Stephen Crane Visits the Doctor

(This reprint of an original story written in January 2008 for Carver’s Dog is in honor of the Library of America’s new release of Stephen Crane: The Complete Poems)

 

The young doctor entered the exam room without knocking. He had the chart in one hand and an affixed smile that sent Stephen’s heart racing at first; he knew that sometimes doctors approached bad news with a smile to mask their own horror. But Stephen quickly ascertained that the smile was genuine, one of pure amusement, and he figured the prognosis couldn’t be that bad.

“Mr. Crane.” The doctor politely nodded, still smiling, and sat down in a rickety desk chair on rollers across from the exam table. He opened Stephen’s chart on his lap, glanced at it briefly, and then looked at the name on the index tab of the folder.

“Crane. Stephen Crane. That’s your real name?”

“For seventy-two years now.”

“Any relation?”

“To … ?”

“Stephen Crane. The writer.”

“Not that I know of, no.” The smile refused to dissolve from the doctor’s thin lips. “Is there something amusing in my chart?”

“Only your name. It’s just, well, sort of funny. I wrote a dissertation on Stephen Crane; in fact, it made the dean’s list.”

“You look barely old enough to be out of high school,” Stephen said.

“Trust me, Mr. Crane, high school was a long, long time ago in a galaxy far away.” The doctor tapped a pencil to his lips and gazed out the exam room window. His eyes glassed over in reverent thought. “Red.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Crane. He was fixated on the color red. ‘The Red Badge of Courage’, of course, being the most glaring example.”

The doctor stood, gently tossed Stephen’s chart on the desk chair, and thrust his hands into his hip pockets. He ambled over to the window. The smile had long since departed and Stephen thought that he looked very sad all of a sudden.

“Maggie had red hair. Maggie in ‘Maggie: A Girl of the Streets’. She had flaming red hair. Crane called war ‘the blood-swollen god.’ Blood. Red. It’s everywhere in his work. You want to hear something, Mr. Crane?”

Stephen shrugged his bony shoulders. He really wanted to hear the results of his exam. “Sure.”

“It’s a passage from ‘Red Badge of Courage’. My favorite passage, actually.”

The doctor turned away from the window and closed his eyes as he recited.

“At nightfall the column broke into regimental pieces, and the fragments went into the fields to camp. Tents sprang up like strange plants. Camp fires, like red, peculiar blossoms, dotted the night. … From this little distance the many fires, with the black forms of men passing to and fro before the crimson rays, made weird and satanic effects.”

The doctor retrieved Stephen’s chart, sat down in the chair once again, and crossed his legs.

“Irony is not the word I’m looking for here … but Crane, he died from tuberculois in a sanatorium in the Black Forest. Twenty-eight years old. He died coughing up these huge globules of bright red blood, according to one of his attending physicians.”

Good Lord, Stephen thought, is he trying to tell me I have tuberculosis? Is that what’s been causing the weakness and shortage of breath?

“I guess ‘irony’ is the correct word, in this case,” the doctor continued. “Who would’ve thought that Crane’s fixation on the color red would manifest itself in his own life in such a dramatic fashion?”

Stephen’s patience suddenly evaporated like rain on a hot desert blacktop.

“Goddamnit,” he snapped. “What are the results of my tests?”

When the doctor leaned his face in close to Stephen, he could smell the distinct aroma of bourbon on the young man’s breath.

“It’s a beautiful thing,” the doctor said in a half-whisper that scared Stephen. “It’s a rhyming sequence deserving of a novel. Are you ready for this?”

Stephen’s teeth clenched. “Just … tell … me … the … results, doctor.”

“Okay. Stephen Crane, the first Stephen Crane, I mean, the writer, fixates on the color red, dies coughing up streams of the color red. Now … you, the other Stephen Crane, the other white meat, as it were, well, the results of your tests reveal that you are anemic, Mr. Crane. You’re anemic! From the Greek, meaning ‘without blood’.  A deficiency of red blood cells. You know what?”

“What?”

“Most days, life doesn’t get any more amusing than that.”

 

Brecht’s Fishing Tackle

Bertolt Brecht, Courtesy All Graphics Online

This evening I switched off the television shortly before 11:00 pm, wishing to avoid any further disastrous updates coming out of Japan, holding off the latest ill news until tomorrow. I had a bad night on Saturday, after all, which cost me countless hours of sleep, owing to a miscount in my daily regimen of prescription opioid pain relievers. It would be best to spend the late night hours reading, I figured, than viewing more horrifying tsunami videos shot on shaky cell phone video cams.

Scanning over the books on my coffee table for something light and escapist to read, I hefted into my hands the terrific 880-page Library of America anthology, Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology (2002). I opened the book at random and landed on page 287, and a poem by German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, who arrived at San Pedro Harbor in 1941, Los Angeles being the last leg of his escape from Nazi Germany, after success with the theatrical works The Threepenny Opera (1928) and The Rise and Fall of the City of the Mahagonny (1930), radically political stage dramas that did not put him in good graces with the ruling political party.

The poem I stumbled across is titled The Fishing-Tackle; the uneasy relevance to the words that have gone before in this posting shall be obvious.

The Fishing-Tackle

In my room, on the whitewashed wall

Hangs a short bamboo stick bound with cord

With an iron hook designed

To snag fishing-nets from the water. The stick

Came from a second-hand store downtown. My son

Gave it to me for my birthday. It is worn.

In salt water the hook’s rust has eaten through the binding.

These traces of use and of work

Lend great dignity to the stick. I

Like to think that this fishing-tackle

Was left behind by those Japanese fishermen

Whom they have now driven from the West Coast into camps

As suspect aliens; that it came into my hands

To keep me in mind of so many

Unsolved but not insoluble

Questions of humanity.

Fifty and Then Some

Fifty:  Middle English, from fifty, adjective, from Old English fīftig,from fīftig, noun, group of 50, from fīf five + -tig group of ten; akin to tīen ten

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For me, turning fifty was not the traumatic experience that it has proven to be for many men (and a few women) I have known. The turn of the calendar to fifty-one, on the other hand, led to a greater degree of intense introspection, pronounced hypochondria, normally associated with a morbid dread and anticipation of the grave, and a certain amount of dissatisfaction.

Fifty-two, looming on March 12, promises to offer more of the same; as the protagonist, Teague O’Regan, of my new novel-in-progress confesses, “Most men work for some special goal. Some want a quiet house in the country; others have dreams of retiring; others do it for the sake of their children … People can die at any age, of course. But when you get to our age, the numbers shift, people start clocking out with greater frequency in their fifties. I find myself lately reading the obituaries and saying, ‘Shit, he was only a year older, or younger, than me’.”

I know I’ve been slowing down at a time when I am also at my most productive — that’s not quite the paradox that it seems; journalism and lit essays come to me as easily as riding a bike. Fiction continues to be a challenge, even an existential struggle of sorts, after a brief machine gun burst of creative writing between 2004 and 2008. Part of the answer may lie in an essay I read last Saturday evening while exploring the fantastic Library of America offering, Baseball: A Literary Anthology. 

In The Silent Season of a Hero, excerpted from his 1970 book Fame and Obscurity, Gay Talese profiles New York Yankees superstar (and Mr. Coffee pitchman) Joe DiMaggio in his lion-in-winter years. One episode finds Joltin’ Joe in a favorite San Francisco watering hole late at night surrounded by writers and other sycophants:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Hey, Joe,” a sportswriter asked, a man researching a magazine piece on golf, “why is it that a golfer, when he starts getting older, loses his putting touch first? Like Snead and Hogan, they can still hit a ball well off the tee, but on the greens they lose the strokes …”

“It’s the pressure of age,” DiMaggio said, turning around on his bar stool. “With age you get jittery. It’s true of golfers, it’s true of any man when he gets into his fifties. He doesn’t take chances like he used to. The younger golfer, on the greens, he’ll stroke his putts better. The older man, he becomes hesitant. A little uncertain. Shaky. When it comes to taking chances the younger man, even when driving a car, will take chances that the older man won’t.”

Return of The Deconstruction Zone

After an extended absence, my Deconstruction Zone literature column for Pop Matters returns this month with a look at the new Library of America release, Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcut:

In 1908, Harry Ward’s Social Creed of the Churches, calling for the abolition of child labor, a shortened work week, greater emphasis on safety in the workplace, and a living wage for all workers, was adopted by ecumenical Federal Council of Churches, and would become synonymous with the moral platform for workplace reform.

Aside from chairing the ACLU for the first 20 years of its existence, Harry Ward was also a co-founder, in 1907, of the Methodist Federation for Social Services (MFSS), a national organization dedicated to mobilizing clergy and laity to take action on issues of poverty and social injustice; Harry served with the MFSS until 1945, the same year that his son Lynd was elected an Associate Member in Graphic Arts of the National Academy of Design in New York City.

This then was the caliber of a man that the HUAC and so-called “friendlies” of McCarthy’s misguided anti-Communist committee like Walt Disney sought to discredit and destroy with their sanctimonious patriotism.

“Actually if you could see close in my eyes,” Disney once told an interviewer (as cited by Dave Smith in The Quotable Walt Disney), “the American flag is waving in both of them and up my spine is growing this red, white and blue stripe.”

Read Lynd Ward and Walt Disney: Illustrators of America’s Tumultuous History at Popmatters.