The Anger of Stephen Crane: Fiction and the Epic Tradition by Chester L. Wolford (review)

Studies in American Fiction239 Scott's involvement, persuaded Alexander Woollcott to praise Sanctuary on radio leading to Faulkner's first commercial success, and, in addition, resulting in Faulkner's first connection with Hollywood through The Story of Temple Drake. Later, it was Wasson who schemed to keep Estelle Faulkner innocent of her husband's activities in Hollywood, and Wasson who arranged for Jean Stein and others to visit Rowan Oak when filming Baby Doll in nearby Benoit. It is also Wasson who takes particular note of Faulkner looking in on an undergraduate dance like Benjy outside Caddy's wedding: "I left him standing there, rapt with the bright scene he viewed through a window" (p. 37). It is also Wasson who senses the awful compromise Faulkner makes in order to gain employment in Hollywood (pp. 117-18), who notes his aching loneliness translated into honest adoration of Helen Baird (p. 75) and later and more urgently Meta Carpenter (pp. 143-49) and Joan Williams (p. 188 —inexplicably unindexed), and who sees the deep reliance on his daughter (p. 193). These powerfully poignant moments, told obliquely and yet with unnerving compassion and respect, serve as more than adequate prelude for the moving scenes that close the book: those of an internationally acclaimed author driven to anxiety and despair resulting in terrible bouts of alcoholism, in the tormenting doubt of the power of A Fable to succeed, and the subsequent guilt which causes him even to relinquish his friend of childhood and old age. Faulkner's final act in Count No 'Count is to sever any connection with Wasson; "'Good-bye, Bud'" (p. 199). The wrenching is painful to read, as it was painful to record. But Wasson uses this recollection too for a deeper and more important purpose. Like the other things which Count No 'Count might have been thought to dabble in, Wasson sees in this remark and in this forced alienation another one of those moments, by which this memoir builds, which in a searing flash reveals some of the deepest and darkest recesses of an author who sought and found release largely in the genius of his fiction. University of Massachusetts, AmherstArthur F. Kinney Wolford, Chester L. The Anger of Stephen Crane: Fiction and the Epic Tradition. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1983. 169 pp. Cloth: $15.95. Despite clear and indisputable evidence to the contrary, literary historians persist in the notion that Stephen Crane was ill-educated. Where they focus is on the years of his formal education, especially the time when he seems to have been hellbent on being thrown out of Lafayette College and Syracuse University. His persistence paid off, of course, so his few college semesters apparently did not increase his knowledge much. But Crane's writings are the best possible evidence that he needed no college to discipline his reading. Wolford is quite right in thinking that Crane knew and responded to the epic tradition. One need go no further than Maggie and The Red Badge of Courage to see that. Wolford also is quite right in seeing that one need go no further than Crane's family to see where he received his learning, including his education in the classics. Crane's disparaging comments about his family as ignorant, backwoods preachers after The Red Badge of Courage made him famous reflected his shyness and his insecurities more than they reflected the truth. That truth is apparent in the family's unknown bibliography. They lived by the word—by reading, writing, and speaking it—and that word was secular as well as religious. The family was well-educated, and from the cradle Crane absorbed their knowledge. 240Reviews Starting from those recognitions, Wolford builds to show that Crane's fiction included, among the enormous repudiations that H.G. Wells noted, an understanding of and reaction against the epic tradition. Inevitably Wolford goes too far, his focus on one aspect of Crane's work obscuring the rest that is there. He also commits some minor blunders along the way, such as taking Crane's schoolmate Harvey Wickham seriously and thinking Crane's "An Experiment in Misery" and "An Experiment in Luxury" experimental fiction. Wolford's...