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MEN, WOMEN, AND BOATS

By Stephen Crane

Edited With an Introduction by Vincent Starrett




NOTE

A Number of the tales and sketches here brought together appear now for
the first time between covers; others for the first time between covers
in this country. All have been gathered from out-of-print volumes and
old magazine files.

"The Open Boat," one of Stephen Crane's finest stories, is used with
the courteous permission of Doubleday, Page & Co., holders of the
copyright. Its companion masterpiece, "The Blue Hotel," because of
copyright complications, has had to be omitted, greatly to the regret
of the editor.

After the death of Stephen Crane, a haphazard and undiscriminating
gathering of his earlier tales and sketches appeared in London under
the misleading title, "Last Words." From this volume, now rarely met
with, a number of characteristic minor works have been selected, and
these will be new to Crane's American admirers; as follows: "The
Reluctant Voyagers," "The End of the Battle," "The Upturned Face," "An
Episode of War," "A Desertion," "Four Men in a Cave," "The Mesmeric
Mountain," "London Impressions," "The Snake."

Three of our present collection, printed by arrangement, appeared in
the London (1898) edition of "The Open Boat and Other Stories,"
published by William Heinemann, but did not occur in the American
volume of that title. They are "An Experiment in Misery," "The Duel
that was not Fought," and "The Pace of Youth."

For the rest, "A Dark Brown Dog," "A Tent in Agony," and "The Scotch
Express," are here printed for the first time in a book.

For the general title of the present collection, the editor alone is
responsible.

V. S.



MEN, WOMEN AND BOATS

CONTENTS

STEPHEN CRANE: _An Estimate_

THE OPEN BOAT

THE RELUCTANT VOYAGERS

THE END OF THE BATTLE

THE UPTURNED FACE

AN EPISODE OF WAR

AN EXPERIMENT IN MISERY

THE DUEL THAT WAS NOT FOUGHT

A DESERTION

THE DARK-BROWN DOG

THE PACE OF YOUTH

SULLIVAN COUNTY SKETCHES

  A TENT IN AGONY

  FOUR MEN IN A CAVE

  THE MESMERIC MOUNTAIN

THE SNAKE

LONDON IMPRESSIONS

THE SCOTCH EXPRESS




STEPHEN CRANE: _AN ESTIMATE_


It hardly profits us to conjecture what Stephen Crane might have
written about the World War had he lived. Certainly, he would have been
in it, in one capacity or another. No man had a greater talent for war
and personal adventure, nor a finer art in describing it. Few writers
of recent times could so well describe the poetry of motion as
manifested in the surge and flow of battle, or so well depict the
isolated deed of heroism in its stark simplicity and terror.

To such an undertaking as Henri Barbusse's "Under Fire," that powerful,
brutal book, Crane would have brought an analytical genius almost
clairvoyant. He possessed an uncanny vision; a descriptive ability
photographic in its clarity and its care for minutiae--yet
unphotographic in that the big central thing often is omitted, to be
felt rather than seen in the occult suggestion of detail. Crane would
have seen and depicted the grisly horror of it all, as did Barbusse,
but also he would have seen the glory and the ecstasy and the wonder of
it, and over that his poetry would have been spread.

While Stephen Crane was an excellent psychologist, he was also a true
poet. Frequently his prose was finer poetry than his deliberate essays
in poesy. His most famous book, "The Red Badge of Courage," is
essentially a psychological study, a delicate clinical dissection of
the soul of a recruit, but it is also a _tour de force_ of the
imagination. When he wrote the book he had never seen a battle: he had
to place himself in the situation of another. Years later, when he came
out of the Greco-Turkish _fracas_, he remarked to a friend: "'The Red
Badge' is all right."

Written by a youth who had scarcely passed his majority, this book has
been compared with Tolstoy's "Sebastopol" and Zola's "La Debacle," and
with some of the short stories of Ambrose Bierce. The comparison with
Bierce's work is legitimate; with the other books, I think, less so.
Tolstoy and Zola see none of the traditional beauty of battle; they
apply themselves to a devoted--almost obscene--study of corpses and
carnage generally; and they lack the American's instinct for the rowdy
commonplace, the natural, the irreverent, which so materially aids his
realism. In "The Red Badge of Courage" invariably the tone is kept down
where one expects a height: the most heroic deeds are accomplished with
studied awkwardness.

Crane was an obscure free-lance when he wrote this book. The effort, he
says, somewhere, "was born of pain--despair, almost." It was a better
piece of work, however, for that very reason, as Crane knew. It is far
from flawless. It has been remarked that it bristles with as many
grammatical errors as with bayonets; but it is a big canvas, and I am
certain that many of Crane's deviations from the rules of polite
rhetoric were deliberate experiments, looking to effect--effect which,
frequently, he gained.

Stephen Crane "arrived" with this book. There are, of course, many who
never have heard of him, to this day, but there was a time when he was
very much talked of. That was in the middle nineties, following
publication of "The Red Badge of Courage," although even before that he
had occasioned a brief flurry with his weird collection of poems called
"The Black Riders and Other Lines." He was highly praised, and highly
abused and laughed at; but he seemed to be "made." We have largely
forgotten since. It is a way we have.

Personally, I prefer his short stories to his novels and his poems;
those, for instance, contained in "The Open Boat," in "Wounds in the
Rain," and in "The Monster." The title-story in that first collection
is perhaps his finest piece of work. Yet what is it? A truthful record
of an adventure of his own in the filibustering days that preceded our
war with Spain; the faithful narrative of the voyage of an open boat,
manned by a handful of shipwrecked men. But Captain Bligh's account of
_his_ small boat journey, after he had been sent adrift by the
mutineers of the _Bounty_, seems tame in comparison, although of the
two the English sailor's voyage was the more perilous.

In "The Open Boat" Crane again gains his effects by keeping down the
tone where another writer might have attempted "fine writing" and have
been lost. In it perhaps is most strikingly evident the poetic cadences
of his prose: its rhythmic, monotonous flow is the flow of the gray
water that laps at the sides of the boat, that rises and recedes in
cruel waves, "like little pointed rocks." It is a desolate picture, and
the tale is one of our greatest short stories. In the other tales that
go to make up the volume are wild, exotic glimpses of Latin-America. I
doubt whether the color and spirit of that region have been better
rendered than in Stephen Crane's curious, distorted, staccato sentences.

"War Stories" is the laconic sub-title of "Wounds in the Rain." It was
not war on a grand scale that Crane saw in the Spanish-American
complication, in which he participated as a war correspondent; no such
war as the recent horror. But the occasions for personal heroism were
no fewer than always, and the opportunities for the exercise of such
powers of trained and appreciative understanding and sympathy as Crane
possessed, were abundant. For the most part, these tales are episodic,
reports of isolated instances--the profanely humorous experiences of
correspondents, the magnificent courage of signalmen under fire, the
forgotten adventure of a converted yacht--but all are instinct with the
red fever of war, and are backgrounded with the choking smoke of
battle. Never again did Crane attempt the large canvas of "The Red
Badge of Courage." Before he had seen war, he imagined its immensity
and painted it with the fury and fidelity of a Verestchagin; when he
was its familiar, he singled out its minor, crimson passages for
briefer but no less careful delineation.

In this book, again, his sense of the poetry of motion is vividly
evident. We see men going into action, wave on wave, or in scattering
charges; we hear the clink of their accoutrements and their breath
whistling through their teeth. They are not men going into action at
all, but men going about their business, which at the moment happens to
be the capture of a trench. They are neither heroes nor cowards. Their
faces reflect no particular emotion save, perhaps, a desire to get
somewhere. They are a line of men running for a train, or following a
fire engine, or charging a trench. It is a relentless picture, ever
changing, ever the same. But it contains poetry, too, in rich,
memorable passages.

In "The Monster and Other Stories," there is a tale called "The Blue
Hotel". A Swede, its central figure, toward the end manages to get
himself murdered. Crane's description of it is just as casual as that.
The story fills a dozen pages of the book; but the social injustice of
the whole world is hinted in that space; the upside-downness of
creation, right prostrate, wrong triumphant,--a mad, crazy world. The
incident of the murdered Swede is just part of the backwash of it all,
but it is an illuminating fragment. The Swede was slain, not by the
gambler whose knife pierced his thick hide: he was the victim of a
condition for which he was no more to blame than the man who stabbed
him. Stephen Crane thus speaks through the lips of one of the
characters:--

    "We are all in it! This poor gambler isn't even
    a noun. He is a kind of an adverb. Every sin is
    the result of a collaboration. We, five of us, have
    collaborated in the murder of this Swede. Usually
    there are from a dozen to forty women really involved
    in every murder, but in this case it seems
    to be only five men--you, I, Johnnie, Old Scully,
    and that fool of an unfortunate gambler came
    merely as a culmination, the apex of a human movement,
    and gets all the punishment."

And then this typical and arresting piece of irony:--

    "The corpse of the Swede, alone in the saloon,
    had its eyes fixed upon a dreadful legend that
    dwelt atop of the cash-machine: 'This registers the
    amount of your purchase.'"

In "The Monster," the ignorance, prejudice and cruelty of an entire
community are sharply focussed. The realism is painful; one blushes for
mankind. But while this story really belongs in the volume called
"Whilomville Stories," it is properly left out of that series. The
Whilomville stories are pure comedy, and "The Monster" is a hideous
tragedy.

Whilomville is any obscure little village one may happen to think of.
To write of it with such sympathy and understanding, Crane must have
done some remarkable listening in Boyville. The truth is, of course, he
was a boy himself--"a wonderful boy," somebody called him--and was
possessed of the boy mind. These tales are chiefly funny because they
are so true--boy stories written for adults; a child, I suppose, would
find them dull. In none of his tales is his curious understanding of
human moods and emotions better shown.

A stupid critic once pointed out that Crane, in his search for striking
effects, had been led into "frequent neglect of the time-hallowed
rights of certain words," and that in his pursuit of color he "falls
occasionally into almost ludicrous mishap." The smug pedantry of the
quoted lines is sufficient answer to the charges, but in support of
these assertions the critic quoted certain passages and phrases. He
objected to cheeks "scarred" by tears, to "dauntless" statues, and to
"terror-stricken" wagons. The very touches of poetic impressionism that
largely make for Crane's greatness, are cited to prove him an
ignoramus. There is the finest of poetic imagery in the suggestions
subtly conveyed by Crane's tricky adjectives, the use of which was as
deliberate with him as his choice of a subject. But Crane was an
imagist before our modern imagists were known.

This unconventional use of adjectives is marked in the Whilomville
tales. In one of them Crane refers to the "solemn odor of burning
turnips." It is the most nearly perfect characterization of burning
turnips conceivable: can anyone improve upon that "solemn odor"?

Stephen Crane's first venture was "