Burning Boy, page 96
“Little Butcher, I will tell Skinner how he came to Bali and stole me”—
To nurse: “Did you know D’ Bruce never heard of him?” Dr called
June 4th 8 P.M.—Gave morphine injection—went at once to heart, I could see by muscular contraction Dr. saw too, tried to give camphor injection to revive action of heart. Dr said next day: “Can you forgive me?” What did he mean? don’t dare to think.
* * *
And then, in a letter to Cora on June seventh, this howl from Henry James after learning the news of Crane’s death: “What a brutal, needless extinction—what an unmitigated unredeemed catastrophe! I think of him with such a sense of possibilities and powers!”
6
Embalmed in Freiburg and then carried by train, boat, and another train to London, the corpse was delivered to a mortuary at 82 Baker Street, which stood almost directly across from 221b, the address of the nonexistent house where the imaginary detective Sherlock Holmes supposedly lived and worked. The man who had invented him, Arthur Conan Doyle, who had known and admired Crane, told a journalist that of all the new American writers, his young friend was the only one who had “the touch of genius.” In the days and weeks that followed, dozens of other writers on both sides of the Atlantic offered their comments as well. Because of his fame, and because he had left this “base blue world” so much earlier than anyone could reasonably have expected, his death was front-page news in every town and city across America and Britain. Some of the obituaries were generous, some were neutral, and some were hostile (the New York Tribune pounced on him again), but all of them were featured prominently and carried large headlines. Then came the articles by friends and colleagues, beginning with Edward Marshall’s “Loss of Stephen Crane—A Real Misfortune to All of Us” on June tenth, followed in the ensuing months by critical assessments of his work, none more valuable than the essay by Wells, who apologized to Cora for not having the heart to show up at the mortuary to view Crane’s body. “These things … affect me so darkly,” he wrote. “I should have found so little comfort & so much distress in this encounter and I have the memory of him in still comfort before that open window & the sea so vividly in my mind, that I do not care to disturb & weaken it by meeting something that was no longer him.”
Other friends did not share those qualms, and for the better part of a week they tramped in to have a last look at Crane, whose dead face was visible through a glass window that had been cut into the lid of the coffin. Among those who turned up were Joseph and Jessie Conrad and Curtis Brown. The undertaker’s shop was a small, tawdry place, Brown remembered, and when the woman in charge finally understood why he was there, she brightened and said, “Outside, under the archway.”
I went out, and through the adjoining archway into a large, square stable-yard, surrounded on three sides by covered bays, and with carts piled up in the middle. There were horses in two or three of the bays; but the rest were empty, except one and there was a coffin on trestles, with the face of my old friend exposed through the glass. He looked as if he had suffered greatly. There was no one else about. I stayed for a time, thinking over our talks together; and then walked slowly away, with a heavy heart.
* * *
Grim as that London death parlor must have been, with Crane’s coffin shoved into an empty horse stall somewhere out in the backyard, the American funeral was even worse. Crane had told Cora that he wanted to be buried next to his parents in the family plot at Evergreen Cemetery in Hillside, New Jersey, and with William attending to the arrangements for the service at a church in lower Manhattan, Cora left England on June seventeenth with her husband’s body, her husband’s niece Helen, Sponge, and another dog from Brede named Powder Puff. They arrived in New York on the twenty-seventh, in the middle of an early summer heat wave, and went to the funeral the next morning. Townley was drying out at the Binghamton Asylum for the Chronic Insane, but all of Crane’s other siblings were there—Wilbur, Edmund, Mary Helen, George, and William—as well as other members of the Crane family. Among the pallbearers were Ripley Hitchcock, Willis Brooks Hawkins, and John Kendrick Bangs from Harper’s, but there was no Howells, no Bacheller, no Linson, no Senger, no Indians from the Art Students League building, no young cohort from Crane’s past. To preside over the gathering and deliver the sermon, William had chosen Reverend James M. Buckley from Newark, the current editor of the Christian Advocate, a onetime friend of Reverend Crane’s and a sanctimonious windbag who had little or no idea who Stephen Crane was. He spoke solemnly and at length about the religious zeal of Crane’s father and maternal grandfather, bemoaned the tragedy of dying in a foreign land, and compared the dead author to Shelley, “a meteor that glows brightly in the sky and then sinks to rest.” To top it off, he ended his eulogy by criticizing Crane’s early work for having indulged in too much “word-painting,” although in recent years he seemed to have recognized his error and had written some less objectionable works.
The Crane family monument, Evergreen Cemetery, Hillside, New Jersey. The names and dates of Crane’s parents are on the front of the stone. Crane and his brother Townley are commemorated on one of the sides and three of their siblings on the other side: George, Wilbur, and Mary Helen. (PHOTOGRAPH BY SPENCER OSTRANDER)
Various members of the press had been assigned to cover the event, among them a twenty-year-old Wallace Stevens, fresh out of Harvard and temporarily working as a journalist before going on to law school. Just eight years younger than Crane, the future prince of twentieth-century American poetry returned to his Greenwich Village apartment that afternoon and wrote in his journal:
This morning I went to the funeral of Stephen Crane at the Central Metropolitan Temple on Seventh Avenue near Fourteenth Street. The church is a small one and was about third full. Most of the people were of the lower classes and had dropped in apparently to pass away the time. There was a sprinkling of men and women who looked literary, but they were a wretched, rag tag, and bob-tail. I recognized John Kendrick Bangs. The whole thing was frightful. The prayers were perfunctory, the choir was worse than perfunctory with the exception of its hymn “Nearer My God to Thee” which is the only appropriate hymn for funerals I ever heard. The address was absurd. The man kept me tittering from the time he began till the time he ended. He spoke of Gladstone + Goethe. Then—on the line of premature death—he dragged in Shelley; and speaking of the dead man’s later work he referred to Hawthorne. Finally came the Judgement Day—and all this with most delicate, sweet, and bursal gestures—when the earth and the sea shall give up their dead. A few of the figures to appear that day flashed through my head—and poor Crane looked ridiculous among them. But he lived a brave, aspiring, hard-working life. Certainly he deserved something better than this absolutely common-place, bare, silly service I have just come from. As the hearse rattled up the street over the cobbles, in the stifling heat of the sun, with not a single person paying the least attention to it and with only four or five carriages behind it at a distance I realized much that I had doubtingly suspected before—There are few hero-worshippers.
Plaque marking the site of Crane’s grave, Evergreen Cemetery, Hillside, New Jersey. The words read: “Stephen Crane—Author—1871–1900.” (PHOTOGRAPH BY SPENCER OSTRANDER)
Therefore, few heroes.
* * *
Cora remained in America for the next three weeks, mostly with her new relatives in Port Jervis and the surrounding countryside, taking walks and swapping stories with her young nieces, who fell for her as all children did whenever she was around, seemed to hit it off especially well with Edmund, who gave her his brother’s old scrapbooks, not so well with her sisters-in-law (who probably didn’t know what to make of her), and did her best to establish cordial relations with William. Getting along with him was crucial, since they were both involved in the will Crane had drawn up with solicitor Plant at the end of April, which had named William as his American executor and Cora (“my dear wife Cora Howorth Crane”) as the beneficiary of all his present and future literary earnings. She therefore had certain financial expectations, and with Wounds in the Rain, Whilomville Stories, and Great Battles of the World all on the brink of publication, not to mention the royalties from earlier books that were still trickling in, she had every reason not to worry about her immediate future. But William was too clever for her, and little by little, through one legal manipulation after another, he gradually pushed her out. His little brother still owed him money, he argued. All those loans he had sprung for over the years had not been paid back, and now that Cora was responsible for squaring the account, whatever royalties that came in would go to the estate, not to her—until such time that all past debts had been settled, which, needless to say, would be never. All legal and aboveboard, but by any ethical or moral or Reverend Buckley standard, repulsive.
One is reminded of the old Aesop fable about the ant and the grasshopper. The ant (William) spends the summer hard at work preparing for the winter ahead while the grasshopper (Crane) prances around all summer singing his songs and neglecting to think about the future. Winter comes, and when the shivering, starving grasshopper shows up at the ant’s door and begs for food, the ant tells him, Sorry, friend, but why should I give you anything? You frittered away the summer on idle amusements while I was in here working my head off, and now you expect me to pay for your mistakes? Too bad, but fair is fair, and I’m not going to do it. So he slams the door on the grasshopper and lets him die in the cold.
William, who had once risked his life to save a black man from lynching, had turned into Uriah Heep. It sounds harsh, perhaps, but what else is one to make of a man whose one published book (1910) bore the title A Scientific Currency?
* * *
Cora returned to England and floundered around for the better part of a year, trying to make a go of it as a freelance writer. In spite of help and encouragement from the Frewens and Curtis Brown, the results were paltry. Stokes was unwilling to advance any money on her proposed biography of Crane, and although she managed to complete and sell one or two of S.C.’s unfinished stories and to publish a few short pieces of her own, she eventually called it quits and returned to America. For a time, she holed up in rural Kentucky at the house of a woman named Lyda Brotherton, a distant relative of Kate Lyon’s, but with her money beginning to run out and her future turning into a brick wall, she left Kentucky, leapfrogged into the past, and resumed the life she had led as Cora Taylor.
“The least boring author’s mate in American literary history,” as A. J. Liebling described her in 1961, Cora had been with Crane for just three and a half years, and now, after a year of mourning, she had to find a way to go on without him. Returning to Jacksonville might not have been the wisest decision, but the success she had found there in the mid-nineties was the only thing she had ever done on her own that made any sense, and surely it was a better way to spend her life than staring at a brick wall.
To invoke the Book of John again, as Crane does at the end of The Monster: He that is without, etc.,… let him first cast, etc.,… at her.
It took some time to renew old acquaintances and reestablish contact with the wealthiest and most powerful of her former clients, but once the money wheels had been sufficiently greased to put the business in operation, she found herself presiding over a freshly built establishment at the junction of Davis and Ward Streets that she named “The Court.” Two stories tall and wrapping around the corner of the block, it was an out-and-out whorehouse this time, with girls living on the premises and hard liquor added to the drinks menu, but the new sporting club was far more elegant than the Hotel de Dreme had ever been: a full-scale, state-of-the-art pleasure palace for well-heeled men looking for diversion, relaxation, and young female bodies.
The business thrived, and within a couple of years Cora had become a woman of substance and property, but little by little, even as she was preparing to open an annex to the Court in a seaside town twenty miles east of Jacksonville, her inner bearings began to wobble, and her life veered slowly into the Land of Strange. The results were catastrophic.
In the summer of 1905, three months in advance of her husband Stewart’s death (which she didn’t learn about until 1907), Cora entered into a ridiculous marriage with a twenty-five-year-old no one named Hammond P. McNeil, a clerk for the wholesale liquor merchant who provided the Court with its booze. A strapping, unbalanced boy from a supposedly good family in Waycross, Georgia, McNeil drank, became violent when drunk, and when not drunk was stupid. Just months after the wedding, the marriage had fallen apart, but for unknown reasons they stayed married, and on the last day of May 1907, convinced that Cora was having an affair with nineteen-year-old Harry Parker, her maid’s boyfriend, McNeil fired four shots into Parker’s body and killed him. He pleaded self-defense at the trial in December and was acquitted. A little more than a year after that, on another psychotic bender, he bloodied Cora so badly in a domestic brawl that she finally sued for divorce. McNeil vanished from her life, but the fearful symmetry continued: Four years after he married again, McNeil’s second wife shot and killed him.
Cora’s grave, Evergreen Cemetery, Jacksonville, Florida. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ELIZABETH FRIEDMANN)
By 1910, burned out and living in semi-retirement at her house in Pablo Beach, the now vastly overweight Cora had already suffered a first, mild stroke. On September fourth, a warm Sunday afternoon with dozens of motorcars traveling up and down the beach outside, Cora was parked somewhere in her living room, doing whatever it was she happened to be doing that day. When she looked out the window and saw that one of the cars had hit a soft spot and was bogged down in the sand, she went outside to help. Others were already helping by then, and so she joined in and started pushing with them. It took some time, but eventually, after much exertion in the hot Florida sun, they maneuvered the car back onto solid ground. Worn out and feeling somewhat dizzy, Cora walked back into the house. Considering all she had been through in the years since she had struck out on her own, it was a remarkably peaceful exit. She lay down on the couch, closed her eyes, and never opened them again. The Evening Metropolis of September fifth reported the cause of death as “hemorrhage of the brain.”
She was forty-five years old. Ten years earlier, Crane had been buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Hillside, New Jersey, and now Cora’s body was put into a grave in another Evergreen Cemetery, nine hundred miles away in Jacksonville, Florida. Make of that what you will. Her headstone reads: CORA E. CRANE / 1868–1910. There is no mystery as to why she had wanted to be remembered as Mrs. Crane, but neither is there a mystery to the puzzle of how a forty-five-year-old woman could have been buried at forty-two. She had been shaving off those three years for decades, and now that her life had stopped, she would be able to prolong the ruse forever. A last little show of vanity before she disappeared into the next world.
7
Newark. Port Jervis. Asbury Park. Syracuse. Lake View. Sullivan County. New York City. Hartwood. Nebraska. Texas. Mexico. Jacksonville. Greece. Oxted. Key West. Cuba. Puerto Rico. Brede. Badenweiler. Hillside.
From The Men in the Storm to An Ominous Baby. From Maggie to The Pace of Youth to The Monster. From Mr. Binks to The Third Violet to The Blue Hotel. From a Pennsylvania coal mine to the electric chair at Sing Sing. From The Red Badge of Courage to The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky. From A Duel Between an Alarm Clock and a Suicidal Purpose to The City Urchin and the Chaste Villagers. From The Black Riders to War Is Kind to A Man Adrift on a Slim Spar. From One Dash—Horses to A Man and Some Others to The Five White Mice. From An Episode of War to The Price of the Harness to The Upturned Face. An Experiment in Misery. The Open Boat. War Memories.
If the people on this veranda ever lower their eyes from the wide river and gaze at these tombstones they probably find that they can just make out the inscriptions at the distance and just can’t make them out at the distance. They encounter the dividing line between coherence and a blur.
Senger, Wheeler, Lawrence. Linson and the husky lot. Hawkins. Hubbard. Button and Barr. Frederic. Bacheller, Marshall, Scovel, Davis, and Hare. Billy Higgins. Captain Murphy. McClure … Hearst … Pulitzer.
Dora Clark. Charles Becker. Theodore Roosevelt.
This poor gambler isn’t even a noun. He is kind of an adverb. Every sin is the result of a collaboration. We, five of us, have collaborated in the murder of this Swede.
Lily Brandon Munroe, Nellie Crouse, and Amy Leslie.
Cora Howorth Murphy Stewart Taylor Crane McNeil.
Yes—no. I don’t know.
Garland and Howells. James, Wells, and Conrad. They were all older than he was, and each man outlived him by many years.
Sisyphus.
He was no one, then he was someone. He was adored by many, despised by many, and then he disappeared. He was forgotten. He was remembered. He was forgotten again. He was remembered again, and now, as I write the last sentences of this book in the early days of 2020, his books are being forgotten again. It is a dark time for America, a dark time everywhere, and with so much happening to erode our certainties about who we are and where we are going next, perhaps the moment has come to dig the burning boy out of his grave and start remembering him again. The prose still crackles, the eye still cuts, the work still stings. Does any of this matter to us anymore? If it does, and one can only hope that it does, attention must be paid.
It is as if the wounded man’s hand is upon the curtain which hangs before the revelations of all existence, the meaning of ants, potentates, wars, cities, sunshine, snow, a feather dropped from a bird’s wing, and the power of it sheds radiance upon a bloody form, and makes the other men understand sometimes that they are little.
