Before venturing too far into this sure-to-be perilous year—when our democracy may end and the nation fragment into hostile culture camps—I have a lit tip for you serious readers. There’s a fine recent biography out on Stephen Crane, one of our under-recognized literary geniuses, ranking (in my opinion) just below Mark Twain and Herman Melville at the top of American letters.
The book is Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephan Crane by Paul Auster, who is clearly a huge fan of his subject and praises him profusely. Crane, as you likely know, is best remembered for his novel The Red Badge of Courage, on the must-read list of many high school English courses, and the strange and rather disturbing short story “The Blue Hotel,” standard fare for college English majors.
Reviewer Mark Athitakis in the Los Angeles Times opines that Auster goes too far in his passionate and “unnecessary” new biography. While conceding Crane’s genius, Athitakis brands him a reckless writer for crossing genres as though qualified to do so:
“His most famous work, 1895’s The Red Badge of Courage, was a Civil War novel produced decades after the fighting ended by a writer who’d never done military service. He conjured up a Wild West he’d only passed through, imagined a Black experience he hardly knew, wrote poetry unbeholden to any tradition. Incapable of staying in his lane, he weaved into all of them.”
That he did. And he did it well, in a fresh, spare, hard-hitting, no-frills writing style fixated on colors, as though he were a painter and wanted you to see what he was describing. (Literary scholars classify Crane variously as an American Realist, a Naturalist, and an Impressionist, or a blend of all three. In any case, he was seminal and before his time, influencing many writers to come, most notably Ernest Hemingway.)
I must also disagree that Crane doesn’t deserve another biography; otherwise you wouldn’t find Google queries like “Is Stephen Crane alive?” and “Was Stephen Crane married to Lana Turner?” Enough said.
What an odd, inscrutable man-boy Crane was. The fourteenth child born to a New Jersey Methodist minister and suffragette wife, he taught himself to write at age four, played baseball at Syracuse University, dropped out of academia and went to New York City, where he was writing for newspapers by age 20.
Crane lived the familiar, struggling artist’s life on New York’s mean streets. He was frail and chronically impoverished, a young chain-smoking consumptive who churned out newspaper pieces while working on his first novel. No publisher wanted Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, his close-up account of a decent girl forced into prostitution by poverty, so he scraped together enough money to self-publish it. Still it got no notice.
It wasn’t until the 1895 publication The Red Badge of Courage became a best seller that Crane gained instant fame as an author and, briefly, celebrity status. His personal reputation soon took a deep dive when polite society learned that he associated with women of the street, had mistresses, and was said to use drugs.
Crane in turn had no use for polite society and went into self-exile in England. Whatever his upright contemporaries in the States thought of him, Crane didn’t give a rip. He was himself alone and burned through his brief life, an iconoclast, enemy of the phony, the conventional, the sentimental. Apparently, he cared only for dogs, baseball, his late-in-life common-law wife (a former madam named Cora), and of course the act of writing. It was this gift that drew admiration from and friendship with some of the literary giants of his time…among them William Dean Howells, Joseph Conrad, and H. G. Wells.
My first serious encounter with Crane’s work was at UCLA when I did my Master’s thesis on his war reporting. Yes, it made perfect sense in the late in 1890s for publishers to hire the celebrity-author of the internationally read The Red Badge of Courage to cover a real war. It made even more sense that his first employer should be the flamboyant William Randolph Hearst, who hired Crane in 1898 to report on the impending war between Greece and Turkey for the New York Journal. Crane took Cora with him to Greece for what turned out to be only a month-long war, with the Turks the decisive winner. Crane did cover the major battle at Velestino, lost by the Greeks to the chagrin of the pro-Greek Crane. His fellow correspondents described the already famous young man as being fearless, seemingly without any sense of danger, as though he had a death wish.
If the Greek-Turkish War was a disappointment in its brevity, Crane soon had a new one to cover in Cuba, where newspaper publishers Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer helped push the United States into the Spanish-American War with their battling newspapers’ circulation-boosting jingoistic headlines. Crane was an active participant, writing about Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, and even being cited by the Army for his messenger service. Again, his fellow reporters commented on his daredevil conduct, on how he would walk on a ridgeline at twilight with a lit cigarette in his mouth, inviting a sharpshooter’s bullet, as though he were playing a game of rifle-fire roulette.
Crane survived, and at war’s end returned to Cora and to England, where he was always welcome. He was also deeply in debt, and wrote constantly (when he wasn’t partying), as though there were no tomorrow. Indeed there weren’t many. His tuberculosis suddenly worsened, and he sought treatment at a Black Forest sanatorium in Germany, where he died on June 5, 1900. He was 28.
Yes, as Auster reminds us, Crane has a secure place in the American canon. But he deserves to be read more widely. I recall still one day during my teaching years when a very bright young student, a woman freshly arrived from Russia, came to me during office hours and asked, “I want to know American literature. Who should I read?”
I thought a bit. Mark Twain should have been the starting point. Then I blurted out, “You might begin with Stephan Crane.”
She brightened. “Oh I love him. He is very popular in Russia!”
I was as stunned then as I am now at her words. Russia? Really? Shouldn’t Crane be as read and highly regarded in his own country—despite having left it as something of a cultural outcast? No, Auster’s biography is not “unnecessary.”
I believe Crane, that stoical, partying-to-the end enigmatic loner wouldn’t have cared one way or another what we thought of him. But many of us are left with that familiar lament and wondering we know from the premature passings of the likes of John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Albert Camus: What gifts would he have given us had he lived a normal lifetime?
You get a taste of Crane’s fatalistic machismo in one of his brief, unconventional poems, below.
A Man Said to the Universe
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”