Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Writings About New York (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (4 page)

It is interesting to compare the two mothers: Mrs. Johnson and Mrs. Kelcey could not have been more different, but their stories are so similar. Mrs. Johnson drinks; Mrs. Kelcey is an active member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Mrs. Johnson keeps a slovenly, disheveled household, filthy and strewn with debris; Mrs. Kelcey, to the degree that she can be in her mean lodging, is house-proud-wantonly destroying a piece of crockery or a piece of furniture would be completely alien to her, unfathomable. For Mrs. Johnson, smashing and destroying her few poor belongings seems to be something of a hobby, or at least her most powerful form of self-expression. It is all Mrs. Johnson can do to put a plate of potatoes on the family dining table, whereas Mrs. Kelcey is forever at the stove, cooking to satisfy her son, working over her pots and pans, wielding them “like weapons.”

Of course, the most telling difference between the two women comes at the end of the two books: When Mary Johnson learns of Maggie’s ignominious demise she cries, not for her “fallen” daughter but for herself, making a showy act of forgiveness. In Mrs. Kelcey’s case, when George falls into drunkenness she remains moral and upright. George doesn’t die—he takes to drink like many of the expendable workingmen in turn-of-the-century New York. But it is too much for Mrs. Kelcey to bear. It is a betrayal, and in that sense it represents the death of her sixth and final son. When George loses his job, Mrs. Kelcey takes to her bed and dies of a broken heart.

 

It has been widely and incorrectly assumed that Stephen Crane drank himself into an early grave, and that he was an opium addict. It is also thought that
George’s Mother
was some sort of autobiographical broadside aimed at his proper, puritanical teetotaling parents, that
George’s Mother
reflects a son’s rejection of all that his parents (particularly his mother) stood for. None of this is true. Crane did drink, maybe on occasion to excess, but no more than the average male of his era.

While Crane has stated that Mrs. Kelcey was an exaggeration of his mother’s own Woman’s Christian Temperance Union advocacy, the comparison ends there. There is little else to connect the well-spoken, educated, suburban preacher’s wife with the roughhewn, barely literate slum dweller Mrs. Kelcey—except that they both possessed a good heart and worried about their wild offspring.

Yet autobiographical connections do exist. Crane admired his mother while resisting her way of life and her manner of thinking. George, in his inchoate way, finds “correctness” in his mother’s morals but experiences her unwavering uprightness as “maddening” nonetheless.

George’s Mother
may be another of Crane’s cautionary tales, but, as with
Maggie,
he is not shoving his own sense of morality down the throats of his readers. Rather, once again, he paints the picture and lets the viewers decide the morality of the tableau for themselves. Whose fault is it, he asks, if the downfall of the slum woman is prostitution and the great abyss awaiting the workingman is the saloon, where all he owns or holds precious is drowned in a pail of cheap beer?

 

Crane did not turn his eagle eye only on the slum-dwelling New Yorkers of his age. As we read in “A Night at the Millionaire’s Club,” he was as attuned to the very rich as he was to the poor. If anything, he was more scabrous in his treatment of society’s upper crust. Written in 1894, “A Night at the Millionaire’s Club” takes place at the height of the gilded age, when vast fortunes were accumulated by a tiny percentage of the population. This was the era of the Morgans, the Vanderbilts, the Fricks, the Goulds, the Rockefellers, the Astors—those families who owned outright textile mills, railroads, shipping lines, vast tracts of land, mines, oil fields, and in the case of Morgan, virtually all of Wall Street itself These vast fortunes—untaxed and unregulated—amounted to a significant percentage of the nation’s economic worth. (According to material presented on economist J. Bradford Long’s Web site, in 1900 one percent of the population held 45 percent of the nation’s wealth.)

It is no wonder then that the smug, self-satisfied, rather desiccated millionaires of their eponymous club considered themselves far above mere mortals, even if the mortals in question happen to be the upright, though plain-speaking, figures of the early days of the American republic: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington—all men of intelligence and action who valued political commitment and democratic ideals over wealth and personal power. Essentially turning this fundamental American morality and identity on its head, the millionaire families used their terrific fortunes to build huge “cottages” in Newport, Rhode Island, buildings long on pretension but distinctly lacking in taste. Crane has endless fun with their absurd pretensions.

When a club servant (wearing a suit of livery that would have cost at least three times George’s yearly salary) enters this sacred space to announce some visitors, the millionaires show little more than a languid curiosity—never mind that the lackey has announced four of the greatest names in American history. It is of no consequence to the millionaires. When they further learn that these interlopers are Americans there is general consternation. “Don’t bring ‘em in here!” “Throw ’em out!” “Kill ’em!” (p. 132).

However, a cooler millionaire head prevails. Erroll Van Dyck Strathmore very calmly gives the orders. The newcomers are to be treated kindly, shown a cigarette end he happened to drop on the steps of the club, given a recipe for Mr. Jones-Jones Smith-Jones’s terrapin stew and a gallery ticket for a theatrical show.Then they are on no account to return to the Millionaire’s Club, because, it has been explained, the millionaires don’t know any Americans.

Crane’s was the time of the Grand Tour, when wealthy Americans looked to Europe for culture, when American money was traded for the titles of Old European nobility (more often than not a nobility fallen on hard times and looking for an infusion of that railroad or steel money that only an American fortune could provide). But more than that, the millionaires refuse to see themselves as Americans, even when confronted by men far more noble and “aristocratic” than they will ever be. The millionaires here have ceased to be Americans at all and have joined a new nationality—that of the plutocracy. In this neat little sketch Crane skewers these plutocrats, holding them up to a scorn and derision that they can only be said to have brought on themselves.

 

Although “An Experiment in Misery” seems to be merely the musings of two young men on the life of a tramp, Stephen Crane and a friend, William Carroll, were actually hired by a newspaper syndicate to disguise themselves as down-and-outers and live as the indigent on the Bowery. Accordingly, the two men dressed as tramps, with just sixty cents between them, and set out to have a closer look at New York’s underworld. As mentioned earlier, visiting the slums was hardly a new idea; it had been something of a tourist tradition for years. People of “quality” would be conducted, under guard and guide, through the dens and alleys to gaze upon and shiver at the filth and degradation in which their fellow citizens chose to live. Mostly these tours were merely a chance for the upper classes to indulge their taste for the pornography of human suffering. Surprisingly, some good came out of this voyeurism: Danish immigrant Jacob Riis caused quite a stir when Charles Scribner’s Sons published his book
How the Other Half Lives
in 1890. He spent the next twenty-five years documenting slum life and campaigning for better living conditions.

Stephen Crane and William Carroll were actually going to live it. Carroll hated every minute of slum living: He reported that while he lay cold and scared and uncomfortable in a nickel-a-night flophouse, Crane reveled in the entire experience. He liked the needle beer and the “free lunch” the cheap bars served—soup they called it, watery and bland, with “little floating suggestions of chicken” (p. 136). Crane’s account of a single night living in the rough is actually an amalgam of several such experiences—Carroll went once and one suspects that he had his fill of low living on that single occasion.

One gets the impression on reading “An Experiment in Luxury” that Crane liked to experiment with squalor. From the dismissive description of what was probably a very elegant brownstone house to that of the pathetic millionaire whose greatest pleasure in his delight-filled home comes from a simple kitten, Crane suggests in no uncertain terms that money is wasted on the wealthy. The journalistic standards of the nineteenth century were not as rigorous as they are today, and one cannot help but suspect that the “old friend” and “the youth” are two sides of Crane’s own character and that it is the “old friend” who most reflects his true opinion of the rich. The old friend’s jeremiad early on in the piece is the most telling. “I have been told all my life that millionaires have no fun, and I know that the poor are always assured that the millionaire is a very unhappy person” (pp. 145-146). Crane goes on to prove that millionaires and their offspring have every reason to be happy, but that they choose not to be. The youth gets plenty of advice on how to be miserable. “Be sure not to get off anything that resembles an original thought.... Be dreary and unspeakably commonplace.... Be damnable” (p. 150). But even for all the gloom of the millionaire’s home, Crane concludes correctly, “Wealth in a certain sense is liberty” (p. 154).

At the time of the publication of
The Red Badge of Courage,
numerous reviewers remarked that the battle scenes in the book were so true to life that they could only have been written by a grizzled veteran of the Civil War. Crane dismisses this story; he says that he had gotten most of his battleground ideas from watching football games. Even if this flippant remark is not true, Crane could not have fought in the Civil War; he was born six years after the cessation of hostilities. Clearly Crane was not above making up details. His exciting and tragic “When Everyone is Panic Stricken” is completely fictional, but that does not make it any less gripping. The story, which appeared in the New York
Press,
has a beautifully evoked “you are there” quality. The reader can smell the smoke, hear the comments of the passersby, and almost feel the anguish in the cry of the mother who has left her child in the flame-engulfed building: “My baby! My baby! My baby!” (p. 182).

The heroic policeman who plunges into the flame to rescue the child, the thundering hooves of the fire horses, the nonchalance of the firemen to whom one fire is much like another—these are all fig ments of Crane’s imagination, and yet it all rings true. Of course, Crane must have witnessed fires in his time, and given that the racing fire engines of the day were one of the great street scenes of New York City, he must have seen those as well. Still, it is all fiction. “The facts are: there was no fire at all, no baby, no hysterical mother, no brave policeman, no nothing, except Crane’s magnificent and, in this instance, impish imagination, and the great William Dean Howells was so taken in that he pronounced Crane’s article ‘a piece of realistic reporting.’ It is fiction, not reporting. Anyone who consults the New York newspapers around the date 25 November 1894 ‘will find nothing at all about any fire having taken place, much less anything about any policeman rescuing a child from a burning building’ ” (John S. Mayfield,
American Book Collector:
January 1957).

Edward Marshall, the Sunday editor of the New York
Press,
expressed himself years later about Crane’s tenement-house fire report: “It is one of the best things he or any other man ever did.” And while it is, the sketch is pure fiction. Crane later attempted to make amends for his deception: While covering the Spanish-American War, he filed a competing dispatch written by Marshall before his own, because Marshall was wounded and could not to do so himself.

Crane’s powers of invention find their way into a number of his New York City pieces. “Coney Island’s Failing Days,” “In a Park Row Restaurant,” and “When Man Falls, a Crowd Gathers” are most likely composites of sights and experiences that Crane witnessed over the years, thought rarely at one time nor with the companions he claimed to have been with. Of course, this does not make them any less valid. To modern readers, the title “Coney Island’s Failing Days” may suggest the decline of the great American playground. Quite the contrary. “Coney Island’s Failing Days” is an account of the closing of the summer resort, which will reopen in all its frankfurter-and-music-hall glory when the season begins the next year. “In a Park Row Restaurant” suggests nothing more than rush hour in a busy restaurant in a part of the city that was, and is, the locus of city business. Restaurants such as the one Crane describes are gone now, but such frenzied dining still goes on in many New York fast-food places. Lunchtime in the Wall Street area may not be quite as frenetic as the battle of Gettysburg, to which the dining experience is compared, but it is still hectic, even in the twenty-first century.

In the interests of truthfulness, Crane may have played fast and loose with the facts, but four of the pieces included in this edition present details of New York life largely as they were, without embellishment. In “Opium’s Varied Dreams” he presents a methodical, almost clinical study of drug addicts in the New York City of his time. His writing here is almost as sympathetic as his slum reportage; he simply states the facts and lets readers draw their own conclusions. There is no doubt that Crane’s observations were intended, in part, to titillate his readers, but one can also discern a certain sympathy for the drug user.

In the 1880s the United States was in the grip of bicycle mania—and New York City was no exception. “New York’s Bicycle Speedway” is Crane’s take on the craze; it notes that wheelmen and wheelwomen, as he called the cyclists, had taken over a number of thoroughfares in the city, including part of Broadway, the area around City Hall, but in particular an extension of Eighth Avenue, now Central Park West, from One Hundred and Tenth Street to Columbus Circle. The bicycle craze wreaked havoc with the already chaotic traffic in the city. The piece is a lighthearted look at a trend that did not last long; it is an interesting snapshot of the city during one brief moment.