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Ms. LINDA DAVIS (Author, "Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephen
Crane"): Well, about 10 years ago, I happened to read Stephen Crane's
great short work "Monster," which is not very well-known. It's about
a man who saves the life of a child in a fire and is horribly
disfigured. He--he lived, but he lives as a man without a face. And
it touched a nerve for me because, when I was eight years old, my
father lost his life in a house fire while trying to save me. And
ever afterwards, I was tormented by dreams in which I couldn't see his
face. And what Crane had done in this novella was write my nightmare,
in effect. There are a lot of small scenes, too, that were eerily
like what happened to me when I was a child. And I thought: Who was
Stephen Crane that he can write this way about a fire? I just had to
know, and that's what got me started.

LAMB: Where were you living when the--your father lost his life?

Ms. DAVIS: I was living in Ft. Rucker, Alabama. My father was a
soldier, which Stephen Crane wanted to be at one time. He was a
career man and he'd been through the Korean War and he was in flight
school in Ft. Rucker. And it was just a house fire. He'd been
through combat and all, and lost his life in a house fire, an irony
that Stephen Crane would've appreciated.

LAMB: And you were saved?

Ms. DAVIS: I was saved, but not by my father. My father, I think,
had underestimated how hot the fire was. He had to make his way down
a hall to my bedroom and was overcome. He actually ended up bypassing
my bedroom, ended up in the den right next to our room, found himself
next to the desk where the telephone was and managed to call an
operator for help. And apparently, a beam dislodged from the ceiling,
knocked him unconscious, and then--and he died. In the meantime, one
of the--this was on an Army base, Ft. Rucker--one of the men across
the street thought to come around to the back to get me out and
managed to pull this very heavy screen off--I guess it was the
adrenaline going--and--and he got me out. He got...

LAMB: Again, you...

Ms. DAVIS: He got the Soldier's Medal for that.

LAMB: Again, you were how old?

Ms. DAVIS: I was eight years old.

LAMB: What do you remem--do you remember it?

Ms. DAVIS: I do. The things I remember are really the things that
I've always been aware of remembering since I was a child. I have
little patches of memory. I remember, for instance, the smell of the
fire, but I don't remember seeing it or seeing smoke. The man who
saved my life, who was retired as a lieutenant colonel in the Army,
Dale Harbert, told me that when he reached his arm in to pull me out,
the smoke was really, really thick in my room and the doctor who
examined me later told my mother that just a couple of minutes later,
I would've been gone from smoke inhalation. But I don't remember
seeing it. Captain Harbert, at the time, told me to keep my head
down--don't remember that at all. I just remember this arm kind of
reaching through and pulling me out and scraping my knee on a picnic
table.

LAMB: Did your dad ever regain consciousness?

Ms. DAVIS: No. No.

LAMB: And you read the "Monster" knowing this, Stephen Crane's novel?

Ms. DAVIS: I knew that it had something to do with a man disfigured
in a fire and I was curious about it, but I didn't know any of the
details and I didn't know Crane's work at all. I somehow had missed
"The Red Badge" and his other great short stories, so...

LAMB: Where were you living when you did this?

Ms. DAVIS: When...

LAMB: When you read the "Monster"?

Ms. DAVIS: When I read the "Monster"? I was living in
Massachusetts.

LAMB: Doing what?

Ms. DAVIS: I was in between books at the time. I'd finished my
first book and I was casting about for another idea, but I really
wasn't thinking of doing another biography, so it kind of came out of
the blue.

LAMB: What was your first biography?

Ms. DAVIS: It was of The New Yorker magazine editor Katharine White.

LAMB: And what had gotten you interested in that?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, I was a fan of The New Yorker and of E.B. White's
writing in particular. When I was in graduate school in Boston,
letters of E.B. White were published and I read it and thought that
it was a wonderful love story, really, about a man and his wife in
addition to other things. I became very interested in Katharine White
and started reading a little bit about her, and then during the summer
of 1977, she died and William Shawn wrote an absolutely magnificent
obituary on the last page of The New Yorker. And I wrote a condolence
note to E.B. White a couple of months later, and that started a
correspondence.

LAMB: Before we leave this subject...

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: ...who was E.B. White and when did he live?

Ms. DAVIS: E.B. White is best-known as a great American essayist
and prose stylist and the author of three children's books, including
"Charlotte's Web," and he died I think it is exactly 13 years ago this
fall. I remember because we went to the memorial service and took our
one-year-old daughter, and she was the only baby there, and she'll be
14, so I think it's 13 years ago he died.

LAMB: Did you get to know him at all?

Ms. DAVIS: I did pretty well, yeah.

LAMB: What was he like?

Ms. DAVIS: He was a very shy and very private man, but once you got
to know him and he felt comfortable with you, he was very charming,
very unpretentious, down to earth, a little bit of a crusty New
Englander, very ordinary, not the literary man that you might expect,
not a great reader. He read the newspaper. He was a little behind
in--in book reading. He told me that just a few years earlier, he'd
finally got around to reading "Gone With the Wind." This is just a few
years before I met him.

LAMB: So you--you read the "Monster"...

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: ...you first introduction to Stephen Crane, and now
here--What?--if I read correctly, eight years later, you got a book.
What did you do next?

Ms. DAVIS: After I read the "Monster," you mean?

LAMB: Mm-hmm.

Ms. DAVIS: Well, it was also around that time that there was an
article in The New York Times about a new edition of Crane's letters
that were coming out edited by Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino,
and there was a very interesting piece in The New York Times by
Herbert Mitgang in which Stanley Wertheim said that a very new Stephen
Crane emerged in these letters--hundreds of new letters had come on
the market. And the Crane of legend proved to be very different
from--from the real Crane. And I did a little research, and seemed
that he'd been very underdone as a subject of biography, so it was...

LAMB: Here were have an 1895 picture...

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: ...of him.

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: What was he doing in 1895?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, let's see. He had written "The Red Badge of
Courage"--that picture was taken here in Washington, interestingly
enough, and he fixed himself up to look nice for the camera. He was
becoming famous for "The Red Badge of Courage," and he was here trying
to write a political novel, actually, but he gave up on it.

LAMB: Why?

Ms. DAVIS: He just felt that he couldn't understand politicians,
couldn't get the hang of 'em.

LAMB: Now I went looking for "The Red Badge of Courage" after reading
your book--or, in the middle of reading your book, and I found one of
these...

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: ...for $1, Dover Thrift Editions, Stephen Crane's "Red
Ba--Badge of Courage," 100 pages. What is this--somebody that's never
read this book--and why does it keep Stephen Crane in front of us
after all these years?

Ms. DAVIS: Mm. Well, of course, it's--it's considered one of the
great novels of the Civil War, if not the greatest novel ever written
about the Civil War. It depends on whose point of view it is. I
think that the reason it lives and it speaks to us today is that Crane
wrote it, as he said, as a psychological portrayal of fear, and even
those of us who've never been through combat, never been near a war
zone, we all know what it is to be afraid. I think A.J. Liebling put
it best when he called it, `It's about a boy in a dragon's wood, and
it's timeless.'

LAMB: And when--when you read this, what was your reaction to it?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, honestly, "The Red Badge" is not my favorite of
Crane's works. I think that there are certain passages in it,
including the opening paragraph, which are among the most beautiful
and arresting in all of literature.

LAMB: Why don't you read it?

Ms. DAVIS: The re--the opening paragraph?

LAMB: Opening paragraph, so people who have never read it can get
some sense of...

Ms. DAVIS: I have to put my reading glasses on.

LAMB: Well, I can read it if you--if you don't have your glasses.

Ms. DAVIS: You read it.

LAMB: `The cold passed reluctantly from the earth and the retiring
fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the
landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened and began to
tremble with eagerness at the noises of rumors. It cast its eye upon
the roads which were growing from long troughs of liquid mud to proper
thoroughfares. A river, amber-tinted in the shadow of its banks,
purled at the army's feet, and at night, when the stream had become of
a sorrowful blackness, one can see across it the red eye-like gleam of
hostile campfires set in the low brows of distant hills.' Why is that
so special?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, the quality of the writing is absolutely
magnificent. I mean, he instantly brings the picture of this army
resting--I love the way he places the word `resting' at the end of
that sentence--to life, the wonderful changes in colors--it's--it's
like a painting. You can just absolutely see this army on the hill.

LAMB: How long did it take him to write this?

Ms. DAVIS: The entire book?

LAMB: "Red Badge of Courage."

Ms. DAVIS: Well, he said himself--and he was not always very
accurate and precise about time and dates, but he--he said himself
that he began the book late in his 21st year and finished it early in
his 22nd year. Now that would mean the rough draft or a good revised
draft. He made alterations after that, and it's awful to think that
somebody could've written a masterpiece essentially in about six
months, but...

LAMB: But it's real short.

Ms. DAVIS: It is short, yeah, but it's beautifully done.

LAMB: Where did he write it?

Ms. DAVIS: He wrote it at his brother's house in Lakeview, New
Jersey, and then he also wrote some of it in New York, in an apartment
in New York on the Lower East Side.

LAMB: And when you started out to find out all about Stephen Crane,
where'd you go?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, I went to various locations around the United
States, to New York--New York state, where he'd gone to school in New
Jersey.

LAMB: Where did he go to school?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, he went to Syracuse University, where I went as an
undergraduate, in fact. He went to Lafayette College, which is no
longer in existence, Pennington Seminary. Yes, that's it. Mm-hmm.

LAMB: And how long did he spend in those places?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, let's see. He went away to Pennington Seminary
when he was 14. He was there a couple of years. Then he went to
Claverack College and Hudson River Institute, which was a
semi-military school, for a couple of years. He was at Lafayette for
one semester and then at Syracuse for one semester, and that's when
his experiment with college ended, as he said.

LAMB: And along the way, did you begin to change your attitude or did
you begin to get excited, or what was your reaction to what you were
learning?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, I was really excited about--about writing a
biography of him from the very beginning because I felt this deep,
deep connection with him. Empathy is the whole key to writing a
biography. You don't need to know all the facts up front. And I just
liked him better and better as the years went on. I empathized with
him more. I just--I--I really grew to love him as a human being as
well as as a writer.

LAMB: How long did he live?

Ms. DAVIS: He lived 28 years.

LAMB: What year did he die?

Ms. DAVIS: He died in 1900.

LAMB: Where did he die?

Ms. DAVIS: In Badenweiler, Germany.

LAMB: Did he every marry and have children?

Ms. DAVIS: He did not marry. He had a common-law wife named Cora
Taylor who went by the way--by the name of Cora Crane. She was
actually legally married to a British officer who would not divorce
her. And he never had children that we know of.

LAMB: How did he write about the Civil War without ever seeing
battle?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, he was very knowledgeable about the Civil War. One
of his older brothers, William, was very, very knowledgeable. He
learned a lot from him. He read a lot. It's unclear exactly what
books and things he might've read growing up, but in the months
preceding the actual writing of the war novel, he was reading old
issues of the Century magazine, which for years ran piece--memoirs and
pieces on the Civil War--very dry, but they were the sorts of things
from which he could pick up a lot of details about army life and camp
life. So he was extremely knowledgeable about the facts of the Civil
War. Also, when Crane was growing up, there were an awful lot of
Civil War veterans around. Crane was born, after all, in 1871, and so
there were a lot of veterans for him to talk to.

LAMB: You--actually, reading your book, I felt like I was listening
to one of these interviews because there's so much about writing and
where he wrote and all that kind of thing. This--back to the Century
magazines, where was it that he started reading his first--the first
issues of that that got him interested in the Civil War?

Ms. DAVIS: He was at his artist friend Corwin Knapp Linson's studio
in New York, and Linson was painting and Crane just wandered in and
flopped down on a sofa one day and grabbed these magazines, which
Linson collected, and started reading them while his friend was
painting. And after a couple of hours or so of reading, he'd fling
them down on the floor in hot disgust and say, you know, `These
fellows spout eternally of what they did, but they never say how they
feel. They are as emotionless as rocks.' And he started getting
excited then about writing his own Civil War novel. He wanted to
know: What did it feel like to be in a war?

LAMB: So if somebody reads "The Red Badge of Courage," what can they
learn about war?

Ms. DAVIS: I think they get a wonderful, wonderful sense of place,
of what it feels like to live in an army camp in the time in a
makeshift tent, to live on hardtack and--and coffee, to spend your
time endlessly drilling and marching. They'll learn a lot about the
tedium of war, not of actual combat but all the waiting that soldiers
go through before they actually get into the fight. They will not
learn specifics about particular Civil War battles. He rarely
mentions--the name Longstreet, General Longstreet, crops up in one of
his Civil War pieces, but that's highly unusual. He deliberately
omitted all reference to specifics, geographical specifics and names
and battles, because he wanted to make his battle a type in order to
do what he was trying to do, which was to, as I said, portray fear.

LAMB: When Shelby Foote was here, he told us that when he wrote the
Civil War series that he went to all the battlefields on the same day
that the battles were fought.

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: And I notice that Stephen Crane did some of the same, you say
in your book. When did he go to the battlefields?

Ms. DAVIS: That was actually later. That was much later than "The
Red Badge." He didn't have the money to travel there when he was
writing "The Red Badge." He was really poor. His toes were coming
through his shoes, just like Henry Fleming's in "The Red Badge." After
"The Red Badge" was published, he was commissioned to do some magazine
pieces or newspaper pieces on the Civil War, and he was interested in
writing a story based on the Battle of Fredericksburg, so he did visit
the battlefields then and he did exactly what Shelby Foote did. He
visited the battlefields at the time during which the battle occurred.

LAMB: Did it have any impact on him?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, not that you can tell reading "The Little
Regiment," which is the story based on the--on Fredericksburg. It's
really a wonderful tale. It's a nice companion piece to "The Red
Badge." It certainly doesn't seem any more authentic than "The Red
Badge" does.

LAMB: When "The Red Badge" was published in this country, it would've
been 18...

Ms. DAVIS: '95.

LAMB: What was going on here?

Ms. DAVIS: Oh, what was going on in the world in 1895?

LAMB: What kind of a world did the book come into and...

Ms. DAVIS: Oh.

LAMB: ...how many copies were printed in the first place and how big
a success was it?

Ms. DAVIS: Yeah. I--I'm afraid I've kind of blocked out world
events at that time. I don't know what the first printing was. The
publisher's records were lost, and so a lot of the details about the
printing and--printings are--are lost.

LAMB: Someplace you refer to 500 copies and I wondered if that was...

Ms. DAVIS: Mm.

LAMB: ...in those days, if they had that s--that small a printing.

Ms. DAVIS: Well, they would have, yeah, but I'm not sure if that was
for "The Red Badge."

LAMB: Was it a best-seller?

Ms. DAVIS: It was--it wasn't a best-seller nationwide. In certain
areas, it was on the best-seller list on and off, mostly on the
Eastern seaboard, but also in the Midwest. It was briefly a
best-seller in England.

LAMB: Could you go find reviews on it in the newspapers?

Ms. DAVIS: Yes, it was widely reviewed, mm-hmm.

LAMB: How do you think it survived all these years and--and, you
know, here again, this---this series, this little--of course, these
aren't copyrighted anymore, so they can sell them for a buck, but
th--you know, they got the just long...

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: ...s--stands of all these different books in them. But what do
you think--what's the main reason?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, I--I think about what William Faulkner said in his
Nobel Prize acceptance speech in the 1950s. He talked about what the
duty of the writer is, that it--it is the writer's duty to write about
the things that matter: love and honor and pity and compassion and
sacrifice--I'm paraphrasing Faulkner--the human heart in conflict with
itself. These are the universal things. These are the things that
matter. And that's what Crane wrote about in "The Red Badge" and
that's what makes it timeless, and the writing is absolutely
beautiful.

LAMB: He died in Germany.

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: Why?

Ms. DAVIS: He had tuberculosis. And Cora, his common-law wife,
insisted that he go there to try to save his life. There was
something called the Nordrack cure or treatment, but Crane's TB was
far too advanced to benefit from it. And, in fact, the trip from
England, which is where they were living at the time, probably
hastened his death by several months because it was so rough, being
jostled by carriage, and it took a while to get there.

LAMB: Why were they living in England?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, he had gone to the Greco-Turkish War in the spring
of 1897 as a correspondent. That lasted only a month. Cora followed
him there. Because she was something of a scarlet woman, they felt
when the war was over, they couldn't really settle together in the
United States. They couldn't get married because her husband wouldn't
divorce her, and so they decided to move to England, which was more
socially tolerant of such liaisons.

LAMB: Where had he met her?

Ms. DAVIS: He had met her in Jacksonville, Florida, be--before the
Spanish-American War.

LAMB: What were the circumstances?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, he'd gone down to Jacksonville to report the
Spanish-American War for The New York Journal, and he visited the
houses of prostitution in Jacksonville. Hers was--was the classiest
joint in Jacksonville. He was introduced to her there.

LAMB: And how did they fall in love, or did they fall in love?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, apparently, they fell in love. We don't know an
awful lot about how Crane felt about her. None of his letters from
her have survived as far as we know; none have ever turned up on the
market. She was absolutely crazy about him. He seems to have been in
love with her at least for a while, but it's a little questionable
about whether that just settled into another kind of love later on or
not.

LAMB: There is a lot in here about the women in his life.

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: There were a lot of women in his life...

Ms. DAVIS: Yes, he's...

LAMB: ...for a 28-year-old.

Ms. DAVIS: He was very young.

LAMB: How did he do it all and what were--what were the--here's a
page, for instance--let me just show these pictures--there are three
pictures, all of the same woman.

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

LAMB: Amy Leslie. I--in--in different times in her life. Who was
she? And let's start up here. When was this picture? Do you know?

Ms. DAVIS: OK. Yeah, that's a very early picture, and I--there's no
date on it. It's from the Harvard Theatre Collection. Amy Leslie was
the drama critic for the Chicago Daily News, and it is not known
exactly how Crane met her. He seems to have met her around 1895 or
'96. She was apparently divorced, perhaps not legally divorced yet,
but had been estranged from her husband for a long time. We don't
know exactly where they met, but they carried on an affair up until
the time he went to Jacksonville and got involved with Cora Taylor.

LAMB: And what happened after that? Was there a lawsuit involved in
that relationship?

Ms. DAVIS: Yeah, the lawsuit came later on. Amy Leslie had loaned
Crane--not loaned Crane, given Crane $800 in November of 1896, I
believe, to put in the bank, put in a bank account in her name.
Instead of doing that, he gave it to a friend of his in New York,
Willis Brookshockens, told him to put it in his own account and then
sort of served as--as his and Amy's banker. Amy went back to Chicago,
which is where she lived and worked as a drama critic. Crane was
basically living in New York, but at the moment, in Jacksonville.

LAMB: Who was Nellie Crouse of Akron, Ohio?

Ms. DAVIS: She was a girl he met about 1895, a friend of a friend.
They had a kind of epistolary romance. He courted her. She wasn't
interested in him. He wrote some very revealing letters to her, but
nothing ever came of it. I think he met her once or twice.

LAMB: Where did you find all the letters?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, the letters are at various Crane collections around
the country. There's a big Crane collection at Syracuse University,
one at the University of Virginia. The Amy Leslie letters, Crane's
letters to Amy Leslie, are at Dartmouth.

LAMB: Did you go to all those places?

Ms. DAVIS: Yes, I did.

LAMB: And as you're--how long did it take you to do this book in--is
eight years the right...

Ms. DAVIS: Yeah, that's--well, it was eight years from the time I
started it to the time I finished it, but it was very on and off.
There was a period of two years in there I really wasn't working on it
at all. I think if I added up the time, it would be more like four
years full time.

LAMB: What c--do you still live in Massachusetts?

Ms. DAVIS: Yes.

LAMB: What city?

Ms. DAVIS: I live in the--a town called Harvard, a little orchard
town not far from...

LAMB: Right outside of Boston?

Ms. DAVIS: About an hour from Boston. It's near Concord.

LAMB: And do you do this full time, writing?

Ms. DAVIS: Yes.

LAMB: You married?

Ms. DAVIS: Yes.

LAMB: 'Cause you thank your husband in here, whose name is not Davis.

Ms. DAVIS: Yes. No, it's Chuck Yanikoski.

LAMB: And what's he do?

Ms. DAVIS: He works for a company called American Financial Systems
and does some very complicated designing of computer programs, which I
don't understand at all.

LAMB: And...

Ms. DAVIS: And he also helps me a lot with my research.

LAMB: And you mentioned you have children. You...

Ms. DAVIS: Yes, two children.

LAMB: How old are they?

Ms. DAVIS: Our daughter is 13, Allie--she's almost 14--son Randy,
he's 12.

LAMB: And in your introduction, you thank someone that's been here
also, Stephen Oates.

Ms. DAVIS: Yes.

LAMB: What did he do for you?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, Stephen Oates is a good friend of mine. He's an
eminent Civil War historian and biographer, and he encouraged me to
write a Crane biography about 10 years ago because he felt there was a
need for one and he felt that we were a good match.

LAMB: Houghton Mifflin bought this.

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: Do you have any idea why? Do you remember--were you in on the
sale to the company?

Ms. DAVIS: Yeah, it was originally bought by Ticknor & Fields, which
is--no longer exists. Houghton Mifflin folded it--I don't know--four
or five years ago, I guess, and signed by a different editor who ended
up--fro--from the editor I have now. And my--the editor who signed it
liked it and the editor who inherited it liked it, and they felt there
was a need for a Crane biography.

LAMB: You also thank Stephen Crane's great-nephew...

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: ...a fellow by the name of Dr. Robert Crane.

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: Where is he? And what did he have to do with this?

Ms. DAVIS: He's a very private man, so I'm not sure if he wants me
to reveal his whereabouts. He does live in the United States and he
is a great-nephew of Stephen Crane. He's descended from one of
Crane's brothers, and he was kind enough to loan me some family
photographs and to answer a couple of questions I had about the
family. He's also written some very valuable genealogical papers
about the Crane family which corrects errors about Crane.

LAMB: How'd you find him?

Ms. DAVIS: I met him at a conference, actually, at the American
Literary--Literature Association some years ago.

LAMB: When you say he's private, what was the first giveaway to you
that he was private?

Ms. DAVIS: Gosh, I think he told me--we happened to get into a
conversation. There was a--a lecture about Stephen Crane, and he--I
didn't know who he was, and he after a while, I guess, decided to tell
me who he was and told me that one of the Crane scholars who knew him
well knew that he was very private and didn't give out his name and
number and didn't give it out to me, even though he knew I was working
on a Crane biography. I think Dr. Crane wanted to size me up for
himself before he told me how to get in touch with him.

LAMB: Now I assume be--because Stephen Crane didn't have any
children, there are no direct descendants...

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: ...and so you--are there a lot of other Cranes around that came
from his brothers?

Ms. DAVIS: Not a lot. I understand there are just a few now, and
I've never met any of the other ones.

LAMB: How many Cranes were there in the family?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, Stephen Crane was the 14th child in his family, but
five of them had died before he was born.

LAMB: His parents are here on this...

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: ...page. Tell us about them.

Ms. DAVIS: Mary Helen Peck Crane was a minister's daughter. The
Reverend Jonathan Townley Crane was also a Methodist minister. He was
52 when Stephen was born and she was 45.

LAMB: How long did they live?

Ms. DAVIS: She died when she was 60 years old and Crane was 20. He
died at the age of 64, when Stephen Crane was eight. He was the same
age when his father died as I was when my father died, another little
connection.

LAMB: And s--you have a picture here of Agnes Crane.

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: What's the story on her?

Ms. DAVIS: Agnes was Stephen Crane's beloved older sister. He had a
couple of sisters, but she was the one he was very close to. She was
very literary and aspired to be a writer him--himself. And she was
really a substitute mother for Stephen Crane when he was a little boy,
and she also died.

LAMB: Of what?

Ms. DAVIS: I think she died of spinal meningitis--my God, I've
forgotten. I'm sorry.

LAMB: How old was Stephen Crane?

Ms. DAVIS: He was 11 or 12, I think, when his sister died.

LAMB: Now his mother...

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: ...was with the Women's Christian Temperance Union.

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: In what regard--what did she do?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, she--she was one of the women who went to
temperance meetings and traveled around giving lectures on temperance,
on the evils of alcohol. She did a lot of public talks about it. She
had a brother who had a problem with alcohol and drinking alcohol was
not in keeping with Methodist teaching at that time. And so she--she
did a lot of lecturing.

LAMB: Did Stephen Crane drink?

Ms. DAVIS: He did, but not to excess. He--he drank a little beer
and whatnot, but he was not a heavy drinker.

LAMB: You paint a picture of him, though, from time to time as
someone who's not very well-kempt and...

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

LAMB: Th--I mean, the personal characteristics--where did you find
the descriptions of him? And what was the worst kind of thing people
would say about him?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, the worst thing people would say about him was that
he was a degenerate, he was--he was a drunk and a drug addict, and
that came from jealous hack reporters who were jealous of his talent
and from the police whom he had alienated when he went up against one
of them on behalf of a prostitute he'd seen falsely arrested in 1896.
Ever afterwards, the cops were out to smear his--his name, and they
did. And to this day, pe--a lot of people think that Stephen Crane
was an alcoholic and a drug addict because of these rumors that--that
started about him.

LAMB: Why were people out to get him?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, the cops--why were the cops out to get him, or...

LAMB: Or anybody. You said a lot of people were jealous of him
and...

Ms. DAVIS: Well, I think that a l--a lot of the--the hack reporters
he knew in his days in New York were jealous of his talent. I mean,
here was this kid in his early 20s, this brilliant writer who could
write circles around most of them with both hands tied behind his
back, and that excited a lot of jealousy. He's a very likable person.
Wasn't anything about his personality, in particular. I think it was
basically jealousy.

LAMB: The names that come up throughout this--at one point you say he
was a friend of Theodore Roosevelt's.

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: When was that, and how long did the friendship last?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, he got to know Theodore Roosevelt in the summer of
1896 when Roosevelt was police commissioner of New York. They were
introduced by a mutual friend. Roosevelt was a big fan of Crane's
writing. They had dinner a couple of times. There was a little bit
of correspondence. They were really just getting to know each other
when Stephen Crane happened to be out on the street one night in New
York in a bad neighborhood. He was escorting a chorus girl to the
subway or the streetcar and went back to find that one of the two
girls who were left on the sidewalk had been falsely arrested by this
very corrupt policeman, Charles Becker. She accused--he accused her
of soliciting. This is one or two in the morning. She wasn't
soliciting. Crane was keeping his eye on the two girls to make sure
they were safe while he was getting the other one safely home. And
she was hauled off to the police station anyway. And against the
advice of the desk sergeant, Crane turned up the next day in court to
speak up on this prostitute's behalf. She was a prostitute, as it
turned out--Dora Clark--but she was not soliciting when she was with
Crane.

And it was a big, big mistake for his career. He felt that it was the
honorable and the right thing to do, but the cops would not forgive
him after that. There was actually a--an official police hearing
afterward a couple of months later. Crane turned up again to testify.
The policeman, Becker, was exonerated, but the cops would not forgive
Crane after that. He literally could not set foot in New York without
the cops trying to arrest him on trumped-up charges. He was finished
as a working reporter in New York...

LAMB: So what happened...

Ms. DAVIS: ...at the age of 25.

LAMB: ...to the relationship with Theodore Roosevelt, because don't
they pop up later in...

Ms. DAVIS: Yes.

LAMB: ...down in Cuba and...

Ms. DAVIS: Well, Roosevelt tr--apparently tried to persuade him not
to testify at the police hearing, that it would be a big mistake.
Crane decided to do it anyway because he felt that it would be
dishonorable of him not to. And Roosevelt sided with the cops, that
was it. They were estranged at that point. A year and a half later,
they both turn up in the Spanish-American War; Crane as a reporter,
Roosevelt with the Rough Riders at that point.

LAMB: Stephen Crane was a reporter at how many different newspapers?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, he was a reporter for the New York Journal, for the
Bachelor Johnson Syndicate of newspapers, for the New York World in
the United States.

LAMB: A journal owned by Hearst.

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm. And Pulitzer's World.

LAMB: And how many different wars did he cover?

Ms. DAVIS: Two, the monthlong Greco-Turkish conflict in the spring
of 1897 and the Spanish-American War, which was 100 years ago this
summer.

LAMB: Other names: Joseph Conrad.

Ms. DAVIS: Joseph Conrad.

LAMB: Who is he?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, a great Polish writer who learned to write in
English, known for the "Heart of Darkness," and "Lord Jim" and the
"Secret Sharer." He...

LAMB: I ought to ask you if you can remember his real name.

Ms. DAVIS: Ah...

LAMB: I didn't write it down.

Ms. DAVIS: Yeah. It's Teodor--I can't pronounce it correctly--Jozef
Korzeniowski or something like that.

LAMB: How did he get the name Joseph Conrad?

Ms. DAVIS: He Americanized his name, I believe.

LAMB: Where did they meet?

Ms. DAVIS: They met in England. They were both living in England.
They had the same publisher. They were introduced at--at lunch.
Crane expressed a desire to meet Conrad, who was some years older than
he was. And it turned out that Conrad had read "The Red Badge" and
wa--and admired Crane's work, and they hit it off and became very
great friends.

LAMB: What was the age difference?

Ms. DAVIS: Crane was in his mid- to late 20s; Conrad was 40. But as
his biographer says, `A very old 40.'

LAMB: H.G. Wells.

Ms. DAVIS: H.G. Wells, the English writer, was living in the same
neighborhood that Crane was living in, in East Sussex in England.

LAMB: What kind of relationship developed there?

Ms. DAVIS: They were friends, too. They were not as close as Crane
and Conrad. Conrad became the great friend of Crane's later years.

LAMB: How was that manifested friendship?

Ms. DAVIS: They would get together when they could for lunch; they
would stay at each other's homes, visit each other; they wrote
letters.

LAMB: Another name on this list is Willa Cather.

Ms. DAVIS: Willa Cather, yes. Willa Cather was working for the
Nebraska Star Journal. She was still in college but she was actually
writing a column. She was reviewing plays, I believe. In 1895
a--early 1895, Crane's "Red Badge" had appeared in a select number of
newspapers across the country, including the newspaper she worked for
in Nebraska, in an extremely abbreviated and butchered form some
months earlier. And he had been sent by the Bachelor Johnson
Syndicate out West as a reporter to gather local color, as Crane put
it. And one of his early stops was Nebraska. He was covering a
drought there. She was in the office when he was and she tried to
draw some conversation out of him during the few days that he was
there.

LAMB: What happened to their relationship as time went by?

Ms. DAVIS: They really never had a relationship. They had one
really good conversation and that was about it, although she wrote
quite a bit about him afterwards.

LAMB: What was--I guess I was going to say relationship, too--but
what--the money problems that he had all his life.

Ms. DAVIS: Mm. Uh-huh.

LAMB: Did he ever make any money?

Ms. DAVIS: He did make money. He didn't make a lot of money.
He--he was very quick to sign a contract with D. Appleton for "The
Red Badge" because he was really poor and really anxious to have the
book published. And he got a bad deal. Instead of having a lawyer,
including his brother William, who was a lawyer, look over the
contract, he just signed on the dotted line--the first taker. And
there was--he got something like--I think--he got no money up front
and he was not going to earn any money until the publisher's costs had
been recovered. And there was no provision for foreign rights at all.

LAMB: I wrote down here that you say none of his books sold well
after "Red Badge."

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm. That's true.

LAMB: And in some way, you make an analysis that he earned an average
of 2.7 cents a word when he was writing, but Kipling at the same time
made 23 cents a word.

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

LAMB: Where'd you get that?

Ms. DAVIS: Gosh, I forgot where I got that. One of the Crane
stollar--scholars did some good digging on that and--and got the
financial records. I didn't do the original research on that. But he
sometimes would earn as much as 5 cents a word for stories, but never
earned a great deal of money.

LAMB: How many books have been written about Stephen Crane?

Ms. DAVIS: There have been--let's see--you mean biographies. There
was an early biography, which isn't really a conventional biography,
by Thomas Behr in the 1920s. Then John Berryman wrote a critical
biography. R.W--R.W. Stallman wrote a biography about 30 years ago.
James Colvert wrote a mini-biography for a Harcourt Brace series in
the '80s. Christopher Benfey wrote a study about eight years ago, I
think. And then mine. So mine is about the sixth book.

LAMB: How is yours different than the others?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, it's the first full-length in 30 years--first
full-length biography of Crane since Stallman's. It's not a critical
or academic biography. I would describe it as a serious literary
biography, but it's perhaps a little more popular in approach than the
others.

LAMB: The main character in "The Red Badge of Courage," Henry
Fleming, got his name where?

Ms. DAVIS: Fleming was the maiden name of one of Stephen Crane's
sisters-in-law. And he used the word--the name Henry a lot. He
was--he was a little bit lazy about naming his characters, so he
recycled the name Henry a lot.

LAMB: And what was the character Henry Fleming like in "Red Badge?"

Ms. DAVIS: He's a boy who's gone off to join the war, which he
thinks is something very romantic because of these very romantic
accounts of war he's read as a boy, so he leaves hi--his widowed
mother on the farm to go off to fight in the great Civil War. He's
very naive and finds the realities of war very different.

LAMB: In--in a--you say this happens more than once--that--that he
wrote a lot about Henry Fleming's reaction to seeing his first corpse.

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm. Yes. It happens a couple of times in "The Red
Badge." It's also a preoccupation with Crane in his writing, not just
his war writing; the sight of a dead face or the face of a wounded
soldier, what--what that face reveals to us. One thinks of Hamlet's
soliloquy as though you can in--in reading the eyes of the dead
soldier find the answer to what Hamlet called the question--the
undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns. I think
that's what was in Crane's mind. And it was in Crane's mind because
he, himself, was very sickly. I think he--he knew that he would not
live a long life and he was very intrigued by--by what would happen
after life.

LAMB: Where did he get consumption--or, tuberculosis?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, we don't know for sure. I suspect he got it in the
household. You usually get TB by repeated exposure to somebody else
with an advanced state of the disease, from repeated exposure for many
hours a day, for perhaps a month at a time. There is some evidence
that Stephen Crane's older brother, William, had TB. But the details
are very vague. So we're not absolutely sure. But it does seem to me
that he probably contracted it as a boy, that the TB healed, at some
point, went into a kind of remission, although he was sickly
frequently throughout his adult life. Then he got malaria in the
Spanish-American War, which was not great for somebody with--who had
bad lungs to begin with, and the TB started to kick in again.

LAMB: Where is he buried, by the way?

Ms. DAVIS: He's buried in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

LAMB: Have you been to all these places that Stephen Crane either
lived in or...

Ms. DAVIS: Yes. Yes, I went down to dra--Jacksonville, Florida, and
found the beach overlooking where the Commodore ran aground. The
Commodore was a filibustering tug Crane went on before the
Spanish-American War actually broke out. It was carrying arms to
Cuba, and went down off the coast of Cuba. I drove down to Florida; I
found the lighthouse along the coast that Crane refers to in "The Open
Boat" which was based on this true story of a shipwreck. I went to
all the Crane locations in England. I went to Basel, Switzerland, and
to Badenweiler, Germany, to see the house where he was buried.

LAMB: Where is this house right here in this picture?

Ms. DAVIS: That's Bree Place, that's in East Sussex, England, and
it's a privately owned house.

LAMB: And how long did he--Mr. Crane live there?

Ms. DAVIS: He was there from the time he returned to England from
the Spanish-American War, the beginning of 1899, until just before he
died, May of 19--1899.

LAMB: Where are these two pictures from?

Ms. DAVIS: Those were taken on board The Three Friends, which was
another fil--filibustering tug in the Spanish-American War. And
that--that's Crane w--at his seediest, as you can see. It's--was
living in--in either pajamas or soiled duck trousers. Didn't take a
bath, stopped shaving, let his hair grow, let his mustache grow about
down to his chin, it looks like, and--and really looked like a
degenerate at that point.

LAMB: In the Bree Place over in--in England, you talk about how they
lived quite fancily, or at least they...

Ms. DAVIS: Hmm.

LAMB: ...entertained a lot and he was there with his--I don't know
what you'd call her--is--it wasn't his wife, Cora.

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: And--but they didn't have any money, so what was going on here?

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm. Well, the--they got a lot of credit. I mean,
even in this day before credit cards, you could run up credit at the
local butchers and grocers and--you know, with the blacksmith and
other people. And they ran up a lot of credit locally, which got them
into huge trouble. I've--I've often thought about what life would be
like for them now with credit cards and the--the trouble they would
get in now. But they ran up a lot of debt. They were constantly
sending flares out to Crane's English agent, the long-suffering James
Pinker, asking him to advance the money. And he advanced them
hundreds of pounds out-of-pocket, which Crane did not earn back before
he died.

LAMB: How long did Cora live?

Ms. DAVIS: Cora did not live too many years after Crane--just 10
years. She died in 1910 at the age of 46.

LAMB: Was she older than--obviously, older than...

Ms. DAVIS: Just six years older than Crane.

LAMB: You say in the book that he wrote between midnight and 4 in the
morning.

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: When do you write?

Ms. DAVIS: Oh, not--not during that time. I write when I get my
kids off to school. That's my best time, from about 9 or 10 in the
morning till 1 or 2 in the afternoon. They're on different school
schedules, so I have to adjust it somewhat. But that's a--three or
four hours a day are about all I'm good for, except if my back is--is
to the wall and I really have to do more than that. I just find that
my--my concentration wanes after that. I suppose because I'm not 28
like Stephen Crane was, so I can't...

LAMB: And--and what impact did it have on him that he wrote in the
middle of the night? What was the reason for that?

Ms. DAVIS: The house was quiet. He was living at his brother's
house a lot of the time. His brother had a family, and there were a
lot of kids and a lot of noise around. And he would wait until the
family went to bed and climb up to this little attic room and write
late at night when it was completely quiet and then he'd sleep till
about lunchtime.

LAMB: You have a picture in the book of--I guess we'd--I think we
used to call in the service hot bedding in--you know, they do it in
the submarines where s--same people sleep in the bed around the clock.
What's this all about? Where is this?

Ms. DAVIS: This is--this was taken in the Art Students League
Building or the old Art Students League Building in New York. A lot
of artists were living there and Crane was bunking with a bunch of
other guys in this studio. And they would sleep three to a bed and
there was a cot. And the fourth fellow would take the cot. Stephen
Crane is the one on the left. His head is sort of turned in. And
some of the other fellas came in and found him and one of the other
guys asleep one morning and as a joke, piled up all the shoes that
they all owned collectively at the foot of the bed and took the
picture. They had kind of a community closet of clothes and shoes and
whoever had a job interview that day and had to look really nice or
whoever was up first in the morning would get the best pick of the
clothes and shoes.

LAMB: Where is this from?

Ms. DAVIS: That is a photograph of a beautiful painting which hangs
at the University of Virginia in the Clifton Waller Barrett
collection, which is the Stephen Crane collection, at the Alderman
Library. It is a photograph of an oil painting done by Stephen
Crane's artist friend, Corwin Knapp Linson when Stephen Crane had
written "The Red Badge of Courage." And it's--it's absolutely
beautiful in life. You know, that doesn't catch the colors at all.

LAMB: You said a lot earlier that you grew to like him...

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: ...love Stephen Crane.

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: What is it that you liked about him?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, he was very young and very full of the devil and a
lot of fun. He had a wonderful sense of humor. He was very boyish
because he was always very young. We both share a fondness for dogs
and horses and horseback riding. And a preference for the color red.
He loved the company of his friends. He was a wonderful, charming
talker. A lot of writers can't talk. They--even if they can write
beautifully, they can't talk. Crane could talk beautifully. I think
he was extremely well-intentioned and kind-hearted. He got into a lot
of trouble, but he was well-meaning. He was a good friend. And he
had that indefinable something we call charisma. He was the sort of
person who walked into a room and created a kind of magic. One of his
friends said, `He was a very alive person, even when he was sitting
and observing in a room and being very quiet.' He was so alive that
his friend Yar Woodriff said that the news of his death seemed a
mistake.

LAMB: What did you think when you found out that he had spent nine
months away from Cora and didn't communicate with anybody?

Ms. DAVIS: Well...

LAMB: And what was that all about?

Ms. DAVIS: Yeah. He was not actually incommunicado for nine months.
He was away from--the time he left England for the Spanish-American
War, he was away for nine months altogether. When the
Spanish-American War ended during the summer of 1898, we hadn't kind
of tied up all the loose ends yet. Stephen Crane disappeared into the
bowels of Havana for four months--that's when he was
incommunicado--and apparently tried to desert Cora--went into hiding,
first at a hotel, then at a boarding house; communicated with no one
except his agent. Took to his room, didn't even see the
correspondence very much.

LAMB: This is Cora here.

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm. As for what I thought of him: I'm reminded of
something somebody else said about biography. I think it was another
biographer, but I don't remember who, who said that there--there's a
point in every biography when the biographer falls out of love with
the subject. And I didn't exactly fall out of love with my subject,
but I was quite disappointed in him. He behaved very badly. She was
absolutely broke in England, desperate for money.

LAMB: And this is her also...

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: ...next to Stephen Crane. She's de--I guess you write her to
be rather plump or...

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: What was his attraction to her?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, I think she didn't photograph well, to be fair to
her. Also, a lot of women in the late 19th century were plump. I
mean, they didn't have to be thin to be considered
attractive--attractive, and she's not wearing a corset there. This
was taken at Bree Place, where she rather let herself go. She started
making these homespun garments and she would let her hair down, which
was rather shocking. You always had your hair done up when other
people were around, although she has her hair done up in that
photograph.

LAMB: When was this taken? This is a photograph of her.

Ms. DAVIS: Yeah. That was taken before she met Crane. She has her
corset on in that picture. This was when she was still married
in--married to and living with Captain Stewart. I think that was
taken some years before she met Crane. She had--the attraction...

LAMB: 1889.

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm. The attraction--Crane's attraction to her--she
actually was a very attractive woman in person. She had beautiful
golden-blond hair that it was--it was such a beautiful shade of
golden-blond that a lot of people thought she dyed her hair, but she
didn't. She had beautiful coloring. She was intelligent. She was
literate. She absolutely adored him. She was a woman who knew how to
take care of herself. She had been well traveled. She was a woman
who knew how to function independently; very--very loyal to him.

LAMB: Now where did he get the name "Red Badge of Courage?"

Ms. DAVIS: Well, now we don't know for sure. My idea--first of all,
it appears in the novel. When Henry Fleming gets a wound, he is
arguing with a soldier. He's accidentally hit in the head by the end
of a rifle--gets a rifle butt. This creates his `red badge of
courage.' I think, however, that Crane might have got the idea for
using that line in the novel and then later titling his book, "Red
Badge of Courage," from Jacob Rise's--or Riis' book, "How The Other
Half Lives" which was a photographic study of tenement life in the
Lower East Side. Crane was familiar it. And Jacob Riis repeatedly
uses the word `badge' as a metaphor. Most strikingly, there's the
phrase, `the white badge of mourning,' which even scans the same as
`the red badge of courage.'

"The Red Badge of Courage" was not the original title of the novel,
however. It was `Private Fleming: His Various Battles.'

LAMB: When did they change it?

Ms. DAVIS: Stephen Crane changed it before publication, before he
actually submitted it. He put it on the final copy of the manuscript.

LAMB: Now after you got all your research done and wrote this book,
go back to the beginning and tell us what impact this had on you
an--as it relates to your--the story of your father saving you or
trying to save you from that fire.

Ms. DAVIS: Hm.

LAMB: Did it--did it work out for you, I mean, working through this
whole thing?

Ms. DAVIS: Yes. Actually, something very strange happened, and I
don't remember exactly how long I'd been researching the book. I
hadn't started writing it yet, but I was pretty steeped in Stephen
Crane at this point. I was continuing to have these--these nightmares
about my father in which I could never see his face. He would appear
to me in--in a pitch-black room, for instance. And I'd be
str--straining my eyes through the darkness to see him. I couldn't
see him. Or he was standing at a distance with his back turned to me
or he was bandaged. But I was never able to see his face.

At some point, when I was very steeped in Stephen Crane, I had a
flashback, not an actual dream, in which I could very clearly see
myse--I--I was a child again, probably about seven or eight years old,
standing in the kitchen in our house in Ft. Rucker. My father was
standing at the kitchen counter making one of his Chef Boyardee
pepperoni pizzas which he liked to make. And he turned around to say
something to me and grinned an--my father had this wonderful smile and
beautiful straight, white teeth. And I--and I remember very clearly
seeing this grin from the perspective of a child who would be looking
up at an adult and--and smiling at me. And I could just suddenly see
him in a way I've never been able to see him. I mean, he died in
1961, so that was a long time. It had been about 30 years since the
fire or--or longer than that.

So I think that the deeper I dug into Ste--Stephen Crane, the more I
found myself. You know, Flaubert once said when he was writing
"Madame Bovary"--I think it was at the end of the book, after
insisting for years that mo--"Madame Bovary" was nothing like him, had
nothing to do with him, at the end he was forced to admit, `Madame
Bovary c'est moi.' And I got to that point where I said to myself,
`Stephen Crane c'est moi.' It was--the--the deeper I dug the more I
found myself.

LAMB: You went to Syracuse to study what?

Ms. DAVIS: I was just in the college of liberal arts. I...

LAMB: Did you go on from there to any other school?

Ms. DAVIS: I did. I went to graduate school in Boston. I got a
master's degree in English at Simmons.

LAMB: In what?

Ms. DAVIS: In English.

LAMB: So after--this is your second book?

Ms. DAVIS: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: You got a third one planned?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, I do. I don't know whether my publisher wants it
yet. I've been kind of lazy about finishing the proposal. But I'd
like to do a Civil War biography of Joshua Chamberlain, who was
commander of the 20th Maine Division at Gettysburg, and do just a
biography covering only the three years during which he served in the
Civil War.

LAMB: Why?

Ms. DAVIS: Well, I think it's the Crane influence again. It's--it's
being so steeped in his war writing. Also, I'm a soldier's daughter
and--so I think it's the combination of--of being a soldier's daughter
and coming to love great war writing through Stephen Crane. I want to
write my own war tale, but non-fiction.

LAMB: So for those interested either in war or in being a journalist
or in being a writer, if they pick up your book, "Badge of Courage,"
what will they--what do you hope that they take way from this that
they might not have known before?

Ms. DAVIS: I hope they take away a sense of how life intersects
with--with writing, of how--how the two are constantly folding into
each other, of what Edith Wharton called `the discipline of the daily
task,' which Stephen Crane knew, of how reality for a writer, even a
non-fiction writer like me, can really have more to do with the life
the writer is creating on paper sometimes than the life the writer is
actually living out in the world.

LAMB: Linda H. Davis, author of "Badge of Courage: The Life of
Stephen Crane," thank you very much for joining us.

Ms. DAVIS: Thank you.

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Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephen Crane