BOOKS
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theory in writing
The Red Badge.
But the fact that he violated it-and
very successfully-with
The Red Badge
is rather used as evidence to hang
him.
What is significant, however, is that having seized on the com–
monplace that creation needn't derive from experience, Mr. Stallman
not only keeps beating what most of us would by now consider a pretty
dead horse, but keeps on and on, with a blend of the doctrinaire and
the petulant, badgering a dead writer of genius. Where most people
would, to begin with, be content to hold that personal experience is no
sine qua non
for successful creation, Mr. Stallman must proclaim it to
be completely
persona non grata.
Let us ignore how much successful
art by other people
is
based on personal experience, and stick to Crane.
Even where Crane's method proves itself, Mr. Stallman must airily dub
it immaterial: "The fight he witnessed . . . became the fight depicted
in
The Blue Hotel,
but the germinal idea for the story might just as
well have had a literary source." And when he cannot validly criticize,
Mr. Stallman must continue to nag: "Was there any need for Crane to
experience a blizzard in order to write
Men in the Storm?"
I must limit myself to just one more example. Mr. Stallman has to
admit that
The Open Boat
is Crane's masterpiece, and that it is based
on personal experience. "Yet," he remarks, "a paradox is here estab–
lished, for the masterpiece ... could have been conceived without the
personal experience." I suspect that Crane, with his delicate feeling for
words, would have relished that use of
paradox;
though he might just
possibly have objected to the use of
conceive-with
the thought that it's
not the conceiving of masterpieces that is so difficult, but the bringing
them to birth.
Having denounced Crane for so much that he did successfully,
Professor Stallman makes clear what Crane ought to have done: "He
could have retreated from life," Mr. Stallman sums up, "to calculate it
from a distance as Hawthorne and James did." By now one is used to
those obtuse and vulgar philistines who insist that what Henry James
needed to do was go home with a streetwalker; but I can't really find
it much more grotesque than to insist that Stephen Crane should have
made himself a shut-in. Not that I'm entirely convinced that James
would have entirely assented to the statement that he had "retreated
from life."
Louis Kronenberger
