Burning boy, p.8
Burning Boy, page 8
On the next page, Crane pinpoints the precise mental spot where the impulse to tell tall tales is born: “In a shooting country, no man should tell just exactly what he did. He should tell what he would have liked to do or what he expected to do, just as if he accomplished it.”
The fictional works in the Sullivan County cycle emerged from Crane’s camping experiences with his three friends, and the four characters in these tales are identified throughout as the little man (Carr), the pudgy man (Lawrence), the tall man (Senger), and the quiet man (Crane—although the quiet man is so quiet that he often seems to merge with the little man). They come across as a late-nineteenth-century version of the Marx Brothers or, more accurately because more crudely, a twofold version of Abbott and Costello.*
As with the sketches, the stories are replete with hyperbolic riffs and tall-tale bravura, a pumped-up tone that is then systematically undercut as the action devolves into a string of slapstick discombobulations. In “Four Men in a Cave,” the four bumblers climb into a deep and spooky subterranean grotto, looking for an adventure they can turn into a story to tell their friends, and chance upon a crazed hermit at the bottom who insists on playing poker with them—or else. In “The Octopush,” the four go off to a pond to fish for pickerel and engage an old-timer referred to as “the individual” to row them out onto the pond in his boat, but once they are deposited on their separate stumps in the middle of the water, the individual gets drunk and leaves them there, stranded, far into the night. Fear overcomes them. “A night wind began to roar and clouds bearing a load of rain appeared in the heavens and threatened their position. The four men shivered and turned up their coat collars. Suddenly it struck each that he was alone, separated from humanity by impassable gulfs.” Salvation comes only after the drunken individual begins hallucinating an “octopush” in the darkness and flees to safety with the four others in his boat. “A Ghoul’s Accountant” begins eerily and poetically with the four companions sleeping around a fading campfire. “In a wilderness sunlight is noise. Darkness is a great, tremendous silence, accented by small and distant sounds. The music of the wind in the trees is songs of loneliness, hymns of abandonment, and lays of the absence of things congenial and alive.” In the third paragraph, “the ghoul” approaches the slumbering men, four “bundles” gathered around the campsite. “His skin was fiercely red and his whiskers infinitely black,” and when he looks down on the foursome, he “smiled a smile that curled his lip and showed yellow, disordered teeth.” The reader is being set up for a horror tale of the most chilling kind, and after the ghoul rousts the little man from his blankets and forces him to march through the woods, the suspense continues to mount: “The bundles were left far in the rear and the little man stumbled on with the ghoul. Tangled thickets tripped him, saplings buffeted him, and stones turned away from his feet. Blinded and badgered, he began to swear frenziedly. A foam drifted to his mouth, and his eyes glowed with a blue light.” They come to a broken-down hovel in the middle of nowhere, and when they step into the chaotic, smashed-up interior, they find a “wild gray man” sitting at a table. The ghoul throws the little man into a chair, and just when it seems that all kinds of grotesque things are about to happen, Crane punctures his vastly inflated balloon with a deft little pinprick of nonsense. Standing by the wild gray man, the ghoul clears his throat and says, “Stranger, how much is thirty-three bushels of pertaters at sixty-four and a half a bushel?” When the little man finally stammers forth the correct answer, the ghoul kicks him out of the house and the story ends. The same combination of terror and nonsense continues through most of the other stories, including “An Explosion of Seven Babies,” a madcap fairy tale about a giantess and her seven little children who have eaten flypaper and are about to burst—whether from puking or shitting is not made clear—and when, within minutes of each other, the little man and the pudgy man approach the house because they are lost in the woods, they are given the works by the giantess, who one by one tosses them over the wall of her garden, “A Tent in Agony,” which recounts the little man’s confrontation with a menacing black bear who gets tangled up in a collapsed tent and runs through the woods “like a white-robed phantom pursued by hornets,” and “The Cry of a Huckleberry Pudding,” which is a story about a stomach-ache, a stomach-ache pure and simple, and yet the screams emitted by the little man in the darkness of the woods strike panic in the three others because they are unaware that the little man is missing and consequently cannot identify the source of the sound. All of a sudden, the tone shifts:
The cry of the unknown instantly awoke them to terror. It is mightier than the war-yell of the dreadful, because the dreadful might be definite. But this whoop strikes greater fear from hearts because it tells of formidable mouths and great, grasping claws that live in impossibility. It is the chant of a phantom force which imagination declares invincible, and awful to the sight.
Only one of the stories escapes the comic-spooky and/or spooky-comic oscillations of the others in the series. Just two and a half pages long, “Killing His Bear” stands apart for several reasons—first, because it dispenses with the four blockheads and focuses on just one of them, the little man; second, because it follows a single, concerted action from beginning to end and does not break up into several loosely connected actions; third, because the writing is wholly consistent with Crane’s purpose, which is to track a solitary man’s thoughts and movements as he tiptoes through the woods with a rifle and hunting dog to vanquish his first bear, that is, to kill his first bear, which by the end assumes the metaphorical weight of vanquishing his first woman; and fourth, because the writing is more robust and precisely articulated than in any of the other stories. Consider these extracts:
The dying sun created a dim purple and flame-colored tumult on the horizon’s edge and then sank until crimson beams struck the trees. As the red rays retreated, armies of shadows stole forward.
A hound, as he nears large game, has the griefs of the world on his shoulders and his baying tells of the approach of death. He is sorry he came.
His rifle-barrel was searching swiftly over the dark shape. Under the fore-shoulder was the place. A chance to pierce the heart, sever an artery or pass through the lungs. The little man saw swirling fur over his gun-barrel. The earth faded to nothing. Only space and the game, the aim and the hunter. Mad emotions, powerful to rock worlds, hurled through the little man, but did not shake his tiniest nerve.
When the rifle cracked it shook his soul to a profound depth. Creation rocked and the bear stumbled.
And then the surprising last paragraph:
The little man yelled again and sprang forward, waving his hat as if he were leading the cheering of thousands. He ran up and kicked the ribs of the bear. Upon his face was the smile of a successful lover.
What are we to make of the Sullivan County stories and sketches? The nonfiction pieces tend to be solid if unremarkable works, with Crane exploring not only legends of the past but at times also debunking them, as he does in a short essay entitled “The Last of the Mohicans” (Cooper’s heroic warrior, Uncas, turns out to be a pathetic, much-pitied character whose only ambition is to “beg, borrow or steal a drink”) and in another essay entitled “Not Much of a Hero,” which takes on the vaunted legend of Indian fighter Tom Quick by asserting in the last sentence that he was “purely and simply a murderer.” As for the stories, the best one can say about them is that they are uneven in quality and rather sophomoric in tone—but that is precisely what Crane would have been if he had remained in college: a sophomore. Aside from the well-executed “Killing His Bear,” only “The Mesmeric Mountain” calls for a second look. The little man, on his own again, imagines that a mountain is moving toward him, runs off afraid, stops, is bewildered to discover that the mountain is now standing directly in front of him, attacks the mountain by throwing pebbles at it, then angrily climbs to the top and discovers that the mountain under his feet is “motionless.” It is a bizarre, somewhat confused parable, but it announces an image that would come to haunt the poems Crane started writing in 1894, for mountains (where earth meets sky, where man looks for God) crop up incessantly in the pages of The Black Riders. Beyond that, for all their flaws and stumbles, the Sullivan County stories contain some vivid bursts of prose and prefigure many of Crane’s obsessions and stylistic trademarks: an abundant use of color imagery to express both emotional states and sensory experiences, a gift for unexpected metaphors and jolting similes, an animistic view of the natural world (the trees, stones, and plants in the woods are alive), a dispassionate approach to character that posits the isolation of the individual in the face of an indifferent universe, and a close scrutiny of the metaphysics of fear, the same fear that runs through every paragraph of The Red Badge of Courage, which Crane would begin writing just two years later. Still, it isn’t difficult to understand why he eventually soured on these early fictions, and if not for his subsequent work, the Sullivan County cycle would have vanished from human memory, in the same way most writings by most writers have vanished since the beginning of time. That said, how not to admire certain bits and pieces of these less than minor works, for example the following paragraph from “The Black Dog,” which was written (we must remember) by a nineteen- or twenty-year-old boy who still had no clear idea of where he was headed:
The phantom dog lay … asleep down the roadway against the windward side of an old shanty. The spectre’s master had moved to Pike County. But the dog lingered as a friend might linger at the tomb of a friend. His fur was like a suit of old clothes. His jowls hung and flopped, exposing his teeth. Yellow famine was in his eyes. The wind-rocked shanty groaned and muttered, but the dog slept. Suddenly, however, he got up and shambled to the roadway. He cast a long glance from his hungry, despairing eyes in the direction of the venerable house. The breeze came full to his nostrils. He threw back his head and gave a long, low howl and started intently up the road. Maybe he smelled a dead man.
3
After the 1891 summer season ended in Asbury Park, Crane moved to his brother Edmund’s house just outside Paterson. On September sixteenth, Townley’s wife, Anna, cracked up and landed in the Trenton asylum. On the thirtieth, for reasons I find difficult to fathom, Townley joined his mother and three of his brothers—William, Edmund, and Stephen—on an excursion to Hartwood. One asks: How could he have gone off on a camping and fishing trip with his young wife raving in a madhouse more than one hundred miles away, unreachable in the event of another emergency? What could he have been thinking, and what could the family have been thinking by inviting him to join them? Did they see it as an attempt to distract him from his troubles, or were those troubles too overwhelming for him to face? Impossible to know, but the words written by Crane in the Hartwood register upon their arrival suggest that the family was in high spirits: “Shortly after dusk this evening a flock of Cranes flew upon the property of the Association and alighted near the clubhouse. The mother bird had considerable difficulty in keeping her children quiet and making them retire for the night.” On October second, he added: “Mother Crane caught seven fine pickerel to her own satisfaction and the astonishment of her brood. The next day she caught three more nice fish in less than an hour.”
An eerie disjunction. How to resolve the dread of a young woman’s mental and physical breakdown with a cheerful romp through the woods? Was the family just as unhinged as she was, or were they a stoical, unflinching lot who had mastered the art of laughing through their troubles?
Near the end of the month, the Asbury Park Journal reported that “Anna Crane has had a second attack of paralysis, and lives in a precarious condition,” and two weeks later (November sixteenth) Townley’s wife died. On the twenty-eighth, the Journal published a short item countering the rumor that Crane’s mother had also died (on the twenty-fifth in Paterson): “Mrs. Crane attended a National W.C.T.U. Convention at Boston and took a severe cold. In addition to this a carbuncle on the neck has greatly prostrated her, so that she is in a critical condition. News of the recent death of her daughter-in-law, which reached her after she had been confined to her bed, produced a great depression and distress of mind, which it is hoped good nursing and the best medical skill will in time relieve.” They did not relieve, and nine days after that Crane’s mother was dead.
Not only do we know nothing about Crane’s reaction to that death, but the next six months of his life are more or less a blank as well. Except for a couple of surviving letters in his published correspondence from February 1892 (one sent from Lake View, the other from Port Jervis) and, sometime in May, a brief, water-soaked, fairly miserable jaunt to Sullivan County with his friend Lawrence (who writes that he had seen “little of Crane for several months”), his personal activities are undocumented between the family trip to Hartwood in October and his setting off to Asbury Park at the end of May for another season of summer reporting. Johnson began publishing the Sullivan County pieces in February 1892, meaning that most of them appeared months after they had been composed, with Johnson no doubt fitting them into the Sunday supplement as best he could whenever space was available, which makes it hard to pinpoint when they were written. The same is true of one of Crane’s first published pieces about New York City, “The Broken-Down Van,” which came out in the Tribune on July 10, 1892, but most likely had been written weeks or months earlier, since Crane was in Asbury Park during the summer and didn’t start living in New York until October, although another, much shorter item, “Youse Want ‘Petey,’ Youse Do,” which was printed in the New York Herald on January 4 (less than a month after his mother’s death), could have been written a day or two before it was published. If nothing else, these articles confirm that he was traveling into the city from Edmund’s house in Lake View to visit the Jefferson Market Police Court and wander around the slums of the Lower East Side. Maggie was surely on his mind, but how far he had advanced with it at that point is not clear. Johnson writes that Crane showed him a version of the manuscript in 1891 (although he undoubtedly meant 1892), which he found “in some respects crude, but powerful and impressive … throbbing with vitality,” although whatever version that was, it is certain that Crane continued working on the book and didn’t begin the final draft until he had settled in New York that fall. None of this matters. What counts is that there is a gap in the story, and the most important gap concerns his mother’s death, about which he said nothing—except perhaps in George’s Mother, which he began writing not long after the publication of Maggie in 1893, but that is not an autobiographical work, and one has to tread carefully when it comes to novels and resist the temptation of reading fiction as an unfiltered look into the author’s life.
There are four things buried in this gap that are worth exploring, however. The first is a letter to his old boarding school sidekick Armistead “Tommie” Borland, who was living in Norfolk, Virginia, by then, the same Borland who had worshipped Crane and tried to emulate him during their years at Claverack. Borland’s letter has been lost, but he had apparently written to grumble about being starved for female companionship in Virginia—more specifically, white female companionship. From Crane’s response:
So you lack females of the white persuasion, do you? How unfortunate! And how extraordinary! I never thought that the world would come to such a pass that you would lack females. Thomas! You indeed must be in a God forsaken country.
Just read these next few lines in a whisper:—I—I think black is quite good—if—if its yellow and young.
For now, I want to confine my remarks to the mysteries of sex. The hushed tones concerning black, yellow, and young warrant further attention, but I will put off examining Crane’s contradictory and evolving attitudes toward race and ethnic bias until later (here). At this early moment in the story, the letter to Borland seems to confirm that the twenty-year-old Crane was no longer a virgin (hardly a surprise), and because there is nothing on record to make us think that he had any black friends or traveled in black social circles, we can assume that the black women he slept with were prostitutes. We know that he slept with white prostitutes as well, but where and when and how his sex life began remains a mystery. As a boy who was already smoking and drinking at six, perhaps his education began earlier than it did for most young men at the time, but for nearly all of them (those from the middle class, at any rate) erotic fulfillment before marriage could be found only with prostitutes, and in American cities of the 1890s prostitutes were everywhere—in the streets, in brothels, and even in the uppermost balconies of theaters, where fornicating couples humped in the darkness as orchestras blared in the pits below. It is not my job to make moral judgments about the evils of women selling their bodies for cash or to delve into the hypocrisies of a social system that tacitly encourages such exchanges. Prostitution was a fact then, it continues to be a fact now, and like it or not we live in a flawed world in which sex is a commodity that can be bought and sold. What I am interested in is understanding who Crane was. Among a multitude of other things, he was a boy who lusted after women and therefore slept with hookers regardless of the color of their skin. Even more, I am interested in understanding Crane’s work as a writer, and because prostitution figures heavily in his first extended piece of fiction, it is instructive to know that he was intimately acquainted with his subject. The letter to Borland provides the earliest clue and is doubly helpful because it overlaps with the creation of Maggie.
