Little “Stevie” was a frail and sensitive child. His father died when he was young, and then his evangelist mother died, and he was left to grope his way alone. We find him turning up at a military academy with a reputation as a baseball player, also with six pipes—which was six too many for a lad who was to die from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-nine. He picked up a living doing odd newspaper jobs, and then he went to Syracuse University. Most singular, prank of history, that James Roscoe Day, D.D., Sc.D., LL.D., D.C.L., L.H.D., Chancellor of the University of Heaven (see “The Goose-Step”), should have had in charge the intellectual and moral training of the author of “Maggie: A Girl of the Street”!
This boy had pathetic courage, and absolutely original opinions, even from the beginning. His young verdict was that Tennyson was “swill” and Oscar Wilde “a mildewed chump.” That, of course, was merely calling names; but in addition he had the oddest and most charming gift of humor. Of his mother he said, “You could argue as well with a wave.”
Having got through with college at the age of twenty, he went to New York to live in a garret and starve for the sake of his independence. He chose the Bowery for his school of art; these being the old days of the wicked street, before the respectable, hard-working Jews took possession; the days when all New York gloried in its “toughness,” and when now and again in the filthy old alleys they raked out a human corpse from a pile of ill-smelling rubbish. Here the boy wrote his first novel, “Maggie,” dealing with a girl whose drunken parents beat her and drove her on to the streets. It was an entirely new note in American literature, because it told the truth about these things quite simply and as a matter of course, without apology or sentimentality.
The young author took it to Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the “Century Magazine,” and went back, hungry and shivering with cold, to get the verdict. The “Century” was one of the four great magazines which determined the destiny of American authors; its policy was guided by the fact that it had “half the expectant mothers in America” on its subscription list. Gilder said that he could not publish “Maggie”; and after he had made long-winded explanations, Stephen boiled them down to one sentence, as was his custom. “You mean that the story is too honest?” And Gilder was honest enough to answer that he did.
Reading about this garret existence sends shivers over my skin; because it was only ten years later that I was to live the same life, and have the same experiences in the same editorial offices. I also took manuscripts to Gilder and was turned down. The same publisher who accepted “The Red Badge of Courage,” and made a fortune out of it, accepted also “The Journal of Arthur Stirling,” and tricked me into signing a contract out of which I never got a cent.
All his life Stephen Crane had heard the war stories of old soldiers—not what you read in the official history books, but the real things that men had felt and done. He decided upon this theme, and read up his “local color,” and in ten quivering nights he produced “The Red Badge of Courage.” At last he had a success; a newspaper syndicate paid him a hundred dollars for the serial rights! He waited a year or two longer, and then it came out in book form. It sold fairly well, until suddenly the English critics went wild over it, and then New York knew that it had a man of genius.
The realists had been ruling the literary roost, insisting that you must portray life by describing its external details. But this boy had a new idea; the interesting thing to him was the way people felt, and details merely served to reveal the human spirit. He was not afraid to describe emotions as having colors. So here was a new kind of fiction, called “impressionism”; and the realists were laid on the shelf for a while.
“Stevie” made a small fortune, and no longer drank his drinks in the saloons of the Bowery, but in the high-priced cafés on Broadway. He wrote short stories and sketches, and verses without rhyme or rhythm, which puzzled the critics—I remember that in my student days they were the joke of the newspaper paragraphers. The gossips got busy with him, of course, and a legend was built up concerning the extent of his revolt against social conventions. His biographer, Thomas Beer, defends him vigorously against these tales. It seems clear that he did not take drugs; while, as to his drinking, we can only repeat what we said about the pipes—any drinking at all was too much for a man who was to die of tuberculosis in a few years.
As to the women stories, they seem to have been partly blackmail, and partly the young writer’s imprudent notions of chivalry. He was talking with a girl of the streets in a saloon, and a policeman arrested the girl, and Crane came into court to testify in her behalf, and so of course got himself in for a lot of disagreeable publicity. It would have been so easy for him to avoid that, by having the ordinary caution of a man of the world. If only he had been willing to learn from Mark Twain and William Dean Howells how to dodge the shadow of a scandal!
The life of this wayward child of genius is one more illustration of that disagreeable alternative which life so often presents us. You may have self-restraint, plus more or less hypocrisy, and live long and successfully; or you may have do-as-you-please, plus absolute honesty, and undermine your constitution and die at the age of twenty-nine. The mind of Stephen Crane was like an acid which dissolved the shams and pretenses of civilization. But he has nothing to put in the place of these things. In “The Red Badge of Courage” he shows us a hero blind with fear; and the theme of all his short stories and later novels is that life is a matter of accident, and the universe a thing without moral sense or meaning. This belief Crane put also into his conduct; he knew nothing to do with his life, except that he had a childish wish to see a real war with his own eyes. First he tried to get to Cuba, and was shipwrecked; and while he got a good story out of that, “The Open Boat,” he paid with a part of his very small store of vitality. Then he went to Greece, but the cooking made him ill. Finally he saw our war in Cuba, and displayed such indifference to his own fate that the tongues of the gossips wagged faster than ever. He must be seeking death, because of some dark scandal hanging over his head!