Young Man in a Hurry

STEPHEN CRANE by R. W. Stallman. 664 pages. Braziller. $12.50.

Blustering God, Stamping across the sky With loud swagger, I fear You not.

No, though from Your highest heaven You plunge Your spear at my heart, I fear You not. No, not if the blow Is as the lightning blasting a tree I fear You not, puffing braggart.

When there is nothing going for him beyond his own confidence in his genius, the pugnacious young artist always takes on God. That is understandable; if he can convince God of his superiority, the public will be a cinch. When he wrote his challenge to the Deity in 1895, Stephen Crane was only 24, but he had already won his public as the author of the flawless Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage. He may have been thinking of God as well as the critics when he chortled: "They used to call me that ter rible young rascal, but now they are beginning to hem and haw and smile--those very old coots who used to adopt a condescending air toward me."

But Crane gloated too soon. Although he scribbled furiously all of his short life (twelve volumes of novels, poems, sketches, short stories), none of his later works ever remotely approached the success of The Red Badge, written before he had ever heard a shot fired in anger. When he died of tuberculosis in a German sanatorium on June 5, 1900, not yet 29, he was destitute and had been begging money from his literary friends, including Henry James and Joseph Conrad. His brother had to pay to have his body brought home to New Jersey for burial. It was the sort of end most people had predicted for a man who gleefully promoted the false rumor that he was an opium addict, and who married the madam of a Jacksonville sporting house, or at least lived with her. Lionized. In the 68 years since Crane's death, two biographies, a thinly disguised biographical novel, and scores of literary essays have tried to grasp the causes of his failure. This massive, prolix biography by Author Stallman, a literature professor at the University of Connecticut, comes as a refreshing if formidable change. Professor Stallman refuses to truckle to the notion that all things in heaven and earth are simply dreams in Freudian psychology and rejects the theories of earlier biographers that Crane was a young man driven by fear. His scholarly, if often tedious, volume simply gathers every available scrap of information about Crane and his writing, and assembles it in chronological order. The result unquestionably is the most exhaustive biography ever written about Crane--or likely to be written. Nothing is ignored: the details of his birth in 1871, the 14th child of a gentle Methodist minister in Newark, the fairly typical boyhood years in Port Jervis, N.Y., the erratic career as a reporter for New York City papers, and finally, his years as a correspondent covering the Greco-Turkish and Spanish-American wars.

Crane was patently a born rebel who delighted in scandalizing his age. But the clearest--and most surprising--picture that emerges from Stallman's meticulous fact-finding is that Crane was not the starving garret poet of popular legend. At his peak, he was well-paid. Convivial and generous, he virtually gave his money away. He was lionized as a celebrity when most of his contemporaries had scarcely finished college. But he was also a frail and sickly young man, and he did have a presentiment that his life-span would be short. He labored desperately to get down on paper the stories and observations that pressed on his mind like ghosts demanding to be exorcised. "Here is a writer," said his great champion, William Dean Howells, in 1893, "who has sprung into life fully armed."

Mystical Dream. Crane was also a serious writer whose only compulsion was to portray life honestly. At his best, he wrote a bold, uncluttered, staccato prose that, like the young Hemingway's, eventually changed both the rhythm and content of American fiction. At the core of that achievement was The Red Badge of Courage, that wholly intuitive, almost mystical dream of war dredged up from his subconscious when he was only 22.

Perhaps Crane's greatest misfortune was to be born in the U.S. of the 1890s. In a later, more generous age, he could undoubtedly have earned enough money to live well--probably even enough to keep his devoted but high-living mistress in style in the English manor house they occupied before his last illness. As it was, when the tree-blasting lightning struck, he went placidly and obediently, his dog Sponge at his bedside, fully aware, as Willa Gather once said, that "all his life was a preparation for sudden departure."

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