Burning Boy, page 89
Barry and Héloïse, the youngest children of Harold Frederic and Kate Lyon. (COURTESY OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY)
The Frewens’ only stipulation in the rental agreement was that two of their servants be retained at the house. Adoni Ptolemy was consequently left behind in Surrey, where he joined his twin brother at the Pease household in Limpsfield, and the Cranes took over as the employers of William MacVittie (known as Mack), an ancient coachman and groom with such a full white beard that Conrad referred to him as Tolstoy, and a veteran butler named Richard Heather. Eventually, they hired a cook as well, a Swiss-English woman known simply as Vernall, who had worked for an American family in England for ten years and had mastered the art of American cuisine. Along with her came her husband, Charles, known as “Chatters,” who worked outdoors and was responsible for pumping water and carrying it into the house. Both Mack and Vernall had a weakness for drink. Tolstoy was such an avid tippler that the liquor cabinet eventually had to be locked, and, according to Jessie Conrad, whenever Vernall was asked to make dinner for a sudden influx of visitors after eight o’clock, she would flatly refuse. Cora, “at her wit’s end for the moment, would wring her hands and appeal to Stephen. He in turn would give her one glance and solemnly ring the bell. Like clockwork the old butler appeared and handed a bottle of brandy to the thirsty woman, who retired with no further comment to her kitchen, and an hour or so later a perfect dinner would be served, complete in every detail.” It is worth noting that when Crane set to work on the semifictionalized “War Memories” in August, he transferred those memories to an imaginary correspondent named Vernall.
This good life had all been constructed on a foundation of bottomless sand, but the Cranes bluffed their way to respectability by maintaining a strict silence about their troubles. Not even their closest friends had any inkling of how hard up they were, and by spending more and more money they did not have, the couple affected a magnificent pose of nonchalance and well-being. When no one was looking, Crane howled forth his distress in letter after letter to his agents and publishers, but Cora was the only one who knew what they were up against, and as Crane’s output increased to manic levels of hyperproduction, she took over as his correspondent by proxy, haranguing those same agents and publishers even more vociferously than he had. They were a team now, a two-person manufacturing company of words, and during the most hectic periods, when for three solid days and nights Crane would lock himself in his small study over the porch—the dampest, chilliest room in the damp stone house—he would slide each finished story or chapter or article under the door, and within hours Cora would have a clean copy typed up on their new writing machine. At other times, to relieve the discomfort of holding a pen in his hand for too many hours, he would compose his work in his head and dictate to her.
In spite of these pressures, that isn’t to say they weren’t happy. For the eternally hopeful Cora, this was the life she had always wanted with Crane, and whatever embarrassments they were facing just then, surely those money obstacles would be overcome in due course. For the dying man, happiness was the only human option available to him. He was not about to give in and squander his last years or months in useless self-pity. As long as he was still breathing, what would be the point in sulking or complaining about the inevitable, and the last thing he wanted was for anyone to feel sorry for him. And so he worked, and he worked, turning himself into a latter-day Sisyphus as he began pushing his rock up the mountain every morning and then watched it roll back to the bottom at night. Same thing the day after that. Same thing the day after that. As Camus puts it in his signature essay about the absurd hero, “One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness.” The nineteenth-century American (1871–1900) and the twentieth-century Frenchman (1913–1960) had much in common: superbly athletic in their youth (baseball catcher, soccer goalie), early victims of TB, writers who struggled to make sense of a world in which the gods have vanished. Camus goes on: “The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing.” That is, by saying yes to life, one assumes the burden of endless toil and a death without meaning. Such was Crane’s position in those last months before his crumbling health destroyed him. “This universe henceforth without master seems to him neither sterile nor futile,” Camus writes. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
2
Edith Ritchie, Kate Lyon’s nineteen-year-old niece, lived with the Cranes from early July to January 1900, and she is the source of a number of delicious anecdotes that confirm the spirit of fun and nonsense that pervaded the rooms at Brede whenever the perspiring rock-pusher paused from his labors. “Who could ever forget Stephen and his whimsicalities, and Cora with her gleaming, golden hair, exquisite skin, and humorous mind?” She called them “Mr. Crane” and “Mummy Crane,” and they called her “Snubby” because of her short nose. Alone among the many people who knew the Cranes during that final period, young Miss Ritchie lived on intimate terms with them and was privy to information about the day-to-day flow of their lives that was not available to anyone else. “They were darlings to me,” she wrote for the Atlantic Monthly in 1954 (when she was in her seventies), but the excerpts that follow are not the sentimental ramblings of an old woman musing about her fondly remembered departed friends—they are vivid recollections of a time that stood out for her as one of the grand adventures of her youth.
Mr. James. All manner of people came to visit the house, among them Henry James, who, according to Ritchie, “would bicycle the seven miles over to Brede at least once a week. One day Mr. James and Stephen were having a discussion about something, and Stephen was getting the better of the argument. Suddenly Mr. James said, ‘How old are you?’ ‘Twenty-seven,’ said Stephen. ‘Humph,’ said Mr. James, ‘prattling babe!’”
Singing dogs. The Cranes owned three dogs, but in this passage Ritchie mentions five, either through a slip of memory or because two dogs happened to be visiting the house. As told by Ritchie: “In those days, I used to sing a little and Stephen liked it. Whenever Mr. James came to call, I was made to sing for the poor man. Then Cora would say, ‘Now, let’s have a concert.’ I would pick up the five puppies and, with three heads over one arm and two over the other, I would sing and play while five little muzzles howled in anguish. Mr. James and the Cranes would become limp with mirth.”
Musical combs. “Sometimes, when there was a crowd in the house, there would be a tap on my bedroom door soon after I had gone to sleep. Cora’s voice would say, ‘Stephen wants some music. Slip into your dressing gown and bring your comb.’ We would all troop down to the huge old kitchen.… There the party might consist of A.E.W. Mason, Joseph Conrad, Mr. and Mrs. H. G. Wells, and others. We would first raid the pantry, and then, with tissue over our combs and Stephen conducting with the toasting fork as his baton, we all would sing horribly and happily through the combs. Such foolishness amused those brilliant minds!”
Ford Madox Ford trips over his words. “When Mr. Hueffer came to Brede, he read some of his poems to us. In one, there was a line about ‘birds in the treetops,’ which he read ‘birds in the tea trops,’ and we three had much difficulty in concealing our giggles.”
Animal Grab with H .G. Wells. A popular Victorian card game, the Animal Grab deck consisted of cards with pictures of animals on them, and players who drew two cards of the same animal would be obliged to imitate the sounds of the beast in question. On their way to Paris in August, the Cranes and Ritchie stopped off at Folkestone, “where we spent the night with the H. G. Wellses. That evening Mrs. Wells and I gave them some music of sorts; then we all played animal grab. I can still hear Stephen roaring like a lion, Cora twittering like a canary, and Mr. Wells barking like a dog.”
Au revoir, Paris. “We met various friends in Paris and had a gay time, with lunches, dinners, theaters, cafés-chantants, and sightseeing. We had meant to stay quite a while, but suddenly we all got homesick for Brede and the dogs and decided to go home. All the time we were away, both Cora and Stephen got small pieces of candy from penny-in-the-slot machines and mailed them home to the dogs.”
Ditto the Emerald Isle. “One morning in October, Stephen came down to breakfast and said, ‘Edith has never been to Ireland. Let’s go to Ireland.’ … So we packed our bags and off we went to London.
That evening there was a big party at the Frewens’, where the Cranes were lionized. Next morning we went to the station to take the boat for Ireland, but found that we had had an old timetable and that the train had gone. No matter. It was fun to have another day in London. We missed the train three days in succession. It sounds as if we were all morons. But we were just happy, carefree country bumpkins who had lost the habit of catching trains. And each day and evening was full of more parties—lunches, teas, dinners. Everyone wanted to entertain the Cranes. Finally we reached Ireland and went from Cork to Ballydehob to Skibbereen to Skull to Bantry, ending at Glengariff, staying at little country inns.… We were to have gone to Killarney, but again we got homesick for Brede and the dogs.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy. Ritchie’s piece is more than just a catalogue of amusing, high-spirited moments, and her comments about Crane’s work habits, for example, or how he and Cora behaved with each other, are indispensable to understanding the texture of their life at Brede. Beyond the descriptions of the house, with its “huge open fireplaces,” its empty rooms, its large oak-paneled hall filled with “comfortable couches and chairs and pretty tables with lamps and plants and books,” or the dining room with its “long refectory table and rushes on the floor from the meadow by the brook”—in lieu of unaffordable rugs—there is this confounding but revelatory statement, which proves how well the Cranes guarded the secret of their bone-crushing debts: “I never heard money discussed while I was there.”
Edith Ritchie was a young woman who kept her eyes and ears open, and not only was she a member of the household for six full months, she went on two trips abroad with the Cranes (as they forked out cash for boats, hotels, restaurants, trains, theater tickets, and cafés—never flinching at a single expense, no matter how extravagant), took part in most if not all of their social activities, and sat down to meals with them once, twice, and even three times a day. If the Cranes ever talked about their finances within earshot of anyone, Ritchie would have heard what they said, but for six long months not one gasp or groan or panicked word was uttered in her presence, and the good times rolled on. Undisciplined spendthrifts, her hosts were also two of the most disciplined actors in the world.
Favorite guest. “Joseph Conrad came often to Brede, but his wife was not well at that time and I never met her.… I liked [him] the most of any of the Brede guests. He was charming, quiet, and courteous. I was shy and inclined to listen rather than to talk. He would discuss books with me as seriously as with his fellow writers.”
Work habits. “Stephen’s workroom was an austere place with a not too comfortable chair and a long table in it, bare except for his papers. When he was in a writing mood, we would all stay away from him. But sometimes he would say that he could think better if he had company, and then he would bring his work down to the hall and write while Cora and I sewed.”
Preparations for the writing of “Manacled.” “One day he told us that he had had a dream which he thought would make a good story. He dreamed that he was acting on the stage of some theater and in the play he was a prisoner. He had been handcuffed and his ankles were bound together. Suddenly there was a cry of ‘Fire!’ In his dream, all the other actors and the audience ran for the exits and forgot that he was tied up and helpless. That was his dream. He wondered, in writing about it, how long it might take him to inch his way along a corridor to an outside door. So he got Cora and me to tie his hands and his ankles together and then he spent the morning trying, over a given distance, to hop or roll or work along like an inchworm, all in deadly seriousness.”
What Edith Ritchie saw—and felt. “I wish I knew how to describe the atmosphere at Brede. I have never known two people more deeply in love with one another than were Stephen and Cora.… Each was extremely sensitive, each protective. Cora ran the household for Stephen’s comfort and happiness. She followed his every change of mood. If he wanted silence, he had silence. If he wanted company and gaiety, he had them. They were fine people, both of them. They were good. Always they were good. Not only were they ‘good’ to me. They were ethically good. They were kind. They were just.… I loved them both.”
* * *
Others, of course, formed other opinions. The butler at Brede, Richard Heather, whom Ritchie describes as “pompous and typical, but devoted to the Cranes,” was observed by Jessie Conrad to have worn that devotion as a mask, behind which he carried on a secret campaign of sabotage and insubordination. On the matter of Crane’s dogs, for example, she writes, “Time after time I have seen [Stephen] raise his thin face bent low over his work and, without the least impatience, open the door for one of those spoiled animals to pass through. Then when he had almost returned to his seat he would have to repeat the performance. Sometimes, when he was too ill and languid to attend to their demands himself, he would request the old servitor … to do so. Many times I have observed the solemn farce, sorely tempted to interfere. The old ruffian, his face set in the most benevolent expression, would escort the dogs to the head of the stone steps and then solemnly kick each one down the steep flight.”
Crane in his study at Brede Place. (COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA)
Nor was Crane’s workroom “an austere place … bare except for his papers,” even if that was how Ritchie remembered it more than fifty years after her stay at Brede. A photograph from September 1899 shows Crane sitting at his desk with a pen or pencil in his hand, hard at work (or pretending to be at work), and the room that surrounds him is filled with objects: at least seven framed pictures mounted on the wall to his right, at the bottom of which one can see the top of a guitar jutting up from the floor, as well as a tall bookcase directly behind him. The surface of the desk is cluttered with more objects: a mess of jumbled, finished pages, a wine glass filled with cigarettes, boxes of matches, a porcelain jar probably used for storing pipe tobacco, a towering lamp with a ridiculously overwrought taffeta shade, and the photograph of Cora dressed in her war correspondent’s outfit, the one she had signed To me old pal Stevie / with best wishes—“Imogene Carter” / Athens / May 22/97. That Ritchie’s memory failed her in this instance is neither here nor there. She was recalling a feeling, not a fact, which we all tend to do with our memories from the distant past, but the striking thing about this photograph is how different Crane looks in it from a similar one taken at Ravensbrook in 1897 or 1898. Again, Crane is sitting at his cluttered desk, pen in hand and apparently at work, this time surrounded by mementos of his trip to Texas and Mexico. At most, no more than two years had gone by since then, but in the second photograph he seems to have aged drastically. His jacket is too large for his diminishing body, and his face is no longer the face of a young man.
Another disputable point is Ritchie’s assertion that “I never saw an uninvited guest. The guests who came were invited by Cora at Stephen’s suggestion. I have heard her protest to him that he should have a rest after a houseful over a weekend. But he loved to have people there.” This was probably both true and not true. There is no question that Crane enjoyed the company of his fellow writers—Conrad, Wells, James, Ford, Barr, and A. E. W. Mason—but just as it had been at Oxted, Brede Place often filled up with unwanted moochers and hangers-on who took advantage of their hosts’ generosity and goodwill and then told malicious stories about them after they returned to London. It was partly Crane’s fault for being too kind, too accommodating, too reluctant to say no to anyone, and this softheartedness often aggravated his friends. Ford, who worshipped Crane and called him “the most beautiful spirit I have ever known,” described his friend’s life at Brede as “a nightmare of misplaced hospitality.” Conrad, no less appalled by these lowlife visitors, refers to the “secret irritation” he felt whenever he encountered them on his visits. Once, when he found the courage to tell Crane that he was too “good-natured,” S.C. “gave me one of his quiet smiles, that seemed to hint so poignantly at the vanity of all things, and after a period of silence remarked: ‘I am glad those Indians are gone.’”
Ritchie was no doubt too young and inexperienced to penetrate the nuances of these complex social interactions, but that in no way diminishes what she felt about the Cranes themselves or undermines the essential truth of her account. Without her, we would know nothing about the singing dogs and musical combs, not to mention the roaring, twittering, and barking animal grabbers in Folkestone. In the same way, without the testimony of another young American visitor to Brede, we would know nothing about how Crane won the Challenge Cup in Spontaneous Writing. Karl Edwin Harriman was a twenty-four-year-old American fiction writer and journalist who had been sent to England by the Detroit Free Press. He came to the house to do an interview with Crane and wound up staying for several weeks, overlapping with Ritchie and almost certainly wearing out his welcome, but he is the source of a memorable little story, and while he got many things wrong in the several articles he wrote about Crane, there is no reason to question the authenticity of this one.
A summer night at Brede Place, following an afternoon of thick gray skies and gathering thunder. Crane and several of his writer friends are sitting around the kitchen table drinking scotch and soda. Conrad and Mason* are the only ones mentioned by Harriman, but he implies that there are others as well. The thunder finally explodes at nine o’clock. Crane has been talking about Harold Frederic’s “adverb screen,” a long list of useful adverbs that his late friend had written out on a window shade to consult while composing his novels. Mason pours himself another drink, another one of Crane’s cigarettes goes out between his fingers, and the thunder cracks again. Conrad thinks it isn’t a bad idea. Mason stands up and says that the only way to write is to know what you are going to do in advance—to map out everything before you begin. Crane strongly disagrees. “My belief has always been that the whole business is a matter of technique,” he says. “If a man is a master of his particular technique he can write a story about anything.” Mason is standing by the window as a bolt of lightning turns the dark sky white, and as he looks out at the meadow in front of him, he says to Crane: “If that is true, write a story about those hay-cocks out there. I challenge you!” “I accept,” says Crane, and then the talk turns in another direction. Eventually, the party breaks up, everyone goes to bed, and the next day Crane is mysteriously absent when lunch is served, but there he is at dinnertime, walking into the room “with a roll in his hand tied with a blue ribbon.” Cora laughs, since she knows what is coming. “You see,” she says, “Stevie has just graduated and he’s brought his diploma to show you. Haven’t you, Stevie?” Crane nods, and when dinner is done and the group gathers for another evening of scotch and soda, he unties the blue ribbon and says, “I’m going to prove something to you Indians.” Then he unrolls the pages and reads them a story set in the time of Cromwell, which happens to be a story set on the grounds of the house in which he is reading to them, a story in which every haycock in the meadow is hiding a Commonwealth soldier, each one waiting for a signal to attack the house as the monks inside cower in holes or disappear into the cellar. When the story is finished, Mason reaches out his hand to Crane and says, “I stand corrected.” Conrad does nothing more than grunt—a sign of deepest approval in the private language he shares with Crane.
