Burning Boy, page 44
A former soap manufacturer turned writer, publisher, and self-appointed “ex-officio General Inspector of the Universe,” the man was saddled with one of the more pungent, comical names of the era: Elbert Hubbard. W. C. Fields would later make a good living by inventing characters with names like that one, but Hubbard managed to elude the unfortunate Elbert in boyhood by masquerading under the nickname of Bertie and as an adult took to calling himself Fra Elbertus, which provided the name of one of the magazines he published, Fra. A hustling blowhard with a penchant for visionary pronouncements and a flair for self-promotion, he became a disciple of the Arts and Crafts movement and in 1895 was inspired by the example of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press in England to found his own American version outside Buffalo, the Roycroft Press, along with establishing a small community of artisans known as the Roycrofters, who worked variously at printing, binding, handmade paper production, and the building of Arts and Crafts furniture. In June of that year, he launched the first of his magazines, The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest, which jabbed at the stodges from the New York literary establishment, mocked the complacent banalities of middle-class American life, and was bound in brown butcher paper to alert the world that there was “meat” to be found inside its covers. Most of the contributions were written by Hubbard himself (the other contributors were unpaid as a matter of principle), and at the peak of its popularity The Philistine attained a circulation of more than one hundred thousand—a remarkable number for a magazine of that kind. In the inaugural issue, Hubbard joined the chorus of glib archers shooting arrows at Crane’s book of poems, wondering why the black riders were black when they “might as easily have been green or yellow or baby-blue for all the book tells about them,” and then later that same month, he had the effrontery to send a letter to Crane, “trusting you will not take to heart the little stunt on The Black Riders,” and ask him to furnish them with “a bit of ms. You can help us and we will try awfully hard to help you.” It was the first time a magazine had solicited a poem from him, and Crane must have been flattered, flattered enough not to bear any hard feelings about the insult, and so rather than ignore the request, he sent off a poem to Hubbard for the next issue, and then another poem for the issue after that, and so the story began, with Crane falling for Hubbard’s line about the two of them helping each other when in fact Hubbard only wanted to use Crane to help himself. Still, the man had offered to publish his poems, which made them allies, Crane felt, fellow renegades in the beautiful war against the status quo, and even if they didn’t see eye to eye on all things, the man wanted to use his work, and what harm could come from tossing an occasional bone to a hungry dog?
The harm, as Amy Lowell pointed out in her introduction to the reissue of The Black Riders, had to do with Hubbard’s reputation and the negative effect it had on Crane’s reputation as a poet. “It was difficult for the world to believe that a man championed by the arch-poser, Elbert Hubbard, could have merit.… It was a thousand pities that poems such as these should appear under the aegis of the Roycrofters.” Crane, however, still so young, and still so inexperienced, failed to notice the problem, and without giving the matter much thought, he kept on going to the cupboard and feeding Hubbard his bones.
Then the invitation showed up in the mail, blasting into the stillness and seclusion of Hartwood in the form of a letter dated November tenth From the Committee For the Philistine Society (a one-off, otherwise nonexistent organization) that began: “Recognizing in yourself and in your genius as a poet, a man whom we would like to know better, the Society of the Philistines desire to give a dinner in your honor early in the future.” The signatories included Hubbard, his partner Henry P. Taber, and nine other men representing newspapers from Buffalo, Syracuse, Boston, New Orleans, Denver, and Washington. Overwhelmed, Crane reacted by immediately writing to Hawkins to ask his friend what he should do. Two years older than S.C.’s brother William and editor of the magazine Brains (one of the first publications devoted to advertising), Hawkins would surely have a better grasp of the situation than he did.
The reply was swift and decisive: “You may answer the Buffalo fellows without delay, for you must—you just must—accept their invitation. There is a business side to life that must not be wholly ignored. It hasn’t a leg to stand on, and there’s no honest reason for it’s being, but here it is and—there you are.… You go ahead and accept. Tell me of the day you fix on, and I’ll agree that you’ll be togged properly for the occasion.” Leaving nothing to chance, Hawkins continued by asking Crane for his chest measurement, what size shoe he wore, and the length of his leg from crotch to heel, since he knew that Crane’s wardrobe was deficient on all fronts and that he lacked the funds to do anything about it. With the zeal of a true friend, the less than wealthy Hawkins was willing to do anything he could to help.
Buoyed by that enthusiastic support, Crane wrote back to Hubbard and accepted, humbly adding, “I am a very simple person and I am dejected when I think of the disappointment of my friends, the Philistines, if they have been good enough to form any opinion at all favorable of my ability or my personality.” That day or the next, Crane wrote to Hawkins with thanks for the advice and to tell him how embarrassed he felt “when I think I was low enough to grab at your generosity.” Then he provided the information Hawkins had asked for: “My chest, bad luck to it, measures 35 inches—scant—and my leg is a 33—worse luck. And foot—rot it—is a seven. There! It is over. I feel I have told you I am a damned thief”—for he knew that Hawkins would have to dig into his own pocket to rescue him. “Heaven send you rest, Willis, and in your old age may you remember how you befriended the greatest literary blockhead in America.”
Early on, Crane sent Hubbard a list of the people he wanted to invite, and before long the regrets began trickling into the Philistine office, not as snubs to the guest of honor but from wariness of the host, who had already established the reputation Amy Lowell would write about thirty years later and who was clearly capitalizing on Crane’s recent success to promote himself and his magazine. Irving Bacheller, Hamlin Garland, Ripley Hitchcock, and William Dean Howells were all otherwise engaged and sent their best wishes. Ambrose Bierce was in California, Richard Harding Davis was somewhere else, and S. S. McClure wrote that much as he appreciated Crane’s talent, he preferred to “admire the valiant Philistines—from a safe distance.” Undaunted, Hubbard pushed on with his plans as the large dinner shrank to a smallish dinner of approximately twenty-five confirmed guests, printing a thick souvenir menu that included a previously unpublished poem by Crane and the responses of the more than three dozen people who found it impossible to attend. Meanwhile, back at Hartwood as the nineteenth of December approached, Crane had slowly worked himself into a glorious, unrelenting nervous fit. To Hawkins on December fifteenth:
I have mapped out my two or three shekels so that I will return home smiling but broke and in the smoking-car. I bought today one full dress shirt and what goes with it. I have a damn fine hat. I have no overcoat save that little gauze one which you may remember. Nor no dress-suit. My brother has—(had)—a pair of patent leathers and I am sleeping with them under my pillow.…
And now, Willis, old man, when I get in all this flumy-doodle business and see you behind there moving the scenes and knowing all the time what a damned fool I am and what a ridiculous hole I’m in, I get fair feeble-minded with dwelling upon it. I leave it all to you. For my part I wish the whole thing was in Ballywhoo because while I look forward to it as probably the greatest pleasure of my life, I feel as if I were astride your shoulders. And if I could stop the thing now I would.
Still optimistic, Hawkins wrote back on the seventeenth:
If you reach the Genesee before I do either wait for me or leave a note for me. I shall express an overcoat to you this afternoon. In Buffalo we will fix up the dress suit question. You bring along your shirt, hat & shoes. I will attend to coat, vest and trousers.
I like this sorto’ thing. Don’t let it bother you a bit.… We’ll have a bully time.
That was the fun part, the comic tangle of frets and jitters and anxious second thoughts, but the dinner that Hawkins and no doubt Hubbard himself imagined would be a cozy, dignified affair turned into an embarrassment, an unruly verbal brawl provoked by a number of razzing, drunken newsmen sitting at one end of the long table. Several eyewitness accounts of the scene have come down to us, and while they differ somewhat in the details, there are no discrepancies in the overall impression of what happened. Crane’s Syracuse fraternity brother Frank Noxon, then working as a drama critic for the Boston Record, was one of the self-described “freaks and near-freaks” in attendance. He had been placed next to Claude Bragdon, a set designer and architect, who was seated across from Crane and Hawkins. Hubbard’s partner, Henry Taber, sat at the head. “After dinner,” Noxon wrote in 1928,
Taber rose and began his speech. “Probably,” he said, “the most unique—” That was as far as he got. A voice somewhere down toward Hubbard [at the other end of the table] called out “Can ‘unique’ be compared?” This was the signal. It determined the tone of the festivities. In the best clown and gridiron manner Taber and all the other speakers were guyed and ragged from start to finish. Crane … was called up, and they had as much fun with him as the others.
Bragdon, writing in 1905, offers his own description of the mayhem:
That dinner, held in a private room of a Buffalo hotel, is still a distressing memory—like the site of a young ox led to a slaughter. At first the dinner was dominated by a lot of drunken pseudo-reporters, who had come there with the evident intention of turning the whole affair to ridicule by their ribald and irrelevant interruptions, much to the distress, naturally, of Hubbard and us others.
Hawkins, sitting immediately to Crane’s left, had a more intimate understanding of what the guest of honor had to endure. In one of his “All in a Lifetime” pieces from the 1920s, he wrote:
Thursday evening, December 19, 1895, Stephen and I sat next to each other at that dinner. He was in immaculate evening clothes, but he was ill at ease. The many speeches lauding his literary work had double effect on him. Nothing in his outward behavior indicated whether they pleased him or displeased him, but every now and then he would nudge me and utter a nearly suppressed groan or half-whispered word of disapproval of what I knew he regarded as kindly-intended bosh; for he had repeatedly assured me that he had done nothing to warrant any of this praise.
When Hubbard, who presided, had, in glowing terms, extolled the honored guest as man and genius, he called on Crane for a few words. Stephen, with manifest reluctance, rose. Evidently, he was panic-stricken. Wetting his pale, parched lips, he seemed for a moment unable to utter a word. At last his innate courage came to his relief, but he could say only that he had done nothing in a literary way but to tell in his own poor words what he saw and as he saw it.…
The fact is, Stephen was in a blue funk.
Both Bragdon and Hawkins were too modest to discuss the roles they played in the proceedings that night, however, and it is only in Noxon’s account that we learn what they did and how Hawkins was the one who prevented the dinner from degenerating into an out-and-out calamity.
When Crane sat down up rose Claude Bragdon. After 31 years I can still hear the sound of his voice and see the look on his face. “I come here,” he said, “to do honor to Stephen Crane, not to ridicule him. I regret to take this step, but I cannot longer remain in the room.” The door was on the far side of the table. To get out, Bragdon had to walk around Taber and Crane. Hawkins stood and blocked him. “One moment,” he said. “I am the oldest man in this room. I know Stephen Crane better than any one else here. I have slept with him, eaten with him, starved with him, swum with him. I know him through and through, every mood. I have taken part in all that has occurred, and he knows I love him and admire him. He knows that you all do. I have come here, like our friend, to do honor to Stephen Crane. I assure you that he feels more complimented by the spirit of this meeting than he would have been by all the solemn eulogies that could be pronounced.” Crane was nodding his head off. Everybody applauded.
“I am sorry,” said Bragdon, “if I have made a mistake. I ask your pardon.”
“Pardon is granted you,” Hawkins answered, “on one condition.”
Bragdon looked up inquiringly.
“That condition,” said Hawkins, “is that you turn around and take your seat.”
And Bragdon did it. *
Somehow or other, the dinner plodded on to its conclusion without further incident. The next day, a journalist from the Buffalo Evening News who had attended the affair reported that thirty-one guests had been present “and every seat was filled.” Ignoring the ruckus that had taken place at the “interesting gathering,” he summarized the speeches given by Taber and Hubbard and then turned his attention to the author of The Red Badge of Courage, “which is exciting widespread interest just now”:
Mr. Crane responded modestly and gracefully, saying he was a working newspaperman who was trying to do what he could “since he had recovered from college” with the machinery which had come into his hands—doing it sincerely, if clumsily, and simply setting forth in his own way his own impressions. The poet made a very good impression. He is a young fellow, 24, with a smooth face and a keen eye and doesn’t take himself over-seriously.
Always quick to pounce on its favorite target, the New York Tribune countered with an article of its own on the twenty-ninth in which the Philistines were denounced for supporting “the irrepressible mediocrity which insists upon affronting public intelligence though the heavens cry out for shame. We had thought the ‘Philistines’ would help to quench the Minor Poet. Instead they give him a dinner and sing his praises to the moon!”
However he might have suffered at that dinner, Crane never felt any resentment toward the man who had lured him up to the Genesee Hotel, and he went on publishing his work in Hubbard’s magazines until the end—poems mostly, but also a number of short prose pieces—unable to turn his back on the person who declared in print, just three months after the dinner, that Stephen Crane had rescued “the fag-end of the century from literary disgrace.” As for Hubbard, he continued to flourish for the next twenty years, maintaining his Roycroft empire as he churned out novels, articles, newspaper columns, and close to two hundred pamphlets, none more popular than A Message to Garcia, a tract on courage, devotion to duty, and honor at all costs that sold several million copies in the decades following its 1899 publication and was twice adapted into films, a silent from 1916 and a feature from 1936 starring Barbara Stanwyck and Wallace Beery, a work that sent its long tentacles so far into the future that in 1960 it was assigned to me and the other thirteen-year-olds in my eighth-grade English class by our teacher Mrs. Brown, a woman on the brink of retirement whose life surely overlapped with Crane’s.
Following a visit to Europe, Hubbard died in the wreck of the Lusitania off the coast of Ireland in May 1915 when he, his wife, and 1,196 other people went down with the ship after it was torpedoed by a German U-boat in the second year of the First World War.
26
Back at Hartwood after spending Christmas in New York, Crane sent off the manuscript of The Third Violet to Hitchcock on December twenty-seventh, declined an invitation to do a series of articles on Civil War battlefields for the McClure syndicate on the thirtieth, and wrote three letters on the thirty-first, one of them the “rotten work” critique of his new novel to Curtis Brown and another to Hawkins, in which he reports that he has taken to wearing corduroys again and will be shipping the overcoat back to him that night. After going on to tell him that “Hubbard and Taber think you are just the smoothest guy in the world,” he asks Hawkins if he was “satisfied with the dinner,” confessing that “I didn’t drink much but the excitement soon turned everything into a grey haze for me and I am not sure that I came off decently,” and then, having finished the letters to his two friends, he closed off the year by writing a third letter to Nellie Crouse in Akron, Ohio.
It made no sense at the time, and it continues to make no sense now. Crane had met her only once—all the way back at the beginning of the year—and he had not written a word to her in the many months that had gone by since then. She had been the most attractive woman at the tea party his friend Button had dragged him to that afternoon in early January (“Stunning figure—stunning,” to repeat the words of Lucian Pontiac), and Crane had monopolized her attention the whole time he was there—in fact had talked to no one else. The flirtations of a bored young man at a boring party or the first signs of a genuine crush? By all accounts, Nellie Crouse was a “prim, thoroughly conventional young woman,” a far cry from the ideal Crane had expressed to Linson on another afternoon in New York (“I don’t know anything finer than the natural talk of a nice girl with brains in her head”), but if Nellie Crouse lacked brains, she most definitely had looks and possessed all the qualifications to rank as a nice girl. Young men fall fast and hard for attractive young women. That is a law of the universe, but if Crane had fallen for the good-looking girl he encountered on one of the first days of the year, why did he wait until the last day of the year before making his next move?
Several answers come to mind, but none of them is wholly convincing. It could be that the seclusion at Hartwood had begun to drive him stir-crazy. Shut off from his friends for the better part of the past two and a half months, starved for female company in his little monk’s room on the second floor of Edmund’s house, young Crane must have been thinking about women to the point of distraction, not only about the imaginary Grace and Splutter in his novel but about real women as well, and as he considered his chances among the various prospects parading through his head, he fixed his eyes on the face of the tea-party girl from Akron—the fairest of them all—and wondered if she might not be worth pursuing. Or, having just spent two months dwelling on the dramas of courtship in his now-completed novel, he was ready to take a stab at courtship himself, to follow the example of Billie Hawker and set his sights on a well-heeled, unattainable beauty—even at the cost of appearing to be perfectly ridiculous. Or (less likely), he had been thinking about Nellie Crouse every day for the past year but had held back from approaching her again because he had felt he needed to enhance his credentials as a suitor before going on the attack, and now that he had earned those credentials with his recent success, he was finally in a position to make his next move. Or, still rattled by that success, still struggling to come to terms with it, and further agitated by the several commotions produced by the Philistine dinner in Buffalo, he had gone slightly bonkers and didn’t know what he was doing. Whatever the reason, the seven letters he wrote to Nellie Crouse between December thirty-first and March eighteenth are both sublimely ridiculous and deeply amusing—Crane’s Guide for the Perplexed transformed into the chronicle of a bungled romance. Round and round he goes, twisting himself into ever-tightening knots of self-conscious bluster, second guesses, apologies, apologies for the apologies, more second guesses of the apologies for the apologies, proceeding in a manner so inept and tortured that you feel sorry for him even as he makes you laugh with his mocking asides and rhetorical somersaults, writing his head off in a storm of chatterboxing brilliance until the sham, one-way courtship runs aground against the shoals of inanity. He had conjured a figment, an invented girl who could have been better used as a secondary character in The Third Violet, and once he understood that she was too dense to understand a fraction of what he was saying to her, it was as if he were writing to himself, chewing off his own ear as he yelled into the void, and then, after charming her and flattering her and making every effort to crack through her doltish impenetrability, she turned him away and he gave up, no doubt disgusted with himself, but also in a dark place, a hole of pure despond—at least for a time—and then he crawled out of it and moved on.
