Burning Boy, page 21
Crane wandered to the New York piers one morning that spring to watch a steamship set sail for Europe, which led to the short, unusually touching “Sailing Day Scenes,” yet another sketch written in a different key as he observes friends and family saying good-bye to their loved ones (“It was surprising to see how full of expression the face of a blunt, every day American business man could become”), noting the tears falling from the eyes of women and the cries of a little boy calling, “Oh, papa! Papa! Here I am!” and then, as the ship departs, the “great tumult of farewells, a song of affection that swelled into a vast incoherent roar,” proving that the tough-minded, unsentimental Crane was tough enough not to squirm in the presence of deeply felt human emotion. After a break during the summer, he returned to New York and began cranking out more pieces for Marshall, on average two or three a month, including the brilliant, acerbic “Coney Island’s Failing Days” and the rambunctious mayhem depicted in the Park Row restaurant sketch, traveled back in spirit if not in person to his old stomping grounds on the Jersey Shore to write two straight-faced, tongue-in-cheek accounts of the legendary revenants and specters who prowl the sands at night (“Ghosts of the New Jersey Coast” and “The Ghostly Sphinx of Metedeconk”), composed the text that Marshall called “one of the best things that he or any other man ever did,” now called “The Fire” but published as “When Every One Is Panic Stricken,” changed gears with a little romp about a bumbling, incoherent drunk who boards a New York streetcar (“A Lovely Jag in a Crowded Car”), and, in December, turned out one of the best of the lot, “When Man Falls, a Crowd Gathers,” which recounts the story of a man and a boy, both of them Italian immigrants, who are walking along the street one day when the man suddenly falls to the ground with an epileptic seizure. In no time at all, a crowd gathers around them, and as with the anonymous neighbors in “The Fire,” who stop everything to watch the blaze and the screaming woman, this crowd is drawn to the man “in a spell of fascination. They seemed scarcely to breathe. They were contemplating the depth into which a human being had sunk and this mystery of life or death held them chained. Occasionally from the rear, a man came thrusting his way impetuously, satisfied that there was a horror to be seen and apparently insane to get a view of it. Less curious persons swore at these men when they trod upon their toes.”
The crowd and the individual. If there is anything that binds these disparate pieces together, it is that all the events Crane describes are witnessed by others, most of them in cluttered public spaces (a flophouse, a restaurant, a streetcar, an amusement park, a wide-open city street), and that when crowds begin to gather, the mentality of the group tends to obliterate the individual, and the larger the crowd, the more socially complex the scene becomes. Horror strikes, or sorrow, or mass confusion, but there are men who work with those situations every day, and unlike the people in the crowd, they are unaffected by them. In “Sailing Day Scenes”: “A pompous officer, obviously vain of his clothes, strode before the agitated faces upon the ship and looked complacently at the pier. It was an old story to him, and he thought it rather silly.” The concluding sentences of “The Fire”: “A fireman … wore a blasé air. They all, in fact, seemed to look at fires with the calm, unexcited vision of veterans. It was only the populace with their new nerves, it seemed, who could feel the thrill and dash of these attacks, these furious charges made in the dead of night, at high noon, at any time, upon the common enemy, the loosened flame.” In “When Man Falls, a Crowd Gathers”: “Then a policeman appeared.… He shouted: ‘Come, make way there! Make way!’ He was evidently a man whose life was half-pestered out of him by the inhabitants of the city who were sufficiently unreasonable and stupid as to insist on being in the streets. His was the rage of a placid cow, who wishes to lead a life of tranquility, but who is eternally besieged by flies that hover in clouds.”
Crane was neither pompous nor a cow, but the attitude of those professional guardians of the peace was essentially no different from the attitude of the writer. Stay calm, keep a close eye on what is happening around you, and no matter how ugly or horrible or violent the situation you find yourself in might be, it must not prevent you from doing your duty. Crane’s self-imposed duty was to write, and in order to “approach the nearest to nature and truth,” he had to stand back from what he was seeing and take it in without prejudice, purging himself of all preconceived notions about human behavior, no matter if he was writing about a dinner at a millionaire’s house or a crush of people gawking at a man stretched out on the pavement in the throes of an epileptic fit. In other words, for Crane to fulfill his duty as a writer, he had to disappear into the shadows and, to whatever extent he could, make himself invisible.
Then came the experiment of standing in a crowd on a night of high drama, of slipping like a phantom in among the people and listening to what they said and recording their words in his notebook, breaking down the mass into its component parts and turning the jumbled horde into a collection of individuals—no longer a chorus singing in unison but a multitude of individual voices, each one singing its own song at the same time as all the others. It was Election Night, November 1894; the city had just gone to the polls, and hundreds or thousands were milling around in front of the Press building as the paper used an industrial-strength magic lantern to project the steadily mounting returns on the façade of a building across the street. Not for the first time (or the last time), it was a period of corruption and scandal in New York politics, but after a ten-thousand-page report issued by the Lexow Committee had exposed the depth of that corruption as practiced by the reigning Tammany Hall Democrats, a ticket of reformist Republicans swept the election, with Levi P. Morton ousting David Bennett Hill as governor, William L. Strong defeating incumbent Hugh J. Grant for mayor, and John W. Goff winning as city recorder. Crane’s piece, “Heard on the Street Election Night,” carried three sub-headlines when it was first published in the Press, and not only do they capture the fervor of the moment, they tell us much about the tone of American journalism in that late Victorian period known as the Naughty Nineties: “Passing Remarks Gathered in Front of ‘The Press’ Stereopticon / HOW THEY TOOK THE GOOD NEWS / Human Nature Had Full Swing Tuesday Evening.” Forty-four snippets of transcribed dialogue followed, among them these examples:
“Hully chee! Everything’s dumped!”*
“Can you tell me, please, if the returns indicate that Goff has a chance?”
“Who? Goff? Well, I guess! He’s running like a race-horse. He’s dead in it.”
“Say, that magic lantern man is a big fakir. Lookatim pushin’ ads in on us. Hey, take that out, will yeh? You ain’t no billposter, are yeh?”
“Well, I guess nit. If Hill wins this time, he’s got to have ice-boats on his feet. He ain’t got a little chance.”
“Down in Fourteenth street,
“Hear that mournful sound;
“All the Indians are a-weeping,
“Davie’s in the cold, cold ground.”
“If Tammany wins this time, we might as well all quit the town and go to Camden. If we don’t beat ’em now, we’re a lot of duffers and we’re only fit to stuff mattresses with.”
“He won’t, hey? You just wait, me boy. If Hill can’t carry this State at any time in any year, I’ll make you a present of the Brooklyn bridge, and paint it a deep purple with gold stripes, all by myself.”
Well, this is what comes from monkeyin’ with the people. You think you’ve got ’em all under a board when, first thing you know, they come out and belt you in the neck.”
“Hully chee!
“Who are we?
“The men who did up Tammanee!”
“‘Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.’ That’s what it is. The people lost their liberty because they went to sleep. Then all of a sudden they wake up and slug around and surprise all of the men who thought they were in a trance. They ought to have done it long ago. And now they are awake, they don’t want to do a thing but sit up night and day and lay for robbers. This waking up every ten or twelve years gives me a pain.”
“There was never a doubt of it. No, sir. It was playing a sure thing from start to finish. I tell you, when the avalanche starts, you want to climb a hill near by and put all your money on the avalanche.”
“Tammany’s in the soup.”
The vox populi set loose in all its unexpurgated vigor—and no doubt one of the first “man in the street” documents ever published. Daring and entertaining as it is, however, to call this article a piece of journalism would probably be a stretch (because there are no named sources, which leaves Crane open to the charge that he invented the whole thing), and yet to call it a work of art would be something of a stretch as well. Perhaps it shares qualities of both, journalism-as-art, if you will, or art in the service of journalism, and then again, perhaps it doesn’t matter how we choose to define it. What jumps out from the page is an effervescent effusion of lived life, the raw data collected one November evening in New York City and then shaped into a forty-four-part piece of splendid, cacophonous music. Stephen Crane in the crowd but not of the crowd, an invisible man watching human nature in full swing.
13
the metaphysics of fear.
The most celebrated war novel in our literature is not a book about war so much as an examination of the effects of war on a young, undeveloped mind, a work that Crane himself would call in retrospect “a psychological portrayal of fear.” A proper war novel would tell us why the war was being fought, who was fighting whom, where the fighting was taking place, and delve into such matters as politics, military strategy, and morale on the home front, but all these indispensable facts—the foundation of every other nineteenth-century war novel—are withheld in The Red Badge of Courage. As he did in Maggie, Crane strips out everything that is not pertinent to the story he means to tell. As in earlier works of his, such as “The Broken-Down Van” and “The Pace of Youth,” the story is framed within a single, severely limited narrative perspective, in this case the eyes, ears, and thoughts of the protagonist. And as with the even earlier Sullivan County cycle, the work is set in a haunted landscape of vast, overarching skies, towering trees, hilly, uneven ground, perpetually shifting light, rivers, open fields, the obscuring smoke of gunfire, and dark, labyrinthine woods—demonic realms stalked by a phantom army of invisible dragons. Covering just a handful of days from beginning to end, the action unfolds in the middle of the American Civil War, and yet there is not one mention of Abraham Lincoln or the struggle to preserve the Union, not a single word about slavery, and the generals in charge of the North’s humiliating defeat at Chancellorsville are not once identified by name or even so much as referred to in passing, but still, against this eerily blank canvas, the war is everywhere, the war is everything and therefore the only thing in the book, not just the background but the foreground and the entire middle ground as well, and a novel that is not strictly speaking a war novel presents us with a world in which every particle of space is suffused with war. Until Crane, no author in the English language had ever attempted such an audacious reduction of elements—to compose a novel of war with no digressions or subplots, without the sentimental trappings of a love story hovering in the wings, and confine himself solely to the combat waged by the foot soldiers in the ranks, to that and nothing else. It is a new kind of war novel, then, a novel that concerns itself not with the large matter of a country torn apart into two countries, two armies, two warring cultures, but the small matter of one man’s role in the conflict, a man who is in fact a boy, a mere adolescent tossed into battle for the first time.
His age is never given, but he appears to be around sixteen, seventeen at the most. He is referred to as the youth. His closest young comrade is the loud soldier, and his most admired older comrade is the tall soldier. They all have names, but the unseen, third-person narrator never uses them, and we learn that they are Henry Fleming, Wilson, and Jim Conklin only when we hear them address one another during their two-way and three-way conversations. We also learn that they come from the same rural town in upstate New York and have known one another for years. Two other significant characters have no names at all and are referred to simply as the tattered soldier and the man of the cheery voice, whereas a number of minor characters in the regiment do have names (revealed in overheard conversations among other soldiers) but no substantial role to play in the story. Except for their names, they are little more than ciphers, suggestions, murky splotches dotting the canvas. Similarly, some passing remarks made by still other nameless soldiers include the words Richmond, Washington, and the Rappahannock, which obliquely situate us in the Civil War, along with comments about rebs and Johnnies (Confederate soldiers) and repeated references to the color of the soldiers’ uniforms, gray and blue, which not only point to the war in question but help emphasize the primacy of color in this color-abundant work. Crane uses those random snatches of dialogue to ground the action in a precise when and where, but they are no more than hints, evanescent words that do not affect the overpowering aura of timelessness that runs through the book. Just as the New York City in Maggie is both a real New York and a mythological New York, the war in The Red Badge of Courage is both anchored in a particular historical moment (1863) and utterly outside it. The battles are real, of course, but the only one that counts is the battle Henry fights with himself.
There are just three elements in this book of vastly reduced elements, but Crane manages to juggle them and weave them together and butt them up against one another with such assurance and skill that the narrative energy of the story never flags. As I was preparing to write this chapter, I picked up the novel again and started going through it for the umpteenth time, determined to note down everything I found to be essential in each paragraph. After four chapters, I had covered twenty-six pages with my small, knotted handwriting and understood that if I carried on with the exercise through all twenty-four chapters of the book, my notes would be as long if not longer than Crane’s novel. Rather than persist in burrowing down that rabbit hole, I abandoned the notebook and continued my reading with a blue pencil, underlining every sentence that struck me as important. By the time I came to the end, almost a third of the sentences were underscored in blue. Which is to say: The Red Badge of Courage is a book of such extreme compression that every paragraph is essential. There is no slack in it, no superfluous material, no passage that diverts one’s attention from the essence of the story. That is why the book caused such a stir in 1895 and why it has never been out of print in the 125 years since then. Not so much because of the story it tells but because of how the story is told.
The three principal elements Crane draws upon to construct his book are the landscape, Henry’s fellow soldiers, and the thoughts inside Henry’s head. A fourth, mostly hidden element is the narrator’s voice, the guiding intelligence that has elected to call Henry the youth and not Henry, for example, and that intervenes in the first and last paragraphs of the novel, but nearly everything else that happens is filtered through Henry’s panicked, impressionable mind, creating a closed-in world of such radical subjectivity that the distinction between what is real and not real is often blurred, so blurred at times that the story begins to feel as if it is the account of a waking dream—or an out-and-out hallucination.
By landscape, I mean everything that surrounds Henry’s body, everything he can perceive with his eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin, everything that is not Henry himself: the near prospect, the far prospect, the men from the two armies—both living and dead—along with the sights and sounds of battle:
Once he saw a tiny battery go dashing along the line of the horizon. The tiny riders were beating the tiny horses.
From a sloping hill came the sound of cheerings and clashes. Smoke welled slowly through the leaves.
