Contrasted: Paul Auster Meets Stephen Crane

He wanted to be a writer, and as Christopher Benfey, another Crane biographer, noted, he was in such a hurry that his life sometimes seemed to outrun himself. She began her first novel, “Maggie: Daughter of the Streets,” about a girl who is dragged from the Bowery to prostitution while she was still in Syracuse and didn’t know much about sex or the streets. He made up for it by going to the Lower East Side and immersing himself in the bohemian life while working as a journalist. He visited cannabis parlors and opium shops, hung out with prostitutes and even lived with someone for a while.

Similarly, Crane wrote his major novel about the Civil War, “The Red Badge of Courage,” at the surprisingly young age of 23, having never seen war. He was later hired as a reporter during both the Greek-Turkish and Spanish-American Wars, partly for money but mostly to see what the war was really like, and decided to put himself in danger. “The danger was that he would break up,” said a colleague. Until then he had been careless about almost everything: money, women, even his health.

In 1897, while waiting for a boat to take him to Cuba in Jacksonville, Crane dated a woman named Cora Taylor. She was twice married, a kind of professional mistress, and later ran a brothel called the Hotel de Dreme. AJ Liebling called him “the friend of the most boring writer in American literary history,” and he – or rather his chaotic life with Crane – gave the second half of Auster’s book a big impetus. They went from Florida to England, where it was easier for them to be together openly, but Crane was a celebrity now, even though he was more popular in England than he was here, they were always broke. They lived beyond their means, with many servants, and were abused by their cynical friends.

Auster has been particularly good in Crane’s last few years, which started off with some kind of crack. Commissioned to cover the Spanish-American War, he first stopped in Washington, where he sought out an old love and possibly proposed to her. In Cuba, he acted recklessly, as if he wanted to be shot, and rarely bothered to eat or sleep. And when the war was over, he hid in Havana for four months. Besieged by creditors, Cora feared she was dead.

Crane returned to England just after New Year’s in 1899, and he and Cora continued their lavish social lives – even crazier now because Crane knew he was probably going to die. HG Wells enjoyed warm friendships with Henry James and Joseph Conrad—especially Conrad, who loved Crane like a younger brother and sometimes just liked to sit in Crane’s study and listen to him. In the spring of 1900, Crane began to bleed. Cora sought money to take her to a sanatorium in Germany, but there was no cure and she died as soon as she got there. His last words to Cora were: “I’m leaving here trying to do something kind, good, firm, determined, impregnable.” He returned to England, tried to become a freelance writer, and when that failed, he returned to Jacksonville and the job he knew best: He opened another brothel.