Pink Badge of Courage

In its brevity and intensity Stephen Crane’s life (as distinguished from Stephen Crane’s biography) has a Keatsian quality. But in the way Crane grappled with the problems of early fame and money, it is a peculiarly American life. One thinks of Bret Harte and Scott Fitzgerald. Crane was only twenty-four when, in 1895, he found himself famous on both sides of the Atlantic as the author of a totally imagined and totally realized “episode of the American Civil War,” The Red Badge of Courage. Here was a genius, said William Dean Howells, which had sprung to life “fully armed.” Challenged by sudden fame, which never brought with it a tenth of the riches he and his public expected, Crane led an increasingly desperate life as journalist and foreign correspondent, occasionally in direct competition with another golden boy of the era, Richard Harding Davis. He wrote some remarkable poetry, a handful of brilliant stories, and a number of potboilers and self-imitations.

by R. W. Stallman (Braziller, $12.50)

In 1896 Crane took up with Cora Taylor, the proprietress of Hotel de Dream, a fashionable sporting house in Jacksonville. Partly to escape American public opinion, which frowned on their relationship and which also, without foundation in fact, entertained dark suspicions that Crane was an alcoholic and a drug addict who had known life in the lower depths too well for his own good, he and Cora settled in England, just as Bret Harte had done. There he was lionized, was intimate with Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and other literary lights of London and East Sussex. A celebrity, he was plagued by unwelcome visitors whom he regarded as locusts but still entertained with free lunches and champagne. The visitors, together with his conviction that a famous writer had to live like a duke, drove him deeper and deeper in debt to the butcher, the wine merchant, and just about everyone around him. If he could only get in the clear, he seemed to be saying in telegrams imploring his agents and publishers for ten pounds here, twenty pounds there, advances against the “short stuff” that he had to grind out. Four months before his twenty-ninth birthday Crane was dead. Medically, the cause of death was tuberculosis. More generally, as A. J. Liebling once wrote, Crane died “of the cause most common among American middle-class males — anxiety about money.”

While making allowances for the fact that neither of the previous biographers, Thomas Beer (1923) and John Berryman (1950), had access to some important primary materials, R. W. Stallman, in Stephen Crane, writes them off, with varying degrees of justice, as inadequate: Beer, because his facts were shaky and because he prudishly scanted the relationship with Cora; and Berryman, largely because he offered psychoanalytic speculations of a sort and tendency which Stallman finds unacceptable. Since Professor Stallman is the reigning and pre-emptive authority on Crane, having edited or co-edited half a dozen books on the subject, including Crane’s Letters, it was inevitable that he should answer the call of that will-o’-the-wisp of American literary scholarship, “the definitive critical biography.”

I am sorry to have to report my opinion that his book is a disaster comparable with the one which befell the filibustering steamer Commodore, which was on its way to Cuba, with Crane as a passenger, when it foundered off the Florida coast. Crane alive made his way to shore (the experience was the basis for his best story, “The Open Boat”), but this, metaphorically speaking, is more than can be said about Crane, dead, in this biography.

Reacting against both Beer and Berryman, Professor Stallman has, on the one hand, given us more facts than he or we could possibly use or want — the book often reads like a Crane “log” or like notes for a biography. On the other hand, he has pretty consistently avoided or suppressed speculations of anything other than a purely circumstantial nature. So we come to the end of 534 pages of main text knowing a great deal about Crane — especially arrivals and departures, addresses and finances, the weather and the condition of the sea when the Commodore went down — but knowing Crane himself scarcely any better than we did at the beginning. The view throughout, except when Stallman is directly quoting Crane or Cora, is external and circumstantial, as if this were a necessary condition for “definitive” or any other kind of literary biography. And it is in this way precisely that Stallman, for all his lengthy critical discussions of Crane’s work, seems to have missed the lesson of Crane himself in The Red Badge of Courage: that “realism” consists in attempting to render objects and events in the personal and spontaneous terms by which the subject comprehends them.

Instead of making an imaginative leap into Crane’s inner life to find out what it was like for him. Stallman focuses on coordinate factuality, even when the fact at hand clearly cannot bear the sort of scrutiny he brings to it. Here, for example, is a scrap of Crane’s shipboard writing which Stallman quotes:

New York 290/261. Took up collection 43 dollars/ Captains own money pd to Paris. / In Paris, 100 police, commissioner of minister of interior./ Arrested in Marseilles No tickets./ Sharefe millionaire.

And here is Stallman’s gloss on the passage:

Everything about this note resists unriddling. It would seem that Crane took up a collection of $43 from the passengers, at the Captain’s suggestion, and what sum the Captain contributed was paid by a note against a Paris bank. Then in Paris, what? Police on parade? Or perhaps Crane had to appear before the Commissioner for the Minister of the Interior, about some passport difficulty. The stateroom numbers, as that’s what they seem to be, put Cora on the same ship with Stephen, but not in the same room.

The book is loaded with repetitions and narrative stumbles of a sort to bring the most determined reader to a dead stop, and even on his favorite level of detail Professor Stallman does not seem as reliable as he ought to be. A seven-line passage about the pseudonymous Ouida contains two terrible errors in the rendering of her real name and one substantive error which vitiates Crane’s review of her work by implying that Under Two Flags was one of her later novels. Edward Waterman Townsend, the author of Chimmie Fadden, a popular book of stories about New York life, appears correctly the first time, the second time as Edward E. Townsend, and the third time as the author of “Jimmie Fadden.” We are given a brief description of a certain barfly by a writer named “O’Henry,” but the only bar I associate this “O’Henry” with is a candy bar.

Slips like this are the least of it. The real sadness of Mr. Stallman’s book is that, like the men in “The Open Boat,” who every moment had to keep their eyes out for the next wave which might drown them all, the biographer and his readers are constantly in trouble and lose sight of the main thing, which is the spirit and inner workings and exigencies of Stephen Crane. “None of them,” said Crane in the opening line of his survival story, “knew the color of the sky.”