Freestyle 3-12- 2013 (Part 1)

[ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 8/11.]

 A gloomy, wet morning here at Ft. Dix Federal Correctional Institution. We had the time change this weekend and I decided to skip breakfast and remain in bed. The extra time spent in bed seems to have done little enough to perk me up. I have gone off to the prison law library to read and write.

The library lies about 100 yards from the unit building. The treeless compound filled with red brick buildings lacks anything attractive. Perhaps familiarity induces boredom.

I read Stephen Crane's "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky". Good story, told crisply. I think there was a Gary Cooper movie made from the story. I never saw the movie.

I am also working my way through Henry James' Portrait of a Lady. If my chronology is correct, James' novel is about 10 years prior to Crane's novella. James writes with such detail that his pacing is glacial. Crane moves forward quickly, but also tidily. James delves into the psychology of his characters - well, their interiors, at any rate. Crane sticks to the action. It has been a long time since I read Jack London, but my memory has prose more like Crane than James. Thinking forward, did Ernest Hemingway and Dashiell Hammett find their styles in Stephen Crane and Jack London? Why the differences between the sedateness of Henry James and the forward motion of Stephen Crane? I suggest the difference between a horse-drawn world and a world of trains.

sch

8/11/2025

I will disagree with my last sentence above. James came to age during the railroad age. Crane knew horse-drawn vehicles. However, I still think the pace of the world in which they came to age were different. The real difference may be in the newspapers - Crane had been a reporter and James had not. There is another connection to Hemingway.

I was wrong about there being a movie and about Gary Cooper. There is the movie, Yellow Sky with Gregory Peck. See, in prison we do not have access to information - no Google - and that means relying on unreliable memories.

Having Google now, I ran across Losing the West: A Critical Analysis of Crane’s “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” by Kaylee Weatherspoon (PDF). I did not read tall 16 pages, but I was taken by this:

... Yet, the themes underlying his portrayal of the urban Northeast and that of the “wild” West are strikingly similar. Both are in keeping with Crane’s commitment to writing honestly and authentically, even when telling stories outside of his own personal experience, as he famously did in The Red Badge of Courage. To Crane, as for many others, the West was a reservoir of simple American authenticity. It follows then, that the shift of the American West from an untamed, unfragmented “honest frontier” to a mimicker of the East would disturb him. He witnessed the culmination of the settlement of the West in his lifetime, as the U.S. Census Bureau declared the frontier officially closed in 1890 (“Following the Frontier Line”). In his short story “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” Crane communicates his anxiety over what he saw as the loss of the ideal American West through his depiction of Western ideals, Jack Potter’s personal transformation, and imagery of death and decay.

 This does bring Hemingway to mind. Skimming to the end, the verdict on Crane reminds me also of Hemingway.

Being a Hammett fan since I was a teen, I could not help but being distracted by these articles while searching for links about his writing style.

Dashiell Hammett's Strange Career by Anne Diebel (The Paris Review)

Finding Morality in Dashiell Hammett (I Would Rather Be Reading blog)

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