When I Knew Stephen Crane

Willa Cather cuenta de su encuentro con Stephen Crane, de su personalidad y sus diálogos. Estos párrafos nos dan la oportunidad de saber cómo era Crane en persona.

Al final unas grageas de Aubrey Beardsley y Hamlin Garland.

Desde A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays, When I Knew Stephen Crane...

 

Fue en el verano del ´94 que un tipo flaco, de pecho estrecho, en un traje gris gastado, con un sombrero que caía sobre sus ojos; entró en la oficina del editor del diario y se presentó como Stephen Crane. Dijo que estaba viajando a México para hacer un trabajo y librarse de su tos y que estaría en Lincoln por unos días. Después explicó que estaba sin plata y que tendría que esperar hasta recibir un cheque del este antes de seguir… era tan flaco que parecía un cadáver, su cara esquelética y sin afeitar. Un fino y negro mostacho aparecía en su labio superior…

 

It was, I think, in the spring of ’94 that a slender, narrow-chested fellow in a shabby grey suit, with a soft felt hat pulled low over his eyes, sauntered into the office of the managing editor of the Nebraska State Journal and introduced himself as Stephen Crane. He stated that he was going to Mexico to do some work for the Bacheller Syndicate and get rid of his cough, and that he would be stopping in Lincoln for a few days. Later he explained that he was out of money and would be compelled to wait until he got a check from the East before he went further. I was a Junior at the Nebraska State University at the time, and was doing some work for the State Journal in my leisure time, and I happened to be in the managing editor’s room when Mr. Crane introduced himself. I was just off the range; I knew a little Greek and something about cattle and a good horse when I saw one, and beyond horses and cattle I considered nothing of vital importance except good stories and the people who wrote them. This was the first man of letters I had ever met in the flesh, and when the young man announced who he was, I dropped into a chair behind the editor’s desk where I could stare at him without being too much in evidence.

Crane, 1891

Only a very youthful enthusiasm and a large propensity for hero worship could have found anything impressive in the young man who stood before the managing editor’s desk. He was thin to emaciation, his face was gaunt and unshaven, a thin dark moustache straggled on his upper lip, his black hair grew low on his forehead and was shaggy and unkempt. His grey clothes were much the worse for wear and fitted him so badly it seemed unlikely he had ever been measured for them. He wore a flannel shirt and a slovenly apology for a necktie, and his shoes were dusty and worn gray about the toes and were badly run over at the heel. I had seen many a tramp printer come up the Journal stairs to hunt a job, but never one who presented such a disreputable appearance as this story-maker man. He wore gloves, which seemed rather a contradiction to the general slovenliness of his attire, but when he took them off to search his pockets for his credentials, I noticed that his hands were singularly fine; long, white, and delicately shaped, with thin, nervous fingers. I have seen pictures of Aubrey Beardsley’s hands that recalled Crane’s very vividly.

At that time Crane was but twenty-four, and almost an unknown man. Hamlin Garland had seen some of his work and believed in him, and had introduced him to Mr. Howells, who recommended him to the Bacheller Syndicate. “The Red Badge of Courage” had been published in the State Journal that winter along with a lot of other syndicate matter, and the grammatical construction of the story was so faulty that the managing editor had several times called on me to edit the copy. In this way I had read it very carefully, and through the careless sentence-structure I saw the wonder of that remarkable performance. But the grammar certainly was bad. I remember one of the reporters who had corrected the phrase “it don’t” for the tenth time remarked savagely, “If I couldn’t write better English than this, I’d quit.”

Crane spent several days in the town, living from hand to mouth and waiting for his money. I think he borrowed a small amount from the managing editor. He lounged about the office most of the time, and I frequently encountered him going in and out of the cheap restaurants on Tenth Street. When he was at the office he talked a good deal in a wandering, absent-minded fashion, and his conversation was uniformly frivolous. If he could not evade a serious question by a joke, he bolted. I cut my classes to lie in wait for him, confident that in some unwary moment I could trap him into serious conversation, that if one burned incense long enough and ardently enough, the oracle would not be dumb. I was Maupassant mad at the time, a malady particularly unattractive in a Junior, and I made a frantic effort to get an expression of opinion from him on “Le Bonheur.” “Oh, you’re Moping, are you?” he remarked with a sarcastic grin, and went on reading a little volume of Poe that he carried in his pocket. At another time I cornered him in the Funny Man’s room and succeeded in getting a little out of him. We were taught literature by an exceedingly analytical method at the University, and we probably distorted the method, and I was busy trying to find the least common multiple of Hamlet and the greatest common divisor of Macbeth, and I began asking him whether stories were constructed by cabalistic formulae. At length he sighed wearily and shook his drooping shoulders, remarking:

“Where did you get all that rot? Yarns aren’t done by mathematics. You can’t do it by rule any more than you can dance by rule. You have to have the itch of the thing in your fingers, and if you haven’t, —well, you’re damned lucky, and you’ll live long and prosper, that’s all.”—And with that he yawned and went down the hall.

Crane was moody most of the time, his health was bad and he seemed profoundly discouraged. Even his jokes were exceedingly drastic. He went about with the tense, preoccupied, self-centered air of a man who is brooding over some impending disaster, and I conjectured vainly as to what it might be. Though he was seemingly entirely idle during the few days I knew him, his manner indicated that he was in the throes of work that told terribly on his nerves. His eyes I remember as the finest I have ever seen, large and dark and full of lustre and changing lights, but with a profound melancholy always lurking deep in them. They were eyes that seemed to be burning themselves out.

As he sat at the desk with his shoulders drooping forward, his head low, and his long, white fingers drumming on the sheets of copy paper, he was as nervous as a race horse fretting to be on the track. Always, as he came and went about the halls, he seemed like a man preparing for a sudden departure. Now that he is dead it occurs to me that all his life was a preparation for sudden departure. I remember once when he was writing a letter he stopped and asked me about the spelling of a word, saying carelessly, “I haven’t time to learn to spell.”

Then, glancing down at his attire, he added with an absent-minded smile, “I haven’t time to dress either; it takes an awful slice out of a fellow’s life.”

He said he was poor, and he certainly looked it, but four years later when he was in Cuba, drawing the largest salary ever paid a newspaper correspondent, he clung to this same untidy manner of dress, and his ragged overalls and buttonless shirt were eyesores to the immaculate Mr. Davis, in his spotless linen and neat khaki uniform, with his Gibson chin  always freshly shaven. When I first heard of his serious illness, his old throat trouble aggravated into consumption by his reckless exposure in Cuba, I recalled a passage from Maeterlinck’s essay, “The Pre-Destined,” on those doomed to early death: “As children, life seems nearer to them than to other children… (Paragraphs from A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays, by Willa Cather, Part 1)

 

Para saber

Aubrey Beardsley (1872 – 1898) fue un ilustrador y autor inglés. Sus dibujos en tinta negra enfatizaban lo grotesco, decadente y erótico. Fue uno de los líderes del movimiento estético junto a Oscar Wilde.

 

Aubrey Beardsley

Hamlin Garland (1860 – 1940) fue un poeta, novelista y ensayista norteamericano, ganador del premio Pulitzer, Georgista e investigador de parapsicología.

Fue en sus lecturas en la biblioteca pública que se enamoró de las ideas de Henry George, y su Single Tax Movement. Main-Travelled Roads fue su primer éxito. Serializó una biografía de Ulysses S. Grant en McClure's Magazine antes de publicarla como libro.

Garland viajó al Yukón para presenciar la fiebre del oro, que inspiró su The Trail of the Gold Seekers.

Un amigo recordó su forma de trabajar:

… se levantaba a las cinco y media, preparaba un café y hacía una tostada en un aparato eléctrico en su estudio y estaba trabajando a las seis. A las nueve había terminado con su trabajo del día. Después desayunaba, leía el diario de la mañana y atendía a su correspondencia… después de almorzar él y la señora Garland salían a dar largos paseos… algunas veces visitaban a Will Rogers (actor), Will Durant (escritor), Robert Benchley (humorista) o a mí, pues tenían amistades de todo rango…

 

Artículos relacionados

… refleja la experiencia interior de su protagonista más que el mundo exterior… The Red Badge of Courage, resumen

… porque el amor es más sabio que la filosofía, aunque ésta es sabia, y más fuerte que la energía, a pesar de que es poderosa… El Ruiseñor y la Rosa

… nunca verían la casita de nuevo. Estaban yendo al país de los indios. Pa dijo que había demasiadas personas en los bosques ahora… La Pequeña Casa en la Pradera

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