Auster attributes this to the way Crane saw his world. “Every sound triggered off a color in his mind,” he writes, and he found it strange that others did not have a similar reaction. Sounds could be colors, but he also found color in emotions and “various shades of thought. These responses were felt deep within and absorbed into Crane’s body, which was the site of a constant inrush of raw sensation, and not only can traces of these collisions between the outside and the inside be found all over his work, it seems perfectly plausible that a man with such a finely tuned nervous system should have been known for his darting, restless, inconstant personality.”
Crane left behind no journals or notebooks to let us know what he was thinking and feeling when he wrote and lived. Everything comes down to his writing—his journalism, novels, and most especially, his short fiction, albeit it an original story or a retelling of his life experiences. So Auster relies on the letters, journals, recollections and unpublished memoirs of others to fill in the considerable gaps in Crane’s life. He also devotes a sizable portion of the real estate in this comprehensive and exhaustively researched book to lit-crit analysis and evaluation of the writer’s oeuvre. His audience is “the invisible army of so-called general readers, that is, people who are not academics or writers themselves, the same people who still take pleasure in reading old standbys such as Melville and Whitman…” His concern is that Crane is no longer read by anyone anymore. Crane has a place in the American canon, and although he is best known for The Red Badge of Courage and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Auster discusses the full range of Crane’s work, including his startlingly dark and beautiful poetry.
Crane also died young of tuberculosis and other ailments that robbed him of life at the age of 28. “When an artist dies at such a young age,” Auster writes, “it is impossible not to wonder what kind of work that artist would have done later in life.” Auster convinces the reader that Crane packed a full life into his years, but they were not always pleasant. He battled constant financial jeopardy, and he wrote much of his work in a frantic effort to stave off the bill collectors and debts he accumulated.
Stephen Crane was born into a large family of fourteen brothers and sisters. His hallmark traits were stubbornness and absolute truthfulness. He did not take to college and found “Humanity was a much more interesting study.” He read voraciously on his own and worked as a journalist to get more experience in the world and to practice his craft. Auster sums up his style this way: “Crane’s obsessions and stylistic trademarks: an abundant use of color imagery to express both emotional states and sensory experiences, a gift for unexpected metaphors and jolting similes, an animistic view of the natural world (the trees, stones, and plants in the woods are alive), a dispassionate approach to character that posits the isolation of the individual in the face of an indifferent universe, and a close scrutiny of the metaphysics of fear, the same fear that runs through every paragraph of The Red Badge of Courage…” He did his best work when “he was afraid, trembling in his bones and scarcely aware of what he was doing—or why he was doing it.”
When writing a biography, one can become an apologist for the subject’s bad behavior. Auster does a little of this with Crane. He claims that Crane did not “hate people who were not like himself. He simply did not understand them, and rather than make the effort to penetrate their thinking or attempt to see the world through their eyes, he stood back and watched, either with indifference (immigrants) or fascination (Indians) but nearly always with a sense that the person he was looking at was alien to him, an inscrutable Other.” One would expect Crane to observe and report, the twin responsibilities of a journalist. He was also a product of his time.
Crane was a man with a strong creed to which he swore absolute fidelity: “we are the most successful in art when we approach the nearest to nature and truth.” Auster does an excellent job of getting to Crane’s “nature and truth,” even if the windows into the interior were limited to the work and his letters. He recognizes Crane’s obsession with death and dying. He offers up the central events of Crane’s life, especially when he nearly drowned off the coast of Florida, an experience that became the basis for his short story, “The Open Boat.” We learn of his consorting with prostitutes and his battles to be with his companion, Cora. He walks us through the final days as the writer slipped away, giving us his most poignant last words: “I leave here gentle, seeking to do good, firm, resolute, impregnable.”
Paul Auster demonstrates the value and necessity of Stephen Crane’s work. His writer’s philosophy to “strip it to the bone…” and “say as much as you can by saying as little as you can,” resonates today. However, Auster also reflects on Crane’s larger importance to our culture as he writes the last sentences of this book in the early days of 2020: “[Crane’s] books are being forgotten again. It is a dark time for America, a dark time everywhere, and with so much happening to erode our certainties about who we are and where we are going next, perhaps the moment has come to dig the burning boy out of his grave and start remembering him again. The prose still crackles, the eye still cuts, the work still stings. Does any of this matter to us anymore? If it does, and one can only hope it does, attention must be paid.”
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