The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Sh - Stephen Crane [105]
2 (p. 168) the men began to come: Given this subject, one of Crane’s literary influences could have been Bierce’s tale “The Applicant,” collected in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891).
3 (p. 169) at these times: The economic event that underlies the story is the Panic of 1893, a crisis of confidence, monetary policy, and unemployment that led to 14,000 commercial failures and 4,000 bank collapses. The rate of unemployment peaked during the summer of 1894, a period marked by violent strikes and strike busting. This economic depression did not end until America’s trade position improved in 1897.
4 . (p. 171) the Prince of Wales : In 1894 Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales, son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, was widely known for his distinctive whiskers. He acceded to the British throne as Edward VII in 1901.
5 . (p. 171) us poor Indians: This metaphorical allusion may be the product of Crane’s friendship with author Hamlin Garland (1860-1940), who at the turn of the century sympathetically depicted the plight of Native Americans in his fiction and elsewhere.
INSPIRED BY THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE
I get a little tired of saying, “Is this true?”
—Stephen Crane, to his biographer Thomas Beer
Rarely has the marriage of literature and the subject of war been more successful than in The Red Badge of Courage, and perhaps that is because Stephen Crane regarded himself first and foremost as a realist. Explaining the blurred line between fiction and nonfiction in his writing, he stated, “I decided that the nearer a writer gets to life the greater he becomes as an artist, and most of my prose writings have been toward the goal partially described by that misunderstood and abused word, realism.”
Ernest Hemingway greatly admired Stephen Crane, and Hemingway’s direct, concise style and steely-eyed attention to the elemental challenges of human life is consistent with the literary precepts Crane lived by. In his introduction to his anthology Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time (1942), which presents selections from the chosen works, Hemingway addresses the difficulty of excerpting The Red Badge of Courage. He writes, “I am sure [Crane] cut it all himself as he wrote it to the exact measure of the poem it is.” By this time, Hemingway had established himself as the most important war writer since Stephen Crane.
Hemingway’s war experiences and literary career occurred in a sequence opposite to Crane’s. Born several years after the end of the Civil War, Stephen Crane was not personally acquainted with the battlefield; he relied on secondary sources for his facts and lore; he landed a job as a war correspondent because of his convincingly real Red Badge of Courage. Hemingway wrote his war masterpieces based on his own wartime experiences. Though he started out as a reporter for the Kansas City Star, he volunteered for service in World War I and drove an ambulance for the American Red Cross, an experience that led to his seminal novel A Farewell to Arms (1929). It tells the story of an American lieutenant who is wounded while serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian front line, and tragically juxtaposes a doomed love affair with the war effort. So accurate was Hemingway’s account of the Italian retreat that the book was immediately banned in Italy.
Later Hemingway covered the Spanish Civil War and gained an intimate knowledge of the landscape he would describe in For Whom the Bell Tolls