Riders of the Imagination: George Monteiro on Stephen Crane Studies

Scholar and poet George Monteiro, Professor Emeritus of English and of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University, was first introduced to Stephen Crane as a subject in 1954 while studying for his master’s degree at Columbia University. “I can recall sitting, one gray autumn afternoon, in Columbia University’s Butler Library,” Monteiro told me, “reading John Berryman’s book on Crane, not because it was assigned in any of my courses, but because of my interest in Ernest Hemingway,” who had cited Crane as one of his most important forerunners.¹ Since that first afternoon in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of upper Manhattan devouring Berryman’s foundational 1950 biography Stephen Crane, Monteiro has authored over sixty articles, notes, and reviews directly pertaining to Crane—an average of more than one a year for over half a century—along with scores of other articles, monographs, translations, and edited collections in English and Portuguese on writers as diverse as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Luís Vaz de Camões, and Fernando Pessoa. Monteiro’s prodigious body of Crane scholarship culminated in Stephen Crane’s Blue Badge of Courage (2000) and offered an ideal foundation for the edited volume, Stephen Crane: The Contemporary Reviews (2009).

No urban dweller by background, Monteiro was born and raised in the small village of Valley Falls in the township of Cumberland, Rhode Island. Alice R. Clemente, a close friend of his since elementary school, describes their hometown as “one of those nineteenth/early twentieth-century mill villages nestled on the banks of the Blackstone River in a region historians now call ‘the cradle of American industry’” (148). New York City was thus a revelation for the 22-year-old Portuguese-New Englander and recent Brown University graduate, who notes that “New York was definable—as it might still be, though more ironically—as ‘accessibility to experience’ (Marianne Moore’s words).” “Having come from a small university,” he continues, “I found Columbia enormous, especially by the day’s standards. All day long and well into the evening its twenty-five thousand students (it seemed) crossed and criss-crossed the heart of the campus at West 116th street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue.” Perhaps most important for the emergent scholar, Monteiro’s English professors at Columbia loomed large as the undisputed titans of twentieth-century literary criticism. “All I had to do was pay attention and I could legitimately consider myself to be a (minor) party to big literary doings. In Philosophy Hall new students paused to read the names on the office doors.” The “names” in question included F. W. Dupee, William York Tindall, Eric Bentley, Lionel Trilling, Richard Chase, Lewis Leary, Suzanne K. Nobbe, Roger Sherman Loomis, and Marjorie Hope Nicholson (then head of the English Department), among others. Monteiro never took a class with Lionel Trilling, the department’s brightest star, but Trilling’s influence on him has always been immense: “When I found it difficult to begin writing a paper, I would then (and for years afterwards) read in The Liberal Imagination on any topic whatsoever until I felt inspired enough to go back to my own writing, usually on a topic foreign to Trilling’s concerns” (“Notes on Columbia”).

Indeed, in 1955 Monteiro was writing his thesis, under the direction of Daniel G. Hoffman, on a topic no doubt “foreign to Trilling’s concerns,” Monteiro adds, entitled “Sports in the Writings of Ernest Hemingway.” Hoffman, now a legendary poet and critic, was then a Ph.D. candidate working on a dissertation examining Crane’s poetry, a study based largely on new acquisitions at Columbia’s library that he soon after expanded into his seminal book The Poetry of Stephen Crane (1957). Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library had just obtained, auspiciously for Monteiro and Hoffman, a raft of primary Crane material that still stands, along with collections at Syracuse University and the University of Virginia, as one of the most important repositories for Crane scholarship. After reading Berryman’s biography, Monteiro...