Burning Boy, page 3
She was allowed to pursue an education because her father was a staunch defender of equal rights for women, and in her teens she left Pennsylvania to attend the Young Ladies Institute of Brooklyn, then moved on to the Rutgers Female Institute, the first college for women in New York City, where she earned a degree in 1847. The following year, at twenty-one, she married Crane’s father and held fast throughout the thirty-two years of their solid if somewhat frenzied union (so many houses occupied and abandoned, so many children living and dead), addressing Jonathan Townley by the affectionate nickname of “Jounty” rather than as “Mr. Crane,” which would have been standard wife protocol for the period, and in spite of her gargantuan family responsibilities, she became increasingly active outside the home as well, so active by the time Crane was born that she was at the forefront of various social and religious causes as both a writer and a spokeswoman, traveling throughout the country to deliver her temperance lectures before large crowds, and, in her spare time (one asks: What spare time?), she painted, sculpted much-admired wax figures, and occasionally wrote short stories. In 1885–86, she suffered a nervous breakdown. Out of commission for about six months, she returned to her former activities with full vigor and in one year alone was credited with having written twenty-five columns for a local newspaper and more than one hundred dispatches for the Associated Press and various New York publications.
Helen R. Crane, the eldest daughter of Crane’s brother Wilbur, who grew up to become a journalist and had known her uncle well during her childhood, was perhaps the first person ever to report on Crane’s feelings about his mother. In a reminiscence published in the American Mercury in 1934, she wrote: “His mother’s memory was dear to him, he had nothing dearer, and although he never questioned her ways when he was outside the family portals, he did marvel always that such an intellectual woman, a university graduate, and capable of being a regular contributor to magazines and newspapers, could have wrapped herself so completely in the ‘vacuous, futile, psalm-singing that passed for worship’ in those days.”
Nevertheless, if Crane learned nothing else from his parents, their example taught him that the world was a place in which responsible grown-ups sat at their desks and wrote, that writing was an important if not essential human activity. Or, as his niece put it: “Being a Crane, he was born with printer’s ink in his veins.”
Mary Helen Peck Crane. (COURTESY OF SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY)
There is no record of how Crane responded to the deaths of his parents nor a single word in print about his reaction to the deaths of his sister Agnes and his brother Luther. Of his remaining siblings, he had little more than the most tenuous connection with his sister Mary Helen (“Nellie”), a painter born in 1849, and his brother George, a Jersey City post office employee born in 1850, but the four others were all a presence in his life, and their stories are worth telling here, since their divergent fates run the gamut from bourgeois respectability to oddball outlandishness, from material success to grim failure, from sober rectitude to alcoholism, from normal health to confinement in a madhouse.
Wilbur (born in 1859) spent five years at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and flunked out after failing to pass his courses on anatomy and having his thesis on typhoid fever rejected twice. With a medical career no longer in his future, he returned to home base in Asbury Park and worked for a couple of years at his brother Townley’s news agency. In 1888, he scandalized the family by marrying one of his brother William’s servants and eventually moved with his wife and four children to Binghamton, New York. He went into a business of some kind there (the sources are obscure on this point), but just as he was beginning to prosper, his wife left him, taking their children with her. Heart-shattered and defeated, he moved to a small town in Georgia and died in 1918, a victim of the Spanish flu pandemic.
Even bleaker is the tale of the eccentric and gifted Townley (pronounced “Toonley”), the man responsible for giving the young Crane his first job as a writer. Born in 1853, he was the wild one in the family, a fractious, subversive boy who often clashed with and insulted his father, but in his adulthood he turned into a first-rate journalist. Secretary of the New York Press Club, a sought-after lecturer, the historian of baseball’s National League, an outspoken advocate for women’s rights, and founder of his own news agency, he was so assiduous in hunting down stories that he came to be known as the “Shore Fiend.” An incorrigible flake who was forever quipping and cracking off-the-wall jokes, he never wore a shirt while at work, hiding his torso under a long coat and sporting a filthy slouch hat on his head. For all his quirks, he was an admired figure, the leading newspaperman of the area, but also a person with a talent for running into some of the foulest bad luck imaginable. He and his wife lost two children, and in 1883, after just five years of marriage, she died of Bright’s disease before the age of thirty. He remarried in 1890, and within half a year his second wife suffered a breakdown and wound up in the Trenton asylum, where she died two months later. A third marriage in 1893 ended in divorce. By the turn of the century, Townley had lapsed into severe alcoholism and was subject to periodic fits of violence. He had turned into what one friend called a “physical derelict” and was no longer employable. After moving to upstate New York to live with Wilbur and his wife (the same wife who would soon abandon Wilbur), he was twice committed to the Binghamton Asylum for the Chronic Insane—and died there, penniless, in 1908.
William, just one year younger than Townley, turned into a solid burgher with a law degree and a good nose for business, a leading citizen of Port Jervis known as Judge Crane (after serving a single one-year term as special judge of Orange County), the acknowledged head of the family after the reverend’s death in 1880 and a quasi second father to his youngest brother, with all the positives and negatives that term implies. During his years in New York City, Crane would go up to Port Jervis for brief or more extended irregular visits with William and his family, but aside from some sporadic, minimal handouts when Crane was dead broke, the one gift of any true importance William gave him was free run of the Hartwood Club, a nature preserve of thirty-six hundred acres located twelve miles north of town, which William and a group of associates began acquiring in the late 1880s and incorporated in 1893, for even though much of Crane’s early writing is grounded in the streets of the city, he was a country boy at heart, and the chance to escape into that wilderness was a great boon to him. For the rest of his life—even after he settled in England—he used Edmund’s house in Hartwood, New York, as his permanent address.
Of all the brothers, it was Edmund who was closest to him, the same Edmund whom Crane chose to be his legal guardian after their mother’s death in 1891 (he still had one year to go before he officially became an adult), the same Edmund at whose house in Lake View, New Jersey, Crane frequently lived during his early years in the New York area, writing much of the first draft of The Red Badge of Courage there in the summer of 1893, and when Edmund left his office job in New York to work as custodian of the Hartwood Club in the spring of 1894 (where he served, according to a letter Crane wrote to his friend Willis Brooks Hawkins, as “postmaster, justice-of-the-peace, ice-man, farmer, millwright, blue stone man, lumberman, station agent on the P.J.M. and N.Y.R.R., and many other things which I now forget”), Crane’s subsequent visits to the north were as much about reconnecting with Edmund as riding his horse through the woods. To understand their bond, one has only to read the short letter Crane wrote to his infant nephew from England a few months before his death—upon learning that Edmund’s wife, Mary, had given birth to twin boys and that one of them had been named Stephen.
My dear Stephen: I need not say to you that I welcomed your advent with joy. You and I will struggle on with the name together and do as best we may. In the meantime, I would remind you to grow up, as much as possible, like your gentle kindly lovable father and please do not repeat the vices and mistakes of
Your devoted uncle,
Stephen Crane.
5
Whatever is known about Crane’s childhood comes from a couple of photographs and several eyewitness accounts written by relatives and friends. Nearly all of those texts were composed years after the fact and therefore are susceptible to the wobbles and deceptions of memory. Whenever someone quotes Crane directly, we have to read the words with suspicion, since most of us would be hard-pressed to rehash verbatim what someone said to us just five minutes ago, let alone five years ago, or thirty years ago. This holds true not just of Crane’s childhood but of all the other periods of his life as well, for many people who had known him put their reminiscences down on paper after his death, but it is doubtful that the words they attribute to him were the ones he actually spoke. Still, because Crane never kept a diary, and because his published letters are mostly devoid of intimate revelations about himself, we must rely on those witnesses, however flawed their memories might be. And yet, flawed or not, that isn’t to say their memories aren’t valuable, for in the end they tell us much.
Stephen Crane, circa 1873. (COURTESY OF SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY)
Crane at the Jersey Shore, circa 1879. (COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA)
The first photograph shows him as an infant of about one and a half looking into the camera with a steady gaze. A curly-headed blond with full lips and somewhat larger than average ears, he was, to use the words his brother Wilbur later wrote about him, “a beautiful baby.”
The second photograph is more interesting: Crane at about seven, standing on a pebble beach somewhere along the New Jersey coast, a full-body shot cut off at the toes, dressed in a white sailor suit with short pants hanging down an inch below his knees, a broad straw hat sitting precariously on his head, his left arm draped over the edge of a dinghy, into which his left hand has disappeared, his right arm hanging plumb down his right side, and a look on his face that can be read as either a slight scowl or a reflexive squint against the glare of the sun, but whatever that look is, there is something peeved about it, as if he resented having to stand still for the photo, and from his expression one gathers there are numerous wheels turning around in his head, that this is a boy who has already cultivated an uncommonly rich inner life.
Everyone called him “Stevie,” both in and out of the family, an affectionate diminutive that clung to him into adulthood, and when he first learned to talk, he couldn’t handle the s and dubbed himself “Tevie.” In a series of rapidly dashed-off notes for a potential biography that was never written, the female companion of his last years, Cora Taylor (known as Mrs. Crane), added: “One day when 2½ yrs of age someone asked him his name while his eyes fairly danced he said: ‘nome Pe-pop-ty’ no one ever knew where he got it from; he evidently made it up—”
He seems to have been both robust and sickly, an active child prone to frequent, sometimes alarming illnesses that kept him in and out of school until his health stabilized at around the age of eight, but when he was in good form he played hard at physical games and impressed everyone with his fearlessness. Edmund reports that when the family left Newark for Bloomington, he and his brothers often went swimming in the Raritan River, not just the big boys but the pint-sized Crane as well.
There was a smooth, sandy bar extending from the south bank across the river, very shallow near shore and growing deeper toward the middle of the river. Stevie would wade around in the shallows watched by one of us. Wading breast deep in the water, he would stretch out his arms and waving his hands, would achieve what he called “fimming.” He started to “fim” to Wee-wee, (Willie), my next older brother, who was farther out in the river. As the depth gradually increased the water came up to his chin, then to his mouth, and then his eyes, but he kept steadily on, and, I plucked him out, gasping but unscared, just as his yellow hair was going under. We boys were naturally delighted with his grit.
Elizabeth Crane, the wife of Crane’s brother George, remembered her boy brother-in-law as “a vigorous lad … passionately fond of outdoor sports, as well as everything pertaining to military affairs.… He loved to play at soldiers from his early childhood. Most of his playthings were in the form of toy soldiers, guns and the like.… When the boy grew older he learned to play baseball and football. He was a member of a uniformed baseball team in Asbury Park, and proved one of the mainstays of the club, although he was the lightest and youngest member.”
In Cora’s telegraph-style notes, there is also this: “greatest play as infant boy buttons which he would call soldiers & would maneuver his armies—never picked up buttons after play.”
Edmund elaborates: “Indoors he had a military game he played alone with buttons of different colors which to him were soldiers of opposing armies. These he marshalled about the floor operating some system that I, for one, did not understand. This game would occupy him for hours at a time, especially on rainy days.”
Edmund also adds that in Asbury Park, Crane had “a trick pony, that he loved devotedly, and whose tricks, learned in some past circus experience, were constantly coming to the surface to Stevie’s wonder and delight. The pony had a large B branded upon his shoulder, and we credited the late P. T. Barnum with having been his owner.”
As for the little boy’s mind, who knows what he was thinking? Edmund asserts that he was “bright and very teachable” and goes on to explain that shortly after Crane learned to talk, “I amused myself by having him pronounce five and six syllable words. After a few laughable failures, he would accomplish a correct pronunciation by spelling the word after me syllable by syllable, resolving them into their sound elements.” In the next paragraph of his short memoir, he tells a family anecdote that reveals why he and his siblings looked upon their tyke brother as “a pet and entertainer”:
When he was about three years old, an older brother, Townley, was a cub reporter with one of the Newark dailies … and when writing his stories at home would often call on his mother for the correct spelling of a word. Stevie was making weird marks on a paper with a lead pencil one day and in the exact tone of one, absorbed in composition, and coming to the surface only for a moment of needed information, called to his mother, “Ma, how do you spell ‘O’?” this happening to be a letter he had just become acquainted with.
Everyone insists that Crane could read fluently by the time he was four.
Nothing is known about his day-to-day conduct in childhood, whether he was a cooperative boy, an obstreperous boy, or a combination of the two, but the available testimony suggests that he was more independent than most small people, an entertaining pet but not a docile one, with a character that tended more toward willfulness than mute submission and, every so often, led to acts of out-and-out mischief. At seven, inspired by a picture that was hanging on a wall in the house (a duck-hunting scene painted by his mother), he shot an arrow straight into the canvas. No word survives on whether he was punished or not.
Religion, of course, was all around him from the moment his life began, the competing strains of Methodism as embodied by his mother’s family (harsh) and his father (somewhat less harsh), which meant that he was obliged to attend Sunday school every week, and while it isn’t known how often he took part in church services and listened to his father’s much-admired sermons, there is no question that the Methodist prayers and hymns he heard throughout his childhood dug their way into the deepest, most internal recesses of his memory. When he was nine or ten, he was given a copy of a book written in 1858 by his great-uncle Bishop Jesse T. Peck, What Must I Do to Be Saved?, which the boy surely read, or at least handled and looked at and absorbed to some extent. Crane soon rebelled against the narrowness of his great-uncle’s teachings, but he held on to the book for the rest of his life.*
Before long, the stubbornness that would evolve into one of his enduring traits was already beginning to coalesce into what one might call a code of being. According to Wilbur, “Stephen’s most marked characteristic was his absolute truthfulness. He was in many minor scrapes but no consideration of consequences would induce him to lie out of them, and the imputation that he was a liar, made the imputer persona non grata with Stephen forever thereafter.” Or, as Helen R. Crane put it in her article for the American Mercury, writing about an older version of her uncle: “I can’t imagine him lying about anything. In fact, he was the sort of person who would have got a great thrill out of being shot at sunrise and all that kind of thing.”
An honest boy, but not always an upright or obedient one, and deep down in his conflicted Methodist heart, a quiet rebel was lurking, who from time to time would transform himself into a daredevil tough. One such episode, as recounted by Post Wheeler, is among the most pertinent stories preserved from Crane’s childhood. It comes from the summer of 1878, when Wheeler was about to turn nine and Crane was six and a half. After a lapse of more than a dozen years, they crossed paths again in the early 1890s when they were both working for New York newspapers in Asbury Park, and a solid, lasting friendship developed between them. Wheeler eventually left journalism for a long and successful career in diplomacy, but the memory of his first meeting with Crane never left him, and when he wrote about it as an old man in the 1950s, it still has the ring of truth. Not the precise words they spoke to each other, perhaps, but the gist of it—and the shock of it.
