Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Writings About New York (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (43 page)

In George and his mother he has to do with folk of country origin as the city affects them, and the son’s decadence is admirably studied; he scarcely struggles against temptation, and his mother’s only art is to cry and to scold. Yet he loves her, in a way, and she is devotedly proud of him. These simple country folk are contrasted with simple city folk of varying degrees of badness. Mr. Crane has the skill to show how evil is greatly the effect of ignorance and imperfect civilization. The club of friends, older men than George, whom he is asked to join, is portrayed with extraordinary insight, and the group of young toughs whom he finally consorts with is done with even greater mastery. The bulldog motive of one of them, who is willing to fight to the death, is most impressively rendered.

—from New York World (July 26, 1896)

 

The relative merits of the
Red Badge of Courage
and
Maggie
are open to question. To the present reviewer it seems that in
Maggie
we come nearer to Mr. Crane’s individuality. Perhaps where we might expect strength we get merely stress, but one may doubt whether we have not been hasty in assuming Mr. Crane to be a strong man in fiction. Strength and gaudy colour rarely go together; tragic and sombre are well nigh inseparable. One gets an impression from the
Red Badge
that at the end Mr. Crane could scarcely have had a gasp left in him—that he must have been mentally hoarse for weeks after it. But here he works chiefly for pretty effects, for gleams of sunlight on the stagnant puddles he paints. He gets them, a little consciously perhaps, but, to the present reviewer’s sense, far more effectively than he gets anger and fear. And he has done his work, one feels, to please himself. His book is a work of art, even if it is not a very great or successful work of art—it ranks above the novel of commerce, if only on that account.

—from
Saturday Review
(December 19. 1896)

 

[Stephen Crane] had indeed a wonderful power of vision, which he applied to the things of this earth and of our mortal humanity with a penetrating force that seemed to reach, within life’s appearances and forms, the very spirit of life’s truth. His ignorance of the world at large—he had seen very little of it—did not stand in the way of his imaginative grasp of facts, events, and picturesque men.

His manner was very quiet, his personality at first sight interesting, and he talked slowly with an intonation which on some people, mainly Americans, had, I believe, a jarring effect. But not on me. Whatever he said had a personal note, and he expressed himself with a graphic simplicity which was extremely engaging. He knew little of literature, either of his own country or of any other, but he was himself a wonderful artist in words whenever he took a pen into his hand. Then his gift came out—and it was seen to be much more than mere felicity of language. His impressionism of phrase went really deeper than the surface. In his writing he was very sure of his effects. I don’t think he was ever in doubt about what he could do. Yet it often seemed to me that he was but half aware of the exceptional quality of his achievement.

This achievement was curtailed by his early death. It was a great loss to his friends, but perhaps not so much to literature. I think he had given his measure fully in the few books he had the time to write. Let me not be misunderstood: the loss was great, but it was the loss of the delight his art could give, not the loss of any further possible revelation. As to himself, who can say how much he gained or lost by quitting so early this world of the living, which he knew how to set before us in the terms of his own artistic vision? Perhaps he did not lose a great deal.

—from
Notes on Life and Letters
( 1921 )

Two qualities in especial combined to form Crane’s unique quality, viz his wonderful insight into, and mastery of, the primary passions, and his irony deriding the swelling emotions of the self. It is his irony that checks the emotional intensity of his delineation, and suddenly reveals passion at high tension in the clutch of the implacable tides of life. It is the perfect fusion of these two forces of passion and irony that creates Crane’s spiritual background, and raises his work, at its finest, into the higher zone of man’s tragic conflict with the universe.... In “Maggie,” 1896, that little masterpiece which drew the highest tribute from the veteran, W. D. Howells, again it is the irony that keeps in right perspective Crane’s remorseless study of New York slum and Bowery morals. The code of herd law by which the inexperienced girl, Maggie, is pressed to death by her family, her lover and the neighbours, is seen working with strange finality The Bowery inhabitants, as we, can be nothing other than what they are; their human nature responds inexorably to their brutal environment; the curious habits and code of the most primitive savage tribes could not be presented with a more impartial exactness, or with more sympathetic understanding.

“Maggie” is not a story about people; it is primitive human nature itself set down with perfect spontaneity and grace of handling. For pure aesthetic beauty and truth no Russian, not Tchekhov himself, could have bettered this study, which, as Howells remarks, has the quality of Greek tragedy

—from
Friday Nights: Literary Criticism and Appreciation
( 1922)

Writers in America who do not know their Stephen Crane are missing a lot.

—from his Introduction to Volume 11 of
The Work of Stephen Crane,
edited by Wilson Follett ( 1925-1926)

No American work of [Maggie’s] length had driven the reader so hard; in none had the author remained so persistently invisible behind his creation.

—from
Stephen Crane
(1950)

1. The French phrase nostalgie
de
la
boue
can be roughly translated as a hankering for the gutter, the lower depths, the slums. Crane seems to have had it. Can you sympathize? Is the attraction to the gutter simply that it stimulates a fantasy of throwing off the burden of respectability? What else motivates this attraction? A strange sense of purity?

2. People who read Maggie are not likely to have much direct experience with the lower depths of life in the slums or with the down-and-out. Yet from the beginning, readers have called the novel realistic or naturalistic, even without being able to compare the actual scene to Crane’s version of it. How does Crane achieve the effect of realism, whether or not he actually captures a reality in words?

3. The nineteenth century was a great period for novels about fallen women. Think of Madame
Bovary
and Anna
Karenina.
What is distinctive about Crane’s treatment of this theme? Is there anything fundamentally American about it?

4. What attitude do you think Crane wanted to create in the minds of his readers? Righteous indignation? Repugnance? A desire to ameliorate the conditions of the urban poor? A desire to call people like Maggie and her friends to a prayer meeting? Scientific detachment? A sense of superiority? Something else?

The first biography of Stephen Crane appeared in 1923. It was Thomas Beer’s
Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters.
Almost as soon as it was published, though, there was some doubt about the veracity of much of the book. Nevertheless, for many years it remained the only source of knowledge about Crane. However, as scholars became more interested in Stephen Crane, doubts about Beer’s biography increased. As a recent Crane scholar, Christopher Benfey, delicately put it: “In the writing of biography, invention is supposed to play a subsidiary role; in Beer’s
Stephen Crane
it was primary”
(The Double Life of Stephen Crane,
p. 8). Nevertheless, I include Beer’s biography in this bibliography and will let readers draw their own conclusions.

Beer, Thomas.
Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923.

Benfey, Christopher.
The Double Life of Stephen Crane.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. An interesting, unorthodox take on the life of the author. Along with Wertheim and Sorrentino, Benfey did much to discredit Beer’s biography.

Berryman, John.
Stephen Crane: A Critical Biography.
1950. Revised edition. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001. As the subtitle suggests, this book focuses on the works of Crane, placing them in literary and historical context.

Davis, Linda H.
Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephen Crane.
Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. This is the most recent and most comprehensive biography of Stephen Crane. Davis was relentless in ferreting out heretofore unknown facts about Crane, and the volume includes a number of photographs not previously published. Although a piece of serious scholarship, it is not dry but very readable and entertaining.

Gandal, Keith.
The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. An interesting study of fact and fiction about the nineteenth-century slum.

Linson, Corwin.
My Stephen Crane.
Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1958. An anecdote-filled memoir of Crane written by a close friend. Although written shortly after Crane’s death, it lay unpublished for fifty years.

Stallman, R. W
Stephen
Crane:
A
Biography. New York: George Braziller, 1968. A good, solid piece of scholarship, Stallman published the first biography of Crane after Beer.

Wertheim, Stanley, and Paul Sorrentino.
The Crane Log: A Documentary Life of Stephen
Crane, 1871-1900. American Author’s Log Series. New York: G. K. Hall, 1994. A thorough investigation of Stephen Crane’s life, this book went far toward discrediting much of the Beer biography.

Bergon, Frank.
Stephen Crane’s Artistry.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1975.

Berryman, John.
Stephen Crane.
New York: Sloane, 1950.

Cady, Edwin H.
Stephen Crane.
Revised edition. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980.

Campbell, Donna M.
Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction
, 1885-1915.
Athens: Ohio
University Press, 1997.

Dooley, Patrick K.
The Pluralistic Philosophy of Stephen Crane.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

LaFrance, Marston.
A Reading of Stephen Crane.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.

Nagel, James.
Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980.

Pizer, Donald, ed.
Critical Essays on Stephen
Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990.

Solomon, Eric.
Stephen Crane: From Parody to Realism.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966.