Fezzik and I arrived in the south of England in 1899, via my time-machine H.G., to interview an American writer. You guessed it, Stephen Crane. We had a few minor problems. Upon our arrival— (It's not a landing—H.G. suddenly appears wherever I have programmed it to go. No Star Trek slow materialization for this piece of rock.) —anyway, upon our arrival several men who happened to see the rock appear and us exit from it wanted to pay me to be a sideshow in a circus. They said they were disciples of P.T. Barnum and guaranteed me (and Fezzik) a comfortable living. I declined. They persisted. I declined. They persisted.

"Fezzik," I said. "Attack!"

There are few things more effective with annoying salespeople than a good set of canine teeth.

Once this distraction had been eliminated Fezzik and I strolled on to the grounds of a huge Elizabethan manor, the home of Stephen Crane. There seemed to be a little party going on with maybe a dozen people. The first man I noticed was a bearded, heavy man in his mid-fifties, a literary looking fellow if I ever saw one.

"Mr. Crane," I said confidently as I strode up to him. "I'm Glen Draeger."

"An invited guest?" he asked.

"No, but I'd like to talk with you."

"I'm sorry, but I am not Mr. Crane—and thankfully so," he said staring hard at me. "My name is Henry James."

My first thought was that I must have typed in the wrong date in H.G. and somehow ended up with the famous Henry James, author of The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, The Turn of the Screw and The American.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I thought this was Mr. Crane's home."

"It is, it is, but I am not he." A strange little smirk crossed his face as he directed me to another man across the yard. "There he is," he said.

I was suspicious. This guy looked young, maybe 26 or 27 and no one that age could have written The Red Badge of Courage. One critic has called it "the greatest war novel by an American."

"Mr. Crane?" I asked.

"Me? Not I," he said in an English accent. "I am Ford Madox Ford." Mr. Ford was an English writer. His most famous novel, and considered his best, is The Good Soldier. Mr. Crane apparently entertained some famous people.

"I'm sorry," I said starting to feel uncomfortable. It's difficult enough trying to get up the courage to approach these people and then to have a joke played on me, well, I felt out-of-place, embarrassed and a little angry. "Would you direct me to him?"

"Oh sure, chap," he said cheerfully, "he's right over there." He pointed to a man in his thirties. I walked up to him, introduced myself and said, "Mr. Crane, it's great to finally meet you. I'm Glen Draeger."

"Great to meet you too," he said in an English accent. There was laughter from two women and a young man standing nearby.

"You're not Mr. Crane, are you?" I asked.

"No, bloke, I'm H.G. Wells."

I couldn't speak. The father of the science fiction novel stood before me. I love reading good science fiction. He also wrote one of my favorite short stories, "The Door in the Wall." I didn't know what to say. "I named my time machine after you," I blurted out.

This comment received more, and, it seemed to me, louder laughter. "How many times have you read my novel, Mr. Dreeger?"

"It's Draeger," I stammered. "I've only read it once, but I've seen the old movie several times and I just saw the new one." Their blank stares, though disconcerting, did not stop me from continuing. "Would you please just tell me which one of you is Stephen Crane?"

"I am," a tall, thin young man said. He had a brown, sparse mustache like one you'd see on a teenage boy making his first attempt at facial hair. When I looked at him I realized I had somehow made a terrible mistake. I thought I had set the time machine for 1899, a year before Crane's death. This guy looked like he was in his early twenties with a frail, gangling body held up by bones, it seemed, that might break during a mild fall. Crane was a war correspondent, he survived the sinking of a ship and he wrote a great novel about the Civil War. This was a kid nearly 20 years my junior who looked like he'd have a tough time handling a preschooler.

"I'm sorry," I said, "I thought this was 1899." The people around us now laughed at me with derision and scorn; it was that brand of laughter that labels the recipient of it as an inferior person.

"You're having a rough week, aren't you?" he said to me. Now for some reason it suddenly occurred to me that I had forgotten all about Fezzik; I had not seen him since I walked up to Henry James. With this distraction the sneers of Crane's guests ceased to bother me.

"My dog? Where's my dog?" I asked.

"Cora took him to see our dog."

"Who's Cora?"

"Cora Taylor, my wife, previously the madame of the Hotel de Dream in Jacksonville."

"I see," I replied. Cora was not the type of woman, if you're a male, that you'd take home to meet your mother.

"She loves animals," he reassured me. "Don't worry about your dog. Now come on. Let's go to my study and I'll talk with you, but only briefly."

I was grateful for his hospitality. He led me up some stone steps into a large entry chamber with a tall ceiling and an opulent chandelier, then down a long hallway and into his study. In the middle of the room sat a desk surrounded by his books and memorabilia from Cuba where he covered the Spanish-American War.

"So," he said, "what do you want to know?"

"I don't know if you can help me much. I was supposed to arrive here after you published The Red Badge of Courage . . ."

"You know," he said, "you have strange way of speaking. My book was published some years ago."

"But you're so young, I thought this was 1899."

"You did read Herbert's novel too much, didn't you? Look, I'm 27, this is 1899. I published The Red Badge of Courage when I was 23."

"23!" I nearly tipped over in my chair.

"Yes. Look mister," he said, "my father was a preacher. He wrote, though not anything that I would write, books against dancing and drinking. He died when I was eight. To be honest with you, I enjoyed gambling, drinking and smoking. Still do. There were fourteen kids in my family and I don't expect my father figured we'd all follow in his footsteps. One thing he told me to do, which I did, was to read my Bible. I read a lot of other stuff too: every 19th century writer I could get my hands on, Shakespeare, Plutarch—-"

"Who is he?" I asked.

"Plutarch? He wrote Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. He was a Greek biographer—lived about 100 A.D. or there abouts. I read a lot of those ancient Greeks."

"Before you were 20?" I must have sounded a little dumbfounded.

"Yes," he replied. "Look, I played baseball too," he said almost defensively. "My buddies figured I could have been a professional and I was the school's leading tenor—yes," he said responding to my disbelief, "a singer. I sang songs."

This guy had done it all. "At what school?" I asked.

"Claverack College, before that I attended Pennington Seminary. Look mister," he said, "my mother was the daughter of a preacher and she sometimes wrote for the New York Tribune. I have writing in my blood and many of my ancestors fought in the Civil War. I guess you could say my relatives were either fightin' the devil or fightin' the rebs."

"So you never even fought in the Civil War?"

"Nah. Wasn't even born until it was over. I once told Joseph Conrad—-"

"You know him too?"

"Here's a piece of advice, mister," he said with some irritation, "don't act like a kid gettin' your first ride on train, all right?"

"I remember now," I said, "Conrad wrote something about you, yeah, it was, 'Your method is fascinating. You are a complete impressionist'"

"He wrote that to me—in a letter," Crane said considering me carefully. "I don't want know how you know that so don't even try to tell me. Anyway, as I was saying, I told Joseph that one of the reasons I became a war correspondent was to see if I had gotten it right in The Red Badge of Courage. I believe I did. I tended to write and then live what I had written about. Maggie, my first novel, is about a woman of the streets, now I'm here living with Cora. I wrote about shipwrecks and then found myself on a sinking ship. My short story, 'The Open Boat,' is about that."

"That's in our book," I said.

"You a teacher?"

"I'm not feeling too much like one now. After your death H.G. Wells wrote that your writing was 'the first expression of the opening mind of a new period.'"

"I'll make sure I tell him that. You know, mister, you really should stop reading Herbert's books and stories. You take them too seriously. What you need to do is get out of your classroom and experience the world."

"It's not exactly a classroom—it's a web site."

"A wha . . . oh nevermind. Listen, you don't experience the world in a book—you experience a book, words, commas and periods. You want to know war—there's only one way. I did it backwards—wrote about it then went to see it—but I have seen it. If you just read books you won't have anything to say—at least not anything worth saying—anyway that's how I see it." He leaned back in his chair. "Well, I think that's about enough for today. This is a private party and it'd probably be good if you found that dog of yours and left now."

"No problem," I said. "Thank you for talking to me. I really appreciate it."

"Don't think nothing of it," he replied. "Just don't come around here again, okay?"

"Don't worry."

I found Fezzik marking new territory on the outskirts of the yard. "Come on, Fez!" I yelled. "Let's get out of here." He ran to me with that over zealous sprint that says, "Where we goin' now! Where we goin' now! Let's go. You wanna go? I wanna go. Let's go."

Back in my study I read some more about Crane. He died at the age of 28 of tuberculosis. He said he intended The Red Badge of Courage to be a "psychological portrayal of fear." It is not meant to be a history of The Civil War. H.L. Mencken wrote that Crane's style was a "sterner, more searching realism that got under the surface." I wonder what else Crane might have written if he had lived to be 60 or 70?

Regards,

Mr. Draeger

Sources:

Benfey, Christopher, The Double Life of Stephen Crane, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, 1992.

Colvert, James B., Stephen Crane, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, San Diego, 1984.

The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., Chicago, Ill., 1988, 15th edition, Vol. 3, pp. 711-712.

Millstone Education:World Literature

I Meet Stephen Crane by Glen Draeger

Millstone Education:
World Literature

I Meet Stephen Crane
by Glen Draeger