GLR September-October 2023

Stephen Crane. Photograph by Bettmann / Corbis.

The lesson was driven home when he sent a copy of Maggie to novelist John D. Barry, who was unsettled by the subject matter and strongly urged him to keep in mind literature ’ s ef fect upon the reader: “ as soon as that effect approaches the morbid, the unhealthful, the art becomes diseased. It is the taint in the peach. ” To most 19th-century readers, homosexuals were clearly tainted fruit, but for Crane they were still well within the com pass of a writer fascinated by the outcasts of American society and eager to tell their stories. Yet, in his novels, short stories, and poetry, in the many newspaper columns he wrote to put food on the table, in the 1,379 pages of the Library of America edition of his selected works, there is only one work that appears to concern itself with men sexually attracted to other men. In 1895, the Bacheller newspaper syndicate sent Crane on a trip west and south, all the way to Mexico, with an assignment to send back color commentary along the way. From Hot Springs, Arkansas, he dispatched a column about the men who gather at the bathhouses of the popular thermal resort. In an ar ticle titled “ Seen at Hot Springs, ” Crane opens with an obser vation he may have intended to be blandly generic, but given the cryptic story that he then proceeds to tell, he may instead have been hinting that men who seek men sometimes seek them at the baths. “ [N]o man need feel strange here, ” he begins his essay. “ He may assure himself that there are men of his kind present. If, however, he is mistaken and there are no men of his kind in Hot Springs, he can conclude that he is a natural phe nomenon and doomed to the curiosity of all peoples. ” Crane then reports a small drama involving three strangers who encountered one another in the bar of a bathhouse, a drama observed by someone who plays no role in the story: “ At the end of the bar was lounging a man with no drink in front of him. ” This no doubt is Crane himself, as always listening closely, taking no part, but mentally recording it all. The three September – October 2023

15