Stephen Crane, c. 1896
Reviewing Paul Sorrentino’s Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire, Thomas Powers observes:
Something had changed in Crane since the publication of ‘The Red Badge of Courage.’ It can be seen in all of the Cuban pieces but most clearly in ‘War Memories,’ a partly fictionalised account as long as a novella. In it, along with much else, Crane describes the fate of Dr John Gibbs, a naval surgeon shot in the night when guerrillas attacked Crane’s detachment at Guantánamo:
‘I heard somebody dying near me. He was dying hard … The darkness was impenetrable. The man was dying in some depression within seven feet of me. Every wave, vibration, of his anguish beat upon my senses. He was long past groaning. There was only the bitter strife for air which pulsed out in a clear penetrating whistle with intervals of terrible silence … I thought this man would never die. I wanted him to die. Ultimately he died. At that moment the adjutant came bustling along erect among the spitting bullets. ‘Where’s the doctor?’ … A man answered briskly: ‘Just died this minute, sir.’ Despite the horror of this night’s business, the man’s mind was somehow influenced by the coincidence of the adjutant’s calling aloud for the doctor within a few seconds of the doctor’s death. It – what shall I say? It interested him, this coincidence.’
Crane had caught a clear glimpse of what he was seeking, the thing beyond ordinary experience. It wasn’t just the death of Gibbs, but the coincidence, and the man’s interest in the coincidence, despite the horror of the night’s business. The change in the writing, the ‘maturing’ noticed by Conrad, is the addition of Crane himself, what he is feeling and experiencing – ‘no longer a cynic. I was a child who, in a fit of ignorance, had jumped into a vat of war.’ He is not only describing war but using himself as an instrument to calibrate the quality and effects of war. Over time this has become a principal technique for writing about war and other extreme experience, widely used by writers as different as Salinger in ‘For Esmé – with Love and Squalor’ and Michael Herr writing about Vietnam in ‘Dispatches.’
