The Red Badge of Courage (1895) had been sitting on my shelf so long, unread, that when I finally opened it recently, determined to cross it off my list of 19th century novels, the cover tore off. One more reason not to keep it on my shelf. I suspect it was assigned reading in the past but I can’t imagine that it’s commonly used for pedagogical purposes now. I’m unable to name a single living writer who’s even mentioned it. The most readily discernible link is to Ernest Hemingway, though it was praised by the draft dodger Henry James too. That’s enough to secure it a place of historical interest. Perhaps sentimentality played a role in raising the book’s reputation further, Crane having died young, of tuberculosis, promise unfulfilled. But it’s the work of a young man: eager, uneven, limited. Another Signet Classic that the writer of the introduction (in this case, novelist and WWII vet James Dickey) suggests doesn’t, on the basis of aesthetic quality, earn the status of a classic. The hinge aspect of the book is a partially modern view of war, as seen through the eyes of its boy-soldier protagonist, the youth, Henry. Romance mixed with equal amounts of fear and ignorance and absurdity. Crane deflates the ancient myth around the individual who distinguishes himself with great deeds in battle, who’ll more likely be the subject of a brief article “under a meek and immaterial title.”
With an alternate meaning, the phrase “fog of war” applies to Crane’s approach. The Red Badge is light on specifics, hazy. There’s a conflagration and the youth decides to participate. This is the strangest part of the novel: it’s divorced from context. The gray men fight the blue men. The blue men suffer grave losses but ultimately seize victory. Crane catalogues a boy’s shifting psychological responses from the bare minimum of historical information. The student of the Civil War would learn absolutely nothing substantial about it from the novel, a callow thought concerning the cause of all this fighting—slavery—somehow never once passing through the youth’s head. If anything, the glaring omission would lead to a misunderstanding of the history.
I don’t mean to be glib when I say that it’s difficult to take this novel entirely seriously. It’s a period piece containing what must be one of the cheesiest passages in American literature, the conclusion to chapter 20:
The impetus of enthusiasm was theirs again. They gazed about them with looks of uplifted pride, feeling new trust in the grim, always confident weapons in their hands. And they were men.
This is no one-off, either. Crane actually brings portentous declarations of manhood back for his ending. The fighting is over. The boy has made it out alive. He is now a man. My preferred final line to the book would have been: “He was a man!” (Sung, in the audiobook version.) The real final line: “Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.” Is my suggestion really much worse?
