The Lover and the Tell-Tale

Stephen Crane (1871–1900)
From Stephen Crane: Prose & Poetry

Interesting Links

“On Cora Crane and the Literary Women Who Prop Up Literary Men: In Celebration of a Writer, Bill-Payer, and Bordello Owner” (Jaime Fuller, Literary Hub)

Podcast: “Linda H. Davis on the Literary Fame and Notorious Exploits of Stephen Crane” (Literary Hub)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Fight,” Stephen Crane
• “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” F. Scott Fitzgerald
• “Drenched in Light,” Zora Neale Hurston
• “The Tarot Witch,” Ray Bradbury

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Stephen Crane: Prose & Poetry
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Little Boy Writing Letter, oil on canvas by American artist Norman Rockwell (1894–1978); cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post, January 17, 1920. The discarded draft at the boy’s feet reads, “dear sweethart i luve you more and more every day.”

Rockwell wrote to the first owner of the painting: “There is a real original for the boy and I often use him. His name is Eddy Carlson and he is a fine little model. You might be glad to know that I always use real persons for every picture I paint. The idea of the red headed boy picture was suggested to me one day when one of the little boys I use for a model, was in my studio trying to write a letter to his girl. He presented much the same picture as the one I painted, only I made it a country boy with country surroundings.” (Image and Rockwell quote courtesy of Sotheby’s)

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“Little Lord Fauntleroy was the Harry Potter of its day,” writes Gretchen Holbrook Gurzina in her biography of the novel’s author, Frances Hodgson Burnett. “In a few years, after the book hit the stage, there would be no one from the smallest midwestern American town to the streets of Paris who had not heard of Cedric, and who did not know what he looked like.” Published in 1886, the novel relates the tale of a poor New York City boy who becomes heir to an earldom after the death of his father, a British aristocrat alienated from the family in England. An immediate success, the book sold hundreds of thousands of copies and went through more than thirty American printings in two years.

Just as famous were the book’s illustrations by Reginald B. Birch. Burnett had sent him as a model a photograph of her son Vivian in a velvet suit with a lace collar. The suit and the long curls of hair depicted in Birch’s illustrations became all the rage—often to the consternation of the boys made to wear them by their mothers. The fashion trend swelled when Burnett’s stage adaptation opened on Broadway in December 1888 and became as big a hit as the book, eventually going on tour. “All across the country, boys who escaped the lace collars the first time around found themselves forced into them now,” writes Gurzina. “The androgyny of the Fauntleroy look, not helped by girls playing the boy on stage, caused boys dressed in the suits to be taunted on the streets.”

Stephen Crane loathed Burnett’s novel. His first biographer, Thomas Beer, relates that in 1894 Crane encountered two boys sporting long curls and Fauntleroy suits, and he gave them money to get their hair cut—much to the distress of their mothers. The incident, possibly apocryphal or at least embellished, is described with different details in another magazine article, in which a grateful father sent the author a box of cigars. Crane wrote his Whilomville stories partly in reaction to Burnett’s sentimental ideal of childhood and Cedric’s wholesome innocence; perhaps tellingly, in one story, the town’s mothers are horrified when they learn that all the children in the gang—boys and girls—get their curly locks shaved off by the local barber. Yet Crane’s stories were not written for children but about children, and one contemporary critic noted that they seemed “more natural” to her than most other stories about young people. “True, the children have the same marvelous predilection for getting into mischief, an equally marvelous ability for making their elders uncomfortable; nevertheless, the stories emphasize more the appreciative and humorous study of the healthiest side of child life.”

When a friend teasingly compared the series to Burnett’s best seller, Crane responded, “If the Whilomville stories seem like Little Lord Fauntleroy to you, you are demented and I know that you are joking, besides. See here, my friend, no kid except a sick little girl would like Lord Fauntleroy unless to look at Birch's pictures for it. The pictures are all right.” Set in opposition to Burnett’s novel and its many imitations, Crane’s story cycle breathed new life into an American literary tradition often referred to as “bad boy literature,” which includes Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s The Story of a Bad Boy (1870), Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1875), and William Dean Howells’s A Boy's Town (1876)—each about childhood life in a small town. The thirteen Whilomville stories, published monthly in Harper’s from mid-1899 through mid-1900, were collected in a book in August 1900, two months after Crane’s death. An earlier story, “His New Mittens,” appeared in a previous collection, along with the Whilomville novella “The Monster,” a much darker and more serious work usually not considered part of the series.

Most prominent among the Whilomville children is Crane’s preadolescent alter ego, Jimmie Trescott, a boy “versed in villainy” who is neither the gang’s leader nor their fool. Most of the tales focus on the misadventures, pranks, and rivalries of Jimmie and his friends, along with the perplexed reactions of the town’s adults. “When all is said and done, however,” writes the late Paul Auster in his recent biography of Crane, “the most effective stories are the ones in which a child from another place comes to Whilomville and disturbs the balance of that closed-off world.” Auster singles out Cora, the “angel-child” from New York City who appears in three stories—and who shares the name of Crane’s common-law wife. One summer, the Trescott family is visited by a relative, who is a famous painter, and his wife:

They had one child. Perhaps it would be better to say that they had one CHILD. It was a girl. When she came to Whilomville with her parents, it was patent that she had an inexhaustible store of white frocks, and that her voice was high and commanding. These things the town knew quickly. Other things it was doomed to discover by a process.

Cora proceeds to lay waste to the always-fragile tranquility of the children and their parents—and especially to the dignity of Jimmie, who “was in love. The beauty of his regal little cousin has stolen his manly heart.” In “The Lover and the Tell-Tale,” her influence persists in absentia when, after her return to New York, Jimmy writes her a love letter—with humiliating results.

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When the angel-child returned with her parents to New York the fond heart of Jimmie Trescott felt its bruise greatly. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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