Stephen Crane

From Philosopedia

Crane, Stephen (1 November 1871 - 5 June 1900)

Sometimes termed the first modern American writer, Crane is known for introducing realism into American fiction.

The fourteenth and last child of an itinerant New Jersey family, he was the son of a Methodist minister who died when Crane was eight. By the age of seven Crane had written some poetry and by fourteen had written a story. His maternal godfather, Jesse T. Peck, a Methodist bishop, was the president of Syracuse University, where Crane attended for one semester but confessed he disliked “the cut-and-dried curriculum.” He dropped out of a ministerial seminary and, an orphan by the age of twenty, he moved into the old Art Students’ League building in New York, encouraged as a writer by Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells to write about Bowery flophouses for the newspaper syndicate Bachellor-Johnson. That he did, but he lived on cheap food, dressed miserably, had matted hair, and smelled of cigarettes and garlic.

By the age of twenty-four, he had written Maggie: A Girl of the Street under the pseudonym Johnston Smith, published it privately with money borrowed from his brother, and was dismayed that it was not a commercial success. However, he then wrote a runaway best seller, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), despite having no personal experience of war.

In 1896 he was sent by a newspaper syndicate to cover a nationalist uprising in Cuba, but the ship sank after leaving Jacksonville, Florida. After rowing thirty hours he and the ship’s broken-armed captain made it back to Florida, an experience that inspired “The Open Boat” (1898). H. G. Wells described the story as “an imperishable gem.”

Crane then shipped off to write about the Greek-Turkish war over Crete, finding the noise of battle “the most beautiful sound of my experience, barring no symphony.” Cora, an English lover who had been the madam of the Hotel de Dream, lived with him in England as his common-law wife, but after nine months he left to write about the Spanish-American War. When he found he had tuberculosis, he returned and with Cora moved into a 14th-century Sussex estate called Brede Place. The run-down place had bats and no electricity or plumbing, but guests included Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells. Cora nursed him when he had a series of lung hemorrhages and an abscess in the rectum area and, searching for a cure, rushed him to Baden-Baden, where he received morphine to help control the pain but died soon after arrival and before his thirtieth birthday.

Although not at all active in his parents’ Methodism, at Syracuse University he was said to have made his mark as the student "unfriendly to Christianity." "Mildewed" he called it.

Edmund White, in Hotel De Dream (2007), wrote a novel about Crane, fictionalizing that while dying of tuberculosis Crane dictated from his deathbed a final novel to his companion Cora. The plot concerned a teenage male prostitute he had met in the Bowery. White, who teaches at Princeton, thought it would be interesting to imagine the idea of a straight man looking at gay life.

Outlook

As to whether Crane thought of himself as an atheist, according to Gary Sloan, it is hard to say:

In a commemorative tribute, H. G. Wells said that Stephen Crane was “the first expression of the opening mind of a new period.” Crane, he meant, was a harbinger of modernist apprehensions of the human lot. Humankind had no divine lineage or privileged position in a hierarchy of being. In The Blue Hotel, Crane envisions human beings as lice who tenaciously “cling to a whirling, fire-smote, ice-locked, disease-stricken, space-lost bulb.” Intuitively grasping the broad social and theological import of contemporaneous science, history, and biblical criticism, Crane repudiated the Christian tradition, sacred mysteries, metaphysical mystifications, stultifying myths, nationalism, and cultural pretensions. “Crane was almost illusionless,” said biographer John Berryman, “whether about his subjects or himself.” Discarding the platitudes of faith, he adopted a stoic ethic of courage, perseverance, and unflinching honesty.

Though Crane has been called a nihilist, he had a honed moral sense. The conviction that we live in a god-abandoned world could, he thought, heighten moral sensibility, making us more empathetic and civil. In “The Open Boat,” the correspondent is morally sensitized by his epiphany: “It is, perhaps, plausible that a man in this situation, impressed with the unconcern of the universe, should see the innumerable flaws in his life and have them taste wickedly in his mind and wish for another chance. A distinction between right and wrong seems absurdly clear to him, then, in this new ignorance of the grave-edge, and he understands that if he were given another opportunity he would mend his conduct and his words, and be better and brighter during an introduction, or at a tea.”

Crane also had a keen romantic sense. Love could nullify all losses, even the universe:

Should the wide world roll away

Limitless night,

Nor God, nor man, nor place to stand

Would be to me essential

If thou and thy white arms were there

And the fall to doom a long way.

Crane wrote the following in The Black Riders:

A God in Wrath

A god in wrath

Was beating a man;

He cuffed him loudly

With thunderous blows

That rang and rolled over the earth.

All the people came running.

The man screamed and struggled,

And bit madly at the feet of the god.

The people cried: “Ah, what a wicked man!”

And

“Ah, what a redoubtable god!”

{Advocate, September 2007; Linda H. Davis, Badge of Courage, 1998; OCAL, OEL}