696
PARTISAN REVIEW
doubt he tried his friends' charity extravagantly.
As
the Russian proverb
about drinking has it, "A man on foot is a poor companion for a man
on horseback." Yet Crane somehow never seems to feel he is galloping
to destruction. In this he is very different from Fitzgerald, who hrui
in the midst of chaos the rather cross-eyed power of gazing upon
his
deterioration as if he were not living it but somehow observing his
soul
and body as one would watch a drop of water slowly drying up in the
sun. Crane, on the other hand, expresses over and over the greatest
delight in alcohol; he sees himself as a true lover of the grape rather
than a snuffling slave of the bottle and, though the results may be the
same, the attitude alters the experience along the way. It is one thing
to die in Bcstasy and another to pass away, moaning, "I knew this stuff
would get me in the end." (This is not suggested as the literal deathbed
mood of either of these authors, but as a fundamental difference of
attitude toward their "difficulties.")
Crane's letters are vivid in every respect- responsive, humorous,
beautifully written, fresh-everything and more. The sheer power of
mind they reveal is dazzling; his comments upon his reading, his con–
temporaries, his own work, even the landscape, are always interesting
and usually brilliant.
It
is impossible to
think
of him, after this, as a
natural who knows not what he doeth. What
is
so appealing about
his
mind is the utter absence of cant, artiness and fear-all those things
Sherwood Anderson seemed to think were the "copy" a literary man
was obliged to wring out of his skin. Even when Crane is wounded
in
his vanity-self-justifying and "true to human nature" as he will be in
his explanation of lapses-there is always something solid and shrewd
in the way he goes about reclaiming himself. One can see in
him
cer–
tainly a "neurotic need for affection" but there is also astonishing inde–
pendence and balance. His melancholy is as short as his enjoyment of
things is long. Very near the end, before he jumped into the sea,
if
he
did
jump, he is writing about the glorious Mexican Easter and the
wonderful singers in the cafes ("has the old Hawaiian gurgling backed
off the map") and detailing his incredibly funny difficulties with a
drunken servant, Daniel. "I took the opportunity to talk to him about
sobriety-meanwhile pouring him glass after glass of Tenampe...."
Reading these letters it is hard to remember the withered and
anesthetized tragedy we thought Crane had become. Yet you cannot
easily account for the amount of joy in them and the joy you receive
from getting close again to Crane's life. Perhaps it is his magical free–
dom from true
disgust
which makes you think this "doomed" poet was,
after all, under the protection of a charm.
Elizabeth Hardwick
