BURNING HIS CANDLE

STEPHEN CRANE'S LIFE WAS SHORT, INTENSELY PACKED, AND HIS TALENT WAS PRODIGIOUS

Author: By John Noel Turner

Date: SUNDAY, August 23, 1998

Page: C1

Section: Books

Though Crane died of consumption in 1900, when he was 28, his story is not remotely slight -- on the contrary, his life was full and intense. In this biography, Linda H. Davis suggests that Crane may have known very early that he had the disease. Doomed to die young, he may have made the necessary arrangements to make his few years eventful. In his early 20s, he slummed on the Bowery in New York, living a marginal and chaotic existence in artists' studios. This period supplied the material for ``Maggie: A Girl of the Streets,'' ``George's Mother,'' and several other stories.

In March 1895, having finished his most celebrated work, ``The Red Badge of Courage,'' he was sent to Mexico on a reporting assignment. Looking for a little adventure, he headed off to the desert countryside with a guide. Drunken banditos with guns set upon them. As Crane led his guide galloping across the Mexican wilderness, the outcome was unclear until they encountered a patrol of militiamen, who restored order by kicking the head bandito's horse in the stomach. (The event was fictionalized in ``One Dash -- Horses.'')

In November 1896, Crane went to Florida to report on preparations for the Spanish-American War. In Jacksonville in January 1897, he boarded the Commodore, a ship carrying arms to Cuba, but the ship sank off the Florida coast. Crane and three others were forced to undertake a remarkable journey to shore in a 10-foot dinghy (fictionalized in ``The Open Boat'').

Before the Commodore set off, Crane had become enamored of Cora Taylor, the woman who was to be his common-law wife for the last years of his life. Taylor came from a breed now doubtless extinct; of good Boston family, she was the madam of a Jacksonville brothel and the estranged wife of a British nobleman. Soon after the Commodore incident, Crane and Taylor went to Europe to cover the Greco-Turkish War -- he for the New York World, she for the New York Journal (a job Crane arranged for her). In June, they settled together in the south of England, where Crane befriended a group of writers living in the nearby countryside -- Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Edward and Constance Garnett, and H. G. Wells. (In New York, by contrast, Crane had accounted himself fortunate to get the fair-weather support of William Dean Howells.)

Davis's account of Crane's friendship with the neighboring circle, particularly that with Conrad, forms the most moving chapter in this book. England was Crane's final home, though he left it to cover foreign wars and again a few months before his death, in June 1900, in a futile effort to restore his health at a sanitarium in Germany.

Crane himself was never a soldier, but on the strength of his fame as the author of ``The Red Badge of Courage'' and a number of shorter Civil War stories, he secured assignments as a war correspondent in the Greek fight against the Turks, and later, in the Spanish-American War. In battle after battle during these two campaigns, Crane displayed an unflagging and sometimes startling indifference to the hazards involved. Crane himself admitted that his brave front was sometimes forced, yet this courage was an impressive and consistent trait throughout his career.

The book's most dramatic scene is the July 1898 attack on San Juan Hill, Cuba, during the Spanish-American War, by Colonel Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders. In 100-degree weather, Crane wandered around wearing a white raincoat, periodically drawing the fire of the Spanish on himself and anyone standing nearby.

Crane's technique as a writer of fiction was not impeccable. He often wrote as though he believed every sentence can be improved by adding a simile. In ``The Red Badge of Courage,'' he wrote, ``He wished to get out of hearing of the crackling shots which were to him like voices. The ground was cluttered with vines and bushes and the trees grew close and spread out like bouquets.'' (Italics added.) His prose is sometimes turgid. But at his frequent best, Crane wrote with insight and power. ``The Red Badge of Courage'' is an astute psychological novel. There are times, when reading its account of Henry Fleming's troubles, that a reader thinks of the moral enshacklement of Raskolnikov in Dostoevski's ``Crime and Punishment.'' He treats Fleming with an unsentimental detachment that was almost unheard-of in American fiction.

Davis's biography is informative and affectionate. I wish she had called her subject ``Crane'' rather than ``Stephen.'' And there are times -- though not many -- when one wants more sustained literary analysis. Sometimes, a work of Crane's is glossed with the blanket remark that it was his best yet or that it was hack work. It's evident that the biographer likes her subject; her affection for Crane's eccentricities, nerve, and courage animates her work.

Crane had a joyous wit, as can be readily seen in this book. In letters, telegrams, gazettes, and conversation, he shows a gift for charming self-effacement and banter. In his fiction, however, this quality is generally dulled by the unredemptive irony, even a certain meanness, that was fashionable in much turn-of-the-century writing. We see it as well in the bitter stories that Maupassant or the young Joyce wrote at this time. A degree of the brightness, the luster, of Crane's personality might have helped his work, either toward the comic or tragic. Equal to so many varied challenges, Stephen Crane seems to have been born grown up. Yet he died before his work could mature fully beyond the callow, brittle strength of its youth.