The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Sh - Stephen Crane [12]
Crane’s most immediate source, however, owed its realistic intentions to another sort of discourse—history. In 1893 he borrowed from the mother of a former childhood playmate the multivolume work Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (1887), a compilation of a mammoth series of articles that had first appeared in The Century magazine years earlier. Here Crane found a rich vein of primary material, including essays by participating Union and Confederate officers, such as Generals Darius N. Couch, Alfred Pleasonton, Oliver O. Howard, and R. E. Colston. With these accounts, Crane began to understand the facts, tactics, and strategies of the Battle of Chancellorsville that he would integrate into his story. Despite the occasional note of nostalgia or bravado, despite the defensive tone adopted by a general in explaining the misdeeds of his troops, these historical sources on the whole do comply with the empirical spirit pursued by a new generation of nineteenth-century historians. These writers presented firsthand testimony when available and assembled all known facts in their correct chronological sequence in order to illustrate an historical event as accurately as the evidence allows.
For all his research in these and other historical texts, however, Crane could not compensate for his one obvious deficiency, one that challenged any claim he might make to call himself a Realist. Realists were supposed to confine their efforts to subjects they knew well and had experienced intimately. Born six years after the Civil War ended, Crane had never even seen a battle before he finished the manuscript for Red Badge. His mentor Howells would later chide him about this predicament, telling him that Maggie was more artistically successful because he based it upon what he had lived and observed directly, unlike Red Badge, which was constructed from the observations of others and Crane’s own guesses. How ironic it was, after the latter novel was published, that the reading public hailed Crane as the nascent star of American Realism.
Nevertheless, many Civil War veterans attested to the validity of Henry Fleming’s experiences in and reactions to combat. However, influenced by recent Russian literature, especially the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, American Realism was evolving. Crane had tapped into its new wellspring—a shift in emphasis from reporting physical truth to constructing narratives that explored psychological truth. Howells’s colleague Henry James had already migrated toward this new direction, which manifested itself in subtler and more complex characterizations in each successive novel he undertook. Crane’s immediate inspiration may have been iconoclastic writer and newspaperman Ambrose Bierce. Using his experiences as an officer in the Union army, Bierce published a dramatic series of Civil War horror tales in a San Francisco newspaper during the 1880s and 1890s. When he collected them in book form in 1891, he also included a number of stories about violent occurrences in civilian life and titled the volume Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. Bierce’s premise was simple. By juxtaposing the atrocities of human experience in both war and peace, he shocked one generation out of its mistaken nostalgia about the war and another younger generation into realizing what war demands from the individual soul. If anyone wanted to comprehend the psychological essence of war, all he had to do was to observe and absorb the horror omnipresent in everyday life and then to project that vision onto a battle situation.
Crane took this lesson to heart. In an extraordinary way, Red Badge can be seen as an amalgam of his experiences in the