J58
PARTISAN REVIEW
A PORTRAIT OF STEPHEN CRANE
STEPHEN CRANE. By John Berrymon. Amedeon Men of Letters Series.
Williom Sioone Assoeiotes. $3.75.
"Book after book on the man [Crane
1,"
writes Berryman,
"has been announced, labored at, and laid by." As one who has at least
briefly labored, this reviewer has no particular disposition to argue with
the high estimate at which Berryman arrives: "By a margin he is prob–
ably the greatest American story-writer, he stands as an artist not
far below Hawthorne and James, he is one of our few poets, and one
of the manifest geniuses the country has produced." I suspect that there
will be others who will be grateful too to this critically sensitive and in–
dustrious, though controversial, biography for giving substantial persua–
siveness and weight to what seems to have been largely a sneaking opin–
ion hitherto.
The criticism of Crane, as Berryman points out, has been oddly
sporadic; the best of it is to be found in scattered
aperfus.
The bulk
of it, however, seems to be divided among the cultists (including some
millions of unpublished schoolboys and college boys) who seem never
to get much beyond an awe at Crane's ability to write realistically of
a state of war he had not experienced, and literary historians who,
suffering from an occupational disability, labor at categories. The cate–
gory they seem to have arrived at, though somewhat uneasily, is Nat–
uralism. Future historians will have to contend with Berryman's book,
and it seems likely their categories will be even more uneasy. About
Crane's alleged naturalism Berryman is very firm: even in
Maggie,
which fits most easily, "Crane was a very imperfect Naturalist indeed
and cannot possibly be seen as a disciple of Zola." As to method, the
other naturalists "all
accumulate,
laborious, insistent, endless";
if
we
must have a term for Crane, he is an impressionist: he "selected and was
gone." The hero of the
Red Badge,
in common with his other charac–
ters, is not "impersonal and typical"; he is "intensely personal and in–
dividual," though no life is strongly imaginable for him except what
Crane lets you see. All this is fully and persuasively argued; perhaps
still more important is the recognition throughout the book that Crane's
true subject was not man in the implacable grip of circumstance, but
character in the face of panic-provoking crisis. Though for Crane there
is not much space left for free will between the outer compulsion of en–
vironment and fate and the inner compulsion of habit and instinct, it is
crucial to understand what space there is.
On
all these matters, as usually when he is relying on native
in-
