The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

Writing about a book you last read at the age of about fourteen feels like returning to book-report days. Maybe even more so when it's clear why that book is given to so many fourteen-year-olds: it's short, focused entirely on one character, and its themes are so high in the text even relatively dull readers can identify them and, one hopes, write semi-coherently about them.

I picked up The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane's most famous bit of literary output, largely because I'd just read a batch of Ambrose Bierce stories about the Civil War, and this Crane novel - in the form of the Library of America omnibus Prose and Poetry, which I think is basically the complete Crane - was on the next shelf. Secondary reasons include the fact that it is short - and I'm all about short books these days, to keep myself motivated - that I hadn't read it since the mid-80s, and that I'd been vaguely thinking about reading a recent graphic-novel adaptation, so it was already in my head.

This is the story of one young man, Henry Fielding, during two days of an unnamed battle sometime towards the end of the US Civil War. Crane is remarkably vague - I should probably say deliberately non-specific, but it often comes across to the reader as vague - throughout, with Henry consistently called "the youth" and other characters named once or twice at best but regularly tagged as "the tall soldier" or "his friend." I assume Crane did this to maximize the Everyman-ness of Henry and universalize his experience; it came across to me, reading it as an adult, as well-meaning but a bit clumsy and convoluted.

Red Badge is also from that 19th century stream of writing that tried to present colloquial speech through typography and spelling, which was a valiant effort but can lead to things such as this (on pp.198 of the edition I read):

"Well, sir, th' colonel met your lieutenant right by us - it was damndest thing I ever heard - an' he ses: 'Ahem! ahem!' he ses. 'Mr. Hasbrouck! he ses. There, Flemin', what d' yeh think 'a that? 'Who was th' lad what carried th' flag?' he ses, an' th' lieutenant, he speaks up right away: 'That's Flemin', an' he's a jimhickey,' he ses, right away. What? I say he did. "A jimhickey,' he ses - those 'r his words. He did, too. I say he did. If you kin tell this story better than I kin, go ahead an' tell it. Well, then, keep yer mouth shet...."

A little of that goes a long way; the part I quoted goes on for another fifteen lines. Red Badge is a short book, but every time one of its enlisted-man characters speaks - the officers have dialogue that's a bit easier to follow - it's like that.

But Red Badge, again, is not difficult to read: the dialogue does take some getting used to, but it's straightforward and mostly clear. Once a reader realizes "the youth" is our hero, and that term is always used for him, Crane's prose is close enough to the modern American idiom that even those legions of fourteen-year-olds can understand it all without too much effort.

Crane runs his hero through a lot of experiences in those two days, back and forth both alone and in company, as the army moves forward, engages the enemy, pauses, fights again, and maneuvers some more. Henry runs away from battle once - that's the great theme and motif and concern of the novel; how a fighting man can know, before the fighting first starts, if he's brave enough to stand up or if he will run away. (Crane, I think, was trying to show all sides of the story, so Henry both runs and is brave, in turn: that may be the point, of course, than all men run away sometimes and stand up other times, and the difference between those times may not be clear or explicable to anyone.) So there is a lot of both activity and philosophizing, as Henry waits for things to happen, and engages when they do happen, and thinks, all the time, of what he should and will and did do. His psychology is also modern and specific enough that a teen reader of today or the 1980s will understand what Henry is worried about and why.

I don't know if Red Badge is a great novel, in world-historical terms. It's a pretty good American novel of its era, tied to a major event in national history (though written three decades later by a young man born after the war), with a lot of hooks that makes it easy to teach and useful for pedagogy. So I expect it will continue to be served up to fourteen-year-olds for quite some time: it's not a novel most Americans of the past couple of generations needed to go out of their way to read; they'd get it, whether they wanted it or not.