Herbert Mitgang Reviews 'Badge of Courage' (August 18, 1998)
By KENNETH SILVERMAN
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BADGE OF COURAGE
The Life of Stephen Crane.
By Linda H. Davis.
Illustrated. 414 pp. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company. $35.
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he lives of many great figures are meagerly recorded and make miserable subjects for biography. What is known about Chaucer or Bach, leaving aside their works, can be told in a few pages. At the opposite end, the Adams family papers colossally span 608 reels of microfilm; the to-and-from correspondence of Ezra Pound, I'm told, weighs in at 300,000 letters.
On the good-subject scale from Bach to Pound, Stephen Crane is about a five. Appealingly to a biographer, he tore through one of the most extravagant lives in American literary history. Frustratingly, though, his career lasted only eight years: he died young. What he thought and did day by day is hard to get at, too. He kept no diaries, and of his 350 or so extant letters, many are brief notes. Scores of reminiscences of him by others exist, but many can't be trusted. And he enjoyed going underground, disguising himself or traveling under an assumed name, leaving obscure traces or none.
Linda H. Davis, the author of a biography of the New Yorker editor Katharine S. White, has fashioned the scrappy record of Crane's life into a biography that is flawed but respectable. She solidly re-creates his early milieu, drawing on his parents' correspondence and the newspapers of Port Jervis, N.Y., and Asbury Park, N.J., where he grew up. The Cranes were a writing family: father, a Methodist minister, wrote sermons; mother, a lecturer for the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, published fiction; brother Townley worked for The New York Tribune; sister Agnes wrote for women's magazines. Stephen followed, composing poems by the age of 7, and his first known story when about 14. Not made for classrooms, he dropped out of a ministerial seminary, a quasi-military school, Lafayette College and Syracuse University, where he registered for one course and left after one semester. He began writing full time, at first sketches and newspaper articles about camping in Sullivan County and life in the New Jersey shore towns, sometimes with a satirical sting.
As Davis portrays him, the young man who evolved from these beginnings seems born to raise hell -- sensitive artist, tough dude, sophomoric slob, an American John Keats by way of John Wayne and John Belushi. Orphaned by the age of 20, he moved into the old Art Students' League building in New York, grubbing along on potato salad and sausages. Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells encouraged his writing and recommended him to the Bachellor-Johnson newspaper syndicate, which hired him to do a story on Bowery flophouses. Slender, mustached, handsome -- ''a god,'' Ford Madox Ford called him, ''an Apollo with starry eyes'' -- he nevertheless wallowed in the watery soup and dime-a-night beds, his clothes filthy, hair matted, stinking of nicotine and garlic. By the age of 24, in the lushest blossoming of any young American writer ever, he had published ''Maggie: A Girl of the Streets,'' ''The Red Badge of Courage'' and a volume of murderously sorrowful free verse, ''The Black Riders.'' ''The Red Badge of Courage'' especially made him a literary celebrity, hailed as a genius here and in England, interviewed, banqueted, endlessly parodied (''The Red Badge of Hysteria,'' ''The Blue Blotch of Cowardice'').
In Davis's account, Crane's four remaining years seem driven by inner demands that he live up to this reputation and also witness the combat he had described but had never experienced. Late in 1896, Bachellor-Johnson sent him to cover the nationalist uprising in Cuba. He left from Jacksonville, Fla., on a coal-burning tug heavy with ammunition and machetes. In a foaming squall its engine room flooded, sinking the ship. Crane, in a small dinghy with the broken-armed captain, made it back to Florida after rowing 30 hours through enormous seas -- the germ of what became his short story ''The Open Boat.'' Having failed to reach Cuba, he took off to report the Greek-Turkish war over Crete, where he at last heard the roll of musketry. It ''had the wonder of human tragedy in it,'' he wrote. ''It was the most beautiful sound of my experience, barring no symphony.''
Crane settled for a while in England with his hefty, golden-haired lover, Cora Taylor, who lived with him as Mrs. Stephen Crane. The loss of his letters to her makes the most frustrating gap in the documentary record, for she was his diamonds-in-the-muck psychic twin. Daughter of a painter, estranged wife of the son of an English baronet, she had also been the madam of the Hotel de Dream, the sportiest sporting house in Jacksonville. Always barely able to make a living, Crane cranked out flimsy fiction and journalism but also wrought intense small masterworks like ''The Monster'' and ''The Blue Hotel.''
He left Cora for nine months to cover the Spanish-American War. To some observers in Cuba he seemed to be asking for it. A reporter saw him coolly standing in oncoming rifle fire, rolling a cigarette and smoking it without moving from the spot. By another account, he headed up San Juan Hill on a pinto pony, wearing a white rubber raincoat, a radiant target. But in fact he was through tempting fate. He developed a lingering case of malaria, and learned that he had tuberculosis.
That Davis's relation of these events is sometimes disconnected and sketchy is partly due to the fragmented evidence. But there are other problems. She presents her sources in too much the form she finds them. She often treats Crane's correspondence, for instance, not as information about his activities but as his correspondence, emphasizing not what he did but that he wrote about it to someone, as if the main event in his life were letter-writing. In staying clear of current critical debates over the moral and esthetic qualities of Crane's work, she avoids slowing the good story she has to tell. But the literary judgments she does venture are often primitive: Crane had ''an eye for the telling detail,'' ''a formidable innate gift with words.'' Nor does she probe with much energy Crane's riotously conflicted personality: ''Like the corduroys he favored, he was both rugged and soft to the touch.'' And the dramatic edge of the narrative is dulled by stock phrases and hazy tropes: it's hard to visualize Crane sending out copies of ''Maggie'' ''with the alacrity of a pitcher on a baseball mound.''
Davis's final chapters, however, are fluent and affecting. They describe Crane's last 18 months, when he and Taylor, though in debt for rent, provisions and a piano, took over a 14th-century Sussex estate called Brede Place. It had a butler and a 100-acre private park, but no plumbing or electricity. Their lives in the broken-down place seem less an attempt to emulate the English squirearchy than to parody it. Crane printed up embossed stationery; Taylor took over the ballroom for her boudoir. Despite the roving bats, sleepover guests came in shoals. Henry James often cycled the seven miles from Rye; Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells joined in tissue paper-comb concerts. To greet the new century, Crane gave a three-day beer-for-breakfast Christmas bash. Some 50 revelers attended, most of them put up on rented hospital cots. For their entertainment Crane produced a ghost play, brought in a small London orchestra for waltzing and barn dancing and gave poker lessons. ''You are,'' Conrad told him, ''the greatest of the boys.''
But the great boy was also hopelessly ill. The spring of 1900 brought a series of lung hemorrhages and an excruciating abscess in his bowel or rectum. Davis points out early on that five of Crane's siblings died in infancy or childhood. She returns to this fact in speculating that Crane had had tuberculosis since childhood, and always knew it -- thus his plunging recklessness. ''He was powerless to stop his fate,'' she writes, ''so why not experience life as fully as possible?''
Crane was taken to the Black Forest for the air, carried part of the way by stretcher. He was put under the care of the head of the Badenweiler sanitarium, who could do no more than ease him across with morphine. One of the dark angels of American literature, Crane lived just long enough to find a language for the apocalyptic scenarios of his imagination, a writhing Day-Glo idiom that still arouses pity and terror. Concerning his death at the age of 28, Henry James had it right: ''What a brutal, needless extinction -- what an unmitigated unredeemed catastrophe!''
Kenneth Silverman's most recent biography is ''Houdini!!! The Career of Ehrich Weiss.''
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