Daddy Wordsworth
Stephen Crane: Letters. Edited by R. W. Stall- Cohen. (Centaur Press, 21s.) 'CRANE was not a great letter writer,' admit the editors of this handsome but somewhat daunt- ing volume, and one has to agree. Nevertheless, they have done the best they can for him, and the result is, at the very least, a superb piece of editing, which includes not only every scrap of Crane's correspondence that has survived, but letters to him from various friends (including Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells) and many letters from his mistress, a rather picturesque figure who started as the proprietor of an euphemistically styled 'night-club' in Jackson- ville, Florida, and remained devoted to Crane during his final years, even acquiring literary ambitions of her own. If Crane still remains something less than a major author after such treatment, it is clearly not his editors' fault. Nevertheless, he did produce a work of undoubted genius, The Red Badge of Courage. In one letter he records his satisfaction• that the book was first acclaimed by reviewers in England : They all insist that I am a veteran of the civil
war, whereas the fact is, as you know, I never smelled even the powder of a sham battle. I know what the psychologists say, that a fellow can't comprehend a condition that he has never experienced. . . . Of course, I have never been in a battle, but I believe that I got my sense of the rage of conflict on the football field, or else fighting is a hereditary instinct, and I wrote in- tuitively; for the Cranes were a family of lighters in the old days, and in the Revolution every member did his duty. Edward Fitzgerald was, by contrast, a natural and consistently engaging letter writer. Though perhaps the least productive of the great Vic- torians, his translation of Omar Khayyam meant that he was—and still is—one of the most widely read poets of his age. Yet despite the fame it brought him he remained in essentials an ob- scure figure, a quirky bachelor living the life of a country gentleman in Suffolk, devoted to boats, making occasional trips to London to see dis- tinguished friends like Thackeray or Carlyle. (When he married in his late forties he described the undertaking as 'a very doubtful experiment': it failed dismally.) His letters shed some light on his literary interests, but they also contain a good deal of gossip about his contemporaries:
You see Daddy Wordsworth is dead, and there is a huge subscription going on for his monument in Westminster Abbey. I believe he deserves one; but I am against stuffing West- minster Abbey with any one's statue till a hundred years or so have proved whether Posterity is as warm about a Man's Merits as we are.
This selection is photographically reproduced from the pages of the Victorian collected edition of Fitzgerald's letters. There is nothing objec- tionable about the method, but since the pub- lishers have not had the common decency to provide a list of contents or an index, the book is a lot less valuable than it might have been.
BERNARD BERGONZI BERNARD BERGONZI
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