The Complete Short Stories and Sketches of Stephen Crane Page 2

  One can anticipate further discoveries of manuscripts, but for the moment this volume is the most complete collection of Crane’s short fiction. I have not included any fragments of short stories, many of which are now in the possession of Special Collections at Columbia University. These include, among others, “Art in Kansas City,” “The Fire Tribe and the White Face,” “A Flurry of Condensed Milk,” and “In the Country of Rhimers and Writers.” They are all of some interest. Nor have I included the generous gifts of Clifton Waller Barrett—“Brer Washington’s Consolation” and “The Ideal and the Real.” Both stories have missing passages, and imaginative guesswork could not solve them. In all, two stories in this collection (“Dan Emmonds” and “The Camel”) have never been published; twenty-one others have never been collected in book form; and one other has never been published in the United States.

  I owe a deep debt of gratitude to many people, individually and collectively, who helped to make this volume possible. I want to take this opportunity to thank the following: Mr. Harold Kuebler of Doubleday, for his interest, which brought this project into being; Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., copyright holders of Crane’s work, for allowing me to reprint these stories; Ronald Baughman, Head of Special Collections at Columbia University, for granting me permission to reprint Crane’s unpublished stories; Mr. Clifton Waller Barrett, for contributing greatly to the progess of Crane scholarship; and Vice-President Ernest Hartung and the University Research Committee of the University of Rhode Island, for grant-in-aid funds.

  I owe special thanks to Mr. Robert H. Rhodes, in charge of interlibrary loans at the University of Rhode Island, for his patient help in acquiring many materials. I wish to express my thanks also to the library staffs of Wisconsin, Dartmouth, University of Virginia, New York Public Library, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Syracuse University, Huntington Library, Free Public Library of Philadelphia, and the Detroit Public Library.

  Finally, I want to acknowledge my indebtedness to all previous Crane scholarship, especially the following: Ames W. Williams and Vincent Starrett, Stephen Crane: A Bibliography (1948); Stephen Crane: An Exhibition of His Writings (1956), arranged and described by Joan H. Baum; Maurice Beebe and Thomas A. Gullason, “Criticism of Stephen Crane: A Selected Checklist with an Index to Studies of Separate Works,” Modern Fiction Studies (Autumn, 1959).

  University of Rhode Island

  Kingston, Rhode Island

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  Introduction

  Sketches from Life: Uncle Jake and the Bell Handle

  The King’s Favor

  A Foreign Policy, in Three Glimpses:

  First Glimpse

  Second Glimpse

  Third Glimpse

  The Camel

  Dan Emmonds

  Four Men in a Cave: Likewise Four Queens, and a Sullivan County Hermit

  Travels in New York: The Broken-Down Van

  The Octopush: A Sullivan County Nocturne [The Fishermen]

  A Ghoul’s Accountant: The Story of a Sullivan County Produce Deal

  The Black Dog: A Night of Spectral Terror

  Killing His Bear: A Winter Tragedy with Three Actors

  The Captain

  A Tent in Agony: A Sullivan County Sketch

  The Cry of a Huckleberry Pudding: A Dim Study of Camping Experiences

  An Explosion of Seven Babies: A Sullivan County Episode

  The Mesmeric Mountain: A Tale of Sullivan County

  The Holler Tree: A Sullivan County Sketch

  Across the Covered Pit

  Why Did the Young Clerk Swear? Or, The Unsatisfactory French

  The Pace of Youth

  The Reluctant Voyagers

  A Desertion

  An Experiment in Misery

  An Experiment in Luxury

  An Ominous Baby

  A Great Mistake

  A Dark Brown Dog

  Billie Atkins Went to Omaha [An American Tramp’s Excursion]

  Mr. Binks’ Day Off: A Study of a Clerk’s Holiday

  The Men in the Storm

  Coney Island’s Failing Days

  In a Park Row Restaurant

  Stories Told by an Artist: A Tale about How “Great Grief” Got His Holiday Dinner [Great Grief’s Holiday Dinner]

  The Silver Pageant

  When Every One Is Panic Stricken [The Fire]

  When a Man Falls a Crowd Gathers [A Street Scene in New York]

  The Duel That Was Not Fought

  A Christmas Dinner Won in Battle

  A Lovely Jag in a Crowded Car

  A Mystery of Heroism

  A Gray Sleeve

  The Judgment of the Sage

  One Dash—Horses [Horses—One Dash]

  A Tale of Mere Chance: Being an Account of the Pursuit of the Tiles, the Statement of the Clock, and the Grip of a Coat of Orange Spots, together with some Criticism of a Detective said to be Carved from an Old Table Leg [The White Tiles]

  Three Miraculous Soldiers

  A Freight Car Incident [A Texas Legend]

  The Little Regiment

  The Veteran

  The Snake

  Raft Story

  An Indiana Campaign

  In the Tenderloin: A Duel Between an Alarm Clock and a Suicidal Purpose

  A Detail

  The Voice of the Mountain

  Yen-Nock Bill and His Sweetheart

  Diamonds and Diamonds

  An Eloquence of Grief

  The Auction

  A Poker Game

  A Man and Some Others

  The Open Boat

  How the Donkey Lifted the Hills

  The Victory of the Moon

  Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure

  An Old Man Goes Wooing

  A Fishing Village

  The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky

  Death and the Child

  The Five White Mice

  The Wise Men

  The Monster

  His New Mittens

  The Blue Hotel

  The Price of the Harness [The Woof of Thin Red Threds]

  A Self-Made Man: An Example of Success That Any One Can Follow

  The Clan of No-Name

  God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen

  The Lone Charge of William B. Perkins

  The Angel Child

  Lynx-Hunting

  The Revenge of the Adolphus

  The Sergeant’s Private Madhouse

  The Battle of Forty Fort

  The Surrender of Forty Fort

  “Ol’ Bennet” and the Indians

  The Lover and the Telltale

  “Showin’ Off”

  Virtue in War [West Pointer and Volunteer; or, Virtue in War]

  Making an Orator

  Twelve O’Clock

  The Second Generation

  An Episode of War

  Shame

  The Carriage-Lamps

  The Kicking Twelfth [“Kim up, the Kickers!”]

  The Shrapnel of Their Friends

  “And If He Wills, We Must Die” [The End of the Battle]

  The Upturned Face

  The Knife

  The Stove

  Moonlight on the Snow

  The Trial, Execution, and Burial of Homer Phelps

  An Illusion in Red and White

  The Fight

  This Majestic Lie

  The City Urchin and the Chaste Villagers

  Manacled

  A Little Pilgrimage [A Little Pilgrim]

  At the Pit Door

  The Squire’s Madness

  The Man from Duluth

  A Man by the Name of Mud

  Stephen Crane: A Chronology

  INTRODUCTION

  Stephen Crane’s literary reputation is based mainly on his Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), and periodic world wars have helped to perpetuate this condition. This has handicapped Crane’s real importance in at least
three ways: it implies that he had only one theme—war; it minimizes his significance as a short story writer; and it suggests that anything he wrote after 1895 was anticlimactic. In reality, Stephen Crane dealt with a variety of themes; he was consistently drawn to short fiction; and his best writing was done in this medium, between 1897 and 1900, the years of “The Open Boat,” “The Blue Hotel,” “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” “The Monster,” “Death and the Child,” “The Price of the Harness,” “An Episode of War,” “The Upturned Face,” and Whilomville Stories. Ernest Hemingway, with whom Crane has often been compared, had a similar fate. Almost always Hemingway was identified with his novels—A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, and For Whom the Bell Tolls—though his major achievement was in the realm of the short story.

  Countless other practitioners of both short and long fiction have, in the end, been judged mainly by their novels. Generally, critics and readers look upon the short story as something light, ephemeral, narrow, insubstantial—a spare-time art. The editor of The Critic, in 1887, went so far as to say: “As a rule, the short story is produced in youth, while the novel is a product of experience.” Nonetheless, America has had a long and distinguished list of short story writers, though the very few essays and books of criticism on the theory and practice of short fiction clearly indicate that it is still not taken seriously. By contrast, there has been an avalanche of books on the novel and novelists. In his Modern Short Story (1941) H. E. Bates, the distinguished writer and critic, admits: “The short story, though much practised, is still a misunderstood and neglected form in the mind of the public.” The judgment of William Faulkner (and other novelists) may one day create a healthier climate: “… the short story … is the most demanding form after poetry.” For like poetry, the short story is brief and seems transitory, but it can have rich and momentous implications.

  Though Stephen Crane did not begin his literary career as a poet, he felt that his best work was done in his volume of poems, The Black Riders (1895). He was fond of its “ethical sense” which reflected his “ideas of life as a whole”; specifically, the volume contained abstracts of the ideas of his fiction. But Crane probably realized that in his verse he sounded too much like a preacher reading sermons (he despised “preaching” in art) and that he was too cryptic. The endless parodies of his work, and the lack of a wide, appreciative audience made him return to poetry only once more, in 1899, with War Is Kind. Still, the best features of his poetic technique were carried over into his fiction so that Crane is, as Carl Van Doren once stated, a “kind of poet among storytellers.”

  Devoting himself primarily to prose fiction, Crane wrote other novels besides The Red Badge: Maggie (1893), George’s Mother (1896), The Third Violet (1897), Active Service (1899), and The O’Ruddy (1903). Most of these were short novels, and even here Crane had a psychological block against length. He was still attracted to the brevity of his poems. A reader of Edgar Allan Poe’s work, he may have been influenced by Poe’s theories on length versus brevity, as seen in “The Poetic Principle” and “The Philosophy of Composition.” Crane rightly sensed that he functioned best in short episodes and dramatic scenes, where he gained in concentration, in taut power, and in unity (the “totality of effect or impression”). Usually in his longer novels, especially Active Service and The O’Ruddy, Crane lost his sustained control, and his effects were sprawling and melodramatic. The reverse was true of The Third Violet, where many scenes in the novel “were too compressed.”

  Crane had a perpetual warfare with the novel form. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and War and Peace he considered too long, especially the latter, which he felt could have been done in “one third of the time.… It goes on and on like Texas.” Zola’s novels bored him, particularly the length of Nana; and in a general summary of this work, he said: “He hangs one thing to another and his story goes along but I find him pretty tiresome.” He was critical of the long novels of Mark Twain; he thought Thomas Hardy overtreated his materials, and that Henry James was too “diffuse.” Even his own Red Badge Crane considered too long. His ideal was simply this: “I like my art straight”; and he could have added, “I like it brief.” The reality was that he defeated himself in his lengthy novels. Two of Crane’s ardent champions saw this waste of talent. Edward Garnett said bluntly: “Crane ought never to have essayed the form of the novel.” And H. L. Mencken believed that Crane’s method “was grossly ill-adapted to the novel,” for he “had no literary small talk.” This was one of many contradictions in Crane’s art and life. He instinctively understood the pitfalls of length, but because he knew that writing novels meant the possibility of more money and a larger audience, he wrote potboilers like Active Service (coaxed along by Harold Frederic) and The O’Ruddy to capitalize on the public’s hunger for romances.

  Along with his theory of brevity, Crane was impressed by the rich tradition of the short story and by the growing number of magazines in the 1890s which provided a ready market. Rudyard Kipling, whose stories were very popular in the 1880s and 1890s, won a temporary convert in Crane, who later renounced his “clever” school of writing in 1892. Ambrose Bierce’s Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) excited him, and pointing specifically to “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” Crane said: “Nothing better exists. That story contains everything.” He knew Maupassant’s work (at least through Henry James’s critical essays), Bret Harte’s early California sketches, and Mark Twain’s Western tales. His close friendship with Hamlin Garland may have led Crane to the Mid-westerner’s Main-Travelled Roads (1891). Finally, the largest single inspiration on Crane seems to have been Poe. Thomas Beer mentions that “Crane liked Poe’s rhythmic prose as a boy.” And in 1895, when Willa Cather met Crane in Lincoln, Nebraska, she found him “reading a little volume of Poe that he carried in his pocket.” Often accused of a lack of bookishness by the critics, Crane was really secretive about his reading habits. In his own library, Crane had novels and tales by Kipling, Henry Fielding, Harold Frederic, Henry James, and Sir Walter Scott, not to mention works by members of his own family; and he knew the writings of William Dean Howells, Balzac, Dostoevsky, and others. Whenever he was engaged in literary discusssions relating to influences on his work, he feigned ignorance of authors, especially French. On one occasion, when asked about Stéphane Mallarmé, he said: “I don’t know much about Irish authors.” In the little-known story “Why Did the Young Clerk Swear?” (1893), the hero becomes disenchanted with a French romantic novel.

  Before Crane turned to fiction, he seemed destined to join a family of journalists. His father, the minister Jonathan Townley Crane, wrote for religious periodicals; his mother served as a reporter for the Philadelphia Press and the New York Tribune; and his older brothers Townley and Wilbur were correspondents for the Tribune. By 1888, at the age of sixteen, young Crane assisted his brother Townley during the summer months at Asbury Park, and by 1891 and 1892 he was contributing his own pieces to the newspapers. However, in 1892, Crane’s promising career with the Tribune ended (both he and his brother Townley were presumably fired) when he wrote a dispatch, “On the New Jersey Coast” (August 21), that read like a caustic editorial. With his sardonic irony, he mocked bourgeois values, Asbury Park itself, and labor, represented by the parading members of the Junior Order of United American Mechanics. From this experience Crane must have developed one of his pet theories—“Preaching is fatal to art in literature”; “An artist has no business to preach.” Later, whether in feature articles or short fiction, Crane sometimes went to extremes: he preached as though from a pulpit, for he was the son of a Methodist minister; he detached himself so completely that his implied moral in Maggie, for example, was not understood, and he was charged instead with “cruelty.”

  It was Willis Johnson, day editor of the Tribune and a friend of Crane’s father, who advised the young man to devote all his time to fiction, for news reporting was not the place for his “subtle rhetorical tricks.” Though Crane accepted his advice and began to produce
more fiction, he never gave up journalism altogether. Crane had jobs, some quite brief, on other New York newspapers: the Sun, Press, Herald, Journal, and World. Practicing journalists quickly realized that Crane had little interest in factual news as such and less interest in the demands of his copy editors. Often editors, like Curtis Brown, thought his few contributions were “queer.” On rare occasions was his reportage found satisfactory. Hamlin Garland was pleased with Crane’s accurate account of his lecture on William Dean Howells (New York Tribune, August 18, 1891).

  Nonetheless, Stephen Crane’s “romance” with journalism was lifelong. In his first literary essay, “Henry M. Stanley,” written in 1890, Crane idealized Stanley, once correspondent for the New York Herald, as a symbol of the brave adventurer, the soldier of fortune, and the Christian gentleman. Years later during the Spanish-American War of 1898, Crane, as war correspondent, displayed these very same traits. He wanted to prove himself both as a man and as a reporter. Many other fiction writers, like Bret Harte, Rudyard Kipling, and Theodore Dreiser had a “romance” with journalism. However, Crane’s time, the 1890s in New York, was the most sensational period in newspaper history. It was the era of yellow journalism, of Joseph Pulitzer, and of William Randolph Hearst. Newspaper work was a “battling apprenticeship” for Crane, but it was worth it.

  Many critics, however, have argued as sincerely as Amy Lowell—“Crane was the last man in this world who should have attempted newspaper writing”—but Crane did not waste his newspaper experience. In his feature articles he gradually refined his rhetorical devices and his impressionistic manner. One episode in 1898 suggested this. An editor, about to release a Crane dispatch, said: “I dropped a few adjectives here and there, Steve. This has to be news, sent at cable rates. You can save your flubdub and shoot it to New York by mail. What I want is the straight story of the fight.” In his day-to-day routine as a reporter, Crane also found readymade subjects for his real fiction. He became a student of the American scene and a shrewd social critic. He watched the mannerisms of the people in the Bowery; he listened to their speech patterns; he “felt” their suffering. He saw the wealth of the few and the poverty of the many, and this gave him deeper insight into the terrors of environment and the need for reform. Some of his “protest” stories include “An Experiment in Misery,” “An Ominous Baby,” and “An Experiment in Luxury.” His literary philosophy—partly naturalistic—developed from his close observation of the violent and subhuman life of the slum dwellers. This revealed more clearly than ever before his humanitarianism, a trait which he admired in his favorite author, Tolstoy. Like Walt Whitman, he too felt a kinship for the oppressed: the prostitute, the dope addict, and the hobo. These New York experiences were probably responsible for turning him to socialism for two weeks, but “when a couple of Socialists assured me I had no right to think differently from any other Socialist and then quarreled with each other about what Socialism meant, I ran away.”