When one tries to locate Stephen Crane and his key works in history or reflects on his relation to literary movements or genres, he becomes ever more elusive. Even his lifespan seems somehow wrong, not fitting into accustomed chronologies. He was born at just the right time (1871) and (sort of) the right place (Newark, New Jersey) to help readers think of him as an heir to the American Renaissance who was nonetheless poised to share in Modernism’s varied origins. Inconveniently, he died far too young (in 1900, at age 28, of tuberculosis) and probably in the wrong place (Badenweiler, Germany) to be a convincing presence in Modernism. In terms of style and inclinations, he borrowed from many categories but settled on none; he was a Romantic, an impressionist, a Symbolist, a naturalist, a realist, a Modernist. Disconcertingly, he seemed to be all of these at once with no overt sense of development from one to another. His own oeuvre is too promiscuous to pin down. He’s best known for his Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895) and for a handful of short stories, although he also wrote poems, journalism, and sketches. The 1984 Library of America edition of his collected works runs to almost 1,400 dense pages.

His personal life also demonstrates apparent contradictions. His father was a Methodist minister who died when Crane was eight. The young Stephen rebelled against any kind of religious heritage and continually insisted on the absence of divine intervention in human affairs, yet he maintained a strong moral element, bordering on didacticism, in much of his work. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and many of the New York stories, for instance, show an attitude toward alcohol that was readily aligned with the temperance movement for which his mother was a prominent campaigner. As a young man, Crane immersed himself in New York’s Bohemian demimonde of streetwalkers and other marginalized figures—and effectively fled the city after persecution by corrupt cops—but was notably abstemious and at times craved respectability and middle-class stability.

Frustrations in trying to enlist Crane as a writer or a man might derive from an impoverished vocabulary when encountering outliers. These frustrations might also expose a nostalgic desire for consistency in any subject and a reluctance to acknowledge human multiplicity. It’s also unclear what literature meant to Crane. At times, he burned with a passion for work that would change the world—or at least change attitudes; at other times, he just wanted to write what could be easily marketed, as his erratic relations with various publishers made clear. Sometimes he hounded them over details and financial arrangements; at other times, he was unconcerned about printing or payments. Looking for parables in his life—or at least for emblematic moments—is difficult to resist.

The 20-year-old Wallace Stevens covered Crane’s funeral as a cub reporter for the New York Tribune, and his appalled response to that meagre event brought home to him the fleeting nature of literary reputation and confirmed his doubts about journalism’s literal adherence to the facts. In his journal, Stevens recorded the incongruity between Crane’s “brave, aspiring, hard-working life” and the “commonplace, bare, silly service” with its inattentive and disengaged attendees. It’s the imagery of “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” and a moment that should be a fable—here, a story of the shift toward determined literary modernity, the ambiguous burial of the past. Even testimony from Crane’s admirers opened and closed avenues simultaneously. Ernest Hemingway advised, “The good writers are Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain.” But which Twain? Which Crane? Even which James—and which Hemingway, for that matter? This isn’t even to mention Crane’s packing everything into a dreadfully short life. In acknowledgement of that life’s intensity, Paul Auster has titled his new biography of Crane Burning Boy (Henry Holt, 2021).

Auster’s imaginative investment in Crane at first seems surprising. Crane doesn’t typically appear among the recurrent literary figures who most engage him: writers such as Poe, Hawthorne, Nabokov, and Beckett, who share Auster’s narrative self-consciousness and intertextual tricksiness. No other contemporary novelist embraces the imaginative possibilities of belatedness as Auster does, refuting the claim that to be belated is a lamentable burden. Even so, why Crane? Auster states that one motivation for this biography was a fear that Crane is no longer “there” for general readers; that his writing exists for scholars and critics but not, to use his example, for his own daughter’s generation. It’s a laudable though perhaps misplaced motive. A more telling one might be Auster’s kinship with Crane in their sense of locality. Crane’s New York of the 1890s has an oblique but potent relation with Auster’s celebrated New York Trilogy (1985–1986), and in some of the strongest parts of the biography, Auster engages brilliantly with Crane’s depictions of the developing metropolis. More generally he and Crane share a need to articulate the individual’s dislocation in urban modernity and the consequent demand to reconfigure the actualities of the self.

Although Auster acknowledges his fear of Crane’s neglect, it’s worth pointing out that Crane has been extraordinarily well-served by at least two generations of critics, editors, and biographers, and his work has been in print continuously. The 10-volume University Press of Virginia edition was completed by 1976, and that massive Library of America volume was among the earliest publications in that prestigious series, which started in 1982. There are also numerous memoirs of Crane by journalists, colleagues, and admiring contemporaries such as Joseph Conrad, which Auster uses well. In addition, there are already significant biographies: by John Berryman in 1950, by R. W. Stallman in 1969, and, fairly recently, by Paul Sorrentino in 2014. This all testifies to Crane as an enduring presence—and of course he’s there (if slightly and perhaps appropriately obscured)—in the 1960s’ pantheon that’s the cover of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Any literary biographer must address the question of what a writer means now and which works may survive into the future. Auster wrestles with this issue throughout the biography, which, he states, is very much one writer’s encounter with another. About two-thirds of the way through the book’s almost 800 pages, he bluntly declares, “In the end, Crane’s reputation stands on six essential works: Maggie, The Red Badge of Courage, ‘The Open Boat,’ The Monster, ‘The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,’ and ‘The Blue Hotel.’” Anyone who has reflected on, taught, or supervised research on Crane will find it hard to disagree with this proposal and with how nicely it fits in with—and perhaps fills a supposed lack in—American literary history. Here he is then: Crane the prose writer who is the key to naturalism, conveniently occupying the perceived gap between the end of the American Renaissance and the stirrings of Modernism; Crane as the only begetter of Hemingway and the subsequent manly American mandate to write what you know. Indeed, Crane as the creative father of Hemingway is given literal credence here. As Auster (surely one of literature’s greatest lovers of coincidence) delightedly points out, Crane’s former girlfriend Grace Hall eventually married Dr. Clarence Hemingway of Illinois, becoming mother to the boy whom E.E. Cummings scathingly called “lil Oinis.”

Going back to those six supposedly essential works, the obvious omission is Crane’s poetry, from the two volumes The Black Riders (1895) and War is Kind (1899). In this biography, Auster is preoccupied with literary and cultural remembrance and at times perhaps exaggerates the need for Crane to be rescued from putative oblivion. It’s hard to gauge any sense of posterity from curricula or syllabi, but in terms of Crane’s poetry, he surely endures, with his poems consistently featured in influential anthologies. In my own first bumbling readings of American poetry as an undergraduate in England in the late 1970s, Crane was an intriguing and disturbing presence. Not quite Whitman and not quite Dickinson but someone who, like them, seemed to me truly American in recalling the very origins of poetry and wanting to start it all over again. Crane seems at times to have viewed his poems as a sideline or an aberration. “They came, and I wrote them,” he once said. That phrase alone should alert readers to the larger mystery of Crane and what he wanted to be as a writer—if he even knew.

But that question of the poems and of how they connect with Crane overall is a vexed one, and Auster tends to be cautious, and a bit disengaged, in his response. Crane’s poems now strike readers most with their abstractions, their elementalism. Writers of realist fiction are expected to reproduce some kind of human actuality, rooted in place, time, and moment—they should avoid the “once upon a time” (or whilom in archaic English) beginning. Crane’s prose is generally, if at times idiosyncratically, obedient to this, even though his most rooted fiction is set in “Whilomville.” The poems take lyric concept so far away from the actualities of time and place that they partake of the imaginative possibilities of fable. Consider “In the Desert,” arguably his signature poem:

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said: “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter – bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”

Taut, elemental, compressed—no wonder Joyce Carol Oates used the final two lines as the title of her 1990 novel. Here’s William Blake fast forwarded 100 years and beyond, but it’s still an essential Crane poem. Essential here means not just something emblematic but something that nudges toward poetry’s very essence and boundaries. Crane’s work is concerned with origins, spells, magic, appeasement, engagement with the primitive.

Crane’s poetic extends those of Whitman and Dickinson in refuting the concept of poetry as palliative. He typically undermines any self-confirming complacency. Robert Frost (born just three years after Crane) called poetry a “momentary stay against confusion,” thus affirming its capacity for articulating and thereby organizing and confirming selfhood. Crane challenges the idea that language is self-affirming and doesn’t represent supposed human control of it as an antidote to chaos. The Modernist ideal of Poundian coherence is already ruptured by Crane’s insistence on the arbitrariness of the actual and on the need for the poet to be true to this:

A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

This aspect of Crane’s poetry appealed most to Berryman, who, among Crane’s more recent champions, remains the most committed. His intense creative involvement with Crane in the 1940s as he worked on the biography was a creative pathway for him and is behind two key pronouncements Berryman made on poetry’s origins and purpose. The first is from a 1959 review reprinted in Berryman’s posthumous essay collection The Freedom of the Poet (1976): “Poetry is a terminal activity, taking place near the end of things, where the poet’s soul addresses one other soul only, never mind when. And it aims … at the reformation of the poet, as prayer does.” (Note Berryman's characteristic sheer audacity of “never mind when.”) Like Blake—or Dickinson, whose work was largely unavailable to Crane because it wasn’t published until 1890—Crane restores an elemental moment of being to poetry, simultaneously metonymic yet redolent of contemporary actuality.

Auster engages positively with Crane’s poetry when he feels obliged to address it, noting that the poems “plant themselves in the mind and are not soon forgotten.” But there could be so much more of Auster himself in that encounter. More than any other living novelist, Auster can luminously invoke “terminal activity” beyond place’s detailed literalness, as he does in the Trilogy, Moon Palace (1989), and elsewhere. He has incisively and emotionally engaged with Beckett, triggering a longing for him to reflect critically on Crane’s poetic landscapes, which suggest a proleptic imaginative affinity with Beckett’s. Never mind when or even where. Crane’s deracinated lyrics might as well possess the same iterative stage directions as Waiting for Godot: “A country road. A tree. Evening”; “Next day. Same time. Same place.”

In the 1940s, Berryman wrote poems in the same enervated, abstracted register he encountered in Crane, which he developed in more tonally excessive and contextualized ways in The Dream Songs (1969). His 1940s poem “The Traveler” echoes Crane perhaps too directly: “They pointed me out on the highway, and they said / ‘That man has a curious way of holding his head.’” Indeed, it’s hard not to read Crane with Berryman in mind—some of the War is Kind lyrics seem embryonic of Berryman’s literary alter ego, Henry. Here’s Crane:

Once a man clambering to the house-tops
Appealed to the heavens.
With strong voice he called to the deaf spheres;
A warrior’s shout he raised to the suns.

And here’s Berryman from his first “Dream Song”:

What he has now to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.
Once in a sycamore I was glad
all at the top and I sang.

Berryman modulates his poetic voice to incorporate humor and many other interactions—yet the same sense of poetry stripped to its essence carries forward from Crane, as does his articulation of panic (from “Dream Song 46”: “I am, outside. Incredible panic rules.”).

Here’s Berryman’s second crucial remark about poetry, from his biography of Crane. Though he’s riffing on Robert Graves’s The White Goddess (1948), Berryman’s insight derives directly from his reading of Crane:

A savage dreams, is frightened by the dream, and goes to the medicine man to have it explained. The medicine man … chants, perhaps he stamps his foot … what he says becomes rhythmical … and what he says begins to rhyme. Poetry begins—as a practical matter, for use.

For Berryman, Crane invoked some spirit that predates written or printed poetry, with its metres, rhymes, and conventional typography. The Black Riders, disconcertingly (for Amy Lowell and others), was printed in full capital letters throughout, exaggerating yet utilizing modern typography and becoming the visible language that scholar Jerome McGann has attended to, which led to his titling his renowned 1993 study Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism after Crane’s collection. There’s no more potent metaphor for print than Black Riders—it’s the word as concrete opacity rather than the window to the real. But once more, Crane is problematic on this issue. Though he insisted that the poems of his first collection should be published in block capitals, he seems not to have cared about their subsequent printing nor how his other works should appear.

There’s still scholarly work to do on what Crane meant to Berryman, who perceived a sort of brotherhood deriving from their both losing fathers at a formative age. (Berryman’s father committed suicide when the poet was 11.) The Dream Songs are facilitated by what Crane opened up—at the very least in terms of their objective to be what the critic Daniel Hughes memorably called “spells for survival.” Crane also provides two of the potentially numerous avatars of Berryman’s Henry: Henry Fleming, the vulnerable, ambiguous “hero” of The Red Badge of Courage, and Henry Johnson, the disfigured African American heroic survivor/scapegoat of The Monster.

Though Auster refers only briefly to Berryman’s biography of Crane, Auster’s approach clearly shares that aspect of one creative writer reading another—looking at what Auster calls “the nuts and bolts of how it is done.” He is at times rather defensive about Crane, as though this biography is mainly about retrieving an endangered animal from the extinction list. That, alas, brings to mind the supposed “gap” that Crane occupies. Auster determinedly represents Crane as the only major writer between the American Renaissance and Modernism. But the writing that Auster represents as periods is really rather fluid, and Auster’s historicizing approach shows something of his self-imposed limitations. There really isn’t a kind of American literary Sahara for seven decades between the two extraordinary years of 1851 and 1922, though Auster wants to present the period as just that. Crane’s own influence and his critical reception depended a good deal on the development of naturalism in the 1890s and his affinity with a number of emerging writers at the time. He inscribed Maggie to Hamlin Garland (surely not the forgotten writer that Auster represents) with naturalism’s snappiest slogan: “environment is a tremendous thing in the world and frequently shapes lives regardless.” Similarly, in the opening chapter of The Red Badge of Courage, Henry Fleming’s mother warns him that he’s “jest one little feller amongst a hull lot of others.”

Many writers developed in the 1890s, including Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Kate Chopin, all of whom explored similar thematic and stylistic territory as Crane. Moreover, that decade was the setting for the emergence of Twain’s pessimism, the ascendancy of Rudyard Kipling, the development of the social sciences, the US cult of masculinity, and the growing internationalisation of literature. Crane’s insistent influence certainly extended into the 20th century via Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, and John Steinbeck, among many others. However, Auster’s representation of Crane is somehow idiomatic, and beyond Crane’s friendship with Conrad and, more tangentially, with James and D.H. Lawrence, the other writers of this period are virtually nonexistent in Auster’s book. Indeed, Auster seems to have no faith in his own putative readers. Surely some won’t think of Garland and Howells as forgotten and will know (Auster thinks they won’t) that upstate New York is the setting for The Last of the Mohicans.

Still, Auster presents a readable, engaging biography with great strengths, notably in his extended creative responses to the prose works, especially “The Open Boat” and the now mostly ignored romantic novel The Third Violet (1897). A clear narrative thread follows complex topics such as Crane’s family associations and his assistance to Dora Clark, a prostitute who embroiled Crane in her lawsuit over wrongful arrest—the same imbroglio that eventually led Crane to flee New York. At the same time, readers are inevitably left with gaps, with mystery, and sometimes Crane seems to disappear from his own biography altogether—exactly that kind of elusiveness that emerges as his main characteristic.

Even after 800 pages, a clear sense of why—or a feeling that Crane himself knew why—he wrote is missing. His muddled, self-contradictory negotiations with publishers obscure whether he wrote for money or some other purpose, and as often as Crane despised the literary marketplace, he equally demanded that it support him. As Auster points out, Crane wasn’t quite a journalist, wasn’t really a war correspondent, and the aims he had for his fiction were sometimes incongruous. The Third Violet, for instance, just seems to grow out of a different fictive soil than that of the other works, and Auster expends considerable energy in showing how this neglected novel can be accommodated to Crane’s overall vision. But Crane remains an opaque figure in so many ways. Did he really propose marriage to his old flame Lily Brandon Monroe in New York while he was supposedly making arrangements for his journey back to England and his waiting common-law wife, Cora? Who knows? Crane’s opacity rightly, though maddeningly, endures even after Auster’s lucid, deeply researched, imaginative interrogations. As for his literary motives, perhaps all that can be done is repeat what Crane said about the poems: “They came, and I wrote them.”