Small barbarians and grade school pirates - Stephen Crane's Whilomville Stories and other

Stephen Crane’s Whilomville Stories (1900) is a book about children but not a children’s book.  Or such is my interpretation.  It’s stories contain the adventures of little Jimmie Trescott who lives in a small town in New York, is in grade school, has a doctor for a father, and can whip anybody.  The point of view is firmly adult, almost anthropological at its best.  This is clearest in “The Carriage-Lamps,” where Jimmie has been grounded and is in his ground floor room.  His Tom Sawyer-like friend is at the window, pretending to be a pirate.  Dr. Trescott is also in the room, unknown to the tiny pirate.

“Oh, come on, Jimmie.  A boat awaits us at the foot of the rocks.  In one short hour you’ll be free forever from your ex – excwable enemies, and their vile plots.  Hasten, for the dawn approaches.”

The suffering Jimmie looked at his father, and was surprised at what he saw.  The doctor was doubled up like a man with the colic.  He was breathing heavily.

How handy, for Crane to model a response for his readers.  We, reading, the story in Harper’s, where it was first published, may not be laughing so hard that we are in pain, like the boy’s father, but still, I thought the scene was pretty funny.  I would have added more comical “w”s.  “Vile pwots… dawn appwoaches.”

These charming stories are a strange contrast to the Cuban war fiction of Wounds in the Rain, published the same year, even though the boys do plenty of fighting.  Crane he had written stories about children before, including some bad, bad New York City children.  See the shocking “An Ominous Baby” for an example: “After the small barbarian had got some distance away, he paused and regarded his booty.”  Don’t see “A Dark-brown Dog”; it is too sad.  These stories are circa 1892, an age ago in the rapid, compressed career of Crane.  The morality of children was all too useful for Crane’s view of human nature.

If you want to read the minor Whilomville Stories, I will note that the Library of America collection of Crane omits three of them, but keeps the one, “The Knife,” that is hmm hmm hmm not congruent with today’s views on the depiction of African-Americans.  The Library of America also omits the grotesque illustrations of the original edition.

See, or avoid, “The Angel Child,” between pages 14 and 15.

I take these light-hearted stories as deliberate money makers, but there are two twists.  One is that the same family features in the Crane novella The Monster (1898), in which a black servant is grievously injured in a fire while rescuing little Jimmie.  The story is a serious look at the town’s fear and hatred of the injured man, the monster, and the father’s loyalty to the man who saved his son.  The tone could hardly be more different than that of the Whilomville Stories.

The other odd thing is that Crane was working on another group of linked stories when he died.  Three of them are in the Library of America volume.  They are episodes in a fictional war between Spitzenberg and Rostina, written much like the Cuban stories except made up from scratch.  It is as if Crane knew he  could not wait for Austria and Italy to go to war – he died fourteen years too soon – so he had to get going in advance.  I wonder what he was doing.

I only hoped that he would be hit just a little - Crane goes into battle

“War Memories” is the most unusual part of Wounds in the Rain.  The rest of the pieces are easier to identify as short stories, single episodes in the Cuban war experienced by a single character, sometimes but not always a journalist.  More good Stephen Crane short stories.

The opener, “The Price in the Harness,” seems designed to showcase Crane’s updated approach to war fiction.  He takes a simple, small action – a supply train runs into some trouble – and describes it with some thickness.

The brown leggings of the men, stained with the mud of other days, took on a deeper colour.  Perspiration broke gently out on the reddish faces.  With his heavy roll of blanket and the half of a shelter-tent crossing his right shoulder and under his left arm, each man presented the appearance of being clasped from behind, wrestler fashion, by a pair of thick white arms.  (7)

Just a touch of weirdness.  Here the strangeness comes from a relatively new technology, a military balloon,

a fat, wavering, yellow thing, [that] was leading the advance like some new conception of war-god.  (12)

Personified, the balloon is the battle’s first casualty:

The balloon was dying, dying a gigantic and public death before the eyes of two armies.  It quivered, sank, faded into the trees amid the flurry of a battle that was suddenly and tremendously like a storm.  (13)

Crane works hard, in this story, on the sounds of battle:

The noise of the rifle bullets broke in their faces like the noise of so many lamp-chimneys… (13)

It reminds one always of a loom, a great grand steel loom, clinking, clanking, plunking, plinking, to weave a woof of thin red threads, the cloth of death.  (25)

Maybe a little overdone there at the end.  The story ends with more sounds, the sound of voices.  The characters in these stories are often interchangeable, made generic by their uniforms or roles.  The most curious title is “Marines Signalling under Fire at Guantanamo,” which sounds like it ought to be reportage, and likely almost is.  It could be an episode in “War Memories.”  Who knows why it is not.  A journalist watches marines signal a ship, asking it to redirect its artillery fire.  To signal, a marine has to carry his signal flags to the top of a ridge, where he will be exposed to enemy fire.

It seemed absurd to hope that he would not be hit; I only hoped that he would be hit just a little, little, in the arm, the shoulder, or the leg.  (188)

It’s the kind of casual courage that Crane has always found so fascinating.

One irony of the book is that almost none of the action Crane witnesses has much to do with the outcome of the war, which was largely decided at sea.  One story, “The Revenge of the Adolphus,” is about a naval action, again as witnessed by war correspondents, and the irony here is that the participants have difficulty seeing the significance of what they did.

A couple of stories are trivial.  Otherwise, Christopher Benfey is right, it’s a shame that Wounds in the Rain has been squeezed off to the side of Crane’s works.

"But to get the real thing!" Stephen Crane remembers the war

Somewhere I saw Christopher Benfey, a critic and biographer of Stephen Crane, call Wounds in the Rain (1900) Crane’s most underrated or underread or ignored or misunderstood book.  Something like that.

It’s a collection of short fiction about the Cuban theater of the 1898 Spanish-American War.  Crane was a war correspondent.  He had written a novel and a book of stories about the Civil War, all of the details about soldiering pulled out of his imagination and books, but as a journalist he got to see the real thing.

On the third night the alarm came early; I went in search of Gibbs, but I soon gave over an active search for the more congenial occupation of lying flat and feeling the hot hiss of the bullets trying to cut my hair.  For the moment I was no longer a cynic.  I was a child who, in a fit of ignorance, had jumped into the vat of war.  I heard somebody dying near me.  He was dying hard.  Hard.  It took him a long time to die.  (“War Memories,” 237-8)

Of course this is not the real thing, even if the narrator is a Crane-like war correspondent, but rather a fictional simulation of it.  (“’But to get the real thing!’ cried Vernall the war-correspondent.  ‘It seems impossible,’” 229)  The difference from the Civil War fiction is that Crane could have been killed gathering his materials, or killed by something other than a book falling on his head.

His style did change, but it had been changing rapidly anyways that I cannot guess how direct experience of war might have affected it.  That “Hard” line was unthinkable in the more baroque The Red Badge of Courage (1895), written all of five years earlier.  I am continuing the same scene:

I thought this man would never die.  I wanted him to die.  Ultimately he died.  (238)

A new mode of war writing is forming in this book, and a new ironic tone.  Ernest Hemingway must have clawed a copy of Wounds in the Rain to pieces.  Does this not sound like it could have been written by Hemingway?

The day broke by inches, with an obvious and maddening reluctance.  (239)

There are other pages in the book, even though I am stuck in this one spot.  “War Memories” was the biggest surprise in the book.  It is long, a quarter of the book, as long as Crane’s novellas, and most directly in his voice and about his experiences.  Yet the character is named Vernall, and the events vary from those experienced by Crane.  It is a story both about the journalist’s experiences but also about his attempts to turn them into something.  The essentially random nature of war destroys effective narrative.

Or perhaps the story is a ragbag.  Here is everything Crane could not turn into something else, plus some things that he could and did, one event after another.  Look at all of this stuff.

The episode was closed.  And you can depend upon it that I have told you nothing at all, nothing at all, nothing at all.  (308)

Because of its length, I guess, the Library of America volume of Crane omits “War Memories,” but it is easy enough to find online.  Page numbers are from a scan of the original edition.

Only a little ink more or less - Crane's War Is Kind

War Is Kind (1899) is Stephen Crane’s second and last book of poetry, another tiny little Arts & Crafts book with poems – or “lines” or “pills” as Crane called them – much like those in The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895), meaning much unlike anything anyone else was writing at the time.

A little ink more or less?
It surely can’t matter?
Even the sky and the opulent sea,
The plains and the hills, aloof,
hear the uproar of all these books.
But it is only a little ink more or less.

Then this goes on to be, explicitly, about the absence of God, e.g., “Where is God?”  The strange writerly link between ink and God returns in a posthumous (1929) poem:

A horizon smaller than a doomed assassin’s cap,
Inky, surging tumults
A reeling, drunken sky and no sky
A pale hand sliding from a polished spar.
                                     God is cold.

Then there is the amusing attack on newspapers, “A newspaper is a collection of half-injustices,” etc.

The War Is Kind poems feel like a concentrated collection of Crane’s concerns.  Journalism, war, shipwreck, fatalism:

A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
“A sense of obligation.”

Crane perhaps would have turned to aphorisms if he had lived longer.  Some poems are more imagistic, some more like  “A man said to the universe,” the wisdom of a 28 year-old who has seen a lot.

I suppose I prefer the images:

A grey and boiling street
Alive with rickety noise.
Suddenly, a hearse,
Trailed by black carriages
Takes a deliberate way
Through this chasm of commerce…  (another posthumous poem)

Or:

Fire-rays fall athwart the robes
Of hooded men, squat and dumb.

Or:

To the maiden
The sea was blue meadow
Alive with little froth-people
Singing.

There is a fantastic side to Crane’s imagination that he unleashes in his poems, where not only God but a variety of knights, demons and weird figures serve as characters.  Maybe if he had lived longer he would have written some Ambrose Bierce-like stuff, some weird tales.

War Is Kind concludes, to my surprise, with a sequence of love poems in which Crane imagines himself as an ogre, or a knight:

I was impelled to be a grand knight,
And swagger and snap my fingers,
And explain my mind finely.

What kind of a knight that is, exactly, I am not sure.  Sometimes God himself interferes; sometimes Crane “sees spectres, / Mists of desires.”  They are odd, the love poems, in keeping with the rest of the book.

Ten – well, twenty – years later, everything Crane does seems normal, and I am reading a hundred years after that.  I can only recapture the strangeness in specific images, phrases, and jokes.  There are plenty of those, though.

stern, mournful, and fine - Stephen Crane's fatalism

Stephen Crane’s fatalism is well earned.  The arbitrariness of death was with him from an early age, when he likely contracted tuberculosis.  Shipwreck and battlefields could only reinforce the idea.  Why me and not him?  Why him and not me?

The correspondent in “The Open Boat,” rowing for his life, suddenly remembers a forgotten poem, about a dying soldier:

He had never considered it his affair that a soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers, nor had it appeared to him as a matter for sorrow.  It was less to him than the breaking of a pencil’s point.

Now, however, it quaintly came to him as a human, living thing.  It was no longer merely a picture of a few throes in the breast of a poet, meanwhile drinking tea and warming his feet at the grate; it was an actuality – stern, mournful, and fine.  (903)

He then envisions the soldier’s death.  “He was sorry for the soldier of the Legion who lay dying in Algiers.”  The series of ironies are outstanding, especially the first vision, of the poet and his tea – again, the character doing the envisioning is in a small boat on a stormy ocean, in danger of imminent death, although the next sentence tells me that the shark following the boat has “grown bored at the delay” had given up.  But the main irony is that the endangered man’s sudden outburst of sympathy is directed at a fictional character.

I thought the funniest declaration of fatalism was in “Twelve O’Clock,” the story about a cowboy who had never seen a cuckoo clock, and the terrible consequences thereof.  His other drunk pals refuse to believe him.  Some maybe do a bit worse:

A cowboy whose mother had a cuckoo-clock in her house in Philadelphia spoke with solemnity.  “Jake’s a liar.  There’s no such clock in the world.  What? a bird inside a clock to tell the time?  Change your drink, Jake.”  (832)

But what smart aleck could possibly resist pursuing the joke?  I sympathize.  Shame about the later murders.

“The Blue Hotel” is the most direct statement of Crane’s sense of the workings of fate.  I mean most direct in that unlike in  “The Open Boat” characters discuss the subject:

“We five of us, have collaborated in the murder of this Swede.  Usually there are from a dozen to forty women really involved in every murder, but in this case it seems to be only five men…” (827)

the last of whom, the actual killer, “isn’t even a noun.  He is a kind of adverb.”

This is another good example of what I was saying yesterday.  Odd ways of saying things.  Crane would have been a good mystery writer, not of the kind where a reader might be able to solve the crime, but the kind where I clutch my head in shock at the absurdity of it all, like in Chester Himes’s great Blind Man with a Pistol (1969).  If Crane had lived longer, he might well have written a story with that title.

Wonderful epithets - Stephen Crane rattles some words around

I see that The Portable Stephen Crane also divvies up his work by geography, although with less prosaic names.  “The World of Maggie” (New York City), “A World of Shipwreck” (the “Open Boat” incident), “A World of Ironies.”  The latter could cover any place in which Crane set foot.  In this book, it is the home of Crane’s Western and Mexican stories, among others, killers like “The Blue Hotel” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” Crane’s proto-Westerns.

Funny how much these stories look like what we now call Westerns.  If I knew how to use the word “tropes” I would use it here.  Like I know from tropes.

Crane’s voice is at full power.  It’s a screwy voice, but strong.  Some examples:

The punchers spent most of the morning in an attack on whiskey which was too earnest to be noisey.  (“Twelve O’Clock,” 830)

There is a kind of corn whiskey bred in Florida which the natives declare is potent in the proportion of seven fights to a drink.  (“Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure,” 916)

When the second engineer came to separate the combatants, he was sincere in his efforts, and he came near to disabling them for life.  (“Flanagan,” 916-7)

Taking up a strategic position, the man howled a challenge.  But this house regarded him as might a great stone god.  It gave no sign.  After a decent wait, the man howled further challenges, mingling them with wonderful epithets.

Presently there came the spectacle of a man churning himself into deepest rage over the immobility of a house.  (“The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” 796)

I wanted to use even more of that last.  “Yellow Sky” gets pretty close to putting some kind of reward in  every passage, something for a reader to suck on for a while.  An image or metaphor or oddly employed verb or adjective.  Churning himself into a rage.  Wonderful epithets.  He was sincere in his efforts.

Last year I read a couple of Charles Portis novels, Norwood (1966) and The Dog of the South (1979), both comic picaresques that begin and end in Texas, where several of these Crane stories are set.  Portis’s voice is hard to describe.  Off kilter.  Precise but somehow wrong, like the narrator can’t quite see straight. 

At last a man was afflicted with a stroke of dice-shaking. (“The Five White Mice,” 758)

The sailors charged three times upon the plate-glass front of the saloon, and when they had finished, it looked as if it had been the victim of a rural fire company’s success in saving it from the flames.  (“A Man and Some Others,” 776)

The prose matches the ethos.  “Twelve O’Clock” is about a series of murders caused by a cuckoo clock, or perhaps by man’s endless sense of wonder, a sense shared by the author. A cuckoo clock is a marvelous thing.  “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” is about what happens when there is a mismatch between style and ethos.  Maybe some other stories are about the same thing.  In Crane’s stories, style is an instrument of fate.

Page numbers from the Library of America collection.

Nibbling the sacred cheese of life with Stephen Crane

Reading Stephen Crane in – not in bulk – in handfuls, in heaps – has been rewarding.  He was an astounding short story writer, with a wide range of subject, tone, and rhetorical flash.  He was moving fast, too.

I have been working on his stories, journalism, hybrid non-fiction, sketches, etc. collected in the Library of America volume of Stephen Crane, a heck of a book.  That edition leads off with the novels and novellas then divides the shorter stuff by time and place, which makes sense for a wandering reporter like Crane – New York City, the Civil War detour, Mexico, Florida, Greece, Cuba, etc., all of which generated good fiction aside from whatever he was writing for newspapers to make a living.

I reconstructed Crane’s books to some degree, regrouping the short stories into The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure (1898) and The Monster and Other Stories (1899, with an expanded English edition in 1901).  The former is a terrific book and it is a shame to break it up; the latter, in either form, makes no sense as a book and is best left in pieces.

I took a break from Crane, but the next book will be Wounds in the Rain (1900), stories from Cuba about the Spanish-American War, which Christopher Benfey has said is Crane’s most underrated and underread book.  Looking forward to that.

I skipped the novellas George’s Mother (1896) and The Third Violet (1897).  And I read Crane’s second tiny, original book of poems, War Is Kind (1899).  So that’s the logistical overview.  Anyone have strong positive feelings about those novellas?

As good as the Civil War stories were – as good as almost all of this material is – “The Open Boat” is such a triumph that it casts a dark shadow.  Crane was on his way to Cuba to cover the revolution; the leaky tub full of arms and mercenaries sank in a squall and Crane and three other men found themselves in a boat not designed for such conditions.

Many a man ought to have a bath-tub larger than the boat which here rode upon the sea.  These waves were most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall, and each froth-top was a problem in small boat navigation.  (part I).

The situation is rich in descriptive, metaphorical, and ethical possibilities.  Crane’s great stroke, though, is the duel narration, the way the omniscient narrator, heard above, interacts with the limited point of view of “the correspondent,” who just rows and sleeps  - he “watched the waves and wondered why he was there.”  He can rarely see over the top of the waves, while this other narrator perceives the cosmos.

They are both Crane, that’s the fun, right?  Retrospective, artistic, metaphysical Crane, recollecting in tranquility, and a Crane trapped in a particular moment, a moment that stretches for days, as a rowing machine who also thinks:

“If I am going to be drowned – if I am going to be drowned – if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?  Was I brought here merely to have my nose dragged away as I was about to nibble the sacred cheese of life?”  (part IV)

The omniscient narrator finds that last phrase hilarious.  It is not clear whether Crane-the-rower has as strong a sense of the ridiculous.

Crane and two of his companions survived; one drowned, randomly, utterly arbitrarily.  That man’s death is the great mystery and tragedy, or perhaps comedy, of “The Open Boat.”  Crane wrote two other versions of the story, a piece of reportage (“Stephen Crane’s Own Story”) and a story from the ship captain’s point of view (“Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure”), both of which make the artistry of “The Open Boat” look all the greater.  All three serve as tributes to Billy Higgins, oiler, who died in place of Stephen Crane.

Crane and Twain put some comedy in their recital - The Private History of a Campaign that Failed

Crane writes about courage in its different forms in the stories in The Little Regiment, just as he does in The Red Badge of Courage.  I thought I should write “courage and cowardice,” but in the stories, unlike the novel, there is little in the way of cowardice.  The courageous characters are not just soldiers but also civilians, young women caught among invading troops, or the inhabitants of an Indiana town worried that a “rebel” is stealing their chickens – well, there is plenty of cowardice in that one (“The Indiana Campaign,” but it is played for laughs), or even the protagonist of Red Badge, brought back as an old man, courageous enough in his own interest at least.  The novel is condensed into a couple of paragraphs.  “Evidently he appreciated some comedy in this recital.”

Bierce’s war stories were generally sources of comedy, too, not just in his fiction but as much or more so in his memoirs, in Bits of Autobiography (1909), where his tone is permanently amused.  But Bierce finds death as a concept to be amusing, which is not Crane’s position, however their sense of irony might overlap; nor is it the position of Mark Twain in “The Private History of a Campaign that Failed” (1885), his memoir of his wartime “service” as a Missouri irregular on the side of the Confederacy.

Among the ironies of the title is the fact that Twain succeeded in getting out of the war without doing too much, or possibly any, harm.

There was more Bull Run material scattered through the early camps of this country than exhibited itself at Bull Run.  And yet it learned its trade presently, and helped to fight the great battles later.  I could have become a soldier myself, if I had waited.  I had got part of it learned; I knew more about retreating than the man that invented retreating.

The story of a bunch of Tom Sawyers playing soldier in the woods and retreating whenever a rumor passes by is well built for amusement:

Then we formed in line of battle and marched four miles to a shady and pleasant piece of woods on the border of the far-reaching expanses of a flowery prairie.  It was an enchanting region for war – our kind of war.

No one follows orders; no one knows how to ride a horse; no one knows much of anything.  The captain is named Dunlap, but since he “was young, ignorant, good-natured, well-meaning, trivial, full of romance, and given to reading chivalric novels and singing forlorn love-ditties” he Frenchifies his name to d’un Lap.  The great skill of this Missouri Quixote is giving names to the soldiers’ camps.

I am taking “The Private History” as a memoir, but it is likely full of lies.  The lies are at least consistent with other lies Twain tells in other works.  The episode I doubt the most is the one where Twain and his comrades fire on a man and kill him.

My campaign was spoiled.  It seemed to me that I was not rightly equipped for this awful business; that war was intended for men, and I for a child’s nurse.  I resolved to retire from this avocation of sham soldiership while I could save some remnant of my self-respect.

And like Huck Finn will later, or earlier, Twain lights out for the Territory.

Stephen Crane's Civil War stories - the stupid water derided him

I could use a book on Stephen Crane’s reading, too.  Or I could look at a Stephen Crane biography, I guess.  The research could be fruitless, though.  His first novel, Maggie (1893), has some superficial resemblance to Zola’s L’Assommoir (1877), and I sure saw a French touch in Crane’s prose.  Had Crane read that novel, or any Zola at all?  It turns out that no one has any idea.  Maybe.

Crane’s Civil War fiction is turning out to be the puzzler.  Mostly, Crane wrote fiction like the journalist he was – he went to the Bowery and wrote stories about the Bowery; trips to the American West and Cuba led to stories about the West and Cuba.  He spent days struggling to get ashore in an open boat, and the result was “The Open Boat.”  But The Red Badge of Courage (1895) and the stories in The Little Regiment and Other Episodes of the Civil War (1896) came out of nowhere.  From Crane’s reading, from his imagination.

Ambrose Bierce, a veteran who fought on many battlefields, published Tales of Soldiers and Civilians in 1891.  An ignoramus, if I had no knowledge of the authors I doubt I would be able to guess which one was the authentic soldier.  If anything, I would likely guess wrong, since Bierce’s stories so often center on bizarre phenomena and unlikely occurrences.  Crane is more grounded, although some of his subjects are also unusual, like the soldier in “A Mystery of Heroism” who risks death for a drink of water because of some badly understood peer effect:

The canteen filled with a maddening slowness in the manner of all bottles.  Presently he recovered his strength and addressed a screaming oath to it…  The stupid water derided him.

But when I say Bierce is bizarre, I mean a story ends with a soldier launched into the air by a tree-catapult, something really odd.  The act of genuine but pointless heroism in the Crane story is an ordinary phenomenon of war.

That passage does show the true oddness of Crane, his style.  Oddest of all is “The Little Regiment,” about the conflicts of two brothers in the same infantry unit.  The opening is terrific:

The fog made the clothes of the column of men in the roadway seem of a luminous quality.  It imparted to the heavy infantry overcoats a new color, a kind of blue which was so pale that a regiment might have been merely a long, low shadow in the mist.  However, a muttering, one part grumble, three parts joke, hovered in the air above the thick ranks, and blended in an undertoned roar, which was the voice of the column.

More of this for a couple of pages, the regiment stationed behind the battle, just artillery at this point, a scene of great strangeness but made stranger by Crane’s metaphors and sensory details:

The fog was as cold as wet clothes…  The machinery of orders had rooted these soldiers deeply into the mud precisely as almighty nature roots mullein stalks.

A little bit French, right?  Maybe also what we now call “over-written.”  Written, at least, definitely written.

Ah, I think there were braver deeds - Stephen Crane's Black Riders

Stephen Crane’s The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895) is a strange little book, but maybe not as strange as I first thought.  Although commonly classified as poetry, I note that Crane is careful to make a vaguer (or more specific?) claim in his title.

Poetry anthologists pick out the most striking, weirdest bits of the book, making it seem stranger than it is.  But also less strange.  The original text looks like this:

Please imagine the rest of the blank page.  I am diluting the effect just be eliminating the white space.  This bizarrerie floats atop the page.  This poem still jolts me, one jolt after another – the heart, the narrator’s strange question, the creature’s stranger answer.

Taken one after another, though, I find in the 68 pieces a lot of conventional sentiments and flat statements among the surprises:

LXVI

IF I SHOULD CAST OFF THIS TATTERED COAT
AND GO FREE INTO THE MIGHTY SKY ;
IF I SHOULD FIND NOTHING THERE
BUT A VAST BLUE,
ECHOLESS, IGNORANT, --
WHAT THEN?

Is that readable?  I think I know why anthologists turn off the all-caps.  The failure of the speaker to find a noun is interesting, but otherwise Crane is giving a conventional idea an unusual typographic package.  If they were recast, would they have the same effect, or any effect at all?

LVI

A man feared that he might find an assassin; another that he might find a victim.  One was more wise than the other.

versus (plus lots of white space):

Still, in a dozen or so poems, in a line or image, I just marvel.  Where did Crane get this stuff:

I

Black riders came from the sea.
There was clang and clang of spear and shield,
and clash and clash of hoof and heel,
wild shouts and the wave of hair
in the rush upon the wind:
thus the ride of sin.

Crane had been writing about battles, for example in The Red Badge of Courage, published in the same year, but here he moves back to something like a ballad, like he is translating from the Old English.  I find it hard not to think of Tolkien, although he reverses the scene, doesn’t he, with the water going after the black riders.

Many of the other poems hover around Crane’s novel.  References to bravery and cowardice are frequent.  “’Tell brave deeds of war,’” poem XV begins, which is just what Crane had been doing, what he was still doing in the 1896 collection The Little Regiment and Other Episodes of the Civil War, but at the end the poet is skeptical – “Ah, I think there were braver deeds.”  Surely there are.

Stephen Crane's Maggie - similes in the Bowery - and then I slugged him

I started my little bit of American reading early, before Christmas, which means for a while I will make remarks about books I read weeks ago and barely remember.

Let’s start with Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), Stephen Crane’s first book, a novella about poverty in the Bowery when it was full of immigrant tenements.  Now it has a Whole Foods and a branch of Momofuku and I couldn’t afford to live there.  Crane was a young reporter slumming in Bowery bars for research purposes only.  That research was poured in to Maggie.

Maggie is pretty and innocent, a bad combination.  Her parents are violent alcoholics, her brother Jimmie merely violent.  “He menaced mankind at the intersections of streets” (Ch. 4).  He gets a job as a truck driver, though, and turns out all right.  His truck is pulled by horses.  The sociological detail of Maggie is often a lot of fun, and this little chapter about the life of a wagon driver in high-traffic Manhattan is full of good examples – Jimmie’s fear of fire engines and contempt for pedestrians and street cars.

At first his tongue strove with these beings, but he eventually was superior.  He became immured like an African cow.  In him grew a majestic contempt for those strings of street cars that followed him like intent bugs.  (Ch. 4)

Those similes, oh yeah.

In a room a woman sat at a table eating like a fat monk in a picture.  (Ch. 19)

The little boy ran to the halls, shrieking like a monk in an earthquake.  (Ch. 2)

He waved his hands like a man of the world, who dismisses religion and philosophy, and says “Fudge.”  (Ch. 5)

The authentic Bowery dialogue was a problem for me:

“‘Gee,’ I says, ‘gee!  Deh hell I am,’ I says.  ‘Deh hell I am,’ like dat.  An’ den I slugged ‘im.  See?”  (Ch. 6)

The problem was that I found it so funny, because of its association with Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson – no, because of parodies of Cagney and Robinson in cartoons.  All of the men in Maggie talk like cartoon gangsters.  Perhaps younger readers will not have been corrupted by Bugs Bunny and can more soberly appreciate the dialogue.

Pete took note of Maggie.

“Say, Mag, I’m stuck on yer shape.  It’s outa sight,” he said, parenthetically, with an affable grin.  (Ch. 6)

Or maybe not.  “Parenthetically.”

Crane writes like he has a case of the jitters.  In a couple of years, in The Red Badge of Courage (1895), he will have calmed down some.  I call that an improvement, but whatever the oddities of Maggie, it pops and fizzes.