8

STEPHEN CRANE’S THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE: THE NOVELLA AS MOVING BOX

One of the most enduring memories of my literary life is the sensation produced by the appearance in 1895 of Crane’s Red Badge of Courage in a small volume belonging to Mr Heinemann’s Pioneer Series of Modern Fiction …. Crane’s work detonated on the mild din ... of our sensibilities with the impact and force of a twelve-inch shell charged with a very high explosive. Unexpected it fell amongst us; and its fall was followed by a great outcry. Not of consternation, however. The energy of that projectile hurt nothing and no one (such was its good fortune), and delighted a good many. It delighted soldiers, men of letters, men in the street; it was welcomed by all lovers of personal expression as a genuine revelation, satisfying the curiosity of a world in which war and love have been the subjects of song and story ever since the beginning of articulate speech. , Preface to The Red Badge of Courage1

There was no real literature of our Civil War, excepting the forgotten “Miss Ravenall’s Conversion” by J.W. De Forest, until wrote “The Red Badge of Courage”. Crane wrote it before he had seen any war. But he had read the contemporary accounts, had heard the old soldiers, they were not so old then, talk, and above all he had seen Matthew Brady’s wonderful photographs. Creating his story out of this material he wrote that great boy’s dream of war that was to be truer to how war is than any war the boy who wrote it would

1 Joseph Conrad, “His War Book: A Preface to Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage.” Republished in Joseph Conrad, Last Essays, London and NY: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1925, 175-83. 160 Gothic to Multicultural

ever live to see. It is one of the finest books of our literature because it is all as much of one piece as a great poem is. , Introduction, Men at War 2

Had he lived beyond his brief span of twenty-nine years (1871-1900) and found himself reading these tributes, Stephen Crane might have derived quite considerable satisfaction. It could hardly be said that The Red Badge of Courage had not in fact won immediate and widespread attention, both the newspaper serial and then the book that came out in 1895 under the imprint of D. Appleton and Company.3 Indeed, over time, Crane actually came to fear that his other principal writings, work like “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets”, key collections such as And Other Stories and the Whilomville Stories, his voluminous war reportage, and the dark, acerbic poetry of The Black Riders and Other Lines and War Is Kind, risked almost permanent eclipse. Yet he would readily have recognized that both Conrad and Hemingway spoke from credentials of no simple order, but rather as writers profoundly taken up with a shared vision of men at war. In Conrad he would no doubt also have thought warmly of the friendship developed across several interludes in England during the 1890s and of a body of fiction whose mastery in depicting human beings caught at the edge he had been quick to learn from and value. Nor would he have failed to see in Hemingway not only a fellow American war writer and journalist but one given to fashioning a style resolutely, and unmistakably, his own. For in common with both of them, and beyond the issue of his as it was thought, or his controversial life and marriage with Cora Taylor, or even his legend as yet another literary figure cut short before his time by consumption, it is Crane as himself the stylist who before all else establishes his claims to attention, and nowhere more decisively than in The Red Badge of Courage.4

2 Ernest Hemingway, “Introduction,” Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time, NY: Crown Publishers, 1942; republished London: Fontana, 1966, 10-11. 3 The Red Badge of Courage has had a changing textual history since the novella’s first appearance. Page references throughout are to The Red Badge of Courage, ed. Henry Binder, NY: W.W. Norton, 1982. 4 Among the standard Crane biographies are , Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923; John Berryman, Stephen Crane, American Men of Letters Series, NY: William Sloane Associates, 1950; Eric Solomon, Stephen Crane in England: A Portrait of The Artist, Columbus, OH: Ohio