Stephen Crane

Steve Looking Foxy


The Open Boat (OB)
I love this story because of the way it is told. And while there is repeated reference to breaking waves, so much so that I was inclined to reach for the Dramamine, it was never stretched; it never seemed anything but real. There was enough tumult, enough palpable tension to keep my interest stoked and going.

Stephen is an easy read. He's a craftsman and strikes me, as with Twain, as having a magical power with language, although... he only opens for Twain and does not share the stage!

Even so, I can relate to Crane's fascination with the concept of nature's indifference to humanity's fate. It's as simple as anything, but I can't get it through my dull head. I've had ample experience with it and yet my wonder persists. Consider:

"When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him..."

"Then, if there be no tangible thing to hoot he feels, perhaps, the desire to confront a personification and indulge in pleas, bowed to one knee, and with hands supplicant, saying: 'Yes, but I love myself'
A High cold star on a winter's night is the word he feels that she says to him. Thereafter he knows the pathos of his situation."

Of course the fixed star answers "So," and the Great Oz has spoken. I just love it.

Crane goes the distance and wins me with combined irony. Everyone knows my partiality to it. I'm the geek with every episode of The Twilight Zone on DVD. How could I not appreciate this:

"The birds sat comfortably in groups, and they were envied by some in the dingey, for the wrath of the sea was no more to them than it was to a covey of prairie chickens a thousand miles inland."

Atypically, my anthology pages of OB came down with a frequent pox of tiny pencil hearts. Examples of wand-wavery that occurred to me:

"...a genius of mental aberrations..."

"...puffed at the big cigars and judged well and ill of all men."

"Was I brought here merely to have my nose dragged away as I was about to nibble the sacred cheese of life?"
(Aside from painting himself a helpless mouse, is this an allusion? I've not heard it before.)

"These two lights were the furniture of the world."

"While his pale left hand was upon his chest in an attempt to thwart the going of his life..."

"...the sunlight flamed on the tips of the waves."

Crane's interesting bio (Cora and Steve in inset) allows that he posessed "a sympathetic but unflinching demand for courage, integrity, grace, and generosity in the face of a universe in which human beings, to quote from 'The Blue Hotel,' are so many lice clinging 'to a whirling, fire-smote, ice locked disease-stricken, space-lost bulb.'"

Somehow there is a sense of integrity and grace in that and this:

"In his childhood, the correspondent had been made acquainted with the fact that a soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers, but he had never regarded it as important. Myriads of his school-fellows had informed him of the soldier's plight, but the dinning had naturally ended by making him perfectly indifferent. He had never considered it his affair that a soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers, nor had it appeared to him as a matter for sorrow. It was less to him than the breaking of a pencil's point."

The integrity is in the honest acknowledgement of his mistake. I also find it slightly ironic that in the "pencil point" statement, he perhaps unconsciously aligns himself with nature in indifference. But grace is in the following:

"Now, however, it quaintly came to him as a human, living thing. It was no longer merely a picture of a few throes in the breast of a poet, meanwhile drinking tea and warming his feet at the grate; it was an actuality-stern, mournful, and fine."

Indeed, the universe will never be as refined, for nothing touches her. She goes on and on being the thin liquid in a child's water globe. And so, we understand and not... and are one-up on her for the trouble of our pain and the perspective it affords.

I laughed a few times:

"...and in the excitement of clambering about the deck of a foundering ship they had also forgotten to eat heartily."

"Well, if he'd just signal us to try the surf again, or to go to sea and wait, or go north, or go south, or go to hell-there would be some reason in it."

"If I ever get ashore and anybody shows me even a photograph of an oar-"

OB was a grand read and offered a strong end:

"...the wind brought the sound of the great sea's voice to the men on shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters."

This harkens back to:

"The wind had a voice as it came over the waves, and it was sadder than the end."

Thus our story ties up in one neat monkey's paw. OB is a peach with no stone, and Crane's word wizardry is sweet, viscid cream.

Visit Crane's grave.