The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895, 117 pages)

Google Reader is closing down on July first so if you follow my blog there, for which I greatly thank you, you need to find another RSS reader very soon.   I have tried several.  The best to me so far is Bloglovin'' and then Feedly.  Both have a direct simple method of importing your Google reader subscriptions. If you Google "replacements for Google Reader" you will see the web pages for these readers and others.   Google has hurt the book  blog world by this action but I guess maybe it is somehow progress.  You can also follow my blog by e mail subscriptions or via Twitter as @thereadinglife.   I have used Google reader for years and will miss it a lot.  I just cannot get crazy for Google Plus.

I last read The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1870 to 1900, New Jersey, USA) several decades ago.  I as motivated to reread it by Edmund White's novel about the last year of Crane's life, Hotel de Dream.  I wish I had a book blog post from long ago so I could see what I thought of the work  when I read it first.   Crane never experienced a battle before writing The Red Badge of Courage when he was barely twenty one.  The work follows the military career of a young New York man in the American Civil War.  By consensus it is one of the classics of American literature and it considered comparable to the very best world wide of battle literature depicting war from the point of view of the foot soldier.  Much of the power of the book is seeing how the battles take the man, really a boy, from callow youth eager for battle against demonized enemies to a much different person as the work closes.   Crane's descriptions of the horrors of war and its absurdity are very powerful.    

Mel u

Hotel de Dream by Edmund White (2007, 228 pages)

I have wanted to read a novel by Edmund White (1940,USA) for sometime now.   Many consider him the best writer who consciously identifies  themselves as a Gay author focusing on Gay life style issues and Gay artists. He has written in addition to numerous novels and short stories biographies of Genet and Proust as well as numerous cultural essays.  He was greatly praised by Susan Sontag and Vladimir Nabokov, among many others.  

I like to read novels and short stories that center on famous authors and Hotel de Dream centers on the last year of the life of the great American writer, Stephen Crane.  (1871 to 1900, born New Jersey, 

Works include Red Badge of Courage and Maggie Girl of the Streets.)  The concept of the novel is very creative and superbly interesting.   Stephen Crane, dying of TB,recalls when he was  is in New York City living with his mistress and many thought wife, Cora.  Crane was very much into prostitutes and enjoyed their company as much as their services.  All biographical data points to him being exclusively heterosexual. In walking the streets on day he meets a young man of 15, obviously a prostitute.  He looks terribly sick and has a horrible history of sexual abuse to tell.  He ran away to the streets of New York to escape the repeated rapes by his father and brothers.  Crane becomes fascinated with him and tells Cora, former prostitute and Madame of a Florida brothel.  There is a literary legend that at the time of his death Crane was working on a story about a young male street prostitute and in an incredibly bold device White includes a version of this story (one he created, of course).  In the story the young man he met, Eliot works the streets as a newsboy and also sells sex to men.  A business man falls in love with him.  I will leave rest of this imagined novel untold but it is really devastating.  We do learn a lot about Gay life on the streets and bars in late 19 th century.  Some of the slang is interesting and some who have read the novel said the slang terms are in part satirical inside jokes and I felt that at times.

The novel has really three segments, the false lost novel, the story from Stephen's point of view and from Cora's perspective. 

The novel takes place not in New York State but in the English countryside, where Cora took Crane in the hope he might recover.  Cora kind of reminded me, having recently read a new biography of James Joyce, of Nora Barnacle in that she deeply love him, saw his weaknesses and in  way deeply understood him but knew little if his work other than as something from which money could sometimes be made.  

Hotel de Dream is a terrible clever and creative novel that illuminates gay street life in New York City around 1898.  I will read, I hope, more of his work.  

I was inspired to reread Red Badge of Courage and hope to post on it soon.

Mel u

Maggie: Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane

Maggie:   A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane (1893, 40 pages)

Like many others, I first read Stephen Crane when I was assigned to read The Red Badge of Courage  for a class in American Literature.   As long ago as this was, when I read his Maggie: Girl of the Streets (some would count this as a short story, others as a novella) the feel of the prose of Crane  came back to me.   Crane is at the start of the American tradition of newspaper man turned literary.   

I am currently reading through Ford Madox Ford's magisterial work The March of Literature.    Ford was an incredibly well read person with an amazing memory for what he  read.    His judgments of the quality of works may be idiosyncratic at times and should not be taken as the word from on high but I take whatever he says on a writer very seriously.         Ford classifies Crane  (1871 to 1900-New Jersey, USA)  as "American Naturalism"  in the same vein as Zola in French Naturalism.    Ford has a simple definition of "Naturalism"-literature that exposes the fact that all people are corrupt and evil!    Of course Ford is being a trifle facetious but not all that much.

In The March of Literature Ford very highly praises Crane's Maggie:   Girl of the Streets as among the very best literary prose written in America in the 19th century.   I did some checking and found I could read this short work at Dailylit.com  so I decided to read it.

Maggie:  A Girl of the Streets is a set in its time, the 1890s, in the roughest part of New York City in the areas where poor first and second generation immigrants (Irish from the character names and the knowledge we have of the times) make their homes.     Maggie's father is a brutal drunk and her mother is not much better.   One night Maggie's brother Tommie gets into a fight.   His good friend Jimmie saves him from being badly hurt or even killed.    Tommie takes Jimmie home with him.    Year go by and in time Maggie and Jimmie begin to form a relationship.    I don't want to relay the plot action (it is not to hard to guess given the title of the work!)   so I will stop here.   The story will seem very like the work of Dickens (but with leaner prose and less vivid descriptions).    

I found the prose of the narrative sections of the story very well done in what I call "newspaper man writes a story" prose.   Here is a sample:

The inexperienced fibres of the boy's eyes were hardened at an early age. He became a young man of leather. He lived some red years without laboring. During that time his sneer became chronic. He studied human nature in the gutter, and found it no worse than he thought he had reason to believe it. He never conceived a respect for the world, because he had begun with no idols that it had smashed.

I do not really like "dialect" speech in novels or stories and this work is about 1/3 dialect speech.    I think  I dislike it is because it slows down my reading speed.  Also I think the use of dialect speech can, perhaps unintentionally, end up as patronizing.  

   For sure this work is worth reading especially as we can read it for free at dailylit.com.    

Mel u

"The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" by Stephen Crane

"The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" by Stephen Crane (1898, 12 pages)

Like many others, I first read Stephen Crane when I was assigned to read The Red Badge of Courage  for a class in American Literature.   As long ago as this was, when I read his short story, "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" the feel of his prose came back to me.  

I am currently reading through Ford Madox Ford's magisterial work The March of Literature.    Ford was an incredibly well read person with an amazing memory for what he  read.    His judgments of the quality of works may be idiosyncratic at times and should not be taken as the word from on high but I take what ever he says on a writer very seriously.     When I read that Ford regarded  Stephen Crane (1871 to 1900-New Jersey, USA) as one of the premier prose stylists of the 19th century I decided to read one of his short
stories, "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky".

"The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" reads like the work of a newspaper writer turned to literature.    Crane was in fact a journalist and a war correspondent.   Maybe he sounds like a typical newspaper writer turned to literature because he set the model for this style of writing.   The prose has a very no nonsense you cannot fool me feel to it.  

As the story opens we are on a luxury passenger train with Jack Potter, sheriff of the wild west town of Yellow Sky, Texas and his unnamed bride of a few days.    Both of them are unaccustomed to the luxury of the train and feel a bit out of place.   Crane does a great job of setting out in just a few sentences how Palmer and his wife feel about the train ride.    I really felt like I was on the train and getting ready to have an incredible meal in the dining car.     We get a feel for just how big Texas felt in the days before cars and airplanes.

When the train gets to Yellow Sky, the town trouble maker and notoriously dangerous when drunk Scratchy Wilson has his gun on and is ready to challenge Sheriff Palmer to a gun fight.    There was a strong demand for "wild west" stories at the time and "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" is both a perfect example as well as a play on this genre.   The story is also below the surface about a part of America in transition.   1898 was at the end of the wild west cow boy era and "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" is very much about that.

There is a very interesting turn of events at the confrontation between Palmer and Scratchy Wilson that really gives the reader a lot to think about.  I will quote briefly from the story so readers can get a feel for Crane's style

 Later, he explained to her about the trains. "You see, it's a thousand miles from one end of Texas to the other, and this train runs right across it and never stops but four times." He had the pride of an owner. He pointed out to her the dazzling fittings of the coach, and in truth her eyes opened wider as she contemplated the sea-green figured velvet, the shining brass, silver, and glass, the wood that gleamed as darkly brilliant as the surface of a pool of oil. At one end a bronze figure sturdily held a support for a separated chamber, and at convenient places on the ceiling were frescoes in olive and silver.

Stephen Crane's  short life was packed with all sorts of adventures.    Wikipedia has a good post on his life and his work.    I think I will read Crane's novella, Maggie:  A Girl of the Streets soon.  

I liked this story a lot and I admit it was a good change of pace for  me from Katherine Mansfield.

The story can be read online here

Mel u