One masterpiece in an otherwise mediocre collectionThe Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure, a collection of short stories by Stephen Crane, was published in 1898. The title selection, “The Open Boat,” is one of Crane’s most highly regarded writings and is considered a landmark work in the history of American literary naturalism. The story is based on an actual shipwreck that Crane lived through. Four survivors of a sunken ship are cast about in a small dinghy on stormy seas. The entire story takes place in the small boat as the castaways struggle to reach the beach without being killed by the crashing surf. This is not a glamorous tale of adventure but rather a harrowing disaster story told in deadpan realism with keen psychological authenticity. This excellent work of short fiction combines the bleak, fatalistic action of a Jack London adventure, the suspense of an Alfred Hitchcock thriller, and the linguistic mastery of a Joseph Conrad novel. Almost long enough to qualify as a novella, “The Open Boat” is the lengthiest piece in this collection and clearly the selection with the highest literary merit. It is a must-read for anyone who appreciates modern realist literature.
The seven remaining selections are a mixed bag. Crane, one of the most innovative and influential writers of American realism, took the literary world by storm in the late nineteenth century with his groundbreaking novels Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and The Red Badge of Courage. His fame and critical acclaim can be partly attributed to his status as the bad boy of American literature. He trampled formulaic conventions and genteel propriety in ways that previous American writers feared to tread. When reading the stories in The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure, one gets the feeling that Crane felt the need to continually scorn convention and defy expectations in order to maintain his status as an iconoclast. The latter half of the title seems intended to be ironic, since Crane mocks the adventure genre more than he embraces it. Though these tales take place in exotic locales (often in Mexico) and the protagonists are ostensibly manly heroes, Crane never allows himself to succumb to the conventions of the genre or gratify his audience with romance and heroic action. He relates these stories from cynical angles that reveal his heroes’ feet of clay and the absurdity and cowardice that often lingers beneath the deceptive illusion of romance. In a way, it’s kind of a shame. Another groundbreaking American realist, Frank Norris, could embrace the adventure genre without compromising his naturalistic principles, as evidenced by his books Moran of the Lady Letty and The Third Circle. In Crane’s collection, however, one feels the author was unwilling to fully commit to the adventure genre.
This is perfectly exemplified by two dismal stories, “The Wise Men” and “Five White Mice.” Both stories take place in Mexico City, though the reader learns nothing about the setting other than the names of a few streets. All of the characters in these stories are white, except for three Mexicans depicted as thugs in “Five White Mice.” Both stories star a pair of young American men known only as “the Kids” whose sole purpose in life is to drink, carouse, and gamble. In “The Wise Men,” the two ne’er-do-wells bet on a foot race between two of their favorite bartenders. The reader thinks the story might lead to a surprise ending, but no, the race ends as expected and the bets pay off as expected, resulting in a complete waste of time. “Five White Mice” leads up to a tense showdown that promises action but simply fizzles to nothing.
There are better selections in this collection, most notably “One Dash - Horses,” which features a thrilling chase scene. “Death and the Child” is a variation on The Red Badge of Courage set in modern Greece. For the most part, however, the Other Tales in The Open Boat and Other Tales are disappointing fare that doesn’t live up to this author’s stellar potential.
Stories in this collection
The Open Boat
A Man and Some Others
One Dash - Horses
Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventures
The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky
The Wise Men: A Detail of American Life in Mexico
Death and the Child
The Five White Mice
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Small-town tales of pioneering realism
The Monster and Other Stories, a collection of short fiction by American author Stephen Crane, was first published in 1899. The book includes two novellas, “The Monster” and “The Blue Hotel,” and one short story, “His New Mittens.”
In “The Monster,” a black servant rescues his employer’s son from a flaming building, but suffers horrible burns in the process. The story takes place in the fictional town of Whilomville, New York, a literary precursor to later imaginary regionalist microcosms like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, or William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawhpa County. To the citizens of Whilomville, the disfigured man is a monster, a hideous and frightening problem that they would prefer to dispose of and forget. Crane was a pioneering author of American realism, and this work was no doubt groundbreaking for its time. In “The Monster,” Crane instills small-town happenings with the gravity of high drama while retaining a genuine, unromanticized tone throughout. He approaches the narrative from multiple perspectives, emphasizing the ensemble cast of community over any one protagonist. In the story’s conclusion, Crane doesn’t take the easy way out, refusing to wrap up everything neatly with a cute little bow. While Crane’s unvarnished, sometimes blunt depiction of the details of small-town life is admirable for its authenticity, he is frequently too humorous in his delivery, often portraying his characters as dumb country bumpkins. The prose often bears a tongue-in-cheek flavor that is inappropriate for the life-and-death subject matter being discussed. One can’t help wondering how another realist like Frank Norris, Charles W. Chesnutt, or Theodore Dreiser might have handled the story with more sensitivity and pathos.
In “The Blue Hotel,” three unacquainted travelers get off a train in the bleak, snow-swept Nebraska town of Fort Romper, where they are immediately accosted by an innkeeper who directs them to the titular establishment. For a small-town lodging house, the accommodations seem adequately comfortable and friendly until one of the newly arrived guests, a Swede, begins to display signs of insanity and starts picking fights with the other guests and the hotel staff. At first “The Blue Hotel” reads like a picturesque Bret Harte western, but Crane subverts the genre by depriving the story of any vestige of heroism and pointing out the senseless stupidity of violence in the name of masculine pride. A surprising ending also works to the story’s advantage, making it a memorable read.
“His New Mittens,” also set in Whilomville, is about a young boy who, having received a freshly made pair of winter hand warmers, is ordered by his mother to keep them dry at all costs. This injunction makes him the object of ridicule and teasing from the neighborhood boys and eventually leads him to rebel against his mother. Crane vividly recreates universal childhood experiences and insightfully captures juvenile thought processes and behaviors in an authentically realistic manner. Though “His New Mittens” is the shortest of the three stories, and the most intimate in scope, it proves to be the best entry in the book.
Early realist writers were often chastised for deliberately depicting the uglier or unseemly sides of life. Though Crane is certainly guilty on that score with his often intentionally unsavory stories, his innovative and challenging fiction helped propel American literature into modernity. The stories included here may not be as strong as his as his seminal novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, but they do provide ample evidence of Crane’s prodigious talent and his indispensable influence on subsequent fiction.
Stories in this collection
The Monster
The Blue Hotel
His New Mittens
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American literary naturalism starts here
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, originally published in 1893, is the first novel by author Stephen Crane. It is also widely considered the first example of naturalism in American fiction, and it is by any measure a groundbreaking work in the history of American literature. Naturalism, the literary movement pioneered by French author Emile Zola, made a marked departure from the romantic tradition by calling for the depiction of the world with a brutal realism, scientific detachment, and meticulous attention to detail. Characters are not seen as individualistic heroes, but rather as organisms defined by their environment and the society in which they live.
Crane’s novel is an exemplar of this new, audacious literary approach. Maggie and her family eke out a sordid existence in the Bowery neighbor of New York City. At first she is a supporting character, waiting in the wings, as her brother Jimmie takes center stage. When the book opens, we find him engaged in a deadly street fight with a rival gang. The reader then follows him to his squalid home, where we meet his drunken parents. We thus experience first-hand the environment in which young Maggie is (or isn’t) raised and nurtured. One day Jimmie brings home a friend named Pete, who takes a liking to Maggie. With this first love, Maggie grows from a girl to a woman, and must contend with the challenge of sexuality vs. respectability faced by women in this harsh milieu.
Crane paints a vividly gritty portrait of life in the slums, and transcribes the dialogue of the denizens of Rum Alley in all its idiosyncratic accents. Nevertheless, he clearly pens his narrative in the literary voice of an academically trained writer. The closest stylistic approximation to Crane’s writing would be the impressionist paintings of the American Ashcan School, painters like John Sloan and George Bellows, who rendered scenes of working class life with lush brush strokes and an expert sense of color.
What’s missing from much of Crane’s narrative is sympathy. His descriptions of squalor appear devoid of any social consciousness, as if to empathize with the characters would be too sentimental. When he describes the drunken, uncouth behavior of Maggie’s parents and brother, there’s a ring of, “Look at these poor people. How they carry on!” Compare this to Zola’s much more sympathetic depiction of alcoholism in L’Assomoir. If Zola is guilty of turning the working class into heroes and martyrs, Crane could be guilty of turning them into buffoons. Maggie is the one character that escapes from this tone of condescension, and when she becomes the story’s main focus in the second half the book vastly improves. There’s almost a hint of proto-feminism in the way Crane points out the absurdity of the double standard that punishes women for being sexually active while their male counterparts are free to philander as they please.
Crane is best known for The Red Badge of Courage, his novel of the Civil War. I’ll confess I wasn’t overly impressed with that work, and my dissatisfaction with it temporarily steered me away from Crane. Maggie, on the other hand, I found a very compelling and affecting work, and I’m glad I gave Crane a second chance. I am now looking forward to digging deeper into his body of work.
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An epic battle between realism and allegory
This novel, first published in 1895, is one of the most gritty and vivid portrayals of combat in the history of literature. Author Stephen Crane not only accurately captures the intensity of combat, but also the day-to-day tedium of the soldier’s life, the confusing lack of communication on the battlefield, and the taxing physical and mental toll on the combatants. Crane subverts the tradition of the epic war novel, stripping away the romance to reveal the realistic hopes and fears of a reluctant warrior. The Red Badge of Courage tells the story of Henry Fleming (usually referred to simply as “the youth”), a new enlistee in the Union army. Henry enters the war with grandiose notions of achieving honor and glory. When his regiment finally proceeds to the battlefield, however, Henry begins to question his own valor and wonders if he will run in the heat of battle. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and Henry does flee. Troubled with shame and remorse for this lack of cowardice, he resolves to redeem himself, fight with bravery, and earn back his pride and his manhood, even if it costs him his life.
Stylistically, this book represents a turning point in American literature. On the one hand Crane builds upon the naturalistic narrative style of classic writers like Tolstoy and Zola. On the other hand, by focusing on the psychological dimensions of war rather than on actual historical events, he exhibits the nascent stirrings of modernism. Due to this unique internal perspective on combat, the book was hailed for its innovation and unconventionality. While there’s no doubt this novel was ground breaking for its time, the effect on the 21st century reader is less than stunning.
Although The Red Badge of Courage takes place during the American Civil War, there’s little that ties it to any specific time, place, or battle. The book is more of a universal statement on war than a depiction of any specific conflict. In striving for this universality, however, Crane unintentionally alienates the reader. The character of Henry stands as a symbol for Man in War, but ultimately fails to resemble a living, breathing person. Crane tries so hard to make his protagonist an Everyman, he only succeeds in making him a nobody. While any human being can empathize on a basic level with Henry’s thoughts and emotions, his utter ambiguity hinders any truly meaningful involvement or identification on the part of the reader. Like the other ciphers he encounters in the book—the tall soldier, the loud soldier, the tattered soldier—he bears little more individuality than the horses that populate the battlefield. Crane writes brilliant prose, crafting poetically powerful scenes of carnage, but the overall structure of the novel, or lack thereof, is disappointing. Despite the brevity of the book, it is quite repetitive in its themes. Henry’s mind set constantly vacillates between the shame of cowardice and the desire for glory. The pointlessness of war, the incompetence of the commanders, and the cluelessness of the participants are all relentlessly hammered home. The final message of the book, however, remains unclear. Through his depiction of battle as haphazard, undignified, and futile, Crane undermines the illusion of the glory of war, yet in the end he seems to argue that it’s an essential illusion, necessary for the transformation of boys to men.
Historically, the Red Badge of Courage has rightfully earned its place in the hallowed halls of American literature, but whether it’s deserving of a spot on the bookshelf of the contemporary reader is debatable. If you really like war stories, it’s a safe bet you’ll enjoy it.
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