Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives

by John Sutherland

  His infantile countenance was livid with fury. His small body was writhing in the delivery of great, crimson oaths.

  ‘Run, Jimmie, run! Dey’ll get yehs,’ screamed a retreating Rum Alley child.

  ‘Naw,’ responded Jimmie with a valiant roar, ‘dese micks can’t make me run.’

  New York is war – already evident is the journalist’s sharp eye and economy of phrase. Manhattan, said Crane, was where all the ‘bad stories’ (i.e. the best stories) come from, and he had an unerring eye for them. However, Maggie could not find a publisher and was brought out by Crane himself at a cost of $700 under the pseudonym ‘Johnston Smith’. It was stillborn. He followed his other gift and drifted into the booming metropolitan newspaper world. Had Stephen Crane never written a line of fiction he would be remembered as a brilliant reporter. Among his classic pieces of this early period is ‘An Experiment in Misery’, when he lived, for a day and night, as a down-and-out bum. Orwell must have studied it carefully.

  He was, meanwhile, keeping his hand in with fiction and poetry (‘Lines’ as he called them) which, as yet, went nowhere. He had various relationships with the kind of woman his parents would have shuddered to know. Until she died, the woman always closest to him was his sister Agnes, a surrogate mother. The Red Badge of Courage was born of a boast that he could write a better battle story than Zola’s La Débâcle. It came out in book form in 1895 when Crane was twenty-three – still youthful. The story records the war experience of Private Henry Fleming in the Civil War. A farm boy, he volunteers to fight for the North, but has no political conviction or sense of history. It is not a novel about war, so much as about the ‘psychology of fear’. Henry runs away from his first fire-fight. A disgusted comrade hits him, savagely, on the head. This is mistaken as an honourable war wound – his ‘red badge of courage’ – and he returns to the fray and fights: ‘He is a man.’ The statement hangs, ironically, over the novel’s last paragraph.

  Crane is a connoisseur of corpses and the physiognomy of death (the result, one suspects, of many visits to the Manhattan morgue). In his flight from the battle, Henry runs through the woods where he comes on:

  a dead man who was seated with his back against a columnlike tree. The corpse was dressed in a uniform that once had been blue, but was now faded to a melancholy shade of green. The eyes, staring at the youth, had changed to the dull hue to be seen on the side of a dead fish. The mouth was open. Its red had changed to an appalling yellow. Over the gray skin of the face ran little ants. One was trundling some sort of bundle along the upper lip.

  The Red Badge went through fourteen printings in its first year. One veteran, a colonel no less, clearly remembered serving with Crane at Antietam, almost ten years before the novelist was born.

  In 1895 Crane travelled to the West and New Mexico. It broadened his horizons well beyond Manhattan (‘Damn the East!’, he proclaimed on his return) and furnished the setting for some of his finest short stories – ‘The Blue Hotel’ and ‘The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.’ His relationships with women remained obscure and mysterious. In the year of his Red Badge triumph he conducted an epistolary romance with a ‘pure woman’ and wrote a novel, The Third Violet (1897), on the strength of it. Derived clearly from du Maurier’s Trilby, with an artist hero, it is a comedown from Red Badge as, the author forlornly predicted, all his fiction must be. Women of the street continued to fascinate him. As a reporter, covering a story, he witnessed a prostitute, Dora Clark, being arrested on a trumped-up charge of soliciting. He took up her case through his newspaper columns and in court. On the witness stand, his reputation was blackened by the admission that he used opium (in a Baudelairian experimental spirit) and had recently been living in sin with a fellow woman reporter.

  Thereafter, the New York Police Department was out to get Stephen Crane. Prudently he turned his skills to war reporting, where the foe was less deadly than Manhattan’s finest. Now a star reporter, he received assignments from the colossus of American journalism, William Randolph Hearst. Like Hearst, Crane did not wait for stories, he made them happen. Things were happening in the mid-1890s in Cuba, which was in the bloody throes of breaking free from Spain. On a secret gun-running voyage to Cuba, in aid of the insurgents, the boat Crane was sailing in, the Commodore, foundered and sank with loss of life. Crane spent three days in an open boat at sea, but survived, and out of the experience came his fine novella, The Open Boat. Like The Red Badge, the story ponders survival. As the exhausted survivors come ashore, a corpse (the engine room man, Billie) is washed up in the surf: ‘In the shallows, face downward, lay the oiler. His forehead touched sand that was periodically, between each wave, clear of the sea.’ No writer handles vignette better than Crane.

  His interest in impure women was inextinguishable and strangely decent. Over the last years of his life, he formed an unsolemnised union with Cora Taylor, a twice married Florida brothel madam, five years older than him. Possessed of true grit, Cora accompanied her man, as America’s first woman war correspondent, she claimed, to the front lines of the Graeco-Turkish conflict. In 1897 the couple moved to the English home counties, of all places, where, in fine style, at Brede Place in Sussex, they lived wildly beyond their means. Crane became intimate with Conrad, Henry James, H. G. Wells, and Ford Madox Hueffer – all of whom loved him and lived more or less nearby. To fill his purse he made forays to cover the Spanish Cuban War and – at its climax – witnessed the American marine landing at Guantanamo and the ‘rough riders’ heroism at San Juan Hill. His reporting, and related short stories, are brilliant. But he caught a fever which hastened his death. Not exactly a red wound, but proof of his courage.

  ‘I go through the world unexplained,’ Crane liked to say. Tantalisingly little is known of his life and that little is polluted by his first biographer, Thomas Beer, whose narrative contains material as fictional as anything in The Red Badge. One would give all the acres of biography on Henry James for a hundred pages telling us more about Crane’s life. He is recorded as habitually carrying a volume of Poe in his pocket. His last weeks – ‘a bloody way of dying’, as he described it to Wells – was appropriately gothic. Suffering with terminal consumption, a rectal abscess, and the malaria he brought back as a war wound from Cuba, he was shipped out to a resort in Germany’s Black Forest where, after a few days, he died. His body was transported back to England. Cora determined it should be sent on for final burial in his native New Jersey. No rest, even in death. ‘He was dying from the start,’ observed a laconic Hemingway. It took Stephen Crane less than thirty years to do it.

  FN

  Stephen Crane

  MRT

  The Red Badge of Courage

  Biog

  Christopher Benfey, The Double Life of Stephen Crane (1992).

  116. Theodore Dreiser 1871–1945

  I spent the better part of forty years trying to induce him to reform and electrify his manner of writing. H. L. Mencken

  Theodore Dreiser was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, a second-generation ‘new American’. His sternly Catholic German father, John Paul, had fled Prussia in 1844 and in America had fallen in love and eloped with a seventeen-year-old Mennonite, Sarah. They would have ten surviving children, brought up speaking German. Theodore had a grossly unsettled upbringing. His father enjoyed brief prosperity in the textile trade, rising to the status of mill-owner during the Civil War period, when the demand for uniforms created a short-lived boom. That prosperity evaporated with the end of the war and – quite fortuitously – the arrival of little Theodore into the family circle. The father he knew in his childhood would be an odd-job man, a loser, consoled only by an ever fiercer devotion to his religion.

  As Paul’s fortunes slumped, the family flitted from one shabby dwelling to another. Among all the hardship Theodore was his mother’s favourite. His biographer, Richard Lingeman, sees the child’s reciprocal adoration as the reason Dreiser – although sexually promiscuous to the point that sterilisation was once considered –could never m
ake a lasting relationship with any other woman. He would be emotionally misshapen for life. What schooling he picked up was scrappy, although he read voraciously. A key moment was the family’s drift to the outskirts of Chicago in 1882. The booming city was, Dreiser later recalled, ‘the wonder of his life’. The move was assisted by a relative who had made it big as a brothel-keeper. In 1887 the sixteen-year-old Theodore left home and threw himself into the heart of the city’s seething life, sent on his way by his mother with three dollars and a lunch bag.

  In Chicago, the young hopeful tramped the streets, looking for work, picking up jobs where he could. With 50,000 new incomers a year, all with similar hopes, you needed luck to survive. Fortune smiled, briefly, on him when a relative financed a year at Indiana University and that single year at Bloomington enabled him in later life to proclaim himself a ‘college man’. But in 1890 his mother died – and with her, he said, died any idea of home and family. After his brief spell of higher education he took to the streets again. He was chronically lonely and never well. He confessed in his later memoirs to irrepressible masturbation – the prelude to a life of inveterate Don Juanism: he carried, as it pleased him to say, a lifelong ‘cross of passion’. The twenty-year-old Dreiser – lanky, wall-eyed, penniless, bronchitic, virginal – was not a young man to excite interest in the girls he fantasised about, though he would make up for those delayed gratifications in later life when fame and money added a lustre to his unprepossessing appearance.

  In 1892 he finally found a niche in journalism as a space-rate (i.e. freelance) reporter and reviewer for the Chicago Globe. There was no long-term future in such hackery, but it was an apprenticeship and got his pen moving. He broadened his view of things, more particularly America, with a year’s bumming around the country in 1894, gravitating, inevitably, to New York, a city whose dynamism dwarfed even that of Chicago. His ideas were forming. He was now a disciple of Herbert Spencer and the English thinker’s Social Darwinism. He had immersed himself in Balzac and would be, for life, a believer in literary realism – ‘veritism’, as it was called. In New York, he kept body and soul together as a ‘magazinist’ – a better vehicle for a man of ideas than deadline-pressed newspaper reporting. Weeklies and monthlies were booming. Many of Dreiser’s pieces were trite – but some, such as the account of a lynching (later fictionalised as the story ‘Nigger Jeff’) and the account of a night (one of many over the years) in a flophouse forecast the novelist to come.

  His brother Paul (Dresser), meanwhile, had made it earlier in life as a popular song-writer (his greatest hit was ‘On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away’) and would be a welcome source of financial handouts to Theodore during the thirty more years of penury – although he had little time for his brother’s sentimental warbles. In 1898, after an extended engagement, he married Sara Osborne White, a schoolteacher from Missouri. The couple never really cohabited and soon separated. He denied her the children she craved; she denied him the divorce he wanted. It was, as the term then had it, a MINO – a marriage in name only. He found consolation in innumerable affairs and one-night stands with other women – ‘varietism’, he called it.

  Dreiser had been trying his hand at magazine stories and in 1900 he embarked on his first novel, Sister Carrie. He encountered difficulties in finding a publisher which would have deterred authors less dogged than he. His addiction to windy abstractions was one thing which put off potential publishers. That which begins Chapter 8 is typical Dreiserism: ‘Among the forces which sweep and play throughout the universe, untutored man is but a wisp in the wind.’ To reach what Dreiser offers, readers have to inure themselves to such ubiquitous windbaggery. Even more objectionable at the time was Sister Carrie’s explicitness about the sexual act. The age was not ready for it. The manuscript was finally accepted by Doubleday on the recommendation of the congenial novelist (another ‘realist’) Frank Norris, who proclaimed the work a ‘masterpiece’. Then Mrs Doubleday happened to read it, and Sister Carrie was firmly rejected. Masterpieces were one thing: references to women’s breasts being handled something quite other. Unwisely, Dreiser resolved to hold Doubleday to their initial agreement. They published it, insisting on many cuts of ‘offensive material’, but delivered the novel effectively still-born into the world. Dreiser’s veritism went down badly with the few reviewers who looked at it. The Chicago Tribune complained, ‘Not once does the name of the Deity appear in the book except as it is implied in the suggestion of profanity.’ There was some consolation in that Sister Carrie was hailed in Britain – where writers such as Thomas Hardy and George Moore had created a less godly climate for fiction.

  Sister Carrie has one of the nineteenth century’s more hackneyed plots – that of the fallen woman. Dreiser adds a twentieth-century twist. Caroline Meeber falls, quite as hard as George Eliot’s Hetty Sorrell, Hardy’s Tess, or Moore’s Esther Waters, but goes on to pick herself up with spectacular success. The action opens in 1889 with the heroine on the train to Chicago, casting never a backward look at the farming family she is leaving behind her. Carrie is eighteen years old, endowed with latent beauty, intelligence, innocence and – most importantly – talent. On her journey she is accosted by Chas. H. Drouet. A salesman by profession, Drouet is a seducer by nature. In the big city Carrie finds herself so much urban flotsam. The only work she can find is as a $4.50 per week shop assistant. In the face of this prospect she succumbs to Drouet’s charms, encouraged by ‘two soft green ten-dollar bills’ he gives her. Now ‘fallen’, she falls in with another admirer, the middle-aged, prosperous saloon manager, George W. Hurstwood – a married man (something Carrie does not at this point know) with children her age. He yearns discontentedly for ‘sympathy’ and thinks he has found it in Carrie. Drouet lands Carrie, now his mistress, a part in an amateur theatrical in which, to everyone’s surprise, she shines brilliantly. Hurstwood gains some advantage over his rival by hinting at marriage – bigamously, as it would have to be.

  In the finest scene in the novel, while closing up his saloon he discovers the firm’s safe unlocked. It contains $10,000. The physical feel of the money tempts him and ‘the imbibation of the evening’ has rendered him reckless. He takes the cash out, to fondle it as one might caress a beautiful woman, and ‘While the money was in his hand, the lock clicked. It had sprung. Did he do it? He grabbed at the knob and pulled vigorously. It had closed. Heavens! he was in for it now, sure enough. The moment he realized that the safe was locked for a surety, the sweat burst out upon his brow and he trembled. He looked about him and decided instantly. There was no delaying now.’ Fate having delivered the money into his hand, he elopes with Carrie. Did he mean to steal the money? Dreiser leaves it enigmatic. Hurstwood and Carrie end up, married but not married, in New York. For him, thereafter, it is the long descent to the flophouse and burial in Potter’s Field. His last words are ‘what’s the use?’ Meanwhile Carrie, ignorant of George’s fate, becomes a Broadway star, though she is unconvinced by the uses of fame and fortune.

  As the century turned, Dreiser found himself blocked artistically, chronically ill, depressed and, for all his promiscuities, alone. There followed what his biographer calls ‘the lost decade’. He published no fiction between 1900 and 1911, other than an unexcised text of Sister Carrie. The obstacles put in that novel’s way he saw as clinching evidence of prejudice against anyone ‘who attempted anything even partially serious in America’. He had started writing his second novel, Jennie Gerhardt, in 1901. The story of a German-American girl, it developed themes opened in Sister Carrie but found the same disfavour with publishers (try another line of work, one good-naturedly advised him) or, when belatedly published in 1911, with reviewers and readers. Dreiser fell back on magazinery. But his fiction, unsuccessful as it was in the marketplace, had attracted the support of opinion-forming friends, notably H. L. Mencken, who devoted himself to promoting the Dreiser cause.

  Unabashed, he progressed – in his third foray into fiction – with a massive work on the robber baron
, Charles T. Yerkes. This interest in ‘capital’ marks the embryonic stirrings of overt Marxism in his thinking. The Yerkesiad, he proclaimed, would be ‘American in theme, European in method’, and, true to his first literary love, Balzacian in length. America, Dreiser believed, was so big that ‘you can’t write about it in a small peckish way’. Dreiser took three large bites at Yerkes with The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914) and The Stoic (1947) – the last unfinished at the time of his death in 1945. Large as the canvas was, Dreiser failed to capture his subject. Even less successful was the ‘art novel’ he published The ‘Genius’ (1915), not helped by the observable fact that the genius he had in mind was Theodore Dreiser.

  Dreiser’s German background tilted him towards his ancestral homeland during the Great War. It helped his career as little as did his anti-Semitism in the run-up to the Second World War and his late life admiration for the USSR (until he actually went there and discovered Communism did not deliver clean sheets and hot running water). His willed opposition to current political orthodoxies was one of the reasons he never got the Nobel his proponents have always maintained he richly deserved. It was during the First World War that he began research on his one indisputably great novel, An American Tragedy. And it was as the war ended that he discovered the most enduring of his many mistresses, Helen Richardson. Some twenty-five years his junior, and looking younger than that, Helen was distantly related. She was, as he liked to call her, his ‘Golden Girl’. One of his diary entries, in the early days of their relationship, records what she brought into his life: ‘From 10 to twelve I work on mss. Two to 4:30 play with Helen. We copulate 3 times. At 5 return to work & at 7 get dinner. 9pm to bed.’