A History of American Literature

276 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900

impressed. In terms of substance, they express a sense of existence that is even more

cast in the shadows than that of Dickinson:

A man adrift on a slim spar

A horizon smaller than the rim of a bottle

Tented waves rearing lashy points

The near whine of froth in circles

God is cold.

In his poems, as in his stories, Crane describes a world of darkness, ocean or desert,

where a man hugs his heart to himself, “Because it is bitter /,” he declares, “And

because it is my heart,” and where the universe blandly dismisses the human demand

for recognition. “A man said to the universe: / ‘Sir, I exist!’ ” one piece declares:

“ ‘However,’ replied the universe, / ‘The fact has not created in me / A sense of obliga-

tion.’ ” That is the entire poem. And it reveals not only the sardonic tone and pellucid

idiom of which Crane was master, but a habit of expression that was so drawn

toward economy that it often verged on the laconic. Like Hemingway, who admired

Crane intensely, Crane knew how to say much in saying little.

It is the prose work, however, that has secured Crane’s reputation. Working

intermittently as a journalist throughout his short life, Crane covered both the

Spanish–American and Graeco-Turk wars. In America, he enjoyed the encourage-

ment of William Dean Howells and Hamlin Garland; and in England, where he settled

for a while, he became a friend of Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and H. G. Wells. His

first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), was not widely noticed when it was first

published. Maggie Johnson, the central character, is a victim of poverty and parental

abuse. Seduced and abandoned, she tries to survive by becoming a prostitute but

eventually drowns herself. Crane wrote of the novel to Garland that “it tries to show

that environment is a tremendous thing in the world and frequently shapes lives

regardless.” “If one proves that theory,” he added, “one makes room in Heaven for all

sorts of souls (notably an occasional street girl) who are not confidently expected to

be there by many excellent people.” Set in the Bowery district of New York, Maggie in

fact combines a trenchant determinism with a sharp, even satiric critique on

moralism: the false morality of those “many excellent people” who would condemn

Maggie for those circumstances for which she is not responsible. If human beings

cannot determine events, Crane intimates, they can at least free themselves from those

systems of judgment that uncritically assume they can. His fictional emphasis bears

down, not just on the inherent evil of slum life, but on the damage done by a false

moral environment, an unjust, blandly moralistic perspective on that life. And, in

using irony here to measure the gap between human event and human evaluation – “a

girl of the streets” and how “excellent people” usually tend to see her – he was preparing

the way for his finest work, The Red Badge of Courage (1895).

The Red Badge of Courage was both a critical and a popular success when it first

appeared. In a characteristically pointilliste style, Crane captures here the flux and

confusion of battle. Unlike Norris, Crane preferred literary impressionism, delicacy of

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