Like his father, Crane also warred against the prevailing romanticism of the times, though not always consistently in his biographical and literary life. Jonathan Crane generally felt that fiction was “counterfeit coin,” and that one should read only the Bible, history, and current events. He admitted in Popular Amusements, however, that “there are some few works of fiction which are well written and true to nature, and which inculcate the right and condemn the wrong.” He wanted fiction to instruct, “to raise him [the reader] to the height of a great purpose.” He was hostile to the romantic effects on readers: “In fact, Cinderella of the old nursery story is the true type of thousands of our novel-readers. They live a sort of double life—one in their own proper persons, and in their real homes; the other as ideal lords and ladies in dream-land.” Young Crane had the urge to great purpose in his fiction; and most of his fiction was anti-romantic.
A special gift of Jonathan Crane’s appears in his son’s fiction. Usually linked with violence and death, Stephen Crane inherited from his minister-father a playful sense of humor. Edith Crane remembered that her grandfather “had a great sense of humor, and was so noted for it that a movement was once made to publish a book of his witticisms.” Clarence Peaslee, a roommate of young Crane’s at Syracuse, also knew that Jonathan Crane was “a noted wit, which was particularly evident in debate and private conversation.” Most critics, however, find Stephen Crane’s work humorless; and a few find only sporadic examples. Melvin Schoberlin says that the only amusing scene in Crane’s fiction is found in “The Carriage-Lamps.” Crane’s comedy is frequently missed, for seemingly somber tales like The Sullivan County Sketches (1892) are really playful hoaxes. Throughout his work one can find many comic situations; the most consistent and fullest examples are in Whilomville Stories (1900). Sometimes Crane’s comedy takes on grim and grotesque overtones, as in “The Blue Hotel”; here the comic “relief” adds to the ironies and enriches the final violence and terror of the story.
The dominant strain in Crane’s life and art—violence and death—is suggested by his reactions against his mother’s religion of hell and by his wearing experiences in New York, the American West, Greece, and Cuba. Thomas Beer’s classic remark—“Let it be stated that the mistress of this boy’s mind was fear”—is too narrow to encompass the variety of sensations Crane personally felt and analyzed. He studied other emotional responses like shame, anger, cowardice, foolhardiness, and courage; and he observed these within an individual or sometimes as the individual clashed with his group world. These emotions, when added up, demonstrate his fascination with the whole inner life of man, which he translated concretely by the physical crises in his stories.
Crane’s own biographical life supplied him with many of these tensions. As a child, he was fearful of riding a “savage” horse until his mother insisted on a display of courage. He was terrorized by dreams of black riders charging up from the sea. His father’s death left him embittered. Once, near Asbury Park, he saw a white girl stabbed by her Negro lover, and he went home in a state of shock. At Lafayette College the upperclassmen battered down his door during a hazing incident, and found him “petrified with fear … in one corner of the room with a revolver in his hand.” During his Western adventures he barely escaped death at the hands of a notorious bandit; this incident was recounted in “One Dash—Horses.”
All these experiences are related to Crane’s mystic attraction to death. To Karl Harriman, he made a prediction, which he also made to others: he would not live beyond thirty-one. During his short life, he seemed to abuse his body in order to prove his point. In his New York days he often went hungry. The ordeal on the Commodore, which Crane recreated in “The Open Boat,” further sapped his strength. Then his sojourn as a war correspondent in Greece and Cuba completely ruined his health. At least once in Cuba he stood up in the line of enemy fire as though he sought death.
The terrors of the group environment he felt keenly as a young boy in the small towns of New York and New Jersey. Here he became sensitive to insult and injury. His mother had insisted on preserving his Lord Fauntleroy curls until his brother Edmund saved him from disgrace; this incident later appeared in “The Angel Child.” The small-town mind he saw epitomized by hypocritical old matrons, or, as he termed them, “feminine mules.” Though he once stated that “the mob has no courage,” he was always aware of group pressure, and sometimes found little comfort in the terrors of loneliness and isolation. The words “lonely” and “doomed” recur frequently in his letters. At times, Crane warred against the group by siding with the outcasts and with the oppressed. At Claverack he joined with the underdog Cuban students against the “collective Goliath.” At Syracuse University, he “found it hard to conform to campus ideals.” In New York City he defended prostitutes against the rough treatment by the police and sent a telegram to Theodore Roosevelt, then police commissioner. It was no surprise that in several inscriptions of Maggie he noted that “… environment is a tremendous thing in the world and frequently shapes lives regardless.”
The most curious contradiction in Crane’s life and art is seen in his relation to romance and reality. Karl Harriman, a guest at Brede Place, England, once reflected: “It is odd that a notorious realist should live amid such romance.” While Crane championed the poverty-stricken slum dwellers of New York and complained of the smugness of the rich, he later seemed aloof to the sufferings of the poor by attempting to live the life of an “Elizabethan baron” at Brede Place. He idealized military correctness in dress and behavior, yet he often looked like a hobo. When Willa Cather met him she was confused by the gloves he wore, “which seemed rather a contradiction,” because his general attire was slovenly. He followed wars as though he had an unending romance with disaster, yet he relished the quiet, rural life at Hartwood, New York. He wooed genteel young women like Helen Trent and Nancy Crouse, and his letters were full of romantic notions. But his reality was the prostitute. He could not tolerate the sentimentality of Robert Louis Stevenson and Frances Burnett (the creator of Little Lord Fauntleroy), but he was touched by sentiment, as seen in his review of Ouida’s Under Two Flags, and in some of his own fiction. His ideal in writing was to get as close to reality as possible, in the best naturalistic fashion; to prove his point, he slept in a flophouse to get the atmosphere for “An Experiment in Misery.” Yet many of his stories were products of his own private reflections. All these factors relating to Crane’s biographical life illuminate his fictional themes and his attitude toward them.
Many other sources besides his family world have been advanced. While Crane’s works are not always “deep,” they do make one raise John Berryman’s query: “Who knows how many origins a deep work has?” The countless literary source studies often relate to Maggie and The Red Badge, but the themes, characters, and style of these two novels are common to his short fiction as well. Several critics are convinced that European backgrounds explain the models of Crane’s works. For Maggie and its naturalism, and presumably the naturalism of his short stories, critics have gone to Zola’s L’Assommoir. For The Red Badge critics, like V. S. Pritchett, feel certain that the novel came in on the Tolstoy “wave” of War and Peace and Sebastopol; and that “but for Tolstoy it would never have been written.” Still others are convinced of the major influence of Zola’s La Débâcle on The Red Badge.
The American sources are lengthier, especially for The Red Badge. Critics have mentioned Corporal Si Klegg, Century’s Battles and Leaders, Harper’s History, Kirkland’s Captain of Company K, the drawings of Winslow Homer, Ambrose Bierce, Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days, General Van Petten, Rudyard Kipling, the oral tales of Civil War veterans, and many others. Recently, Marcus Cunliffe tried to prove that Crane’s sources for Maggie were in the main American: Crane’s New York, the social consciousness of the magazine Arena, Charles Loring Brace’s The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Thomas De Witt Talmage’s sermons. Besides all this, Crane knew Jacob Riis, the famous social reformer; he reporte
d his lecture on slum life at Asbury Park (July 24, 1892). And Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1891) forecasts the atmosphere and tone of Maggie. Crane’s early champions, Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells, were both vitally concerned with social questions, and both talked to Crane with some frequency in the early 1890s. In fact, Garland suggested the “protest” story “The Men in the Storm” to Crane, and then the Arena as publisher, for this magazine was noted for reform articles on poverty, sweatshops, slum clearance, child labor, and alcoholism. If one acknowledges the importance of his biographical life and of these native American sources, Stephen Crane (not Mark Twain, who was really quite preoccupied with European civilization) is our first thoroughly American writer. Moreover, Maxwell Geismar’s conclusion—that Crane’s ignorance of the world around him restricted his art—should be challenged. Stephen Crane was remarkably knowledgeable about the world, and this helped to widen the art and life of his fiction.
Whatever sources he used, Stephen Crane’s literary reputation was adversely affected by his bohemian life and by his modern style of writing. At one time or another he was labeled a dope addict and a syphilitic. He was continually linked with prostitutes, and his life at Brede Place was likened to a “Babylonian orgy.” The New York City police hounded him until he forsook the city, and spent his last years in England. Hamlin Garland, for one, was disillusioned by his protégé’s behavior, and their later relations were lukewarm. The subjects of some of his early fiction—prostitution, alcoholism, dope addiction—reinforced the charges leveled against Crane.
But Crane’s style, not his subjects, made his literary rise difficult. The same year Maggie was published and poorly received there appeared The Heavenly Twins, which hinted at the then shocking problem of venereal disease. The Heavenly Twins, however, was protected by its romantic style. Crane’s ironic-impressionistic method in Maggie, and not the subject of prostitution, so bewildered the editors they missed his compassion completely. Mark Twain may have sounded the note of irony in American literature, but it was not modern like Crane’s, whose abrupt, disconnected, flat statements and darting, rapierlike ironies seemed too arty and too hating. Crane had to wait until the 1920s before he could be understood at all on his own terms. He was too modern in other ways: his impressionism seemed to be an affectation and made no sense; his symbolism was ignored; his stories lacked the conventional plot; and his curse words were unacceptable (they were usually deleted by his American publishers). To illustrate the conservatism of the decade, one need only point to Frances Willard who censured Richard Gilder for allowing the word “rape” in his Century Magazine. Later, Gilder, as Crane’s own publisher, complained about “swearing in fiction” as late as October 1896.
Realism was making some headway in the 1890s, but Crane’s art was too extreme even for his fellow realists and literary fathers, Garland and Howells. While he confessed that his “little creed of art” was “identical with the one of Howells and Garland,” and that this “readjustment of his point of view” was concluded in 1892, Crane was too radical and too progressive for them. Garland was shocked by one of Crane’s projects, the novel Flowers of Asphalt (never completed), about a boy prostitute. He praised Maggie, but felt that Crane studied only the worst elements of slum life and ignored “the families living on the next street, who live lives of heroic purity and helpless hardship.” Howells also seemed worried by Crane’s boldness. He mentioned Crane’s attention to the “grimy truth,” and he was concerned about his use of profanity. In his estimate of Crane’s art in 1902, Howells indicated a gap between his credo and Crane’s, and that, like Garland, he did not fully understand Crane’s talent: “… Maggie remains the best thing he did … while The Red Badge of Courage and the other things that followed it, were the throes of an art failing with materials to which it could not render an absolute devotion from absolute knowledge.” Crane was almost singlehandedly carrying on the real battle of modernism in literature.
Today in the 1960s, though his literary reputation is finally secure, Stephen Crane is still plagued by a variety of legends. Several critics repeatedly stress one fact: Crane began at the peak of his writing career, and he had no need to improve. He did not, however, come into life “fully armed.” He had a very brief apprenticeship during his fiction writing career, which began in 1891 and ended in 1900. His news dispatches from Asbury Park, his earliest New York sketches, and The Sullivan County Sketches gave him something that resembled a training period. The eleven Sullivan County Sketches are especially significant because they present on a miniature scale the characteristic hero, theme, structure, panorama, and style of much of his later fiction. These include the grotesque and anonymous anti-hero, the “little man”; the theme of crime and punishment, where the little man is repeatedly punished for his “crime” of egotism; the ironic structure of the sketches, which usually end in anticlimax; the larger panorama, the world of nature, which underscores the smallness of man and his isolation; and finally the impressionistic style and the animal imagery, which color and objectify the primitive emotion or emotions under study. But Crane, in these sketches, was too imitative and too self-conscious. He tried to be “clever,” like Kipling; he parodied Poe’s horror stories. There is a great distance, then, in art, substance, and individuality between these sketches and “The Blue Hotel.”
A related problem, stressed by some critics, is that because Crane wrote enough to fill twelve volumes in nine years he wrote too hastily—he was a hack. Crane encouraged this view, for he mentions that he wrote Maggie in a few days, The Red Badge in ten days, and “The Monster” in a week. His unpublished notebook, the manuscript versions of the tales, and the changes made on a single work as it appeared in a newspaper, magazine, and in a book indicate that Crane continually revised and corrected some of his work. Yet Conrad, who watched Crane write, insisted that his friend did not need to rewrite. Crane’s manner of writing poetry adds to this myth. Hamlin Garland recalled with amazement how Crane turned on his “poetic spout” and produced complete poems at a moment’s notice: “That’s the way they come—in little rows, all made up, ready to put down on paper.” Then, too, the fact that Crane was driven by the need of money supposedly forced him to write so quickly that ideas never ripened in his mind. Up to a point this is true. In his last years in England he borrowed hastily from his grandfather’s Wyoming. Here is a passage from Wyoming:
Just at that moment the only two Indians remaining alive took to their heels, when Mr. Bennett, who could throw a tomahawk with the precision and force of any red-skin on the frontier, picked up a tomahawk and let it slip, and it stuck in the back of one of them. The Indian turned round, being at about the distance of forty feet, and hollowed out “whoo,” and his blanket fell from his shoulders, and the hatchet was left with it on the ground, he running off naked.
Here is Crane’s version in “ ‘Ol’ Bennet’ and the Indians”:
The scream of the watchman instantly aroused the other warriors, who, as they scrambled in their blankets, found over them a terrible white-lipped creature with an axe—an axe, the most appallingly brutal of weapons. Hammond buried his weapon in the head of the leader of the Indians even as the man gave out his first great cry. The second blow missed an agile warrior’s head, but caught him in the nape of the neck, and he swung, to bury his face in the red-hot ashes at the edge of the fire.… Well, this slaughter continued in the red glare of the fire on the lonely mountainside until two shrieking creatures ran off through the trees, but even then my father [Ol’ Bennet] hurled a tomahawk with all his strength. It struck one of the fleeing Indians on the shoulder. His blanket dropped from him, and he ran on practically naked.
Crane’s confessions to Willa Cather in 1895 gave insight into his literary methods. To her he admitted that while the writing of a story was brief, it took months before “he could get any sort of personal contact with it, or feel any potency to handle it.” Referring to The Red Badge, he said he wrote the novel in nine days but that he
“had been unconsciously working the detail of the story through most of his boyhood.” He said he led a “double life,” writing in “the first place the matter that pleased himself, and doing it very slowly; in the second place any sort of stuff that would sell.” Many stories seem hastily written or written to a kind of formula: “A Christmas Dinner Won in Battle,” “Stories Told by an Artist,” “An Indiana Campaign,” “The Reluctant Voyagers,” “A Gray Sleeve,” “Three Miraculous Soldiers,” and others. His best stories, like “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” and “The Blue Hotel,” really mattered to Crane.
Another complaint is that Crane could not construct a plot. Yet Clarence Peaslee recalled: “It was his delight to block out the plot of a story and then tell his friends about it, putting it in various lights and constructions, and then asking which was more effective.” His plots are there, but they are obscured by style and method. In “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” the reader is aware of four sharply defined episodes, which seem unconnected, but which are connected by the jarring ironies. Crane wanted to contrast two environments—the old West and the new—and to bring the two perspectives into sharper focus he depended on episodic structure; this technique—this arrangement—is common to much of his fiction. Like Chekhov, Crane’s intention in his stories was to study the mood of a man’s soul in relation to a crisis situation; the events of his stories explain the emotional state and reaction of his characters. Crane bridges his episodic structures by means of mood. He worked in terms of episodes because he was anxious to dramatize scenes or to sketch in a situation. Many of his stories are in fact called “sketches” or “scenes.”
By using other devices from the other arts, like painting, Crane buried plot further and so enriched the form of the short story. The technique of impressionism he seems to have learned from his friends at the Art Students’ League in New York; Hamlin Garland espoused the theories of French impressionism as early as the 1880s; and there was available in English a book of sketches by French symbolists and impressionists, Pastels in Prose (1890). A few of Crane’s stories—“The Silver Pageant,” “Stories Told by an Artist,” and The Third Violet—reveal his attraction to art and the artist. Both Conrad and Garnett were convinced that Crane was the “complete impressionist.” Like Conrad, Crane was anxious to make one “feel” and to make one “see.” He wanted to convey the sensations produced on the sensibility of his characters, and like the impressionist painters, he sketched the “fluid play of light” on his heroes, as he interpreted aspects of their natures. In “War Memories,” Crane studied the figure of a man: “He was naked save for a breech clout, and so close, so clear was the ecclesiastic suggestion that one’s mind leaped to a fantasy that this thin, pale figure had just been torn down from a cross. The flash of the impression was like light, and for this instant it illumined all the dark recesses of one’s remotest idea of sacrilege, ghastly and wanton. I bring this to you merely as an effect, an effect of mental light and shade, if you like; something done in thought similar to that which the French impressionists do in color; something meaningless and at the same time overwhelming, crushing, monstrous.” By using color imagery and color contrasts, Crane approximated the painter’s attempt to merge objects with their surroundings and at the same time to capture the separateness and the fast-changing face of life. To Crane, the universe was abrupt, indefinite, and chaotic, and he caught this rhythm in the movement of his impressionistic prose.