Homage to Stephen Crane

He was 28 when he died, at a health spa in the Black Forest of Germany.  What had we achieved by that age, reader?  For my part, very little.  Perhaps you achieved more, or much.  But it's his age at death that makes him most remarkable, in light of what he did in his short life.

I wonder if they still make students read The Red Badge of Courage in high school.  It was during that four year--what?--that I read it.  I suppose that by making us do so at the time, it was intended in some respect to honor Crane.  I think that requiring books to be read during those years does an author a disservice.  It's difficult to enjoy or appreciate a book one is required to read.  But I suppose something else was intended as well, enjoyment and appreciation not being something to be expected by high school students in their studies, at least.

That particular work of Crane made quite a stir when published.  It was, for the time, a different depiction of war.  It's difficult to think of any other depiction in novels of the same sort up until then.  Ambrose Bierce served in the Civil War and wrote some striking short stories about it, but such as Tolstoy were too busy making grand moral points or indulging in Romantic fantasies to do it what can be called justice.  Unlike Bierce, however, Crane had never experienced war when he wrote that book.  It was entirely a work of his imagination, though considered by most to be unusual in its realism.  Crane experienced war subsequently in his capacity as a newspaper correspondent, "embedded" as we (curiously) say now with soldiers fighting the Greco-Turkish and Spanish-American wars.

I remember the words "realism" and "naturalism" associated with his works.  I read now that "impressionism" is associated with them as well.  It's difficult for a mere reader like myself to keep track of literary categorizations, let alone understand them.  But certainly he wrote of things that took place in life and that were not evidently such as it would be unlikely to encounter in life.  He's been compared, I see, with the prolix Emerson and the less prolix Thoreau among American writers.  I don't see it, really, especially the comparison with Emerson.  Crane was far too direct and spare an author to be compared with Emerson, who bloviated on many things; too many things, in fact.  One can understand why Hemingway thought well of him.  Now and then, Hemingway seems to have expressed admiration for certain writers already dead.  Hemingway thought well of Henry James and Mark Twain also.

Twain is an author I was also forced to read in high school and so neither enjoyed nor appreciated at the time.  I revisited him later, and alas was unimpressed.  That's not the case with Crane.  I confess I've paid no attention to James.  Perhaps I'm unduly concerned as it's been claimed that he wrote novels like a philosopher, while his brother William wrote philosophy like a novelist.  The thought of a philosopher writing a novel troubles me.

I think Crane was at his best writing short stories.  The Monster, The Blue Hotel, The Open Boat are certainly among the best I've read.  Short stories have an unfortunate reputation.  It seems to me that they're not taken seriously enough; all are looking to write or read The Great Novel.  Novels invite excess, however, and imprecision; or so it's seemed to me, and I've read my share of them.  Unless, that is, their chapters are written as short stories themselves, as a kind of serial or series of scenes in the life of a person or event.

With apologies to such as Chekov and others, I think it may be said that American authors have written the finest short stories, and it may also be said (by me at least) that this is to be expected.  American civilization isn't quite what Oscar Wilde claimed it to be (nonexistent) but it doesn't seem to encourage extended reflection or effort on any particular thing, and this would be a prerequisite for creating a novel. 

I'm not a fan of Crane's poetry.  His poetry makes him appear immature, while his prose does not.  His prose was innovative in a way we can't understand now, being used to Hemingway and others who succeeded in extending its precision and simplicity in description.  I'm old now, or old enough, and am astonished he wrote as he did and by what he did so young.  Certain geniuses (Mozart, Schubert come to mind in music) are at once prolific and intensely focused, and are enduringly special and unique as a result.  Crane was one of them.

O Bella Roma

Relatively fresh from a visit to Italy, specifically those cities which seem to be most visited by tourists like myself (Rome, Florence and Venice), I'm inclined to expound on them here--that place where I am emperor, of ice cream (or gelato?) if anything at all.

As may be guessed from my nom de blog and a review of this blog itself, I'm fascinated by the history of ancient Rome.  At long last, I've personally seen many of its ruins.  Edward Gibbon on viewing the Roman Forum was inclined to bemoan its condition, and this he wrote motivated his history of Rome's decline and fall.  It seems in much better shape now than it was when he viewed it, but in viewing it myself I'm inclined to marvel at its ruins.  Perhaps I entirely lack any Romantic instincts, but I'm too impressed by the remains of ancient Rome to indulge in pontifications along the lines of sic transit gloria mundi.

The ruins of the Forum including the rostra and the Curia, the arches of Titus, Septimius Severus and Constantine, Trajan's Market, his column, his forum; those of Augustus and Nerva, the Ars Pacis Augustae, the mausoleum of Augustus, the baths of Caracalla and Diocletian, the Flavian Amphitheater a/k/a the Colosseum, the tomb of Hadrian, the column of Marcus Aurelius and his equestrian statue, represent only the most evident architectural monuments of Rome and its empire, and they're stunning to one such as me.

It's difficult to imagine how impressive they were thousands of years ago.  Henry James, I know, found Roman ruins (or at least some of them) indicative of a kind of brutality and baseness.  They were just too big for Henry.  I wonder, though, whether his attitude and those of others with similar views is more an implied acknowledgement of how small we and our civilization became after Rome fell.  It's easy in a way to resent the Romans as it took us centuries to achieve what they achieved even in matters of plumbing and hygiene, in the building of roads, the supplying of water to cities, let alone the fine arts.

One thing I find disturbing was the tendency of the popes who restored certain of the ruins to emblazon their names on them.  I suppose the desire was that they be granted a kind of immortality by association with monuments which represented ancient glory and would clearly last far into the future.  Restoration by Christians seems entirely appropriate in any case, however, as various Christians after the fall of the empire regularly took stones and marble from the ruins of Rome to adorn their buildings.

Even more disturbing are the figures of popes and saints which were plopped on top of the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius.  As those columns depict scenes of the conquests and campaigns of those emperors, it's unclear why any pope or saint would be glorified by appearing at the summit of such military monuments.  Churches, of course, were regularly placed on top of pagan temples.  There's something profane about the imposition of Christian icons on and over these pagan relics; something profane about the physical triumph of the Christian sacred.  But who remembers those popes, compared to those who know the names of the emperors who lived centuries earlier?

It can't be doubted that brutality and cruelty were aspects of Roman civilization.  But walking along the Sacred Way, where emperors and generals rode in triumphs and religious processions took place, where Cicero, Cato and Caesar walked, one senses that much more was involved, good and bad, and that what we are now is in large part mere imitation or emulation.  And not merely that of "skirt-mad Mussolini" as Robert Lowell called him, unfurling the eagle of Caesar.

Rome remains a world capitol; a crowded, busy city apart from but existing in and around the imposing corpse of the Roman Empire and of course around the center of what may be called its ghost, the Roman Catholic Church, a sovereign state in its own right thanks to the Lateran Treaty (and Mussolini, it must be said).  But it's still served by the aqueducts which continue to bring potable water to its inhabitants.  Ancient Rome is a living presence in a living city.  It's filled not merely with monuments to the past or recalling the past, but with the past itself.  Rome's past is present.