Satirist in Asbury Park

With the exception of Edgar Allan 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. Crane was born on this day in 1871. Here is a brief bit from Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire focusing on Crane’s early years as a journalist in New Jersey.

During the spring of 1892, Crane stayed at William’s house in Port Jervis while continuing to write sketches about Sullivan County. On May 28, he left for Asbury Park to resume work as a New York Tribune shore correspondent, missing by five days an event that shook Port Jervis. On June 2, a black man wrongfully charged with raping a woman was twice hanged from a tree across the street from the house. William was among the few townsfolk who tried unsuccessfully to prevent a mob of about two thousand from lynching the man and gave a deposition at the inquest. Although Stephen did not witness the tragedy, he would have learned about it from his brother and from detailed accounts in the Tribune. Five years later, he transformed the prejudice, fear, and violence of Port Jervis into his story “The Monster.”

The Sullivan County tales and sketches mixed humor and improbable events for the diversion of idle Sunday readers. Crane realized that those stories were often contrived, artificial, and derivative; years later, he remarked,“How I wish I had dropped them into the waste basket!” Since the previous August, he had been thinking about Garland’s insistence that authors adhere to their own personal vision and write about what they know and care about. Increasingly he was becoming convinced that good writing, whether fiction or journalism, should be based on an honest depiction of what one sees. Returning to Townley’s news agency for another summer of resort reporting, he knew he would not be satisfied simply reporting trivial facts. One day during that summer, he and Arthur Oliver, his classmate at Lafayette and a fellow New Jersey journalist, were sitting on the beach discussing the difficulty of using language to transform one’s personal experiences into art. “Somehow I can’t get down to the real thing,” Oliver lamented.“I know I have something unusual to tell, but I get all tangled up with different notions of how it ought to be told.” In response, Stephen tossed a handful of sand into the wind. “Treat your notions like that,” he asserted. “Forget what you think about it and tell how you feel about it. Make the other fellow realize you are just as human as he is.That’s the big secret of story-telling. Away with literary cads and canons. Be yourself !” By the end of the summer, Crane’s views would unalterably shape his private life and public career.

In late June, while working out of Townley’s office in the Lake Avenue Hotel, Stephen met Alice Augusta Brandon Munroe, nicknamed “Lily.” With her teenage sister Dorothy (“Dottie”) and her mother-in- law, she was staying at the hotel. Lily had had a wealthy upbringing — early years in England followed by public and private schooling in New York City. Married in 1891, she was now estranged from her husband, Hersey Munroe, who frequently traveled for the U.S. Geological Survey as a topographer. During the summer, Stephen and Lily fell in love; they spent hours riding the carousel at Asbury Park’s Hippodrome and walking along the beach and boardwalk. Older and more prudent, Lily could tell that Stephen was a restless spirit who cared little for his health and appearance. He was constantly coughing because of incessant smoking, and he wrote notes to himself on his shirt cuffs. Impoverished and insecure, he became upset when her singing attracted other admirers, and he skipped buying ice cream for himself — he actually disliked it — so that he could treat her to a scoop at Day’s in Ocean Grove, where the Victorian porches and courtyard garden of the ice cream parlor created a romantic haven. Her father, a respected businessman, disapproved of Crane’s bohemianism and discouraged their relationship.When Crane was invited to dine with the Brandons in New York City, he tried to impress them by speaking briefly in French to Lily’s father, who, Crane knew, was multilingual. In response, Mr. Brandon curtly chided him:“My daughter does not speak French, Mr. Crane.”

Despite differences in temperament, Lily and Stephen loved each other. She recognized his intelligence, sincerity, and curious blend of contradictions. He was not handsome, yet she was struck by the intensity of his gray, almond-shaped eyes; he was prudish about women’s bathing suits and self-conscious when dancing with her, but he delighted in shocking straitlaced matrons who judged other vacationers; he expected to die young, yet he had an intense desire to be happy. His occasionally taciturn demeanor belied a playful, kindhearted spirit. He treated Dottie affectionately, as though she were a niece, and bet her a necklet that his brother Townley would never remarry (a bet he lost). An impulsive romantic, Crane once asked Lily to light a candle in her window in New York so that he could see her as she walked around the room. When it began to rain, she assumed that he had left and blew out the candle, only to learn later that he had stayed, hoping that she would relight it, and had caught a devastating cold. Stephen had once jokingly told his nieces that if he ever met a woman with hair as golden as theirs, he would marry her instantly.5 Lily became this woman. Before the summer had ended, she was seriously considering his plea that they elope.

At the height of their relationship, Stephen entrusted Lily with copies of his stories, including the manuscript of Maggie, and he arranged for his friend David Ericson to paint her portrait (it was never completed). Crane idealized her in two short stories. “The Captain,” an amusing sketch written during the summer of 1892, describes a boat excursion and involves wordplay about courtship, a “‘smart young man’ from nowhere,” and three young city women — a composite portrayal of Lily. One woman, ostensibly talking about the trip, hopes “we can go out again to-morrow.” When another asks what she might catch if she went fishing, the captain quips,“You might catch some of those young men.” The following spring Crane composed “The Pace of Youth,” a fictional billedoux that recounts the love affair between a young man and woman who work at her father’s carousel in the amusement park at As- bury Park. The young man’s desire for marriage is complicated by her indecision, his insecurity about a possible rival suitor, and the father’s resistance to their romance. Eventually they elope in a carriage drawn by “a young and modern” horse, while the father vainly tries to catch them in an “old vehicle” drawn by “its drowsy horse and its dusty-eyed and tranquil driver.” Crane recreated his own situation in the story. Playing with his surname, he was the young man, who, bird-like, gets “a good view from his perch” at the carousel and who, along with Lizzie (a name similar to Lily) escapes along “the trail of birds.” Stimson, the authoritarian father, who is estranged from his wife, represents Lily’s father and husband, Mr. Brandon and Mr. Munroe. The iron and brass rings that the young man puts on a wooden arm for riders on the carousel to grab symbolize matrimonial rings, and the fleeing carriage on the road of life is “youth, with youth’s pace . . . swift-flying with the hope of dreams.” With the pace of youth, Crane told Lily via the short story, they could escape their past and start life anew.

A romantic dreamer, Crane knew he lacked direction and needed to prove his worth. He avoided seeing Lily for several months until he felt “worthy to have you think of me”; then, in April 1893, following the publication of his first novel, he began a series of impassioned love letters, chronicling “how much I have changed.” He was now on the road to “my success” as a writer. With the publication of Maggie, he bragged that “Hamlin Garland was the first to over-whelm me with all manner of extraordinary language. The book has made me a powerful friend in W. D. Howells. B. O. Flower of the ‘Arena’ has practically offered me the benefits of his publishing company for all that I may in future write. Albert Shaw of the ‘Review of Reviews’ wrote me congratulations this morning and to-morrow I dine with the editor of the ‘Forum.’”While Lily had become “the shadow and the light of my life; — the whole of it,” Crane knew that her marriage — “the present griefs which are to me tragic, because they say they are engraven for life” — inhibited their relationship. For her part, Lily sensed the difficulties involved in eloping with an impetuous youth and stopped answering his letters. When her husband, whom she eventually divorced in 1897, discovered their secret relationship, he destroyed Lily’s mementoes of Stephen: his letters (some- how four survived), photos, and the manuscript of Maggie.

Though Stephen’s dispatches from Townley’s bureau to the New York Tribune were still unsigned in 1892, they were unmistakably his, marked by his biting, sardonic style. The diction, imagery, and characterization were so distinctive that, had Stephen developed no further as a writer, he would have been assured a successful career as a journalist. His ironic sensibility was suited for skewering the social and cultural pretensions of vacationers, as well as the smug complacency of civic and religious leaders who legislated their own ethical and religious values. Crane also lampooned the carnival-like atmosphere of the beach resorts. Photographers convinced tourists to have their “features libelled” by posing with dogs and babies; fair maidens — “a bit of interesting tinsel flashing near the sombre hued waves” — were pursued by their beaux, whose “rose-tint and gilt-edge” demeanor as they strutted in their “somewhat false hues” belied their normally levelheaded behavior; and the most daring visitors enjoyed “contrivances to tumble-bumble the soul and gain possession of nickels” so long as each amusement ride was “of course, a moral machine” that provided respectable pleasure. Seekers of culture attended classes at the Seaside Assembly in Avon-by-the-Sea, where “art students . . . chatter and paint and paint and chatter,” while others inspected exotic sea-growths and chased “June-bugs around the block on warm nights.”