Burning Boy, page 105
* The impact of The Black Riders extends beyond the world of poetry. No fewer than three postwar American novels use lines from Crane’s poems as their titles: In a Lonely Place, by Dorothy B. Hughes, 1947 (turned into a film directed by Nicholas Ray and starring Humphrey Bogart in 1950); Find a Victim, by Ross Macdonald, 1954; Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, by Joyce Carol Oates, 1990.
* Dickinson had died unknown and unread in 1886, but following the initial publication of her poems in 1890, she had come to be regarded as the most brilliant and powerful poet in America. Even dead, she was still a new poet in 1894, and with Whitman now buried in Camden, New Jersey, she had no living rival. Howells was one of her many enthusiasts.
* Melville to Hawthorne (June 1, 1851): “Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar.… What I feel most moved to write, that is banned—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.”
* “Out-bring” is a bizarre locution, archaic enough to sound as if Crane were writing in Anglo-Saxon, but there it stands on page 1270 of Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary (second edition, 1983) defined as “to bring or carry forth,” which seems to suggest something akin to “output.” In general, Crane’s 1890s vocabulary does not sound dated in the early twenty-first century, but every now and then there is a word that jars to some degree—the past tense of “bend,” for example, which Crane nearly always writes as “bended” rather than the more contemporary “bent.”
* Abraham Cahan (1860–1951) was born in Lithuania and made his way to New York in 1882. A socialist and bilingual writer, he was editor of the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward for forty-six years and also contributed articles to numerous English-language dailies, among them the New York Press and the New York Sun. His best-known novel is The Rise of David Levinsky (1917).
* “The Battle of Forty Fort,” “The Surrender of Forty Fort,” and “‘Ol’ Bennet’ and the Indians” were all derived from Crane’s reading of a book written by his maternal grandfather, the Reverend George Peck, that was published in 1858: Wyoming: Its History, Stirring Incidents, and Romantic Adventures. One of the illustrations was made by Crane’s mother, and Crane himself owned two copies of the book, which he held on to for his entire life. When the six-year-old Crane and his mother traveled to the Wyoming Valley to attend the WCTU conference in July 1878 (those heady days of cigarettes and beer), the one-hundredth-anniversary reenactments they witnessed of Revolutionary War battles—and massacres—were the same ones recounted in his 1899 stories. To further enhance the family connection, the primary source for Crane’s source (his grandfather’s book) was an unpublished memoir written by Martha (Bennet) Myers, Crane’s grandfather’s mother-in-law, who was the daughter of Thomas Bennet, the crusty, opinionated Ol’ Bennet of the stories and—to cinch the knot of family connections even more tightly—Crane’s great-great-grandfather.
* Carlisle’s best-known graduate, Jim Thorpe—Olympic gold medalist in the decathlon, professional baseball player, college and professional football star—is widely considered to be the greatest all-around athlete in American history.
* The allotment of points at the time was: touchdown 4, successful kick after touchdown 2, safety 2, field goal 5.
* The editors of The Correspondence, Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino, speculate that it could have been Amy Leslie, but they are by no means certain of it.
* “The good writers are Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain. That’s not the order they’re good in. There is no order for good writers.” (From The Green Hills of Africa, 1935.) And in Men at War, an anthology he edited in 1942, Hemingway called The Red Badge of Courage “a great boy’s dream of war … one of the finest books in our literature.”
† The N-word, so repulsive to our ears today, was common coin in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not just in private but in public as well—often on the covers of books. As recently as 1939, Agatha Christie published a mystery novel with the title Ten Little Niggers (based on the lyrics of a popular British blackface song), but the title was changed for the American publication in 1940 to And Then There Were None. Apparently, the word had been deemed too offensive by 1940 to be used in American public discourse, but what people said in private was another matter, and the word lives on even today among bigots from all classes of society. The point being, however, that back in Crane’s time and well beyond it, the word was used in polite society as well.
* One telling exchange with Post Wheeler in 1894 offers written proof: “Dear Stevie—Are you in a hurry for that twenty? Post W,” to which Crane scrawled a reply at the bottom of Wheeler’s letter and promptly sent it back to him: “Good heavens! Forget all about it! Don’t ever mention it! S.”
† His artist friend David Ericson reported that Crane invited him to lunch one afternoon, but once they sat down at their table in the restaurant, Crane “immediately pulled out his pad and pencil and began to write,” and when they finished the meal, Crane—forgetting that he had offered to pay for the lunch—simply stood up and walked out, leaving Ericson to cover the check.
* If legend is to be believed, he walked in at around midnight, and there he came upon Cather, standing on her feet with her eyes closed, fast asleep and motionless as a statue. The astonished Crane is reported to have said that he had never seen anything like it.
* Or seventeen, if one counts the three fables he also wrote in Mexico or immediately after his return, all of them published by Bacheller: “The Voice of the Mountains,” “How the Donkey Lifted the Hills,” and “The Victory of the Moon.”
* A recent example would be the current Oxford Book of American Poetry (edited by David Lehman, 2006), in which this poem is one of seven chosen to represent Crane’s work.
* William Steele Holman (1822–1897). Not a senator but a longtime congressman, famous for his stubborn opposition to government spending.
* American actress and comedian (1857–1916) known for her “personality style” of acting.
† President of France from 1887 until his assassination in 1894.
* Nelson Greene, in a 1947 letter to Schoberlin, wrote that Crane “met my model, Gertrude Selene, who was probably the ‘Florinda.’ She was reputed at 18 to have the best figure of any model in New York City. She had beautiful blond hair, gray eyes and she was not beautiful. Nevertheless she was attractive and distinctly a man’s girl. Kindly do not use her name. She later married a doctor and became highly respectable. She and Crane got on very well. She admired his keen mind and often talked with him and discussed him with me. He never tumbled with her however.”
* Years later, in a book published in 1938 (More Lives Than One), Bragdon revisited that night and confessed that he was the culprit who had “cowed them,” although he never would have spoken out as he did if he hadn’t been “a little drunk.” He also understood that the dinner “was really a bit of shrewd advertising of Hubbard himself” and then, with great feeling and insight, wrote these words about the guest of honor: “Crane made a deep impression on me, though I never saw him except that once: a youth sincere and ardent, with an inward fire greater than that of other men—so great, indeed, that it was even then burning him up.” The author gives thanks to the ghost of Claude Bragdon (1866–1946), whose last remark inspired the title of this book.
* Reynolds (1864–1944) opened his agency in 1893, and over the years his clients included H. G. Wells, Edith Wharton, Jack London, George Bernard Shaw, Willa Cather, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Joseph Conrad, Émile Zola, and Leo Tolstoy. Although Crane mentions Bacheller and McClure in the same sentence, his relationships with the two men were quite different. Bacheller, who had always treated Crane kindly and fairly, was not in a position to pay such an exalted sum as $350, whereas Crane felt trapped with McClure and needed help in circumventing the bad agreement he had made with him.
* On the subject of cows, see Crane’s humor piece from 1895 or ’96, “Art in Kansas City” (Works, volume VIII), in which the narrator recounts a story told to him by his Uncle Clarence about a cow with a genius for painting watercolors, but because her milk is becoming thin and she refuses to work in oils, her owner has forbidden her to paint anymore, thus depriving Kansas City of its most brilliant artist.
* Erle Stanley Gardner, a great fan of the magazine when he was a boy, used the name of its founder for the lawyer hero of his best-known stories and novels: Perry Mason.
* The term yellow journalism derives from a character named the Yellow Kid in Richard F. Outcault’s Sunday comic strip Hogan’s Alley, which was originally published in Pulitzer’s World. When Hearst lured Outcault into working for the Journal (along with other members of the World staff), Pulitzer countered by hiring another artist to continue the strip in his paper. “Yellow Kid Journalism” soon became “yellow journalism,” a catchword for the sensationalized reportage practiced by both papers. Each sold roughly one million copies per day.
* The inscription read: “To Hamlin Garland / of the great honest West / From Stephen Crane / of the false East. / New York City / July 1896.”
* The Republicans were swept out of office in November, and the Tammany Democrats regained control of the city. The following April, Roosevelt left his job with the police department to become assistant secretary of the navy in the newly installed McKinley administration.
* The law had its comical aspects as well. In The Battle with the Slum (Macmillan, 1902), Jacob Riis reports on the invention of “brick sandwiches”—a single brick clamped between two slices of bread—which were placed on bars in mocking compliance with the statute. Real sandwiches were sometimes placed there for show, but once, when an unsuspecting customer picked one up and was about to start eating it, “the police restored the sandwich to the bartender and made no arrests” (p. 224).
* For all the new administration’s efforts to abandon the Clubber Williams philosophy of law enforcement, sin remained a profitable business because the police were still on the take, collecting their weekly protection-money envelopes from the hundreds of enterprises that filled the darkened blocks—from peep shows to dope houses to bordellos (both straight and gay) to raunchy bars with private rooms for indulging in this, that, and the other. As long as these underground establishments stayed clear of the boulevards and brightly lit thoroughfares, the law continued to play an active role in keeping them open.
* It is also possible that in a clever double twist Crane was toying with the common slang meaning of “juke” in the late nineteenth century as a derogatory reference to the rural poor. A book published by sociologist Richard L. Dugdale in 1877, The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity, charts the history of several generations of an ever-expanding family of criminals. The name Jukes (a pseudonym) and the word “juke” were in the air during Crane’s lifetime, and perhaps “royal juke” is meant to signify the top man in a gang of bumpkin outlaws, in other words, the lowest of the low, which would add another layer of meaning to this jesting passage. Then again, “juke” might well be a misprint of “duke,” which would make the humor simpler and more straightforward—but still cutting. It is almost certain, however, that the name Swift Doyer is meant to evoke the crime-ridden alley in Manhattan’s Chinatown that gave birth to the expression “As crooked as Doyers Street.”
* The transcript of the trial no longer exists. The only accounts I have read are in the reports published by the World (October 18, 1896), the New York Journal (October 16 and 17), and the Sun (October 16), which were reprinted in The New York City Sketches of Stephen Crane and Related Pieces, edited by R. W. Stallman and E. R. Hagemann (New York University Press, 1966).
* A botched abortion that resulted in Annie Goodwin’s death.
* To complicate matters even further, there was a second Amy Leslie in Crane’s life, a long-distance friend who worked as the drama critic for the Chicago Tribune. She was sixteen years older than Crane, but because she was a well-known figure, and because she was known to be on good terms with Crane, for more than a hundred years every Crane scholar in America believed that she was the Amy Leslie who had lived with him in the summer of 1896. The fact that there were two Amy Leslies was not uncovered until 2000, when Kathryn Hilt and Stanley Wertheim published a masterful piece of literary detective work, “Stephen Crane and Amy Leslie: A Rereading of the Evidence” (American Literary Realism 32, no. 3 [Spring 2000]), which establishes the existence of Amy Traphagen-Huntington-Leslie from New York and proves that she was Crane’s lover—not the forty-one-year-old Amy Leslie from Chicago. The final twist is that neither woman was born with that name. The Chicago journalist had been Lillie West, a prominent singer who had performed in opera houses throughout the country, but after she retired from the stage and began her new career, she wrote for the Tribune under the pen name Amy Leslie, which became her legal name as well. She lived until 1939, and to her dying day she angrily insisted she was not the woman who had been romantically involved with Crane, but no one believed her.
* No doubt a winking nod to the American poet Will Carlton, who supported the cause of Cuban independence and had written a widely read poem urging the United States to intervene on the rebels’ behalf. Spurred on by anti-Spanish reports in the yellow press (Hearst and Pulitzer), American opinion was largely sympathetic to the Cubans, but the government was still neutral at that point, and a blockade had been put in force by the American navy to prevent clandestine boats carrying arms, rebel soldiers, and journalists from entering Cuba.
* Another journalist friend who was with Crane in Florida and later in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. He served as the model for the character known as “Shackles” in three of Crane’s stories from 1899 (“God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen,” “Virtue in War,” “The Revenge of the Adolphus”) and appears as McCurdy in the autobiographical “War Memories.”
† The third member of the Asbury Park trio of cub-reporter friends in the early nineties. The other two were Post Wheeler and Crane.
* The captain had given the life jackets to Montgomery and Crane. The instant S.C. found himself in the water, he unbuckled the money belt to rid himself of the encumbrance. Seven hundred dollars in gold (the equivalent of around twenty thousand dollars today) sank to the bottom of the ocean. A short time later, Bacheller left the newspaper syndicate business to become the Sunday editor of the World, then turned his attention to writing short stories, poems, essays, and novels—more than thirty of them—one of which (Eben Holden, 1900) sold nearly a million copies.
* In the days following the disaster, numerous articles contended that sabotage had destroyed the Commodore—most likely caused by someone tampering with the pumps. There was an official investigation, but no evidence was found either to prove or disprove that idea.
* From Crane’s second collection of poems, War Is Kind (1899). The composition date of the newspaper poem has not been established, but in all likelihood it was written during the period when Crane was attracting so much negative and positive attention in the press.
* The published poem reads: I explain the silvered passing of a ship at night / The sweep of each sad lost wave / The dwindling boom of the steel thing’s striving / The little cry of a man to a man / A shadow falling across the greyer night / And the sinking of the small star. // Then the waste, the far waste of waters / And the soft lashing of black waves / For long and in loneliness. // Remember, thou, oh ship of love / Thou leavest a far waste of waters / And the soft lashing of black waves / For long and in loneliness.
* In a short, humorous article written some months later, Crane comments: “Good slang is subtle and elusive. If there is a quick equivalent for a phrase it is not good slang, because good slang comes to fill a vacancy.”
* Cora was duly engaged by the Journal as woman war correspondent Imogene Carter, and she was at Crane’s side nearly every moment throughout their stay in Greece. She wrote just three short dispatches, however, and the best and longest of them, “War Seen Through a Woman’s Eyes” (April 26), clearly shows the mark of heavy rewriting by Crane. Even better than that one, though, is the rough draft of an unfinished article written entirely in her own hand, which tells of her adventures during the one night she and Crane spent apart, when she slept on a billiard table in an empty coffeehouse. “My maid who grumbled constantly at everything and who had cried over our dinner of black bread (which was very good and sweet) and cheese, now flatly rebelled—and I paid her and sent her to the diligence by which she returned to Lamia—and so I was alone, the only woman in Pharsala or within many miles of it.” Such was Cora’s brave, independent spirit, and if she didn’t pan out as a journalist, the diary she kept during the war is an invaluable source for tracking their day-to-day movements and activities together. In another dispatch she wrote: “I spent most of the time with the Second Battery of mountain howitzers.… Shells screamed at me as I went toward the station, and I had one narrow squeak.… The soldiers were amazed at the presence of a woman during the fighting.” Neither a burden nor someone just tagging along for the ride, she was a full and equal participant in the hardships and dangers of covering the Greco-Turkish War. And how telling it is that she found the black bread very good and sweet.
