THE BOWERY BOY
We come now to another one of those unhappy tales of young rebellious
geniuses who cannot or will not fit themselves into the bourgeois world.
This time it is Stephen Crane, who was the fourteenth child of a
Methodist preacher and an evangelist mother, and was born in Newark,
New Jersey; which goes to prove that a genius may spring up anywhere in
the world.
There is an old saying that a preacher’s son always turns out to be a
rake. I don’t suppose that statistically this statement could be
justified, but psychologically we should expect such cases; for other
children get religion once a week, but the children of clergymen get it
all the time. The tragedy of poor “Stevie” Crane reveals to us the folly
of attaching fundamental moral principles to incredible fairy tales.
When the child grows up and finds that he no longer believes the tales,
he is apt to conclude that the moral principles are equally false and
superfluous.
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!
He was altogether out of step with the 1890’s; but now a new generation
has come, and all our young intellectuals are cold and objective and
cynical, agreeing that pity is a mistake and life nothing in particular.
They leave to me the unpleasant task of holding uninvited post-mortems
over the ardent unhappy dead.
Let me put it briefly: that some day there will be yet another
generation, which will realize that no man can get along without a
religion, least of all the creative artist. It will not be the Methodist
religion, but it will be something that gives young geniuses a reason
for taking care of themselves and their gifts.
There was one religion which Stephen Crane adopted for a period of two
weeks. He was a Socialist for that long--so he explains in a letter; but
he met two other Socialists, who told him his doctrines were wrong, and
then fell to quarreling as to which of the two was right. I say: Oh,
young Stephen Cranes of the future, judge truth by the tests of truth,
and not by our personal frailties and follies!