Stephen Crane: The Contemporary Reviews (review)

George Monteiro’s Stephen Crane: The Contemporary Reviews is the most recent volume of Cambridge University Press’ American Critical Archives series; it offers American and British reviews and covers Stephen Crane’s nineteen books published from 1893 to 1903. (The 1893 and 1896 editions of Maggie are rightly considered two distinct works.) Monteiro specifies that he based a review’s inclusion on two factors: “(1) they provide perceptive commentary on Crane’s work, or (2) they express clearly and often strongly an important point of view regarding Crane’s achievement.” An appendix at the end of each book lists reviews that presumably did not meet these criteria. Monteiro’s introduction is masterfully written, surely the finest essay on Crane’s critical reception to date. In this narrative summary, Monteiro incorporates a generous sampling of responses from Crane’s literary admirers—Stevens, Faulkner, Hemingway, Saroyan—passages on Crane’s legacy that add intimacy and historical depth to the reviews that follow and temper the often fiery admonitions of his worst detractors.

Crane’s meteoric rise in letters with the release of The Red Badge of Courage in October 1895, his torrential output following that, and his untimely death at 28 made for engaging copy. Monteiro’s section on Red Badge in particular brings to mind the critical squabbling that accompanied Jonathan Franzen’s literary upset with the novel Freedom, which placed its author on the cover of Time in the spring of 2010. (Crane might have found himself there too had the magazine existed in the 1890s.) But in contrast to Franzen’s legendary restraint, in one decade (1893–1903) Crane and his publishers churned out volume after volume, a strategy met by many critics with stern disapproval. Crane’s reviewers tackled his unique style hard and fast. Indeed, what strikes me most in these reviews is the near total absence of a lackluster tone, what Dreiser calls “half-writing” in his meta-review of Red Badge. On the one hand, we find Crane compared to Poe, Tolstoy, Whitman, Kipling, Nietzsche, and Zola, and described as a true artist capable of conjuring a mental image “as wonderful as a picture by Claude Monet”; on the other, the author’s prose style is likened to the “plunkity-plunk, plunkity-plunk of the car wheels as you lie awake in the night” and reviled for its “shoddy pathos, sham colloquialisms, and the overdoing of a jerky style, with funny failures in word-painting and hifalutin description.”

Countless references are made to key subjects of Crane scholarship—literary impressionism, naturalism, the chromatic aspect of his work. Well over a dozen mention his realistic depictions of the “dialect and local color . . . of the Bowery.” Monteiro has elsewhere implored today’s critics “to extend Crane the courtesy of reading all (or at least more) of his work as if they were by Joyce or Chekhov or Hemingway.” This collection will no doubt aid that venture, though many reviewers collected here believed that Crane had, as the New York Times averred after his death, “crowded his brief years with work and missed the maturity of his powers by too eagerly anticipating it.” I would liked to have heard more about Monteiro’s process of selection and collection. We can ascertain, for instance, that the volume updates and amends Richard M. Weatherford’s Stephen Crane: The Critical Heritage (1973), though the exact distinction between the projects’ methodologies remains unclear. The cost will prevent all but the most devoted from owning it. But readers of ALR can do the next best thing—request copies for their local or university libraries. The book is indispensible for understanding Crane’s reception amid a clamorous, historically significant, and, dare I say, highly entertaining literary climate.