The Double Life of Stephen Crane

...Was there some strange compulsion to "rescue fallen women," maybe arising from a Methodist minister father and a rigid, ungenerous mother who left him an emotional orphan...

...He died in 1900, having sensed his doom for at least a few years before...

...Its setting in the slums of lower Manhattan is typical of this displacement...

...Even his lesser-known stories—about shipwrecks and stolen toys and lost dogs—have to do with separation, the forced detachment from "not-me" objects...

...Hence the tragic, bitter, seen-it-all air we find throughout Crane's life and writings—touching, but a little melodramatic in a man who never reached 30 years of age...

...Even stranger, he seemed to "live his life backwards," writing about things he would then uncannily experience—war, shipwrecks, prostitutes...

...Perhaps, then, Maggie was a metaphor for his own absent mother...

...selves if you have done something strange and extravagant and have broken the monotony of a decorous age...

...How did a 22-year-old, a no-account student, and not even much of a reader, sit down in a shabby New York apartment one day to write The Red Badge of Courage...

...and yes, perhaps his works are full of "oral-maternal associations" and—Berryman' s thesis—"Oedipal guilt-sense toward the father...

...Indeed, to explain Cora and Dora, one could offer the more practical point that Crane's calling and sense of impending death simplified the choice between life's symbolic sexual poles, betrothal and brothel...

...His well-warranted fatalism may also explain those oddities in his life over which Benfey and other scholars have labored...

...Never mind that he had not seen a battlefield—it wouldn't be any less a mystery if he had...

...Given another thirty or forty years, the author of one of our greatest novels might have degenerated into a stylish celebrity like "Papa" Hemingway, relieving the "monotony of a decorous age" with boorish behavior, public brawls, ferocious literary quarrels, and serial marriages...

...Commodore...

...Modern literature has a romance with the idea of artful self-destruction—breaking our monotony through reckless living, boozing, carnal abandon, fidelity only to one's craft...

...Of course being a tragic, illusionless figure can be a pretty vain illusion itself...

...Well, maybe so...

...Hence his "double life...

...Crane's grief is disguised and displaced in [Maggie]," writes Benfey...

...Though by the end we have had our fill of Freud and the various other psychologists Benfey (like Berryman) invokes, the book is a skillful case study in those archetypal yearnings one carries through life, emotional dissonance of one kind or another in search of resolution...

...Why, for instance, that attraction to prostitutes and prostitution, not only in his compelling first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, but also in several real-life affairs...

...B ut knowing this, as in his better moments Benfey seems to, does not really deepen the experience of reading Crane's work—which after all reaches to themes beyond whatever sorrows, fantasies, or frustrations the author may have known...

...His mother's death left him feeling bereft and in need of appropriate language to explain his loss...

...he's making a hard sell...

...CI The American Spectator November 1992 73...

...The standard view, shared by Benfey, holds that Crane's grim realism was a reaction to the pietism of his parents, his unconventional ways a rebellion against their Christian moralism...

...And surely when Benfey finds the names "Cora" and "Dora"—two of the prostitutes Crane fell in love with—encoded in Crane's first-hand account of the wreck of a real ship called the Commodore off the coast of Cuba ("Cora is like Dora...

...In the end, his is the story of a gift mysteriously given and brilliantly used...

...An odd union of austerity and carelessness mark his character: he seemed to practice both life and writing as the art of elimination...

...sketching slum life in Manhattan while writing The Red Badge of Courage on the side, dispatching profiles of Indians in New Mexico, surfacing next in Greece, from there dashing off to the Cuban War, then on to London—and sometimes vanishing so completely that biographers haven't a clue where he might have been...

...One detects a bit of this antihero-worship in Christopher Benfey's The Double Life of Stephen Crane, an inquiry that is otherwise sober and perceptive—particularly in its literary analysis...

...for Crane, economic deprivation is a metaphor for its emotional counterpart...

...Crane's own despairing view of God and man is cited in the simple lines: "A man said to the universe, 'Sir, I exist!' `However,' the universe replied, 'that fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.'" As with most of Crane's writings, one hears not the intellectual's usual sigh of spiritual dissatisfaction but the authentic realism of a soul who, having stared out into the universe, has grasped that he is owed nothing, and that all the obligations run the other way...

...Cora como Dora...

...But in the time allotted him Crane seems to have guarded his literary integrity...

...Spare" describes not only Crane's prose but his physical appearance and material possessions...

...Like most journalists, he was a glory hound (afraid a war might end before the famous Stephen Crane could get there to cover it), and not the best manager of his personal affairs (mounting debts, untreated sicknesses, lavish living with pampered prostitutes...

...Roughly half the biographies reviewed in the New York Times on any given Sunday fit this description—purring praise of strange, extravagant, and often thoroughly depraved lives...

...Benfey observes, too, that The Red Badge and so much of Crane's writing centers on the theme of exposure—"the lost child looking for a safe haven...

...He was a wanderer and not a settler, and if one has grimly resolved toembrace the impermanent, what companion could better embody that decision...

...So when Crane wrote, in a letter quoted by Benfey, "The lives of some people are one long apology . . . I go through life unexplained," it wasn't an Emersonian evasion...

...And the quieter types who write literary biographies lap the stuff up like kittens at the saucer...

...In his 1951 biography, John Berryman described Crane admiringly as the thoroughly "illusionless" man, meaning the young author of The Red Badge of Courage had come to see life in all its false trappings, stared into the Void, refused to join in the "dance of death," and so on...

...And unlike the usual psychobiographer, he's prepared now and then to acknowledge the mystery of personality and say, "We can never know...

...Consider the fool's proverb from Emerson that Crane jotted down in a notebook, evidently as some sort of defiant personal credo: "Congratulate yourMatthew Scully is a speechwriter for the Vice President...

...But his triumph was to resist the lure of lazy cynicism and remain faithful to his calling, scribbling furiously even in his final weeks...

...It was the avowal of a gifted man with little time to spare for self-exploration...

...And to be fair to Crane, his mournful, fatalistic air was understandable: a long series of sicknesses prefigured the tuberculosis that eventually got him at 29...

...72 The American Spectator November 1992 T hroughout his twenties, Crane rushed from continent to continent, garret to garret, and woman to woman...

...It's as good a psychological reading as any, and Benfey offers extensive and thoughtful arguments to back it up...

...THE DOUBLE LIFE OF STEPHEN CRANE Christopher Benfey Alfred A. Knopf /294 pages/$25 reviewed by MATTHEW SCULLY T he life of Stephen Crane, like the lives of Hemingway and other literary realists who came to a sad end, draws its power from the cliché of the suffering artist consumed alike by creativity and dissipation...