenting on the girls, the mails from New York and Rochester are distributed, the bandleader (an emblem, as it were, for the town) postures with practiced hypocrisy and strokes his brow sentimentally, the lamps show the wind blowing the leaves of the trees — when the idyllic peace is broken by the "sinister note" of a factory whistle, a fire signal that "sang in the night wind one long call that held the crowd in the park immovable, speechless" (p. 37). The narrative concentrates on the crowd, for the people of Whilomville will be spectators of the dramatic action but prime movers of the ethical action. 185 •

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The next movement brings forth the rush of firefighting equipment. Impressionistically, the actions occur almost simultaneously. Men haul the fire wagon toward district two, and a crowd whirls after it like "an apex of a dark wave," an adjunct to the water within the wagon. As this "black torrent" of potential saviors rolls to the fire, "numerous miraculous figures" accompany it on bicycles. The presence of religious tones is manifest. "Somebody had grappled the bell-rope in the Methodist church, and now over the town rang this solemn and terrible voice, speaking from the clouds. Moved from its peaceful business, this bell gained a new spirit in the portentous night, and it swung the heart to and fro, up and down, with each peal of it" (p. 39). This patch of overwritten prose is instantly undercut by the section's closing words, the plaintive wail of a little boy who begs his mother to let him follow the fire: " 'Just down to the corner, ma?' 'Willie, it's half-past nine n o w ' " (p. 39). No solemn and terrible voice can outshout the firm tones of domestic security. Crane takes a second approach to the fire by moving back to a time before the alarm has been sounded and focusing on the peaceful neighborhood when the first wisps of smoke appear from the Trescott home. He personifies fire into fire imps, clan calling to clan, as bloody specters; smoke becomes gray monkeys (perhaps reminding us of the terms earlier used to describe Negro society). This imagery of clans "gathering to the colours" might seem strained, particularly as it leads up to a seemingly incongruous line, still in reference to the flames: "This outbreak had been well planned, as if by professional revolutionists" (p. 40). The imagery, however, is richly appropriate to the basic motif of the plot; the overthrow of the Trescotts' social position. Just as the society of fire imps destroys the wooden house, so 186 •

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the result of the fire will be a revolution that drops their social edifice. In both cases, the theme is the fall of the house of Trescott. And when the neighbor Hannigan tries to persuade Mrs. Trescott of her danger, he is horrified to notice that a lick of flame is destroying a cord from which an engraving hangs. The picture is "Signing the Declaration," and the image of social revolution is reinforced as this engraving, a reminder of the traditional American dream of independence of thought and action, drops to the floor and bursts "with the sound of a bomb" (p. 41). Now the action appears through the consciousness of Henry, who has raced to the rescue. This seventh section is easily the most vividly written in the book, tense, dramatic, and full of verbal as well as literal pyrotechnics. Crane brings forth the terror of hellfire, partly through his poetic descriptions, partly through Henry's horror, and partly through contrast with the seemingly innocent vision of the white-robed Jimmie bathed in a beautiful rosy light of reflected flames. At first Henry, holding Jimmie in his arms, finds no escape, and with a measure of psychological (and political) insight the author remarks, "He was submitting, submitting because of his fathers, bending his mind in a most perfect slavery to this conflagration" (p. 44). There is a way out, it appears, through the laboratory, where, like one of Hawthorne's overweening scientists, the doctor has been accustomed to carry on experiments that interested him. We infer from what happens later that his experiments are evidence of Trescott's pride and independence of mind. The conflict between Henry and the flames recalls the psychological power of Crane's war fiction. Indeed, Crane's expression of the idea that fear comes when there is still hope of escape, when the mind must work and not submit, is a more profound insight than any produced in The 187 •

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Red Badge of Courage: "He was no longer creature to the flames, and he was afraid of the battle with them. It was a singular and swift set of alternations in which he feared twice without submission, and submitted once without fear" (p. 44). There may be excesses in the five paragraphs that combine an impressionistic indulgence in color with a naturalistic reduction of man to the status of an animal — or a wailing Negro who echoes the sadness of the swamps. Crane himself was fascinated by fire.0 In two powerful stories, one earlier and one later than The Monster, he draws a similar scene, also in lush terms. The closing paragraphs of "The Veteran" show Henry Fleming giving up his soul to the flames of a burning barn; in the late story "Manacled" (1900) an actor in a melodrama, chained hand and foot, is abandoned on stage in a burning theater, and his death in the holocaust is both ghastly and beautiful. In the burning laboratory Henry finds animated odors, "alive with envy, hatred, and malice." Yet the flaming room has a wonderous beauty. "The room was like a garden in the region where might be burning flowers. Flames of violet, crimson, green, blue, orange, and purple were blooming everywhere" (p. 45). We are naturally reminded of the heavenly garden at the novel's start. In this hellish torture garden the flames are alternately savagely cruel and beautifully tender — like a "panther," an "animal," and "eagles" with "talons," or of "delicate, trembling, sapphire shape like a fairy lady." The * One of Crane's early newspaper stories, "When Every One is Panic Stricken" (1894), describes with fascinated lyricism a tenement fire as "the ravings of a red beast in a cage. The flames grew as if fanned by tempests, a sweeping, inexorable appetite of a thing, shining, with fierce, pitiless brilliancy . . . the voices of the demons of the flame." Stephen Crane: Uncollected Writings, ed. Olov W. Fryckstedt (Uppsala, 1963), p. 96. 188

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serpent ("ruby-red snakelike") fire both caresses and destroys. It should be noted that the doctor's chemicals add greatly to Henry's agony in the garden. The climax of this part is fantastic and sadistic, lovely and hateful. The snakelike ribbon of flame "waved its sizzling molten head to and fro over the closed eyes of the man beneath it. Then, in a moment, with a mystic impulse, it moved again, and the red snake flowed directly down into Johnson's upturned face. Afterward the trail of this creature seemed to reek, and amid flames and low explosions drops like red-hot jewels pattered softly down it at leisurely intervals" (p. 46). The religious overtones (snake, garden, fire), the sexual note, and the realistic situation combine into a prose amalgam that is in strange contrast to the ironic, controlled, almost stark prose of most of the novel. Perhaps Crane was indulging in fine writing here; but in the context the fire provides the dramatic high point, the reason for the ensuing social dilemma that will be handled drily and coolly. Therefore the rich prose may be justified. Crane returns for a third time to the early moments of the fire. Driving home from a successful case, proud of his powers, "feeling that this last case was now in complete obedience to him, like a wild animal that he had subdued" (p. 4 7 ) , Dr. Trescott is unaware of the unsubdued wild animal flames that are destroying his house — and will destroy his position. The only fire he considers is in the subdued ash of his cigar. His confusion as to which district harbors the fire reinforces the earlier impression that he is not all-wise. Yet when he arrives at his home, the rather fuzzy man of thought turns into an effective man of action. He breaks into the laboratory and carries out Jimmie. He is restrained from going after Henry, however, and curses his deterrers, using "all the deep blasphemies of his medical student days" 189 •

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(p. 48). His medical practitioner blasphemies are yet to come, however. An anonymous character, identified only as a young railway brakeman, seeks out Henry. In a phrase in intense contrast to the lush fire passage and to the tense rescue description, the narrator says simply that the brakeman "brought forth a thing which he laid on the grass" (P- 49)The ninth section of The Monster brings to a close the dramatic events of the fire. Crane momentarily abandons the serious implications of the relations between Henry and the doctor and returns to an analysis of the crowd. The novel is not really tragic; none of Crane's work finally is. The comic perspective takes over, as always in Crane's fiction, and the multiple awareness of the narrative leaves space for the parody of some customs of small-town fiction. In this tragicomic novel, the prevailing tone is comic — harshly comic, blackly comic, but still essentially comic. The official community rescuers now arrive, posturing and flamboyant. This section appears from the point of view of the excited, impish boys who welcome "Never-Die Hose Company Number Three as if it were composed of a chariot dragged by a band of gods" (p. 49). The firemen become the official heroes. This scene is comic, and the painful truths of Henry's heroism recede. The boys who care only for violent drama are bored by the quietly efficient fire chief; they prefer the former chief who bellowed and gesticulated. The relevance of this passage is doubtful at first, unless it be taken as part of the lampooning of traditional small-town values. Soon we learn, by the nature of the rumors that sweep through the crowd, that no group can be depended on for a sensible attitude toward reality. Just as they do not understand what makes an effective fire chief, neither do they comprehend actuality. The public version of 190 •

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the happenings is totally wrong-headed: Jimmie was supposedly sick with measles, Henry upset a lamp and lit the fire, the doctor was in his office, and all were burned until the firemen made the rescue; furthermore, they are all dying, or dead. The dramatic fire sermon certainly ends on a whimpering note, the voice of the mob's stupidity, the sight of the three victims veiled in yellow blankets being carried off by "twelve important men" (p. 52). These footmen to death are not apostles, but they do become the jury that will convict Dr. Trescott. This first part of the novel is very tightly filled with action and description. After the climactic fire, the attention is on the ethics of Dr. Trescott's decision to save the ghastly vegetable that was once Henry Johnson, and on society's inability to comprehend or accept the unusual. The pace is slower, and the narration of action gives way to the analysis of motives. The relative slowness of the final fifteen sections is effective, for as the affair works itself out, following the laws of social prejudice, there is a certain dragging inevitability and hopelessness that succeeds the climax of the physical drama. The decisions of the ethical drama are more complex, the results less easy to envision. The destruction of a man by prejudice is more complicated and less dramatic than the destruction of a house by fire. Community opinion treats the results of the fire in two ways: Henry, so badly burned that he has no longer any face, must surely die; and he will die a hero, even a saint. As the story makes clear, the community is wrong in both cases. Although the morning newspaper announces Henry's death, he lives and is nursed in the home of Judge Hagenthorpe, the town's most influential citizen. The religious strain, mocking as ever — in the light of circumstances to 191

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come — occurs once more. The town pays "reverent" attention to the blasted hero; "The name of Henry Johnson became suddenly the title of saint to the little boys" (p. 53). The ironies are multiple. The only good saint is a dead saint; the same holds true for a Negro, even though the boys leave off their chant "Nigger, nigger, never die, Black face and shining eye" (p. 54). Should the saint live, it will only be to suffer the crowd's sportive scorn. The town is convinced, moreover, that no one can live without a face, an appearance, a face, as Eliot puts it, to meet the faces that one meets. The final irony recalls Watermelon Alley's burlesque of Whilomville: Bella announces her engagement to the comatose Henry. Henry never does die, and Dr. Trescott is responsible for bringing this Lazarus back from near death. Section eleven contains one of the most impressive scenes in all of Crane's fiction. Dr. Trescott, the man of science and good will, debates with Judge Hagenthorpe, the man of law and realism, over the wisdom and morality of saving Henry's life. The old and cynical judge can predict the results of the doctor's act, for the judge, unlike Dr. Trescott, fully comprehends small-town society and the inability of the mass of men to deal with the unexpected. The judge goes so far as to hint at the justice of mercy killing, and Trescott seems to recognize the fundamental question involved: "There was in Trescott's face at once a look of recognition, as if in this tangent of the judge he saw an old problem." But Trescott remains still as incapable of answering questions as he has been from the start. "He merely sighed and answered, 'Who knows?'" (p- 55)- The problem moves from the realm of medical ethics — "the questionable charity" involved in saving "a monster, a perfect monster and probably with an affected brain" — to a matter of the doctor's ego and sentimental 192 •

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involvement, what the judge considers a possible "blunder of virtue." The judge seems to have the better of the debate. He accuses Trescott of overwhelming intellectual pride: "He will be your creation, you understand. He is purely your creation. Nature has very evidently given him up. He is dead. . . . You are making him, and he will be a monster, and with no mind" (p. 56). In other words, by saving Henry the doctor will be usurping God's role. Furthermore, the judge seems to realize that guilt as well as duty and pride and gratitude may be pushing Dr. Trescott's decision. Henry assumed the role of father when he saved the doctor's son, and the repayment must be for the doctor to resume his position by an act of medical magic. The final point is Trescott's: "Would you kill him?" (p. 57). The judge concludes the discussion with a last statement, a sentiment that is the crux of the novel. "It is hard for a man to know what to do" (p. 58). This dialogue brings to a close the twenty-four hour period covered by the first half of the novel. Now time stretches to cover the slow twists and turns of society's rejection of the monster-saint and his maker. Crane's analysis of society's toll is inexorable. The study commences at the lowest rung of the Whilomville social ladder, the Negro community. The doctor takes the "recovered" Henry, who lacks both face and mind, to board at the home of Henry's old friend Alek Williams (who will reappear in "The Knife," one of the Whilomville Stories). Henry cannot master the situation, for his mind's clock is permanently stopped at the hour before the fire, and he considers himself only as he was, a handsome figure and an experienced hostler. The Williams family shriek in horror at Henry's appearance. In a long, too long, interlude, Alek wheedles another dollar per week out of the judge 193 •

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because of the unexpected burden caused by Henry's shocking effect on anyone around him. Although Alek is a ridiculous Uncle Tom figure, a mixture of humility and cupidity, his situation is problematical. No one will visit his home, and his children are too scared of their visitor to eat. The judge, who represents the "wiser" white society, scoffs at Alek's problems and brusquely counsels his foolish friends to stay at home. The full impact of the irony is delayed until the novel's final pages, when the Negro Williams' isolated position is repeated in the white Trescott residence — and the judge's wife is among those who refuse to visit. A further twist is that the Negro community is by now convinced that Henry is the devil — certainly a rapid reversal of his sainthood. Alek, for his part, will take on the devil for the forthcoming extra dollar a week. (In a sense, Henry is a devil; for Whilomville, like Mark Twain's Hadleyburg, is corrupted by the monster's presence.) After this view of the Negro group, the narrative moves to the white community, to the next higher social level, that of the barber shop patrons. They approach the problem discussed earlier by the judge and the doctor and take the position that Henry should have been allowed to die. The heartless sarcasms of the men about Henry's facelessness indicate the gradual hardening of group opinion. The social problem is not simple. W e can sympathize with Williams' position, a position he has been forced into by Dr. Trescott's benevolent paternalism. It is interesting that when a terrified Alek rushes to inform Dr. Trescott that Henry has disappeared from his room, Alek thinks of the doctor as God: "It was as if Trescott was poised in the contemplative sky over the running negro and could heed this reaching voice — 'Docteh Trescott!'" (p. 74). Henry's first stop is little Theresa Page's tea party, where by looking in 194 •

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a window he reduces a girl to a state of incoherent fright. "Was it a man? She didn't know. It was simply a thing, a dreadful thing" (p. 76). Having moved from the lowest level of Whilomville Negro society, the Williams cabin, to the barber shop patrons who represent the white working class, to Theresa Page's home, which stands for the upper-middle-class stratum, the narrative now takes Henry to the more urban Negro settlement of Watermelon Alley, which is in its way as superior to the rural Williams level of society as is the gracious Page home to the barber shop. Bella, who had proudly announced her engagement to the dead saint, crawls babbling away from the live devil. What is monstrous about Henry is his inability to comprehend the effect of his altered appearance. This opacity society can never forgive, for Henry's weakminded refusal to accept appearances calls into question the social and religious hypocrisies that order men's lives. Despite the slapstick humor in the frightened Negroes' panic, Crane does not evade the complexities that make the humorous mask but the reverse of the tragic one. Certainly the community does display an utter failure of imagination and charity in regard to the monster and his maker, but Henry is in appearance a monster, and Trescott did make him. Indeed, the diction at the start of the next portion makes Trescott appear vaguely sinister, a black magician. The "black mass" (surely an unintentional pun) of his burnt house has barely cooled before a new house springs up at a "fabulous" rate; the doctor's office is the first part completed, "like a magical composition born of the ashes" (p. 78). It is here that the police chief reports the full extent of Henry's inroads upon the Whilomville complacencies, including his arrival on the main street, the riot that ensues 195 •

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as a mob chases him with rocks, and the police's eventual discovery, the next morning, of Henry wandering the vacant streets. The perceptive officer allays the doctor's worry about Henry's condition: "Guess there isn't much of him to hurt anymore, is there? Guess he's been hurt up to the limit" (p. 79). If the ugly mob is unable to hurt Henry further, the uglier, and more subtle, community leaders can hurt his maker. Jake Winter, the father of the frightened little girl, wants to have Dr. Trescott arrested for allowing Henry to be at large. The chief warns the doctor to come to the jail at night to pick up Henry — and to bring a veil. The town cannot bear the sight of reality. From this point on, the novel concentrates on the Trescotts. Their experiences provide the dark material for Crane's parodic version of the small-town idyl. In order to show the full force of the village virus, Crane establishes an entirely new center of consciousness. He probes in some detail, albeit rather awkwardly, the household of one Martha Goodwin, spinster, gossip, formidable and harsh critic of everyone around her. Crane intends this character to represent the frustrated, limited small-town intelligence. "In regard to social misdemeanors, she who was simply the mausoleum of a dead passion was probably the most savage critic in town" (p. 83). Despite this portraiture, however, she seems to voice the author's opinions, frowning on two old women who attack Dr. Trescott and his medical practice. The Goodwin house is meant to summarize the town's new view of Trescott. The fear that the monster has awakened has been transferred from the scapegoat to his keeper, from the idiot to the intellectual, from the being who is different to the humanist who can accept the difference. It is this acceptance of the abnormal that enrages the doctor's fellow townsmen. Dr. Trescott's isolation increases. 196

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Each successive section of the novel adds to the irony and the discomfort of his position. In part twenty the unkindest cut of all occurs. Jimmie, home at summer's end from his recuperation in Connecticut, is at first terrified of his savior, the monster — now living in a room over the Trescott's carriage house. The children eventually use Henry, who is always swathed in a mysterious veil, as the object of their dares, and Jimmie, the saved lamb, leads all the mocking tormenters. As in the later Whilomville Stories, the children's antics provide a gloss on their elders' absurd behavior, and in this case a little child leads them in their unconsciously cruel torment of the victim. Crane's use of animal imagery, an old naturalistic trick with him, shows the boys crowing and bleating — like monsters. And their victim? He mournfully and slowly waves his arms "to a religious chant" (p. 90). Dr. Trescott arrives to ask of Jimmie the same question as at the novel's opening, what game he is playing. But now Trescott realizes what he was not wise enough, nor sufficiently tempered by social monstrosities of behavior, to understand when faced with the problem of the broken flower. He simply groans, "his countenance . . . clouded in sorrow" (p. 92). He groans not only for Jimmie, but for all of them, all the broken flowers that cannot be put upright, for their exclusion from the garden, perhaps for the fall of man. Soon man's inhumanity comes home even more patently to Trescott. He suffers a crude verbal attack from the father of the girl Henry scared, and the Goodwin ladies, standing for Whilomville opinion, are delighted by his discomfiture.4 Only Martha, so misanthropic that she almost comes full circle to support the doctor's position, refuses to subscribe to the consensus that "you can't go against the whole town" (p. 96). Even she succumbs, however, to the cynical news that the Hannigans (whose report had 197 •

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originally made Henry into a hero) are moving away from the neighborhood of the contaminated Trescotts. The final two sections of The Monster cap the monstrous ironies that have followed Trescotts act of compassion and wrecked his social standing in the small town. Two cliches of small-town fiction — the deputation of leading citizens and the tea party — change into bitter social commentary, always within the framework of the traditional genre. It is autumn. Both the" trees and Trescott's career are in the sere, the yellow leaf. The town fathers, accompanied by Judge Hagenthorpe, who, like an oracle, had warned Trescott of the inevitable consequences of his questionably merciful act, are led by a wholesale grocer "worth $400,000, and reported to be worth over a million" (p. 98). In response to their genuine concern over the fact that the doctor, as far as his diminished practice is concerned, is ruining himself, Trescott can only say that he is not ruining himself. They are not communicating, for Trescott is discussing morals, and they are concerned with business. They seek compromises, ways to defeat the power of the women who violently disapprove of the doctor's support of Henry. * Trescott stead* A few years before writing The Monster, Stephen Crane himself assayed the difficult role of a battler against the establishment when he sought to protect the reputation of a young girl from the persecution of the New York City Police. He wrote at that time: " A man who possessed a sense of justice was a dolt, a simpleton, and a double-dyed idiot for finally his sense of justice would get him into a corner and, if he obeyed it, make him infamous. The inopportune arrival of a moral obligation can bring just as much personal humiliation as can a sudden impulse to steal or any of the other mental suggestions which we accept as calamitous." Unpublished ms. in Clifton Waller Barrett Collection, University of Virginia Library, quoted in Olov W. Fryckstedt, "Stephen Crane in the Tenderloin," Studia Neophilologica, 34 (1962), 161-62. Crane refined this idea in a piece of journalism, "In the 'Tenderloin'" ( 1 8 9 6 ) : "Usually social form as practised by the stupid is not a law. It is a vital sensation. It is not temporary, emotional; it is fixed and, very likely, the power that makes the rain, the sunshine, the wind, now recognizes social form as an important element in the curious fashioning of the world." Uncollected Writings, p. 216.

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fastly refuses to transfer the responsibility for Henry, to accept the well-meant offers of financial aid, an old farm in the country, a public institution. The section ends with the old judge brooding silently over the scene, "thoughtfully smoothing the polished ivory head of his cane" (p. 100). The judge comes closest to understanding the difficulty of Trescott's position, his feelings of guilt and pride that will not let him relinquish his role, which has shifted from that of godlike creator of a monster's life to a martyred victim of society's blindness. Like Dr. Stockmann in Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, Dr. Trescott must stand alone against the hypocritical community. The novel ends in the snow of winter, closing the cycle from early summer. And like the anticlimax of the "plop" that undercut the close of "The Upturned Face," so the tea party with which his small-town novel ends reveals the punctured balloon of Mrs. Trescott's social claims. A whimpering anticlimax, surely; yet the fifteen empty teacups, the woman's desolation, the sound of the wind and the snow lashing the house, indicate an actual, not just a teapot, tempest. "As he sat holding her head on his shoulder, Trescott found himself occasionally trying to count the cups. There were fifteen of them" (p. 102). Thus the novel ends in defeat and irresolution, with a bleaker vision than that evoked in most of the realistic novels of small-town life. Stephen Crane's quiet accomplishment in The Monster is remarkable, for he has simultaneously derided the tradition of most sentimental small-town fiction — "gentle and secure . . . fathomlessly peaceful . . . the genial atmosphere of the horse and buggy age, warm, kindly, tranquil, neighborly, unhurried . . . the home of all the virtues"5 — and deepened the tone of desperation that was a part of seriously realistic small-town novels. He has universalized the 199 •

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story of a doctor and his patient into a parable of social disaster, of the sickness of man. Whatever American dilemmas may be implicit in The Monster — the position of the Negro in American life, the drive for conformity, the suspicion of the intellectual — the novel is no polemic, no tract. As Trescott's motives are constantly called into question, The Monster is a novel without a hero, raising many questions and answering none. Crane's portrait of small-town life is both harsh and problematical, despairing and enigmatic.

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The Crucible of Childhood If the Whtlomville stories seem like Little Lord Fauntleroy to you you are demented and I know that you are joking, besides. — C r a n e , letter to a book reviewer, early 1900? 1

S TEPHEN CRANE'S Whilomville Stories deserves to be bracketed with Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a book ostensibly about boys and actually about mankind. Like Huckleberry Finn, Crane's volume of childhood tales has a more mature vision and serious purpose than most American boyhood stories,2 and it parodies the usual formulae of sentimental, nostalgic, dreamy, and happy childhood tales. Despite the warmly humorous anecdotes of boyhood that make up the outer shell of Whilomville Stories, Stephen Crane was anticipating the techniques employed in Richard Hughes's High Wind in Jamaica, William March's The Bad Seed, and William Golding's Lord of the Flies. These novelists construct extreme situations through which they can portray young children displaying destructive behavior that parallels, in the authors' view, that of adult society. Stephen Crane's children are at once young and old, reflecting the values of the mature world and prefiguring the actions that such a world will demand. Parody and 201 •

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pain combine in Whilomville Stories to offer in the guise of a childhood idyl a bitter version of man in society. Beneath the concrete evocation of small-town America lurks the trenchant criticism of the universe that Crane called forth in his more clearly adult fiction. Crane both mocks the familiar boyhood idyls and uses the form to disguise his savage attacks on his society. Guilt and innocence, freedom and authority, appearance and reality, isolation, fear, the rigid codes of a stratified society, the demand for conformity, the harshness of organized religion — all cohere to make Whilomville Stories a serious work of fiction. Whilomville: the word coined by Crane points to a town that might have existed "once upon a time" or one that did exist at some past time. The deliberate ambiguity of the title separates Crane's book from the boyhood volumes written by his contemporaries, stories that used such obvious titles as Peck's Bad Boy and His Pa (George W. Peck), The Story of a Bad Boy (Thomas Bailey Aldrich), Being a Boy (Charles Dudley Warner), A New England Boyhood (Edward Everett Hale), A Boy's Town (William Dean Howells), or simply Penrod (Booth Tarkington). In a series of tales that appeared in McClure's in 1898, the same year that the magazine published the first of Crane's boyhood tales, William Allen White employed a similar title, The Court of Boyville. Although White's stories are often sentimental and use the slapstick humor that authors from Peck to Tarkington depended on, White insists on the alien quality of Boyville; but, unlike Crane, White regrets his exile from this ideal world that has laws going back to the begining of time. Neither he nor Tarkington conceived of a boy's existence as a caricature of adult behavior; Penrod takes place in an isolated Whilomville: " 'When I was a boy!' It really is the land of nowadays that we never discover."3 202 •

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The books by Peck and Aldrich, as well as Owen Johnson's Lawrenceville stories and Edward Eggleston's tales of a Hoosier schoolboy, gain their effects through the humor of awkward situations and the nostalgia for childish ambitions. These books show youth as a time of hopeful beginning; Crane's autumnal boy stories prefigure a pessimistic end. Nevertheless, it must be granted that all these writers are, in a sense, scoffing at the earlier syrupy tradition of childhood stories that called for a good-good hero or heroine — the genteel tales of St. Nicholas or Youth's Companion; Jacob Abbott's didactic Rollo stories, or those by "Peter Parley" and Charlotte Yonge, to say nothing of Crane's detested Miss Mullock. The later humorists shared with Crane a realistic view of childhood's flaws and foibles as well as its glories. Howells, however, in his less fictional and more plainly autobiographical A Boy's Town, conceives the world of childhood as a frame for serious social comment. Howells shows a world where freedom and a brand of native socialism exist without ever being named, where a boy's life of imagination, love of nature, and tolerance represent a better — younger — America. And Howells also understood how a book such as Whilomville Stories, concentrating on the inner life of a boy, could express universal. According to Howells' own view of childhood, the boy "lives under a law of favor or of fear, but never of justice"; he has "the idea of some sort of supernal Being who abode in the skies for his advantage and disadvantage, and made winter and summer, wet weather and dry, with an eye single to him; of a family of which he was necessarily the center, and of that far, vast, unknown Town, lurking all around him, and existing on account of him, if not because of him."4 Such egocentric "boys" occur in all of Stephen Crane's stories, whatever their settings. 203 •

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One must understand Stephen Crane's aim in order to grasp the true value of Whilomville Stories; more than in any of his other works, the parodic principle is operative here. If one considers the tales as fundamentally about children, then one must reject the volume as a failure of tone because of the disparity between the sophisticated form and diction and the seemingly naive content. Yet Crane was far too aware of the modes of childhood thought not to realize that stories for children should be cast in a simple form. "Does anybody know how a child thinks? The horrible thing about a kid is that it makes no excuses, none at all. They are much like breakers on a beach. They do something, and that is all there is in it."5 (Perhaps this explains the childishness of Crane's veteran soldiers, who also refuse to analyze motives.) As in his best parodic-realistic fiction, Crane sustains a double vision in Whilomville Stories: Jimmie Trescott and his friends often act from childish motives in childish ways; but these motives and actions are not very different — and are sometimes not at all different — from those of the adult world. The stories most often reproduce grownup behavior on the level of children's actions, as in Lord of the Flies, and at the same time indicate how the child's world may be in some ways better than that of his elders. The child's actions many times travesty those of the mature members of the community; as in Tom Sawyer, adult morality is a prime target. As among adults, for example, a newcomer must establish himself in society according to a formal code. The children never equal in sheer awfulness, however, adults such as Crane's Sunday-school superintendent, "one who had never felt hunger or thirst or the wound of the challenge of dishonor; a man, indeed, with beautiful flat hands who waved them in greasy victorious beneficence over a crowd of children" (V, 186). 204 •

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Crane's children mimic the problems of adulthood, and these parodied problems appear in stark clarity because the facade of pretense and verbiage that covers grownup life is much less sophisticated among children. According to Booth Tarkington, "Boys are just like people, really. . . . Only they're not quite so awful, because they haven't learned to cover themselves all over with little pretences."6 Like Tarkington, Crane analyzes the psychology of the child in a book written for adults; unlike Tarkington, Crane moves beyond the child's mind to expose man's moral deficiencies.7 It is when the worlds of childhood and adulthood coalesce that Whilomville Stories engages the reader's mind as well as his emotions and is most profound. Howells showed how a boy's world could be used, as the more bitter Crane would use it, to anatomize society. He insisted that the boy's society was as strict as any other through its "unwritten usages . . . binding through all personal vicissitudes, upon the great body of boys between six and twelve years old. No boy can violate them without losing his standing among the other boys. . . . It has its own ideals and superstitions, and those are often of a ferocity, a depravity, scarcely credible in after life."8 Stephen Crane comprehended that the after life of men and women was just as ferocious as the world of boys and girls, and usually more so; thus in Maggie he resorts to the same war imagery that appears in The Red Badge of Courage, indicating that both the slum child and the Civil War soldier live in a state of warfare. In the village of Whilomville run the same savage currents that define Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg; growing up in America is a battle for survival. Stephen Crane wrote the thirteen stories that make up the Whilomville volume during the last year of his life. A 205 •

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year earlier, in The Monster, he had experimented with a mordant view of life in a small-town setting. But in that short novel, set though it is in the village of Crane's childhood, the adults of the Trescott family are central, while the small boy Jimmie is something of a peripheral figure, observing action without comprehension. The later stories concentrate on Jimmie, who remains an innocent eye sharing his parents' weaknesses and often himself repeating or being victimized by adult behavior. Although The Monster ends in defeat for the idealistic doctor (as will many of the stories), the boy is scarcely affected. A tale much closer to the technique of Whilomville Stories appeared in McClure's in 1898. Crane's "His New Mittens" treats a youth named Horace who is in mild revolt against his family. The boy refuses to wear clothing that he thinks will make him an outcast in his society, runs away, and eventually returns to his forgiving mother and aunt. Written with some humor and more sentiment, the story anticipates the Whilomville series in setting and in its theme of the pressures on the individual to conform. When Crane turned again to Whilomville, he was writing against time and for money. He turned out the stories hastily; some were obviously based on his own memories, others on those of his wife, Cora — who appears, under her own name, in two tales. His dark view of mankind, aggravated by his illness and his frantic need for cash, made Whilomville Stories far different from the usual nostalgic memoir. A close study of these stories reveals three important facts. First, the stories were clearly conceived as a series. They appeared in successive issues of Harpers for thirteen months from August 1899 through August 1900 (two months after the author's death) and when published in book form in 206 •

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1900 were kept in the same order. Second, the tales follow a chronological pattern, moving from summer to summer and including two Christmases to cover a two and one-half year cycle. Obviously Whilomville Stories is not a random collection of fugitive pieces like Crane's other short-story volumes, The Little Regiment and The Open Boat. He thought of the book as a book, and it has a clear pattern of developing seriousness. From the early stories that show youthful innocence bruising its high spirits against the restrictions of the official culture, the narratives grow more bleak until at the end Jimmie Trescott displays all the hypocrisies of the adult world. Third, each story represents a flaw in man. Beneath the childish play and humorous situation constantly runs Crane's disappointment with man's puny — childish — ambitions and behavior. All of the seven deadly sins, with the obvious exception of lechery, appear in the volume. As we shall see, the book commences with a story about an "angel" and closes with a devilish perversion of the spirit of Christmas. Of course, the thirteen stories are neither of a uniform level of achievement nor of an equal seriousness of tone. And Crane adheres to the usual formal requirements of the boyhood story. Whilomville Stories is rich in remembered detail, the local color of upstate New York, the aspects of a boy's life at home, in school, at play. The backdrop is idyllic: ". . . nothing was finer than the cool sheen of the hose sprays over the cropped lawns under the many maples in the twilight" (p. 19). The town, as pictured in Peter Newell's illustrations in Harper's, is pleasant, tree-shaded, comfortable; the surrounding area is a boy's haven of fields and woods in summer — "The breeze was heavy with the smell of sweetfern. The pines and hemlocks sighed as they waved their branches. In the hollows the leaves of the laurels were 207

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lacquered where the sunlight found them" (p. 36); and in winter, "From time to time an enwearied pine bough let fall to the earth its load of melting snow, and the branch swung back glistening in the faint wintery sunlight. Down the gulch a brook clattered amid its ice with the sound of a perpetual breaking of glass" (p. 1 4 1 ) . In such an atmosphere the youth of Whilomville find their pleasures. They hunt, pretend to be bandits or pirates, wrestle and box, ride their velocipedes, throw rocks at carriage lamps, go on picnics. Jimmie Trescott's home is secure: a comfortable house, a hearty cook, a colorful Negro coachman (named Peter Washington in this version of the Trescotts' domestic economy), an adoring mother, a strict but humorous father. School exists primarily for recess and sport. The world is full of interesting places, candy stores, barber shops, stables. There are many novelties to keep a child from boredom; the seasons vary, new neighbors appear: "Then, near the first of April, would come along a wagonload of furniture, and children would assemble on the walk by the gate and make serious examination of everything that passed into the house" (p. 155). As for the adults, they farm, vaguely pursue professions as doctors or artists, give tea parties, argue. There are Negro slums, but the atmosphere is jolly and silly, poverty is unreal.9 In the Whilomville environment, a youth's mind is free to release its imaginative force. "Each boy had . . . a conviction that some day the wilderness was to give forth to him a marvelous secret. They felt that the hills and the forest knew much, and they heard a voice of it in the silence. It was vague, thrilling, and altogether fabulous . . . they lived there, in season, lives of ringing adventure — by dint of imagination" (p. 35). And a boy's psychology makes life appear relatively simple. "The long-drawn animosities of men have no place in the life of a boy. 208

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The boy's mind is flexible; he readjusts his position with an ease which is derived from the fact — simply — that he is not yet a man" (p. 172). Surely this world seems similar to those of the boys who gambol through the pages of Aldrich and Peck, White and Howells. Yet there is a difference that becomes manifest when the theme and tone of each story is fully ascertained. A close reading is necessary since here, departing from his earlier handling of parodic frames, Crane accepts the traditional techniques and manners throughout, but mocks with equal consistency the didactic undertones of the genre. The first of the Whilomville Stories, "The Angel Child," is essentially comic. Jimmie Trescott's cousin Cora, beautiful and imperious, uses five dollars absent-mindedly given her by her artist-father to lead astray Jimmie and his friends — who represent "the families of most excellent people" (p. 21). After gorging themselves on candy, the children follow Cora to the barber shop, and all lose their shining childhood tresses. The outcome of this shearing is, naturally, parental horror, anger, and blame. The source of humor is obvious, but underneath the "cute" story move disturbing currents. The tale is about pride: the pride of Cora that comes from the corrupting forces of money, beauty, and the need to be a queen who rules "with an iron grip" (p. 22). The tale is about mob hysteria, as the children blindly struggle to attain the barber's chair, ignoring the obvious consequences. "Little did they know if this were fun; they only knew that their small leader said it was fun" (p. 24). The tale is about the childish, hysterical attitudes of the adults who screech, form a giddy whirl, talk of mob revenge, of destroying Cora's family or the idiotic barber. Crane's diction heightens the absurdity of the supposedly mature social leaders whose 209 •

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responses cannot be differentiated from those of their children. They "storm," cry for "midnightly massacre," for dipping "arms in blood to the elbows" (p. 29). While reason eventually prevails, Crane's story presents the narrow line that separates childish from adult action, as well as the corrupting effect of money, the postures of group conformity, and the force of pride. And, incidentally, "The Angel Child" touches on the question of guilt and innocence. Cora escapes the opprobrium that falls upon her unworldly father, that dreamy man who does not understand the nature of a five-dollar bill (surely a sin in the gilded age of American prosperity). A man "never energetic enough to be irritable unless someone broke through into that place where he lived with the desires of his life" (p. 20), he is charged, with conscious incongruity on the author's part, "in the most biblical way" as "the guilty one — he!" (p. 30). "The Angel Child" is not a complex story; it is a humorous tale about children's behavior that carries manifold overtones of serious comment about human behavior in general. The story serves to alert the reader that even the safe, comfortable world of Whilomville children is a part of the savage universe that the author most often chronicles in a style heavy with irony. The second story, "Lynx-Hunting," is one of the most interesting in the volume. Here it is not necessary to seek far beneath the surface for Crane's meanings; form and content coalesce in a tense précis of man's corruptibility in society. As the story opens Jimmie feels guilty because he wants to borrow his father's rifle. He needs this symbol of manhood since he has told his friends the "black lie" that he, like Willie Dalzel, who has a gun that makes him "superior in manfulness" (p. 33), can also use his father's weapon. Thus 210 •

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at the very start of the story a foolish pride has driven Jimmie to lie "as naturally as most animals swim" (p. 33). Crane's language forces the reader to make the imaginative leap that will enable him to realize that this boy's story is about society in general. Jimmie's companions are called distinguished; he is pompous. The social demands of the situation, the rules for conduct, force Jimmie to persist in his easily detected falsehood and, "backed into an ethical corner," to prevaricate "as stupidly, as desperately, as hopelessly as every lone savage fights when surrounded at last in his jungle" (p. 34). The boys go off to hunt a lynx, a fabulous beast known only to adults (and described in a school text), which, again in order to conform, the young hunters must lie about and pretend to have seen themselves. Crane stresses the boys' lack of respect for the truth; they all lie carefully about their courage, they play games of make-believe, as boys are "willed" to do. As they pretend to be smugglers, they parrot terms of subliterature without any comprehension of their meaning. "Once aboard the lugger, Bill, and the girl is mine. Now to burn the chateau and destroy all evidence of our crime" (p. 37) — these phrases mean no more than the word "lynx." Like the Swede in "The Blue Hotel," they live in an imaginative world informed by the "fine words" of dimenovel rhetoric, that of Tom Sawyer's "best authorities." The contrast between illusion (the fabulous beast that they hunt) and reality (an innocent bird that they blow into a rag of wet feathers) is clear. When it is Jimmie's turn with the gun, he aims at a chipmunk — a beast no more fabulous than the defunct bird — and hits the least romantic and most domestic of all animals, a cow. Although Jimmie does not want to fire the weapon in the first place, he cannot 211

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withstand the pressure of the group; "if he refused to shoot he would lose his caste, his scalp-lock, his girdle, his honor" (p- 37)- The words are important because the remainder of the story will question the meaning of such abstractions as honor and faith. Had the story ended here, leaving Jimmie secure in the egoistic pride that the first shot of his life brings forth, and focusing on the mistaken target bellowing across the pasture, "Lynx-Hunting" would be no more than an account of the desire to conform that brings on lies and illusions. Crane is not willing, however, to let his little men off easily. Just as in The Red Badge of Courage, the results of one's action are at least as important as the action itself. Interestingly enough, it is the hero of the war novel, Henry Fleming grown older, who insists that the boys pierce through their illusions and accept the responsibility for their actions — the same Henry Fleming who started his battle of life as both a coward and a liar. Suddenly the boys are no longer smugglers and lynx hunters; they are fleeing miscreants whom a gigantic Swedish farmhand captures and drags to Farmer Fleming for judgment. Again, Crane's diction demands notice. An Old Testament wrath threatens the boys as the land appears to them black and the farmhand seems to come from the heavens. Caught by this chastiser, who beats them as blindly as does the god in Crane's poem "A god in wrath was beating a man," the boys collapse completely. Their illusions of truth, courage, and loyalty break down to the realities of lies, cowardice, and betrayal. "They begged like cowards on the scaffold, and each one was for himself. 'Oh, please let me go, mister! I didn't do it, mister! He did it!'" (p. 39)Crane does editorialize to indicate that these betrayals result from the boys' terror and their youthful belief that 212 •

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for boys there are no such events as accidents; since they are caught, they must be guilty. These sinners in the hands of an angry god — Henry Fleming, flourishing a cruel whip — are already in Hell, but a Hell of their own making. "At his approach the boys suffered the agonies of the fire regions" (p. 40). This kind old man, however, cares for boys, and the whip is in his hand by chance; it is simply their guilt that drives them into tearful and clamorous denials as if they were martyrs at the stake. The comparison emphasizes once more that the human being is a wretched creature, and makes his own Hell on earth by his fear. The story closes on a carefully conceived anticlimax. Jimmie admits that he shot the cow and gives as his excuse the story that he thought the cow was a lynx. This admission reduces Fleming and the Swede to helpless laughter, and the story ends on this note. But the finish provides an additional irony: Jimmie may have imagined that he was aiming at a lynx, but he was actually shooting at a chipmunk when he hit the cow. Boys do not know what is truth, and the amused farmers do not care to wait for the correct answer. In Crane's next story, "The Lover and the Telltale," Jimmie Trescott violates the mores of the children's society by staying in school during recess and writing a love letter to the angel child. This motif is a staple in nearly every boys' book from Aldrich to Tarkington, but only Crane uses the commonplace plot device to comment on the savage behavior of society — wolflike is Crane's adjective — toward one who goes his own way. Again, there is plenty of incidental humor in "The Lover and the Telltale" as Jimmie struggles with his letter, in which the language reduces to absurdity conventional lovers' rhetoric. "My dear Cora I love thee with all my hart oh come bac again, bac, bac gain 213

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for I love thee best of all oh come bac again When the spring come again we'l fly and we'l fly like a brid" [p. 44]). Nevertheless, the burden of the story is a stern rejection not only of childish society but most particularly of the adult society that is mirrored in youth's parody of elders' acts. The child is father to the man: Jimmie is accustomed to prey on his younger companions "with all the cruel disregard of a grown man" (p. 43). If in the first two stories the children prefigure adult behavior, here the children clearly imitate the weaknesses of the older generation. Crane is most explicit. The villainess, little Rose Goldege (who is no flower and from no golden age), is in a position to spy on Jimmie because she is consciously parodying her elders, staying in the classroom to play house, pretending to be a matron "dramatizing her idea of a household" (p. 44). But what is her idea of a household? And why does she betray Jimmie's secret? Because, says Crane, she is the imitator of her family's customs, she must reflect all the bitterness of a provincial household without men, of a middle-class family whose source of income has disappeared, of a group of women, in short, who resort to vicious gossip to lower their neighbors' reputations." Stephen Crane embarks on one of his most serious and sustained analyses of social behavior in his description of the girl's environment. "It contained now only a collection of women who existed submissively, defiantly, securely, mysteriously, in a pretentious and often exasperating virtue. It was often too triumphantly clear that they were free of bad habits. However, 'bad habits' is a term here used in a commoner meaning, because it is certainly true that the principal and indeed solitary joy which entered * Crane always hated gossip, probably the more so because he was vulnerable to it, particularly before he left America for England. Recall his portrait of the summer hotel ladies in The Third Violet.

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their lonely lives was the joy of talking wickedly and busily about their neighbors. It was all done without dream of its being of the vulgarity of the alleys. Indeed it was simply a constitutional but not incredible chastity and honesty expressing itself in its ordinary superior way of the whirling circles of life, and the vehemence of the criticism was not lessened by a further infusion of an acid of worldly defeat, worldly suffering, and worldly hopelessness" (p. 45). Rose is "typical" of this harsh world; she spends her evenings listening to her mother and a group of spinsters gossip around the stove. "Thus all her home teaching" (p. 46) prepares her to flush out Jimmie's secret and to broadcast it to the world. And Jimmie, the sensitive poet, is thrown upon the mercies of the tribe whose codes he has been ignoring. Crane's double vision of the two worlds of child and adult enables him to show Jimmie reacting as a child to a child's dilemma that is also an adult one. He scuffles with Rose, accepts the word of the teacher as law, and leaves the classroom to confront his fate in the schoolyard among the "barbarians," the "yelping demoniac mob." Friends and enemies alike (as in Lord of the Flies) revert to animal behavior, that of "little blood-fanged wolves" (p. 47). Shocked out of his previous stance of romantic lover, Jimmie too reverts to the tribal code and fights for his place in society, striking out blindly at whoever comes within his reach. For all the violence and the blood-stained shirts in the noisy schoolyard that sounds "like a pine tree when a hundred crows roost in it at night" (p. 48), the children are not animals. As in the end of Golding's novel, when the atavistic hunt for Ralph ceases at the appearance of an adult naval officer, so the pealing school bell returns these boyish fighters to order. "It was a bell that these children obeyed, even as older nations obey the formal law which is printed in calfskin" 215 •

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(p. 48). Such wording would seem pretentious if "The Lover and the Telltale" were simply a child's story. But the phrase fits Crane's version of a world where children repeat the ageold unpleasant roles of mob and victim. Crane's dark parody lets him use the simple form as a frame and add an overall realism of motive and action in language suitable to the mocked adult world. As usual, the story ends quietly, on a muted bit of irony. The two worlds separate when the teacher cannot understand Jimmie's inability to distinguish his antagonists. Society can never understand what it does to the rebel; it can only punish. The imagery joins the blind ruler — the teacher — with the conscious villainess — Rose; the teacher "blazes," disintegrates into "flaming fagots of anger," while the "Satanic eyes" of the girl gloat at Jimmie's discomfiture (p. 49). Although the adult world finds a reflection in the childish one, the characters do not comprehend the relationship — such knowledge belongs to Crane and his readers. The next two stories, "Showin' Off" and "Making an Orator," are the weakest in the Whilomville series. In the first tale Jimmie shows off his physical prowess in order to impress a girl; he taunts his rival to such an extent that the latter rides his velocipede off a hill and wrecks the vehicle. There are no parents visible in this tale, and they would not be able to understand the boys' motives. "One cannot often sound the profound well in which lie the meanings of boyhood" (p. 56). Yet the weaknesses exhibited in "Showin' Off" are not the property of a single age group. Vanity and pride in possessions, pompous and boastful words, gratuitous flaunting of personal strength, may be childish, but few adults avoid these foibles. (Jimmie's antics remind one of Dick Diver's pathetic attempts to retain his youthful image in Tender Is the Night.) His own haughty words trap Jim216

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mie's antagonist and lead to the deeds that wreck his pride. As a fable, "Showin' Off" indicates that competition for its own sake is unreasonable and self-destructive. The obviousness of the moral exemplifies the story's real weakness; as in "Making an Orator," Crane is preaching. The latter story chronicles Jimmies fear of public speaking. Crane uses Jimmie Trescott's futile attempts to evade a recitation of "The Charge of the Light Brigade" as a comment on educational methods. Although the tale contains considerable humor, a slight acknowledgment of the dangers of sloth, and a glance, as in the rest of the volume, at group cruelty — his schoolmates watch the suffering Jimmie with glee, "seeing in him another lamb brought to butchery" (p. 67) — t h e author, not his characters, carries the burden of the story. At the end of the account of the boy's failure to remember his lines, Crane informs us that because of this experience Jimmie (like Crane) will have an incapacity for public speaking as long as he lives.® The story is in large part a parody of public rhetorical techniques, that use of loud, extravagant, flaming words without meaning. The sixth story, "Shame," again exhibits the tension that comes from simultaneously viewing a youthful experience and understanding its more general application. In this rendering of childhood dialogue and desires, the plot is once more deceptively simple. In "Shame" Jimmie's friends are going on a picnic; he joins them but carries his lunch in a pail that his cook has filled for him. And this tin pail becomes his mark of Cain. At first warmly welcomed into the group for what * In his nostalgic A New England Boyhood, Edward Everett Hale, an accomplished public speaker, takes precisely the opposite view of youthful oratory. Crane hated public speaking and avoided appearances whenever possible, to the extent of letting his poetry be read in public by another. Other events that Crane treats with scorn, Hale remembers fondly: teas, Sunday school, church, studies, and the like.

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he really is, a friend, Jimmie becomes an outcast, "a social leper" when the girls notice that he is "different" because of his tin lunch pail. Crane delineates social responses in swift strokes. Even the boys, who wouldn't care if Jimmie brought his lunch in a coal hod, follow the herd instinct and move away from him. "They dared not compromise themselves" (p. 79). Having broken the form, Jimmie, like many modern fictional heroes, loses his identity. "Never again during that picnic did the little girls speak of him as Jimmie Trescott. His name now was Him" (pp. 79-80). The organic form of Whilomville Stories is indicated by references back to the third story, "The Lover and the Telltale," where Jimmie was able to deal violently with group distaste. As part of his development, however, he now finds himself in a more precarious and sophisticated social setting — there are adults present — and he therefore cannot resort to force to extricate himself from his isolated position. At this point in the story the tale verges on bathos as the reader is made to feel pity for the little outcast and a beautiful young lady comes to Jimmie's rescue. But Crane avoids false sentiment by retaining his ironic stance. Since Jimmie is still a child, the reader is able to understand how Jimmie's pretty guardian angel is manipulating his responses and condescending to him, in adult fashion. The boy's romantic dreams are set in juxtaposition to the reader's clear knowledge of the distance between these dreams and the actual motherly instincts of the lady. If the story seems to end rather like a rude farce, much like the close of Huckleberry Finn, as Jimmie strives to hide his uneaten lunch from the cook, the ending clearly means to jolt the boy back to reality, to return the story full circle, as in Twain's novel, to the opening tone. But in both works the serious elements re218

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main powerful despite the boyhood mood that ultimately prevails. "Shame" ends as the Trescott's hired man, Peter Washington, refuses to allow Jimmie to hide his pail in the stables. The next piece, "The Carriage-Lamps," commences with a conflict between Jimmie and the hired man, who tells the boy's father that Jimmie possesses a pistol; the carriage lamps of the title break under Jimmie's wrathful efforts at revenge as he hurls stones at the informer. The remainder of this rather flimsy effort concentrates on the clash between the worlds of maturity (represented by Dr. Trescott, who is both logical and powerful) and of youth (represented by Jimmie and his imaginative friends, who are both silly and ineffective). The antics of the pirates and outlaws who, remaining faithful to the language and rules set forth in the boys' books of Reid or Stevenson, try to rescue Jimmie from his room seem utterly ridiculous to the doctor. He is so amused that he releases Jimmie to his childhood pleasures and complacently returns to his adult comfort. Even in such light comedy, Crane retains his irony. If Jimmie is a child, trapped in a kind of J. D. Salinger world where "everything was an enemy" (p. 95), his parents appear equally childish. Their judgments are as inaccurate as Jimmie's: he blames the hired man for the rock throwing, and his parents blame Jimmie's friends for their son's mischief. And when Jimmie flaunts his newly achieved freedom, he treats the Negro hired man as if he were a child. The dividing lines between child and adult become indeed fuzzy in Whilomville Stories. This lack of constant differentiation would seem to explain why Crane chooses to abandon the children's world for a story about the Whilomville Negro community. If age 219 •

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brings no substantive difference, if actions are all that difine children, then the author may define the childlike world of Peter Washington and his friends in the same manner that Crane treats Jimmie's circumstances. Crane strikes the modern reader as accepting without much thought the nineties' literary stereotype of the comic Negro in "The Knife" where these old boys play out their games under the eyes of a white farmer. For all the obsequious Uncle Tomism of the protagonists, the story of the two Negroes' attempts to deceive each other as to their true motives when they meet in Farmer Bryant's watermelon patch at midnight has its moments. Crane's mastery of dialect and his fascinating portraits of a northern Negro community contribute to the story's local-color interest. Moreover, "The Knife" treats the same themes that mark the other Whilomville stories and serves as a further commentary on mankind's foibles and another refinement of the child-adult relation. The theme of "The Knife" is gluttony and mendacity; Peter Washington and Alek Williams succumb to the tempting of their appetites; they lie and cheat with blatant hypocrisy (in contrast to the actions of the "good" Negroes of Joel Chandler Harris or Thomas Nelson Page). Yet the two Negroes are able to resolve their differences and to make the white Owner of the watermelons appear as foolish as most adults do in Whilomville. Si Bryant cannot cope with Alek's ability to lie cleverly about the ownership of a knife discovered in the patch. The authority may belong to the white farmer, but the imaginative audacity belongs to the childish Negro; Crane has the ironic grace to make both worlds equally absurd. "The Stove" emphasizes these absurdities as the children deliberately parody the adults' activities, and innocent destructiveness seems less grim than experienced hypocrisy. 220 •

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This ninth tale of the volume marks the return of little Cora, the angel child of the first story. The plot of "The Stove" provides a perfect framework for the parodic child-adult conflict. The simple childish farce carried on by Jimmie and Cora is juxtaposed to the adult "games" and points up their foolishness because the two events are similar. Jimmie and Cora are playing in the cellar with Cora's stove, imitating the actions of their elders by pretending to cook "dozens an' dozens of puddings" (p. 134); what they imagine to be puddings are actually old turnips. Absurd? Obviously. But what are the adults doing upstairs at the same moment? They are having a tea party, an event that Crane also considers to be farcical and unreal. The ladies of Whilomville carry on the "pagan habit" (p. 128) of tea parties with all the eager intensity little Jimmie and Cora devote to cooking their turnip puddings over a fire. The parents also live in a world of pretense: "Then they had tea, which was a habit and a delight with none of them, their usual beverage being coffee with milk" (p. 128). Just as form rather than actual content is important to children's games, the ladies at tea are involved only in the form of the cups, not the taste of the tea, in the formal appearance of their dresses, not in the reality of their selves. Crane's imagery stresses the similarity of these adult modes to the games of children. The women chatter with the noise of a cotton mill "combined with the noise of a few penny whistles" (p. 128). There is little difference, then, between the tea party above stairs and the turnip cooking below stairs. Yet a difference there is, of a sort that puts Crane's childhood stories at a far remove from traditional efforts in the genre. The children may be foolish — turnips are not puddings. The children may be destructive — burning turnips stink. 221 •

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The children may be illogical — "Nothing affects children so much as rhetoric. It may not involve any definite presentation of common sense, but if it is picturesque they surrender decently to its influence" (p. 1 3 1 — an important comment in its own right, by the way, that casts light on Crane's own rhetoric of parodic fiction). As we have seen in the earlier stories, the children may be cruel. Their elders display all these qualities, says Crane, plus one more, selfconscious hypocrisy, as the ending of The Monster makes very plain. The author's description here of the tea party rite that never took place in the Whilomville novel is pure sarcasm, and exemplifies the tone that prevails throughout most of Whilomville Stories-. "On the fatal afternoon a small picked company of latent enemies would meet. . . . Those who wore old dresses would wish then that they had not come; and those who saw +hat, in the company, they were well clad, would be pleased or exalted, or filled with the joys of cruelty" (p. 128). The children in "Shame" may be equally severe about appearances — Jimmie's lunch pail — but these responses are not carefully premeditated. Children are instinctively cruel, Crane avers, and adults are consciously cruel. "These tea parties were in a large way the result of a conspiracy of certain unenlightened people to make life still more uncomfortable" (p. 130). The foolishness and destructiveness of children are but a pale reflection of adults' stupidity and savagery. In counterpoint to the turnip party, the ladies, "Instead of seeing that they were very stupid . . . thought they were very fine. And they gave and took heart-bruises — fierce, deep heart-bruises — under the impression that of such kind of rubbish was the kingdom of nice people" (pp. 129-30). There is a difference between the physical bruises that the children will give each other in the succeeding stories, which steadily increase in 222 •

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violence, and the more cruel mental bruises that the adults are accustomed to inflict. In Crane's story the children rout the "tea-fighters" (p. 130). The smell of burning turnips — the child's overt game — drives the chattering women out of the house, and ends the tea party — the woman's covert game. Crane allows the story to dribble to an end; as in "The Angel Child," the artist father is virtually unable to cope with his offspring, and the ending reveals the older generation in despair, as incapable as are the children of making a logical response to the questions of life.* Dr. Trescott "seemed about to say something classic, and, quite instinctively, they waited. The stillness was deep, and the wait was longer than a moment. 'Well,' he said, 'we can't live in the cellar. Let's go upstairs'" (p. 138). The tenth of the Whilomville tales, "The Trial, Execution, and Burial of Homer Phelps," concentrates once more on the youngsters. As in "Lynx-Hunting," but less effectively, the story indicates the boy's world of imagination, the burlesque performances of dime-novel adventures. The underlying theme is a familiar one in this series, the need to conform, to follow the "boyish law" (p. 144). The children act the roles society will insist upon in later years— "You've got to play it the right way." The nonconformist remains an outcast until he worms his way back into the group's favor by obedience to their explicit codes. Such a return is not difficult for one who is bom to the group. In the next two tales Crane confronts the problem of the stranger, the outsider from a different world who seeks entrance to the * When the story deals with the clash between the adult world—incapable of effective action—and the children's world, the ending is muted. The stories that focus on childhood alone end with a genuine climax, usually forceful. This structural effect may be Crane's comment on one difference between age and youth.

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highly organized society of boys. In "The Fight" and "The City Urchin and the Chaste Villagers" the satiric tone sharpens, the pace speeds up, the sense of violence becomes more marked. Crane's portrayal of isolation and xenophobia is coruscating. In some of his works Crane found an ideal frame for his views of man in society by using war as a metaphor for life's struggle; thus "The Fight" uses the physical combat between Johnnie Hedge, the new boy in the neighborhood, and Willie Dalzel, the official leader of the gang, to emphasize the almost Darwinian "antagonism and palpable cruelty" (p. 159) of the new environment. The savage ritual that calls for the new boy to fight his way into society appears in terms that apply equally well to the organism's struggle for survival or the adult's search for status. The first meeting between the stranger and the local boys is a travesty of the language and setting of adventure fiction: "He approached slowly the group of older inhabitants, and they had grown profoundly silent. They looked him over; he looked them over. They might have been savages observing the first white man, or white men observing the first savage. The silence held steady" (p. 156). The formal code makes two demands: to discover the stranger's place of origin (Jersey City) and to determine his exact position in the neighborhood (his fighting prowess). The new boy understands the code, and the "populace of urchins" (p. 158) goads him to fight with Jimmie so that the group can enjoy the show. Tension builds up for several days. Johnnie Hedge must undergo the ordeal of going to a new school; "Alone he had to go among a new people, a new tribe, and he apprehended his serious time" (p. 1 6 1 ) . He must find his place in "the strata of boy life" that have "chieftains and subchieftains 224 •

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and assistant subchieftains" (p. 1 6 1 ) . Unless one is familiar with Crane's ironic purpose, the language will seem fearfully overblown. "He was a stranger cast away upon the moon" (p. 1 6 1 ) . Although the jackal creatures are literally boys, in Crane's metaphorical structure they are the members of any beastly society. One boy acts like a customshouse officer; others are vultures; teachers are new kings; Johnnie is in harness in an environment of "absolute strangeness" (p. 162). Crane informs us, with obvious empathy, "he was a foreigner. The village school was like a nation. It was tight" (p. 163). Stephen Crane, we recall, wrote these stories while living as an expatriate in a small English village. The story comes to the inevitable violent climax. Crane twists the familiar lines of Reginald Heber's hymn "From Greenland's Icy Mountains" to fit the description of the crowd of eager onlookers: "It was a time when certain natures were impressed that only man is vile" (p. 166). Although every prospect in Whilomville pleases, boy — and man — are vile. The parochialism of Whilomville suffers a harsh defeat; Jersey City boys do not adhere to the local custom of ineffectual grappling and rolling in the mud. Johnnie Hedge becomes no longer a boy but "a cornered, desperate, fire-eyed little man" (p. 167), and he punches Jimmie in the eye — and, having felled him, also hits Willie Dalzel. This strange behavior reduces the Whilomville ranks to chaos. The stranger is not only strange, he is terrifying, and Willie flees "as a man might run from the sudden appearance of a vampire or a ghoul or a gorilla" (p. 168). The diction goes on to parody the language of knightly jousts: "The lone lad from Jersey City had smitten him full sore." Johnnie Hedge has evinced his valor, but he remains an outsider. He must be tamed before he can be accepted. "The City Urchin and the Chaste Villagers" takes up 225 •

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where "The Fight" left off. Willie Dalzel's tribe is in a state of anarchy after their leader's fall; now they insist that Johnnie prove his exact place in the hierarchy of battlers. Eventually the two champions meet again, and this time Willie gains a temporary victory. But when the stranger, fired with rage, returns to his Jersey City style of fighting, the Whilomville society explodes, and the boys demand that this "terrible thing" cease (p. 180). Lest we forget that there is also an adult world, Crane arranges his denouement to bring the two worlds into an immediate clash. Mothers, too, fight in a terrible way, and Mrs. Hedge manages to box the ears of both boys before the crowd stampedes. In this penultimate tale the adult returns the child's world to its properly inferior perspective. And Crane's language supplies a last mocking glance at war, which he both exalted and belittled throughout much of his fiction: "Yes, the war for supremacy was over, and the question was never again disputed. The supreme power was Mrs. Hedge" (p. 180), and the boys are united in defeat. Jimmie Trescott also meets defeat in the final Whilomville story, "A Little Pilgrimage." Set in a pre-Christmas atmosphere, the tale provides a suitable conclusion to the book. The Christmas spirit turns out to be a compound of hypocrisy and greed; religion is mocked; and Jimmie is no longer the innocent he was at the start of Whilomville Stories. He is now able to carry out the same kind of conscious deceptions that his parents use. If the book started with an angel child, it ends with Jimmie playing the devil's game. In a virtuous burst the children of the Presbyterian Sunday school vote to forgo their usual Christmas tree and to send the money to aid the victims of the Charleston earthquake. This decision is taken a long time before Christmas, how226

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T H E C R U C I B L E OF C H I L D H O O D ever. Pride and cupidity prevail over the Golden Rule in Jimmie's heart, and he deceptively persuades his father that the Big Progressive church has a Sunday school with stronger spiritual appeal. The Sunday school itself contains images of the entire Whilomville community: oily superintendent, authoritarian teachers, confused children. The meaning of the lesson, from Jeremiah, is beyond the grasp of all of them. Perhaps the key passage of the volume is Crane's analysis of the child's response to the biblical definitions of good and evil. "This thing of being good — this great business of life — apparently it was always successful. They knew from the fairy tales. But it was difficult, wasn't it? . . . And the angels, the Sunday-school superintendent, and the teacher swam in the high visions of little boys as beings so good that if a boy scratched his shin in the same room he was a profane and sentenced devil" (p. 187). The deviltry is as ironic as the angelicism at the volume's start. Neither children nor their elders have the slightest understanding of the abstract words virtue and sin. The authorities for moral behavior in both worlds — fairy tales and Bible — are equally misleading and laughable. If Jimmie is a hypocrite in choosing a new Sunday school for venal reasons, the school betrays him by renouncing its Christmas tree also. There are no rewards, not even for the hypocrite. The world is a grim and empty place. As for "religion," if Jimmie "remembered Sunday-school at all, it was to remember that he did not like it" (p. 189). Jimmie dislikes the adult world of hypocrisy, gossip, and false pride, but he is admirably prepared to enter it. He leaves the Sunday school to grow up in Whilomville, a town that exists sometime and all the time, for it represents a state of mind, 227 •

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of spiritual vacuity. Whilomville Stories is a coherent work of fiction that examines and considers the developing consciousness of a boy in a nineteenth-century American town that stands for the bleak world in which all men, adults and children alike, must live and die.

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The Gunfighters When the prophet, a complacent fat man, Arrived: at the mountain-top, He cried: "Woe to my knowledge! I intended to see good white lands And bad black lands, But the scene is grey." —Crane, War Is Kind, xxn

T

X H E myth and the reality of the American West provided Stephen Crane with the setting for some of his most brutally violent and richly humorous stories. Immensely attracted to the West as an idea, as what Vernon Parrington has called "the old frontier story of swagger and slovenliness, of boundless hope and heroic endurance — a story deeply marked with violence and crime," 1 Crane accepted many of the Western traditions and made them vibrant in his short fiction. Simultaneously he cast a cold eye on the myth of the Western hero. Crane laughed at this myth which had become degraded into hardened stereotypes by the 1890's. As Mark Twain in Roughing It was able both to parody romantic notions of gold seekers and desperadoes and at the same time to create in Scotty Briggs and Jack Slade vital portraits of those types — real, humorous, gen229 •

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erous, vernacular — so Crane undercut the myth for the sake of the imbedded reality that he had observed, then reconstructed the myth, beyond parody, into tales that approximate Western tragedies. While Crane's funniest stories are clearly anti-Westerns, employing the mode largely to reject it,2 his most impressive tales accept the Western ideas of individualism, violence, strength, and honor. The Western myth has many facets. Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land has documented the anarchic freedom of Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, and the mountain men, Natty Bumppo's dream of a spiritually revivifying nature, the ideal of the open plains of America's manifest destiny. From the first there existed a concept of a terrible and sublime isolation— of man alone, like the protagonist of "The Blue Hotel," in a "hostile or at best neutral universe,"3 in a huge and timeless landscape that diminished man's stature. But the sensation-mongering dime novels reflected the deterioration of the Western story in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Whatever may have been valid, if oversimplified and half true, in the idealization of a land of adventure, self-reliance, and freedom was made commonplace by the rigid conventions of horsemanship, marksmanship, crime, heroism, assaulted maidens, and rapacious cattle barons. According to Smith, "By the 1890s the Western dime novel had come to hinge almost entirely upon conflicts between detectives and bands of robbers that had little to do with the ostensibly Western locale."4 The clichés of the Western story were well established before Stephen Crane assayed the form. The stagecoach holdup, the cattle stampede, the range war between cattlemen and farmers, the escape from hostile Indians (or evil Mexicans), all had become familiar set pieces of Western literature and subliterature. The conflicts between the hero 230 •

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and the villain were equally hackneyed, for stock character types were absolutely defined. Any reader of nineteenthcentury Western fiction knew the dance halls, the poker games, the barroom brawls, the climactic shoot-downs on empty streets, and could tell instantly what fictional role in these activities a figure was meant to sustain — just as twentieth-century readers (long before movies and television ) discovered the clichés of the works by novelists from Stewart Edward White, William MacCloud Raine, and Zane Gray through Clarence Mulford and Eugene Haycox. The hero, out of Owen Wister's Virginian by William S. Hart, had become a folk figure much earlier. Proud, laconic, alone, lacking a past, he lived for the moment and rarely indulged in a flicker of self-doubt — or insight. In what Leslie Fiedler has characterized as the male world of American fiction, the Western hero became the archetype of the man on the run,5 faithful only to his horse, his partner should he have one, his shot of redeye, and his code of a fair draw and revenge for a slight. Many aspects of the Western myth were close to the reality observed by Stephen Crane on his Western travels following the publication and success of The Red Badge of Courage. The West appealed to him as a land full of paradoxes and ambiguities almost impossible to define, as difficult to comprehend as battle, the sea, or the village. While the Western landscape represented space and free will, there were both mountains and deserts, heat and cold, cattle country and farmland.6 Perhaps two generalizations about the nineteenth-century West are valid: the land was open, and life was isolated. The openness led to the sense of selftrust shown in the character of the Western hero; the isolation usually compounded the feeling of individualism by putting the law into the individual's own hands and making 231 •

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important such attributes as strength, courage, and gun skill. Writers stressed these mythic qualities at the expense of verisimilitude; in contrast to authentic "cowboys," legendary figures neither worked, nor ate, nor changed costume — only fought and rode and drank. The realities of the West, however, like the realities of life at sea or in battle, did lead to a confrontation between man and his environment that was often abrupt and turbulent. In life as in fiction, man kept in close touch with nature, which was, in actuality, both malign and benign. Man faced his fate in this setting, aided by actualities that fiction rapidly made symbolic: the bottle, the horse, and the gun. Crane employed these realities, in seven superb tales and other interesting stories and journalistic pieces, without stressing their symbolic import. A recent critic has described the conflict between Western myth and reality, a tension that informs the raw material of Stephen Crane's Western writings: "Part of the difficulty in the traditional western novel has been the surplus of emotion in the reactions of man to the terrors and glories of the land. He is overwhelmed by the landscape before he can give it any form. . . . Its context is a fusion of history with immediacy, because the western past is recent and available, its tone is pastoral, because the land itself is an ever-present influence, and its style is lyrical, because the major confrontation is still with the elemental mysteries of nature." 7 Understanding well the realities, Crane in his fiction both accepted and scoffed at the Western myths; his heroes, in the suitable Western setting, continue to challenge society, but unlike their Western prototypes Crane's characters show fear, run, and cannot depend on their guns. While undercutting and parodying the Western conventions, Crane also built up and made oddly heroic or sad his own versions of the cowboy seeking to define 232 •

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his existence against a landscape that contains equal potential for beauty or terror. By slicing away the imaginative excesses of familiar Western tales, Crane uses his parodic manner, his techniques of inversion, to recapture for literature the essence and the ambiguity of the genre. There were very few complexities in the plots and characterizations developed by Crane's precursors and contemporaries in the Western genre. Once again, merely the titles of some of the more popular dime novels of Crane's era are revealing: Derringer Dick, the Man with the Drop; or, Colonel Coldstead and His Lucky Seven (1885); Lion-Hearted Dick, the Gentleman Road-Agent: A Wild Tale of California Adventure (1885). Along with Edward L. Wheeler's Deadwood Dick series, probably the best-known body of tales about a Western hero was the Buffalo Bill canon of "Ned Buntline" (Edward Z. Judson); the title of an 1892 version of Bill's adventures indicates the series' tone: Buffalo Bills Beagles; or, Silk Lasso Sam, the Outlaw of the Overland: A Story of Wild West Heroes and Heroism. These Western heroes, unlike Stephen Crane's antiheroes, were virtuous, fearless, generous, impregnable. Like "Hustler Harry," the familiar dime-novel hero has "great strength and manly grace. . . . Every limb was rounded and muscular, yet not overburdened and cumbersome. . . . His features were round and clear-cut, as if chiseled from marble, but the square, full lower jaw, denoted a determined, unswerving nature."8 The more serious writers also leaned heavily on melodramatic devices and devious plot twists. Theodore Winthrop's John Brent (1862), an early Western novel, depends on double-dyed villains, wild chases, and lost heroines for most of its effects; nevertheless certain elements that would appear in Crane's stories are evident — honest and tough descriptions of rugged "Pike" miners, of horses that "will 233 •

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do all they know for men, if men will only let them," and of gamblers: "The gambler's face and the gambler's manner are the same all over the world. Always the same impassible watchfulness." 9 Of course the most famous evocation of the Western gambler appears in the pages of Bret Harte's Western tales. The melancholy, abstracted, lonely, cool John Oakhurst of "The Luck of Roaring Camp" (1868) and of "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" (1869) displays some of the qualities that Crane would catch, with similar irony, in the gambler of "The Blue Hotel." And Harte's more long-lived version of the species, Jack Hamlin, assumes a similar "listless and grave indifference of his class," as a "lonely calculator of chances, with his pale Greek face and Homeric gravity." 10 Harte fixed many other Western types — the whore with the heart of gold, the rugged stage driver, the inarticulate, illiterate, but profoundly loyal partner. In Harte's stories appear many of the scenes that Crane employed: the drunken brawl, the attempted hanging, the characters trapped in a snowstorm. For all Harte's homely details and accurate evocation of certain Western landscapes and types, for all his humor and often effective use of vernacular, his plots are overwhelmingly cloying in their sentiment, his characters vastly oversimplified, and his climaxes overcharged with spurious dramatic effects. His work was quite like the later Western stories of O. Henry collected in Heart of the West (1904). Where Stephen Crane would use a snowstorm in "The Blue Hotel" to comment on man's insignificance, Bret Harte would use snow, or flood, as in "How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar" (1872), to indicate the basic fineness of even the roughest Westerner's humanity. The Western backgrounds in Harte's tales emphasize the worth of the protagonists in conflict with open plains and high mountains. 234 •

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A considerably tougher mind appeared in the occasionally excellent combinations of vernacular humor and sudden violence that make up Alfred Henry Lewis' first grouping of Western stories, Wolfville (1897). The stories are too often wordy — they are set in the tranquil frame of an Old Cattleman's recollections — and the humor is ordinarily callous, but the awkward and uncouth (if rather undifferentiated) characters face up to the facts of Western life in situations that are typical and forceful. In "The Stinging Lizard" a quiet, slim gambler knifes a savage gunman who has lost at cards; in "Enright's Pard, Jim Willis" a man sacrifices his life for his partner; in "The Man from Red Dog" a drunken and offensive cowboy is finally gunned down; in "Bogg's Experience" a tough cowpuncher drives off an attacking horde of venal Mexicans. Comparable scenes occur in Crane's stories; the great difference is in style (Lewis rambles interminably) and in tone (Lewis' characters are callously jocular). Crane's "A Man and — Some Others" deals with the miserable and inevitable defeat oi the lone cowboy at the hands of his Mexican antagonists. For Lewis, the same situation is simple. "The Mexicans downs Spanish Bill's pony, an' a bullet creases Bill's side . . . As Spanish Bill goes down, the Mexicans scatter. The game is too high for 'em. They was shy two people, with another plugged deep an' strong; by which you notes that Bill is aimin' low an' good." 11 The gunfight — almost certainly the climax of each codification of the Western myth — was to Crane a matter of frightening import. Lewis and his contemporary Andy Adams — in whose memoirs appear perhaps the most realistic extant descriptions of a cattle drive in the old Southwest, where periods of drink, gambling, and gunfights in cattle towns along the trail punctuate the cowpunchers' weeks of work — treat gun battles in Kipling's mode of com235 •

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placent knowledgeability. "When a gent notices the signs a-gettin about right for him to go on the war-path, he picks out his meat, surges up an' declar's himse'f. The victim, who is most likely a mighty serious an' experienced person, don't copper the play by makin' vain remarks, but brings his gatlin' into play surprisin'. Next it's bang! bang! mixed up with flashes an' white smoke, and the dooel is over complete. The gent who still adorns our midst takes a drink on the house, while St. Peter onbars things a lot an' arranges gate an' seat checks with the other in the realms of light. That's all thar is to it."12 The Western stories of Owen Wister, a close friend of Crane's early acquaintance, Theodore Roosevelt, seem midway between the styles of Harte and Lewis. The themes of Wister's famous novel The Virginian (1902)—gambling, partnership, duty, love, revenge — appear in his earlier Western tales, collected as Red Men and White (1895) and Lin McLean (1897). A mode of cynical realism accompanies a great deal of romance, whimsy, and sentiment. Wister condones a lynching in "The Serenade at Siskiyou," and he sees humor in gunfights. Corruption and violence in the town of Drybone add some bite to the slow-moving courtship of Lin McLean. And Wister openly treats a theme implicit in many of Crane's stories, the conflict between Eastern and Western values and experiences. The idea of Western democracy is played off against the ever-present threat of casual assassination found in the new and "impersonal, surrounding hostility of the unknown."13 As in Crane's stories, the Easterner speaks for social norms, the Westerner for natural freedoms. The classic narration of the conflict between East and West occurs in Mark Twain's Roughing It (1872). In "Buck Fanshaw's Funeral" Western vernacular and amorality clash with Eastern gentility and formal religion, and both give a 236 •

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little. Twain's approach to the West — as to fiction and parody generally, as we have observed — is similar in many ways to that of Stephen Crane. Like Crane, Twain chronicled the decline of the frontier in the face of Eastern money and literacy. Like Crane, Twain chortled at Western crudity even while he savaged the unthinking cruelty and arrogance of feuds that led to senseless killing. Both writers were torn between admiration for the violent man and disgust at unnecessary violence. Twain's portrayal of Colonel Sherburn is the perfect example of this split, but in a more Western setting, as Henry Nash Smith has indicated, Twain exhibits the same ambivalence toward the killer Jack Slade. "He seemed not to know whether he feared the man, or admired his courage and skill, or hated him for his brutality, or despised him for the cowardice that might possibly be the basic trait of the desperado."14 Similarly in "A Man and — Some Others" Crane both attacks and defends his killerprotagonist and, like Twain with Slade, seems appalled at the character's violent end. Both authors (who, incidentally, despite their mutual friendships with Howells, never seem to have made personal or intellectual contact) used humor to comment on the flaws of traditional fictional practices. Twain often heavily burlesqued the Western traditions where Crane more delicately parodied them, but, as we have seen, the parodic elements of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn reveal the same basic strategy that is behind most of Crane's major fiction. And "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" sustains a Twainian tone of burlesque (Scratchy Wilson seems to owe something to Twain's Scotty Briggs, by the way), just as in a very early piece of journalism Crane seems to be adopting Twain's stance of tall-story teller: "I remember that my old friend Jim Wilkinson, the exsheriff of Tin Can, Nevada, got very drunk one night and 237

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wandered into the business end of the bowling alley there. Of course he thought that they were shooting at him, and in reply he killed three of the best bowlers in Tin Can." 15 There is a Twain ring to the anecdote of the miners who become so angered at the lack of nutrition in some canned soup that they want to lynch the storekeeper, until a passing drummer explains that the cans are really a temperance drink.16 Most of Stephen Crane's Western stories appeared nearly twenty years after Mark Twain abandoned the vein. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, with a few exceptions, Western stories lacked any moral or social implications and became increasingly bound to tired formulae that could lead only to simplified juvenile books or, later, movie scripts, where the most obviously sensational elements would prevail. Stephen Crane turned to this hackneyed form in his last years, as he had earlier turned to the genres of slum, war, small-town, and sea fiction, and by laughing away the more ridiculous elements of the Western clichés recaptured the stark verities of pity and terror inherent in the form. Stephen Crane's occasional pieces of journalism and fugitive short stories in 1895 and 1896 gave him opportunities to try out some of the concepts and situations that later appeared in his important Western fiction. One of his best jobs of reporting, a sensitive and forceful account of farm life in a Nebraska devastated by some of nature's cruelest tricks — dust storms later followed by blizzards — describes the scene he would use in "The Blue Hotel." Snows and subzero temperatures pound a landscape and make it feel "the weight of the strange and unspeakable punishment of nature." "Over the wide white expanses of prairie, the icy 238 •

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winds from the north shriek, whirling high sheets of snow and enveloping the house in white clouds of it." 17 Despite nature's antagonisms, the Western men survive because of their endurance, their courage, and their ability to help each other; whatever flaws Crane's later fictional Westerners display, the author never lost his admiration for the same quality he found in his soldiers and sailors — dogged courage, in this case the courage to create farms and towns in vast empty spaces. At the same time Crane realized that civilization meant an end to the freedoms demanded by Scratchy Wilson and feared by the Swede. In "A Christmas Dinner Won in Battle" (1895) the death knell for the Old West is tolled by the arrival of a hotel, a mayor, and blueprints for "a street railway three miles long" — the electric streetcars anticipated eagerly by Scully for Fort Romper. As in Yellow Sky, "When the cowboys rode in with their customary noise to celebrate the fact that they had been paid, their efforts were discouraged. . . One of Crane's prime effects in his Western stories is a sudden, serious, and murderous denouement that brings to a shocking close a predominantly humorous tale. "Caged with a Wild Man" (i8g6) tells of a man trapped in a freight car with a drunken gunfighter whom a gang is seeking. Crane handles the narration humorously, and the vainglorious boasts of the gunman turn him into a ridiculous figure, • " A Christmas Dinner Won in Battle," Stephen Crane: Uncollected Writings, ed. Olov W. Fryckstedt (Uppsala, 1963), p. 105. As early as 1894 Crane was toying with the idea that lies behind "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky." A Nevadan sheriff recalls his past in one of the "gayest counties" where the citizens didn't understand a sheriff"s job and didn't like to see him interfere. "One man originated a popular philosophy, in which he asserted that if a man required pastime, it was really better to shoot the sheriff than any other person, for then it would be quite impossible for the sheriff to organize a posse and pursue the assassin." "In a Park Row Restaurant," Uncollected Writings, pp. 82-83.

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shouting at the crowd massive threats to make ventilators of them. "Where's all these galoots what was goin t' shoot at me? Where be they? . . . . Let 'em pull 'em onct! Jest let 'em tap 'em with their fingers, an' I'll drive a stove-hole through every last one a' their low-down hides!" As in "The Man from Duluth" (1896), the main character's drunken shouts retain an authentic vernacular ring. But the former story ends violently if inevitably: "Oh, yes, they got him that night. . . . In a saloon somewhere. They got him all right."18 Stephen Crane's early Western story "Horses — One Dash" (1896) is a revealing and not wholly successful amalgam of parody and thriller. The bare plot is that of a thriller: an Easterner named Richardson, accompanied by a comic Mexican servant, José, puts up for the night in a Mexican village where a group of sinister desperadoes later arrive. These outlaws are bloodthirsty and eager to butcher the supposedly sleeping Richardson for the sake of his expensive saddle and spurs. Our hero sneaks out at dawn and rides to safety after a wild chase across the plains. Certain parodie elements are obvious in this recital of the plot. The usual Western hero is not afraid, and he almost never runs. Crane seems a bit uneasy with his attempts at comic incongruity, however. He wants something heroic for the story and settles for Richardson's horse, a tough, capable pony. Although the choice is understandable, given Crane's love for horses, it confuses the comic tone with some sentimental clichés out of Black Beauty. While travestying the myth of the fearless hero, Crane supports the myth of the noble horse (a naturalistic gambit, to be sure), and he fails of his desired effect. Richardson first appears as a figure of fun, a dude with enormous silver spurs, a huge revolver, saddles large enough 240 •

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for building sites. This poseur's dreams of his beloved North are broken by the rude voices of the drunken Mexicans who have decided to kill him. Crane's diction seeks out the humor of the situation: Richardson's knee joints turn to bread. He is so terrified that he forgets his Spanish and lets the evil tones of the conversation destroy his nerve. The chief villain hardly fits the convention. He is a fat, roundfaced Mexican. The moment of truth, the traditional confrontation of the two armed enemies, is absurd. The fat Mexican stares drunkenly at Richardson who is so horrified that he can only stare silently back. This apparent coolness disconcerts his enemy. "At the approach of their menacing company, why did not this American cry out and turn pale, or run, or pray them mercy? The animal merely sat still, and stared, and waited for them to begin. Well, evidently he was a great fighter; or perhaps he was an idiot. Indeed, this was an embarrassing situation, for who was going forward to discover whether he was a great fighter or an idiot?" (XII, 208). This scene ends when some women arrive, and the Mexicans temporarily withdraw to pursue other pleasures. The shift from humor to suspense is rather awkward here, and Crane depends too heavily on rhetoric to convince the reader that the mock hero is truly in danger. Crane strains after a Poelike effect through the device of a silent, blanketcovered doorway, menacing, deathlike, perhaps about to open. "As grim white sheets, the black and silver of coffins, all the panoply of death, affect us because of that which they hide, so this blanket, dangling before a hole in an adobe wall, was to Richardson a horrible emblem . . (p. 2 1 1 ) . Unlike Poe, Crane creates terror which is neither of Germany nor of the soul — it is only of the words. The successful attempt of Richardson and José to sneak 241 •

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away before dawn retains some slapstick routines — the jingling spurs that sound like cymbals, the horse that whinnies a loud welcome. The shaking hands of our hero can barely buckle on his saddle. Because Crane loses himself in admiration for the confident, steady, workmanlike little horse (and the proliferation of adjectives reflects, I think, Crane's memory of the pony that saved him in a situation similar to the one he is now attempting to ridicule, which he took seriously at the time), he presents the chase quite straightforwardly. The only humor is in the ironic mockery of Richardson's ego, a motif reminiscent of Crane's treatment of Henry Fleming. "Although quite a humane man, he did not once think of his servant. José being a Mexican, it was natural that he should be killed in Mexico; but for himself, a New Yorker — " (p. 2 1 7 ) . Crane makes his humorous view of character explicitly parodie of literary conventions: "He remembered all the tales of such races for life, and he thought them badly written" (p. 2 1 7 ) ; the hero imagines his prospective capture in terms that appear in every Western dime novel — "the flurry of dust from the hoofs of horses pulled suddenly to their haunches, the shrill biting curses of the men, the ring of the shots, his own last contortion" (pp. 217-18). The tale is a comedy, and the ending returns to farce. The two ride into the arms of a detachment of Mexican cavalry, who do not, as custom might require, kill the bandits, but only kick them and drive them off. Actually, the last word remains with the horse. "Richardson longed for speech, but he could only bend forward and pat the shining, silken shoulders. The little horse turned his head and looked back gravely" (p. 220). The story is an interesting failure, for we see Crane experimenting with methods of enclosing the Western reality he admired — in this case, a horse's loyal 242 •

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courage — within an envelope of ridicule of Western myth — here the idea of the lone hero in conflict with an outlaw gang. Crane is not sure where he wants to deflate and where he wants to identify, and the story suffers. He solves the problem in his next Western tale, where wry humor and bitter cruelty, identification with and disgust for the protagonist, join in a story that is a triumph in the Western form. "A Man and — Some Others" (1897) is heroic and antiheroic, funny and terrible, absurd and inevitable. By comprehending the paradoxes inherent in the Western setting, where freedom mixes with isolation and courage is a part of savagery, Stephen Crane uses his distortion of the traditional view of the hero to create a work of fiction that moves beyond derision to a terrible beauty. The tale opens with a marvelously evocative panorama of isolation. Dark mesquite spreads from horizon to horizon; the world seems an unpeopled desert, and only a blue mist in the far distance reminds a sheep herder of the existence of mountains, of another world. Here following a central theme of American literature, the theme of loneliness, Stephen Crane tells his story of the lonely hero, self-dependent on a range peopled only by hostile Mexicans who insist that he leave or be killed. In the first section of the tale, Bill, cooking his solitary dinner, is annoyed by what seems like a parody of a desperado who draws himself up "in the manner affected by the villain in the play." This comic-opera bandit tells Bill to give up the range or his life; his response to this menace seems to be heroic, American, particularly Western American, self-reliant. "I've got rights, and I suppose if I don't see 'em through, no one is likely to give me a good hand and help me lick you fellers, since I'm the only white man in half a day's ride" (XII, 66f). Accepting 243 •

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his role as natural man, quick on the draw and unwilling to accept restriction, Bill promises to kill at least half of his enemies, and particularly the one who has delivered the threat. The second part of the story ruthlessly complicates any traditional Western good-guys-versus-bad-guys plot, for Bill is a very hard case, almost a lampoon of the conventional hero. He is much worse than the crude gunman of the pages of Harte and Lewis, who turns out to have a soft spot somewhere. Bill has scarcely a redeeming feature. According to Crane's tracing of Bill's past, he is arrogant, a former mineowner who lost all his money in a poker game yet can't forget that he once had the power to order men around. When he became a cowboy, "all that remained of his former splendour was his pride, or his vanity. . . . He killed the foreman of the ranch over an inconsequent matter as to which of them was a liar, and the midnight train carried him eastward" (p. 68). His career has involved many types of asocial behavior. He became a brakeman on the Union Pacific and brutalized hobos.* Bill is sadistic because he himself is a creature of ill fortune. His downward movement continued after he became involved in a strike, had to assume a false name, grew less punctilious about his honor. He ended up as a bouncer in a Bowery saloon, a man of some standing once more because he had nearly killed Bad Hennessy in a brawl. With his fame as a fistfighter, Bill was again corrupted by his power. Crane displays insight in this characterization, an understanding of the decadent influence of violence, which he deliberately shied away from in his war fiction. "But let a man adopt fighting as his business, and • In his 1894 piece "Billie Atkins Went to Omaha" Crane shows deep sympathy toward the hobo and real disgust at the brakemen who represent society's cruel police powers.

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the thought grows constantly within him that it is his business to fight" (p. 6g).° In his arrogance, Bill took on three sailors; when the brawl ended, the saloon was wrecked, Bill hospitalized. Now he is a sheep herder in southwestern Texas. Crane's manner is derisive and unsympathetic in his analysis of Bill's rogue's progress. By playing off his flawed Western protagonist against a figure who comes on the scene as a surrogate for the narrator— an innocent Easterner whose stirrups do not fit — Crane complicates the characterization. True, Bill is a killer who lives by a revolver that has taken the lives of several men. Crane overwrites his hymn to the gun, comparing it to an eagle's claw, a lion's tooth, a snake's poison, but the weapon is a friend to this utterly friendless man. "Bill loved it because its allegiance was more than that of man, horse, or dog. It questioned neither social nor moral position; it obeyed alike the saint and the assassin" (p. 7 1 ) . The young stranger does not comprehend the manner of the man he has discovered in the desert, a man whose eyes are at first wolflike, then childlike. Contact with someone from another civilization, beyond the mesquite, brings into relief the weakness and shame that this reprobate has never admitted to himself. He is neither as ugly as his biography indicated — although he is tattered, bearded, red from sun and whisk e y — nor as rugged as his defiance of the Mexican portended; seen through the youth's eyes, Bill appears to be filled with self-contempt. "Here was evidently a man who had often stormed the iron walls of the city of success, and who now sometimes valued himself as the rabbit values 0

In an 1897 war dispatch Crane comments, in reference to German officers who are products of a civilization that teaches a man to be first of all a soldier: "As a consequence, he ultimately becomes simply a soldier, and not a man at all . . . [soldiers are] hired assassins." "Stephen Crane at Velestino," Uncollected Writings, p. 259.

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his prowess" (p. 73). This third section reveals Bill to be an uneasy combination of strength, amorality, vulnerability, and shame. Crane's achievement is special, for in a short story primarily dedicated to rapid action he has created an enigmatic figure who breaks down a Western stereotype and engages the reader's sympathy. Bill tries to send the stranger on his way because the fight is the sheep herder's alone. Such scruples may not seem to fit his rancid past, may sound like an echo of some Western cliché of "honor." Bill, however, goes beyond a dime-novel hero's code in his insistence, "while I might like a man's company all right, I couldn't let him in for no such game when he ain't got nothin' to do with the trouble" (p. 74). The stranger cannot grasp the reason for Bill's acceptance of his fate, knowing as he does that with eight men after him he must let down his guard, or sleep, or just grow tired of waiting and eventually rush his enemies in order to take two or three of them along with him. In his amazement and lack of understanding of the rules, of the code that governs the responses of even an abandoned wretch like Bill, the stranger asks why Bill doesn't go for the sheriff. "'Oh, hell!' said Bill" (p. 75). What motivates Bill, in a region where there are no sheriffs, in a way of life that denies the aids of established law? Why does he neither escape nor seek the help of a fellow citizen? He is perhaps loyal to the code of the West that insists on a man's responsibility for his own battles and demands that a man be willing to hold his life in less esteem than the freedom his way of life calls for. And there is a kind of honor that the violent man adheres to, finally. According to Irving Howe, "Honor depends upon an assertion of one's worth, integrity upon a readiness to face the full burden of one's existence,"19 and the gunfighter can only assert his worth with his gun, 246 •

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his gun. Crane's hero is most alive when closest to death; he comes closest to self-realization and integrity, despite his desperate past, when cornered. There also exists the possibility, which casts light forward to "The Blue Hotel," that Bill has some kind of inchoate death wish. One feels that all these possibilities inhere in the story and the character. By hiding in the darkness, Bill tricks the Mexicans with a deception that is a staple of Western fiction; they blast his empty sleeping bag with sawed-off shotguns. He is splendid and terrible in his "ridicule, hatred, ferocity" (p. 77) when, like a latter-day Nick of the Woods, he bests his enemies at their own game, and his demoniac laugh rings out before he guns down one of the marauders. Clearly Crane's sympathies are with Bill, the dying natural man, asocial and amoral, doomed in the lonely desert where "human tragedy" (p. 78) is of no consequence. The author insists that the wind and the fire, the boom of the sea, bear the message that tragedy is dead. The elemental man knows the message of the elements, but the non-Westerner, still retaining his belief in human tragedy, cannot understand what is happening. Nor can he bring himself to leave this stolid and profane killer who looks calmly on the corpse that was once a man named Miguel. A moment of macabre humor intervenes; Bill is moved to anger for the first time by the realization that his frying pan has been riddled. But the humor is lost on the stranger, who cannot forget the corpse; it makes him feel like a murderer, so valuable does he still consider human life to be. The stranger cannot make contact with the mind of the gunman. Bill is impervious to guilt, particularly the guilt felt by a stranger who wasn't even the killer. While willing to talk to this "eddycated man," Bill, true to Western tradition, pays little heed to the worth of words. The Mexicans attack, and as Bill hurls him247 •

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self to the ground he remarks on the difference between the world of the stranger, one of guilt and ambiguity where discussion is of value, and Bill's world of an odd innocence and clear-sightedness: " 'This comes from discussin' things,' cried Bill, angrily" (p. 80). Since the stranger's horse has been killed in the attack, he is more than ever bound to what Conrad calls the nightmare of his choice, to his opposite, the cynical, wicked, deadly gunfighter, who obscenely taunts his silent and invisible enemies. Here the West of myth and the West of reality draw close; the landscape is beautiful, open, and sinister. "The stillness had returned to the plain. The sun's brilliant rays swept over the sea of mesquit, painting the far mists of the west with faint rosy light, and high in the air some great bird fled toward the south" (p. 81). The story comes to a swift, expected, problematic, and nearly tragic end. The reader suddenly realizes that the stranger is of some importance himself, as more than a pendant. Crane implies that increased understanding emerges from the few hours that Bill and the stranger share in the violent landscape. Thus, though the story ends as it must with Bill's death, this end is also a beginning, the real start of the stranger's story; for he too, during the Mexicans' final charge, shoots and kills. In that moment when a panther is born in his heart, understanding and perhaps manhood are also born. Whatever is born, however, comes in the blaze of Bill's last passion. Crane only impressionistically hints at the facts of the ultimate gunfight. It is a "picture half drawn" (p. 83) that resembles a dream, so violent is the action. Forever in the young man's memory will certain lines and forms stand out from the incoherence, the author insists. The stranger learns the lessons of the West, the real West: that it is easy to kill a man; that a man who can die 248 •

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with dignity is a "good" man (a term that defies further definition). "Moreover, he suddenly felt for Bill, this grimy sheep-herder, some deep form of idolatry. Bill was dying, and the dignity of last defeat, the superiority of him who stands in his grave, was in the pose of the lost sheep-herder" (P- 83). The final section of the story is very brief. The man is dead, and so are some of the others. Bill has died as he lived, and his gray hands still clasp an enemy throat. Having attained some sense of Bill's worth, the stranger covers the body with a blanket. Not a word is said, but as his reason returns, so does his alarm. He has nothing to fear, for he is alone in the stillness and peace of the wilderness. What the stranger has learned may be wrong, for we know more about Bill than the young man does. Or, Crane seems to be asking, do we? In the Western plain where a man's gun and his courage define his existence, who can judge a man's life? We and the stranger can judge, however, the manner of a man's death, and learn from it. Knowledge is the key element in many of Crane's subsequent Western writings. In 1898 he wrote a pair of stories featuring two youths, the San Francisco Kid and the New York Kid. These two are audacious, bantering, and tough, and Crane might have been planning a series; the progress of the New York Kid, from city streets to Mexican towns and then to gun duels, bears a superficial resemblance to the early career of Billy the Kid. While the first story, "The Wise Men," is negligible, "The Five White Mice" utilizes the Western setting to dramatize a young man's education into the ways of fear and bluff. Like the earlier tale, much of the narrative of "The Five White Mice" involves an elaboration of the Kid's gambling efforts. The New York Kid 249 •

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attempts a cold bluff with the dice and fails, despite his little gambler's slogan that provides the story's coda: Oh, five white mice of chance, Shirts of wool and corduroy pants, Gold and wine, women and sin, All for you if you let me come in— Into the house of chance. (XII, 161) The Kid explains that five white mice are as good as anything else to believe in, but before the story is over, he has learned to believe in himself. After a good deal of humorous byplay — and the story is essentially comic, the other side of the Western coin from " A Man and — Some Others" — the sober New York Kid finds himself and his two staggeringly drunken companions facing three murderous, knife-carrying Mexicans who are seeking a fight. The humorous tone gives way to a sinister atmosphere of danger ("There was no sound nor light in the world") and impending doom: "Into the mouth of the sober Kid came a wretched, bitter taste, as if it had filled with blood. He was transfixed, as if he was already seeing the lightning ripples on the knife-blade" (pp. 168, 169). The situation retains some aura of mocking humor. Three absolutely evil villains face two intoxicated tourists and one sober Kid who grips his gun. The weapon, traditional symbol of Western potency, is caricatured, for on its black handle of robust size is stamped a romantic hunting scene in which a sportsman aims at a stag. The Kid's mind is full of the clichés of melodrama; he decides he will be killed, foresees the tears of his mother and sister, his father's silent grief, the mourning of the other Kid, and then, following the custom of adventure fiction, he has a momentary vision of a peaceful, sunny landscape. Although his mind reflects literary traditions, the reality of 250 •

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his immediate position of stress and the realization that unless he takes responsibility there will be no other Kid left to mourn turn the New York Kid's thoughts from the melodramatic and sentimental conventions to the actualities of this new game. Now Crane is surely deriding the traditional Western plot, and his attack on the convention turns into comic realism. The Kid decides to bluff, to draw his gun and face down the Mexicans; unlike the usual Western gunfighter, the Kid worries about his ability to draw the weapon. Will it be too unwieldy, will he drop it, will he entangle the gun in his coat? Whatever the grim potentialities of the scene, Crane plays it for laughs and stresses his hero's distance from the basic hero of Western fiction. The Kid wins his gamble. The gun rapidly clears its holster, and the Mexicans fall back in disorganization. Like Henry Fleming, the Kid has a shock of recognition that allows him to perceive his own identity in comparison to others. He has no monopoly on fear; all men are afraid. The Kid has learned that, as the figure of old Southwestern humor Simon Suggs said, it's good to be shifty in a new country, and the Kid also discovers, to his rage, that all men are vulnerable, a concept absolutely antithetical to the nineteenth-century Western mode of strong silent heroics. The comedy ends on a similarly parodic note as the three friends, two still oblivious of their escape, go home. The last sentence, "Nothing had happened" (p. 175), is at odds with the usual violent endings of the Western story. Nevertheless, beyond his parodic stance, Crane shows that a great deal has happened, for his protagonist has understood that gambles are worthwhile because all men are not as strong as they appear. Whatever the validity of this idea, the tale illustrates how Crane can both deprecate and exploit the Western theme in his fiction. His most famous Western 251

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comedy, "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," written that same year, combines parodic humor and chastening realism in a similar but more consistently sustained manner. "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" is the triumphant example of Stephen Crane's mixture of parody and realism in his fiction. The parody of the convention is a basic part of the story's continuity, and creates, rather than comments on, the dramatic movement. The first section gently scoffs at the tradition of romance in the Western story. The newlyweds, Marshal Jack Potter of Yellow Sky and a bride who is neither pretty nor young and who has been a cook before her marriage, contribute to a travesty of the familiar Western love plot, in which marriage comes at (or after) the end and in which the couple is usually young and handsome. (This last was not often the case in the works of Lewis and Wister.) Much of the humor derives from the behavior of Potter and his bride, who are awkward and embarrassed in the great Pullman car — an Eastern, dignified sanctum replete with Victorian ornament and Negro porters. Indeed, the act of marriage itself strikes Potter as a betrayal of the Western, Yellow Sky ethos. He is condemned in his own eyes for betraying two traditions: he has tarnished the persona of Marshal, a figure fearsome and independent, and he has tampered with the custom of partnership — he has not consulted his male friends. "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" is a study of identities. Although insecure in his new role as married and responsible official, Jack Potter is conscious of his change from his former role as the lone marshal, ever ready for a fight. His opposite, Scratchy Wilson, cannot face his own two roles. For in reality Scratchy is the town bum, an aging cowboy who is an anachronism. (James Agee, in his movie version of the story, emphasized this aspect of Scratchy by making 252 •

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him a handyman who cleans out cesspools.) But when drunk, Scratchy reverts to his former role of tough gunfighter. In order to sustain this conception of himself, Scratchy must define it against his antagonist, Marshal Potter in his earlier guise as typical marshal of the Old West, untrammeled and quick on the draw. The serious element of this comic tale comes from Scratchy Wilson's recognition that, with Potter's shucking off his character as mythic marshal, Scratchy cannot retain his own particular dream role as mythic Western gunfighter. When Potter and his bride debark from the Eastern train, so involved is he in his new identity as husband that he forgets his Western position — and assumes the station agent's excitement stems from the sight of him with a woman. But it is the marshal that the agent is seeking, not the fleeing bridegroom. The second part of the story opens in a world of complete contrast to the Eastern Pullman: the setting is Western, the bar of the Weary Gentleman Saloon, twentyone minutes before the train bearing the Potters is to arrive. The time shift enables Crane not only to sketch rapidly the plot situation but also to evoke the familiar Western background. Crane supplies an Easterner, a drummer, to serve as an outside observer who must learn about the local mores and the customary epic drunks of Scratchy Wilson that disturb the dozing atmosphere. Scratchy's binges are formulaic, and the formula depends upon Marshal Potter to bring the ceremony of shouting and shooting to a halt by engaging in a ritual fight with Scratchy. The bar is locked, and its inmates, supported by the two Western staples (guns and whiskey) that have turned Scratchy loose, take cover. Scratchy's position in the Yellow Sky social order becomes manifest: he is "a wonder with a gun," "the last one of the old gang that used to hang out along the river here," and, 253 •

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when sober, the "nicest fellow in town" (XII, 96). That is, Scratchy is a living cliché of the Old West, a quick draw, a deadly shot, a rough with a heart of gold: in every way outdated. And the section closes on that most hackneyed of all Western dime-novel phrases, echo of a thousand descriptions of Indian or badman attacks, "Here he comes" (p. 97). The travesty is that this attack is reduced to the singular absurdity of one old man. If the ambience of the first part of the story is that of the East and of the second the West, the third section is emblematic of the Old West diminished and perverted by the modern East. Scratchy, the ur-Westerner, enters wearing a maroon shirt of the sort "made principally by some Jewish women on the East Side of New York," and boots with "red tops with gilded imprints, of the kind beloved in winter by little sledding boys on the hillsides of New England" (p. 97; the raucous gunman in Lewis' "The Man from Red Dog" is similarly attired). He is absurd and childish, perhaps, but also deadly. In his whiskey rage, Scratchy stalks the streets like a midnight cat. His identity emanates from the gun: "The long revolvers in his hands were as easy as straws; they were moved with an electric swiftness. The little fingers of each hand played sometimes in a musician's way" (pp. 97f). Meanly shooting at a stray dog, fiercely demonstrating his prowess with a gun, Scratchy is playing with the town, his toy. The climax of his excursion is to be, as always, the duel with the marshal. No one is present, however, when the howling, cursing, shooting Scratchy arrives at Potter's residence, and the old man churns "himself into deepest rage over the immobility of a house" (p. 99) — which is, unbeknown to Scratchy, now a home. All worlds meet in the final episode when the relic of the Old West runs into the new bourgeois and his wife. The 254 •

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narrative brings together the modes of thriller (Scratchy's hair-trigger threats), comedy (the incongruous situation of a drunken old man confronting a blushing pair of newlyweds), and realism (the pathetic realization that age and time have triumphed). The staple of Western fiction, two strong men face to face, meets with mockery once more, just as in "Horses — One Dash" and "The Five White Mice." The tradition in this case cracks wide open because the marshal is unarmed. Marriage has removed him from the Western scene: "He was stiffening and steadying, but yet somewhere at the back of his mind a vision of the Pullman floated: the sea-green figured velvet, the shining brass, silver, and glass . . . all the glory of the marriage, the environment of the new estate" (pp. loof). Scratchy's world crumbles, the circle breaks: "There ain't a man in Texas ever seen you without no gun. Don't take me for no kid" (p. 1 0 1 ) . But Scratchy is a kid — in a kid's costume, playing a child's game, in the world of children's books and dime novels, in his case, sadly, in the realms of second childhood. The word "world" is Crane's own. Stunned with the news of the marriage — the phrase must be repeated for him five times — Scratchy is unmanned. " 'No!' he said. He was like a creature allowed a glimpse of another world" (p. 1 0 1 ) . And Scratchy is quick to grant that "it's all off now" (p. 102), the traditional duel, and the actuality of the Old West of myth, of gunfighters and marshals. If the marshal is a married householder, then the gunfighter, the opponent, is — nothing. This "foreign condition of marriage" returns Scratchy to his unviable role of a "simple child of the earlier plains" (p. 102). He is indeed a kid, and, shoving his outmoded weapons into his holsters for what will be the last time, he departs. "His feet made funnel-shaped tracks in the heavy sand" (p. 102). The image is a particularly rich one. 255 •

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As in the funnel of an hourglass, the sands of Scratchy Wilson's time have run out; he leaves his footprints on these sands as his dreams end and his life closes in. Still, the story is parody, Crane's kind of parody. All the données of the Western story are reversed; the empty forms are shattered. The marshal is an unarmed honeymooner; the gunman is a childish old man; the gunfight is aborted. The basic devices are comic — misunderstanding and ridicule. Yet parody need not preclude seriousness. We recall the reason given by young Ike McCaslin for killing the bear in William Faulkner's story: he does it before it will be too late, before the final day, when even the bear wouldn't want it to last any longer; for then the woods would be gone, destroyed by civilization's weapons, the sawmill and the railroad. Civilization's weapons have come to Yellow Sky, and they are stronger than Scratchy's guns. It is already too late for Scratchy Wilson. The gunfighter should have died the way he wanted, in the traditional manner — with his boots on, as the familiar phrase goes — according to the violent ritual of his calling. "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" is a beautifully balanced combination of humor and pathos, tightly, almost rigidly, organized; it is perhaps Stephen Crane's finest example of the creative uses of parody.

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Death on the Plains A man feared that he might find an assassin; Another that he might find a victim. One was more wise than the other. —Crane, The Black Riders, LVI

P E R H A P S "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" is Stephen Crane's outstanding combination of parody and realism: "The Blue Hotel," Crane's best-known, most anthologized and analyzed story, depends on parody less strongly but still capitalizes on the technique, and moves even closer to the stuff of tragedy. The idea behind the story, one of the finest of all Western tales, is the search for identity and the desire of an outsider to define himself through conflict with a society. And this outsider, because of his internal contradictions, fails in Crane's world, a world once described as analogous to Hemingway's universe "of man damaged and alone in a hostile, violent world, of life as one long war which we seek out and challenge in fear and controlled panic." 1 "The Blue Hotel" articulates such a conception as the battle-lustful Swede strides through the snowy winds of Fort Romper, a deserted village on an earth that one could scarcely imagine 257 •

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peopled: "One viewed the existence of man then as a marvel, and conceded a glamour of wonder to these lice which were caused to cling to a whirling, fire-smitten, ice-locked, disease-stricken, space-lost bulb" (X, 124). The world that the Swede discovers in the West is dreadful and absurd, and the story chronicles the outsider's defeat, what Stephen Crane terms "a tragedy greater than the tragedy of action" (p. 1 1 7 ) . In simplest outline, "The Blue Hotel" tells of the initial victory and eventual defeat and death of an odd, disturbed stranger. The story treats, in a mixture of fantasy, realism, and parody, the fear that drives men to acts of violence. The narrative raises many questions as to the nature of fear and courage, the responsibility for a man's death, the inability of men to communicate. The questions appear throughout and not all find answers by the end of the tale, which is as problematical as most of Crane's best fiction. From the start of the long story, where no one will discuss fear or death with the Swede, to the conclusion where he has lost fear and gains death, a note of inevitability prevails. Stephen Crane once spoke of the kind of tragic event that was "not the tragedy of a street accident, but foreseen, inexorable, invincible tragedy." 2 In this 1898 story another innocent in the long list of Crane na'ifs that stretches back to Henry Fleming and Maggie must meet the test of experience. According to R. W. B. Lewis, the story of the fall of Adamic man usually appears in American writers' later works, in which they sum up their experiences of America and probe the tragedy inherent in the innocence of the new hero.3 In "The Blue Hotel," the hero, the Swede, new to the Western world that he perceives in dime-novel commonplaces, falls victim to some of the very conventions that Stephen Crane reduces to parody throughout his Western fiction. 258 •

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Setting is always important in Crane's work, but perhaps nowhere is it of more structural and qualitative value to his narrative than in "The Blue Hotel"; for the story is organized around the conflict among three worlds, not the two worlds of Crane's previous Western stories. There is the world of the Swede, predicated on a perhaps false reading of the Western myth; the world of the Blue Hotel, which is a parody of the myth and the reality alike; and the world of the saloon where the Swede meets his fate. This last world, shown briefly and violently, is that of Western reality, where the Swede's mythic preconceptions about the West discover more reality than in what has passed for actuality in the hotel. Only by following Crane's parodic view can we sort out these worlds and see how their inclusion in the story serves both structure and idea. The story opens with a description of the Palace Hotel at Fort Romper, painted a light blue. The words are very important: "Palace" implies an unreal, romantic, fairytale setting; "Romper" indicates something childish; and blue is a color usually associated with innocence, childhood, fair skies. The color is absurd and declares itself against any background, clashes with the town, and, also like a child, is "always screaming and howling" (p. 93). The hotel is neither Eastern (travelers accustomed to the brown-reds and dark greens of the East laugh at the sight of the Blue Hotel when they pass on the train, laugh in shame, pity, and horror) nor Western (the rest of the town is colorless, gray); it is a world unto itself. "It stood alone on the prairie . . ." (p. 93). The Blue Hotel, then, is a kind of parody of an inn, and its keeper, Pat Scully, is both a figure of fun and a "master of strategy" (p. 9 3 ) — a seducer, a Boniface who catches men for his establishment as they leave the train and lures them into his blue world. The setting is 259 •

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strange, to be sure, but in its childishness it is a parody of the traditional atmosphere of Western fiction. Here men gamble, as in Western tales, but not for money; here men fight, as always in Western fiction, but not with guns — rather, with their fists. And in myth and reality alike, "the law of the west permitted a gun [or a knife] in protecting one's life, but fighting with fists on foot was demeaning and not for white men."4 The denizens of the hotel are equally parodies of the conventional Western fictional figures, who should be strong, silent men of action. .Those who come to the Blue Hotel talk; they don't act. It is not until the narrarative reaches the saloon that we discover real Westerners, and these, to the Swede's discomfiture, act but don't talk. It is a mixed bag that the Irish proprietor snares for his hotel, the Swede, shaky and quick-eyed, a tall, bronzed cowboy, and a little, silent man from the East, through whose eyes we are to see much of the story. These characters enter the hotel, where Johnnie, Scully's son, is quarreling with an old farmer over a card game. Although each visitor responds to the new atmosphere in his own careful way, the Easterner and the cowboy are much more like each other than like the Swede: they both douse themselves with icy water, while the Swede merely dips his fingers. They enter into the Blue Hotel by these "small ceremonies"; the Swede remains aloof, seemingly badly frightened. Crane indicates the nature of the Swede's fear. He is an Easterner himself, a New York tailor, who believes in the world of the wild and woolly West, where men are quick on the draw and death looms near. When he lets it be known that "some of these Western communities were very dangerous" (p. 96) and looks as if he expects to be assaulted, he is responding to an atmosphere of books, a Western setting of violence that has no relevance. Actually, 260 •

D E A T H ON T H E P L A I N S Crane is creating a double parody. The Swede's preconceptions of the West as a land of quick and violent death — " I suppose there have been a good many men killed in this room" (p. 98), "I don't want to fight" (p. 99), "These men are going to kill me" (p. 100) — are responses that derive from the Swede's having read too many Western novels. He distorts the reality of the hotel just as Don Quixote, full of romances of chivalry, distorts the inns at which he stays, or as the heroine of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, too steeped in Gothic romances, reads her literary excitement into a tranquil country house. The duality of Crane's parody, however, comes from the fact that the Blue Hotel world is, in a very different way, as much of a parody of reality as are the Swede's melodramatic clichés of barroom violence and sudden death. For if the world of the Swede's mind is unrealistically savage, the world of the Blue Hotel is unrealistically petty. Here games are for fun, fighting consists of fisticuffs, drinking is from clandestine bottles hidden from the wife and daughters — who in themselves violate the maleness of the Western setting, where women in a bar are not wives and daughters. The Blue Hotel leads the Swede as far astray as do the dime novels, for reality exists somewhere in between. In his case, he will meet reality, and a real gambler, in the real saloon that holds his destiny. But having conquered the parodie childish atmosphere of the Blue Hotel by virtue of his heavy fists and his arrogant words, he will make the false assumption that the Blue Hotel is reality and will attempt to dominate the real world of the saloon, where men drink, gamble, and fight — for keeps, as the phrase goes. And so the three worlds of the Swede conspire to destroy him. One world is larger than life, and one is smaller; believing in the first and winning over the second, he forms his own distorted parody of Western reality 261 •

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and carries it to the saloon, where genuine — if ironically presented — reality crushes him. Crane describes in sea images the hotel room where the men sit around a warm stove that defies the blizzard outside. There is a "turmoiling sea of snow," and the room is an "island of the sea" (p. 96). While the surface of these images indicates safety for the guests, we know from "The Open Boat" that danger lurks in every wave. The card game terrifies the Swede, and his paranoia begins to grate on the other men. Once he appeals to his fellow Easterner to support these fears, but the latter refuses to respond. Terms such as "martyr" and "dying swan" point up the extent of the Swede's terror, which he cannot communicate to his companions. For the Swede appears crazy, and the only man capable of understanding him, the Easterner — significantly named Mr. Blanc — won't. As for the others, they are none of them "capable of making excursions into the domain of another man's habits," as Crane once put it in another context.5 Yet Patrick Scully as innkeeper readily takes upon himself the terrible burden of interpreting the Swede to the others and to himself. As the second part closes, no one can answer Scully's question as to what they have been doing to frighten the Swede. In retrospect, the Easterner's reply, "I didn't see anything wrong at all," and Johnnie's frantic shout, "Well, what have I done?" (p. 102), may not be simply innocent expressions of man's inability to grasp enigmas. Perhaps Johnnie has been cheating at this early stage, and the Easterner already knows it; then the Swede has reason for his dime-novel terror, and he is truly the victim of a conspiracy, a conspiracy of silence. Or perhaps the Swede brings it all upon himself, and these answers merely underline the childishness of the world — Scully's pride in his establishment, the Swede's panic, the Easterner's hesita262 •

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tion, Johnnie's bawling. Surely all this is a form of parody. The scene provides caricatures of the conventional strong, silent men of action; here they all babble, and the hotel keeper, traditionally the most minor of secondary characters, dominates the scene. The third section consists of a dialogue between Scully and the Swede. They argue over illusion and reality. Although the diction — which describes Scully as resembling a murderer, refusing the Swede's money, almost forcing him to drink — could be interpreted in religious terms of betrayal and baptism, the parody here seems much less profound. Scully is a figure of fun, but no mock priest or devil. Rather he is an anticipation of Babbitt, the incarnation of a Western booster, a type that Crane would savagely attack in his later Western story "Moonlight on the Snow." Over and against the Swede's alternately cringing and aggressive claims to knowledge of the awful West, Scully argues from the premises of a real estate saleman. To the Swede, "going West" has meant what the phrase symbolizes — death. "Upon the Swede's deathly pale cheeks were two spots brightly crimson and sharply edged, as if they had been carefully painted" (p. 1 0 3 ) — l i k e a medieval mask. To Scully, on the other hand, "the West" means a new West of "ilictric street-cars," churches, the railroad, a brick schoolhouse, and a factory. "Why, in two years RomperU be a met-tro-poZ-is" (p. 103). The Swede's West is the land once described by Theodore Roosevelt as the country of "desperadoes of every grade, from the gambler up through the horse-thief to the murderous professional bully."8 Scully, however, would stress Roosevelt's qualifying remark, "now, however, a much less conspicuous object than formerly." But Scully is unable to persuade the Swede that, in Roosevelt's words again, "No man traveling through . . . the country 263 •

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need fear molestation from the cowboys," and Scully himself brings about the one danger that the historian envisioned— "unless he himself accompanies them on their drinking bouts, or in other ways plays the fool." 7 The innkeeper will not let his guest escape. Scully refuses the Swede's money: "You don't owe me anythin'" (p. 104); the phrase is ironic in foreshadowing the cash register image that provides the Swede's epitaph at the story's close. Scully succeeds in persuading the Swede to remain. The old man plays on the kind of false sentiment Mark Twain satirizes in his portrait of the home of the murderously feuding Grangerfords, where tender poetry predominates. Scully tries to use the picture of his dead little girl to prove the innocence of the Blue Hotel. All else failing, Scully gives the Swede a drink. In a scene that mocks the conventional barroom with its shot of redeye, Scully unearths a hidden bottle. Supporter or tempter, initiator or devil-figure, Scully is ambiguous, similar to a Hawthorne character in his alternative possibilities. Is the old man helping the Swede, although accidentally contributing to his destruction? Or is Scully so apprehensive for his hotel's good name that he cares only for the Swede as an item, a guest who must not leave? Whatever Scully's motives, the Dutch courage of the bottle destroys the Swede just as surely as liquor did its victims in the temperance novels Crane earlier satirized. All the Swede's weaknesses — his hostility to others, his willingness to gamble, to drink, to fight, his selfrighteousness— come to the surface. As he finally accepts the tempting Scully's drink, the Swede seems to have substituted for his terrible fear of death a mad foreknowledge. "The Swede laughed wildly. He grabbed the bottle, put it to his mouth; and as his lips curled absurdly around the 264 •

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opening and his throat worked, he kept his glance, burning with hatred, upon the old man's face" (p. 106). The next four sections of the novella are primarily descriptions of action, but before the Swede returns from Scully's room, the others discuss the outsider's nature. "What is he then?" (p. 106), Johnnie asks, and this is the problem. The hesitant, "travelled" Easterner knows, however: "it seems to me this man has been reading dime novels, and he thinks he's right out in the middle of it — the shootin' and stabbin' and all" (p. 107). The others are scandalized, for Nebraska is not Wyoming, not "out West." The Easterner avers that the Swede is convinced he is in the middle of hell. The ironies and paradoxes are evident. Although the Blue Hotel is an ineffective parody of dime-novel society, "stabbin' and all" is just around the corner. Hell is a state of mind, a disordered mixture of parody and reality, which builds up an atmosphere of illusion. In Twain's Roughing It the source of humor is often the tenderfoot's bookish notions of, say, how to survive in a storm; in Crane's story the Swede's reading prepares the way for disaster. For the novelist who includes parody as part of his fiction, one technique of developing characters who do not properly perceive reality is to show them confusing life and literature.8 The whiskey-brave Swede now dominates in his arrogance, profanity, anger, for Scully's argument about the security of the hotel has prevailed. Yet Scully will not allow the others to stop the Swede's offensive behavior, since Scully too is a product of excessive reading, and he is attempting to fulfil a dimly conceived traditional role of host.* * James Agee's unproduced screenplay of "The Bine Hotel" emphasizes this aspect of Scully: his gestures are a parody of mine host. James Agee,

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His speech is "a combination of Irish brogue and idiom, Western twang and idiom, and scraps of curiously formal diction taken from the story-books and newspapers" (p. 109). The Swede's aggressive disdain causes the others to reveal their inner natures; the Easterner withdraws into reserve, the cowboy is stupidly amazed, Johnnie is wrathful, and Scully is embarrassed. The card game, traditional setting for Western fictional quarrels, resumes, and the "three terrible words" that are the staple of Western melodrama ring out, "You are cheatinT' (p. 1 1 2 ) . Crane shows how conscious he is of his technique here. The narrator breaks into the action to announce that any room may be tragic or comic — and we realize that comedy (even parody) can lead to tragedy. Again, everyone acts according to type: the accusing Swede is aggressive, the accused Johnnie defensive, the Easterner pale, the cowboy bovinely confused, Scully loud. In contrast to the later barroom scene, the present action is crowded, bustling, ineffectual, as the men tumble and shout in their attempts to deal with the situation, witnessed by the "fat and painted kings and queens" (p. 1 1 3 ) of the trampled playing cards. The Easterner, the voice of logic, importunes and questions the value of a fight over a game of cards. But the Swede is adamant, and the men go outside for the fist fight that is more like the childhood combats in Whilomville than the real duels of the West. The wild storm comments on man's puniness and stupid verbosity by tearing their words out of their mouths and scattering the valueless arguments out of hearing. Before the fight starts, the Easterner records his Agee on Film (Boston, 1963), II, 395. Agee also posits that the Swede's desire, in the last part of the story, to buy the gambler a drink reflects the Swede's concept of a properly "Western" aftermath to a successful fight— "Drinks on me . . ." (p. 480). 266 •

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impressions of the scene in terms that seem overwrought. Scully is "the iron-nerved master of the ceremony, the Swede is "pale, motionless, terrible," and Johnnie is "serene yet ferocious, brutish yet heroic" (p. 1 1 7 ) . It is here that Crane mentions the prelude's having in it a tragedy far greater than the tragedy of action — for the prelude is in the Easterner's mind, and his tragedy, the human tragedy, is greater than a fight, greater even than death. Thus the terms are not excessive, for the primary victim is not the Swede but the Easterner, who knows yet cannot act upon his knowledge; he is the betrayer. The final editorial section of "The Blue Hotel," then, is not extraneous, because if the Easterner's mental reactions are the essence of the tragedy, then his feeling of guilt is of utmost importance. The fight is an impressionistic pinwheel of fists, grunts, loud shouts from the ineffectual observers, shouts that carry their own irony — "Kill him" — since the victorious Swede will be killed. The Swede conquers and, to the Easterner, seems splendid in his isolation. When the victor takes his leave of the Blue Hotel, he is confirmed in his arrogance. Once again he asks Scully the amount of the bill, and again the innkeeper refuses to charge and insists the Swede owes nothing. But they owe the Swede something, the knowledge that they have twice failed to communicate. These palavering, complaining, boasting men are themselves parodies of the Western character, reductions, just as the dime novels that influenced the Swede were a heightening, of reality. The Swede believes in his dime-novel West, and he defeats the diminished Blue Hotel Westerners without ever perceiving that they also are parodic. When he mimics their earlier bloodthirsty cries, convulsed with ironic laughter, the joke is on him. Although they stare at him with glassy, dead eyes, it is he who will go forth into reality, outside 267 •

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of the warm room where his antagonists talk faster and faster about what they would have done to the Swede if —. And they are all guilty, even without taking into consideration the matter of cheating, for they have lured the Swede into their anomalous society, which he easily comes to dominate, and let him think that he has met and mastered the real West. In the Blue Hotel, as we have seen, the violence is all verbal, a travesty of reality. One understands why critics have found Stephen Crane to be either a symbolist, an impressionist, or an ironic realist, for he is all things to all readers, even within the same tale. Crane describes the Blue Hotel impressionistically; it is a symbol of talk and unreal dream, and the blue exterior shelters men who, however fierce they seem, are actually children, ineffectual amateurs. Considering this blue world the real one, the Swede makes a clean break, symbolized by the snowy plain he struggles across as if it were a sea and he a ship, tacking, carrying sail. Isolated and proud, he enters a saloon, in every way the opposite of the hotel. The lamp outside the saloon is red — "In front of it an indomitable red light was burning" — to Crane the color of death, as blue is of life, a concept he insists on: "the snowflakes were made blood-colour as they flew through the circumscribed territory of the lamp's shining" (p. 1 2 4 ) . The Swede has come here, full of conceit, through the storm that should have reminded him that men are lice. His victory in the Blue Hotel makes it impossible for the Swede to realize that "One was a coxcomb not to die in it [the storm]. However, the Swede found a saloon" (p. 124). The juxtaposition of the two instruments of death, storm and saloon, is effective. In the saloon are men, not boys, a professional gambler, not an amateur, open drinkers, not furtive nippers. It is a 268 •

D E A T H ON T H E P L A I N S complex world, that of the saloon, a subtle social situation for which the Swede is utterly unprepared, since his experiences in the dime-novel realm of imagination and the childish setting of the Blue Hotel have been unreal. R. W. B. Lewis describes the protagonist of the archetypal American story as "an Adamic person, springing from nowhere, outside time, at home only in the presence of nature and God [God has long since disappeared, as far as Crane is concerned, but the Swede in the blizzard shows his sureness in the presence of nature], who is thrust by circumstance into an actual world and an actual age."9 The fateful eighth section of "The Blue Hotel" records the Swede's collision with the actual West. The society in the saloon is in every way the reverse of the group in the hotel. The bartender presiding at his "radiant bar" is indifferent, dreamy, and silent, only grunting in response to the Swede's boasts. And, we note, the bartender rings up the Swede's coin on a nickel-plated cash register: here one must pay. The group drinking at a table is also encased in reserve. Two businessmen, the district attorney, and a "square" professional gambler make up a society of actors, not talkers. The group is as different from the mythic Western barroom crowd as from the mock gamesters of the hotel, so there is no appeal to either of the Swede's reserves of experience. The gambler himself is in some ways similar to the figures evolved by Lewis and Harte. He has delicate manners and quiet dignity, only preys on outsiders, and, in a realistic comment on the fictional tradition of the solitary gambler, has "a real wife and two real children in a neat cottage in a suburb" (p. 127). Since this society is real, Stephen Crane anatomizes it with as sharp a knife as he uses in his small-town fiction, satirizing the hypocrisy of the men who drink with the gambler, admire his exemplary 269 •

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home life, but exclude this "generous," "just," "moral," and "thieving card-player" (p. 127) from their new club. This is the way of the real world, and the gambler has long since accepted the fact that some societies are closed; not so the Swede who loudly attempts to force his way into the group. He breaks the rules and demands companionship. Stalking to the table, he lays his hand "by chance" — an ill-fated gamble — on the gambler's shoulder. The slim man, abiding by the rule of his society against wasting words, simply remarks, "I don't know you," and in a kindly manner advises the childish Swede ("Now, my boy . . .") to mind his own business. The Swede, accustomed to the wordy expostulations and ineffectual fighting of those in the Blue Hotel, seizes the little gambler by the throat, and dies. "There was a great tumult, and then was seen a long blade in the hand of the gambler. It shot forward, and a human body, this citadel of virtue, wisdom, power, was pierced as easily as if it had been a melon. The Swede fell with a cry of supreme astonishment" (p. 129). The ironic description of human dignity carries far beyond parody, of course, into misery, but the quiet knifing itself remains a parody of dime-novel barroom brouhahas. The others flee, the gambler calmly wipes his knife on a bar towel and goes home to wait. The section ends on a note of superb, and well-prepared, irony. "The corpse of the Swede, alone in the saloon, had its eyes fixed upon a dreadful legend that dwelt atop of the cashmachine: 'This registers the amount of your purchase'" (p. 130). It is one of those marvelously rich lines that Crane exults in. In Western slang, the Swede has bought his load; in the context of the story, he has finally paid the price that Scully twice refused, and it is the price for his pride — and his isolation, the solitude that he finally finds on the floor of the saloon. How ironic a comment on the peaceful 270 •

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modern West of streetcars and churches is the modern machine that registers the purchase of that staple of the Old West — violent death!* Like the oiler in "The Open Boat," the Swede has survived the èlements only to lose his life once he has reached the shore. If the oiler violates the code of inclusiveness, forgetting the group in his pride, the Swede violates the code of exclusiveness, seeking to join the group because of his pride. Both deaths owe something to chance, but both also are emblematic of a payment for man's (coxcomb's) presumption. The finest irony of all is that society's debt from the outsider Swede is collected by another outsider, the gambler. In the opinion of many readers, "The Blue Hotel" should properly have ended at this point. The additional two pages of comment, which takes place months later when the cowboy and the Easterner meet near the Dakota line, are informative, to be sure. With a twist worthy of Ambrose Bierce or O. Henry, the narrative tells us that Johnnie actually was cheating and that the Easterner knew it all along. Many critics have found this fact to be irrelevant and the Easterner's comments on the nature of guilt and complicity extraneous. Perhaps the Easterner's bitter paragraph of social philosophy is unnecessary, but while "The Blue Hotel" in eight sections would be a complete story, it would not be a complete story by Stephen Crane. This section is not a case of the author's testing alternative endings and seemingly adding just one more, as in Crane's war novel. Here, for the full impact of irony, Crane must circle back from the saloon to the Blue Hotel and demonstrate that, as the exis* Finley Peter Dunne's Mr. Dooley somewhere comments on the wonders of America: "th' cotton-gin . . . an' th' bicycle an' th' flyin'-machine an' th' nickel-in-th'-slot machine an' th' Croker machine an' th' sody-fountain an'—crownin' wurruk iv our civilization—th' cash raygister."

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tentialists would have it, man is free but also responsible for seeing to it that his freedom does not destroy the freedom of others. The Swede has lost his freedom to live, and the gambler has been sentenced to three years in jail. There is opacity in the cowboy's ruminations that question the Swede's stupid motives for accusing Johnnie of cheating in a game for fun. The cowboy's dullness of vision is further stressed by his belief that some blame should adhere to the bartender who, if he had been any good, would have cracked the Swede on the head with a bottle. Parody gives way to cosmic laughter. The Easterner, agreeing that a thousand things might have happened, insists that the blame should not be put on the gambler: "This poor gambler isn't even a noun. He is kind of an adverb. Every sin is the result of a collaboration" (p. 1 3 1 ) . True, fate brought the Swede and the gambler together, as the opposites that polarize and define each other, but the guilt belongs not in the real saloon but in the comic hotel and its patrons who betrayed the Swede. How? The Easterner is very sure: "Johnnie was cheating. I saw him. I know it. I saw him. And I refused to stand up and be a man. I let the Swede fight it out alone" (p. 1 3 1 ) . The Easterner, whose characteristic phrase has been "I don't know," now knows the extent of his complicity. The story, then, belongs to him as much as to the Swede, and the focus of the last section is entirely fitting. Possibly the angry, nearly hysterical Easterner rambles in his and Crane's indictment of the damned human race. The fellowship that seemed of transcendent and positive importance to Henry Fleming and Dr. Trescott, to the correspondent and George, now appears horrible to the Easterner. "We, five of us, have collaborated in the murder of this Swede" (p. 1 3 1 ) . The human condition combines isolation 272 •

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and responsibility, and these men have all failed. Certainly the Swede is one of them in his weakness, but his vices, we suddenly recall, are no worse than those of the others in the Blue Hotel. He is aloof like the Easterner, drinks like Scully, slaps cards grandiosely like the cowboy, and fights like Johnnie. His pride and naivete are excessive, to be sure, but partly because of the weakness of the other men, whom he readily dominates. Like all Crane's protagonists, the Swede is trapped in a hostile environment; as he fights nature — human nature in his case — proudly, he is crushed, like the oiler, by the one more wave, the one more fight, that remains always on the horizon. His acquaintances have not attempted to save him. He is in the hell he imagined, for the five men have denied his individuality and human value. Where the controlling consciousness of "The Open Boat" finds satisfaction in comradeship, the Easterner discovers only alienation, inner nothingness, betrayal, and defeat in the absence of true camaraderie. Therefore, insists the Easterner, the foolish gambler is merely the culmination, the apex of the human movement, on whom, ironically, all the punishment is heaped. Indeed, from one point of view the Swede is better than his five murderers. He is not as stupid as the cowboy, he does not cheat like Johnnie, lie like Scully, condone like the Easterner, or indulge in hypocrisy like the gambler. This summing-up tests the clichés of character set forth in the story and further modifies the traditional roles by showing the relativity and incongruity of expected behavior patterns. Perhaps Stephen Crane's finest touch is to leave the last word with the cowboy, invincible in his stupidity. In an ultimate parodie glance at the cowboy of legend, Crane lets his cowboy cry out blindly in the face of the guiltridden Easterner's "fog of mysterious theory" the deadly 273

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question, "Well, I didn't do anythin', did I?" (p. 132). Exactly the point. Unlike the active, knowledgeable, involved cowboy of legend, this cowboy is a cipher. First, the cowboy was restrained, so he didn't hit the Swede (an action that might have lessened the latter's sense of superiority); second, he didn't cheat or know of the cheating; third, he didn't help the Swede: he didn't do anything, and in that lack of action, he, as the Easterner comprehends, did everything. "The Blue Hotel" closes with a choice of readings. Like the author himself, we must accept the ambiguity of life and death, good and evil, truth and lie, isolation and complicity. The cash register ending is simply too pat. The problematical close of "I didn't do anythin', did I?" fits Crane's approach to Western fiction, which, like all his parody, combines sympathy and detachment. Stephen Crane followed "The Blue Hotel" with two more Western stories, the short and enigmatic "Twelve O'Clock" in 1899 and a rather harsh attack on social hypocrisy, "Moonlight on the Snow," in 1900. While these tales lack the universal overtones and the structural and linguistic mastery that distinguish some of Crane's earlier Western stories, the late pieces stress the irrational violence that gives the main thrust to all Crane's writing." "Twelve O'Clock" is a black comedy in three acts. The setting recalls Alfred Lewis' Wolfville, as a group of citizens discuss, with graphic illustrations, the dangerous fury of drunken 0 In discovering a predilection for violence in American fiction, Marius Bewley has found physical violence to be "a surgeon's probe that explores a moral question outside the consciousness of any one of the characters . . . action as a phenomenon of the physical world has a moral significance in its own right." Marius Bewley, The Eccentric Design (London, 1959), P- 74-

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cowpunchers when they come to town after a period on the trail. The story seems to be heading toward satire, for the citizens are pompous and their main interest lies in the opinion of imaginary Eastern capitalists who would refuse to invest in a town where "ther's too much loose-handed shootin'" (XII, 106). Act II is pure comedy, a tall story worthy of Roughing It. An ignorant, half-inebriated cowboy notices in Placer's Hotel — the best within two hundred miles, replete with armchairs, brown papier-mache spitoons, a pink counter, and an irascible owner carefully making entries in a ledger — a cuckoo clock. Amazed by this phenomenon, the cowboy attempts to persuade his comrades of the wonder he has seen; the third act seems foretold: the drunken cowboys will invade the hotel, but the cuckoo will not appear until the hour strikes. The Act III written by Crane, however, while commencing as expected, suddenly turns shockingly raw. The scene is set for a comic argument, even when another drunken cowboy, Big Watson, enters into a controversy with the cowboy who first noticed the cuckoo. As the two men draw their guns and glare murder at each other, Crane seems to have shifted the tone from comedy to melodrama. The result of the shooting affray shocks the reader who expects the traditional gunfight. In perhaps the grimmest reverse twist in Crane's pages, he sketches a frighteningly realistic scene. The angry hotel owner attempts to drive the rowdies from his lobby: "Big Watson laughed, and speeding up his six-shooter like a flash of blue light, he shot Placer through the throat — shot the man as he stood behind his absurd pink counter with his two aimed revolvers in his incompetent hands. . . . Placer fell behind the counter, and down upon him came his 275 •

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ledger and his inkstand, so that one could not have told blood from ink" (p. 113). In conventional Western tales, hotel owners are simply not shot. The implications are clear: the Old West represented by a six-shooter has destroyed the New West represented by a ledger and an inkstand. But Crane's point is that for all its senseless violence and kicks at progress, the Old West is an anachronism. Big Watson is as outdated as Scratchy Wilson on one of his rampages. Once more caricaturing Western fictional tradition, Crane omits the customary battle between town and trail. The cowboys refuse to fight the aroused citizens, and after one cowboy is shot, they turn over Big Watson to the forces of order. Violence and order seem equally meaningless as the story ends with the awaited cry of the cuckoo — sounded twelve times. Such is Stephen Crane's epitaph for the West of song and story. The burden of "Moonlight on the Snow" is more satiric, and the story defends the violent yet honest Old West against the law-abiding yet venal New West. Here Crane comes down clearly on the side of the gambler who, like his counterpart in "The Blue Hotel," shoots and kills a man who has accused the card player of cheating. Larpent the gambler is a leading citizen in the Western town, which has become corrupted by Eastern motives, corrupted into accepting a set of moral standards that are a travesty of the mythic Western ideals of force and honor. When the story opens, the town of Warpost is a relic of the Old West of the Swede's dime novels. It has an evil name, and its citizens "had been for years grotesquely proud of their fame as a collection of hard-shooting gentlemen who invariably 'got' the men who came up against them" (XII, 117). This propensity for war stands against the "angel of peace" — a real estate project. Crane's analysis of the rise 276 •

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of the modern West is drenched in a lyric irony, a comic contempt. "And from the East came both the sane and the insane with hope, with courage, with hoarded savings, with cold decks, with Bibles, with knives in boots, with humility and fear, with bland impudence" (p. 118). The march of civilization, with building lots and fancy names, stops short of Warpost, proud of its identity and reputation for manly bloodshed. The code of Warpost — straight shooting — seems worthless in the new era. Mean neighbors without guns become rich, and Warpost sees "her standard of excellence, her creed, her reason for being great, all tumbling about her ears . . ." (p. 1 1 8 ) . In a meeting that is rich with humor, the leading citizens discuss their problems. They drink at the expense of Tom Larpent the gambler, who is the chief intellectual force in the town — "he had been educated somewhere, and his slow speech had a certain mordant quality" — and is both Stephen Crane's mouthpiece as cynical observer and the protagonist as amoral hero. The others, Bob Hether the barkeeper and Smith Hanham the roulette whirler, are agreed that virtue equals nonviolence and brings money. An end to gunfights will mean wealth. The era of Scratchy Wilson must pass, or, in Larpent's ironic drawl, "The value of human life has to be established before there can be theatres, water-works, street-cars, women, and babies" (p. 1 1 9 ) . In other words, Warpost must create for itself the atmosphere that Pat Scully claims for Fort Romper. Warpost, a Western version of Whilomville, falls similarly under Crane's withering scorn. Complacent in newly acquired virtue, the town fathers proclaim law. Any man who kills another man shall be hanged, and the traditional Western values of violence and partnership must not transgress the law, which must be rigidly upheld. Bob Hether emotion277 •

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ally declares he will hang his own brother if necessary for the good of the community (of course, as Larpent points out, the brother lives in Connecticut). Everyone is enthusiastic, except a few Mexicans who don't understand — but, the narrative insists, their silence doesn't matter since they would obviously be victims in any shooting fray. And "At half-past ten the next morning Larpent shot and killed a man who had accused him of cheating at a game. Larpent had then taken a chair by the window" (p. 120). Once Crane has set the conflict between "virtue" and the "gunfighter's code," in the remainder of the story he portrays an outrageous parody of a lynching, probably the most trenchant attack on this staple of Western fiction until The Ox-Bow Incident. Only Larpent — who is drinking whiskey secretly imported from the East and reading Scott's Fair Maid of Perth, which stamps him as an intellectual — has the moral courage to face up to the new law and its implications. He also realizes that he is the only citizen sufficiently courageous and intelligent to conduct the ceremony that would be his own death. The old highwayman's phrase, "Your money or your life," is perverted in "Moonlight on the Snow," for it is the respectable citizens who are demanding Larpent's life in order to enhance the value of real estate. Larpent spells out their difficulty. "In short, my milk-fed patriots, you seem fat-headed enough to believe that I am going to hang myself if you wait long enough; but unfortunately I am going to allow you to conduct your own real-estate speculations" (p. 122). An inebriate who was once a Baptist preacher stumblingly establishes that Larpent indeed killed his man, and to the tune of the gambler's ironic, mocking shafts the scene shifts to a platform in front of the general store where a wooden crane stands. The development of this mad plot with its wickedly venal jury and 278 •

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bitingly sardonic protagonist anticipates the mordant humor of the George Bernard Shaw of The Devils Disciple. Larpent's comments, witty in a Shavian manner, continue to anathematize and anatomize the social structure of the town, when, with a brilliantly absurd comic stroke, Crane brings a stagecoach onto the scene. Naturally, from the coach steps a parodic version of Eastern gentility, the traditional schoolmarm figure who wallows in sentiment. A beautiful young lady, two little girls, and a venerable gentleman more fitting for the pages of Oliver Goldsmith disembark and realize that something "wicked" is transpiring. "And the rough West stood in naked immorality before the eyes of the gentle East" (p. 126)." Tom Larpent, Crane's Dick Dudgeon — handsome, distinguished, "a devil, a devil as cold as moonlight upon the ice" (p. 126) — explains the situation in witty rhetoric. The affair is perfectly regular because he killed a man, and these "people here, who look like a fine collection of premier scoundrels, are really engaged in forcing a real-estate boom. In short, they are speculators, land barons, and not the children of infamy which you no doubt took them for at first" (p. 127). The situation is at an impasse. Warpost is populated by thugs and thieves, men whose profession is preying on cowboys who ride into town in search of sin. Although the citizens are treacherous and obscene — and here the parody touches on Bret Harte and his kindly ruffians — they are conscious of the perfect sentimental tableau facing them: angelic children, a beautiful lady prostrate, a trembling aged • One of the most hackneyed traditions of Western fiction was the arrival of the "lady" from the East who, often helped by her angel child, reforms the men. See Roger Walterhouse, Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, and the Western Local Color Story (Chicago, 1939), p. 9.

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father. "All the simplicity of a mere lynching was gone from this thing" (p. 128). The town divides into four groups, each representing a general social attitude. There are realists who want to run away; poets who have forgotten why they are present; businessmen who wonder about the newcomers' influence; and the mob of boobs who would kill the stagecoach driver for bringing in these complications. Larpent himself must resolve the dilemma by ordering them to call off the lynching. How, then, may the demands of the law be served? Only a deus ex machina can find a solution for the Warposters, caught between a new concept of law and a traditional belief in individuality. What better proof that the day of the Old West of fable has passed than to bring the law, the real law, to Warpost, in the person of our old friend from Yellow Sky, Marshal (now County Sheriff) Jack Potter? And to cap the proof that the law is mighty and shall prevail, who is the Sheriff's deputy but a reformed Scratchy Wilson, "once a no less famous desperado" (p. 130)? The Western parody is complete. Potter and Scratchy are now on the same side, and a new West, where law can invade Warpost, is in the ascendency. The impassive Sheriff takes Larpent away to Yellow Sky to face a charge of grand larceny. Larpent does not depart Warpost, however, without additional ironies. The Old Western codes die hard, and a gunfight is averted only by bartender Hether's insistence that Warpost's new reputation for law and order calls for compliance with Sheriff Potter's directives. The clan spirit is strong, but Potter's quiet authority is stronger, and the law is the final victor in "Moonlight on the Snow." Or is it? As Bobbie Hether remarks, they can't find a man guilty of larceny without witnesses, and there will be none in War280 •

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post. What price law now? To the prospective real estate agents, "what in hell does grand larceny amount to?" (P- 133)In Harry Levin's words, fiction, "viewed against its institutional setting, becomes a satire as well as a parody. It penetrates beyond literary convention to social convention. . . . In criticizing literature, it criticizes life." 10 Stephen Crane's Western stories make a fitting climax to the essentially parodie approach that defines his fiction from start to finish. In his powerful and dramatic Western adventures, Crane laughs at the formulae of the Western story; without commitment he still manages to employ the traditional evocative qualities of the form while engaged in the process of criticizing the form itself.* With a style that is at once clear and ambiguous, language that is precise and evocative, settings that are immediate and impressionistic, dialogue that is lucid and vernacular, prose that is concentrated and rich, structure that is firm and flexible, Stephen Crane created an impressive body of fiction. With a philosophy of life that is bleak yet toughminded, Crane viewed man in many situations of tense con• See Rosemary Freeman, "Parody as a Literary Form: George Herbert and Wilfred Owen," Essays in Criticism, 1 3 ( 1 9 6 3 ) , 308. Miss Freeman's analysis may provide a final clarification of what I consider to be Crane's fundamental method. An author with something to say "believes that the language which can best express his thought is a familiar language possibly spoilt by over-use but still more forceful than any idiom free from wellworn associations." Miss Freeman spots the dangers inherent in using parody for serious purposes. "Of course, the initial style he adapts brings dangers of its own, and in his employment of it his imaginative strength must be sufficient to over-ride the cliché and yet turn it to advantage. Some connection between the inherited style and the new purpose . . . must be established. And, above all, the writer and the reader have to discover an appropriate degree of detachment." I think Stephen Crane uses the wise gambler in "Moonlight on the S n o w " and the Easterner in " T h e Blue Hotel" to provide this degree of detachment.

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flict — with nature, society, himself. Even in his most severe indictments of human and environmental limitations, however, Stephen Crane never lost sight of the ridiculous. Crane's major fiction most often commences in parody and concludes in creativity. He derided conventional slum sentimentality, mocked temperance fiction, glanced at certain excesses of sea tales, triumphantly made the conventions of war literature his own best medium, showed contempt for the stories of small-town America, and caricatured the narratives of the Old West. In his best work parody and realism become one. "The Blue Hotel" represents powerfully by the logic of the story's own action the typical development of Stephen Crane's imagination throughout his fiction. In the story he moves from an idea of stereotyped Western myth, to parody, to reality — the movement the Swede literally makes from his arrival with his head filled by mythic fears, to the absurd hotel, to the real saloon. So Crane generally views the traditional abstraction, cuts it to pieces through parody, then puts it together his way, redefining the actuality behind the abstraction. "The Blue Hotel" actually brings the parodic approach to its logical culmination, for the Swede is a living parody, a badly scared Don Quixote nurtured on dime-novel fiction, whose death, in the finest irony of all, is both a parody of art and the sole reality of his life.

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Notes Introduction. Parody and Realism 1. Crane, letter to Copöland and Day, June? 1895, Stephen Crane: Letters, ed. R. W. Stallman and Lillian Gilkes (New York: New York University Press, i960), p. 59. 2. The Sullivan County Sketches of Stephen Crane, ed. Melvin Schoberlin (Syracuse, 1949), pp. 27, 29, 26, 40. 3. Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn (New York, 1963), p. 51. 4. Rosemary Freeman, "Parody as a Literary Form: George Herbert and Wilfred Owen," Essays in Criticism, 13 (1963), 307. 5. Maurice Johnson, Fielding's Art of Fiction (Philadelphia, 1961), p. 48. 6. The Complete Short Stories and Sketches of Stephen Crane, ed. Thomas A. Gullason (New York, 1963), p. 109. 7. Corwin Knapp Linson, My Stephen Crane, ed. Edwin H. Cady (Syracuse, 1958), p- 3°8. Crane, "A Christmas Dinner Won in Battle" (1895), Stephen Crane: Uncollected Writings, ed. Olov W. Fryckstedt (Uppsala, 1963), P- 108. 9. Crane, "Some Hints for Playmakers," Uncollected Writings, pp. 36-3710. The Work of Stephen Crane, ed. Wilson Follett (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925-1926), XII, 233. Subsequent references to this edition will be identified in the text by volume and page number. Since this edition is still the one most available for readers interested in the fullest body of Crane's work, I use it (except for The Red Badge of Courage, where there are important textual changes) despite its occasional minor unreliability and its use of a few of the Knopf house rules for spelling. 11. Crane, letter to John N. Hilliard, Jan. 1896? Letters, p. 110. 12. David Worcester, The Art of Satire (Cambridge, Mass., 1940), p. 42. 13. Thomas Beer thinks that Crane had Tom Grogan, a novel by F. Hopkinson Smith, in mind (Crane, Work, vol. VII, p. ix). I find no similarities, however. As Corwin Linson has testified, the young author never had any use for "the old school of romance novelists," 285 •

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particularly Sir Walter Scott and Victor Hugo. My Stephen Crane, pp. 31-32. 14. Letter from A. E. W. Mason to Vincent Starrett, Oct. 4, 1945, Letters, p. 344. 15. Joseph Kirkland, Zury, The Meanest Man in Spring County (Boston, 1887), p. 35. 16. An early review of the novel noticed this effect: "A serio-comic effect seems to be intended throughout," John Borrow Allen, Academy, 49 (1896), 13517. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1953). P- 2 7318. Crane, "On the Boardwalk" (1892), Uncollected Writings, p. 27. I. Love and Death in the Slums 1. Stephen Crane: Letters, ed. R. W. Stallman and Lillian Gilkes (New York: New York University Press, i960), p. 14. 2. Stephen Crane, "In the Tenderloin," reprinted in Stephen Crane: Uncollected Writings, ed. Olov W. Fryckstedt (Uppsala, 1963), p. 200. Page references for subsequent quotations from this story are given in the text. 3. Frank Kermode, "The Prime of Miss Muriel Spark," New Statesman, 66 (1963), 397. 4. I have drawn on Alexander Cowie's excellent discussion of sentimental fiction in his The Rise of the American Novel (New York, 1948), pp. 412fr. 5. Walter F. Taylor, The Economic Novel in America (Chapel Hill, 1942), pp. 79-80. 6. "The Bowery and Bohemia," The Stories of H. C. Bunner (New York, 1916), pp. 370, 336. 7. Quoted in Mark Sullivan, Our Times (New York, 1926), I, 218198. Crane, letter to Catherine Harris, Nov. 12? 1896, Letters, p. 133. 9. It is interesting to note that in this novel there is a character named Maggie who goes bad; Townsend's A Daughter of the Tenements also has a fallen Maggie. 10. "In plot, Crane's book is the most faithful of all to the stereotype . . . [and involves] travesties." Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (Cleveland, i960), pp. 238-39. 11. Blanche Gelfant, The American City Novel (Norman, 1954), p. 6. 12. Helen Campbell, The Problems of the Poor (New York, 1882), p. 114. 286 •

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13. Stephen Crane: An Exhibition, ed. Joan H. Baum (New York, 1956), p. 15. 14. As Crane inscribed in one presentation copy of Maggie, "It is indeed a brave new binding and I wish the inside were braver." To De Witt Miller, July 3, 1896, The Modern Library in First Editions (New York, 1938), p. 53. 15. Stephen Crane, "Fears Realists Must Wait" (1894), Uncollected Writings, p. 79. 16. See William M. Gibson, 'Textual and Bibliographical Note," Stephen Crane: The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Prose and Poetry (New York, 1956), p. xvii. 17. "The Judgment of the Sage," Uncollected Writings, p. 177. 18. Stephen Crane, inscription in copy of Maggie presented to Dr. Lucius L. Button, March 1893? Letters, p. 14. II. The Failure on the Barroom Floor 1. Willis B. Clarke, Nov. 1899, Stephen Crane: Letters, ed. R. W. Stallman and Lillian Gilkes (New York: New York University Press, i960), pp. 242-43. 2. Kenneth Lynn, The Dream of Success (Boston, 1955), p. 6. 3. Horatio Alger, Strive and Succeed (Philadelphia, 1872), p. 355. 4. The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman, ed. Emory Holloway (New York, 1921), II, 108. 5. Ibid., p. 146. 6. Edgar Fawcett, A Man's Will (New York, 1888), p. 127. 7. J. T. Crane, Arts of Intoxication (New York, 1870), pp. 142, 1458. "Authors are in no position to see themselves; conscious selfparodies lack shape and bite." John Updike, Assorted Prose (New York, 1965), p. 242. Crane's references here to his own previous serious statements may be for ironic contrast rather than for selfparody; in any case, they don't quite come off. 9. According to Leslie Fiedler, drunkenness is a symbol for sexual betrayal, the saloon is the anti-home, the refuge for the fleeing, ineffective male. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (Cleveland, i960), p. 259. III. A Definition of the War Novel 1. For a fuller survey, see my unpublished dissertation, "Studies in Nineteenth-Century War Fiction," Harvard University, 1958.

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2. Charles King, Between the Lines (New York, 1888), p. 17. 3. Harold Frederic, Marsena and Other Stories of the Wartime (New York, 1894), p. 80. 4. I have discussed Kirkland's novel as a possible source in "Another Analogue for The Red Badge of Courage,' Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 13 (1958-59), 63-67. 5. For a more extended treatment of Crane's predecessors in Civil War fiction, see my The Faded Banners (New York, i960). 6. "Some novels might be fairly described as ruined parodies. The little dolls whittled in fun escape the author's derision and take on life . . . . Cervantes' masterpiece Lives not because it succeeds as parody but because it immensely fails. Setting out to demonstrate the folly of romantic aspirations, Cervantes ends by locating in just this folly, this futility, such aspirations' grandeur and so provides . . . an adjective and a metaphor for the new human condition." John Updike, Assorted Prose (New York, 1965), pp. 247-48. 7. Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, in Stephen Crane: An Omnibus, ed. R. W. Stallman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958), p. 238. All subsequent references to this novel—which in this edition includes those portions of the ms. that were left out of the first edition —appear in the text. 8. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (New York: The Modern Library, 1931), p. 214. 9. Crane, letter to John N. Hilliard, 1897? in Stephen Crane: Letters, ed. R. W. Stallman and Lillian Gilkes (New York: New York University Press, i960), p. 158. We need not take Crane's description of his novel as the final word. An author's statement about his own work is valuable, of course, but his opinion may be suspect because of a later shift in attitude or a disparity between intent and effect. 10. Mark Schorer, Foreword to Critiques and Essays on Modern Fiction, ed. John W. Aldridge (New York, 1952), p. xviii. Malcolm Cowley holds that the relationship between the individual and the social order must undergo some change by the end of the novel. See Malcolm Cowley, "The Limits of the Novel," New Republic, July 9, 1956, p. 16. 11. Edward Sackville-West, Inclinations (London, 1949), p. 177. 12. Houghton holograph page of the original ms., quoted in footnote to R. W. Stallman, ed., The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Stories (New York, 1963), p. 217. 13. Joseph Conrad, "His War Book," Tales of Hearsay and Last Essays (London, 1955), P- 1 2 1 288

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14. Joseph Conrad, Introduction to Thomas Beer, Stephen Crane (New York, 1923), p. 3. 15. I, 204. His statement looks forward to Yossarian's argument in Joseph Heller's Catch-22. IV. The Bitterness of Battle 1. Stephen Crane: Letters, ed. R. W. Stallman and Lillian Gilkes (New York: New York University Press, i960), pp. 222-23. 2. For example, in the twelve-volume edition of Crane's collected works edited by Wilson Follett for Knopf in 1925-26, the earliest war stories appear in volumes II and XII, the latest in volume IX. 3. Pages 102-3. Crane's study of the gratuitous act in war may seem fanciful, but Siegfried Sassoon, in his slightly fictionalized autobiography of a World War I officer, describes similar actions time and again. Sassoon considers the motives behind such actions to resemble the impetuous desire of a fox hunter to clear a high fence. Crane, we recall, was still writing of war from his knowledge of football. Stendhal's Fabrizio and Tolstoy's Petya perform like acts. 4. Ford Madox Ford, "Stephen Crane," American Mercury, 37 (1936), 37. Ford hails Crane as the precursor of the group of English novelists—civilian-soldiers—who wrote of their experiences in World War I: "this was exactly how we all did take it [war] twenty years later, from the English Channel to the frontiers of Italy." 5. 'The Private History of a Campaign That Failed," The Writings of Mark Twain (New York, 1899), IX, 271. 6. Twain, Writings, IX, 278. Twain also shows his distaste for war at the end of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and in his journalism. 7. Crane, "War Memories," IX, 201. Compare Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York, 1955), p. 2: "But the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years, or with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to get it." 8. Philip Rahv, 'The Cult of Experience in American Writing," Image and Idea (Norfolk, Conn., 1949), p. 10. 9. Robert A. Spiller, The Cycle of American Literature (New York, 1956), p. 197. 10. Henry James, The Future of the Novel, ed. Leon Edel (New York, 1956), p. 59. 289

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11. Crane, letter to Paul Revere Reynolds, Nov. 3, 1898, Letters, P- 19312. Stephen Crane: Uncollected Writings, ed. Olov W. Fryckstedt (Uppsala, 1963), pp. 371-73. 13. Crane, letter to Lily Brandon Munroe, March 1894, Letters, P- 3214. Humphrey Hare, Introduction to Alfred de Vigny, Servitude et grandeur militaires (New York, 1953), p. xxi. V. The Romances That Failed 1. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), p. 306. 2. For this formula, see Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn (New York, 1963), p. 190. 3. Crane, letter to John N. Hilliard, Jan. 2, 1896, Stephen Crane: Letters, ed. R. W. Stallman and Lillian Gilkes (New York: New York University Press, i960), p. 95. 4. Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades (New York, 1955), p. 227. 5. The Complete Short Stories and Sketches of Stephen Crane, ed. Thomas A. Gullason (New York, 1963), p. 196. 6. Crane was quite an able narrator of his favorite game; his story "A Poker Game" (1896 probably) is tense and clever. VI. The Destructive Element 1. Thomas Philbrick, James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), p. 9. 2. Philbrick, Cooper and American Sea Fiction, p. 20. 3. All these stories end on the same note: "Finally, everybody perishes with the exception of the fortunate few, among whom is the hero, whose powers of resistance are abnormal." Ernest C. Ross, The Development of the English Sea Novel (Ann Arbor, n.d.), p. 37. 4. Stephen Crane, letter to Ripley Hitchcock, March 26, 1896, Stephen Crane: Letters, ed. R. W. Stallman and Lillian Gilkes (New York, i960), p. 121. 5. The Complete Short Stories and Sketches of Stephen Crane, ed. Thomas A. Gullason (New York, 1963), p. 62. Subsequent references to this edition follow immediately in the text. 6. Stephen Crane: Uncollected Writings, ed. Olov W. Fryckstedt (Uppsala, 1963), pp. 20-21. 7. Uncollected Writings, p. 93. 8. Uncollected Writings, p. 117. 290

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9. Uncollected Writings, p. 235. Page references for subsequent quotations from this piece are given in the text. 10. Malcolm Cowley, "A Natural History of American Naturalism," in George F. Becker, ed., Documents of Modern Literary Realism (Princeton, 1963), p. 444. 11. N. G. Chernishevsky, "Life and Aesthetics," in Becker, ed., Documents, p. 54. 12. W. H. Auden, The Enchafed Flood (New York, 1950), p. 66. 13. Lillian Gilkes, Cora Crane (Bloomington, i960), p. 257. 14. Donald Davie, "Mr. Eliot," New Statesman, 66 (1963), 496. 15. Stephen Crane, "In the Depths of a Coal Mine" (1894), Uncollected Writings, p. 65. 16. Cf. Auden, The Enchaßd Flood, p. 14. 17. Auden, The Enchaßd Flood, p. 77. 18. Crane, "In the Depths of a Coal Mine," Uncollected Writings, pp. 71-72. And see Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York, n.d.), p. 68: "Thus each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky." 19. Auden, The Enchafed Flood, p. 94. 20. Auden, The Enchaßd Flood, p. 96. 21. Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the "Narcissus," in The Viking Portable Conrad, ed. M. D. Zabel (New York, 1947), p. 453. VII. The Village Virus 1. See Karl Harriman, "A Romantic Idealist—Mr. Stephen Crane," Literary Review, April 1900, p. 86. 2. Carl Van Dören, Contemporary American Novelists (New York, 1922), p. 147. 3. See Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961), p. 217. Booth here is referring to Henry Fielding in Tom Jones. Two of the terms in Booth's next sentence might apply to the narrator of The Monster; the third most emphatically does not: "It is his wisdom and learning and benevolence that permeate the book. . . ." 4. As Crane wrote in 1896, "Let a woman once take an interest in the shortcomings of her neighbors, and she immediately and naturally begins to magnify events in a preposterous fashion. . . . There is one phrase which she uses eternally. They say.'" Uncollected Writings, ed. Olov W. Fryckstedt (Uppsala, 1963), p. 217. 5. Van Wyck Brooks, The Confident Years: 1885-1915 (New York, 1952). PP- 3 6 . 66-67. 291 •

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VIII. The Crucible of Childhood 1. Stephen Crane: Letters, ed. R. W. Stallman and Lillian Gilkes (New York: New York University Press, i960), pp. 279-80. 2. Edwin Cady distinguishes the genre of boy stories from the stories written for boys. Edwin Cady, The Road to Realism (Syracuse, 1956), p. 12. According to Wright Morris, most children appear in "safe" books wherein the adults are reverting to childhood. Wright Morris, The Territory Ahead (New York, 1963), p. 128. 3. Booth Tarkington, Pernod (New York, 1914), p. 285. Tarkington fully appreciated Crane's book: "Crane's children were children . . . He built them without the waste of a word and at the same time didn't lose a hair of their heads; it's all beautifully, beautifully done." Quoted in Alexander Woollcott, "Stephen Crane's Whihmville Stories," Saturday Review of Literature, Oct. 23, 1937, p. 14. Alfred Kazin points out that Crane's Whilomville is an abstraction that subsumes the towns of previous boys' books but adds an aura of evil. Alfred Kazin, "A Procession of Children," American Scholar, 33 (1964), 182. 4. William Dean Howells, A Boy's Town (New York, 1890), p. 6. 5. Oral comment by Crane, quoted in Thomas Beer, Stephen Crane (New York, 1924), p. 147. 6. Tarkington, Penrod, p. 313. 7. A recent critic has remarked that Penrod stands the test of time but not the demands of maturity. "It remains a book for boys, and if the adult reader retreats into its pages in the afternoon hope of a delightful moral discovery, he is foredoomed to failure." John D. Seelye, "That Marvelous Boy—Penrod Once Again," Virginia Quarterly Review, 37 (1961), 591. In The Innocent Eye (New Haven, 1961), Albert Stone examines quite fully the tradition of boy stories. 8. Howells, A Boy's Town, p. 67. 9. The child's perspective mediates between sentimentalism and savagery. See Stone, The Innocent Eye, p. 79. Earlier, in a few sketches about Maggie's baby brother, Tommie, Crane experimented with a child's vision of the slums that is neither sentimental nor brutal; see "An Ominous Baby" or "A Great Mistake." IX. The Gunfighters 1. Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, Vol. Ill, The Beginnings of Critical Realism (New York, 1930), 15. 2. Of all the genres Crane worked in, critics have been most alert to the parody in his Western stories. See Edwin Cady, "Stephen Crane and the Strenuous Life," ELH, 28 (1961), 382, which finds "The

292 •

N O T E S TO P A G E S

230-246

Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" to be "a hilariously funny parody of the neo-romantic lamentations over 'The Passing of the West.' The last marshal is tamed by a prosaic marriage and exempted from playing The Game so absurdly romanticized by Street and Smith, The Police Gazette, and finally Owen Wister." Also Marvin Klotz, "Stephen Crane: Tragedian or Comedian," University of Kansas City Review, 27 ( 1 9 6 1 ) , 1 7 2 , discovers, wrongly I think, "The Blue Hotel" to be "a deliberate burlesque of literary naturalism." 3 . Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land (New York, 1 9 5 7 ) , p. 9 7 . 4. Smith, Virgin Land, p. 101. 5 . Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (Cleveland, i 9 6 0 ) , p. XX. 6. In "The "Western Story' as Literature," Western Humanities Review, 3 ( 1 9 4 9 ) , 3 3 , W. H. Hutchinson describes the boundaries of the West: "For a period of thirty-five years at most, from Appomattox to the turn of the century, it stretched from the One Hundredth Meridian to the Sierra-Cascade summit between the Rio Grande border line and the equally unfortified line of Milk River." 7. John R. Milton, "The Western Novel: Sources and Forms," Chicago Review, 5 1 ( 1 9 6 3 ) , 9 2 . 8. William G. Patten, Hustler Harry, the Cowboy Sport; or, Daring Dan Shark's General Delivery (New York, 1 8 8 9 ) , p. 3 . Quoted in Warren French, 'The Cowboy in the Dime Novel," Texas University Studies in English, 3 0 ( 1 9 5 1 ) , 2 3 2 . 9 . Theodore Winthrop, John Brent (New York, 1 8 7 6 ) , pp. 2 4 , 7 5 . 10. Bret Harte, "Brown of Calaveras," Bret Harte, ed. Joseph B. Harrison (New York, 1 9 4 1 ) , p. 2 5 0 . ix. Alfred Henry Lewis, Wolfville (New York, 1 8 9 7 ) , p. 2 2 9 . 12. Lewis, Wolfville, p. gg. 1 3 . Owen Wister, Lin McLean (Chicago, 1 9 2 5 ) , p. 9 0 . X4. Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (Cambridge, Mass., 1 9 6 2 ) , p. 6 4 . 1 5 . Stephen Crane, "In a Park Row Restaurant" ( 1 8 9 4 ) , Stephen Crane: Uncollected Writings, ed. Olov W. Fryckstedt (Uppsala, 1 9 6 3 ) , p . 8 5 . Crane repeated the anecdote in "London Impressions" (1897)-

x 6 . Uncollected Writings, p. 8 4 . Stephen Crane, "Nebraskan's Bitter Fight for Life" ( 1 8 9 5 ) , Uncollected Writings, pp. 123, 126. 1 8 . Stephen Crane, "Caged with a Wild Man" ( 1 8 9 6 ) , Uncollected Writings, pp. 173, 174. 19. Irving Howe, "William Faulkner," Major Writers of America, ed. Perry Miller et al. (New York, 1 9 6 2 ) , II, 8 3 6 . 17.

293

NOTES

TO P A G E S

257-281

X. Death on the Plains 1. Philip Young, Ernest Hemingway (New York, 1952), p. 163. There are, of course, a great many similarities in form as well as content between Crane and Hemingway. Daniel Fuchs has recently shown how Hemingway imbeds parody in his best fiction, making his "encounter with literature an inextricable part of it"; like Crane, Hemingway burlesqued heroic rhetoric, storybook endings, genteel and chivalric displays. "Hemingway is one of those writers who would not have written so well had others not written so poorly." Daniel Fuchs, "Ernest Hemingway, Literary Critic," American Literature, 36 (196465), 451, 432. 2. Stephen Crane, 'The Red Badge of Courage Was His Wig-Wag Flag" (1898), Stephen Crane: Uncollected Writings, ed. Olov W. Fryckstedt (Uppsala, 1963), p. 336. 3. R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago, 1959), p. 6. 4. Joe B. Frantz and Julian Choate, The American Cowboy: The Myth and the Reality (Norman, 1955), p. 84. 5. Stephen Crane, "Queenstown" (1897), Uncollected Writings, p. 298. 6. Theodore Roosevelt, "Ranch Life in the Far West," Century, 35 (1887-88), 502.^ 7. Roosevelt, "Ranch Life," p. 503. 8. Edward M. White, "Emma and the Parodic Point of View," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 18 (1963), 55. 9. Lewis, The American Adam, p. 89. 10. Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn (New York, 1963), p. 56.

294

Index Abbott, Jacob, Rollo, 203 Active Service, 73, 11511, n g n , 1293i, 135-44 Adams, Andy, 235-36 Ade, George, 47 Agee, James, 5, 252, 265-6611 Aldington, Richard, 76, 106 Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 203, 209, 2 1 3 ; The Story of a Bad Boy, 202 Alger, Horatio: Brave and Bold, 49; Pluck and Luck, 49; Work and Win, 49 Algren, Nelson, 25 "And If He Wills, We Must Die," 126 Anderson, Sherwood, 178 Arnold, Matthew, 68; "Dover Beach," 158, 168 Art Students' League, 133 Arthur, Timothy Shay: Three Years in a Man Trap, 52; Ten Nights in a Barroom, 52 Auden, W. H., i53n, 159, 175 Auerbach, Erich, 6, 17-18 Austen, Jane, Northanger Abbey, 261 Balzac, Honore de, 8 Barbusse, Henri, 76, 106 Barr, Robert, 1 3 Barth, John, 1 7 Beer, Thomas, 3, 5; The Mauve Decade, 5n Benchley, Robert, 9 Bewley, Marius, 274n Bierce, Ambrose, 2, 7 1 , 105, 107, 271; Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, 72; "Chickamauga," 72; "One Officer, One Man," 106 "Billie Atkins Went to Omaha," 244n Bird, Robert Montgomery, 2

"Blue Hotel, The," 4, 2 1 1 , 234, 247, 257-74, 276, 282; Agee's scenario of, 5; and resolution of conflicts, 1 8 1 , 230; and nature of courage, 238-39 Bookman, 28-29 Boyd, James, 106 Boyesen, H. H., 24 "Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, The," 252-57; Agee's scenario of, 5, 252; and nature of courage, 12, 239; and Twainian burlesque, 237-38 Broun, Heywood, 47 Bunner, H. C., 24, 132 Buntline, Ned (Edward Z. Judson), Buffalo BiWs Beagles; or, Silk Lasso Sam, the Outlaw of the Overland: A Story of Wild West Heroes and Heroism, 233 Cable, George Washington, 69 "Caged with a Wild Man," 239-40 "Camel, The," 7 Camus, Albert, The Plague, 291 "Captain, The," 150 Cervantes, 6, 74; Don Quixote, 2, 1 3 1 , 261, 282, 288 Chambers, Robert W., In the Quarter, 132 "Chased by a Big 'Spanish—Man O'—War,'" I48n Chekhov, Anton, 48-49 "Christmas Dinner Won in Battle, A," 239 "Clan of No Name, The," 1 1 8 - 1 9 Clark, Walter Van Tilburg, The OxBow Incident, 278 Cocteau, Jean, 33 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Ancient Mariner, 1 6 1 , 175 Commodore (ship), 1 5 1 , 160 Conrad, Joseph, 3, 4, 92, 145, 149,

295 •

INDEX 163; Lord Jim, 79-80, 147; The Nigger of the "Narcissus," 14711, 163, 175-76 Cooke, John Esten, 70-71, 75; Mohun, 70-71 Cooper, James Fenimore, 69, 145, 147 Cowley, Malcolm, 153 Crane, Cora, I42n, 182, 206; in "The Angel Child," 209, 2 2 1 ; in "The Lover and the Telltale," 2 1 3 Crane, Jonathan Townley, 52-53; Arts of Intoxication, The Aim and the Results, The, 53 Crouse, Nellie, I35n Cummins, Maria, 23 Daily Tribune, New York, 7 1 "Dan Emmonds," 149-50 Dana, Richard Henry, 147; Two Years Before the Mast, 149 "Dark Brown Dog, A," 48 Davis, Richard Harding, 24, 140; "A Patron of the Arts," 132; Soldiers of Fortune, 136 "Death and the Child," 72, 107-13, 1 1 6 - 1 7 ; burlesque overtones, 1 0 1 ; and Active Service, 143 Defoe, Daniel, 145; Robinson Crusoe, 148 De Forest, John William, 25; Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty, 16-17, 71-72 "Desertion, A," 48 "Detail, A," 48-49 Detective's Ward; or, The Fortunes of a Bowery Girl, The (dime novel), 24 Dos Passos, John, 106 Dostoevsky, Fedor, The Idiot, 22n Dreiser, Theodore, 15, 16, 25, 34; Sister Carrie, 32 "Duel That Was Not Fought, The," 49 Dumas, Alexandre, 1 3 Du Maurier, George, 135; Trilby, 133 Dunne, Finley Peter, 47, 2 7 m

296 •

Eggleston, Edward, 15, 203; The Hoosier Schoolmaster, 179-80 Eggleston, George Cary, 69, 100 Eliot, T. S., 10 "Eloquence of Grief, An," 48 Engels, Friedrich, 26n "Episode of War, An," 124 "Experiment in Luxury, An," 27, 46 "Experiment in Misery, An," 27, 45, 53"54n Farrell, James T., 25 Faulkner, William, 180, 256; The Bear, 2 1 Fawcett, Edgar: The Evil That Men Do, 25-26; A Man's Will, 52 Fiedler, Leslie, 2 3 1 , 287 Fielding, Henry, 5; Joseph Andrews, 60; Shamela, 60; Tom Jones, 78 Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby, 54; Tender is the Night,

..

269

"Five Yellow Mice, The," 12, 249, 255; the New York Kid (character), 249-51 "Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure," 146, 152, 153-58 Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary, 79 n Fleet Scourge; or, The Sea Wings of Salem: A Romance of Whalers and Sea Rovers, The (dime novel), 148 Ford, Ford Madox, 3, 4, 106, 1 2 1 , 289 "Fragment of Velestino, A," 143 Frederic, Harold, 69-70, 180 Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins, 178 Freeman, Rosemary, 5, 28m Fryckstedt, Olov W., 20n Frye, Northrop, 1 3 1 Garland, Hamlin, 1 1 , 178 Garnett, Edward, 3, 4 Gay, John, The Beggar's Opera, 39 George's Mother, 23, 47-67, 82; and nature of cowardice, 12; as antisuccess story, 16, 1 8 1

INDEX "Ghostly Sphinx of Metedeconck, The," 1 5 1 "Ghosts on the Jersey Coast," 150-51 Gleig, George, 69 "God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen," 118, I25n Golding, William, Lord of the Flies, 201, 204, 215 Goldsmith, Oliver, 279 Great Battles of the World, 13 "Great Griefs Holiday Dinner," 134 "Great Mistake, A," 48 "Grey Sleeve, A," 100-1 Grey, Zane, 231 Haggard, H. Rider, 2-3, 136 Hale, Edward Everett, A New England Boyhood, 202, 2i7n Hardy, Thomas, 1 1 , 184 Hare, Humphrey, 127 Harkness, Margaret, 26n Harland, Henry, 132 Harper's Monthly Magazine, i33n, 206-7 Harris, Joel Chandler, 179, 220 Harte, Bret, 6, 236, 244, 269, 279; "The Luck of Roaring Camp," 234; "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," 234; "How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar," 234 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 180; The Scarlet Letter, 77, 87; "The Minister's Black Veil," 87; "Roger Malvin's Burial," 89 Haycox, Eugene, 231 Hearst, William Randolph, 137 Heber, Reginald, "From Greenland's Icy Mountains" (hymn), 225 Hecht, Ben, and Charles MacArthur, The Front Page, 137 Heller, Joseph, 17; Catch-22, 289 Hemingway, Ernest, 1 1 3 , 147-48, 257, 294; Death in the Afternoon, 289; To Have and Have Not, 155 Henry, O. (William Sydney Porter), 25, 271; Heart of tne West, 234 High Noon (film), 5 "His New Mittens," 206

Holt, A. F., The Ocean Drift; or, the Fight for Two Lives: A Sea and Shore Romance, 148 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 153; "The Windhover," 124 "Horses—One Dash," 240-43, 255 Howe, E. W., The Story of a Country Town, 179, 180 Howe, Irving, 246 Howells, William Dean, 6, 1 1 , 12, 24• 48, 130. 178, 209, 237; The Rise of Silas Lapham, 16; A Hazard of New Fortunes, 132; The Coast of Bohemia, 132; A Boy's Town, 202 Hughes, Richard, High Wind in Jamaica, 201 Hulme, T. E., 1 3 Ibsen, Henrik, An Enemy of the People, 199 "In the Broadway Cars," 46 "In the Tenderloin," 19-22, 47 "Indiana Campaign, An," 101 James, Henry, 4, 6, 116, 130 Janvier, Thomas, 132 Jewett, Sara Orne, 178 John Armstrong, Mechanic; or, From the Bottom to the Top of the Ladder. A Story of How a Man Can Rise in America (dime novel), 50 Johnson, Owen, 203 Jones, James, From Here to Eternity, 91 Joyce, James, 5n, 79n 'Joys of Pulque Down in Mexico," 53 n Judson, Edward Z., see Buntline, Ned "Just Plain Private Nolan," 121-24 Kermode, Frank, 23 "Kicking Twelfth; Four Regimental Episodes, The," 100, 124-28 "Kim Up, the Kickers," 125 King, Charles, 70

297 •

INDEX Kipling, Rudyard, 69, 73, 1 1 9 , 1 2 1 , 124, 126, 145, 147, 2 3 5 ; " T h e Man Who Was," 9 1 ; The Light That Failed, 137-38 Kirldand, Joseph, 1 5 ; Zury: The Meanest Man in Spring County, 1 5 - 1 6 , 179; The Captain of Company K, 7 1 Knopf, Alfred, 3 Lanier, Sidney, Tiger-Lilies, 71 Lanthom Club, 1 3 3 Lardner, Ring, 9; "Haircut," 184 Last Words, 100, 124-28 Lawrence, D. H., Sons and Lovers, 64 L e Fanu, J . Sheridan, 2 Lever, Charles, 1 3 - 1 4 , 69, 136, 143; Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, 14 Levin, Harry, 4, ion, 6gn, 2 8 1 Lewis, Alfred Henry, 235-36, 244, 252, 269; Wolfville,^ 2 3 5 , 274; " T h e Singing Lizard," 235; " E n right's Pard, Jim Willis," 235; " T h e Man from Red Dog," 235, 254; "Bogg's Experience," 2 3 5 Lewis, Sinclair, 1 7 8 Liebling, A. J., 4 7 Linson, Corwin Knapp, 1 3 3 , 285-86 Little Regiment, The, 99, 100-2, 207 London, Jack, 148 "Lone Charge of William B . Perkins, The," 1 0 1 , 1 1 7 "Lovely Jag in a Crowded Car, A," 53n Lynn, Kenneth, 49 McClure's Magazine, 202, 206 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, 3, 23-44, 54, 129; and the nature of courage, 12; Maggie (character), 23-24, 30-33. 34, 35-44, 48, 51, 58, 60, 62-63, 258; and social criticism, 46, 48, 1 8 1 ; and war imagery, 57, 205; and George's Mother, 57-59

298 •

"Manacled," g, 188 "Man and—Some Others, A," 2 3 5 , 2 3 7 , 243-49, 250 "Man by the Name of Mud, A," 129-30 Mann, Thomas, 88n; Death in Venice, 105 March, William, 106; The Bad Seed, 201 Marquis, Don, 4 7 Marriot-Watson, H. B., 1 3 Mason, A. E . W., 1 3 Masson, Thomas, 1 3 3 Masters, Edgar Lee, 1 7 8 Mauldin, Bill, 87n Melville, Herman, 1 1 9 , 145, 149, 163; "The March Into Virginia," 79; White-Jacket, 147-48; Moby Dick, 164 "Men in the Storm, T h e , " 47 "Minetta Lane," 47 Monster, The, 159, 180-200, 206, 222; and the nature of courage, 12; and social comment, 30; Crane's appraisal of, 1 7 7 "Moonlight on the Snow," 263, 27681; and social hypocrisy, 274 Mulford, Clarence, 2 3 1 Mumford, Lewis, 1 3 4 Murger, Henry, 1 3 5 ; Scènes de la vie de Bohème, 132 "Mystery of Heroism, A," 102-6; and nature of courage, 12; burlesque overtones of, 1 0 1 , 107 Nabokov, Vladimir, 1 7 Newell, Peter, 207 Noms, Frank, 6 "Ominous Baby, An," 47-48 "Open Boat, The," 4, 99, 154, 157" 76, 207; and nature of courage, 12, 82; and social comment, 23; and Crane's personal experience, 145, 146, 1 5 1 - 5 3 ; nature of conflict in, 1 8 1 ; and "Blue Hotel," 262, 2 7 1 , 2 7 3

INDEX Orphan Nell, the Orange Girl; or the Lost Heir, 24 O'Ruddy, The, 13-15, 136 "Pace of Youth, The," 129 Page, Thomas Nelso*, 70, 100, 179, 220 Parkman, Francis, 1 1 3 Parley, Peter (Samuel Griswold Goodrich), 203 Parrington, Vemon, 229 Peck, George W., 203, 209; Feck's Bad Boy and His Pa, 202 Philbrick, Thomas, 147 Poe, Edgar Allan, 2, 241; "The Cask of Amontillado," 10; "The Tell-Tale Heart," 10 "Poker Game, A," 290 Pound, Ezra, 5, 13 Press, New York, 27; "Stephen Crane's Own Story," 151 "Price of the Harness, The," 114, 1 1 7 , 120-24 Proust, Marcel, 1 5 Quiller-Couch, Arthur, 13 Rahv, Philip, 1 1 4 Raine, William MacCloud, 231 Red Badge of Courage, The, 5-6, 6898, 99, 100, 101, 103, 117, 128, 141, 174, 212; critical acclaim for, 3-4, 16-17, 68, 231; and nature of courage, 12, 107, 110; and social criticism, 22-23, 205; and reportorial honesty, 28, 46, 116, 124, 143; and Georges Mother, 57, 66; Henry Fleming (character), 58, 62, 74, 98, 105, 107, 109, 1 1 3 , 120, 125, 143, 163, 165, 188, 212, 213, 242, 251, 258, 272; and romantic essence of war, 1 1 5 , 146; view of nature, 159, 163; and social hypocrisy, 180; and fire, 187-88 "Regulars Get No Glory," ll7n, 1 2 1 22

Reid, Mayne, 150; The Ocean Waifs, 148 "Reluctant Voyagers, The," 150, 166 Remarque, Erich Maria, 76, 106 Riis, Jacob, 26; How the Other Half Lives, 24 Riley, James Whitcomb, 178 Robinson, E. A. 178 Roe, E. P., 23 "Roof Gardens," 46-47 Roosevelt, Theodore, 236, 263-64 Runyon, Damon, 25 Russell, William Clark, The Wreck of the Grosvener, 148-49 Ryder, Albert Pinkham, 133-34 Sackville-West, Edward, 85-86 Salinger, J. D., 219 Saltus, Edgar E., The Imperial Purple, 59 Sassoon, Siegfried, 289 Schorer, Mark, 81 Scott, Sir Walter, 69, 71, 73, 75, 136, 145; Fair Maid of Perth, 278 Sea Siren; or, The Fugitive Privateer: A Romance of Ocean Trails, The (dime novel), 148 "Second Generation, The," 1 1 7 "Self-Made Man, A," 49-50, 60 "Sergeant's Private Madhouse, The," 118 Sewell, Anna, Black Beauty, 240 Shaw, George Bernard, The DeviTs Disciple, 279 "Shrapnel of Their Friends, The," 126 Shelley, Mary, 2-3 "Silver Pageant, The," 134 Simms, William Gilmore, 2, 69 Sinclair, Upton, 26, 27; The Jungle, 33 Smith, Henry Nash, 237; Virgin Land, 230 Smollett, Tobias, 147 "Some Hints for Playmakers," 9 Southworth, E. D. E. N., 23

299 •

INDEX Stendhal, (Marie Henri Beyle), 6, ( 69, 79, n o "Stephen Crane's Own Story" (newspaper report), 146, 151-53; Captain Edward Murphy, 152; Billy Higgins, 152 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 13, 136, ( 145, 147 "Street Scene in New York, A," 43a, 47 Sullivan County Sketches, 1-3, 57; "A Ghoul's Accountant," 2; "The Black Dog," 2; "A Tent in Agony," 2; Tour Men in a Cave," 2-3; "The Cry of a Huckleberry Pudding," 3 "Tale of Mere Chance, A," 10 Tarkington, Booth, 178, 205, 213, 292; Penrod, 202 Taylor, Bayard, 24 Taylor, Walter F., 24 " Tenderloin' As It Really Is, The," 4m Thackeray, William Makepeace, 69, 71 Third Violet, The, 129-35, 136, 144. 2i4n "Thompson of Ours," 7 1 "Three Miraculous Soldiers," 100-1 Tolstoy, Leo, 6, 69, 88n; Sebastopol, 73; War and Peace, 106 Townsend, Edward, 25; A Daughter of the Tenements, 25, 32 Town Topics, 19 Travels in New York: The Broken Down Van," 34n Twain, Mark, 6, 52n, 147-48, 178, 194, 237, 238, 264, 289; "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed," 106-7; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 201, 218-19, 237; Tom Sawyer, 204; Roughing It, 229-30, 236, 265, 275; Buck Fanshaw's Funeral," 236-37 'Twelve O'Clock," 274-76 Updike, John, 287, 288

300 •

"Upturned Face, The," 127, 199 Van Doren, Carl, 179, 180 "Veteran, The," 89, 97-98, 188 Vigny, Alfred de, 69, 127 "Virtue in War," 101, 1 1 8 Vosburgh, R. G., 133 "War Memories," 114-15, 1 1 6 Warner, Charles Dudley, Being a Boy, jQn, 202 Warner, Susan, 23 Wells, H. G , 4 West, Nathanael, 66; A Cool Million, 50; Miss Lonelyhearts, 136 Western dime novels, 233; Derringer Dick, the Man with the Drop; or, Colonel Coldstead and His Lucky Seven, 233; LionHearted Dick, the Gentleman Road-Agent: A Wild Tale of California Adventure, 233 Wharton, Edith, 178 Wheeler, Edward, Deadwood Dick series, 233 "When Every One is Panic Stricken" (newspaper story), i88n Whilomville Stories, 178, 185, 197, 201-28; "The Knife," 193, 220; Jimmie Trescott (character), 204, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210-12, 21316; and Cora Crane, 206, 209, 213, 221; in Harper's, 206-7; 'The Angel Child," 209-10, 223; "LynxHunting," 210-13, 223; 'The Lover and the Telltale," 213, 218; Rose Goldege (character), 21416; "Showin Off," 216-17; "Making an Orator," 216, 217; "Sname," 217-18, 219, 222-23; 'The Carriage Lamp," 219; "The Stone," 220-23; "The Trial, Execution, and Burial of Homer Phelps," 223; "The Fight," 22324, 226; "The City Urchin and the Chaste Villagers," 223-26; "A Little Pilgrimage," 226-29

INDEX White, Stewart Edward, 231 White, William Allen, 209; The Court of Boyville, 202 Whitman, Walt, 52; Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate, 51-52 "Why Did the Young Clerk Swear? Or, The Unsatisfactory French," 7-8 Winthrop, Theodore, John Brent, 233 "Wise Men, The," 249 Wister, Owen, 231, 252; The Virginian, 236; Red Men and White,

236; Lin McLean, 236; "The Serenade at Siskiyou," 236 Worcester, David, 1 1 Wounds in the Rain, 99-100, 114-24, 128 Wyss, Johann David, Swiss Family Robinson, 148 "Yen-Nock Bill and His Sweetheart," 4m Yonge, Charlotte, 203 Zola, Emile, 6, 8, 69; L'Assommoir, 26

301 •