Burning Boy, page 62
Chapter V gives way to chapter VI, and the correspondent is still alone, meditating on the seven mad gods of the sea as he mutters his familiar refrain, “If I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned,” but now he begins to push his thinking beyond mere petulance into a broader view of his situation, no longer treating it as a personal insult but as a philosophical problem that can afflict any man who finds himself confronting the irrational forces of the elements.
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 that there are no bricks and no temples. Any visible expression of nature would surely be pelleted with his jeers.
Then, if there be no tangible thing to hoot he feels, perhaps, the desire to confront a personification and indulge in pleas, bowed to one knee, and with hands supplicant, saying: “Yes, but I love myself.”
A high cold star on a winter’s night is the word he feels that she says to him. Thereafter he knows the pathos of his situation.
The correspondent’s mind wanders, inexplicably going back to a poem he read in childhood, so long ago that he has “forgotten that he had forgotten the verse,” a dreadful bit of hokum about a soldier of the Legion who lay dying in Algiers and would never more see his native land, a work that made no impression on him as a boy, for while he knew he was supposed to be filled with sorrow for the dying soldier, “it was less to him than the breaking of a pencil’s point.”
Now, however, it quaintly came to him as a human, living thing. It was no longer merely a picture of a few throes in the breast of a poet, meanwhile drinking tea and warming his feet at the grate; it was an actuality—stern, mournful, and fine.
… In the far Algerian distance, a city of low square forms was set against a sky that was faint with the last sunset hues. The correspondent, plying the oars and dreaming of the slow and slower movements of the lips of the soldier, was moved by a profound and perfectly impersonal comprehension. He was sorry for the soldier of the Legion who lay dying in Algiers.
Another one of Crane’s stream-of-consciousness divagations, similar to the barrage of thoughts tumbling through the head of the New York Kid in “The Five White Mice,” but also a parable of how Crane chose to write his story, a fable within the true-life fable that is “The Open Boat,” a work set in Florida but written in the cold of an upstate New York winter, no doubt in a room warmed by a comfortable fire, not unlike the room the correspondent imagines the poet to be sitting in when he writes about the soldier in hot, distant Algiers. The poem is still a bad poem, and because of its dead language the soldier is already dead before he dies, but the boy who failed to respond to it is now a man, a correspondent rowing for his life in the darkness who has at last understood the pathos of his situation, which has allowed him to attain a “perfectly impersonal comprehension” that cuts through the dead language of the poem and gives him the dying soldier again in all the pathos of his situation. He can be moved by the poem now, not because it is a good poem but because the poem no longer matters. It is the human, living thing that counts, the human situation, which is no less human than his own, and therefore he can feel “sorry for the soldier of the Legion who lay dying in Algiers.”
All to the point, certainly, but somewhat cracked as well, for this mental detour is also the product of duress, the extreme discombobulation brought on by a full day and half a night spent in an open boat: a psychological fact engendered by a mind that has started to buckle under the physical demands of the ordeal.
The captain stirs back to consciousness, the correspondent and the oiler trade places again, and as the correspondent lies down next to the sleeping cook, his teeth are chattering from the cold and “playing all the popular airs.” He sleeps so soundly that no more than an instant seems to go by before he hears a voice “in the last stages of exhaustion”: “Will you spell me?” And the correspondent replies: “Sure, Billie.”
A bit later, the captain instructs the cook “to take one oar at the stern and keep the boat facing the sea.” That will enable the correspondent and the oiler “to get respite together” and give them “a chance,” as the captain says, “to get into shape again.” So they sleep the dead sleep one more time, “and the ominous slash of the wind and the water affected them as it would have affected mummies.” At this point in the struggle, their principal task is to keep the dinghy poised in a delicate balance between sea and shore, and whatever skills they possess in the art of small-boat navigation must be used to prevent the dinghy from coming too close to the treacherous surf and at the same time prevent it from drifting too far out and losing contact with the land. Another shark, or perhaps the same one, appears alongside the boat as the cook mans the oar. Then it is the correspondent’s turn to row again. The captain gives him whiskey and water to steady “the chills out of him,” and when the correspondent reaches the point of exhaustion for the umpteenth time, he turns to the oiler and asks, “Billie.… Billie, will you spell me?” and for the umpteenth time the oiler says, “Sure.”
The last chapter begins as the correspondent opens his eyes and sees dawn breaking around him. The sky is gray at first, but as the minutes pass, “carmine and gold was painted upon the waters. The morning appeared finally, in its splendor, with a sky of pure blue, and the sunlight flamed on the tips of the waves.” He knows the color of the sky now, and because he has achieved an “impersonal comprehension” of things, he is capable of looking at the world with an objective eye, an unclouded eye. He studies the distant shore, and what he sees is this: sand dunes, a number of small black cottages, and a tall white windmill towering above them. Signs of life, it would seem, but everything is deserted. No people, no dogs, no bicycles—nothing.
A conference was held in the boat. “Well,” said the captain, “if no help is coming, we might better try a run through the surf right away. If we stay out here much longer we will be too weak to do anything for ourselves at all.” The others silently acquiesced in this reasoning. The boat was headed for the beach. The correspondent wondered if none ever ascended the tall wind-tower, and if then they never looked seaward. This tower was a giant standing with its back to the plight of the ants. It represented in a degree to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual—nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to him then, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent.
Crane had visited this place in his mind many times before, but now he was experiencing it in the flesh, relearning the lessons he had already learned in a way that would imprint them in his bones forever, and from now on he would feel his way toward a new understanding of his mission as a writer. If nature is indifferent to the struggles of mankind, that does not mean it is cruel or even hostile, simply that it has no intrinsic meaning, or a meaning so far beyond the grasp of human intelligence that it has, in the end, no meaning. A design, perhaps, but no purpose or reason for existing except to perpetuate itself as a blind force, and mankind is left to cope for itself, to find meanings for itself in the subtle, unarticulated human bond, as in the case of four men stranded together in a boat that cannot reach the shore. Crane the gambler knew that when the dice rolled out of the cup, the result was a matter of pure chance. Forget God, forget destiny, forget fate—and understand that we are ruled by arbitrary forces beyond our control. Four men are stranded in a boat. They suffer through the same ordeal, but three of them will live and one of them will not. Why? Not only does the question have no answer, it has no meaning. Billie Hawkins dies. Mourn him by remembering him, remember him by mourning him, and then, if you happen to be a person who writes, put him in your story, and if your story from 1897 is good enough, it will go on being read for a long time to come, as it is being read today by a man sitting alone in a room in Brooklyn, New York, one hundred and twenty-two years after the fact.
They are heading toward the beach. It is certain that the boat will be swamped long before they get there, and as the oiler steers the dinghy in backward, the biggest question is when they will be swamped and how far they will have to swim. “The monstrous inshore rollers heaved the boat high,” the narrator tells us, and then the last element of the story is brought into play, the final voice of the fugue, which suddenly changes the odds of surviving the battle ahead: fatigue, an immense and overpowering physical fatigue. The correspondent’s “mind was dominated at this time by the muscles, and the muscles said they did not care. It merely occurred to him that if he should drown it would be a shame.” He must fight for his life at the very moment when his will to live is draining out of him, and no sooner does he think this thought than the battle begins. A gigantic white wave “came roaring down upon the boat.… The boat slid up the incline, leaped at the furious top, bounced over it, and swung down the long back of the wave.” Then the next wave comes: “The tumbling boiling flood of white water caught the boat and whirled it almost perpendicular. Water swarmed in from all sides.” The captain warns them that “the next one will do for us, sure”—and it does. “The third wave moved forward, huge, furious, implacable. It fairly swallowed the dingey, and almost simultaneously the men tumbled into the sea. A piece of life-belt had lain in the bottom of the boat, and as the correspondent went overboard he held this to his chest with his left hand.”
What follows is a blow-by-blow account of his struggle in the icy water, his mind flailing between confusion and clarity as he pushes on through his mounting exhaustion. The oiler is swimming “strongly and rapidly.” The cook, girdled in a life jacket, has followed the captain’s instructions and is lying on his back with an oar in his hands, moving along “as if he were a canoe.” The captain is clinging to the overturned boat with his one good hand and riding the waves inward. Meanwhile, the correspondent is dog-paddling slowly and “leisurely” in order to preserve his strength, conscious of little but the “noisy water” and the shifting currents below him as his thoughts become more and more dissociated, so detached that when he looks ahead to the shore, it “was spread like a picture before him. It was very near to him then, but he was impressed as one who in a gallery looks at a scene from Brittany or Holland.” For the last time, he repeats the refrain that has been running through his head from the beginning, but it is muted now, simpler and more direct, with all the rhetorical flourishes stripped out as his weary body paddles on toward land.
He thought: “I am going to drown? Can it be possible? Can it be possible? Can it be possible?” Perhaps an individual must consider his own death to be the final phenomenon of nature.
The captain, sensing that the correspondent is in trouble, calls out to him to come to the boat, but that will not be easy, for the magnitude of the effort required is mostly beyond him now.
In his struggle to reach the captain and the boat, he reflected that when one gets properly wearied, drowning must really be a comfortable arrangement, a cessation of hostilities accompanied by a large degree of relief, and he was glad of it, for the main thing in his mind for some moments had been horror of the temporary agony. He did not wish to be hurt.
He seems to be giving up, resigning himself to death in the waves even as he is within shouting distance of the land, but then he gets lucky, so lucky that what rescues him is one of the killer waves that have been threatening to drown him, a wave so large and so powerful that it vaults him clear over the boat and deposits him in water that is only waist-deep. He stands up, but the correspondent is too exhausted to stand, and a moment later he falls down. The waves lash into him again, again the undertow pulls at him, and once again he gets lucky. A man on the shore “who had been running and undressing, undressing and running, [came] bounding into the water.… He was naked, naked as a tree in winter, but a halo was about his head, and he shone like a saint. He gave a strong pull, and a long drag, and a bully heave at the correspondent’s hand. The correspondent, schooled in the minor formulae, said: ‘Thanks, old man.’”
The oiler, of course, does not have the luck to be rescued by a wave or anything else, and the naked saint is powerless to help him. As the three survivors are given a “warm and generous” welcome by the people gathering around them, “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.”
The story ends with a twelve-hour leap from morning into darkness.
When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea’s voice to the men on shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters.
Interpreters of the elements. Interpreters of the dividing line between coherence and a blur. Latter-day oracles reading the entrails of the world.
* * *
Earth, air, fire, and water. A poet of extreme situations, Crane was also a dedicated student of the four classical elements, and the primal, even primitive force of his best work springs from his attunement to the natural order (and chaos) of how things are. He does not invent, he observes, and in passage after passage of his stories, novels, and sketches we see the elements as few other writers have been able to present them. Think earth, for example, and suddenly you will see the landscapes described in The Red Badge of Courage, the southwest Texas desert described in “A Man and Some Others,” the fields of withered corn in “Nebraska’s Bitter Fight for Life.” Think air, and all at once you are seeing his manifold depictions of light, clouds, wind, snow, and rain, the blizzards in “The Blue Hotel” and “The Men in the Storm,” the slant of the sun on the gleaming rifles in “An Episode of War,” and the precision of this nuanced effect of light momentarily seen by the correspondent as he rows through the darkness in “The Open Boat”: “Southward, some one had evidently built a watch-fire on the beach. It was too low and too far to be seen, but it made a shimmering, roseate reflection upon the bluff [in] back of it, and this could be discerned from the boat.” Think fire, and there you are looking at the tenement fire in the New York sketch he wrote for Edward Marshall in 1894, the fire of exploding chemicals that burns off a man’s face in The Monster, and the fire he saw in a dream toward the end of his life and transformed into “Manacled,” a story about a fire that breaks out in a theater with a man trapped on the stage inside. Extreme situations. Human situations embedded in the surround of a specific natural environment, and because Crane had been blessed with an uncommon gift for observation—along with an equally uncommon gift for transcribing his observations into words—he gives tangibility to what otherwise would be mere abstractions, a ground for the reader to stand on and enter those extreme situations as lived experiences.
But we are talking about “The Open Boat” now, and the element under discussion is water, the water Crane nearly drowned in as a little boy when he waded out too far in the Raritan River, the ocean off the sands of Asbury Park that he studied obsessively throughout his teens and early twenties, the shipwrecks recounted in “Ghosts of the Jersey Coast” (1894), the specter-woman who prowled the beach at night long after she was dead, mourning her lover who had drowned in a shipwreck in 1815 (“The Ghostly Sphinx of Metedeconk,” 1895), and the enormous, abandoned log raft (ten thousand tons and six hundred feet long) drifting aimlessly across oceans in the tall tale from 1896, “Six Years Afloat,” and then, after the sinking of the Commodore, the enduring pain of Billy Higgins’s death and the image of the seven drowned men that went on tormenting him for the rest of his life, and even as he was dying at the Villa Eberhardt in the Black Forest, Cora wrote that “he lives over everything in dreams & talks aloud constantly. It is too awful to hear him try to change places in the ‘open boat’!”
It was the most important experience of his life, and not only did it change him, it changed his work as well. The story he wrote about it marks a turning point in his progress as a writer, and when he wasn’t scrambling to dig his way out of debt or covering wars as a battlefield correspondent, Crane continued to travel down the new road that had opened before him. God knows how far he would have gone if he had managed to live.
5
As promised, he returned to Jacksonville and started looking for another boat to take him to Cuba. More than anything else at this point, he seems to have wanted war, a real war, not just some imagined facsimile of it, and if he couldn’t find it in Cuba, he would go looking for it elsewhere. For now, that compulsion had become even more important to him than his work as a writer—which is another one of the things that sets Crane apart from most other writers, both then and now.
He was in a curious spot. Over the past several months, one battering had followed another, a succession of blows that had spun him around so often it was a wonder he wasn’t lying out cold on the mat. The Dora Clark Affair and his expulsion from New York; the ditching of Amy Leslie and the complicated romance now brewing with Cora Taylor; shipwreck, the open boat, and his near death in the Atlantic surf. After such a persistent, rapid-fire pounding, most people would want to withdraw for a while and contemplate their next step. Crane did just the opposite. It is true that he needed money, and therefore was in need of work, but there were a dozen other ways he could have earned money besides going off to war.
