Burning boy, p.46
Burning Boy, page 46
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Even more dangerous was the decision to allow S. S. McClure back into his life. After two miserable episodes with him in the past—the six-month ordeal of waiting for a response to Red Badge and the harsh amputations administered to the coal mine report—one would think that he had had enough of the man to keep him at a safe distance, but as Crane continued his lurching advance toward adulthood, he was proving himself to be one of those rare people who find it impossible to hold a grudge. He had forgiven the rascal Hubbard for mocking his poems and taking advantage of him with the Philistine dinner, and now, when the bigger and more cunning rascal McClure approached him with various proposals for work, Crane was willing to forget the past and listen. Needless to say, McClure was hoping to cash in on the boy’s new celebrity, and needless to say the boy was aware of that, but the boy also needed money, and if the rascal could deliver, why not bury the hatchet and give him another chance? Crane was a much-solicited figure now, but mostly he was being asked to join clubs and societies and to give interviews to newspapers and magazines, and McClure was the only one who came to him with dollars on his mind—and an opportunity for Crane to replenish his empty purse.
The first documented overture came from McClure’s partner, John Phillips, with the proposal to visit Civil War battlefields for a series of syndicated articles—which Crane turned down in his letter from December thirtieth, begging off because he was too busy with other work—but it seems that he had already been approached by McClure sometime before that with a proposal to publish new stories about the Civil War, and with “A Grey Sleeve” and “A Mystery of Heroism” already behind him, Crane plunged in and started another. As early as January seventh, he told Hawkins that “I am writing a story—‘The Little Regiment’—for McClure. It is awfully hard. I have invented the sum of my invention in regard to war and this story keeps me in eternal despair. However I am coming on with it very comfortably after all.” So comfortably that he traveled down to northern Virginia about a week later for a long look at the site of the Battle of Fredericksburg to research the setting of his story in progress, and after he finished “The Little Regiment,” he wrote three other war stories in fairly rapid succession, making for a total of six, which turned out to be long enough to gather into a volume of stories that Appleton hustled to press and released in November under the title The Little Regiment and Other Episodes of the American Civil War. Crane’s distinguished publisher was no less eager than McClure to cash in on the spoils of Red Badge, so war trumped love and the stories appeared in book form six months in advance of The Third Violet, which was syndicated in serialized fragments that same fall by none other than … McClure.
Another one of McClure’s proposals turned into a time-wasting dud. The offer to publish new war stories from Crane had worked out well because, without quite knowing it himself, Crane had wanted to return to the subject of war. To write a novel about national politics, on the other hand, was something that had never occurred to him, yet when McClure presented him with the tantalizing offer of financing a trip to Washington in order to research a prospective novel about politicians and politics, Crane thought there might be something to the idea and journeyed down to the capital to see what he could see and learn what he could learn before committing himself to the project. His willingness to go was one more sign of how confused and destabilized he was during those months, for Crane was a writer who wrote from the inside out—not the other way around—and no amount of research was ever going to ignite the inner spark he needed to hurl himself into a new novel. He had already come up with the idea of Maggie before he started prowling the slums for more details to work into his story, and he had already conceived the plan for The Red Badge of Courage before he settled down to his historical investigations of the Civil War. In the case of The Third Violet, nearly everything had come directly from his own life. Now he was proposing to work from the outside in, and the only thing that came of it was a long visit to Washington that lasted from early March to April second in the pleasant surroundings of the Cosmos Club, where he worked on his war stories and wrote a number of striking letters, among them the “mouthful of dust” conclusion to his romance with Crouse, the nasty threat to Hitchcock during their contretemps over George’s Mother, and the spirited, self-teasing remarks to Viola Allen about being “such an ass—such a pure complete ass” while they were at school together. The novel about Washington, however, the thing that had brought him to Washington in the first place, crashed into a brick wall. Fortunately, he was intelligent enough to recognize when he was defeated, and after writing to Hitchcock as late as March twenty-third that he was “gradually learning things” and had already visited “a number of senatorial interiors,” he wrote again just a week later to tell Hitchcock that he was giving up: “You may see me back in New York for good by the end of this week. These men pose so hard that it would take a double-barreled shotgun to disclose their inner feelings and I despair of knowing them.” One day after that (March thirty-first), he wrote to Hawkins and simply said: “Washington pains me.”
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Underneath these misfires and errors of judgment was the question of money, the fundamental problem of how to earn a steady enough income to sustain himself without running into blank periods that would threaten him with belt-tightening shortfalls and, even worse, lapses into the poverty that had marked his early years in New York. There was no question that Crane’s work was in demand now, that he could count on publishing nearly everything he wrote, but the fees paid by newspapers and magazines were small, thirty dollars here, twenty-five dollars there, occasionally as much as fifty or seventy-five, but even the serialization of a full-length novel such as The Third Violet brought in only one hundred and fifty. As Crane struggled to find a new equilibrium in this disorienting moment of transition, he was not only battling to adjust to his new inner circumstances but looking for a way to organize his economic future, and with no one to give him advice, and with his own less than cautious impulses often clouding his decisions, he found himself being suckered into arrangements that looked good on the surface but ultimately worked to his disadvantage, diminishing his income rather than increasing it, which threw him into the conundrum of having to do more and more in order to earn less and less. One such arrangement was the bargain he struck with McClure, who capitalized on Crane’s anxieties about not having enough ready cash on hand by offering to put him on a sort of retainer, in other words, paying him in advance for work not yet written, so that when Crane turned in a piece to him, McClure did not give him cash for the work but merely credited it to his account—while taking a commission for the service he had provided. Early on, Crane seemed to sense the potential difficulties that lay ahead of him when he wrote to McClure on January twenty-seventh: “I think the agreement with you is a good thing. I am perfectly satisfied with my end of it but your end somewhat worries me for I am often inexpressibly dull and uncreative and those periods often last for days.” Only days. But what if one of those periods lasted for two weeks or a month—or even longer? By August, Crane understood that he was effectively in servitude to his purported benefactor, and in his frustration he turned elsewhere, entering into an agreement with Paul Revere Reynolds, America’s first literary agent, to sell one of his recent stories (which happened to be one of his best, “A Man and Some Others”) for what he hoped would be as much as $350, concluding a letter he wrote to him on September ninth with these words of caution: “Don’t go to Bacheller or McClure.”*
But placing his work in newspapers and magazines was only part of the story, and if Crane intended to earn his living exclusively from his writing, he needed to have conscientious, dedicated book publishers as well, and not only did he have to be paid fairly by those publishers, it was essential that he maintain good relations with them. Since he had self-published Maggie and then published the five-hundred-copy edition of The Black Riders with the small Boston firm of Copeland and Day, the move to D. Appleton & Company in New York was his first experience with a large, commercial house. Founded in 1831, Appleton was a venerable name in American publishing, with a list of authors that included Lewis Carroll, Charles Darwin, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Huxley, and Henry James—to mention just a few—and the man who served as his editor there, Ripley Hitchcock, was both highly intelligent and tough, a Harvard-educated art historian on the one hand and, on the other, a diligent literary adviser who understood that publishing was a business and that his job was to ensure that Appleton remained a profitable concern. He and Crane mostly got along, but there were tensions between them from time to time as well, none worse than when Crane succumbed to the pressure of a former Claverack classmate who worked as the American representative of the Anglo-American firm Edward Arnold and handed him the manuscript of George’s Mother without bothering to inform Hitchcock. That led to Crane’s hostile, uncharacteristically threatening letter of March twenty-sixth, a conflict that in all likelihood was defused when Hitchcock made the mollifying gesture of increasing Crane’s royalties from ten to fifteen percent, but the problem flared up again that summer, as Crane scholar J. C. Levenson reports:
Evidently the change from 10 to 15 percent was made about this time [early spring], for Crane’s next letters to Hitchcock were tranquil businesslike communications. But when Arnold, having lost out on Maggie, tried to get the English rights to later works and thus undo Appleton’s arrangement with Heinemann, the old problem came to a head. The matter was cleared up when Crane wrote, not to Hitchcock, but to Mr. Appleton himself [July 6]: “I have written to Arnold that your arrangement with Heinemann concerning The Little Regiment and The Third Violet must stand—that it was a prior and just contract and that I intend to see that Heinemann’s rights in the books shall be guarded.” This letter, written on Appleton stationery and bearing a date filled in by someone other than Crane, bears the marks of having been done in the Appleton office with Hitchcock standing over Crane’s shoulder and breathing some strong words on the meaning of legal obligation.
The dressing-down must have been hard on him, but the truth was that he deserved it, and once the letter was put in Appleton’s hands, the matter seems to have been settled. At least for now, and at least with Hitchcock, but after publishing three more books with him in the space of a year (the new Maggie, The Little Regiment, and The Third Violet), Crane wandered off to other publishers—and to more bumps in the road ahead.
How innocent it looks in retrospect to invoke the letter he wrote to Hitchcock in early February, asking for a one-hundred-dollar advance against royalties to buy a “saddle horse” he had set his heart on, and when Hitchcock came through with the money, Crane thanked him for his “prompt sympathy” and added, “It is a luxury to feel that some of my pleasures are due to my little pen.” The horse’s owner was Elbert Hubbard, and Crane had seen the young gelding on his trip to Buffalo and East Aurora in December, but rather than stand firm on a price of one hundred dollars, Hubbard was flexible enough to let the horse go for sixty. One wonders how Crane spent the extra forty he had pocketed from Hitchcock—how many cigarettes smoked, how many meals consumed, how many nighttime excursions to the back of beyond?
Renamed Peanuts by his new owner, the animal was transported to Hartwood in the spring of 1896 and spent the rest of his life there, outlasting the man who had bought him by many years.
28
After Crane returned from Washington, he moved back into the apartment he shared with Post Wheeler on West Twenty-third Street, and before long he was writing about New York City again, picking up where he had left off prior to his travels through the West and Mexico. He had thought he would be working on his now-defunct political novel, and with no plans to embark on any other major project in the foreseeable future, he split his time over the next several months between short story writing and journalism. Not a lot of journalism, but enough to bring in some money, and the articles he produced were good ones, five in all between mid-May and mid-August, each one syndicated by McClure (under Crane’s copyright) and covering such varied topics as roof-garden restaurants, a day in the life of a Broadway cable car, and the fad for high-speed bicycle sprints that had caught on among athletic young men and bloomer-clad young women who made a sport of wheeling their way past pursuing cops down “the Western Boulevard” (Fifty-ninth Street) between Columbus Circle and the river. All sharply written, all little jewels of close observation and humor, but the one that stands out and goes deepest, that explores an aspect of New York life that was all but invisible to the rest of the world, is the first one, a six-page article that appeared on May seventeenth under the headline “Opium’s Varied Dreams.”
It could be that McClure had assigned him to work on the story, but it seems more likely that Crane suggested it himself. He was back in New York after an absence of several months, and for all his growing disenchantment with the city, it was still a source of fascination to him. Especially the poor and the marginalized, the fallen ones, the ones who had been cast out and driven underground, and as a veteran nighthawk and chronicler of flophouses and slum saloons, he now turned his eyes on the subterranean fraternity of opium addicts, some twenty-five thousand strong by his reckoning, concentrated in two separate areas of Manhattan—Chinatown, where it all began, and the Tenderloin, with its population of “cheap actors, race track touts, gamblers and the different kinds of confidence men.”
In that era of yellow-press sensationalism, Crane handles his sensational subject with solemn detachment, as if presenting a scientific report to a room filled with doctors and sociologists. His language is dry and circumspect, devoid of personal commentary or rhetorical flourish, and he provides no specific cases (no stories) to advance his argument, preferring instead to give a general overview of the phenomenon as he understands it. No, he says in the first paragraph, the opium habit is not confined exclusively to the Chinese and the majority of smokers are in fact white men and white women. Until the police crackdowns of recent years, there were splendid “joints” scattered throughout the city, opulent enough to be considered “palatial if not for the bad taste of the decorations,” but now “opium [has] retired to private flats.” The first trial is often unpleasant, he says, with the room and everything in it whirling “like the insides of an electric light plant,” followed by “a thirst, a great thirst,” but if the beginner chooses to try again, “Gradually, the power of the drug sinks into his heart. It absorbs his thought. He begins to lie with more and more grace to cover the shortcomings and little failures of his life. And then finally he may become a full-fledged ‘pipe fiend,’ a man with a ‘yen-yen.’” At that point, he explains, the newly addicted person will learn how to prepare the opium himself—how to “cook it”—which is a delicate operation that involves rolling “the pill” and heating it over a small lamp, and “when a man can cook for himself and buys his own ‘layout,’ he is gone, probably. He has placed upon his shoulders an elephant which he may carry to the edge of forever.” Crane then goes on to give a long, meticulous account of the cooking procedure, beginning with the pipe itself and its clay bowl, bamboo stem, and ivory mouthpiece (which bears no resemblance to the popular conception of the opium pipe as portrayed in newspaper drawings) and then moving on to the role of the “yen-hock,” which he describes as “a sort of sharpened darning needle,” a multipurpose instrument used to spear the opium from its box and then hold it over the flame until it achieves the consistency of “boiling molasses” as the thumb and forefinger of the other hand work it into the proper shape, at which point the pill is transferred to the bowl of the pipe and then further manipulated by the yen-hock “until it is a little button-like thing with a hole in the centre fitting squarely over the hole in the bowl.”
After that exacting inventory of the mechanics of opium consumption, Crane turns his attention to the smokers themselves, who always gather in small groups, passing around a single pipe from one to the other as the cook prepares a new bowl for each smoker, and because of the quiet intimacy of the closely huddled participants, Crane is led to offer an unlikely but apt comparison between “a group of men about a midnight camp-fire in a forest and a group of smokers about a layout tray with its tiny light … [for] just as the lazy eyes about a camp-fire fasten themselves dreamfully upon the blaze of logs so do the lazy eyes about an opium layout fasten themselves upon the little yellow flame.” In both cases, there is the camaraderie of the group, but at the same time the isolation of each member of the group from all the others. Alone together, as it were, or together and yet alone as each man sinks into his own thoughts and drifts away from his comrades, transfixed by the light in front of him.
It is only in the last two paragraphs that Crane returns to the individual smoker and finally addresses the problem of addiction, but those paragraphs are so strong that they overwhelm the nineteen others that come before them, ambushing the reader with their frankness and unbiased understanding of the lure drugs represent. Dispassionate, wholly free of moral judgments, Crane’s words transmit a deep sensitivity to the psychological vortex that traps the user in an endless, spinning dance of desperation and transcendent release from the pain of being alive: the mind and body engaged in a constant war with each other until the body finally wins.
