The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Sh - Stephen Crane [6]
Break, agonized and clear.
The aspiring writer was astounded. He had just experienced a revela tory moment equivalent to John Keats’s first reading of George Chapman’s translations of the Homeric epics or Charles Baudelaire’s walking into a salon and first seeing a painting by Eugène Delacroix. Both the English and the French poets did not abandon what they believed in order to embrace something new; instead, they found artistic works that crystallized their own conceptions of art. This first contact permitted them to analyze what they already practiced in their own poetry and to speculate why they did so. During the 1890s in America, most good writers found such a muse by encountering the work of an earlier artist. In Saint Louis, for example, another writer also struggling to find her place and voice, Kate Chopin, used the fiction of Guy de Maupassant for such a purpose.
The recitation had multiple effects upon the young writer. He em pathized with the pained failure described in the poem. More importantly, he saw aspects of his own emerging voice in the woman poet’s surgical concision of language. In his recent novel about the “girl of the streets,” for example, he had crafted intensely imagistic sentences: “The girl, Maggie, blossomed in a mud puddle.” Inspired by the reading, the young writer soon began to compose poems of his own, rattling off a great many in a short space of time:
Black riders came from the sea.
There was clang and clang of spear and shield,
And clash and clash of hoof and heel,
Wild shouts and the wave of hair
In the rush upon the wind:
Thus the ride of sin.
Even in the heavily edited versions the host read that day, the young writer could hear the liberties the dead poet had taken with the hymnal form, and he would accelerate her assault against the conventions of poetry by abandoning rhyme and traditional cadences altogether. He called his efforts not poems but “lines.” When he bragged that he usually had several poems configured in his mind ready to be put on paper, his friend Hamlin Garland challenged him to do so. The young writer immediately wrote out one without fumbling a word. His “lines” allowed him to distill his fatalistic notions, almost to the point of becoming epigrams regarding individual impotence:
I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
“It is futile,” I said,
“You can never—”
“You lie,” he cried,
And ran on.
The poems the host read that April day excited another level of response in the young writer. The woman poet had composed much of her work in an intense spurt of inspiration during the American Civil War; consequently, many of her poems were populated with images and metaphors of battle. In his desperation to earn money, the young writer had been researching and writing a new manuscript that he hoped might exploit the curiosity by the American public during the 1890s about the Civil War. He first considered turning the novel into a romantic “potboiler” so as to ensure its financial success. But the embattled insights into the human heart contained in the poems he heard that day and his own evolving artistic ambitions turned the project into something finer. The host did not realize it then, but he had given his young guest the necessary ammunition to rebel against the literary values he had championed for a lifetime.
The host was William Dean Howells, the nexus of American Realism; the poet, Emily Dickinson, the private genius of Amherst; the aspiring writer, Stephen Crane, the self-consuming literary meteor of the 1890s; and the novel, The Red Badge of Courage, his most enduring and influential work. If you have made it thus far in this essay, I thank you for your patience and indulgence. In addition to recreating a brief but pregnant moment in Crane’s emerging talent, I wanted to mimic (I hope not too poorly) his prose style and, in particular, one of his fictional devices. At a crucial stage in one of the drafts of Red Badge, Crane went through his manuscript and greatly reduced