LI
A MAN WENT BEFORE A STRANGE GOD, —
THE GOD OF MANY MEN, SADLY WISE.
AND THE DEITY THUNDERED LOUDLY,
FAT WITH RAGE, AND PUFFING,
'KNEEL, MORTAL, AND CRINGE
'AND GROVEL AND DO HOMAGE
TO MY PARTICULARLY SUBLIME MAJESTY.'
THE MAN FLED
THEN THE MAN WENT TO ANOTHER GOD, —
THE GOD OF HIS INNER THOUGHTS.
AND THIS ONE LOOKED AT HIM
WITH SOFT EYES
LIT WITH INFINITE COMPREHENSION,
AND SAID, 'MY POOR CHILD!'
The Black Riders and Other Lines
1895
The first edition prints all the poems — or 'lines' as Crane insisted on calling them — in block capitals as replicated above. Subsequent editions omitted to do this, nullifying the effect of scare-mongering newspaper headlines the poet had intended to create.
[Untitled]
A newspaper is a collection of half injustices
Which, bawled by boys from mile to mile,
Spreads it curious opinion
To a million merciful and sneering men,
While families cuddle the joys of the fireside
When spurred by a tale of dire lone agony.
A newspaper is a court
Where every one is kindly and unfairly tried
By a squalor of honest men.
A newspaper is a market
Where wisdom sells its freedom
And melons are crowned by the crowd.
A newspaper is a game
Where his error scores the player victory
While another's skill wins death.
A newspaper is a symbol;
It is fetless* life's chronicle,
A collection of loud tales
Concentrating eternal stupidities,
That in remote ages lived unhaltered,
Roaming through a fenceless world.
War Is Kind
1899
* 'Fetless' is possibly an archaic form of 'unfettered' or a substitute for 'footless.'
The literary reputation of North American writer, journalist and poet Stephen Crane rests primarily on his 1895 bestseller The Red Badge of Courage, the story of a young Union soldier's introduction to combat during his country's bloody Civil War.
This short novel, which earned its twenty-four year old author the admiration and friendship of William Dean Howells, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford and HG Wells among others, is now considered a pioneering work of literary impressionism, one that exerted a powerful influence on the work of several of his fellow writers including Conrad whose 1897 novel The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' was directly inspired by its groundbreaking use of 'in the moment' realism. The book, neglected for many years following Crane's death as was all his work, was subsequently rediscovered by critics in the 1920s and went on to inspire a young Ernest Hemingway along with some of the poets of that decade's emerging Imagist movement.
Stephen Crane, the fourteenth child of Methodist minister Jonathon Townley Crane and his wife Mary Helen Peck, was born in Newark, New Jersey on 1 November 1871. His childhood was dominated by his parents' strict religious beliefs and their disdain for anything they considered to be 'ungodly.' This did not prevent Crane from developing a nose for trouble and a precocious gift for language which saw him obtain a summer job in 1888 as a reporter with a local news bureau that already employed one of his brothers. After failing to complete an Engineering degree and enrolling as a 'special student' at Syracuse University, Crane continued to work as a freelance journalist for the New York Tribune while penning his first stories and sketches, permanently abandoning his studies in September 1891 in order to devote himself exclusively to writing.
In December of that year, shortly after the death of his mother, Crane wrote the first draft of his first novel Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, a book based on his personal observations of life in and around the saloons and flophouses of New York's notoriously down-at-heel Bowery district. Crane allegedly completed the book in two days, only to rewrite it the following year before publishing it at his own expense — using money borrowed against the inheritance he was due to receive from his mother's estate — in March 1893 under the identity concealing pseudonym 'Johnston Smith.' Luckily, the book was read by novelist and essayist Hamlin Garland who recommended it to his friend William Dean Howells, editor of The Atlantic who was, at that time, the most respected figure in North American letters.
Crane began writing The Red Badge of Courage soon after meeting Howells, making up for his lack of direct combat experience by devouring the memoirs and correspondence of Civil War veterans in addition to historical accounts of the conflict's most significant battles. The book, which originally appeared in serial form in several east coast newspapers, was published in October 1895, by which time the perpetually industrious Crane had completed the novels George's Mother and The Third Violet and published The Black Riders and Other Lines, a collection of epigrammatic free verse strongly influenced by the Biblical imagery and language that had been the defining element of his childhood. The collection was scorned by the critics who disapproved of its unusual, all capitals typography and 'anti-poetic' style, leading one of them to dismiss Crane as 'the Aubrey Beardsley of poetry.' The poet took these objections in his stride, telling friends that he was pleased his lines were at least gaining some attention.
During this period Crane also found time to travel to the western states of Missouri, Nebraska, Louisiana and Texas, ostensibly to gather material for a column he had been contracted to write for the Bacheller newspaper syndicate. He ended his trip in Mexico City where he took a keen interest in studying the inhabitants of its poorest slums before traveling further south into what, in those days, were Mexico's largely lawless provinces.
By the middle of 1896 Crane was a well-established literary presence in New York, a member of the Lantern Club — a group of young, up-and-coming writers who met regularly on the roof of a building in Brooklyn to drink and carouse — and a genuine publishing phenomenon whose debut work of fiction had already been reprinted sixteen times. His novel had even won the approval of future US President Theodore Roosevelt, then serving as the city's hardnosed Police Commissioner. Despite this success, Crane continued to live a precarious, hand-to-mouth existence in New York, eating poorly and overindulging in alcohol, tobacco and coffee while maintaining a grueling work schedule that saw him churn out articles and stories at a rate that, even by hyperproductive nineteenth century standards, was nothing short of astonishing.
In September 1896 Crane's work brought him into conflict with the law while he claimed to be conducting research for a piece about the city's prostitutes at an 'entertainment resort' known as the Broadway Garden. He left the establishment at 2AM in order to accompany two of its chorus girls to a nearby trolley stop, the group being met on the street by another woman named Dora Clark, a streetwalker well known to the police under her professional name 'Ruby Young.' Leaving Ms Clark to chat with one of the chorus girls, Crane escorted the other girl to her trolley stop, returning to find that Ms Clark and her friend had been arrested in his absence by a police officer named Charles Becker for the alleged crime of soliciting.
After protesting their innocence and insisting to Becker that the remaining chorus girl was his wife, Crane appeared in court on behalf of the two women later that morning (against the advice of his new friend Theodore Roosevelt) where he gladly repeated his story to the presiding magistrate who, having recognized the famous young writer from previous research gathering visits to his courtroom, immediately exonerated them. Publicly humiliated and now very angry into the bargain, Becker subsequently counter-sued Dora Clark after she filed a lawsuit against him for harassment and wrongful arrest.
Crane was called as a witness in Becker's court case, with the former policeman's lawyer doing everything possible to portray the writer as a man of dubious character. The trial, which Becker won, became a widely publicized east coast scandal that prompted Crane to flee New York for the distant, less judgmental atmosphere of Jacksonville, Florida. From here Crane planned to sail to Cuba with a consignment of weapons being smuggled to the rebels who were seeking to overthrow the island's Spanish colonial government. It was in Jacksonville, while preparing for this voyage, that he met Cora Taylor (also known as Cora Howarth), a twice married brothel owner six years his senior who became his common-law wife and eventually took his surname.
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CORA TAYLOR and STEPHEN CRANE, c 1897
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Crane never made it to Cuba. The SS Commodore, the ship he had boarded in Jacksonville, sank on 2 January 1897, forcing him and three other men to abandon it in a dinghy that remained at sea for a day and a half before they were finally able to save their lives by swimming back to the Florida coast. The incident, which would later serve as the inspiration for Crane's short story The Open Boat, was widely reported in many US newspapers, adding to the writer's growing fame as a kind of literary soldier of fortune and doing much to repair the damage done to his reputation by his involvement in the Dora Clark scandal. He remained in Florida until 11 January before returning to New York where he was joined two months later by Cora.
Out of work again, Crane signed on as a war correspondent for the New York Journal, a tabloid newspaper owned and run by William Randolph Hearst, to cover the Greco-Turkish War. Cora was also hired by Hearst as a war correspondent (she was the first female citizen of the United States to be employed by a newspaper in this capacity) and the couple left for Athens soon afterwards, making a brief stopover in England, the country they returned to when the conflict, which had lasted a total of thirty days, ended on 20 May 1897.
It was in England, not long after moving into a cottage in the Surrey village of Oxted, that Crane was introduced to Joseph Conrad by the latter's publisher SS Pawling, beginning what would become an important friendship for both writers. 'His eye is very individual,' Conrad wrote to his friend Edward Garnett after reading The Open Boat, 'and his expression satisfies me artistically. He certainly is the impressionist and his temperament is curiously unique. His thought is concise, connected, never very deep — yet often startling.' It has been suggested, and not without reason, that Conrad based the relationship between his characters Marlow and Jim in his 1900 novel Lord Jim on his own, semi-paternalistic relationship with Crane.
Increasingly short of money and worried that his reputation might be on the wane at home, Crane soon embarked on a typically punishing schedule of work, churning out copy that was eagerly snapped up by many prestigious periodicals both there and in the UK. Unfortunately, Crane's diligence did not improve his financial position. After being sued by a former lover who claimed he owed her $800 and displaying the first symptoms of the then-fatal lung disease tuberculosis, he accepted an offer from Hearst's great rival Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World, to travel to Cuba to report on the newly begun Spanish-American War — a conflict that was largely the product of Hearst's shameless fear-mongering in the pages of the Journal following the sinking of the battleship the USS Maine in Havana Harbor on 15 February 1898.
Crane's stay in Cuba — which saw him come under Spanish fire in Guantánamo, Las Guásimas and San Juan Hill and earn what one of his fellow journalists described as 'the first place among correspondents' — had a disastrous effect on his health, further weakening his damaged lungs and eventually forcing him to flee the war zone so he could recuperate at a Virginia resort where it was hoped that daily exposure to sea air would have a positive impact on his health. By August he was back in Havana, simultaneously working on newspaper articles, a new series of poems that would be published under the title War Is Kind as well as a new novel titled Active Service that was based on what he had witnessed and experienced during the Greco-Turkish War. Out of touch with Cora who had remained in England and was now close to penury thanks to her unchecked extravagance, he returned to New York in mid-November, only to sail again for England on 31 December.
The final eighteen months of Crane's life, which were spent in the county of Sussex in a draughty, partially restored manor house known as Brede Place, were divided between furious bouts of work on several new projects — including stories, poems and the short novel The Monster — and ruinously expensive parties that further jeopardized his failing health and threatened to bankrupt him. Undernourished, overworked and physically exhausted, he suffered his first tubercular hemorrhage on 29 December 1899, almost one year to the day since he and Cora had set sail for London. Sick as he now was, Crane continued to work on articles and The O'Ruddy, a swashbuckling novel set in Ireland that had been inspired by a brief visit he and Cora had paid to that country in 1897.
By April Crane's condition had deteriorated to the point where he was obliged to make a new will. In May, growing weaker by the day, he was transported to Dover as a 'litter patient' (a patient deemed incapable of standing or walking) in preparation for what was to be his final journey to a sanitarium in the Schwarzwald region of southern Germany. While in Dover he was visited by Conrad and his wife Jessie, who saw him for what was to be the last time on 16 May, and by other friends including Ford Madox Ford and HG Wells (although not by Henry James who could not face the horror of seeing him in such a debilitated state). Crane crossed the English Channel to France on 24 May accompanied by Cora, a butler, two nurses, a doctor and his dog Sponge, reaching the German spa town of Badenweiler a few days later. He barely survived a week before dying on 5 June 1900 at the age of twenty-eight.
Cora, who had been named Crane's sole heir in his revised will, outlived him by a decade. She returned to Florida in 1901 where she prospered as a bar/brothel owner in Jacksonville and eventually married Hammond P McNeill, the twenty-five year old scion of a prominent South Carolina family whom she'd hired to manage one of her businesses. McNeill subsequently shot and killed a man he suspected of being Cora's lover, only to be acquitted of the charge of murder by an all-male jury who deemed his actions to be legally justified given the possibility that adultery had occurred between the deceased and his wife. When McNeill's trial ended Cora divorced him and reverted to using the name 'Cora Crane,' under which she published articles in magazines including The Smart Set and Harper's Weekly while living a decidedly bohemian life and hoping to one day return to Europe. She suffered a stroke that left her severely weakened and died of heat exhaustion — brought on by her ill-advised decision to help a stranded motorist push their stalled car out of the sand — in the Florida resort town of Pablo Beach on 5 September 1910.
Use the link below to read more free verse by STEPHEN CRANE, including selections from The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895) and War Is Kind (1899):
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/stephen-crane
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