Stephen Crane

Paul Sorrentino

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780674419711
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

With the exception of Poe, no American writer has proven as challenging to biographers as the author of The Red Badge of Courage. Stephen Crane's short, compact life—"a life of fire, " he called it—continues to be surrounded by myths and half-truths, distortions and outright fabrications. Mindful of the pitfalls that have marred previous biographies, Paul Sorrentino has sifted through garbled chronologies and contradictory eyewitness accounts, scoured the archives, and followed in Crane's footsteps. The result is the most complete and accurate account of the poet and novelist written to date.Whether Crane was dressing as a hobo to document the life of the homeless in the Bowery, defending a prostitute against corrupt New York City law enforcement, or covering the historic charge up the San Juan hills as a correspondent during the Spanish-American War, his adventures were front-page news. From Sorrentino's layered narrative of the various phases of Crane's life a portrait slowly emerges. By turns taciturn and garrulous, confident and insecure, romantic and cynical, Crane was a man of irresolvable contradictions. He rebelled against tradition yet was proud of his family heritage; he lived a Bohemian existence yet was drawn to social status; he romanticized women yet obsessively sought out prostitutes; he spurned a God he saw as remote yet wished for His presence.Incorporating decades of research by the foremost authority on Crane's work, Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire sets a new benchmark for biographers.

Part I

THE WRENCHES OF CHILDHOOD

1

Roots and Beginnings

1635–1871

STEPHEN CRANE’S BIRTH, on November 1, 1871, in Newark, New Jersey, was greeted with apprehension. At forty-four, Mrs. Crane was well beyond the normal age for childbearing. She had already lost five of her thirteen other children, the last four having died within their first year or so, suffering the fate of their sister Elizabeth Blanche Crane. A healthy baby at age three months, one week later she was dead, her grief-stricken parents suffering “hours of anxiety.” Despite assertions to his father-in-law that “the Lord is good,” Reverend Crane cloaked his pain by tersely writing, “I need not comment.”¹

Nonetheless, the family celebrated the arrival of another of God’s holy children. His birth in the red-brick, three-story parsonage at 14 Mulberry Place gave neighbors a rare chance to visit the Cranes, whose church duties kept them preoccupied. That evening, a proud father wrote in his diary that the baby would be named after two other Stephen Cranes. Reverend and Mrs. Crane had long stressed their pride of heritage by identifying their children with previous namesakes. Although family tradition held that the first Stephen Crane had traveled from England to Massachusetts in 1635 and that his son Stephen had later moved to Connecticut, the direct line of Reverend Crane’s ancestry was rooted in New Jersey, for as his youngest son later wrote, “The family is founded deep in Jersey soil (since the birth of Newark), and I am about as much of a Jerseyman as you can find.” Jasper and Azariah Crane founded Cranetown (later renamed Montclair), and Jasper helped to settle Newark. The new baby’s first namesake (1640?–1710?) emigrated from England or Wales and was one of the sixty-five “Associates” who founded Elizabethtown, the first English settlement in New Jersey, in 1665–1666. Prominent in the community, he swore allegiance to King Charles II, but rebelled against Governor Philip Carteret because of an illegal land deal involving one of the governor’s political allies. His grandson, the baby’s second namesake (1709–1780), served as a sheriff, judge, mayor, and trustee of the First Presbyterian Church in Elizabethtown. A patriot of the American Revolution, he was Speaker of the New Jersey Assembly, president of the two Colonial Assemblies in New York, and a delegate to the Continental Congress. Had he not been called home in June 1776 to help settle a political crisis involving Tories in the New Jersey legislature, he would have been in Philadelphia to sign the Declaration of Independence. Eventually captured by the British in June 1780, he died of bayonet wounds.²

The latter’s sons also valiantly aided the cause of colonial America. Jonathan was executed after refusing to reveal the location of General Washington’s army to the enemy; one brother rose to senior commodore in the Navy; and William, the oldest son, commanded the 6th Regiment of New Jersey Infantry during the American Revolution, was wounded during the advance on Quebec, and was ultimately promoted to major general. His son William later won fame as a naval commander during the War of 1812 and against the Barbary pirates in 1815. Still other family members were imprisoned on British ships in New York harbor during the Revolution. To later generations of Cranes, their ancestors were courageous patriots defending their unalienable rights. Not surprisingly, Reverend and Mrs. Crane’s youngest child was raised with anti-British sentiments because of the fate his ancestors had suffered at the hands of the enemy, and as an adult he angrily asserted, “Our family has little cause to love the gentle Britisher.”³

Stephen’s maternal ancestry, also firmly rooted in American soil, was descended from Henry Peck, a founder of New Haven, Connecticut. Corporal Jesse Peck and his five sons served in the Connecticut militia during the Revolution; later family members proudly joined the Sons of the American Revolution and Daughters of the American Revolution. By the nineteenth century, a number of the Pecks were spreading the Good News of God across America as Methodist ministers. “Upon my mother’s side,” as Stephen recalled, “everybody as soon as he could walk, became a Methodist clergyman—of the old ambling-nag, saddle-bag, exhorting kind.”⁴

Crane was proud of his ancestry. Later generations of the family thought that the Revolutionary Stephen Crane had offered the opening prayer at the First Continental Congress in 1774 (they were mistaken) and had signed the Declaration of Independence. In 1895, when Stephen visited Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia with his friend Frederic M. Lawrence, he proudly pointed out Crane’s portrait among the portraits of other delegates to the Congress. In 1896 Stephen joined the Sons of the American Revolution, and in 1899 planned to commemorate his ancestry in a novel about the American Revolution. To his mind, his ancestors had assumed responsibility for their actions without self-pity or self-congratulation, a code of behavior against which he would later judge his fictional characters. “I swear by the real aristocrat,” he declared. “The man whose forefathers were men of courage, sympathy and wisdom, is usually one who will stand the strain whatever it may be. He is like a thorough-bred horse. His nerves may be high and he will do a lot of jumping often but in the crises he settles down and becomes the most reliable and enduring of created things.”⁵

Crane’s ancestors imbued him with military pride, but he also inherited a strong religious background. However much he rebelled against it in later years, it always informed his personality and the themes and style of his writing. In the only surviving portrait of his father (see Figure 3), a stern gaze reveals the judgmental attitude of a minister whose religious tracts condemned idle amusements like smoking, drinking, and gambling, all of which Stephen reveled in. Yet Reverend Crane was also a loving, caring father with a strong sense of independence, tenacity, and fortitude—traits that his youngest son would inherit. Despite obvious differences between father and son, they were uncannily similar in upbringing, personality, and disposition. Both were the youngest sibling in a large family, and both lost a father early on: Jonathan was almost eleven; Stephen, eight. Father and son were each partly raised by, and relied upon, an older sister named Agnes. As young adults, both rebelled against some form of Christianity: the father, against Presbyterianism; the son, Methodism. And both used the power of the written word to criticize and satirize human foibles.

Jonathan Townley Crane was born near Elizabethtown in Connecticut Farms (today part of Union), New Jersey, on June 19, 1819, the youngest of six children of William and Sarah (Townley) Crane. He was raised a strict Presbyterian, with a Calvinist emphasis on predestination and infant damnation.⁶ After his father’s death and his mother’s death from cholera two years later, he and his sister Agnes lived with an aunt in New Providence. To support himself, Jonathan became an apprentice to Smith Halsey, a Newark trunk maker who became a surrogate father to him. Proud of his work, Jonathan kept until his death several of the trunks he had made. At age eighteen, he dramatically changed his vocation while living with his aunt, whose home was a haven for Methodist ministers, one of whom, the Reverend Curtis Talley, had married Agnes. After attending a revival at his brother-in-law’s church, Jonathan converted to Methodism and decided to become a preacher. To help him achieve his goal, his brother Richard paid Halsey the remaining part of the indenture. In 1841, at the age of twenty-one, Jonathan used the money he had earned as a trunk maker and as a teacher in local schools, supplemented by a modest inheritance from his father’s estate, to enroll in the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University).⁷

Because Jonathan had read widely and studied on his own, he was given advance standing as a second-term sophomore and excelled as a student and writer in a liberal curriculum grounded in the classics. In his senior year, he was elected president of the Cliosophic Society, one of the school’s two literary societies; was awarded a prize for English composition; and wrote essays under the pen name “Theodorus” for the Nassau Monthly, Princeton’s literary magazine. Curiously, the essays anticipated the thinking later displayed by his son Stephen. In a witty and ironic essay titled “The Fiction of Our Popular Magazines,” Theodorus criticized sentimental literature, as Stephen later did in such works as Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and “The Blue Hotel,” because it misled naïve readers into confusing their own mundane lives with those of heroes and heroines in melodramatic adventures. Similarly, Theodorus’s “English Strictures on American Slavery” and Stephen’s college sketch “A Foreign Policy in Three Glimpses” censured British imperialism.

After graduating from college in 1843, Reverend Crane became an exhorter in the Methodist Church and was soon licensed to preach. Because itinerant Methodist ministers stayed in an assigned circuit no more than three years, he was repeatedly reassigned. Of his first five appointments, two lasted for a mere six months, two for one year each, and the last for about two years. Traveling with only a horse and a few religious texts, he spread God’s Word throughout New Jersey and New York. During his ministry, his self-deprecating sense of humor prompted friends and family to consider publishing a collection of anecdotes about him. He could quip about how his undelivered mail had “disappeared mysteriously, vanished into thin air, à la mode de Virgil,” and how a church member swore that Reverend Crane’s sermon on dancing was “the most ridiculous piece of nonsense he ever heard.” Once, when he absentmindedly began repeating a sermon he had already given to the same congregation, he jested, “Well, we have another barrel load along with us, and we’ll see what we can do with another text.” Yet at times he feared that his “preaching was doing no good”; and when crises arrived unexpectedly—“storms, sickness, & absences grown-out of our bereavements”—life became “a troubled dream.”⁸

Reverend Crane was as much a writer as he was a preacher committed to spreading Methodism. A prolific author of books and essays on religious and social issues, he was well known for polemical tracts like An Essay on Dancing (1849), Popular Amusements (1869), and Arts of Intoxication: The Aim and the Results (1870). These tracts were more than simply diatribes against social practices. He readily acknowledged that dancing was an important social ritual in certain cultures, and to those who criticized his attack on dancing because he was “wholly unacquainted, experimentally, with his theme,” he wittily responded that he was “in the honourable companionship of the gentlemen who have penned learned disquisitions upon Capital Punishment. It is not needful, either to dance, or to be hung, in order to be able to come to a conclusion touching the expediency of the performance.” Similarly, in Popular Amusements he condemned such pastimes as the theater and the idle reading of fiction, but he carefully made distinctions. Novels, for example, were in his view not inherently good or bad. The criteria should be whether “the portraiture be true, and there be a good reason for the portrayal.” He tried his hand at writing a novella, The Lawyer and His Family: A Temperance Story for Youth (1845); and though he criticized sentimental romances, he recommended that people read “the best works of fiction” by such authors as Dickens, Trollope, and Thackeray. When parents in the Methodist community worried that Sunday-school libraries were being packed with “worldly literature,” he calmly explained that educated children needed to supplement their religious reading with books from a “secular list” of worthwhile literature. In addition to his own appreciation of classical literature, Crane read widely among dramatists like Aristophanes and Shakespeare and poets like Byron, Shelley, and Poe. Like his father, Stephen parodied sentimental fiction and insisted that fiction approximate reality.⁹

Reverend Crane married Mary Helen Peck in 1848. Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on April 10, 1827, to the Reverend George and Mary Helen (Myers) Peck, Mary Helen was the middle child and only daughter among their five children and grew up thoroughly immersed in Methodism. Her father, author of religious and historical works and editor of the Methodist Quarterly Review and the Christian Advocate and Journal, shaped the direction of Methodism in nineteenth-century America. Born in a log cabin, he embodied the rugged individualism of early America as he spread the Gospel to the frontier. He ended his distinguished career as pastor and presiding elder of the Wyoming Conference in Pennsylvania. Among his four brothers, all of whom were Methodist ministers, was Mary Helen’s equally influential uncle Jesse Truesdell Peck, later a bishop and cofounder of Syracuse University. Mary Helen attended the Young Ladies Institute of Brooklyn, New York, was teaching in the Sabbath school at the Pacific Street Church in Brooklyn, New York, by 1845, and graduated from the Rutgers Female Institute in 1847.¹⁰

A complex personality in whom straitlaced orthodoxy battled with a restless, creative spirit, Mrs. Crane spent much of her early married life caring for an ever-growing household; but later, driven by a persistent determination and religious fervor, she became a prominent figure in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. As president of two WCTU chapters in New Jersey (Asbury Park and Ocean Grove) and one in New York (Port Jervis), and as state superintendent of press for the WCTU in New Jersey, she lectured on social vices like alcohol and gambling. She also lobbied for women’s rights and suffrage and published newspaper articles on religious and reform issues. But she also composed sketches and paintings, carefully crafted wax figures, and wrote short fiction, humorous letters, and moralistic fables that dramatized her family memories and political leanings. In her story “Thanksgiving or Christmas, Which?” she depicts a fatherless son, Little Zekey (affectionately called “Stevie”); in her letters, she evokes the imaginary local communities of Sandune Park and Scrub Oak Grove (Asbury Park and Ocean Grove); and in one particular fictional letter (“Jerusha Ann Stubbs to Cousin Abigail Jane”), she portrays a woman married to a man named Jonathan for forty years—the number of years that Jonathan Townley and Mary Helen Crane would have been married in 1888, the year she published the letter, had he not died in 1880. In her best work, she satirized a patriarchal society that denied women suffrage and equal rights. In “Jerusha Ann’s Third Letter,” the appropriately named “Deekin Uriah Blatherskite,” whose blustering attitude hypocritically undercuts his professed Christian sensibility, complains about “radikel wimmin folks who went rampagin round the country a preechin and lecturin and meddlin with polyticks, and upsetting all the fundymental institushuns of government, and was rapidly a usurpin the divine prerogytives of men folks.” Ironically, Mrs. Crane was also criticized for constantly traveling to lecture on church business rather than staying home with her children. Nonetheless, after her husband’s death she was devoted to Stephen, though in later years, despite his love for her, he was surprised, according to a niece, that someone so educated and imaginative “could have wrapped herself so completely in the ‘vacuous, futile, psalm-singing that passed for worship’ in those days.” Crane eventually portrayed his mother ambivalently as Mrs. Kelsey, the overbearing, indefatigable mother and religious zealot in George’s Mother.¹¹

Moving from New York to the small village of Belvidere in New Jersey later in 1848, following her marriage, Mary Helen had little in common with neighbors who identified her as “from the city,” and her husband’s frequent travels ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Prologue: Final Days, January–June 1900
• Part I: The Wrenches of Childhood
• Part II: Learning the Craft
• Part III: Fame, Notoriety, an Altered Point of View
• Part IV: New Start, Old Habits
• Part V: Search for Respectability, Country Squire
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index