 I'm Betsy Peck-Learned, Dean of University Libraries, and thank you all so much for coming. This is a great turnout. The John Howard Burst Junior Memorial Program includes this evening's keynote lecture. The exhibition currently mounted in the library's exhibition cases, which was curated by Professor Christine Fagan, right here, with help from Heidi Benedict, our archivist, and several other staff members in the library. It was really a team effort. It also includes a satellite exhibit at the Rogers Free Library in Bristol, reading group discussions that took place there. And for the first time this year, a found poetry writing workshop. And Susan Tassant led those discussions and the poetry workshop. Susan, can you raise your hand or stand up a little? There she is. Thank you so much. Is she ready? She's right there. The Burst program celebrates a milestone anniversary of the publication of an important work of literature. This year's selection, the Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, is celebrating its 125th year and was selected by the Burst Committee, a group of Roger Williams faculty, staff, and students. Our Burst program donor, Jennifer Murphy over here and a representative from Rogers Free Library in Bristol, Susan Tassant, who I introduced. This committee is chaired by Professor Adam Braver, a Roger Williams University Professor of Creative Writing and also our library program director. You will meet him in a minute. And thank you very much to the Burst Committee. I know that Meg Case is here from that committee. And we had a couple of meetings, but it was a very easy selection this year and certainly a consensus by all in the committee. Tonight, we welcome Christopher Benfee, Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, whom Professor Braver will introduce in a moment. We are hugely grateful to Robert Blaze, an alumnus of Roger Williams University in 1970. Bob, can you stand up so everybody can see you? OK, raise your hand. Who, with his gift to the university in the year 2000, made these events possible. Unfortunately, oh, I won't say it. Unfortunately, Mr. Blaze can't be here tonight because he's here. We're thrilled that Mr. Blaze is here tonight and honored that his daughter, Jennifer, has been helping us with both the Burst selection and attending all of our events. Mr. Blaze's gift to the university was in honor of his mentor and friend, Professor John Howard Burst, Jr. Professor Burst was a scholar of Herman Melville and Walt Whitman and a collector of first editions. This year's selection, the Red Badge of Courage, held a special place in the heart of Professor Burst. Bob Blaze maintains a collection of Professor Burst's research on the novel. And we believe it's a fitting selection this year to celebrate 20 years of Burst programming here at Roger Williams with this selection, the Red Badge of Courage. The Blaze gift supports an exhibition, a library book fund for collecting works related to the exhibit and a keynote lecture. In partnership with funding from the Honors Program, the donation also allows for a library-led archival visit with two students, or we call them Burst Fellows. This year, Jillian Dimiani and Emma Phipps. Are you here, Jillian and Emma? Oh, there they are. Thank you. Who visited the Stephen Crane Archive at Columbia University to select items for the exhibition. We believe this is a really great opportunity of experiential learning for our students. And if they are here. So I already said that. Sorry. For those of you who have not yet seen the exhibition, please visit the exhibit cases behind the library and media tech desks out front. It will be up until the end of March. I'd also like to point out that library staff have prepared a research guide on the book and a virtual exhibit with images of artifacts from the exhibition available on the library's website, on the Burst webpage. And there's a link from the library homepage to the Burst page, or you can simply Google Roger Williams, Burst, and it will come up. And now I'd like to invite Adam to introduce Professor Benfield. Thank you. Right, thank you all for attending. It's really a privilege to have this lecture annually, this talk annually, in part because I think it's very important that we pause and consider works of art, works of literature that have transcended the moment and in a way perhaps can help ground us through ever-changing times. And yes, we are excited that this is the 20th year of the Burst programming, but because we cannot sit still, we already are pleased to announce next year's book. And next year's book will be the 50th anniversary of Ernest J. Gaines' novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. And along with that, I'll add that the Burst course that accompanies the selection, we have some of the students here tonight, will be held in the fall this upcoming year, a little different than it has been in the past, for those of you who might be interested, in that it will be an experiential learning project with students researching and developing a digital humanities project that will support the exhibition, but onto the red badge of courage. As Betsy mentioned, the Burst committee, after discussing and debating so many wonderful and meaningful books, ultimately chose the red badge of courage. I was going to say, as Betsy outlined, and it was articulated in the statement from the committee, and that was celebrating its 125th anniversary. And I learned from Susan Tassin at the book group 125 years of never being out of print. So it's been consistently in print for 125 years. Stephen Crane's classic novel is known for its early modernist portrayal of the Civil War and its psychological perspectives on the myth-making of heroism and cowardice. Still, in many respects, the red badge of courage goes beyond history, suggesting relevance over a century later by speaking to issues of our day, specifically a country that is visibly divided along ideological lines, which for many may seem irreconcilable. In revisiting the red badge of courage, one can't help but be prompted to ask, is our country broken? But is it a book of war, or is it one of finding responsibility in the face of unease, or a coming of age book? To consider the book, its author and its place in American culture and letters, we are honored to have Dr. Christopher Benfy. Is the author of five highly regarded books about the American Gilded Age, including the double life of Stephen Crane and the Summer of Hummingbirds? His most recent book, If the Untold Story of Kipling's American Years, was a New York Times notable book of 2019. Chris also is a cultural critic and public intellectual, if I may, a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the New York Times Sunday Times Book Review. Chris is also a poet who has regularly published works of poetry and engaged in the world of letters from that angle as well. He's a Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, and as Betsy mentioned, is a Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. But that's it. Please welcome Chris. Benfy is the 20th speaker in the history of the BERS program. Thank you, Betsy. And thank you, Adam. And thank you, Robert Blaise, who I just had the pleasure to talk with a little bit about Meld Illustrations, a topic dear to both of our hearts. And thank you, Christine, for showing me around the lovely exhibition out there. Color meant a great deal to Stephen Crane, and I'm very smitten with that red-schemed design out there. The artifacts from the Civil War, the artifacts from Stephen Crane, and the comic book version of the Red Badger Curve. As Adam mentioned, I did write a book 100 years ago about Stephen Crane, which had a perverse argument to it. I called it The Double Life of Stephen Crane. And the argument was that Crane lived his life backwards, that he would first write an experience, and then he would try obsessively to experience it in real life. He first, with no experience of war, wrote a book about war, and then he became a really significant war correspondent. He first wrote a hallucinatory story about a shipwreck, and then he managed to get himself into a shipwreck. And he wrote The Great Story of the Open Boat. He first wrote a book about a sex worker, and then he set up Housekeeping with the madam of the House of Prostitution in Jacksonville. It's always interesting to go back to a book you loved when you were a different person. I was in my early 30s when I first became obsessed with Stephen Crane, and I was going to say my early 60s, but that's not quite true. I'm in my mid-60s now, and thanks to Adam and Betsy and Bob and the rest of you, I've been invited to go back into this book. And I teach at a women's college. This Red Badge of Courage is not an obvious book to teach at a women's college. They're remarkably few women characters in the book. And it often is thought of as a kind of a guy book, like many of our American classics. In going back through the book, though, I found something else was grabbing my attention, and that was the pervasive theme of poverty, both in Crane's life and oddly in the Red Badge of Courage. So my working title for this talk is Stephen Crane's War on Poverty. So during the spring of 1893, Stephen Crane began writing a novel tentatively titled Private Fleming, His Various Battles, about an ordinary soldier's experiences during the American Civil War. The nature of courage was not front and center in Stephen Crane's mind at the time. Crane was more concerned with getting enough to eat. A 21-year-old college dropout, Crane had been living a hand-to-mouth existence as a freelance writer for New York newspapers, mainly covering the sufferings of the urban poor and homeless, which he knew at first hand. The gap between haves and have-nots already conspicuous during the Gilded Age, widened after the financial panic of 1893 when the population of homeless and unemployed people mushroomed in American cities, and especially in New York. Crane had completed a previous novel, begun during his brief stint at Syracuse University, about a jilted Irish girl's descent into poverty and prostitution called Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, which he had published with his own money from what was left of his inheritance from his mother. During the brutal, blizzard-ridden winter of 1894, as he poured over illustrated accounts of the Civil War, and especially the Battle of Chancellorsville, Crane dressed up as a homeless man and spent a couple of nights in a lured downtown homeless shelter, writing up his findings in a vivid sketch called An Experiment in Misery. Quote, he was going forth to eat as the wanderer may eat, he wrote of his disguised protagonist, and sleep as the homeless sleep. Commenting on the story, Crane explained that he had, quote, tried to make plain that the root of Bowery life is a sort of cowardice. Perhaps he added, I mean a lack of ambition or to willingly be knocked flat and accept the licking. Scholars have noticed the apparent disjunction between Crane's immersive experience of urban poverty, his notion that only through hardship can you truly understand the poor, and his simultaneous investment, imaginative investment in war, seemingly so remote from his own experience. Ironically, as Crane's recent biographer, biographer Paul Sarantino remarks, ironically, while Crane was exploring immersion as the basis for his art, he was continuing to imagine and write about a war that had ended more than six years before his birth. And yet, Crane's seemingly heartless social Darwinist remark about the root of Bowery life as being a sort of cowardice is an early indication that the apparently disparate subjects of war and urban poverty were united for Crane by the shared theme of cowardice. To put it slightly differently, Crane conceived of war and poverty as opportunities or tests of courage. In another sketch written about the same time, Crane compared the wanderings of a homeless tramp to, quote, detailed accounts of great battles. Not an obvious connection, but an interesting connection. During these months of probation, Crane was pursuing an extended experiment in misery of his own. While both of his parents were dead, his father a prominent Methodist minister in New Jersey, his mother a crusader for the women's Christian Temperance Union. Crane's older brothers included a prosperous lawyer in Port Jervis and a teacher in nearby Patterson, New Jersey. We still wonder one of Crane's nieces later remarked, we still wonder why he went through such experiences when he was always so very welcome at both our house and Uncle Edmunds. But Crane preferred the hard-scrabble life on the margins in Manhattan. When a newspaper editor asked him in 1895 about the origins of the Red Badge of Courage, Crane said that the novel was, quote, an effort born of pain. It seems a pity that art should be a child of pain, he added. Of course we have fine writers who are prosperous and contented, but in my opinion their work would be greater if this were not so. It lacks the sting it would have if written under the spur of a great need. Crane had no secure address during this period of voluntary poverty, sporadically sharing a large studio with three artist friends. You can see some of the pictures of these studios in the show in the lobby of the library. Sporadically sharing a large studio with three artist friends in a boarding house or really a flop house in the decrepit old Art Students League building on East 23rd Street. In the topmost and remotest studio, Crane wrote, there is an old beam which bears this line from Emerson in half obliterated chalk marks, quote, congratulate yourselves if you have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age. And yet just to repeat, boldly pursuing what Emerson said was something strange and extravagant, was emphatically not what Crane was trying to do in his Civil War novel. His primary objective in taking up such a hackneyed subject was to make money. Quote, I deliberately started to do a pot boiler, Crane confessed, something that would take the boarding school element. Crane, as I said before, was too young to have had any direct experience of war. But here, too, the boarding school element came to us rescue. Crane wrote, I never even smelled, I never even, I never smelled even the powder of a sham battle. But he said he had gotten, quote, his sense of the rage of conflict on the football field. So let that be a lesson if you want to write a war novel. Play football. But Stephen Crane was an artist to his fingertips. Compromise does not come easily to such temperaments. As he worked feverishly at his money-making pot boiler, Crane felt the quickening of his artistic ambitions. I got interested in the thing in spite of myself, he reported to a friend. And I couldn't, I couldn't, I had to do it my own way. In other words, he couldn't write a pot boiler. And so it was that Crane ended up writing something strange and extravagant after all. The incandescent novel we now know as The Red Badge of Courage. A masterpiece of continuous stylistic invention and visionary intensity. Is it possible, however, that the novel's conflicted origins, as pulp fiction written for money, versus a book that he made in his own way, is it possible that the novel's conflicted origins remained in the finished work in some way? That divided origin might help to explain the shockingly diverse interpretations that the novel has inspired during the century plus, in which it has remained in print, and steadily acquired the status of a classic work of American literature. We might, for the sake of convenience, sketch out three main ways, or really two plus, in which the novel has been understood during the 20th century. If we take the nature of courage as the central theme of the narrative, it will be seen that courage is treated in starkly different terms in each of these readings. First, the novel maintains its status, we might call this its boarding school status, as a book about an ancient, I'm sorry, a book about an anxious young man's passage from boyhood to manhood after surviving the testing ground of an intense battle. In his first encounter with fighting so this version of the novel goes, the young man runs abjectly from the fray, only when he has digested the traumatic experience does he return and demonstrates conspicuous bravery in leading a charge and capturing the enemy's flag. Courage, according to this narrative, is achieved by dentive facing up to danger and recognizing that bravery can win the day. In this version, the red badge of courage is a coming of age novel, a novel about how war turns cowardly boys into courageous men. A second reading of the novel is a more complicated version of the first. In this interpretation, the passage from cowardice to courage is more ambiguous, less clearly drawn. We're forced to recognize that the youth in Crane's account appears to stumble accidentally into courage, rather than grasping it intentionally. After running from battle and persuading himself that it was the rational thing to do, he is shocked to learn that his regiment was victorious after all. Deeply ashamed, he envies the parade of wounded men longing for a wound, a red badge of courage, of his own. When he tries to exact a description of the battle from a passing veteran, the veteran swings his rifle and hits the youth in the head. Thus the youth suffers a wound after all his own personal red badge of courage. And it is this wound inflicted by friendly fire, so to speak, that facilitates his triumphant return to his regiment and his even more triumphant performance in battle the next day. The supreme test is the battle itself. The youth passes the test with flying colors, sees in the actual colors the Confederate battle flag. Currents according to the second version of the narrative may be achieved in roundabout ways, but it is still the real thing. This is the fake it till you make it approach to courage. A third rating of the novel casts a colder eye on the youth's performance. This rating highlights the fact that the youth's courage is purchased by a lie. He tells his friend the loud soldier that he was shot in the head. Of course, he had suffered nothing of the kind. According to this rating, Crane sought in the red badge of courage to question the very nature of battlefield courage and treated the pompous dreams of the youth with relentless irony. What the youth achieves on his second day of battle is not maturity or a quiet manhood, but rather a momentary stilling of self-doubt. Courage according to this third version of the narrative is an uneasy blend of shame and mania. Courage is a fraud on the illusion of youth, a swindle. I don't see how we can overemphasize just how extreme the disagreements over the meaning of the novel have been. This debate about the meaning of the novel goes on to this day. It goes on in classrooms everywhere that the book is read. Imagine two people looking at Van Gogh's Starry Night. What a devastating image of oblivion one person says. All I can think of is death. What an ecstatic vision of life on earth and in heaven says another. All I can think of is the glory of existence. I was tempted to talk about Adam's crows over the wheat field which is similarly diverse interpretations. As critics argued about the red badge of courage over the years and debated Crane's intentions, a fresh piece of evidence was enlisted by the proponents of this third version. The third version, let me remind you, is that Crane viewed courage as a lie. This fresh piece of evidence was the original manuscript of the novel. It turned out on close inspection that certain editorial interventions had been inflicted on Crane's original text with the result that his irony was apparently deliberately toned down. The originalists argued that Crane had written an out and out anti-war novel, a book that critiqued all the motivations for war along with its supposed benefits, heroism, courage, maturity, manhood, and so on. So this battle between triumphalus and ironis, red badge of courage is heroic coming of age novel or red badge of courage is deeply ironic deflation of battlefield heroism. It turns out that this argument between triumphalus and ironis had played out already and in an unexpected place and without benefit of the original manuscript of the red badge of courage. In 1950, the great film director John Houston won the reluctant support of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio to make a movie of Stephen Crane's classic novel. You can see the original poster for the novel out in the exhibition in the lobby. As Lillian Ross writes in picture, her marvelous book linked the count of the making and unmaking of the movie, the MGM executives were convinced that the project would be a commercial disaster. In their view, the movie Houston had in mind, quote, had no standard plot, no romance, no leading female characters, and if Houston had his way, he would also have no stars. To which one could add no African-American characters, no mention of the Civil War or its causes and so on. Houston had bold ideas for telling his war story. He insisted on using black and white film, hoping to match some of the high contrast and visual intensity of Matthew Brady's famous photographs of the war, photographs that happened to have been a major source for Stephen Crane as well. Second, Houston wanted Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier in World War II but a Hollywood unknown to play the starring role of the youth not as the studio heads proposed a recognizable heartthrob like Montgomery Clift. Most importantly, though, was Houston's overall interpretation of Crane's novel. As Ross put it, Houston, like Stephen Crane, wanted to show something of the emotions of men in war and the ironically thin line between cowardice and heroism. From the start, Houston, John Houston, do we know something about John Houston, the treasure of the Sierra Madre, the African Queen, the creepy, creepy father in Chinatown, that's John Houston. Angelica Houston's that. From the start, Houston was determined to eliminate any hint of traditional heroism or tragic grandeur from his account of the youth's initiation under fire. He carefully explained to his star, Audie Murphy, that there was a humorous aspect to the youth's panic. Fear in a man is something tragic or reprehensible, you know, Audie, Houston said, but fear in a youth, it's ludicrous. To accentuate the youth's abject response to battle, Houston emphasized a second act of cowardice. The youth abandons the severely wounded and disoriented tattered soldier to his death. For Houston, this scene was the high point of the film. When Houston met with a composer who would provide a musical soundtrack for the film, he sought to reinforce this anti-heroic interpretation. The boy is afraid, Houston explained, and it is funny. Houston thought the youth's bravery was also funny. By insisting on, quote, the irony of the youth's heroic action, Houston was crafting a critique of battlefield courage. He suggested that a banjo, rather than the traditional trumpets, might reduce any temptation to view the youth in a tragic way. He told the composer, he's a banjo for the soundtrack. That'd be perfect. He shouldn't be treated tragically, he told the composer. He is a little ridiculous. You're getting the point, ludicrous, ridiculous, funny. Even in the final scenes when the youth leads a charge against the enemy and seizes the rebel battle flag, Houston saw nothing but irony. Far from showing the youth's final triumph in battle, Houston aimed to express instead, quote, the pointlessness of the youth's courage in helping to capture a fragment of wall in the book, an advantage immediately abandoned by the regiment. So they capture the wall, and then they leave the battlefield. In Houston's view, Cranes' novel placed the whole notion of courage under a microscope and found it wanting. Houston's film failed with its initial previews, and Houston himself departed to Africa to film the African Queen. And various remedies were proposed by the studio. It was thought that the transition from cowardice to courage was too abrupt with nothing to indicate why the youth suddenly stops being a coward and becomes a hero. The transition it was suggested might be eased with voiceover narration drawn from the novel, so that was put into the movie. The scene of the tattered soldier's death, Houston's favorite, was cut from the film since it reinforced the youth's cowardice. At the outset, the narrator gravely informed audiences that the red batch of courage was an acknowledged literary classic. All of these were trying to sell this failed movie. And with all the fixes, the revised film was still a failure with audiences. Houston's film was never the film the fixers wanted. They wanted tragedy, heroism, redemption. These were precisely the things Houston sought to banish from the film. And there was only so much that they could do to remake or unmake the film that Houston had made. In the first scene of the red batch of courage that Houston shot, a column of new recruits encounters a corpse in the road. Houston gave careful attention to the appearance of the actor playing the dead man, dousing his hair and face with multiple layers of mud and fake blood, and repeatedly reminded the bit players that this was their first corpse and that their faces should respond accordingly. For Houston, the scenes in which the youth contemplated death, the corpse in the road, a dead officer sitting against a tree in the woods, the tattered soldier dying with the heart of his film. Two of the scenes ended up on the cutting room floor. For Houston, the living contemplating the dead is the primal event of the film, towing the ironic line between cowardice and courage. For the distinguished art historian Michael Freed, encounters with corpses are also the crucial passages in the red batch of courage. The scene that preoccupied Houston of new recruits encountering a dead body in the road happens to be the first literary passage examined in Freed's important book, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration, on Thomas Akins and Stephen Crane. For Freed, the intensity of the scene arises from factors other than those that were added and braided by Houston. For Freed, the scene exhibits what he calls the conflicted nature of Crane's realism. Now here's the relevant passage from the red badge. Once the line encountered the body of a dead soldier, he lay upon his back staring at the sky. He was dressed in an awkward suit of yellowish brown. The youth could see that the soles of his shoes were worn to the thinness of writing paper. He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare, the impulse of the living to try to read in dead eyes the answer to the question. In Freed's analysis, Crane, like the gawking recruits, could not take his eyes off the dead man's face, but for other reasons than those evoked by John Houston. Freed argues that Crane tried to write a realistic account of men in war, while simultaneously and unconsciously writing about the physical act of writing and the actual tools of writing. Hence the references in Crane's text to lines and writing paper and the impulse to read in dead eyes. According to Freed, the image of the upturned face recurs in many of Crane's texts and always carries this double weight of the front scene of writing. I mentioned at the start of this talk the curious linkage for Crane between urban poverty and war as occasions for cowardice or courage. Faced with poverty, the poor can be brave or cowardly, Crane suggests, just like the young recruits. As it happens, Crane was hardly alone during the 1890s in addressing the boundary between cowardly and courageous behavior. A constellation of literary texts probed the distinction as though a whole generation of writers, too young to have experienced war firsthand, considered the nature of courage to be a pressing problem. With the relative absence of major wars, there was a worried sense that the blessings of peace not be all that they were cracked up to be. As Crane writes of his youthful recruit in the first chapter of the Red Badge, there had been a portion of the world's history which he had regarded as the time of wars, but it he thought had been long gone over the horizon and had disappeared forever. Around 1900, there was a pervasive worry among the privileged classes in the United States that society afflicted with peace was becoming over-civilized, soft, cowardly. T.S. Eliot remarked that Boston was, quote, refined beyond the point of civilization. For whatever cultural or historical reasons he defined in the space of five or six years first the Red Badge of Courage in 1895, in which a young man deserts his regiment. Rudyard Kipling's American novel, Captain's Courageous, of 1897, in which a spoiled rich kid is rescued by a fishing vessel headed to the North Atlantic. Joseph Conrad's Lord Gem of 1900, in which the first mate of a ship full of poor immigrants, saves his own life while abandoning his vulnerable charges. What these works have in common is a preliminary diagnosis of manly cowardice, which must be healed, so to speak, by conspicuous acts of courage. In each case, the protagonist is dragged down into poverty, and in each case the protagonist found wanting when first tested by circumstance is granted a second chance at bravery. The writers of these works were united by ties of friendship and admiration. Crain was deeply indebted to Kipling's works. The two men met in New York in 1896, and it was from Kipling that Crain had derived his deep-seated conviction that art and suffering were allied. There are few things more edifying unto arts as the artist-hero of Kipling's The Light That Failed than the actual belly pinch of hunger. Conrad and Crain, Conrad gets pride of place in the exhibition here. Conrad and Crain forged a close friendship in England. It has been suggested that not only did Crain borrow in Lord Gem a major theme from the Red Badge of Courage, that of a coward given a second chance, but that he might even have modeled Gem on Stephen Crain himself. Now I'm coming around to my conclusion, so hold your breath. Stephen Crain's two great subjects, as I've said multiple times, were urban poverty and war. These were the conditions he tried obsessively to experience in his own life. As a freelance newspaper man, he lived so close to starvation that he hardly had to pass as an indigent writer. Having vividly imagined war on the Red Badge, he spent the rest of his life chasing actual wars as a war correspondent for Pulitzer and Hearst. So what's the linkage of poverty and war? Is there some tight connection? William James thought so. In the lectures that became his 1902 masterpiece, The Varieties of Religious Experience, James conceived of the world as, quote, essentially a theater for heroism. War was the traditional machinery for turning young men into heroes in James's view. He could almost be describing the plot of the Red Badge when he wrote, quote, the most significant individual, I'm sorry, the most insignificant individual when thrown into an army in the field is weaned from whatever excess of tenderness towards his precious person he may bring with him and may easily develop into a monster of insensibility. The challenge William James believed was to find in a modern and more civilized world, a world in which wars, James thought, had been banished to the past, to find in this peaceful world, quote, something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does. In a phrase that became famous after the publication of his 1910 essay, an essay that opens with a nostalgic embrace of the Civil War, William James announced the need in civilized times for what he called, quote, a moral equivalent of war. For men of earlier times, and James is only talking about men, for men of earlier times, according to James, the greatest fear was war, the specter that haunts Henry Fleming of being found wanting on the battlefield. What then were modern men in a world of commercial trade most afraid of? For Americans of the Gilded Age, the greatest fear in James's startling view was poverty, quote, we have grown literally afraid to be poor, he wrote, scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship. When we quake at the thought of having a child without a bank account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion, end of quote. Forget Theodore Roosevelt's martial fantasies of the strenuous life, his theatrical rough writers passing for heroic soldiers of the past, forget all that. As James said, poverty is the strenuous life. Without brass bands or uniforms or hysteric popular applause or lies or circumlocutions, poverty is the strenuous life. There's a moment in the Red Badge of Courage when the fear of battle and the fear of poverty converge dramatically. It comes from the same passage that so fascinated both John Houston, the filmmaker, and Michael Freed, the art historian, when the marching column of raw recruits encounters their first corpse in the room. And I'll read it again with another sentence included, he was dressed in an awkward and yellowish brown. The youth could see that the soles of his feet had been worn to the thinness of writing paper and from a great rent in one the dead foot projected piteously. And it was as if fate had betrayed the soldier. In death it exposed to his enemies that poverty which in life he had perhaps concealed from his friends. Strange sense. Every sense in the Red Badge of Courage is strange. And it was as if fate had betrayed the soldier. In death it exposed to his enemies that poverty which in life he had perhaps concealed from his friends. For a moment we are transported to an elegantly balanced sentence which recalls the phrasing of Samuel Johnson to a very different battlefield altogether. The youth is paralyzed by the fear that he will run from battle. And here is a dead soldier who was afraid instead that his carefully concealed poverty would be revealed. The two great sources of fear, war and poverty are thus momentarily elided in the Red Badge of Courage they were for William James. In a society obsessed with martial prowess or making money any falling short is regarded as shameful hence to be hidden from the sight of others. And both war and poverty for Crane and for James provide an opening for courage. Exposure for both writers is a small price to pay for a more noble a more courageous existence. James writes, we have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant the liberation from material attachments the unbridled soul. If as James believed the prevalent fear of poverty become our, quote, worst moral disease then perhaps voluntary poverty could serve a money-grubbing age like Crane's like our own as, quote, the transformation of military courage. Thank you. So I'd be happy to field a few questions about war, football or poverty. Yeah, thank you. I had questions that kept evolving because it kept taking us into different places. So I'm going to come back to my initial question with the spin from the end which is, early in the book he mentions Homer and the Homeric. Says that's all over, that's right. Where does that fit in with, is that in a style record? Absolutely. It's sort of safer than safe from all of this. Exactly. So early in the novel in the first chapter as the youth is headed as they're waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting to see any real action the youth reflects that the days of Homeric battle and I don't remember Crane's exact wording but basically that all we care about is trade and commerce war has been banished. And of course he's completely ambivalent because he's both enraptured of the idea that he'll be found to have the right metal and terrified that he won. But yes, and I'm suggesting that both Crane and William James are writing writing from the perspective that maybe wars are coming to an end. That's the fear suggested in the red badge and the fear that William James has that we're all going to become softies. And there's a connection between Crane and William James. William James's well-known brother Henry was a good friend to him. Steven Crane. Is it clear that the kind of war of the ancient world isn't here anymore? You and I don't fight up close and personal and look each other in the eye. I kill you from 100 yards away because of the weaponry, the rifle in the Civil War and even better weapons in subsequent wars. Cannons that can kill from hundreds and hundreds of yards. Does that make war and heroism antithetical? Yeah, that's a great question. There's two wonderful images out in the exhibition from Winslow Homer before doing nostalgic scenes. New England was a great battlefield artist. And there's one of the sniper which suggests the incredible weaponry of the Civil War at the same time, the fact that soldiers had no armor. They were wearing woolen coats. So I think that recognition that war had become impossible for heroism waits until World War I. It's true it already happened in the Civil War, but Steven Crane still writes the battlefield scenes of the Red Baton Courage as though it's almost hand-to-hand contact. He wants Henry Fleming not to be holding a gun but just to be holding the standard and then grabbing the enemy's standard and sort of running through bullets and so on. So I think that nightmare of mechanized warfare which had already been experienced in the Russo-Japanese War which is going on in Crane's lifetime. I don't think that's his fear about war. He thinks it's disappearing, ironic under the circumstances since just after the novel was published we had about 100 years of continuous war and we're still having it. So I don't think it's entirely gone away. So William James Essay, the moral equivalent of war, was incredibly influential in American society and in the war and in the war and in the war and in the war. So it's very influential in American society and the idea of some kind of national service as some kind of voluntary poverty at least for a couple of years, like the couple of years, one might be expected to serve in the armed forces if one were drafted. That's had its life in the Peace Corps. It's called the Peace Corps and it's that idea of we can get the experience of the Marine Corps in times of peace in Teach for America and a lot of things that college students I think look at as something viable and worth doing before a career in finance or consulting college teacher. I think it's still very much with us. Pete Buttigieg, very interesting case of a military man making the case for peaceful national service. We still live with these. I mean, Adam was talking about the weird connections between the first Gilded Age and the second one, which is what we're living through now for our sins. See, Bob's got a new look. What's going on here? I'm curious if you mentioned Pete Buttigieg. What else are we thinking about? You just caused a nuclear explosion in my head in terms of his association with the military. He does have an association with the military. But if you think of all of the individuals that have run for president and lionized in terms of military, they were true military. I don't know if Buttigieg... No, he wasn't. But he talked about being trained with the AK... What do we use? That was his association that nothing else could talk about. Correct. Now, I think he drove a vehicle and did some destiny. No, I think that was a great example. I'm not criticize me. I think that was a great example. I think... I'm from Indiana, so as is my friend Betsy. We Hoosers, you know, we're not going to totally dump these guys. She's even from South Bend, for God's sake. Yeah. Well, then you were talking about war and football. South Bend is war and football. Yeah, I played basketball, though. From Indiana. It's curious. The movie was just done recently on PCM, the traditional classic movie. And I mean, it's interesting that, you know, Houston, you know, Houston also did Moby Dick. Right. I always found it interesting that the hero, which he is a hero in the movie, was also the most decorated human being in World War II. Correct. Kind of ironic. Yeah. That he plays just the opposite. Yeah, that Houston is saying, it's ludicrous when somebody like you is brave. I think you did use the word ludicrous. No, yeah, Houston does. And I think the individual that introduced the movie, I don't think it was Mankiewicz. I can't remember. That's part of my problem today, is not being able to remember that she would use this individual, Lordy Murphy, this individual, Lordy, he was trying to become an actor, so. Yeah. I think you nailed it. Thanks. I want to hear from more students. What do you think? Did you all read this book? I think the book is so strange, you know. It's not, we try to turn it into the book that our teachers seem to have thought it was in high school. And then you read it and you think, it's like this hallucinatory kind of crazy book. Yeah. So you've done some research on this, yeah. You kind of talked about different editions of the book, having different interpretations. But you didn't touch on the comic book. Like what? Yeah, see I'm not a scholar of the comic book. But you are. So touch on it. What did you? I just thought it was more geared towards, it seemed like they were trying to take the story and like a generation of like adults wanted the story for their kids and they translated the story for someone about their kids. See I think even without the comic book, the parents have translated the story into the story they want it to be, which is the coming of age story. It's what all American books are supposed to be. They're supposed to be coming of age stories. When they write Moby Dick or The Red Voucher of Courage. Yeah, I mean I, as I said at the beginning of the talk, I think some of the, just enough of the pot boiler is still in it, that the comic book writers and the high school, the college teachers and the parents can still make this book seem something that it's not. And the irony in it is, is shifty, is squishy. It's not a stable, oh I get it, Crane thinks this whole war thing is ridiculous, or ludicrous. It's, it's shifty. The book is, is squirrely, weasley, it's strange. It plays a lot of different keys. So that, I mean, when I talk about those three different views of the novel, those are major critical views of this book. You know, the book is a story of a young man finding courage in 48 hours. The story is about a kid who's fooling himself right up to the very end. Yep. I have to go off the mom. Yep. And head out. Yep. Become a man. And mom has a certain presence in the novel. A very big presence. She doesn't cry at all. That's right. She doesn't go off. Yep. Talks like a mother should to her son going off to war. A man who's soft. Yeah. Yeah. She says, don't do anything, you'd be ashamed of. Right. And laundry can come home, which is a pretty good mom. Yeah. But. It comes home either way. And I can't get it. Yeah, it does. And I get it. Yeah. And I get where that would sit in with the, um, coming of age story. Because you have to grow up. You have to leave home. You have to leave mom. You have to become a man. But where does it sit in with the poverty story? Yeah. Good. May I have what a great question? Yeah. That's a great question. I mean, Crane, he did write a whole novel about a woman's descent into poverty. And it's a novel that uses just as familiar, like everybody knew this. Everybody knew she was going to die. Everybody knew she'd kill herself. The story was so, was so well known. Um, but he seems to have kind of endorsed the idea that poverty kills women and poverty elevates men. He did write a second poverty novel, though, called George's Mother, which is all mom all the time. And oddly, the working title of George's Mother, which he wrote right after the Red Badge occurred. And I, by right after, I mean, couple of months, couple of months ago, I mean, he's writing at just this red hot speed. The original title of George's Mother was A Woman Without Weapons. It's kind of interesting. So some sense that maybe, I mean, the absence of women in the novel was a disaster for the filmmakers. You should check out the original poster of the movie. There's one scene where a soldier tries to steal a pig from a house. And a young woman comes running out to say, that's our pig. And the studio head said, make that bigger. So you see a Victor Body Murphy with the only woman in the movie. Like, there's love interest. Like, it's going to be gone with the wind after. They want it gone with the wind, of course. Which was the big success. But they got the Red Badge occurred. Thank you very much. Great time.