Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Writings About New York (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (2 page)

In his short but brilliant career, Stephen Crane produced six novels, two collections of poetry, and more than one hundred stories, which were compiled in a ten-volume edition published by the University Press of Virginia (1969-1976). He is remembered as a pioneering writer who anticipated the styles that modernized American literature in the 1920s.

Poor Crane was ... never properly appreciated. We were great friends from the first, after he arrived in England. But believe me... no paper, no review would look at anything I or anybody else could write about Crane now. They would laugh at the suggestion.... Mere literary excellence won’t save a man’s memory. Sad but true.

—JOSEPH CONRAD (1912)

 

 

Conrad wrote those words just six years after Crane’s death, and, at the time, it seemed as if the great writer had written the epitaph of his “great friend.” Less than a decade after his death, Crane’s groundbreaking work in American letters was largely forgotten. “Who’s Crane?” Conrad laments. “Who cares for Crane.... I hardly meet anyone now who knows or remembers anything of him. For the younger, on-coming writers he does not exist.”

Conrad’s lament may have been true at the time, but by the 1920s Crane’s works had been rediscovered and his reputation began an inexorable rise. Crane’s standing is now perhaps higher than it was when he was alive, and his contributions to American literature are confirmed and cemented in place. While he might never be as beloved as his contemporaries Mark Twain and Henry James, Crane is undoubtedly a pillar of nineteenth-century letters, far eclipsing popular contemporaries such as Francis Marion Crawford and William Dean Howells. There remains even now, a hundred years after his death, a whiff of danger and brimstone about Stephen Crane—though he would never claim the sentiment as his own, he may be said to be the first American literary figure to embody the ambitions of a later generation: Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse. While no one can attest to the last attribute, he exemplified the first two. As for the first—in just eleven short years Crane wrote novels, poems, short stories, and hundreds of pieces of reportage, including war correspondence—he even managed to find time to compile a book of songs. Had he written nothing more than the novels Maggie:
A Girl of the Streets,
George’s
Mother,
and his masterpiece
The Red Badge of Courage,
his reputation would be secure. In addition, though, we have the racy facts of Crane’s life. He consorted with those considered the lowest of the low—Bowery bums, prostitutes, crooked cops, con men, men of violence—but he was equally at home with the great and good, and he was as well-learned as the members of high society. He was at ease in stately homes in England, fashionable spas, and the watering places of Mittel-Europa, as well as tenement slums and opium dens.

By the age of twenty-four he was famous enough to rise in an open court of law and announce himself as “Stephen Crane, the novelist,” confident, I would imagine, that everyone present knew who he was. It seems that they did. In any case, the judge asked for no further identification.

 

Stephen Crane was born in 1871 in Newark, New Jersey, the son of the Reverend Jonathan Townley Crane and Mary Helen Peck Crane, the last of fourteen children born to the couple. Both his mother and father were active, proselytizing Methodists, puritanical in the extreme. Reverend Crane wrote impassioned jeremiads against many popular pastimes—baseball was one of his particular bugaboos—and his wife joined the crusade against alcohol. Mrs. Crane enjoyed great success with a series of articles and lectures on the damage done to the human body by liquor, accompanied by a graphic magic-lantern show during her public-speaking addresses. Mrs. Crane was active in the New Jersey branch of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and later became a power in the national organization.

It would seem that the young Stephen Crane had the perfect springboard to push against when he decided to abandon the restrictive values of his straight-laced family and launch himself into the louche world of the demimonde. But in the manner of many of the offspring of religious parents, it seems that Crane never quite lost his sense of sin, his genetically imprinted fear of God. As one of his champions, Amy Levenell observed: “He disbelieved it and he hated it, but he could not free himself of it.”

Still, somehow he managed to tamp down the fires of self-damnation. He was not far into his teenage years when he made his first stabs at bohemianism. At a semi-military prep school in Claverack, New York, he was said to be given to outlandish dress, was “giftedly profane,” and made his contempt for authority quite obvious. Cadet Crane did not make it through a single year at the academy.

At Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, he began to read widely—not the required texts, but contemporary literature, particularly Flaubert and Tolstoy, authors still a generation away from the curriculum of a small American liberal-arts college. He repeatedly voiced profound opinions on these writers and on any other matters of the day. The brief experience at Lafayette College was succeeded by a stint at Syracuse University. It was at Syracuse that Crane developed a taste for the slums and the police courts—a curiosity that would stay with him throughout his brief life.

It was darkly bruited about at Syracuse that the colorful Stephen Crane was writing a scandalous novel about a prostitute. Legend has it that he started the book as early as sixteen years of age, but surely that would have been too young, even for someone as precocious as Stephen Crane. Most scholars of Crane’s works agree that he began the book at nineteen years of age, during his only semester at Syracuse University.