What would you do if Stephen Crane's attorney brother William sent you a letter asking you to be a pallbearer at Stephen's funeral? While you might be a little late replying, considering Crane was buried 110 years ago, you can now own such a letter.
Stuart Lutz historical autographs of New Jersey is selling the type-written and signed letter for around $500. It is addressed to Colonel Church and references Ripley Hitchcock. The price tag seems reasonable for such a unique item, if it is somewhat morbid. We of the Red Blog of Courage would buy it for our collection if we weren't so damn broke.
The letter can be seen on Lutz's website here:
http://www.historydocs.com/viewimage.asp?RecNum=11&StockNo=2624&ImageCount=1&ViewImage=1
If any of you buy it, let us know! Or if you know who Crane's other pallbearers were, leave a comment below. Hopefully Church made it to the, uh, church on time! RIP Stephen Crane.
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2 comments:
Other pallbearers were Willis Brooks Hawkins, Ripley Hitchcock, and John Kendrick Bangs. The coice of Church as a pallbearer is difficult to explain since he and Crane apparently never met.
Covering the funeral for the New York Tribune, the poet Wallace Stephens wrote:
This morning I went to the funeral of Stephen Crane at the Central Metropolitan Temple on Seventh Avenue near Fourteenth Street. The church is a small one and was about [a] third full. Most of the people were of the lower classes and had dropped in apparently to pass away the time. There was a sprinkling of men and women who looked literary, but they were a wretched, rag, tag, and bob-tail. I recognized John Kendrick Bangs. The whole thing was frightful. The prayers were perfunctory, the choir worse than perfunctory with the exception of its hymn "Nearer My God To Thee" which is the only appropriate hymn for funerals I ever heard. The address was absurd. The man kept me tittering from the time he began till the time he ended. He spoke of Gladstone + Goethe. Then—on the line of premature death—he dragged in Shelley; and speaking of the dead man's later work he referred to Hawthorne. Finally came the Judgement day—and all this with most delicate, sweet, and bursal gestures—when the earth and the sea shall give up their dead. A few of the figures to appear that day flashed through my head—and poor Crane looked ridiculous among them. But he lived a brave, aspiring, hard-working life. Certainly he deserved something better than this absolutely common-place, bare, silly service I have just come from. As the hearse rattled up the street over the cobbles, in the stifling heat of the sun, with not a single person paying the least attention to it and with only four or five carriages behind it at a distance I realized much that I had doubtingly suspected before—There are few hero-worshippers.
Nice! Thanks for answering my question about the pallbearers, and for posting the Wallace Stevens account. I should have thought of that! Total blog reader participation score right there, thanks again for the help!
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