Son of Thunder: Stephen Crane and the Fourth Evangelist

Abstract

IN THE FALL OF 1891, an obscure customs collector named Herman Melville died quietly in New York, leaving among his papers Billy Budd. A few months later Stephen Crane showed his friends the first known draft of his first novel, not yet titled Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. In our briefer literary chronicles, the contrast between these two events has considerable value: the setting sun of the nineteenth century is a world away from the rising sun of the twentieth; the myth-burdened visions of a sub-sub librarian fade, even as, with a suddenness that destroys all shadows, the Bowery world scalds us with sour light. Naturalism has arrived, in effect, and with it modern American literature. The drama so played was always too absolute to be true; but Crane has been thought ever since to mark the sudden turning of a corner, and he has also been stuck ever since, more or less prominently, with the epithet naturalist. And for good reason. Nothing seems to connect Crane with Melville except, perhaps, a curious common interest in Goethe; a good deal seems to link him with the new literary scientism. First, Maggie embodies a close study of Bowery life: Crane may have started the book in Syracuse, but he took it to New York to finish. Second, it treats that life with an almost surgical detachment: no social reticence, no literary custom, no windy symbol obscures our view of Maggie's insipid daydreams, her mother's liquor-swollen veins, her brother's arthritic decencies-of the human animal in the human jungle. Last, Maggie's defeat and death at the hands of her world are inevitable: the novel's essential narrative structure seems to flow from an almost scientific interest in mass phenomena and from the determinism