Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (57 page)

Throughout Bower’s life, her publishers insisted she disguise her sex. As a result of the deception – which fooled most readers – details of her early life were carefully buried and remain unknown. The narrative of her breakthrough novel, closely read, none the less betrays the woman’s hand. Della Whitmore returns to the family ranch, the Flying U (named after its brand), on graduating from medical school in the east. She wins over the hard-bitten cowpoke, Chip, even uncovering a latent artistic talent in him. He and his ‘Little Doctor’ kiss, and are a team over many subsequent novels. There was no such bliss for the author. In 1905 she divorced Clayton (who had taken to calling his wife ‘my little red-headed gold-mine’) after what is recorded only as an ‘unforgivable act’ in the Midwestern cabin where they lived with their two children. In 1912 Bower promptly married Bertrand W. Sinclair, her literary adviser (and, probably, another marital gold-digger), twelve years her senior and himself a writer of less successful Westerns. The couple settled down in Great Falls, where a daughter was born.

The book version of
Chip, of the Flying U
(brought out in 1906 by the New York publisher Dillingham, with fine illustrations by Charles Marion Russell) established Bower as a writer of Westerns second only to Owen Wister, author of
The Virginian
. Bower’s favoured state was not Wister’s Wyoming but Montana, where some forty of her sixty-eight novels would be set. On the strength of her swelling income, the family moved to a mansion in the clement climate of Santa Cruz, in 1908, but Bower went on to divorce Sinclair also in 1912. Like his predecessor he was a heavy drinker. Bower herself suffered a series of health breakdowns around the age of forty. None the less she signed a contract with Little, Brown to produce two books a year – which she manfully did for the next three decades. In 1920, she married a cowboy and another heavy drinker, Robert E. (‘Bud’) Cowan. The couple tried, quixotically, to run a silver-mine in Nevada. It proved less successful than the literary gold Bower could spin, effortlessly, with her pen and that third marriage also failed.

Chip, of the Flying U
was popularised worldwide, and for many years, by a string of films: Tom Mix, Hoot Gibson, and, after 1939, Johnny Mack Brown all starred in the lead role. In later life – with no one left to call her Bert – she insisted friends (even little girls) call her ‘Bower’. She spent her last years in California where she toured in the ‘solid cars’ she enjoyed – tapping away, all the time, on her typewriter to keep the studios happy.

The idea of falling like heroes on ceremonial battle-fields was gone forever; we knew that we should fall like street-sweepers subsiding ignobly into seas of mud.
Ford Madox Hueffer on the corrective effect of
The Red Badge of Courage

When asked for his curriculum vitae, Crane would begin with the first Stephen Crane who arrived in the colony in 1635 and skip to his third namesake who had narrowly missed being a signatory to the Declaration of Independence. Stephen Crane IV (as he saw himself) was a proud ‘son of the American Revolution’. But that ancestral glory had passed. The Cranes had come down in the world when he was born, the youngest of fourteen children, of whom his four immediate predecessors never made it to childhood. He himself was sickly from birth and may not have been expected to survive. His father, Jonathan Townley Crane, was a Methodist minister whose views bordered on pusillanimous fanaticism. He held that dancing was the root of all evil. He died when his youngest son was eight. Stephen’s mother, M. Helen Crane, was forty-five at the time of his birth, and not overwhelmingly motherly. Fourteen births, and five funerals, can wear out a woman’s tenderness. A crusader against the demon rum, she was a pillar of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (they disliked the acronym WCTU for the irrelevant implication of the two first letters). She died mad in Stephen’s late teens.

Raised in New Jersey, in a domestic atmosphere of ‘exhortation’, young ‘Steve’ had plenty to rebel against. Undistinguished at school and oddly slow to read or write, in his teens he spent two years at a military academy. These, he claimed, were the happiest years of his life. He left with faux lieutenant’s pips on his shoulders and went on to college – where he was welcome for his prowess on the baseball diamond (he was a catcher and shortstop) but was kicked out for spectacularly bad grades. It was baseball, he said, which taught him all he had to know about combat.

In 1891, on the death of his mother and the inheritance of some money, he moved to New York, took up residence in a boarding house, and began serious work on his first novel. He was, lifelong, fascinated by prostitutes and the ‘hellish’ street life of lower Manhattan. The two were brought together in
Maggie, A Girl of the Streets
(1893). The plot of the novel is hackneyed – a good girl is done wrong by her man, stoops to folly, and drowns herself in the East River. The streets are more interesting than the girl, as the lively opening paragraphs predict:

A very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honor of Rum Alley. He was throwing stones at howling urchins from Devil’s Row who were circling madly about the heap and pelting at him.

His infantile countenance was livid with fury. His small body was writhing in the delivery of great, crimson oaths.

‘Run, Jimmie, run! Dey’ll get yehs,’ screamed a retreating Rum Alley child.

‘Naw,’ responded Jimmie with a valiant roar, ‘dese micks can’t make me run.’

New York is war – already evident is the journalist’s sharp eye and economy of phrase. Manhattan, said Crane, was where all the ‘bad stories’ (i.e. the best stories) come from, and he had an unerring eye for them. However,
Maggie
could not find a publisher and was brought out by Crane himself at a cost of $700 under the pseudonym ‘Johnston Smith’. It was stillborn. He followed his other gift and drifted into the booming metropolitan newspaper world. Had Stephen Crane never written a line of fiction he would be remembered as a brilliant reporter. Among his classic pieces of this early period is ‘An Experiment in Misery’, when he lived, for a day and night, as a down-and-out bum. Orwell must have studied it carefully.

He was, meanwhile, keeping his hand in with fiction and poetry (‘Lines’ as he called them) which, as yet, went nowhere. He had various relationships with the kind of woman his parents would have shuddered to know. Until she died, the woman always closest to him was his sister Agnes, a surrogate mother.
The Red Badge of Courage
was born of a boast that he could write a better battle story than Zola’s
La Débâcle
. It came out in book form in 1895 when Crane was twenty-three – still youthful. The story records the war experience of Private Henry Fleming in the Civil War. A farm boy, he volunteers to fight for the North, but has no political conviction or sense of history. It is not a novel about war, so much as about the ‘psychology of fear’. Henry runs away from his first fire-fight. A disgusted comrade hits him, savagely, on the head. This is mistaken as an honourable war wound – his ‘red badge of courage’ – and he returns to the fray and fights: ‘He is a man.’ The statement hangs, ironically, over the novel’s last paragraph.

Crane is a connoisseur of corpses and the physiognomy of death (the result, one suspects, of many visits to the Manhattan morgue). In his flight from the battle, Henry runs through the woods where he comes on:

a dead man who was seated with his back against a columnlike tree. The corpse was dressed in a uniform that once had been blue, but was now faded to a melancholy shade of green. The eyes, staring at the youth, had changed to the dull hue to be seen on the side of a dead fish. The mouth was open. Its red had changed to an appalling yellow. Over the gray skin of the face ran little ants. One was trundling some sort of bundle along the upper lip.

The Red Badge
went through fourteen printings in its first year. One veteran, a
colonel no less, clearly remembered serving with Crane at Antietam, almost ten years before the novelist was born.

In 1895 Crane travelled to the West and New Mexico. It broadened his horizons well beyond Manhattan (‘Damn the East!’, he proclaimed on his return) and furnished the setting for some of his finest short stories – ‘The Blue Hotel’ and ‘The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.’ His relationships with women remained obscure and mysterious. In the year of his
Red Badge
triumph he conducted an epistolary romance with a ‘pure woman’ and wrote a novel,
The Third Violet
(1897), on the strength of it. Derived clearly from du Maurier’s
Trilby
, with an artist hero, it is a comedown from
Red Badge
as, the author forlornly predicted, all his fiction must be. Women of the street continued to fascinate him. As a reporter, covering a story, he witnessed a prostitute, Dora Clark, being arrested on a trumped-up charge of soliciting. He took up her case through his newspaper columns and in court. On the witness stand, his reputation was blackened by the admission that he used opium (in a Baudelairian experimental spirit) and had recently been living in sin with a fellow woman reporter.

Thereafter, the New York Police Department was out to get Stephen Crane. Prudently he turned his skills to war reporting, where the foe was less deadly than Manhattan’s finest. Now a star reporter, he received assignments from the colossus of American journalism, William Randolph Hearst. Like Hearst, Crane did not wait for stories, he made them happen. Things were happening in the mid-1890s in Cuba, which was in the bloody throes of breaking free from Spain. On a secret gun-running voyage to Cuba, in aid of the insurgents, the boat Crane was sailing in, the
Commodore
, foundered and sank with loss of life. Crane spent three days in an open boat at sea, but survived, and out of the experience came his fine novella,
The Open Boat
. Like
The Red Badge
, the story ponders survival. As the exhausted survivors come ashore, a corpse (the engine room man, Billie) is washed up in the surf: ‘In the shallows, face downward, lay the oiler. His forehead touched sand that was periodically, between each wave, clear of the sea.’ No writer handles vignette better than Crane.

His interest in impure women was inextinguishable and strangely decent. Over the last years of his life, he formed an unsolemnised union with Cora Taylor, a twice married Florida brothel madam, five years older than him. Possessed of true grit, Cora accompanied her man, as America’s first woman war correspondent, she claimed, to the front lines of the Graeco-Turkish conflict. In 1897 the couple moved to the English home counties, of all places, where, in fine style, at Brede Place in Sussex, they lived wildly beyond their means. Crane became intimate with Conrad, Henry James, H. G. Wells, and Ford Madox Hueffer – all of whom loved him and lived
more or less nearby. To fill his purse he made forays to cover the Spanish Cuban War and – at its climax – witnessed the American marine landing at Guantanamo and the ‘rough riders’ heroism at San Juan Hill. His reporting, and related short stories, are brilliant. But he caught a fever which hastened his death. Not exactly a red wound, but proof of his courage.

‘I go through the world unexplained,’ Crane liked to say. Tantalisingly little is known of his life and that little is polluted by his first biographer, Thomas Beer, whose narrative contains material as fictional as anything in
The Red Badge
. One would give all the acres of biography on Henry James for a hundred pages telling us more about Crane’s life. He is recorded as habitually carrying a volume of Poe in his pocket. His last weeks – ‘a bloody way of dying’, as he described it to Wells – was appropriately gothic. Suffering with terminal consumption, a rectal abscess, and the malaria he brought back as a war wound from Cuba, he was shipped out to a resort in Germany’s Black Forest where, after a few days, he died. His body was transported back to England. Cora determined it should be sent on for final burial in his native New Jersey. No rest, even in death. ‘He was dying from the start,’ observed a laconic Hemingway. It took Stephen Crane less than thirty years to do it.

I spent the better part of forty years trying to induce him to reform and electrify his manner of writing.
H. L. Mencken

Theodore Dreiser was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, a second-generation ‘new American’. His sternly Catholic German father, John Paul, had fled Prussia in 1844 and in America had fallen in love and eloped with a seventeen-year-old Mennonite, Sarah. They would have ten surviving children, brought up speaking German. Theodore had a grossly unsettled upbringing. His father enjoyed brief prosperity in the textile trade, rising to the status of mill-owner during the Civil War period, when the demand for uniforms created a short-lived boom. That prosperity evaporated with the end of the war and – quite fortuitously – the arrival of little Theodore into the family circle. The father he knew in his childhood would be an odd-job man, a loser, consoled only by an ever fiercer devotion to his religion.