Stephen Crane (1871-1900)

1.life

American author, whose unromanticized war novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), brought him international fame. Crane's first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, was a milestone in the development of literary naturalism. At its appearance in 1893 Crane was just twenty-one. His manuscript was turned down by the publishers, who considered its realism too "ugly". Crane had to print the book at his own expense, borrowing the money from his brother. In its inscription Crane warned that "it is inevitable that you be greatly shocked by this book but continue, please, with all possible courage to the end." The story of the descent of a slum girl in turn-of-the-century New York into prostitution was first published under the pseudonym of Johnston Smith. Maggie was generally ignored by readers but it won the admiration of other realist writers.

"In the street infants played or fought with other infants or sat stupidly in the way of vehicles. Formidable women, with uncombed hair and disordered dress, gossiped while leaning on railings, or screamed in frantic quarrels. Withered persons, in curious postures of submission to something, sat smoking pipes in obscure corners. A thousand odors of cooking food came forth to the street. The building quivered and creaked from the weight of humanity stamping about in its bowels." (from Maggie)

Stephen Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey, the 14th child of a Methodist minister Jonathan Townley Crane and his wife Mary Helen Peck Crane. Crane was brought up in a household of conventional piety. His father died in 1880 when he was young, and the mother  made money by writing moralistic articles for religious magazines. But he rebelled against this kind of conventional, religious, and moral upbringing. He was restless and sickly as a child. Crane began to write stories at the age of eight; also both of his parents did some writing and two of his brothers became newspapermen. Crane's mother was active in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and published fiction. Reverend Dr. Crane, an advocate of temperance, published The Arts of Intoxication: The Aim and the Results, a condemnation of alcohol. Crane's first article, on the explorer Henry M. Stanley, appeared in 1890 in Villette.

Crane studied at Lafayette College and Syracuse University. As he spent little time studying but more time playing baseball, he stayed there for less than a year and left school in 1891.After his mother's death in 1890 - his father had died earlier - Crane moved to New York. He worked as a free-lance writer and journalist for the Bachellor-Johnson newspaper syndicate. While supporting himself by his pen, he lived among the poor in the Bowery slums to research his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. In England the subtitle was changed to 'A Child of the Streets. 'Maggie' was a common slang term for a female prostitute; in French the word is 'grue', which also means 'crane'. Possibly Crane had read Jacob A. Riis's books How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890) and The Children of the Poor (1892), studies of the conditions of slum life. In the novellette George's Mother (1896), originally entitled A Woman Without Weapons, Crane returned to the city life, especially to the lot of the idlers. Maggie Johnson also made a brief appearance as the dream girl of one of the characters. Crane's faithfulness to accuracy of details led him once to dress up as a tramp and spend the night in a flophouse. This produced the sketch 'Experiment in Misery' in 1894.

During this period, however, he developed his powers as an observer of psychological and social reality. Then he met Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells who helped him in his work. He also met the painters whose impressionism influenced him in his writing.Crane's pioneering novel inspired other writers, such as Hutchins Hapgood (1869-1944), to examine the Lower East Side.

2.literary Career

In 1893 Crane published his first novel called Maggie, A Girl of the Streets under the pseudonym Johnson Smith at his own expense about 700dollars. This is the first naturallist novel written by an American. This story, set in the New York slums, tells about a young girl whose parents are alcoholics. They do not support her. The girl must support her brothers and sisters, and the only thing available for her is  to turn to prostitution. Now in a way this is a highly moralistic book, because Maggie ends up drowning herself by walking into the river at the end of the novel,in grief over the life that she has been forced to lead. The message throughout the book is that Maggie’s downfall and destruction is the result of her environment. She is incapable of being the kind of woman that her free will wants it to be, because the enviornment is pitted against her. She is destroyed by her slum environment as well as by a false moral convention. Talking about the book, Crane once said, “It tries to show that environment is a tremendous thing in the world that frequently shapes lives regardless.” In other words, environment counts for a great deal in determining human fate. This book is filled with a dialect that is hard to understand and with many curse words, too. Because it depicts squalor, immorality, and the bitter life of the slum-dwellers unabashedly, it fails to receive initial popularity.

In 1895 he published his most famous book  The Red Badge of Courage, depicted the American Civil War from the point of view of an ordinary soldier. In England readers believed that the book was written by a veteran soldier - the text was so believable. Crane dismissed this theory by saying that he got his ideas from the football field.

It is a work of naturalist fiction about a young boy who leaves home with dreams of glory, of how great and heroic a soldier he will be. When the first battle comes along, he runs away in horror. By the end of the novel he was successfully participated in th e battle, and he has this feeling that now he has matured, that now he understands life realistically. But actually he is just as deluded as he was in the beginning and cannot grasp the complecities of war, of  life. In the novel, courage and heroism are irrelevant to fighting. Sheer impulse govens all, leaving no one in control of events or themselves. Against the romantic view of war as a symbol of courage and glory, Crane depicted it in alarming honesty.

    This novel graphically depicts the thoughts and deeds of a young soldier under fire. With astonishing insight, it reveals the effect of war on a raw recruit. Although it is an old story about the educatiion of a young man in the context of struggle, crane was modern in personal identity as complex and ambiguous in obliging his readers to judge for themselves the adequacy of the protagonist’s responses to his experiences.

The central character is Henry Fleming, who enrolls as a soldier in the Union army. He has dreamed of battles and glory all his life, but his expectations are shattered in his encounter with the enemy. Witnessing the chaos on the battle field, he starts to fear that the regiment was leaving him behind, and flees from the battle. "Since he had turned his back upon the fight his fears had been wondrously magnified. Death about to thrust him between the shoulder blades was far more dreadful than death about to smite him between the eyes. When he thought of it later, he conceived the impression that it is better to view the appalling than to be merely within hearing. The noises of the battle were like stones; he believed himself liable to be crushed."

Henry wanders into a thick wood, and meets a group of wounded men. He tries to help a tall soldier, who dies, and leaves a tattered soldier on a field. He returns to the lines and a deserter hits him with a gun. Henry gets a head wound. Marked now by the "red badge" he falls asleep with his comrades in the evening Next day he feels sore and stiff from his experiences, but in his hatred starts to shoot blindly at the enemy. "Some of the men muttered and looked, awe struck, at the youth. It was plain that as he had gone on loading and firing and cursing without the proper intermission, they had found time to regard him. And they now looked upon him as a war devil." In the heat of the battle, he picks up the regiment's flag with his friend when it falls from the color sergeant's hands. An officer, who has called him and the other soldiers "mule drivers", calls them again "a lot of mud diggers". Henry wants to die in the battle to prove the officer is wrong. He tries to seize the enemy flag, but his friend is faster and wrenches it free from the hands of the dying color bearer. He is filled with guilt when he remembers the tattered soldier whom he had deserted. "Yet the youth smiled, for he saw that the world was a world for him, though many discovered it to be made of oaths and walking sticks. He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover's thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks - an existence of soft and eternal peace." The Red Badge of Courage has been called the first modern war novel, but it also borrows from the conventions of a bildungsroman: after the final battle, Henry has matured, and he understands better his personal strengths and weaknesses. Later Crane portayed his hero in the story 'The Veteran' (1896), in which Henry Fleming, eventually promoted to orderly sergeant, recount his battle experiences to his grandson and dies while attempting to rescue colts from his burning barn. The Red Badge of Courage won the appreciation of such famous writers as W.D Howells and Henry James, and brought Stephen Crane immediate popularity.

In the same year he turned out his first book of poems, The Black Riders and Other Lines. This book is too experimental in form and too unconventional in philosophical outlook to win wide acceptance of the time, but Crane is now acclaimed as a precursor of imagist poetry.  Crane's collection of poems, The Black Rider (1895), has much in common with Emily Dickinson's simple, stripped style.

Crane's rising fame brought him better reporting assignments and he sought experiences as a war correspondent in combat areas. Crane travelled to Greece, Cuba, Texas and Mexico, reporting mostly on war events. Active Service (1899) was based on the Greco-Turkish War.He was considered by his contemporaries the best reporter of war. Later Crane moved with his wife to Europe. He settled in England and became friends with such writers as Henry James. At the beginning of the Spanish-American War in 1898, he tried to enlist in the American Navy, but was rejected because he had tuberculosis. Despite this , he went to cuba as a war correspondent. His exertions in Cuba further damaged his health. He returned to England. In 1899 he drafted thirteen stories for Harper’s magazine and published his second volume of poetry War Is Kind.

His other novels include George’s Mother\(1896), The Third Violet(1897), and Active Service(1899). His collections of stories include The Little Regiment(1896), the Open Boat and Other Stories (1898), and The Monster and Other Stories(1898). 'The Open Boat,' is based on a true experience, when his ship, a coal-burning tug heavy with ammunition and machetes, sank on the journey to Cuba in 1896. With a small party of other passengers, Crane spent several days drifting in a dinghy off the coast of Florida before being rescued. This experience impaired his health permanently. In the story, originally published in Scribner's Magazine in June 1897, Crane focused on four men, who eventually decide to swim for shore.

-- When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples. Any visible expression of nature would surely be pelleted with his jeers.
--   Then, if there be no tangible thing to hoot at he feels, perhaps, the desire to confront a personification and indulge in pleas, bowed to one knee, and with hands supplicant, saying: 'Yes, but I love myself.'
(from 'The Open Boat')

In Greece Crane wrote about the Greco-Turkish War, settling in 1898 in Sussex, England, where he lived with the author Cora Taylor, who was the proprietress of the Hotel de Dream, a well-known Jacksonville sporting house. In England Crane became friends with Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, and Henry James. During this period Crane wrote some of his best stories, including 'The Monster,' 'The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,' and 'The Blue Hotel' (1898), Crane's much anthologized short story, which was first published serially in Collier's Weekly. Swede, a nervous New Yorker, fascinated by tales of the Wild West, enters Pat Scully's hotel in Fort Romper, Nebraska; the hotel is a haven of rest in a blizzard. Swede meets Mr. Blanc from the East, and a reserved cowboy. He drinks heavily and beats Scully's son, Johnnie, after accusing him of cheating at cards. When the Swede attacks another hotel customer, he is stabbed and killed. Several months later Mr. Blanc, feeling responsible for the death, confesses that Johnnie indeed cheated. In a letter from 1898 Conrad wrote to Crane: "You have the terseness, the clear eye the easy imagination. You have all - and I have only the accursed faculty of dreaming. My ideas fade - Yours come out sharp cut as cameos - they come all living out of Your brain and bring images - and bring light." Like Emile Zola (1840-1902) in France, Crane used realism - or naturalism - as a method of exposing social ills, as in The George's Mother, which explored life in the Bowery. Crane himself did not much like Zola. 

In 1898 Crane returned to Cuba, to cover the Spanish-American War for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. He was involved in combat, covered the landings at Guant jamo, the advance of Rough Riders, and the Battle of San Juan Hill. According to Crane, the dismounted Rough Riders "marched noisily through the narrow road in the woods, talking volubly", and were then ambushed, suffering heavy losses. Crane concluded that "It was simply a gallant blunder." In Havanna Crane completed most of the Cuban War stories, but did not tell his family or Cora where he was.

 Due to poor health he was obliged to return to England. There he rented with Cora a cold and wet 14th-century Sussex estate, called Brede Place. Crane died on June 5, 1900, at Badenweiler in Germany of tuberculosis, that was worsened by malarial fever he had caught in Cuba. He was 28 - his career has lasted only eight years. Crane's posthumous publications include the sketches and stories from his life as a correspondent in Wounds in the Rain (1900) and Whilomville Stories (1900), depicting a childhood in a small state. After Crane's death his work was neglected for many years until such writers as Amy Lowell and Willa Cather brought it again to public attention. Although Crane introduced realism into American literature, his use of symbolism also gave his work a romantic quality.

3.Major featurs:

Crane’s writing has been called realistic, naturalistic, and impressionistic. He presented in complete characters and a broken world.. it is Crane’s power with words and his ability to live with paradox that make him interesting. Eight features are peculiar in Crane’s fiction.

1.       he understood the significance of isolated immediate moments. He did not write fiction with a highly complex plot where one event causes another event, and the reader can trace the chain of cause and effect. He did not believe that the world worked with that kind of cause and efffect theory. Important for him were the immediate moments of experience. He focused on that moment and tried to understand it.

2.       he emphasized the feelings that exist in immediate experience. Therefore, for Crane, one’s consciousness is more important than one’s actions. In his writing there is less emphasis on action and more emphasis on the feeling while something is going on.

3.       his syntax is direct and simple. Yet it is boring, because his writing is extremely intense. With his emphasis on feeling, he tried to work that feeling into the reader, and this keeps the simple syntax from becoming too boring.

4.       he used symbols. He had this philosophy about the symbols:an object becomes a symbol during an intense moment of experience. So he did not always deal with the world of universal symbols or traditional symbols. He picked an object form that very event and gave it symbolic meaning. The symbol comes from the experience itself, and not from  the outside world. This is known as original symbols or private symbols. They are often used to suggest the dehumanizing effect of war.

5.       Crane was very much influenced by impressionistic painters. While he was in New York, he was living with a group that included some pinters. From the impressionists he learned the importance of feeling and the way of choosing parts of reality, and not choosing others so that the feeling would come across.he gave the reader just those objects which create the real impression. He would rather render the scene as a whole than focus on detail. The essential vision generates feelings on the part of the readers.

6.       he used irony. It is ironic that people think help is on the way when nobody is coming to help them. Irony is based on wrong perception that real situations never meet our preconceptions. Our expectations are never fufilled. We might think that it is going to be this way, but when it turns out, when it happens, it is not the way we thought it was going to be at all. Crane’s tough-minded irony emphasizes this disparity between what we assume it will be and what actually happens.

7.       crane was very careful in choosing narrative point of view. This is something tha thenry James worked on. Crane was especially interested in choosing a detached and scientific observer’s point of view to deal with his characteristic subject matter: the physical, emotional, and intellectual responses of people under extreme pressure, and the dominant themes of nature’s indifference to humanity’s fate and the consequent need ofr compassionate collective action.

8.       Crane’s writing is also characteristic of vivid color, animal imagery, stereotyped characters, colloquial English, and simple and straightforward narration..