A recent critic, Robert Hough, notes the influence of Goethe’s Theory of Colors (1810). In one place, Crane had mentioned his interest in Goethe’s theories. Crane, then, learned about the psychology of colors not only from impressionism but also from Goethe, who demonstrated how colors created certain states of feeling, how they defined a situation, and how they helped to paint dramatic and panoramic effects. Most important, colors to Goethe and to Crane became useful as symbols: dull yellow was linked to decay and death; red to high tension; cold colors to darkness and violence. In his fiction, Crane hints at the relevance of colors as symbols. In “When Every One Is Panic Stricken,” there “glared [from the fire in the basement] a deep and terrible hue of red, the color of satanic wrath, the color of murder.” In “The Blue Hotel” the “covered land was blue with the sheen of an unearthly satin.…”
In still another way, Crane lessened the value of a mechanical plot. As he painted striking yet isolated scenes, Crane made each episode become part of a moving picture, so that his art is properly linked with cinematic techniques. In “The Blue Hotel” the Easterner’s “mind, like a film, took lasting impressions of three men—the iron-nerved master of the ceremony; the Swede, pale, motionless, terrible; and Johnnie, serene yet ferocious, brutish yet heroic.” Crane depended on rapid movement, on change, on gnarled and disconnected effects, and on indirect and understated gestures. His vision was scenic; and his lack of transitions suggested the chaos and dislocations in the life of his fictions. What Crane succeeded in doing, then, by imposing the various arts on to the plot, was to prove that the short story could be a fluid and flexible medium of expression. By itself, plot hampered Crane.
Another charge leveled against Crane is that he cannot create characters. In his best stories his people are often thought of in general terms, like the soldier, the cook, and the correspondent. If they do have names, they have common ones, like Billie, Henry, and Jimmie. While the characters seem wooden and one-dimensional, Crane keeps them typical and anonymous because he is interested in the dual nature of man. He translates the inner effects on a character as he faces a crisis situation, usually death; at the same time, Crane contrasts this inner tension with the character’s outer self, usually a static and confident portrait. By this method, Crane posits the appearance-reality motif: man as he thinks he is; and man as he really is. Then follows the struggle—the war—between man’s will and courage, and the world of chance, fate, and nature. Sometimes man is victorious; and even when he loses, he has at least accepted a challenge to his dignity. The Crane hero, then, is left anonymous and typical in order to mirror symbolically the isolated and grotesque life of man who is warped by his own ego or temporarily frustrated or rendered helpless by his illusions, by his environment, and by nature.
Critics have felt safest with the themes of Crane’s fiction. They have mentioned many plausible ones: the initiation theme; the discovery of self; ideals versus realities; death and rebirth; the moral problem of conduct; the theme of absurdity; themes relating to courage, cowardice, loyalty, isolation, and disenchantment; the search for social acceptance; and others. One ironic theme, however, dominates Crane’s short fiction from the very first: crime and punishment. Sometimes he renders this theme comically, as in his first story “Uncle Jake and the Bell Handle.” Uncle Jake commits a “crime” by pulling a bell handle; until he returns home, he suffers punishment. Throughout The Sullivan County Sketches, the little man commits the “crime” of egotism, and is punished for it by having his ego deflated by a madman, a woman, a hungry dog, a bear, and others. In other tales the theme of crime and punishment leads to pathos and to tragedy. In “The Monster” Henry Johnson and Dr. Trescott commit a “crime” of humanity, and they are punished by an inhuman community. There is the “crime” of poverty in “An Ominous Baby” and in “An Experiment in Misery”; as the poor receive their undeserved punishments, they are contrasted to the indifference of the well-to-do, who reflect the general indifference of American capitalism. The ending of “An Experiment in Misery” exposes the real crime: “And in the background a multitude of buildings, of pitiless hues and sternly high, were to him [the outcast] emblematic of a nation forcing its regal head into the clouds, throwing no downward glances; in the sublimity of its aspirations ignoring the wretches who may flounder at its feet.” In “His New Mittens” Horace commits a crime by wetting his mittens, and after he is punished by his mother and his aunt, he punishes them in turn by running away. In “The Open Boat” and “The Blue Hotel” this theme reaches a highly complex level. The social environment, and not the gambler, should be punished for the crime of killing the Swede in “The Blue Hotel.” Nature’s crime of indifference has led to the unnecessary punishment of the oiler in “The Open Boat.”
Generally, the story patterns are consistent too. They begin quietly, often in the world of nature, which suggests peace and harmony. Suddenly, from nowhere, a crisis occurs, and until the end of the story the situation is explosive and disastrous, reflecting the true nature of things. The movement in a Crane story, then, is from peace to war. The characters themselves chart this chaos. In “An Explosion of Seven Babies” the little man “touched some hidden spring in his being and went off like a firework.” In “The Blue Hotel” the Swede “fizzed like a firewheel.” As the Crane hero goes off like a firework, he opens up his inner life.
Crane’s other uses of imagery further heighten the ironies of his essentially tragic vision. Often, as he tells a serious or comic story, Crane suggests the solemn, austere pomp and glory of the Bible: “Soon it came to pass.…” (“A Tent in Agony”); “Now it came to pass.…” (“Uncle Jake and the Bell Handle”); “And it was written.…” (“A Great Mistake”); “They were fearful he had met his time” (“The Holler Tree”). He also refers to Biblical materials directly: Daniel, Resurrection morn, the priest, and the altar. On the one hand, this tone and this imagery most often relate to the mock-epic scope of Crane’s fiction; on the other, they show, in “An Experiment in Misery,” the emptiness of things—life as a wasteland. Religious imagery, ironically employed, enriches Crane’s themes.
Nor is it unusual that many of Crane’s stories take place in the dark or at midnight. At one time, Crane wanted to publish fifteen or twenty of his New York sketches under the title Midnight Sketches. The power of blackness intrigued him. It became the symbol of terror, violence, and “the portals of death.” In “The Duel That Was Not Fought” the time is midnight, the prelude to the potential disaster in the story. “An Experiment in Misery” takes place at night; “daylight was commonplace and uninteresting.” In “When Every One Is Panic Stricken” the stranger “was imparting some grim midnight reflections upon existence.…”
In Crane’s work, theme, character, structure, and imagery take on symbolic overtones, and though many critics refuse to accept it, Crane’s best stories make full use of symbols and emblems. References to the West, the sea, and nature in some of his lesser stories and feature articles expand in meaning and complexity in the later fiction. Before his famous statement on nature in “The Open Boat,” Crane, in a feature article “Nebraska’s Bitter Fight for Life” (February 24, 1895), saw “this terrible and inscrutable wrath of nature. It was as if upon the massive altar of the earth, their homes and their families were being offered in sacrifice to the wrath of some blind and pitiless deity.” In “Mr. Binks’ Day Off” he thought again in these terms: “It [the song of the trees] was filled with an infinite sorrow—a sorrow for birth, slavery, death. It was a wail telling the griefs, the pains of all ages. It was the symbol of agonies. It celebrated all suffering.… It is the universal voice raised in lamentations.” In “One Dash—Horses” the blanket before an adobe wall “was to Richardson a horrible emblem.” In “Death and the Child” a single sentence leads to the meaningful level of the story: “It was as simple as some powerful symbol.”
Even before Crane left New York for the West or “The Open Boat” experience, he saw the power of these
environments and eventually described them in symbolic terms. The country environment is contrasted to the urban environment in “Uncle Jake and the Bell Handle”; here, Uncle Jake’s innocence is thwarted by advanced civilization. The city environment is likened to battle and the country to peace in “Mr. Binks’ Day Off.” The sketches “Billie Atkins Went to Omaha,” “In a Park Row Restaurant,” “The Duel That Was Not Fought,” “A Freight Car Incident,” and “A Christmas Dinner Won in Battle” all prepare for, in brief compass, Western civilization, and the issues and conflicts which accumulate in “The Blue Hotel.” A seemingly offhand remark in “Coney Island’s Failing Days”—“the sea always make me feel that I am a trivial object”—is a first stage, along with “The Reluctant Voyagers,” in suggesting the sea’s symbolic role in “The Open Boat.” Continually Crane contrasts environments in his stories for ironic and tragic effects: the poor versus the middle class in the New York sketches; the Easterner versus the Westerner; and the land versus the sea.
Moving in so many environments, Crane individualized them and his characters mainly through his ever present use of dialect. In “The Blue Hotel” Pat Scully’s speech “was always a combination of Irish brogue and idiom, Western twang and idiom, and scraps of curiously formal diction taken from the storybooks and newspapers.” Crane’s Negroes in Whilomville Stories and in “The Monster,” the Irish in “An Old Man Goes Wooing,” the Bowery dialect, the speech patterns of the adults and the children from rural communities—all these demonstrate another way in which Crane achieved his sense of immediacy.
While the stories do have these distinguishing features, there are definite changes in Crane’s art and themes. In the beginning in 1891, with “Uncle Jake and the Bell Handle,” “The Camel,” “A Foreign Policy, in Three Glimpses,” and “The King’s Favor,” Crane is playful, humorous, and satiric. He is depending mainly on anecdotes and topical issues, like Maine’s prohibition and British imperialism. His stories are really sketches, scenes, and personal (sometimes too personal) impressions. There is little plot interest, and less evidence of his later impressionistic style. In The Sullivan County Sketches in 1892, Crane is still too theatrical and too self-conscious. While he imitates both Kipling and Poe, he displays his typical and individualized impressionistic style. He is now thinking of stories or sketches in groups. Each scene or sketch of Sullivan County becomes a part of a whole series, a panoramic study of camping life. But on the whole, Crane’s language in these sketches is too stilted and bombastic; and his plots are too boyish and full of pranks.
In this same year, Crane wrote his first city sketch, “Travels in New York: The Broken-Down Van,” and here he was laying the groundwork for his Bowery novels, Maggie and George’s Mother. A story in 1893, “A Desertion,” is an episode straight out of Maggie, and underlines a distinct change in Crane’s art. The social problems of the city affected him so deeply that the boyish hoaxes of The Sullivan County Sketches are nowhere in evidence. During this period, however, Crane was so solemn that the preaching urge of “On the New Jersey Coast” returns in “An Experiment in Misery,” “The Men in the Storm,” “An Experiment in Luxury,” and elsewhere. “An Experiment in Luxury,” especially, shows that Crane had not separated himself fully from journalism, for he reports and does not render his story. Like The Sullivan County Sketches, the New York City sketches should be viewed as a group, as scenes of city life. The best tales of this social phase of Crane’s career are “An Experiment in Misery” and “The Men in the Storm.” Both demonstrate that social problems sobered him up; serious issues made him take himself and his art seriously. But he was too serious and too self-conscious about his social causes; he still did not have complete control of himself and his materials. At least he was no longer clever and imitative. He was now the individualistic writer who saw the everyday social problems in symbolic terms.
With the serialization of The Red Badge in December 1894, Crane turned to war fiction. His earlier sketches had already sounded this theme. In “Uncle Jake and the Bell Handle” the uncle says: “To see this innocent country plunged in to er civil war by the hand of an ignorant old man would be terr’ble.” The eleven Sullivan County Sketches, besides representing the themes of his war stories, contain the animal imagery and the combat pictures so familiar to The Red Badge. In “Mr. Binks’ Day Off” Crane says, “The sense of a city is battle.” The prewar stories, collected as The Little Regiment (1896), are a curious blending of romantic and realistic materials. They prove again that Crane had not fully declared his independence as an artist; and he was still experimenting with style and subject. “A Gray Sleeve” and “Three Miraculous Soldiers” are clearly imitative of the popular romances of the day. “A Mystery of Heroism” and “The Little Regiment” are distillations of The Red Badge; they are the best tales in the collection. In “A Mystery of Heroism,” the most successful of the tales, the hero “had been blindly led by quaint emotions, and laid himself under an obligation to walk squarely up to the face of death.” Here Crane maintains a perfect balance between the trivial and ironical adventure of Collins, and the large scale war and havoc surrounding him. The terrifying pathos of the story is rendered powerfully by means of understatement; the anticlimactic close is not a clever trick, as it was in The Sullivan County Sketches: it illuminates the riddle of heroism.
Far less attention has been given to Crane’s later war stories, most of which are collected in Wounds in the Rain (1900). Actually these stories are superior to the prewar ones. Real war saved Crane from sterile repetitions of The Red Badge. Real war gave him a variety of new themes—some humorous (“The Sergeant’s Private Madhouse,” “The Lone Charge of William B. Perkins”); it made him become more objective and more sensitive to the tensions and pressures and moods of combat. His satire was broader, as it revealed the individual and the social world; and his psychological penetration was more acute and less pretentious. The real experience of war taught Crane more about proportion, emphasis, restraint, contrast, and naturalness. A comparison between The Red Badge and The Little Regiment on the one hand and his real war stories on the other shows that earlier Crane was lost in imaginative and artificial guesswork, and that he was depending on a good deal of bombast, on overwriting—demonstrated by his rhetoric and the outpourings of images and colors—to approximate the emotions of men in combat. Fred Pattee raises a crucial question about impressionism, and it explains Crane’s problem with style during The Red Badge phase:” If every detail has been made vivid it becomes like music played wholly in fortissimo; if every epithet and color stroke has been heightened to its extreme the result is monotony. There is no contrast; the straining is too evident.…”
In the best of Crane’s later war stories—“Death and the Child,” “The Price of the Harness,” “An Episode of War,” “The Upturned Face”—Crane’s style is flat because he is studying his subjects, like “naked duty” and “the simple, majestic commonplace,” in a low key. A statement at the close of “War Memories” spells out Crane’s new manner: “The episode was closed. And you can depend upon it that I have told you nothing at all, nothing at all, nothing at all.” His impressionism is now subdued for better effect; he is more direct and more dependent on understatement. In fact, “An Episode of War” and “The Upturned Face” are amazing forecasts of Hemingway’s style and subject. Crane captures the stark tragedies of war in “The Price of the Harness,” “An Episode of War,” and “The Upturned Face.” With a maturer vision and a maturer style he strips his materials to the barest essentials and by this achieves a more powerful impact. Other stories in Wounds in the Rain prove that when Crane is rooted in topical newspaper issues his craft weakens. “This Majestic Lie,” for example, grew out of his news dispatch, “Grocer’s Blockade”; “The Lone Charge of William B. Perkins” was based on the actions of a news reporter, Ralph Paine.
Of the Western tales, the outstanding ones are “The Blue Hotel,” “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” and “One Dash—Horses.
” Though Crane has been accused of not picturing society enough, he does in these stories display a characteristic trait. Individuals—the Easterner, the drummer, and others—come to represent various sections of the country, even though the tales are localized in the West. Eastern culture and the West’s new environment clash with the old image of Western primitivism. This is the meeting ground of these stories. And Crane uses this world of nature in the raw to display the elemental struggles of man in spite of the civilization that has touched both East and West. He recreates this conflict of the old and the new West in a playful manner in “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” He studies the lawlessness in primitive Mexico in “One Dash—Horses,” where Richardson must depend on his ingenuity in order to survive. In “The Blue Hotel,” the West becomes the center of the cosmic struggle of man as he faces his primitivism, his civilization, and the absurdity of life. All these tales are tense and dramatic, where Crane renders in sharply edged episodes the responses to the terribleness of death and the mystery of life.