The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Sh - Stephen Crane [10]
After departing Claverack, Crane spent one unsuccessful academic year at two colleges. In autumn 1890 he enrolled as a mining engineering student (obviously a concession to his mother’s practicality) at Lafayette College on the eastern border of Pennsylvania. He played intramural baseball but could not make the varsity team. He joined a fraternity but then jeopardized his relationship with his frat brothers by brandishing a loaded revolver when they tried to haze him. He ab sented himself from class so often that three of his teachers did not report a grade for him in December. As one might expect, one of these three classes was on the Bible. Crane could quote many passages from scripture with accuracy, but he was too immersed in his own secular rebellion to revisit his religious past. By Christmas, Lafayette’s administration advised Crane not to return for the spring semester. He therefore transferred to Syracuse University at the beginning of 1891. His acceptance was likely facilitated by the circumstance that his mother’s uncle, the Reverend Jesse Peck, had founded the institution. Crane did make the varsity baseball team this time and became a very capable shortstop, but his performance in class proved to be even more lackluster than it had been at Lafayette. By the end of the semester, he passed only one course—he earned an A in English literature. Thus ended Stephen Crane’s formal education.
He did learn much, however, during his one year in college. Taking advantage of both college libraries as well as the books owned by his fraternity, Delta Upsilon, he read eclectically but voraciously on his own, studying the works of writers such as Leo Tolstoy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe, and Rudyard Kipling. He worked as a stringer for the New York Tribune, contributing news items about the city of Syracuse and about the college itself Several Crane scholars believe that after reporting about the poor in Syracuse, Crane probably composed the first draft of the story that painfully and eventually evolved into Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893). This early draft was doubtlessly plagued by a lack of sufficient convincing detail about the reality of poverty in America, so Crane returned to Asbury Park in 1891 in order to study firsthand tenement life in neighboring New York City.
For the next three years, while living in New Jersey and then in New York City itself, Crane pursued the strange existence of a writer trying to hone his talent amid squalor and a depressing lack of opportunities and encouragement. In the city, he occupied a succession of cheap quarters, sharing them with medical students, artists, and other aspirants at the impoverished end of ambitious careers. When his funds ran out, which happened often, he temporarily lived with and borrowed money from his older brothers. During this period, his ambivalent feelings about his mother intensified when she died in December 1891. Thus the anxious young man who visited W. D. Howells in April 1893 brought with him to the party all the confusion and hardship of his own frustrations as well as that of the Bowery in which he had immersed himself
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What still fascinates is how, amid such conditions, Crane was able to informally pursue his aesthetic education and produce a novel that is one of the better summations of American sensibilities in the 1890s. His mind was, in effect, a sponge, capable of absorbing the principles of past and current literary traditions, the insights of the leading writers of the day, the beliefs held by competing philosophical schools, the dogmas held by diverse Christian sects, and the trends of political and economic thought. His artistic genius resided in his ability to knit many dissimilar and, at times, conflicting perspectives so