Man in Search of a Hero

STEPHEN CRANE (347 pp.)--John Berryman--Sloane ($3.75).

Only horses, dogs and children got very close to Stephen Crane while he lived. In the half century since his death, two biographers have tried to crash the circle. Thomas Beer's study in 1923 recreated the '90s more vividly than it did Crane. Poet John Berryman sticks closer to his subject, but the reader may still wonder occasionally whether he is on the trail of a man or a mirage.

Stephen Crane was born in Newark in 1871. He was the frail 14th child of a gentle Methodist pastor named Jonathan and an unyielding force of nature named Mary. "You could argue just as well with a wave," her favorite son once said. Baby Stephen's first intelligible query is supposed to have been: "Ma, how do you spell O?" He was obviously destined to be a writer. When he died of tuberculosis at 28, he had been that and other things.

Fate's Guinea Pig. In his short life he produced 14 books--poems, novels, short stories--some masterly, some amateurish. He pursued an erratic career as reporter and war correspondent. He made punishing journeys to wars and insurrections, and he acquired a Bohemian notoriety that reads like a composite of Poe and De Quincey. A rebellious spirit, he took a peculiarly joyless pleasure in scandalizing the age. A groundless charge of drug addiction provoked a characteristic response: he concocted a piece on the opium habit.

His life was laced with women of comparatively easy virtue to whom he was unfailingly kind and, when he had money, generous. One sued him; another just missed him with a knife; still another married him, or at least they lived together as man & wife. Cora Taylor was devoted to him, but only a romp with his tiny nieces ever brought a smile to the face of Stephen Crane. His life had a kind of luckless ill grace as if he had been selected fate's prize guinea pig.

Beaded Sweat. His work was a triumph of the will. At his best, he wrote with an audacious, staccato directness which permanently altered the rhythm and content of American fiction. The core of that achievement is the self-explanatory novella, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage, and a handful of poems and stories, notably The Open Boat, The Blue Hotel and The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky. Written when Crane was 22, The Red Badge was a brilliantly intuitive study of war and the emotions of men in combat, by a man who had yet to see a battlefield.

Crane's only esthetic creed was "honesty." He did much to release American fiction from the cocoon of euphemism and sentimentality. Technically, he was an Impressionist. Like Flaubert, Chekhov and James, he aimed for "the immediate sense of life, not the removed report." He himself never achieved that summit of craft where art appears to be artless. His oddly arresting similes and metaphors jut up like boulders deflecting the clear stream of his narratives. Many a sentence of Crane's is beaded with the sweat that went into its construction. Despite these deficiencies, his pages twang with an intense, nervous conviction of actuality.

One Fine Morning? The spirit of modernity that pulses through his best work is as much a matter of outlook as technique. His view of existence was doomsday-dark. He saw the condition of man as shipwrecked, life as perpetual war, the world as strange, alien and hostile, the universe as an ironically dirty trick. The dominant emotion in his stories is fear, a kind of anonymous panic which an "age of anxiety" is well-equipped to comprehend.

Yet Crane would have had little sympathy for the modern vogue of the "victim." He was obsessed by the image of the hero. "I think Steve was born a coward," said a friend of Crane's to his biographer, "but he wouldn't stay one." He cultivated the stoic virtues of courage and fortitude, but he was never granted stoic resignation. What haunted his perturbed spirit nobody will ever fully know. Biographer Berryman glibly discerns an Oedipus complex, but there are more things in heaven & earth than are dreamed of in Freudian psychology.

Possibly, like Baudelaire, Crane was "intoxicated by the idea of damnation." Unbeliever though he was, he may have found the void of atheism no fit home for a minister's son. Or perhaps, like that classic dreamer, Jay Gatsby, he "believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning--"

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