GLR September-October 2023

ESSAY Painted Angels and Tainted Fruit W ILLIAM B ENEMANN

L ATE on a brisk New York evening in 1894 (or so the story goes), Stephen Crane (1871 – 1900), not yet famous for The Red Badge of Courage , was crossing Union Square together with the arts critic James Gibbons Huneker. Huneker had been to the theater and was in dapper evening dress, while Crane was in his usual rumpled and patched bohemian garb. The two friends had met up by chance in the street and were now on their way to a late supper at the Everett House hotel, although Huneker had imbibed heavily during the play ’ s intermission and confessed to being already somewhat in his cups. In the square, they were approached by an emaciated young man who smiled at them provocatively. “ I was drunk enough to give him a quarter, ” Huneker later wrote. “ He followed along and I saw that he was really soliciting. ” Union Square was one of the main sites for ho mosexual cruising in New York City, but Crane (according to Huneker) was too naïve to understand that the youth was hoping to barter a hot meal for a blow job. “ We got to the Everett House and we could see that the kid was painted. He was very handsome — looked like a Rossetti angel — big violet eyes — probably full of belladonna. ” Crane, Edmund White, in his novel Hotel de Dream , imagines the scene in the Everett House dining room from Crane ’ s point of view. “ There was a table free but the headwaiter glanced at the manager — but couldn ’ t stop us. We headed right for the table, which was near Siberia, close to the swinging kitchen doors. I placed my frail burden in a chair and, just to bluff my way out of being intimidated I snapped my fingers and ordered some hot soup and a cup of tea. The headwaiter played with his huge menus like a fan dancer before he finally acquiesced and ex tended them to us. ” Later, again according to Huneker, Crane began a novel to be titled “ Flowers of Asphalt, ” about a country boy who comes to New York to pursue his dream, only to end as a street hustler dragged down by drugs and syphilis. Crane read the opening pages of the manuscript to his mentor, the writer Hamlin Gar land, who was so disgusted by what he was hearing that he in sisted that the reading of this sordid tale cease immediately, and William Benemann is the author of Unruly Desires: American Sailors and Homosexualities in the Age of Sail and Men in Eden: William Drum mond Stewart and Same-Sex Desire in the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade . who liked to steep himself in the lives of the downtrodden to assure the authenticity of his prose, saw in this frail painted angel a portal into a world about which he knew very little. He invited the gaunt young man to join them for dinner at the hotel, where he could pump him for information about New York ’ s ho mosexual underworld.

the existing pages be consigned to the flames. That, at least, is one version of the story. Its accuracy has been questioned, as it relies solely on a one-page reminiscence by James Gibbons Huneker himself. Yet the story has legs be cause it clearly could be true, given what is known about Stephen Crane ’ s life. Crane was the son and grandson of Methodist ministers, and he was reared in a home where the line between the righteous and the damned was clearly delineated. But from at least his college years at Syracuse University, Crane made it clear that his sympathies lay with the damned. His first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets , displays an un canny ability to climb inside the head of an adolescent girl who has known only violence and degradation, but who has somehow managed to guard a small candle flame of belief in a romantic future — until that flame, too, is snuffed out. In a later novel, George ’ sMother , Crane slips the reader into the cigar-stench of Bowery saloons and all-male house parties where rough men bond and boast and fight, until they collapse in a boozy heap on the bedroom floor. To assure the authenticity of his stories, Crane haunted the night courts of Syracuse and the seven-cent flop houses of the Lower East Side, talking to sex workers and opium reticence is not surprising, given how Maggie: A Girl of the Streets was received. Crane could find no publisher willing to take on the manuscript, so he sold his part of a family inheri tance to his brother in order to self-publish. Even then, the printer was so repulsed by the subject matter that he refused to allow his company ’ s name to appear on the book, and — waver ing in his own resolve to publish and be damned — Crane de cided at the last minute to adopt the pseudonym “ Johnston Smith ” for the title page. When he attempted to peddle the book, he encountered further discouragement. Brentano ’ swas one of the few bookstores willing to carry the novel. They took a dozen copies — and eventually returned ten. Shivering in his garret room, sometimes eating only one meal a day, Crane found it cold comfort that his first novel was at last in print as he stared at the stacks of unsold copies. In a bohemian scene straight out of Puccini, he took to ripping out pages and feeding them to the fire in order to keep warm. Crane was poor and hungry. He could not afford to write some thing that would not sell, and if a novel about a female prosti tute caused booksellers to blanch and slam their doors, what point would there be in writing a novel about a homosexual? addicts about their lives, sitting for hours in the dark shadows of dive bars, nursing a sin gle drink while he watched and listened, recording everything like a human Kineto graph camera. Yet Crane ’ s published novels and short stories never touch on New York ’ s extensive and varied population of homosexuals. This

Stephen Crane began a novel about a country boy who comes to New York to pursue his dream, only to end as a street hustler.

TheG & LR

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