Auster talks 'The Red Badge of Courage'

I am still less than one-third of the way through Paul Auster’s book on Stephen Crane. I’m reading slowly, savoring it. It’s that good.

I think this would be a fair summary of Auster’s views on The Red Badge of Courage.

• It’s the Great American War Novel. It’s certainly the best novel about the Civil War. And the novel captured war in a way that novels about later wars didn’t. (Could you name the novel about World War II?)

• America’s great war novel is not about war. It’s about what fear does to one character.

• If you doubt that, look at what’s missing: There are no references to President Lincoln or to slavery. The novel is superficially about the Battle of Chancellorsville, a fascinating test of tactics, but the generals aren’t named and there’s nothing on their strategy. The story is not about that battle but about the battle Pvt. Henry Fleming fights with himself.

• Henry cares more about the opinions of others than what he thinks of himself. He wants to be seen as brave, but he’s afraid that he might run. He does, in fact, run. Cowardice is not a test of will. Fear overwhelms intelligence. Later we find that bravery can overwhelm intelligence too.

• Here is the heart of the novella: Henry lies to cover his own cowardice and failure. He’s willing to manipulate — that is, do violence to — a friend to maintain the lie. He not only lies, he believes his own lie. He’s dishonest with himself. Auster observes that’s a state of mind that Kierkegaard called the “sickness unto death.”

• Henry remembers some of his failures but forgets — or doesn’t face — others. He’s haunted that he abandoned a mortally wounded soldier. But he can’t admit that he ran from the fighting or that his claim that his wound was caused by an enemy bullet is a lie. The guilt is unbearable, so he just doesn’t bear it.

Crane’s novella was required reading when I was a schoolboy. It opened my mind in the mysterious way that a good book can. I probably got a glimpse of most of the insights that Auster outlines clearly.

When I had my first class in American literature in high school, I became a friend of the essayists and memoirists. Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson talked to me in a way fiction writers didn’t.

Crane opened the door to fiction for me.

Hemingway said modern American literature, meaning fiction, began with Mark Twain. The critic Carl Van Doren said it began with Crane. I’m with Van Doren.

• Source: Paul Auster, Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane; New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2021.