Burning boy, p.86
Burning Boy, page 86
The September twenty-fifth letter to Reynolds is another plea for help, but in this case not just in tracking down S.C.’s whereabouts but in solving the problem of Cora’s rapidly increasing money troubles, which had become so extreme in the past months that they were threatening to put her life on red alert.
After rehashing the information from the Florida newspaper, she tells Reynolds that
I am in great distress of mind as I can get no news through the Journal office here. Mr. Crane’s affairs … need his attention. I am in great need of money. And I fear we will lose our house … if I cannot get money to pay some pressing debts [she had been served with summonses from the local butcher and grocer]. The Journal is behaving very shabily.… If you can collect any money due to Mr. Crane please cable it to me without delay. This being so helpless in a foreign country together with my fears for Mr. Crane are almost driving me mad. Will you use your influence with Mr. Hearst. He has no right to allow a man like Mr. Crane to be missing for over three weeks without using means to find him. And if he allows Stephen Cranes wife to be turned out of her house, while Stephen is risking his life in his service, I have told Mr. Creelman I would let every correspondent in London know about it.
Her neighbor Robert Barr (1850–1912), who had become a good friend of both Cranes since their move to Oxted, was standing at the ready, prepared to help Cora in any way he could on both fronts: finding Crane and squaring her debts. In a letter written on the twenty-seventh, he tells her that the Hearst press has wired the London office to report that Crane has been hiding out in a Havana rooming house and, according to a conversation he has had with Creelman, that it is almost certain that “at least some of your communications [have] reached Crane.” Assuming this is true, he says—and he has no reason to suppose it isn’t—“then I should hate to put down in black and white what I think of Stephen Crane. If he has not disappeared, and if he has been drawing money for himself, while leaving you without cash, then that article about his disappearance in the Florida paper is a put-up job, and he does not intend to return.” Barr, who loved and admired Crane, who would declare in print just a few months later that he was “probably the greatest genius America has produced since Edgar Allan Poe,” was so disgusted with his friend’s behavior that he could barely hold back his anger, and yet, as he goes on to tell Cora, “If in these circumstances, you think it worth while to go after such a man, then there is nothing to do but consider the ways and means.” He then sketches out an elaborate plan to convince the Atlantic Transport Line to grant Cora deferred payment on an ocean crossing that would allow her to reach Havana and drag Crane back to England herself. It appears that Cora entertained this possibility for a while but then backed out at the last minute, no doubt anticipating the scandal that would explode if she happened to find S.C. shacked up with another woman. It turned out to be a good decision. The ship she would have taken on October thirteenth, the SS Mohegan, left port on schedule and one day later struck a reef and sank.
Another episode from the endless chronicle of the unreal real.
She responded to a card from Reynolds by writing to him again on the twenty-ninth. Although she sounds much assuaged and refers to her “great distress” about the Florida newspaper article in the past tense, she is now aware that the agent has been in communication with her husband and asks him to let her “know if Mr. Crane gets my letters and where he is at the time this reaches you.” The politeness of her request should be noted carefully, for if she could ask this favor from him, it would follow that she was almost certain Reynolds knew Crane’s address, and yet she does not demand that he tell her what it is, she merely asks, and so quietly and modestly that it is hard to tell if that is what she is asking. Such restraint shows how delicate her position was just then. She was poised on a narrow balance beam, and circumstances demanded that she demonstrate the agility to walk from one end to the other without falling and breaking her neck. If she said nothing, she would fall. If she said too much and began to act as an outraged, vindictive wife, she would fall even harder. Her object was to get Crane back to England, but he wouldn’t come back unless he wanted to, and because she didn’t know Reynolds well enough to trust him not to reveal—and perhaps even exaggerate to S.C.—an outright demand for the address, she merely and meekly asked her simple, straightforward question and in that way kept her toes firmly planted on the beam.
She had been through a terrible scare, but now that it was over, she was back where she had been a week earlier—or almost. Crane was still silent, and she still didn’t know how to contact him—but at least she knew he was somewhere in Havana, hiding out in a place so obscure that it could have been on the dark side of the moon, where boardinghouse was no doubt a polite term for brothel, just as it had been in the old Jacksonville days of Ethel Dreme.
Sometime in the first half of October, she traveled to Stanford-le-Hope with Mrs. Ruedy to visit the Conrads. Warmly received by young, sympathetic Jessie and stalwart brother-ally Conrad (who now worked with a photograph of Crane on his desk), she finally let down her defenses in that intimate, welcoming atmosphere and opened up to them. In her memoir, Jessie recalled that the visit “was marred by her very real anxiety as to [Crane’s] whereabouts, and a fierce jealousy as to his possible fancy for someone he might meet. In vain I assured her of my complete conviction that Stephen was deeply attached to her, and that his thought as soon as he was able to get a letter through would be of her.”
When Cora returned to Oxted, that letter (in the form of a telegram) was waiting for her. It did not contain an apology but, rather, an explanation or at least a description of what the missing man was up to in Havana: writing his head off to produce enough money to plow his way out of debt and eventually raise the funds to cover the trip back to England. Inadequate as the message might have been in human terms, in practical terms it was sufficient, at least for Cora, who, unlike most women subjected to similar ordeals of neglect, had already made up her mind to forgive Crane without a single word of reproach—as long as he was prepared to come back of his own free will. The telegram proved that he was, and for the first time in nearly two months, her heart rate slowed down to something in the general vicinity of normal.
The good news of the telegram, and then, just days afterward, the rough news of Harold Frederic’s death, followed by the painful business of the inquest and trial, which rumbled along at the same time Cora was grappling with a multitude of financial dilemmas. Besides her friend Kate, money was the only issue that counted now, both finding the money to keep herself afloat until Crane returned and finding a source of money to hasten that return, a two-pronged effort that would consume most of her time throughout the fall and early winter, even as she and Scott Stokes continued their search for money to support Kate’s children.
In late September, Barr looked into the matter of the threatened lawsuits from the grocer and butcher and discovered that a rumor was spreading around the village that Cora was planning to leave the country (which in fact was true—at least until she called off the trip to Havana). He suggested that she talk to those men herself and reassure them that she wasn’t going anywhere. It would appear that Cora followed his advice, since she did not wind up in court, did not lose her house, and stopped referring to the problem in her letters. One danger had been removed, but when she turned to the more difficult task of generating new income for herself, she blundered into alien territory and quickly lost her way. Requests from editors were continually coming in to publish work by Crane, and rather than hold on to them until he could respond himself, Cora naïvely assumed she could act in his place. Until then, Scott Stokes had served as an informal consultant for Crane’s literary business in England, but he was overwhelmed by his duties as Frederic’s executor and no longer had the time. An excellent young British agent, James B. Pinker, had just started representing Crane, and although he was consistently gracious in his dealings with Cora, she often rushed in to negotiate matters he was already negotiating himself and inadvertently stepped on his toes, at one point, for example, asking a publisher for a seventy-five-pound initial advance on an unwritten novel when Pinker had already persuaded him to offer a hundred. She was hopelessly unprepared to do what she was trying to do, and the long and short of it was that the hoped-for income did not materialize.
In the end, as if acknowledging the futility of her efforts over the past several months, she wrote in her journal sometime that December: “My letters are one long inky howl!”
She had better luck enlisting various friends to help find the money to pay for Crane’s trip back to England, and among those friends, no one tried harder than Conrad, who answered Cora’s appeal in an October twenty-eighth letter that suggested he already had a plan in mind.
Just a word in haste to tell you I shall try to do what I can. Don’t build any hopes on it. It is a most remote chance—but it’s the only thing I can think of. What kind of trouble is Stephen in? You make me very uneasy. Are you sure you can bring him back. I do not doubt your influence mind! but knowing the circumstances I do not know how far it would be feasible. In Stephen’s coming back to England is salvation there is no doubt about that.
Will he come? Can he come? I am utterly in the dark as to the state of affairs.…
Jess shall write tomorrow. I will let you know shortly (I hope) whether my plan has been of any good.
Three days later, he wrote back to tell her he had approached David Meldrum at Blackwood’s (the same man who had provided the original sixty pounds for Crane’s crossing to Cuba) to lend her another fifty pounds, proposing that security could be guaranteed by putting up Crane’s work as collateral, or Cora’s furniture (as long as she had a bill of sale to prove she owned it—which was doubtful), or, in a pinch, Conrad’s own future work “for what it is worth.” Two days after that, he wrote again to report on Meldrum’s hedging, inconclusive response, although the Blackwood’s editor had promised to approach yet another man, London publisher John Macqueen, to lend the money. Predictably enough, that man turned them down, and with Meldrum and “that wretched Macqueen” both eliminated from his list of potential benefactors, Conrad had suddenly run out of ideas. For all his efforts, he had failed to extract a single pound from anyone, but other friends were working on a solution as well, and when Scott Stokes turned to Sidney Pawling at Heinemann’s, the fifty pounds suddenly and miraculously appeared. Wheels began to turn, and before long the money had been wired to General Wade in Havana. As Conrad wrote to Cora on December fourth: “It was an immense relief to hear you had been lucky in some other quarter. Do you think Stephen will be in England before Christmas?… Ah! but I do feel relieved.”
In late December, Cora wrote to her future landlord Moreton Frewen about the preparations she had been making for the move to Brede Place. Then she added:
The horror of the last few months is almost at an end. Mr. Crane is in New York settling up some business affairs, but sails next Saturday week.
I have sent to Brede over three hundred very choice roses. One in particular which was budded by a very prominent author [Ford Madox Ford], I’ve had planted against the front of the house.
She was getting the place ready for her absent prince, and damn the cost of planting three hundred rosebushes in the dead of winter. Nothing could interfere with the splendor of his homecoming. They were moving into a castle, after all, and by the time they had fully settled in, the roses would be blooming again.
5
The war was over, but until the peace treaty was signed on December tenth and American forces officially took control on the first day of the new year, Havana was an off-limits city. The Spanish army and administration were still there in force, Cuban rebels were barred from entering, and foreign journalists were subject to strict censorship from the local authorities, even to the point of arrest. Food was scarce, price gouging was common practice in shops, bars, groceries, and restaurants, and sanitary conditions were abysmal. In a hastily jotted-down note for an article that was never finished, Crane described the handful of Americans in Havana as “an unregenerate and abandoned collection of newspaper correspondents, cattle men, gamblers, speculators, and drummers [salesmen] who have lived practically as they pleased, without care or restraint, going—most of them—wherever interest or whim led, with no regard for yellow fever or any other terror of the tropics.” Havana was a collapsed city, a not yet fully conquered city suspended between past and future as it hung on in the chaos of the present. Could there have been a more appropriate hiding place for a man similarly trapped between past and future? Havana was the capital of the present tense, and not only was Crane stuck there, he was ill, depressed, and nearly broke.
Just a few things are known about what happened to him during those four months. Beyond the work he accomplished then (the last poems for the collection War Is Kind, seventeen articles for the Journal on conditions in Havana, “The Price of the Harness,” “Marines Signaling Under Fire at Guantanamo,” and a pair of other stories set in Cuba), the only information comes from two reminiscences published by fellow American journalists and Crane’s correspondence with Reynolds. His agent was the one person from the outside world he wrote to with any regularity, but while his letters provide details about what he was writing and when he was writing it—along with some anguished rants about how hard up he was—they tell us nothing about what Crane was thinking or feeling during what turned out to be a considerable length of time—especially considering how little time he had left.
Walter Parker of the New Orleans Times-Democrat was one of the two eyewitnesses who was with him in Havana during that eerie limbo phase before the Spanish pulled out and left the city. In a piece written forty-two years after the fact, Parker recounts that when Crane was still living at the Hotel Pasaje, he used to hang out next door at the correspondents’ favorite watering hole, the American Bar, where the writers would begin gathering at ten in the morning and remain until ten at night “or until a riot broke out.” Crane was always the last one to show up. He drank nothing but “tropical beer” (many bottles of tropical beer), “was never hurried … always quite reserved” and often so low on funds that the others would chip in to pay for his drinks. No one seems to have minded, however, and Parker adds how valuable Crane was to his fellow journalists because of his “Cuban revolutionary affiliations” and the respect he had won from the insurgents for his filibustering activities in late ’96 and early ’97. One man in particular, “an inside figure in the Cuban revolutionary movement,” owed Crane his life for having rescued him from drowning just as the Commodore was about to sink and, according to Parker, felt so indebted to Crane that he “would kneel and kiss his hand or the hem of his coat every time they met.”
The rebels were forbidden to enter Havana, but they managed to slip through anyway, and in that upside-down city where the victors were outcasts and the vanquished were still in control, the Cubans made a point of showing up at the restaurants frequented by the Spaniards, where the two groups would inevitably fall into rancorous shouting matches and hurl insults at each other across the room. That was when everyone happened to be in a tranquil mood, but there were other evenings when the words became bullets and gunshots were exchanged. On the night after a bloody melee had smashed up the Hotel Inglaterra and men had been shot, Crane and Parker found themselves in a tense situation when they were at a café talking to a Cuban officer dressed in civilian clothes and a Spanish officer invited himself to sit down at their table. An instant later, the newcomer started cursing the Cuban and his idiotic, unholy revolution, and an instant after that, the Cuban wrapped his fingers around the handle of his revolver. If Crane hadn’t intervened just then, who knows if the man wouldn’t have pulled it out and fired, but S.C., who could not speak Spanish, talked to the Cuban in whatever French he could muster and persuaded him to back down.
One death averted, but Parker also mentions another evening when Crane jumped in to break up a fight and things did not go so well.
The friend from the Commodore had invited Crane and Parker to an illegal fundraising dance for the Cuban cause, and one of Parker’s colleagues from New Orleans, who had just arrived in Havana and had spent the day stupefying himself on cognac at the American Bar, was taken along “because we did not know what else to do with him.”
Down the center of the room there were two lines of chairs, back to back. Our group were assigned seats in one row. Crane’s Cuban friend and his lady love, a really beautiful girl, sat in the row just back of us. Our inebriated companion kept tilting his chair which knocked against the back of the chair occupied by the lady. She complained that she was being annoyed.
Up leaped the Cuban, knife in hand, and made for the offender, intending to stab him in the heart.
Crane jumped to the rescue and caught the sharp glittering blade in his right hand. The Cuban dropped to his knees and kissed the hem of Crane’s coat. Crane’s hand was bleeding. He wrapped it in a handkerchief and thrust it in his coat pocket. We made apologies to the lady through the Cuban and retired.
Next day we shipped the offender back to the United States. Havana was no place for him in those days.
Crane failed to show up in the morning as was his custom. His hotel door was locked and we could get no answer from him. Later we climbed over the half-wall partition and found Crane in high fever, unconscious and with a terrible wound in his hand. The Cuban procured a doctor who gave him treatment. Many days had to pass before Crane’s hand was completely cured. Even then he kept his hand in his pocket most of the time as though desirous of hiding it.
