Transatlantic Stephen Crane

ELT 42 : 3 1999 photographs, stored in the darkroom of memory.... [The self is] an actual psychic entity . . . which contains cells or seeds which can be affiliated to the selves of people, living or long dead. A bit of me can really "live" something of a word or phrase, cut on a wall at Karnak... a little cell of my brain responds to a cell of someone's brain, who died thousands of years ago. A word opens a door. In a jagged world, H.D. sought permeable boundaries. In Bethlehem, siblings and cousins passed easily from one house to another; neighbors shared communal religious rituals, holiday preparations, music and pageants. Where the geography of exile may inform modernist sensibility , The Gift erases borderlines. H.D. reaches into all-time. This edition is beautifully designed, and includes many well-chosen photographs not previously published. The cover photograph shows a brightly smiling very young Hilda Doolittle standing with family before a trellised blooming vine. An element not usually associated with H.D. is laughter. Mamalie in her trance tells the child Hilda: "it was laughing, laughing all the time ... like scales running up and down ... it was the laughter of leaves, of wind, of snow swirling, it was ... outpouring of the Mystic Chalice ... it poured from the sky or from the inner realm of the Spirit." If the letters of the lost mystical "Secret" can be written, they will spell peace, love, joy. H.D. sought balm in The Gift, and readers now are her beneficiaries. Charlotte Mandel __________________ Cedar Grove, New Jersey Transatlantic Stephen Crane Stanley Wertheim. A Stephen Crane Encyclopedia. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997. xv + 413 pp $85.00 HERE IS a magisterial accomplishment, composed by the person best qualified to prepare it. Stanley Wertheim's longtime interest in, collecting of, and publishing about Stephen Crane come to wonderful fruition in this Encyclopedia. Wertheim states that his book "seeks to increase the reader's knowledge of Stephen Crane's short but furiously creative life and to encourage a more extensive appreciation of his works." Those goals are well met by the alphabetically arranged entries on signal events and aspects of Crane's life and career. Family members appear, as well as "friends and associates, famous and obscure," places and persons important to the life and career, literary movements, his fiction , poems, and journalism. Nearly every one of Crane's prose works has an entry; the poems are treated with greater selectivity because 348 BOOK REVIEWS many are "epigrammatic" or "fragmentary and redundant," although some uncollected or posthumously published poems have individual entries . From the prose works, minor or unnamed characters who play "consequential roles" are given separate entries; those of lesser significance are not. Entries are "selectively cross-referenced with an asterisk ." Finally: "Assumed names and editorially supplied titles for posthumously published or unpublished works are indicated by brackets ." Thus the Encyclopedia offers a panorama that should satisfy even the most particular Crane devotee. Parts of that panorama—often especially outstanding bits in the greater design—are relevant to ELT readers. After all, Crane rapidly became a darling or one of the damned in many British eyes, once The Red Badge of Courage was issued in England. For starters in this vein, see the entry for Harold Frederic, himself an American expatriate familiar in British literary circles during the 1890s as the British correspondent to the New York Times, a position he had held since 1884. Frederic's 26 January 1896 Times column, "Stephen Crane's Triumph," outlined the astonishing reception among the English of The Red Badge of Courage. Shortly thereafter he and Crane met; their friendship in its turn led to the marshalling of support for Frederic's mistress and her children upon Frederic's death in 1898. Frederic on the British estimate of The Red Badge represents but a tip of an iceberg. Considering that London alone during the 1890s sustained publication of seventy-nine daily newspapers , the sub-surface of the Crane reception awaits further exploration. The Frederic entry is just one in the Encyclopedia that touches on ELT areas. For similar outreach, try those on Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, Cora Crane, Ford Madox Ford...