by Daniel Wolff
The family didn't suffer financially (Mrs. Crane had inherited money), and the children prospered. Stephen's brother William became a judge in the next town over. Another brother, Townley Crane, worked as the Associated Press reporter in Asbury Park and doubled as the Long Branch stringer for the New York Daily Tribune. In Port Jervis, Mrs. Crane helped organize an industrial school "to supply the lack of early training . . . by instruction in the use of the needle . . . [to] colored women and children." But despite the reverend doctor's efforts to be optimistic, his disappointments included a fundamental spiritual one. He had never felt the kind of revelation that had struck James Bradley. "Much encouragement in my work," he wrote. "Still, thus far, no wave of power has come sweeping all before it, as we sometimes see. Perhaps it will, if we hold on our way, doing our duty."
He did his duty, but the wave never broke. In February 1880, age sixty, Dr. Crane died of a heart attack. Stephen was eight. For the next few years, the Cranes remained near William in Port Jervis, visiting Townley on the Jersey shore in the summer. There, the old-fashioned Methodist values of Ocean Grove and Asbury Park appealed to Mrs. Crane, especially the active local temperance society. In June of 1883, when Townley was named editor of the Asbury Park Shore Press, Mrs. Crane, eleven-year-old Stephen, and his twenty-eight-year-old unmarried sister, Agnes, moved to 508 Fourth Avenue in Asbury Park. Their home, Arbutus Cottage, was a proper two-story place in the good part of town. It cost Mrs. Crane $7,000. As Stephen later described the neighborhood, "There is square after square of cottages, trees and little terraces, little terraces, trees and cottages, while the wide avenues funnel toward a distant gray sky."
The Cranes moved to Asbury during boom times. The Coleman House Hotel had gone up on the beachfront in 1879, with the Madison Hotel just to its west; a year later, the new "promenade boardwalk" drew thousands of couples, strolling to see and be seen; two years after the Cranes arrived, the massive Grand Avenue Hotel was completed. Mrs. Crane was soon elected president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union of Ocean Grove and Asbury Park. In Asbury's morals debate, she supported James Bradley's brand of old-fashioned Methodism (with Mrs. Bradley playing the melodeon at local Methodist services). In a piece Mrs. Crane wrote for the Ocean Grove Record, she weighed in against "the growing taste for worldly amusements which keeps the young from the house of God." That included card playing, dancing, and theatergoing, all of which Stephen's mother described as "devices to 'kill time,' which means to waste the precious hours given us for holier uses."
Stephen, meanwhile, was killing time as often as he could. He'd later write that he spent his childhood riding his pony, playing baseball, swimming, and fishing. These were not "holier uses." Plus, he tried smoking and drinking early on. Some of this may have been because his mother wasn't around that much. According to Stephen, she had "lived in and for religion," and much of his rearing was left to sister Agnes, a teacher at Asbury's intermediate school.
Almost immediately after their move to the shore, the family's fortunes began to fail. The panic of 1884 led to massive strikes in the Pennsylvania coal mines, which, in turn, cut Mrs. Crane's dividends. ("Strikes," she would later write in a letter to the local paper, "were fomented by the idle and the vicious." The true problem, in her opinion, was not low wages or bad working conditions but "the drinking habits of the working classes.") Starting that second summer in Asbury, she was forced to rent their cottage to tourists.
One misfortune followed another. That June, with Stephen not yet thirteen, his surrogate mother, Agnes, died of meningitis. A quiet, unwed schoolteacher, she'd encouraged Stephen to enjoy life and speak out instead of succumbing to what she called their "oyster-like family." After her death, Stephen's mother packed him off to boarding school, and when he'd come home on vacation or for the summer, it was his brother Townley who took care of him. Before Stephen had turned fifteen, the Asbury Park Shore Press was reporting that Mrs. Crane was "extremely ill . . . with mental troubles." Townley was his own kind of eccentric. A New York Daily Tribune columnist, he was described as a "physical derelict" who— even in the hottest weather— walked the shore in a long coat, no shirt, and a muffler. As an added blow to the family, another brother, Luther, having survived an overdose, fell in front of a train and was crushed.
So, by the time he was a teenager, Stephen was mostly on his own. It isn't surprising that he rebelled against the values of his disintegrating family. There's the story that when he was seven, he bought a mug of beer and drank it down in one, long gulp. When a friend, astonished, asked how he could do such a thing, Stephen reportedly answered, "Beer ain't nothing at all . . . How was I going to know what it tasted like less'n I tasted it? How you going to know about things at all less'n you do 'em?"
The incident sounds a little too pat to be true, a perfect precursor to his career as a realist writer. But Crane encouraged stories like this, adding on tales of sea rescues and playing soldier, all of which fed the image of a daring rebel. Growing up in a particularly moralistic city and raised by religious crusaders, Stephen Crane ended up, in the words of Teddy Roosevelt, "a man of bad character." It was a reputation the son of the reverend doctor seemed proud of and had worked hard for.
His first newspaper piece may have been an 1887 Philadelphia Press sketch of young lovers at the shore. Crane's characters deliberately flaunt the social conventions of a town a lot like Asbury Park. Crane set them on the beach, where "they were partly protected from the sun's rays by a very loud striped parasol, but shielded from the gaze of the beach throng by nothing." So in love were the two as they sat together that "the whole world was but a myth to them." Enter a puritanical beach censor. The lovers had broken that restriction described in the Ocean Grove charter as "assuming attitudes on the sand that would be immoral at their city homes." When the censor, pretty clearly modeled on Bradley, descends upon them, the sixteen-year- old Crane sides with the "tender seaside doves" and against the old and narrow-minded.
The young writer would return often to this subject matter: the battle not so much of good versus evil as morality versus sensuality. And Bradley's promised land offered a perfect battlefield. In the hot sun, with the Epicycloidal Wheel ringing in the distance, the nineteenth century was ending. Some new, liberated time was coming. Even in this early story, Crane heard the boardwalk's promise of excitement, pleasure, desire.
Stephen's unwell mother continued to lecture against drinking, now using a small distillery to demonstrate the "presence of alcohol in many things of common use." Meanwhile, her son took to satirizing the hypocrisies of Asbury Park and Ocean Grove. In an 1890 New York Daily Tribune column, he has a newcomer ask, "Don't the people go to meeting all the time, and don't the constant singing and praying make one nervous?" If the question is irreverent, Crane's answer verges on the blasphemous: "Many ministers and other Christian workers come here to get away from the responsibility of conducting meetings to be in a place where they need not preach or even attend." If you go down to the beach, he wrote, you'll see "the entire population is disporting itself in the surf or lying in the sand." And he dismissed one of Bradley's most successful publicity schemes— the annual Baby Parade, where infants dressed as adults competed for prizes— by keeping his coverage of the "dimpled youngsters" to a single sentence.
These jabs apparently landed close enough to the mark for another Tribune writer (some commentators think it may have been brother Townley) to answer with a long, laudatory profile of the "great religious summer resort." Ocean Grove was easy to make fun of, the author says, and "a certain class of newspaper writers expend a great deal of energy and ink every year in denouncing the officers of the association and what they call 'their Puritanical laws.'" The best rebuttal was Ocean Grove's prosperity. It now boasted an open-air auditorium with a capacity of ten thousand, a tabernacle, a young people's temple, a chapel, and a summer population of over twenty-five thousand devout Christians.
Stephen didn't answer directly. As a cub reporter, he probabl
y couldn't. Instead, he used the weapon of description, sprinkling his newspaper columns with the kind of realistic detail that flew in the face of these ideal communities. In the opening of an 1891 column, he evokes "great train-loads of pleasure-seekers and religious worshippers . . . arriving at the huge double railway station of Ocean Grove and Asbury Park." He goes on to describe "the rapacity of the hackmen," "the huge pile of trunks," and "the wriggling, howling mass of humanity." In other reports, he pauses lovingly over the foolish glory of the seaside amusements: a machine called a "razzle-dazzle," the big Wheel "to tumble-bumble the soul and gain possession of nickels," the steam organs, which made "weird music eternally." Were these, as his parents preached, "devices to kill time?" Absolutely. He calls them "enlarged toys." And what exactly is wrong with that? "Humanity only needs to be provided for ten minutes with a few whirligigs and things of that sort," he writes, "and it can forget at least four centuries of misery."
In the Methodist war against amusement, Crane's deadpan satire always came down on the same side. The next summer, he carefully dissected the average summer visitor to Asbury as "a rather portly man, with a good watch-chain and a business suit of clothes, a wife, and about three children. He stands in his two shoes with American self-reliance and, playing with his watch-chain, looks at the world with a clear eye." Here was Asbury's ideal visitor. In contrast, Crane reports that an attraction for the day-trippers— the big, steam-driven Observation Wheel on Lake Avenue— was getting into "a great lot of trouble" with hotel owners, who were complaining about its sparks and ashes. "Also," Crane adds, "residents of Ocean Grove came and said that the steam organ disturbed their pious meditations on the evils of the world."
Crane can barely contain his disgust with the pious middle class. At the same time, he begins to explore and empathize with the misery of the urban poor. During the summer of 1891, in what was supposedly little more than a seaside gossip column, Crane discussed the new documentary trend of social realism. "Muckraking" journalists were starting to expose the dark side of the Gilded Age, and Crane joined them. He had taken to spending time in New York City, particularly down in the Bowery, where Bradley had come from and where he still ran his brush factory. Walking the tenement streets, drinking in the bars, Crane was collecting material for his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. A groundbreaking piece of fiction, it would describe a young factory worker "gradually and surely shriveling" from hopelessness. Describing Maggie's job in a typical sweatshop factory, Crane writes how "the begrimed windows rattled incessantly from the passing of elevated trains," and the "grizzled women in the room" were little more than "mechanical contrivances sewing seams."
Crane had completed an early draft of Maggie when his mother died in the winter of 1891. Still legally a minor, he was placed under the guardianship of yet another brother, Edmund. By this time, Townley may have been too eccentric to take charge. Meanwhile, brother William, the judge, bought out the siblings' remaining shares in the coalfields at a bargain price. Stephen spent the early part of 1892 working for a mercantile company and would soon start his Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage.
The next summer, Crane returned to Asbury Park as a stringer for the New York Daily Tribune. In one column, he described an illustrated lecture by the early documentarian and activist Jacob Riis. Riis's groundbreaking book, How the Other Half Lives, had come out two winters before and created a sensation. In it, Riis had focused on the nearly half a million tenement dwellers living below New York City's Fourteenth Street, insisting that America couldn't forget the poverty, disease, and near starvation found there. The book had helped inspire and was, in a way, the nonfiction version of Maggie.
During his Asbury lecture, Riis made the point that writers who continued to produce inspirational, Horatio Alger stories were duping their public. By focusing on the few shining examples— self-made men like James Bradley— these writers supported the illusion that anyone with perseverance could escape tenement life. "We know now that there is no way out" is how Riis put it in his book. "The 'system' that was the evil offspring of public neglect and greed has come to stay."
It was a radical analysis, certainly in Asbury Park. Bradley's rags-to- riches story was a false model, implicitly attacking poor people for not working hard enough or having high enough morals. What's more, Riis implied that a resort like Asbury was at best just a release valve. It allowed its middle-class vacationers to look the other way (out to sea) instead of facing the disturbing facts. Stephen Crane found some hope in the large audience that showed up to hear Riis: "The thousands of summer visitors who have fled the hot, stifling air of the cities to enjoy the cool sea breezes are not entirely forgetful of the unfortunates who have to stay in their crowded tenements."
Crane, meanwhile, haunted the shore. A description by his girlfriend of the time paints a picture of a loner in the midst of the "tumble-bumble" of a beach town. "He was abjectly poor and undernourished— ate little and seemed to resent others eating heartily." With a cigarette hanging off his lower lip and his battered, unkempt clothes, Crane would walk the boardwalk, observing life, stopping for a Day's ice cream (though he could barely afford it), and taking his lover on the new sensation, the Kingsley Avenue merry-go-round. Not far from the big Observation Wheel, right about where the briars had first torn into Bradley's clothes, the Carousel House had gone up in 1888. The glittering machine spun in a special four-sided pavilion with multicolored sliding doors and brilliant murals of boardwalk scenes. Its array of elegantly carved, shiny wooden horses could carry seventy-eight passengers at a time. Mirrors reflected their speeding images, and there was the added excitement of leaning out into the wind and reaching for the brass ring that guaranteed a free ride. It was pointless, of course, this spinning in circles: a diversion from Jacob Riis's social crusade. But Crane and his girl rode it over and over, then would walk together along the shore. "Steve particularly enjoyed watching the surf," his lover remembered. He would tell her that "whenever she saw the ocean she would think of him."
This portrait of an artist as a young man had a flip side: an anger as strong as the romantic streak. Judging by one of his columns from that summer, Crane defined himself in opposition to Asbury Park's values and to James Bradley in particular. He started with the hand-painted moral warnings that dotted the beach and moved on from there:
"There is probably no man in the world that can beat 'Founder' Bradley in writing signs. His work has an air of philosophic thought about it which is very taking to anyone of a literary turn of mind. He usually starts off with an abstract truth, an axiom, not foreign nor irrelevant, but bearing somewhat upon a hidden meaning in the sign—' Keep off the grass,' or something of that sort . . . He is no mere bungler or trivial paint-slinger. He has the powers of condensation which are so much admired at this day. For instance: 'Modesty of apparel is as becoming to a lady in a bathing suit as to a lady dressed in silks and satins.' There are some very sweet thoughts in that declaration. It is really a beautiful expression of sentiment . . . A thoughtless man might have been guilty of some . . . unnecessary uncouthness. But to 'Founder' Bradley it would be impossible. He is not merely a man. He is an artist."
Through the thick fog of irony, you can hear Stephen Crane dismissing the idea of moral uplift and trying to figure out what a real artist might be. And later that summer, he'd make clear that he wasn't limiting his attack to just the founding father. "Asbury Park," Crane wrote in 1892, "creates nothing. It does not make; it merely amuses. There is a factory where nightshirts are manufactured, but it is some miles from town. This is a resort of wealth and leisure, of women and considerable wine." The occasion for this outburst was an American Day parade held in mid-August by the Junior Order of United American Mechanics. Here were people who made their living with their hands walking right in the midst of the "cool sea breezes," and Crane dug into the contrasts with a vengeance:
"The throng along the line of march was composed of summer gowns, lace parasols, tennis tro
users, straw hats and indifferent smiles. The procession was composed of men, bronzed, slope-shouldered, uncouth and begrimed with dust. Their clothes fitted them illy, for the most part, and they had no ideas of marching. They merely plodded along, not seeming quite to understand, stolid, unconcerned and, in a certain sense, dignified— a pace and a bearing emblematic of their lives. They smiled occasionally and from time to time greeted friends in the crowd on the sidewalk. Such an assemblage of the spraddle-legged men of the middle class, whose hands were bent and shoulders stooped from delving and constructing, had never appeared to an Asbury Park summer crowd, and the latter was vaguely amused."
Almost a century later, Bruce Springsteen would write the music that fit this scene: the heavy, dragging beat of his song "Factory." For Crane, as for Springsteen, if these workingmen are heroes, they're confused, very human heroes, plodding forward through what Springsteen would call "the mansions of fear . . . the mansions of pain." Crane, who had spent the previous year writing Maggie, recognized that these guys weren't Riis's starving masses. Compared to the folks in the Bowery, they were well-off. At the same time, they're distinctly not the summer crowd in their tennis trousers. Partly because he insisted on describing the scene in all its contradictory detail, the American Day march became known as "the parade that made Stevie Crane famous."