Those who follow this blog on a regular basis know that I sometimes like to write about other writers who have influenced my life and my writing in some way or another by providing some type of inspiration, albeit in a small way. I also like to read books about those authors and enjoy writing about those books as well.
On an early December morning in 1884, Henry James went to prison. He enjoyed walking and probably set out on foot from his flat near Picadilly, cutting through London's Green Park and down through Westminster toward the river, heading for Millbank Penitentiary, today the site of Tate Britain. It had once held convicts waiting transport to Australia. On this particular day, it was on the verge of closing, but it was still busy enough to inspire a scene for James' new novel. The results of that trip can be found in the third chapter of the 1886 novel The Princess Casamassina, where he recounts "a vast interior dimness" where one can hear "the grinding of keys and bolts" and catch a peephole glimpse of a prison cell.
Still, the characters sent there by James are only visitors. Their errand is over as quickly as his own and he contents himself with capturing the impression the place would make on people who had never visited and had no intention of ever returning once they had left. His characters look at it and think about it, yet the main focus of the novel, Millbank, never enters it; its clammy walls never become a spot within the soul.
James' novel comes to mind when one reads Stephen Crane's 1893 work Maggie: A Girl of The Streets. Only seven years separate it from James' novel, but something new starts to happen when Crane writes his first major work, that separates his generation from that of James. The two men liked each other and there is no doubt that Crane learned from James. Yet, with Maggie, he is within the tale, within its space and violence, in a way that James never was with Millbank.
The story begins with boys throwing rocks at one another and leering when one draws blood; its hallucinatory climax takes the title character on a walk through the streets of Manhattan, with the face of one potential customer after another swimming up before her. Crane's narrative voice is strangely formal throughout - the boys wait in "ecstatic awe" when a drunken father approaches to wallop his son.
Yet, none of his characters has anything like a Jamesian inner life, that ability to separate one's actual self from one's circumstances. We see what Maggie sees on that final walk, not what she thinks, and indeed she can be said to barely think at all. There is no space between the character and the grime and cruelty in which she lives, as if she were entirely subsumed by the impressions her world makes upon her. Nor would it help if there were because the streets do not care about one's thoughts, no more than the waves Crane later described in his 1897 work The Open Boat, or the cannon fire of his 1895 work The Red Badge of Courage.
Crane is physically immersive in a way that James never was. He specialized in finding the place where sensation meets the psyche, though there is another way to put it, as Carl Van Doren did almost a century ago when he said that "when Crane went into the slums he did not go slumming."
The paradox is that when he finished Maggie, the 21-year-old Crane knew little more of life in the slums than James did; little more, in fact, than he did of combat when, a few months later, he began to write about the Civil War.
Born in 1871, he was the 14th and last child of a well-connected Methodist minister who died when Stephen was eight and he dropped out of Syracuse University after his freshman year. He had only spent a few months in New York City and was already fascinated by the Bowery's saloons and prostitutes, but the difference with James was not primarily one of experience. Rather, it was a difference in artistic stance, an ability to let the physical world so saturate the consciousness that the mind itself seemed to vanish. And yet, Crane would come to know those slums, just as he would later report from battlefields in Greece and Cuba and find their terrors much as he had imagined: a double life in Christopher Benfey's phrase, in which his work seemed to predict his experience.
Paul Auster's massively detailed new biography, Burning Boy, opens with a show-stopping first sentence: "Born on the Day of the Dead and dead five months before his twenty-ninth birthday, Stephen Crane lived five months and five days into the twentieth century, undone by tuberculosis before he had a chance to drive an automobile or see an airplane, to watch a film projected on a large screen or listen to a radio, a figure from the horse-and-buggy world who missed out on the future that was awaiting his peers, not just the construction of those miraculous machines and inventions, but the horrors of the age as well, including the destruction of tens of millions of lives in two world wars."
Is it churlish to note that someone who died in June 1900 did not, by the usual definition, live into the 20th century at all? Nevertheless, that sentence points to an essential truth: we think of Crane as late Victorian, when in reality he was a modernist whose contemporaries included Willa Cather, Robert Frost and Henri Matisse, as well: someone who should have lived to see Pearl harbor and beyond.
Instead, Crane remains fixed in promise, with the 10 volumes of his collected works as a down payment on a career that did not happen. Auster calls him "America's answer to Keats and Shelley," and it is true that The Open Boat is very nearly as perfect as To Autumn.
Still - Burning Boy? Auster's title builds on that of Paul Sorrentino's 2014 book Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire and it is true that Crane pushed his own strength beyond what it could bear. He wrote fast and his physical existence was often punishing and usually he had no choice about either. He consumed his own substance, though nobody knows precisely how he caught the tuberculosis that ultimately took his life. He did not have a hemorrhage until December 29, 1899, on the last night of a three-day party, where he was already weakened by the malaria he had caught while covering the Spanish-American War.
Crane loved his work, his common-law wife Cora and, he came to love danger too, but love itself was rarely his subject.
He found his material instead in what Auster describes as "extreme situations...matters of life and death, war, poverty and physical danger." He worked best "when he was afraid, trembling in his bones and scarcely aware of what he was doing." Yet, it is perhaps more accurate to say that fear interested him and perhaps because he knew so little of himself. Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage because he wanted to see what physical fear felt like; later observers found him surprisingly cool under fire.
The Open Boat aside, that extremity rarely lay in the stories of man against nature that consumed his contemporary Jack London and even in that story of a shipwreck he is interested not in the isolated individual, but in the way the survivors find their common purpose. The dangers he wrote about were no less inimical for being social.
If you ever begin reading Crane, you will always finish reading him. You will want to know what happens; and that is leaving aside the more obviously plot-driven tales Crane set in the American West. You so badly want to know what happens that it is easy to ignore the writing itself, to look through instead of at it, at the word-by-word construction of a narrative.
Light and sound and color are all transitive and emotions have their shades as well. He loved color. It was the verbal tool for which he reached most often. He had a gift for succinct, indelible similes. Yet, his dialogue, as many novels of that era did, drew controversy. The things that appalled James about the city were precisely the ones Crane found most enthralling.
He was forever the minister's son who fought with a distant God, yet wished for His presence. Crane was poor until 1895 when Red Badge of Courage became a best seller after a publisher finally released it from the ash heap. He then joined the staff of William Randoph 'Hearst's New York Journal. He was later friends with Joseph Conrad, whose career was just beginning in 1897. Crane published three books in 1899 and finished two others. Novels might have paid more, but Crane never mastered the long form and no one could make money as a freelance writer in those days. By then he was sick. H.G. Wells rode a bicycle through the night in search of a doctor, who sent him to a sanitarium in the Black Forest of Germany, where he died. His family bilked Cora out of any future royalties.
One of the last things he wrote was a book about children that is not a children's book. It was published posthumously in 1900 and is set in the land of Crane's childhood, a small town in upstate New York. It is a vivid picture of life as a boy of eight or nine years old.
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