The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Sh - Stephen Crane [5]
A twentieth-century biographer unearthed an interview with a New York newspaper that detailed the host’s appearance around that time. Although approximately the same height as the young writer, the host was more “stout, round, and contented looking,” but this excess weight visually enhanced his aura of confidence, refinement, and sagac ity. His “iron-gray” hair and mustache were meticulously groomed. His pleasant voice hinted that he was “satisfied with his career and with the success he had made in life.” The carefully tailored host greeting the awkwardly clad young guest would have made an interesting snapshot.
Despite the opportunity, despite the good wishes of his host, the young writer felt ill at ease for most of the dinner party. True, when a moment for a private conversation with his famous mentor arrived, it went well. The host later complimented the young man before his guests by pronouncing that Maggie accomplished “things that [Mark Twain] can’t.” But keeping his manners and language in check before polite company greatly taxed the young man’s composure. He would not feel relaxed until long after the party when he kibitzed at a back-room poker game among black New Yorkers later that night.
During the course of this tedious rite of passage in the career of a young writer, however, a wonderful event occurred in a casual moment. The host had fetched a volume of poetry. He wanted to read selections from it to his guests. The author of this book had been dead for seven years. During her life, only a few of her poems saw the light of print. Few of them had been published with her consent. After her death, her family recovered among her possessions one of the great treasures of American literature—more than 1,700 brilliant poems, assorted and neatly sewn into many small bundles. Her family decided to do something that the poet could never bring herself to do—publish them.
A first selection was issued in 1890; a second in 1891. In 1893, both series had been combined into one volume. One of the editors was the host’s professional friend, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who was himself well respected for his publishing endeavors and for his command of a black regiment during the Civil War. Thirty years previously, the poet had sent him four poems, and he had not been very encouraging then. He found them “spasmodic,” “uncontrolled,” and, at times, incomprehensible. Thus, his assignment as her posthumous editor was not without the distaste of irony. Unable to fathom the true intent that underscored her genius, Higginson and his coeditor selected from among her safer poems for inclusion in the first volume. They manhandled many poems in their editing, replacing her idiosyncratic use of the dash with more conventional punctuation and ghost rewriting lines to create the traditional scansion and rhyme that a nineteenth-century audience expected. But despite all the ham-handedness of the editors, the publication of these poems propagated a revolution in American poetry.
The host had a pleasing voice and an ingratiating demeanor, which made him an excellent reciter. The poet had adapted the cadences of church hymns in her poetry, and so the host spoke at a rhythmic pace that his guests were very familiar with. With his devout Methodist upbringing, the young writer had heard such hymns all his life.
What poems were read that day are not known, but I think it likely that the host performed the first poem of the 1890 volume:
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne‘er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
Not one of all the purple host
Who took the flag to-day
Can tell the definition,
So clear, of victory,
As he, defeated, dying,
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains