Life’s dark side: the catastrophic world of Stephen Crane

Long before Ernest Hemingway wasted his late career playing the he-man on battlefields and in fishing boats, or Norman Mailer wasted an entire career playing Hemingway, Stephen Crane was the most world-striding combative male intelligence in literature. And while he created the template for every ‘manly’ novelist who came after, from Jack London to Robert Ruark, he never sought attention as a man but only as a writer; and he certainly never issued many advertisements for himself.

Instead, he almost surreptitiously explored the world’s most violent places with inexhaustible intrepidity. Living both privately and intensely, he wrote some of the most powerful prose of his generation, and died too young — though by all accounts he placed himself in so many dangerous situations, especially as a war correspondent in Cuba and Greece for the Hearst newspapers, that he might easily have died even younger.

This is more than an unusual, well-written account of more than Crane’s life: it is an account of one man’s close reading of another over 50 years of continual interest and affection. And while Paul Auster relies on many useful academic books and authorities, he admirably avoids using critical terminology. There is minimal ‘historicising’ of Crane, even though the chronology of the family is well recounted; and there is hardly a hint of ‘psychologising’ a very complex man. Rather, Auster simply wants to get to know Crane the man and writer better; and along the way, help readers to get to know him better, too.

He was born in Auster’s home town of Newark in 1871; and from a young age, death seemed to be everywhere. His parents were schoolteachers who, like several of their children, died young; and Crane was never in good health himself. He caught the writing bug early; and long before Orwell was taking ‘urban rides’ in the poorest parts of England, or Jack London was exploring hobo camps and train cars to devise his gritty socialism-inspired novels, Crane was exploring the mean streets of New Jersey and Manhattan, especially The Bowery, where he completed his first short, explosive novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, at the age of 19.