There's More to New Jersey than the Sopranos

22 The Ghostly Sphynx of Metedeconk

108 There’s More to New Jersey . . . we regard the Junior Order of United American Mechanics with high respect and hold its principles worthy of all emulation.” The apology didn’t much help; Reid’s Republican ticket lost the election. Of course, everybody had missed the point of Crane’s piece. He wasn’t insulting the marchers so much as the rich who looked down on them. Stephen and his brother Townley got the axe: articles from the news bureau were no longer welcome in the Tribune. But the younger Crane seemed to be pleased and surprised at the power of his words. “You’d hardly think a little innocent chap like me could have stirred up such a row in American politics,” he boasted.“It shows what innocence can do if it has the opportunity.” When Crane returned to New York after the scandal, the Tribune editor who had mistakenly run his parade piece (and was called on the carpet for it) took Crane aside and suggested that a writer with his talent should stop wasting his time producing empty fluff. Crane took that advice. He retrieved a manuscript he had been working on fitfully for years, rewrote it, and borrowed money to get it published . The book was Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, now considered a pioneering novel of social realism. It is suffused with the same anger as the article about the Junior Mechanics. It was followed by The Red Badge of Courage, along with short stories, poems, and frontline reports from the Spanish-American War. Between that summer in Asbury Park and his premature death from tuberculosis eight years later at age twenty-eight, Crane became one of the greatest writers in the English-speaking world. The parade of the Junior Mechanics had quite unexpected consequences for Stephen Crane and for American literature. 22 The Ghostly Sphynx of Metedeconk There is another piece of Stephen Crane’s writing that deserves our attention. It is not great literature like The Red Badge of The Ghostly Sphynx of Metedeconk 109 Courage, and it did not have the profound effect on his career as did his Junior Mechanics article. But it’s worth a look as Jersey-related entertainment . We’re talking here about two articles on the subject of ghosts on the Jersey Shore that Crane churned out in his hungry freelance days, when he was earning five dollars a column. The first of the ghost articles appeared in the New York Press in November 1894; the second in January 1895. The articles carried no byline, and the author was identified only as a “Special Correspondent.” Except for a bit of literary detective work, we might never have known that they were written by the twenty-three-yearold Crane. It seems that his common-law wife, Cora, kept a scrapbook of her husband’s work; after her death, the notebook was acquired by the Columbia University library, where it was examined by an expert on Crane, Professor Daniel G. Hoffman of Swarthmore. In the red scrapbook with its broken binding, the professor came across the ghost stories lovingly pasted in by Cora. On this basis, Professor Hoffman decided that the stories were Crane’s, and they have since become a part of the collected works. Professor Hoffman notes that there is nothing pathbreaking about these stories. Although they have the flavor of the Jersey Shore, they are inhabited by the stock plots and character types that were hackneyed even in the 1890s—the spirit of a fierce black dog guards his master’s grave, an evil Indian hunts for the wife he murdered, a dead Tory captain weeps for the rebels he killed, a phantom pirate ship cruises the inlets, two ghostly lovers keep a tryst by the ocean. What is pure Crane is the quality of the writing. Crane describes the violent surf as “a white smothering riot of water,” a drowning sailor from a distance looks like “a black bead on this wild fabric of white foam,” and a dog howls in the “indescribable key of woe.” It also has about it Crane’s pessimistic view of humans caught up in an uncaring universe. Crane probably picked up some elements of his ghost stories from local folk along the Jersey Shore. Crane himself said that the area was filled with legends of the supernatural:“It can truly be said that more hair has risen on the New Jersey shore than any other known place...