360
PARTISAN REVIEW
record is so laconic and contradictory as Crane's the difficulties are mag–
nified. The attempt, of course, is to use the work as a substitute record:
and with a writer so little overtly autobiographical as Crane, this re–
quires the manipulation of symbol substitutions on a whirling scale.
There is also in question the utility of the life as an illumination of the
work. From the point of view of the reader who is interested simply in
the impact of the story I cannot see that it is less than distracting to
learn that "The Upturned Face" represents "the father's death, even
the father's defiled death"; or that of the six delineated characters in "The
Blue Hotel" four are masks of Crane himself. The general question is
wider; but Berryman, at any rate, seems to me most illuminating-as
in the exceedingly perceptive account of "The Open BoatH-when the
critic and the biographer are least involved with one another.
The purpose underlying the analysis, nevertheless, is serious and ad–
mirable. Berryman
is
concerned to find the pattern in terms of which
the life makes sense: a comprehension of the battle between Will and
Necessity which will illuminate not only the life but the art. It is not a
question, of course, of explaining the fact of genius itself, which is
presumably inexplicable, but the direction which the genius takes. Ber–
ryman finds Crane's inner Necessity (the nature of the Liberty is less
clear) in a subconscious anxiety at the implications of dark parental
guilt, which in turn inspires his work's concern with panic and the effort
to surmount it, and with the sense of menace or indifference in the
universe and the performance of character in the face of that knowledge.
Without this clue, he thinks, Crane's life is inscrutable; Beer's mono–
graph, for instance, is "agreeably incomprehensible." Here I retain my–
self a different impression; while notably unpretentious and uninsistent,
Beer seems
to
me to be building up an implicit explanation which one
might describe as the proper balance of protection and exposure. Accord–
ing
to
this theory there would have been protection enough in Crane's
childhood-in early beliefs, in the maternal care of a youngest child,
in circumstances of gentility-to preserve an acute sensitivity to shock
at the exposure to the death of the father (Crane
is
himself very ex–
plicit about
this),
at the pains of maturing (where no doubt the epi–
sode at twelve would fit in), and at personal and observed hardship and
injustice. To an older psychology, at least, this would
be
easily as per–
suasive; it would appear to have the advantage of dealing with condi–
tions more individual, and hence more determinative, than the Oedipal
situation and the early sexual trauma. It seems unnecessary anyway to
take so narrow a Freudian line as to ignore, as R. G. Davis put it re–
cently in PR, "the way in which society helps to determine the charac-
