R-CH-RD H-RD-NG D-V-S
Athens, April 24. There is this to say about reporting a battle on the spot. It must necessarily be a one-sided account, unless a man is between the contending armies, and, used as I am to writing amid peculiar and distracting surroundings, I don’t think I could make much of a go at that. So I have taken up my headquarters in the royal palace, and my room opens into King George’s office, and thus I have the benefit of the news as it comes to the head of the Greeks.
The following despatch has just been sent to the New York Sun:—” It is learned here, this afternoon, that a desperate battle was fought at Mati, yesterday.”
Mati is about fifteen miles northwest of Larissa as the crow flies. After the war is over I intend to visit the battlefield and think that I can make quite a good magazine article out of it. There seems to be a mountain range near it and the map shows a wagon road through it, so I shall not be at a loss for picturesque material.
I understand that my contemporaries, Stephen Kipling and Rudyard Crane, are on the scene of action. Well, I’ve been to Cuba, so it’s an old story to me, this battle business. But as for Crane, it seems as if it wouldn’t be a bad idea for him to get some actual experience. Not but that “The Red Badge” was a good story in spite of the spelling.
George has just asked me in to lunch, so I must stop. To morrow I expect to send more war news and incidentally I will describe the palace and try to give some idea of the inside life of “Geordie,” as I have learned to call him.
St-ph-n Cr-n
Brindisi, April 24. Able students of the art of war who read my “Red Badge of Courage” said that beyond a doubt I must have borne arms in our Civil War but as a matter of fact, I wasn’t even borne in arms until a year or so after it was finished. Now, if I could write so graphic and convincing an account of a conflict, the varying colors of which had faded and gone before I came upon the scene, it follows that I ought to be able to write an account of the present Graeco Turkish war that shall be at least as highly colored as any other man’s and that too from a point where I am able to give my whole attention to writing and mixing my colors and am in no danger from stray bullets. From what the critics say, I know all about war without ever having been near one. What have I to expect by being on the scene except an incapacitating wound? It is more fair to those who sent me out as war correspondent that I stay here in Italy. So 1 will give my imagination free play and sling in lots of color, and there’s not one man in a million can tell where I’m wrong if I am.
I have just received the following despatch:—”Athens, April 24. It is learned here that a desperate battle was fought at Mati yesterday.”
The fight must have been between the Greeks and the Turks and so it was full of my favorite color, red — Turkey red. The Turkish and Greek troops lay encamped before Mati. A huge and laborious fog wallowed and pirouetted by turns, shutting out the operations of the armies from the knowledge of my contemporaries, Richard Harding Kipling and Rudyard Davis. Now and again a Greek youth filled with patriotic fire of an exceedingly effective shade of scarlet would swear volubly in Greek, but as I am not a linguist I am unable to spell his conversation either phonetically or after my own system. The effect of the Greek fire which is of course in constant use in the army was to color the fog beautifully and make Richard Harding think he was at a pyrotechnic display at Coney Island. Shortly after four o’clock the Turks were ordered to win the battle and they pressed forward with religious frenzy, waving their bundles of shoestrings, just as they do on Broadway. A giant Turk stubbed his toe and fell to sobbing piteously, but unmoved at the sight the rest swept on uttering huge yellow oaths that it would tax even my ingenuity to spell. One Turk who had been in business in New York and had returned to fight for his country ran along crying irrelevantly, “This is a heluva note. Wanta shoestring? This is a heluva note. Wanta shoestring? Five cent.”
At half-past four the Greeks heard a pale green rumble and they knew that the Turks were upon them. The Greek youth remembered that other youth who fired the Ephesian dome, and he spoke of it to a tall Greek who stood next aim, but he received no response. A squirrel sat upon a cannon and cracked cannon balls with saucy gibberings, unspellable. Red and brown and green ants hurried this way and that as if scenting the coming danger. The Greek youth remembered his mother. She would be making doughnuts full of grease about this time and he cried silently. A short Greek by his side looked blue for a minute, and then at a remark from the youth he changed color. The fog as if rejoiced at balking the efforts of Davis and Kipling wallowed at intervals of five minutes.
Then there was a Turkish crash, cream color with a selvedge of red and the ants and the youth and the squirrel were gone and the Turks had won the battle of Mati.
Charles Battell Loomis.
From: Munsey’s Magazine, V. XV, No. 5, August 1896, p.630
STEPHEN CRANE AND HIS SLUM STORIES. (Munsey’s Magazine, V. XV, No. 5, August 1896)
Little by little it is dawning upon the reading public of America that there is at least one new thing under the sun, and that that one new thing is Mr. Stephen Crane. So sudden and phenomenal has been his literary progress that his reputation seems to have been conjured by oriental genii. Yesterday he was practically an unknown newspaper man, today he is a shining light among American authors.
When Mr. Crane published “The Black Riders” there arose gibings and sneers galore. It is said that these “lines” were written in a week, and we can well believe it. They possessed neither finish nor power. But the end was not yet. The critics were prepared to jeer at anything which bore the name of Crane, ready to hark back to “The Black Riders” and point a moral on all that might follow. Then came “The Red Badge of Courage,” which set all the reading world of England and the United States agog, and disposed, as its publishers have said, “of the lingering tradition that only a well known author, or an author with the hall mark of foreign approval, is recognized by the reviewers.” From the first there was no question that in this singularly forceful and absorbing story Mr. Crane had struck a new and commanding note, and that thenceforward he would never have to complain of any lack of attention. Those who had been most prejudiced against him by the bizarre quality of his “poetry” were foremost in acknowledging the remarkable merit of his prose, and Stephen Crane was forthwith enrolled upon the Parnassian roster.
His position thus secured, he has followed up “The Red Badge” with two other books, written in the same vein, but dealing with characters of a very different stamp. “George’s Mother “ and “Maggie, a Girl of the Streets’’ are frankly slum stories, and the latter at least is a study of the seamy side of life ; but they are so carefully done, and show such a scrupulous regard for veracious description, that they stand forth far in advance of other American efforts in the same line. They are as novel as if Chimmie Fadden had never been written. Both books are in a way unpleasant. Even in our short experience of Mr. Crane’s work, we have learned that we have little of sentiment to expect from him. His descriptions of tenement life are as uncompromising as the life itself, and what little humor is to be found in his books is of a grim nature. Maggie conies to the hideous end which is the natural result of her parentage and training, and there is no attempt to ward off the inevitable.
In this, mainly, lies Mr. Crane’s art. He has ruthlessly robbed war of its glamour and exposed it for the awful reality that it is, and with equally relentless fidelity he has painted his gloomy picture of life in the city slums. Every soldier knows how true to nature is “The Red Badge,” and every mission worker will recognize that “George’s Mother” and “Maggie” possess the same virtue. Some of us, perhaps, may prefer to dwell upon the gallantry of battle and the rare instances of humor in the tenements, but a large majority will admire Mr. Crane for his painstaking accuracy, and read his books because their author has taken the trouble to learn his ground before venturing to guide others over it.
From: The Bookman, V. LV, No. 6, August, 192
2, p.674
The Bookman, V. LV, No. 6, August, 1922
Theodore Dreiser sends us a copy of a letter written about Stephen Crane. Incidentally, this letter was published in the Sunday Magazine of the “Michigan Daily”, a publication issued by the students at Ann Arbor. This little magazine is the most definite expression of literary awakening in an American college that we know of. Mr. Dreiser’s letter follows, in part:
Your letter of October twenty-fourth, asking for an appropriate word in connection with the unveiling of a bronze tablet to Stephen Crane in Newark on November seventh, reaches me today. It pleases me no little to learn that the Schoolmen’s Club is to honor Stephen Crane with a bronze tablet. He was among the very earliest of my purely American literary admirations and one of the few writers who stood forward intellectually and artistically at n time when this nation was as thoroughly submerged in romance and sentimentality and business as it is today. At that time, in so far as America was concerned, there were but James and Howells and Mark Twain among the elder realists and Garland and Fuller and Crane us beginners. Of this younger group Crane was a peer. And he certainly had more of a directness and force and daring than most of his elders. “Maggie” and “George’s Mother”, while little more than sketches in the best sense, bear all the marks of a keen and unbiassed sympathy with life, as well as a high level of literary perception.
At this time, when realism, on the one hand, stands in danger of becoming a trivial fad, and pastime, a task to which every seeker after I little notoriety seeks to set his hand and, on the other hand, can only be written with a vice-crusader leaning over one’s shoulder to see whether the American home and school, however dull and ignorant, are being properly preserved in their dullness and ignorance, it is just as well that an organization somewhere should take upon itself to honor a genius like Crane, and so to write itself down as not entirely submissive to the American program of Business First, and Sweetness and Light afterwards.
The little that Crane did, as you will note, was done with fire and a conscious or unconscious independence of our strawy and smothering notions and theories in regard to letters. Also it boded well for American letters. He took our hampering hurdles without a thought or a care. The “Red Badge of Courage” is a fine picture of war. And it is not pleasant. There is not much sweetness about it and very little uplift. It ends as it begins, grimly, and without any solution, moral or spiritual. This in itself is wrong, according to our moral, and hence, our spiritual standards. If you doubt it study our current books and magazines. But let that be.
From: The Literary World, V. XXVI, No. 22, November 2, 1895, p.371
NEW YORK LETTER. (The Literary World, V. XXVI, No. 22, November 2, 1895)
It is two years now since I mentioned in the Literary World the work of Mr. Stephen Crane, whose two new books, “The Black Rider and Other Poems” and “The Red Badge of Courage,” are being extensively noticed by the reviewers. At that time Mr. Crane had produced, in a little book called “Maggie,” a striking study of life in the slums of New York, one of the most pitilessly realistic stories ever published in this country. It appeared unheralded, in paper form, without a publisher’s name on the title-page, and with a pseudonym in place of the name of the author. Books are frail creatures, and when they come into the world under such inauspicious circumstances they usually die at birth. Mr. Crane’s story did not die at birth, but it had only a feeble life. By some chance it fell into the hands of Mr. Hamlin Garland, who discovered merit in it and communicated his discovery to the public through a review in the Arena. This led a few other people to seek for the book, and among those who were able to find it I know of several who believed that it showed power and promise of greater power. It was my good fortune to see the work before it had sunk in the sea of new books, and I shall never forget the impression it made upon me.
Now that Mr. Crane has done better things than “Maggie” and secured a fair hearing, I suspect that he must be glad that his first story was so coldly received, for, in spite of its power and its unflinching fidelity to life, it was essentially practice work; it showed that the writer had not as yet learned to handle his tools. He had the reader at his mercy, and he gave no quarter, but hacked and hewed at the tenderest of human sympathies. Even if “Maggie” had had a fair chance it could never have been popular; it was too terrible a picture to please a public which insists that literature shall, at any cost, be entertaining. But, if it had no other merit, it deserves the attention of the serious student of literature as being the first successful attempt to reproduce in book form the curious language developed during the past few years among the inhabitants of the slums of New York.
Mr. Crane’s second story, “The Red Badge of Courage,” which the Appletons have brought out in most attractive shape, gives him a far more favorable introduction to the public than his first work could have done. It has been called by a keen critic a fine promise rather than a fine achievement; but even if it be only a promise it is notable, for Mr. Crane is so young, hardly more than twenty-one, that the insight and the earnestness of his work indicate that he possesses remarkable qualities. His poems, which Copeland & Day publish, show the same serious inquiry into life that is to be found in the novels. Their complete indifference to the laws of meter will, I suppose, turn many readers away from them. Those, however, who are willing to take Mr. Crane’s point of view, to try to see what he is driving at, will, I think, find in them a rare charm and stimulus. At any rate, in both prose and verse Mr. Crane has broken away. Now that he has made his start he is sure to have a career that is worth being watched. Among all the younger men in the large army of writers in New York I know of no one who gives more promise. Most of these young men, by the way, are swept into the vortex of daily journalism, and their “brilliantly superficial work,” as some one has called the newspaper writing of this country, is being daily swept into oblivion. Thus far Mr. Crane has had the good fortune to keep out of this vortex, and literature has profited by it.
John D. Barry
Reviews
From: The Freeman, V. IV, No. 97, January 18, 1922, p.455
A REVIEWER’S NOTEBOOK. (The Freeman, V. IV, No. 97, January 18, 1922)
Some one ought to write a book about the eighteen-nineties in this country. Mr. Holbrook Jackson has done it for England, and so has Mr. Blaikie Murdock; but it seems not to have been realized that our literature also had, in that remarkable decade, a significant movement of its own, a false dawn, if you will. The current of literary feeling that found its most characteristic expression in “The Yellow Book.” itself edited by an American, ran from one end to the other of the English-speaking world; it emerged in Chicago; it emerged in San Francisco, it seemed to be on the point of creating half-a-dozen centres of activity west of New York. Of the magazines that were born in those days, of the talents that came to light, few survived the century, and the intervening years have swept those nascent literary capitals all but bare: New York has engulfed them in one way and commercialism in another. Yet the movement had a positive character, as one can see from the work of such men as Frank Norris and Stephen Crane. To collect the records of it would require time and patience, but anyone who attempts to do so will find himself in possession of an extraordinarily interesting subject.
It was an urban movement, it recognized that literature is a social art, it was a fruit of cosmopolitan influences. In these respects it represented something quite new in America. Equally true of this country as of England, moreover, is the fact that, as Mr. Blaikie Murdock puts it, “the ‘nineties produced an art of nerves.” For all these reasons and because of his unique faculty the central figure in the book ought to be Stephen Crane. Mr. Vincent Starrett has just collected for the “Modem Library,” under the happy title of “Men, Women and Boats,” a number of Crane’s sketches, several of which have never before appeared between covers; and the result throws into relief at once the distinction of this writer and the singularity and remoteness of the ‘nine
ties themselves. Here we have, to perfection, the “nerves” and the urbanity, the sociality and the cosmopolitanism, without a trace of that note of social criticism which characterizes the novel of to-day; on the other hand, this talent, an essentially popular talent, is quite free from the tricks of technique that have turned the American “short story” into a standardized product. Crane was a minor artist, without doubt: a writer of prose who dies before he is thirty can scarcely be anything else. But a man who can do work of this sort with his left hand is, at least on our side of the Atlantic, a rare and almost a miraculous phenomenon.
One hardly knows how to do justice to the apparently effortless charm of these impressions. Crane was a preternaturally sensitive man; he saw everything, he heard, tasted, felt everything with the exquisite aptitude of a convalescent. The tremor of a butterfly’s wing was not too slight to escape him, and it would be absurd to mention, in any other terms than his own, the subjects of most of the pieces in this volume. A man meets a snake on a mountain path, a cab drives across London, a bear entangles himself in a tent and falls off a precipice, some soldiers hesitate to throw the earth over the upturned face of a dead comrade. That is all; yet acting upon such an acute sensibility these trifling situations assume for the moment a prodigious importance. We pass from one sensation to another, and we are seized by them all, although no writing could be more innocent of emphasis and the calculated element of surprise; it is all so light and so swift — swift with the “pace of youth,” to quote one of Crane’s titles.
Complete Works of Stephen Crane Page 201