Crane’s education through New York journalism made him report mentally to himself, and then, after a period of reflection, he rendered the crimes and punishments of city life in his fiction. To a fellow journalist, Arthur Oliver, he demonstrated how an artist could get to the “real thing.” Crane scooped up a handful of sand and tossed it to the sea breezes of Asbury Park and said, “Treat your notions like that … Forget what you think about it and how you feel about it.” Crane’s fascination with the psychology of “feeling” could be seen in other places. To Corwin Linson, he complained about Century’s Battles and Leaders of the Civil War which he studied as possible background for his Red Badge: “I wonder that some of these fellows don’t tell how they felt in those scraps! They spout eternally of what they did, but they are as emotionless as rocks!” On another occasion Linson, wondering why Crane did not wear heavier clothing as he stood in a breadline getting the “atmosphere” for “The Men in the Storm,” heard his friend remark, “How would I know how those poor devils felt if I was warm myself?” Through journalism Crane tested and retested one of the keys of his aesthetic credo. Ambrose Bierce knew the essence of Crane’s art when he said, “This young man has the power to feel.”
But this did not mean that Crane had no interest in the what, in everyday events. He had a very keen sense for what was newsworthy. In 1893, for example, he requested Linson to return the only copy of his tale, “An Ominous Baby,” for “during these labor troubles—is the best possible time to dispose of it.” And to the magazine editor Mr. McClure he wrote, in 1896: “By the way I would like to go to the scene of the next street-car strike.” Some of his fiction, like “A Gray Sleeve,” seemed aimed at the trite tastes of the sentimental reader; others, like “The Second Generation,” drew upon the topical issues of the day. Still others, like the unpublished “Vashti in the Dark,” which dealt with rape, and “The Monster” were examples of the way the boldness and sensationalism of yellow journalism rubbed off on Crane. He could have become the ideal newspaperman, but on his terms (he was later considered the best of the war correspondents in Cuba). He had the right temperament: “Humanity was a much more interesting study. When I ought to have been at recitations [at Syracuse University] I was studying faces on the streets, and when I ought to have been studying my next day’s lessons I was watching the trains roll in and out of Central Station.” Crane used these facts of humanity for his own inimitable ends.
Another phase of journalism—dramatic criticism—indirectly hinted at a significant development in Crane’s fictional manner. As late as September 1895, Crane felt certain that he would become the drama critic of the Philadelphia Press, but he was not hired. Disappointed, Crane still had a keen interest in the theater, and living in New York, he had seen productions of Hauptmann’s Hannele and Herne’s Shore Acres. In his own work he created short playlets: “A Prologue,” “At Clancy’s Wake,” and the unpublished “Greed Rampant.” In many of his stories he alluded to the theater, to melodrama, and to the romantic and tragic scenes which involved the hero or heroine. One of his earliest efforts, the satiric, dramatic sketches “A Foreign Policy, in Three Glimpses” (1891), suggested his later reading play, The Blood of the Martyr (1898), which was similar in tone and purpose. Only one of Crane’s plays was meant to be acted, and this was the charity affair The Ghost (1898), a collaborative effort with nine friends. Crane had endless other dramatic projects but none of them materialized. He urged Joseph Conrad to collaborate with him on a play to be named The Predecessor; he talked over an idea with Clyde Fitch; he tried to interest someone in a stage adaptation of his short story, “The Upturned Face.” Several of his unpublished and incomplete plays (in the possession of Special Collections, Columbia University) include one set in “Old France,” another in Cuba, and a third in the American West (“The Fire Tribe and the Paleface” seems to be an adaptation of his unpublished story, “The Fire Tribe and the White Face”). Like Chekhov, Crane continually thought in terms of “staging” his fiction. A close study of “The Open Boat,” among others, shows that Crane experimented and enriched his materials with the aid of dramatic techniques. For in this story, Crane was more anxious to render rather than to report; he was far more concerned in the dramatic, not the narrative level; and he fouced on dialogue and on a series of crisis scenes and episodes to achieve a remarkable sense of immediacy.
Crane’s adventures in journalism do not, however, explain enough of the backgrounds of his literary life. His family world makes clear many of the themes in his work, and, in turn, helps to give a clearer perspective on his art. With his father a Methodist minister and his mother the daughter of one, Crane developed rebellious instincts quite early. Though he loved his father and once called him “a great, fine, simple mind,” he could not always tolerate his conservatism. In works such as Popular Amusements (1869) and Arts of Intoxication (1870), Jonathan Crane warred against gambling, profanity, cigarette and opium smoking, alcohol, baseball, dancing, novels, and the theater (which suggested “indecency” and the “brothel”). The war was carried to the pious climate of Asbury Park and Ocean Grove where young Crane spent part of his boyhood, and where Methodist leaders tried to prohibit dancing, gambling, alcohol, and the sale of newspapers on Sundays. But sins were in evidence, and Crane observed. In his own actions, he seemed to purposely sin against the complaints of the father, which later became subjects and conflicts in his fiction. At Hudson River Institute in New York (1888–90), he probably worked hard to earn the nickname, “the minister’s wild son.” Though there was no proof that he ever took opium, Crane knew of the habit (the term “yen nock” in “Yen-Nock Bill and His Sweetheart” refers to the opium pipe) and he wrote an article, “Opium’s Varied Dreams” (May, 1896). He played baseball and football; he cursed; he smoked cigarettes; he gambled. Often he was linked with prostitutes, and eventually eloped with the madam of the Hotel de Dream, Cora Taylor. Theodore Roosevelt’s summary of Crane’s reputation in the 1890s was widely accepted: “He was a man of bad character and he was simply consorting with loose women.” By reveling in sin and damnation, Crane was warring against his father and a genteel age.
Crane’s mother had a more troubling effect on him. Daughter of George Peck, a well-known Methodist clergyman (other members of the Peck clan were also clergymen), Mary Crane’s Calvinistic upbringing, with its belief in natural depravity and in the hell-fire and day-of-doom philosophy, only instilled fear and horror in young Crane and then finally open rebellion. His volumes of poetry chart this rebellion. Forced to attend religious meetings at Ocean Grove, Crane once termed Methodism a “holy show”; and after his father’s death in 1880, matters became worse. Now his mother “lived in and for religion.” In November 1899, Crane reflected on those earlier times: “My brother Will used to try and argue with her on religious subjects such as hell but he always gave it up. Don’t understand that mother was bitter or mean but it hurt her that any of us should be slipping from Grace and giving up eternal damnation or those things. You could argue just as well with a wave.” At least on one occasion, when Crane was fourteen, his growing rebellion against religion took on the air of a grotesque comedy. He surprised his mother by agreeing to go to a prayer meeting—only after he had been made “ecstatic” by some wine given to him by an organ grinder. Crane later used this incident with ironic force in George’s Mother. There are many other references to religion in Crane’s fiction, often through imagery, to show his long-standing battle with his Methodist background and with the Bible, which he studied at home and in the schools he attended. Frank Noxon remembered Crane saying that he had “had such a dose of piety in his youth that the reaction was unfavorable to religious consecration in later years.” For these reasons, Crane baldly posed one of the tragedies of his life by asking another: “… is there any place exactly suited to a minister’s son?”
Another contradiction comes to light, for Crane’s parents were also crusading humanitarians, and this exactly suited their youngest son. Hi
s father had forsaken Presbyterianism for Methodism, because he was disturbed about “a point in its dogma: did the souls of unbaptized infants go to hell?” He had doubts about the “intentions of missionaries” overseas, and the “sanctity of small towns.” A Methodist employer had fired a boy because he denied hell, and Jonathan Crane tried to save the boy’s job. Mary Crane had a similar nature. Despite criticism, she took care of a girl who “had an accidental baby.” She fought the sale of alcohol to children, and tried to win a wider franchise for women by attempting to get them placed on school boards. These qualities became part of young Crane’s rebellion and explains, partially, why he was attracted to Cora Taylor, also a champion of causes (for example, she aided the orphaned Frederic children). This sense of social purpose, later to be found in Crane’s fiction, was part of the everyday world of his parents. In the opening pages of Arts of Intoxication, Jonathan Crane implied his deep sense of service: “Italy, France, Germany, England, and the United States are laboring beneath a mountain weight of crime, poverty, suffering, and wrong of every description, and no nation on either continent is fully awake to the perils of the hour.”
The intellectual life of his parents suggests that Stephen Crane had a rich, though private, education. His father was a graduate of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) and his mother graduated from the City College of New York. Though their youngest son never paid much attention to formal education at Claverack (Hudson River Institute), Lafayette College, and Syracuse University, he had a substantial informal one. His story “Uncle Jake and the Bell Handle,” written when he was fourteen, shows his precocious way with language. As Thomas Beer once demonstrated, Crane could use difficult words with ease very early—words like irascible, pyrotechnic, impartial, and memorial. He even invented words, like “higgle.” The major share of his father’s library was left to him, and as late as 1900, H. G. Wells noted that young Crane cherished his father’s books and those by other relatives.
A review of Jonathan Crane’s works proves him to have been a veritable encyclopedia of knowledge. He had a strong preference for classical literature and for history. In his volumes he refers to Homer, Alexander, Caesar, the Biblical wars, Herodotus, the Crusades, an English victory in India, the battle at Vera Cruz, the war of 1674 between France and the several powers of Europe, the American Revolution, the Civil War, and Harpers Ferry. This in turn explains his son’s obsession with war and with history. Never having witnessed a battle, Jonathan Crane could say to the readers of his pious works: “Let us again recur to military life for illustration.” Arts of Intoxication and Popular Amusements begin with scenes of conflict; and there are scattered passages which refer to the illusions and the tragic ironies of battle (in one case, the Civil War), the psychological responses of a human being under the stress of combat, and animal imagery (the “panther-like yell of assault”). All these are reflected in one way or another in his son’s fiction.
The distinguished war record of earlier Cranes gave Jonathan Crane added incentive to refer to war in his religious tracts. His youngest son, Stephen, gave a prideful summary, in 1896, of the achievements of his ancestors: one had commanded the Sixth New Jersey Infantry during the Revolution; another had been a commander in the Navy; and still another, after being captured by the Hessians, had been brutally treated and then killed. This record, along with their father’s possible urging, made some of the children students of military life. One son, William, became an expert “in the strategy of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg”; another son gave Harry Castleman’s romantic war tales as gifts to young Crane; and Crane himself was a lieutenant, then a captain in military training at Claverack. Years later Harvey Wickham recalled a day at Claverack when he dropped his gun during a prize drill and his superior, Crane, after calling him “Idiot! Imbecile!” added: “You were fairly decent up to the last minute. And then to drop your gun! Such a thing was never heard of.” During his short life, young Crane often displayed a similar fanatic pride in things relating to military life.
In other ways, Crane was close to the mementos and visions of war. In 1896, a literary critic visited Crane’s apartment and was surprised to find that a wall was relieved at intervals by “war trophies.” Crane read football articles in the newspapers with glee, because “That’s like war!” He told Hamlin Garland on one occasion that all his knowledge of battle was gained on the football field: “The psychology is the same. The opposite team is an enemy tribe.” Two of his football articles, “Harvard University Against the Carlisle Indians” (November 1, 1896) and “How Princeton Met Harvard at Cambridge …” (November 8, 1896), described the games as though they were raging battlefields. In England in 1898, Crane asked his brother William, in the United States, to keep his Claverack swords. One reason for his sardonic irony in relation to the parading Junior Order of United American Mechanics was because they “had no ideas of marching.” In May 1899, he complained about Captain Rowan, the “hero” of “A Message to Garcia”: “… he wore a yachting cap as part of his uniform which was damnable.” No wonder Crane once told Willa Cather that war was “a native product,” because he had been imagining battles and military life since his “knickerbocker days.”
The examples of Crane’s parents and his ancestors made him a student of classical literature and history, past and present. Yet most critics, like Carl Van Doren, were certain that the “Civil War was as far back in time as his imagination went with any passionate knowledge.” A school companion knew that Crane “reveled in the classics of Greece and Rome” and that Plutarch’s Lives was his “constant companion.” And history was Crane’s favorite subject. His mother encouraged him to read Harper’s History of the Rebellion. One friend at Syracuse University remembered that his knowledge of history was “considerable”; and while there he took Dr. Little’s course on the French Revolution. He was a student of Cromwellian days peopled with Roundheads and Royalists and of Queen Anne’s time; this was suggested by his lost tale, “Siege,” and The O’Ruddy. In his own library, he had May’s Constitutional History of England, Sterling’s Russia Under Nicholas the First, Robertson’s History of Scotland, and George Peck’s (Crane’s grandfather) Wyoming, which dealt with the American Revolution. In August 1899, Crane, who had plans for a new work of historical fiction, sent a letter to the New Jersey Historical Society inquiring about facts relating to the American Revolution.
Another charge made by Carl Van Doren, and echoed by others, was that Crane was “as ignorant as an American diplomat of history and political conditions.” Crane’s sense for present history was as acute as his understanding of the past. In “The King’s Favor,” he dealt with a real incident which involved King Cetewayo, a Zulu chief, and British imperialism. In “A Foreign Policy, in Three Glimpses,” he dramatized the Afghanistan troubles of 1884, the Fiji Island raids by the British in 1874, and the U.S.-Chilean friction of 1891. In “The Monster” he mentioned the Armenian massacres, and in The Blood of the Martyr he satirized German imperialism in China during the 1890s. Continually (often in his war dispatches) Crane referred to the policies and actions of the major powers: Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Spain, Italy, and the United States.
This sense of the past and present plays a significant role in his fiction. Crane makes many allusions to historical figures and subjects: to Romans, the Huns, Xenophon’s Anabasis, Napoleon, Washington at the Battle of Long Island, the French Revolution, the history of Cortez and the Aztecs, a Roman mob in Nero’s time, Waterloo, and the American Revolution. Several times Crane alludes to Homer, the Greek sense of tragedy, and to the knights of the Middle Ages. These only hint at his fuller knowledge. Crane used these historical images frequently for mock epic purposes—to heighten, sometimes with comic irony, the isolated hero and his pathetic cosmic struggle; and at other times to symbolize the tragic struggle of man through the ages. In Maggie, he wrote: “The two little boys, fighting in the mode of four thousand years ago, did not hear the warning.” In The
Red Badge: “He had long despaired of witnessing a Greeklike struggle.… Tales of great movements shook the land. They might not be distinctly Homeric, but there seemed to be much glory in them.” In “An Explosion of Seven Babies,” Crane drew upon the past for mock epic effect: “His [the little man’s] chosen course lay directly toward the seven babies who, in their anxiety to view the combat, had risen from the bench and were standing ready as a Roman populace to signify the little man’s death by rubbing their stomachs.” This points to another obvious contradiction in Crane’s aesthetic credo. On the one hand, he was a ruthless student of firsthand observation, the factual reporter seeing and testing and reflecting before he wrote his fiction; on the other hand, he ignored the facts of observation, and depended on his imagination and on his reading to recreate unobserved things like the Civil War.