The New Yorker on the Genius of “The Red Badge of Courage”

Before there was The Killer Angels or Gone With the Wind, the most popular novel of the Civil War was Red Badge of Courage. Many people my age read it as pre-teens. It was often cast as what we would now call Young Adult Fiction. Being so widely read by the young, the book’s literary merits sometimes get overlooked. Adam Gopnik has a good piece in The New Yorker today on its author Stephen Crane and a new bio by Paul Auster. The article has a particular focus on Red Badge. Here are some excerpts from Gopnik::

It’s the story of a teen-age boy, of his immersion and panic in battle, during the Civil War, and of his achievement of the “red badge”—a wound, though thankfully not a fatal one. “Red Badge” is one of the great American acts of originality; and if Auster is right that it has largely vanished from the high-school curriculum, its exile is hard to explain, given that it crosses no pieties, offends no taboos, and steps on no obviously inflamed corn. It is relentlessly apolitical, in a way that, as many critics have remarked, removes the reasons for the war from the war. It’s a work of sheer pointillist sensuality and violence: no causes, no purposes, no justifications—just a stream of consciousness of fear and, in the end, deliverance through a kind of courage that is indistinguishable from insanity.

But that’s what gives it credibility as a work of human imagination: teen-age boys set down in a universe of limitless boredom suddenly interrupted by hideous violence and omnipresent death would not, in truth, think of the cause but of their own survival, seeking only the implicit approval of their fellow-soldiers. “Red Badge” is not about war; it is about battle. Soldiers fight and die so they don’t let down the other men who are in the line with them. One of the miracles of American fiction is that Crane somehow imagined all this, and then faithfully reported his imagination as though it had happened. What’s astonishing is not simply that he could imagine battle but that he could so keenly imagine the details of exhaustion, tedium, and routines entirely unknown to him:

The men had begun to count the miles upon their fingers, and they grew tired. “Sore feet an’ damned short rations, that’s all,” said the loud soldier. There was perspiration and grumblings. After a time they began to shed their knapsacks. Some tossed them unconcernedly down; others hid them carefully, asserting their plans to return for them at some convenient time. Men extricated themselves from thick shirts. Presently few carried anything but their necessary clothing, blankets, haversacks, canteens, and arms and ammunition. “You can now eat and shoot,” said the tall soldier to the youth. “That’s all you want to do.”

There was a sudden change from the ponderous infantry of theory to the light and speedy infantry of practice. The regiment, relieved of a burden, received a new impetus. But there was much loss of valuable knapsacks, and, on the whole, very good shirts. . . . Presently the army again sat down to think. The odor of the peaceful pines was in the men’s nostrils. The sound of monotonous axe blows rang through the forest, and the insects, nodding upon their perches, crooned like old women.

It was Crane, more than any other novelist, who invented the American stoical sound. Edmund Wilson, in “Patriotic Gore” (1962), saw this new tone, with its impassive gestures and tight-lipped, laconic ambiguities, as a broader effect of the Civil War on American literature. The only answer to the nihilism of war is a neutrality of diction, with rage vibrating just underneath. Hemingway wrote of the Great War, in “A Farewell to Arms,” almost in homage to what Crane had written of the Civil War.

How did Crane conjure it all? Auster dutifully pulls out the memoirs and historical sources that Crane had likely read. But the novel really seems to have been a case of a first-class imagination going to work on what had become all-pervasive material. The Civil War and its warriors were everywhere; when Crane went to Cuba to cover the Spanish-American War, in 1898, many of the leaders of the American troops were Civil War officers, including some Confederates.

Auster is often sharp-eyed and revealing about the details of Crane’s writing, as when he points out how much Crane’s tone of serene omniscience depends on the passive construction of his sentences. But when he implies that Crane is original because he summons up interior experience in the guise of exterior experience—makes a psychology by inspecting a perceptual field—he is a little wide of the mark. This is, after all, simply a description of what good writing does: Homer and Virgil writing on war were doing it, too. (We are inside Odysseus’ head, then out on the Trojan plain. We visit motive, then get blood.) What makes Crane remarkable is not that he rendered things felt as things seen but that he could report with such meticulous attention on things that were felt and seen only in his imagination. Again and again in his novel, the writing has the eerie, hyperintense credibility of remembered trauma—not just of something known but of something that, in its mundane horror, the narrator finds impossible to forget:

The men dropped here and there like bundles. The captain of the youth’s company had been killed in an early part of the action. His body lay stretched out in the position of a tired man resting, but upon his face there was an astonished and sorrowful look, as if he thought some friend had done him an ill turn. The babbling man was grazed by a shot that made the blood stream widely down his face. He clapped both hands to his head. “Oh!” he said, and ran. Another grunted suddenly as if he had been struck by a club in the stomach. He sat down and gazed ruefully. In his eyes there was mute, indefinite reproach. Farther up the line, a man, standing behind a tree, had had his knee joint splintered by a ball. Immediately he had dropped his rifle and gripped the tree with both arms. And there he remained, clinging desperately and crying for assistance that he might withdraw his hold upon the tree.

The wounded man clinging desperately to the tree has the awkward, anti-dramatic quality of something known. “Red Badge” has this post-traumatic intensity throughout, but so do later stories, just as fictive, like “The Blue Hotel” and the unforgettable “The Five White Mice,” about a night of gambling in Mexico that almost turns to murder, where the sudden possibility of death hangs in the air, and on the page, in a way that isn’t just vivid but tangible. The ability not simply to imagine but to animate imagination is as rare a gift as the composer’s gift of melody, and, like that gift, it shows up early or it doesn’t show up at all. 

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