{"id":77114,"date":"1992-10-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"1992-10-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/books-into-life\/"},"modified":"2024-03-26T14:13:39","modified_gmt":"2024-03-26T18:13:39","slug":"books-into-life","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/books-into-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Books into life"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/font>n 1925<\/font> Thomas Beer\u2019s Stephen Crane<\/i>, along with Wilson Follett\u2019s twelve-volume The Work<\/i> [sic<\/i>] of Stephen Crane<\/i> (1925<\/font>–26<\/font>), fixed Crane securely in the American canon. There had been a biography in 1923<\/font>, by Thomas L. Raymond. Follett\u2019s collected works had prefaces to individual volumes by Willa Cather (who met the young Crane in a Nebraska newspaper office), Carl Van Doren, Amy Lowell, and Henry Mencken. Beer\u2019s charming biography had for an introduction a thirty-three-page essay by Joseph Conrad. Crane figures in the reminiscences of H. G. Wells and Ford Madox Ford, among others. No American student can get through high school or college without being assigned The Red Badge of Courage<\/i> at least twice; and \u201cThe Open Boat,\u201d \u201cThe Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,\u201d and \u201cThe Blue Hotel\u201d are standard stories in anthologies. The Library of America Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry<\/i> (1984<\/font>, and now in its third printing), edited by J. C. Levenson, contains just over a hundred pieces. Crane was twenty-nine when he died in the Black Forest in Germany, in 1900<\/font>, of tuberculosis.<\/p>\n

Thomas Beer\u2019s biography, a companion to his The Mauve Decade<\/i>, is as readable as Lytton Strachey, the influence of whose style, sense of fun, and irony is obvious, and as lively as Mencken. Beer\u2019s Crane is a kind of Penrod who evolves into one of O. Henry\u2019s fly young men who have come to New York from the sticks eager for the romance of real life. And with an O. Henryish flair for doing the unexpected, he wrote Maggie: A Girl of the Streets<\/i> in a Syracuse frat house before he had ever seen the Bowery. He wrote The Red Badge<\/i> with such convincing detail that a veteran of the War bragged of knowing him at Antietam. (Several of Whitman\u2019s most graphic poems about soldiers and their suffering were written a decade before the War, and neither Beer nor his latest biographer, Chistopher Benfey, recalls Daniel Defoe, the arch counterfeiter, whose way with fiction is exactly Crane\u2019s.) Benfey is good at spotting these reflections of life in art: \u201cThe Bride Comes to Yellow Sky\u201d encodes the awkwardness of Crane\u2019s mistress (passing as his wife) Cora, formerly madam of the Hotel de Dream whorehouse in Jacksonville, Florida, being introduced to her new neighbors in England, among whom was Henry James (who liked her).<\/p>\n

But as soon as we open Professor Benfey\u2019s The Double Life of Stephen Crane<\/i> we are told that Beer\u2019s is a work of fiction based on forged letters and coming from a hyperactive imagination. Scholarship has recently snatched away from us the friendship of Picasso and Alfred Jarry (it turns out that they never met). Beer\u2019s biography, to my eye, is not all that inaccurate or misleading. If biography is a literary art (as Plutarch, at its inception, thought it was, and has suffered damnably at the hands of nit-picking German pedants), then I still prefer Beer\u2019s biography as reading matter, while giving Benfey fullest credit for his diligence in research and interpretation of the texts.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s best to think of Beer as an early biographer who did not have Benfey\u2019s advantages.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s best to think of Beer as an early biographer who did not have Benfey\u2019s advantages. He might have known that the young reporter who covered Crane\u2019s burial service in New Jersey was named Wallace Stevens, but then the name would have meant nothing to him in 1925<\/font>. What Benfey has done is fill in large blanks in Beer.<\/p>\n

Even so, Benfey has hard going of it in finding Crane, and in establishing a plot for his life. Lives do not have plots, only biographies do. And practically all of Crane\u2019s wildly active life\u2014on battlefields in Greece and Cuba, in New York courtrooms and Greenwich Village studios\u2014has only Crane as its witness. What novelist would have his hero leave the Spanish-American War, nip up to a sanatorium in Tennessee, and then nip back to Cuba? Only a comic novelist\u2014an Alphonse Daudet\u2014would have his hero set out for Cuba in the first place, end up in Greece, and then, after a frantic afternoon in London with Conrad trying to raise travel funds, get to Cuba after all? Who, but the most confused and impractical of people, would set out from England (Cora thought it was the thing to do) when Crane was more than half dead, to cross the Channel in raging weather, and proceed on a litter to Germany, where Crane died almost immediately?<\/p>\n

T<\/font>he \u201cdouble life\u201d of Professor Benfey\u2019s title refers to the fact that Crane\u2019s writing anticipated so much of what he later did: the reality came after the fiction. He wanted to see if \u201che got it right.\u201d He authenticated the battle scenes in The Red Badge<\/i> by observing Greeks and Turks. He authenticated Henry Fleming\u2019s experience in battle at San Juan Hill.<\/p>\n

Perhaps biography is, after all, a nuisance. A writer\u2019s life must have something<\/i> to do with what he wrote. Shakespeare is an absolute denial of this. Edgar Johnson\u2019s magnificent two volumes of Walter Scott\u2019s life add nothing whatever to our understanding or enjoyment of Scott\u2019s poetry or fiction. Richard Ellmann was so determined to get Joyce and his writing in sync that he concocted a curiously inaccurate biography as well as an imaginary work by Joyce (which he called Giacomo Joyce<\/i>\u2014it\u2019s simply one of Joyce\u2019s many notebooks on the front of which he whimsically wrote his name in Italian).<\/p>\n

Curiosity is curiosity, and biography is a cultural ritual. Plutarch wrote his exemplary lives as a moralist and philosopher. Biographies are now written by journalists, professors, and surviving kin. Psychology has replaced philosophy, and the achievement (or sins) of the subject is the reason a biography gets written.<\/p>\n

Benfey makes a great deal of Crane\u2019s childhood, despite a paucity of information. Beer treats the parents\u2014a Methodist minister, the father, a YMCA<\/span> temperance-tract writer and orator, the mother\u2014adequately; Benfey read their Methodist treatises and makes a convincing case for Crane\u2019s growing up in a family that wrote, and thus became a writer. But the toddler Crane who played at writing (he was the fourteenth child and had seen lots of homework) and asked \u201cHow do you spell O<\/font><\/i><\/span>?\u201d sounds like a more plausible beginning: writing is a thing to do. <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

Stephen Crane is an intractable subject because so much of his emotional life is an impenetrable surface. Benfey has hard weather of it with the love affairs, and even with Cora, who remains a blur. Only Conrad\u2019s account of knowing Crane (the preface to Beer\u2019s biography) gives us any sense of what the man was like, and Conrad\u2019s words are so finely nuanced, so ironically reserved, and so obviously shaped for effect, as to be a Conrad story, a kind of \u201cSecret Sharer\u201d in a different key. One hopes that Max Beerbohm was tempted to make a drawing of Conrad telling Crane, all of a long evening, Balzac\u2019s La Com\u00e9die humaine<\/i>. What other writer would have asked to have it told, and what other writer would have obligingly told it? <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

The poems are disconcertingly mystical, the stories about babies are an imaginative truancy.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

Crane\u2019s writing is more than we are aware of, and very uneven. The poems are disconcertingly mystical, the stories about babies are an imaginative truancy. Genius is sometimes very strange. Crane\u2019s best works were bolts of genius, unplanned, and quickly written, never revised. In a sense, he did not live beyond his adolescence as a writer. His identity was invented and shaped right until our time by Conrad and Ford, for whom he was the Impressionist. This metaphor from painting obscures the fact that Crane\u2019s painterly analogues are Winslow Homer and John Sloan. We had a real Impressionist in Lafcadio Hearn, of whom Conrad and Crane may have been vaguely aware. What they were really admiring was a perfection of narrative skill. We experience<\/i> \u201cThe Open Boat.\u201d Crane and Conrad together changed the act of reading. We experience The Nigger of the \u201cNarcissus.\u201d<\/i> Tolstoy we watch; Balzac we listen to; Joyce we follow. Crane at his best gets under our skin and stays there. We go through his imagined experiences with him. How he does it we have no science of knowing. <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing extraordinary about Crane\u2019s prose, in itself. His words are simple. His images have been praised for their startling originality. O. Henry had a better ear for dialogue. The clue, I think, is in his attack. \u201cNone of them knew the color of the sky\u201d became for Conrad and his circle as magic a sentence as the last one of Flaubert\u2019s \u201cH\u00e9rodias.\u201d Maggie<\/i> begins with a rock fight among children, The Red Badge<\/i> with lifting fog that discloses a bivouac. This abruptness is the first step in a masterly timing. It is Crane\u2019s pace that distinguishes him. It varies from an amble to a quick-step, but it is always brisk. He was a superb director of action. He is never retrograde, like Conrad, or diffuse, like James. He has the clarity of a comic-strip, and a comic-strip\u2019s coloring (red, yellow, blue, black, white\u2014his palette is as distinctive as his narrative pace). <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

B<\/font>enfey\u2019s Crane is hard-won from new research and from a great deal of original insight, especially among patterns (things in a row, psychological undercurrents), and his biography is a worthy and welcome contribution to Crane studies; yet Crane as a person is at a greater distance from us in Benfey\u2019s pages than in Beer\u2019s, which in turn place Crane at a greater distance than Conrad\u2019s thirty pages. And the essence of Crane may be in a few lines of Ford, who says (probably lying) that Crane once demonstrated precision in writing by pinning an ace of spades to his study wall and, from the opposite doorway, putting a bullet from his revolver through the center of it.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A review of <\/i>The Double Life of Stephen Crane by Christopher Benfey.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1394,"featured_media":129801,"template":"","tags":[745],"department_id":[561],"issue":[3185],"section":[],"acf":{"participants":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_65fd9fbaa0408","label":"Authors","name":"participants","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"user","value":null,"menu_order":0,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"role":"","return_format":"array","multiple":1,"allow_null":0,"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"participants","_valid":1}},"page_number":{"simple_value_formatted":68,"value_formatted":68,"value":"68","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_647e2bc0c860c","label":"Page Number","name":"page_number","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"number","value":null,"menu_order":1,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"default_value":"","min":"","max":"","placeholder":"","step":"","prepend":"","append":"","_name":"page_number","_valid":1}},"featured_image_credits":{"simple_value_formatted":"Stephen Crane\u2019s signature. 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