The Red Badge of Courage and Other Stories (2 page)

On the other hand, some readers objected to Crane's ostensible failures of verisimilitude in the novel. A. C. McClurg, a Civil War general, dismissed it as nothing more than “a vicious satire upon American soldiers and American armies” and “a mere work of diseased imagination” which ignored entirely “the quiet, manly, self-respecting, and patriotic men, influenced by the highest sense of duty, who in reality fought our battles.” William M. Payne, editor of the
Dial,
scorned what he considered Crane's nondescript method: “There is almost no story to Mr. Crane's production, but merely an account, in roughshod descriptive style, of the thoughts and feelings of a young soldier during his first days of active fighting.” The reviewer for the New York
Independent,
in sharp contrast to the favorable notices of the novel, claimed it was merely “a raw lump of pseudo-realism wherein a man, who clearly has no first-hand knowledge of war, attempts to present an American picture in Tolstoi's manner. It is, in fact, not true to life, and as a romance it is supremely disgusting.”
⁹
Many other critics negotiated a middle ground between these extremes. A. C. Sedgwick in the
Nation,
for example, thought Crane “a rather promising writer of the animalistic school,”
¹⁰
a form of praising with faint damns. In all,
The Red Badge of Courage
made him famous and, but for his profligate spending, it might have made him rich.

Instead, he continued to work at a furious pace. In November 1896, Crane accepted an assignment from the Bacheller syndicate to report on the political situation in Cuba. While waiting to sail from Jacksonville he met Cora Taylor, madam of a fashionable brothel, who soon becomes his common-law wife. On New Year's Eve he sailed for Cuba on the filibustering steamer
Commodore,
which foundered off the coast of Florida on 2 January 1897 after the boiler exploded. With three other men he drifted in a small dinghy for thirty hours before they reached shore near Daytona Beach. The experience would inspire one of his most famous stories, “The Open Boat.” In March he accepted an assignment with the Hearst papers and the McClure syndicate to cover the month-long Greco-Turkish war in the spring. Accompanied by Cora, Crane spent the next several weeks on the continent before settling in England. There he met Joseph Conrad and wrote “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” and “The Blue Hotel,” both based on his trip to the West in early 1895. Accepting an assignment from the New York
World
to cover the Spanish-American War in Cuba, he landed with the U.S. Marines at Guantánamo in June 1898 and lived in Havana from August until December, filing occasional dispatches. In December he returned to England deep in debt and spent the entire next year vainly trying to earn enough money by writing to appease his creditors. Crane suffered a tubercular hemorrhage in December 1899 and his health rapidly failed. He died six months later in a Black Forest village in southern Germany. In
The Green Hills of Africa
(1935) Ernest Hemingway expressed his admiration for Crane's writing and when asked “what happened to him?” he replied, “He died. That's simple. He was dying from the start.”
¹¹

 

One of the most rapidly maturing authors in American literary history, Crane refined the crude brand of naturalism evident in his first novel
Maggie
in his masterwork
The Red Badge of Courage
. He broadly modeled the battle in the novel on the battle of Chancellorsville in early May 1863, with Fleming's regiment, the 304
^th
New York, based on the 124
^th
New York, a unit raised around Port Jervis. Still, the novel invokes the names of no officers associated with the fight because, as Crane explained later, “it was essential that I should make my battle a type” so as not to raise the ire of any generals in the field.
¹²
Instead, Crane's characters were archetypes—e.g., “the tall soldier,” “the youth,” “the loud soldier,” “the cheery soldier,” “the tattered soldier”—for the same reason the four characters in “The Open Boat” are identified simply as the cook, the captain, the oiler, and the correspondent. Much as Crane's soldiers in
Red Badge
are given names (e.g., Jim Conklin, Henry Fleming, Wilson) only in dialogue, the single character given a name in “The Open Boat” (Billie) is so distinguished in dialogue as well.

The novel is often regarded as an initiation story in the grand American tradition of Hawthorne's “My Kinsman, Major Molineaux,” Melville's
Redburn,
and Twain's
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
. The director John Huston endorsed this interpretation when he cast Audie Murphy, the most decorated American combat soldier in World War II, as the hero of the film version released in 1951. But, in truth, Crane's novel confounds the critics who try to read it as a
Bildungsroman
. Henry Fleming never really grows or learns anything. Or as Charles C. Walcutt insists, “Increasingly, Crane makes us see Henry Fleming as an emotional puppet controlled by whatever sight he sees at the moment. . . . If there is any one point that has been made it is that Henry has never been able to evaluate his conduct. . . . Crane seems plainly to be showing that he has not achieved a lasting wisdom or self-knowledge.”
¹³
Put another way, the tall soldier (Jim Conklin) is a responsible adult when the novel opens; the loud soldier (Wilson) becomes an adult after his first day in battle; but “the youth” (Fleming) does not change at all. He remains a dupe to his illusions to the final page.

In fact, he has been conditioned to harbor his illusions from an early age. His ideas about war have been gleaned from reading classical Greek authors, Homer's
Iliad
in particular. “He had read of marches, sieges, conflicts, and he had longed to see it all,” but Fleming now despairs that “Greeklike struggles would be no more.” Modern warfare would be neither as noble nor as savage as it was for the Greeks. Henry fears he will run in battle, moreover, and he conceives of war (as would a good Darwinian) as a crucible for testing character: “He tried to mathematically prove to himself that he would not run from a battle.” On the eve of his first skirmish, he rationalizes that he has been coerced to volunteer in the army, that he has not enlisted of his own free will, that he is a mere will of the wisp in a naturalistic universe. “He was in a moving box” of “tradition and law.” The army and the war are consistently described with animal metaphors—as “two serpents crawling from the cavern of the night,” “the red animal,” a “brown swarm of running men,” a “red and green monster”—and the individual soldier is but an impersonal cog in a war machine, a “part of a vast blue demonstration,” “not a man but a member” of his unit who is “welded into a common personality” and “dominated by a single desire.” At first, confident he will “become another thing in battle,” Fleming stands his ground in a condition of “battle sleep.” But during a second charge, Fleming does run when he thinks his entire regiment is retreating: “A man near him . . . ran with howls. . . . He, too, threw down his gun and fled. There was no shame in his face. He ran like a rabbit.” Fleming rationalizes his fear and trepidation in naturalistic terms: “He had fled, he told himself, because annihilation approached.” Wandering through the woods, Fleming throws a pinecone at a squirrel who “ran with chattering fear,” which he considers a sign from Nature. He had run from danger exactly like the squirrel in a personal “struggle for existence.” (Obviously, animal metaphors appeared in literature before Darwin, but it is fair to say they had a different resonance in the late nineteenth century, after the publication of
The Origin of Species
.) Fleming soon detects a second sign from Nature that reinforces the lesson of the first. He sees a small animal catch a fish from a pool of standing water, and then in a type of chapel in the woods he comes across the decaying body of a Union soldier whose eyes resemble those of “a dead fish.” The implication is clear, at least to Henry: Had he not fled the battle, he would have been prey to the enemy, killed like the fish. In brief, as Milne Holton concludes, “Confronting Henry is a Darwinian Nature, a Nature red in tooth and claw.”
¹⁴

Fleming's ostensible “heroism” throughout the remainder of the novel merely consists of mindless, instinctive, animal-like acts of self-preservation. “He forgot that he was engaged in combating the universe,” the reader learns. “He threw aside his mental pamphlets on the philosophy of the treated and rules for the guidance of the damned.” In the chaos of the retreat, Fleming accosts another soldier who, in a fit of rage, slams his rifle butt against Fleming's head, inflicting an utterly ironic “red badge of courage.” (That is, the very title of the novel drips with sarcasm.) In the
melée,
Fleming meets the “tattered soldier,” who embarrasses him with repeated questions about his wound. (Conscience, it seems, is simply a fear of social condemnation, not an innate faculty.) He also crosses paths with the “cheery soldier,” the one figure in the novel who exhibits genuine kindness toward him, though not until they separate does Fleming realize “that he had not once seen his face.” And he again encounters his friend Jim Conklin, the “tall soldier,” whom Fleming watches die from his wound, a genuine “red badge of courage.” The next several chapters reinforce the notions of war as a ruthless Darwinian struggle and violence as the essence of life. In this respect, Crane anticipated such war novels as Norman Mailer's
The Naked and the Dead
(1948) and James Jones's
From Here to Eternity
(1951).

In the exact center of the novel, the beginning of chapter XIII (of twenty-four chapters), Fleming returns to his regiment. Wilson, now a veteran of combat, exhibits “a fine reliance” and an “inward confidence” in sharp contrast to his friend, who continues to rationalize his conduct the day before: “he had fled with discretion and dignity.” Fleming returns the letters Wilson had entrusted to him to mail in the event of his death, but does so patronizingly: “It was a generous thing.” But he soon rebels against the constant threat of renewed war. He feels “like a damn' kitten in a bag” or “a kitten chased by boys. . . . It was not well to drive men into final corners; at those moments they could all develop teeth and claws.” The soldiers, to Henry, were akin to “animals tossed for a death struggle into a dark pit.” Once more he responds instinctively to danger. In the next skirmish, he is “not conscious that he is erect upon his feet” during a charge and “not aware of a lull” in the fighting a few minutes later. After the battle, in which the enemy is briefly routed, “It was revealed to him [note the passive voice] that he had been a barbarian, a beast.” More to the point, if he is not a hero (and how could he be, given that his response to danger was neither planned nor deliberate?), “he was now
what he called a hero
” (italics added). He had fallen asleep and, “awakening, found himself a knight,” at least in his own eyes.

Ironically, at this juncture Fleming learns of his comparative insignificance in the vast scheme of war. Far from the hero of his adolescent dreams, he is reduced to a cipher when he overhears a general order his regiment into battle like sheep to the slaughter. He experiences an epiphany: “the most startling thing was to learn suddenly that he was very insignificant.” The moment recalls one of Crane's bitterly ironic poems:

In a stupor, “unconsciously in advance” of his regiment, Fleming leads his compatriots into battle, though later he has no good idea “why he himself was there. . . . the youth wondered, afterward, what reasons he could have had for being there.” Like other naturalistic characters, Fleming inhabits a non-teleological, non-purposeful universe. Or like other soldiers in combat, he “showed a lack of a certain feeling of responsibility.” The novel is absolutely silent on the issues of slavery or states rights or any other reason usually invoked to justify the war. Rather, the soldiers' conscious purpose for fighting has been supplanted by primitive emotion or, worse yet, unthinking “patriotism.” Fleming imagines “a despairing fondness” for the flag that symbolizes his nation, so much so that when the color sergeant is killed he “made a spring and a clutch at the pole” to save the emblem from touching the earth. He even eroticizes the Stars and Stripes: “It was a woman, red and white, hating and loving, that called him with the voice of his hopes.” Ironically, Fleming and the other fighters charge within half a hundred feet of victory, not that they realize their failure until later. They are, after all, as pawn-like infantrymen “oblivious to all larger purposes of war.”

Fleming emerges from his so-called “battle madness” in the final chapter of the novel. But the conclusion of the text preserves or sustains its ambiguity. In the fourth to the final paragraph, Fleming declares that “He was a man”—an affirmation of his entry into adulthood, a sentence if read straightforwardly that would support a reading of the novel as an initiation story. But a few lines later, in the penultimate paragraph of the text, the reader learns that “He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war.” To be a man is to be an animal, it seems. As John Condor concludes, “Far from bringing Henry into a world of freedom where he will operate as a free agent, the last chapter shows him developing new illusions. They are illusions that the battlefield itself exposed: e.g., the fiction that people are free and therefore morally responsible for their actions.”
¹⁵

In short,
The Red Badge of Courage
may be read as an anti-war novel much as the movie
Patton
(1970), for example, may be viewed as an anti-war film. Fleming (=lemming?) may simply be a fool who suffers his illusions unself-consciously, and such a notion required a sophisticated point of view. Crane eschewed both an omniscient narrator who reliably describes the ebb and flow of objective reality and a first-person narrator whose perspective is blinded by the chaos and confusion of war. Instead, he developed a terse, impressionistic, and apprehensional style in which all events are mediated or refracted through Fleming's consciousness and all the reader finally knows is the play of his imagination.
The Red Badge of Courage
essentially recounts through Fleming's impressions the fears of an ironic hero or an anti-hero. Reality exists only insofar as Fleming apprehends it. Not only is there no objectivity to his story, the very notion of reality is a shifting, unstable, and distorted construction of his imagination and defies precise definition. Put another way, Crane had begun to develop naturalistic themes in an impressionistic or pointillistic style. For the record, Crane alluded explicitly to the French impressionists in his sketch “War Memories” (1899). As Sergio Perosa suggests,