Down and Out in New York: the fact and fiction of Stephen Crane 1893-4

                                    

 Better known for his war stories, Stephen Crane (1871-1900) also wrote powerfully about the experiences of New York’s poorest citizens. His early short stories resonate with the sorrows of humanity, of dark figures huddled up on cellar stairs, on cold park benches and down filthy alleyways. His chosen locations reflect an urban brutality, the harshness of poverty and the futility of individual attempts to exercise free will. Many of his characters display a mute incomprehension at their misfortune or marginalisation, as the march of progress leaves them behind. They are anonymous and abandoned, too down-trodden to exercise any form of solidarity or resistance.

Crane had first-hand experience of the New York slums. Whilst visiting the city in 1891-2, he slept in the cheapest Bowery shelters and observed the dehumanising struggle for survival on the streets. In a 1909 study, social commentator Ignatz Nascher described the cheapest accommodation available to the destitute, from the ten cents per night dormitories where men slept on wooden planks, one row above the other, softened by straw; to the five cents “stalls” divided off a corridor, or suspended bunk-like strips of canvas. Worst of all were the flophouses at the rear of tenements, or the Municipal Lodging houses, where the poorest had to strip and hand over their clothing before being allocated a bed in a crowded room. Their garments were returned damp, crumpled and “disinfected” in the morning. Nascher found people asleep in the public toilets and the photographs of his contemporary, Jacob Riis, expose the regular use of corners, cellars, bridges, police cells, corridors, parks and saloon floors as places of rest. By Riis’ calculation, in 1890, more than half New York’s lodging houses were in the Bowery, sheltering three quarters of the homeless. These rapidly became breeding grounds “for more beggary and crime” where young men in “nine cases out of ten …turn out a thief, or a burglar…if not…a murderer.”

"Happy Jack's Canvas Palace-" a cheap doss house photographed by Jacob Riis 1890s

Central New York at the time was a city of paradoxes: in the Jamesian brownstone mansions of Fifth Avenue and north to Central Park, the rich lived in privilege only a few blocks away from the crippling poverty of the immigrant tenements. One of Crane’s protagonists catches a glimpse of prosperous New York society, which puts his life firmly into context. Contrasting his “old garments” with those of well-dressed passers-by, he identifies the “infinite distance” between them and the impossibility of attaining the “unconquerable kingdoms” of “social comfort” and “the pleasures of living;” neither can he understand their “confusion of strange tongues.”

The 1900 census listed nearly three and a half million people living in the Manhattan district, in an era when the city was approaching the “apogee of its self-confidence,” a vibrant cultural mix enhanced by expansion outwards and upwards. Between 1880 and 1920, two million Jews from Russia, Poland, Austria-Hungary and the Balkans established their own ghettoes in the tenements on the lower East side. These slums were among the poorest districts in the city, unhealthy, overcrowded and unsafe, although efforts were being made to bring the plight of their inhabitants to public attention: legislation in 1879, 1887 and 1895 had attempted to improve standards but the ever increasing population, coupled with inflation and low wages meant more and more people were crammed into unsanitary conditions. Manhattan’s 42,000 tenement blocks listed in 1900, housed over a million and a half people. Yet even below this, there existed an underclass, a huge mass of disenfranchised men and women, eking out an existence on the streets.

                A crowded Lower East Side tenement, home to immigrant workers 1890s

 Two of Crane’s stories of 1894; “An Experiment in Misery” and “The Men in the Storm;” transform his experiences into hellish metaphors where the city and even the weather are enemies of the dispossessed. Their lowly status makes them a target for the malice of wind and rain, one among the dumb, oppressed animals, flowing like “rivers” of “aimless men like chickens in a storm.” The elevated railway squats over the street like a pre-Kafkaesque “monstrous kind of crab” and the protagonist is “swallowed” by a saloon. In some ways, the city itself seems equally, if not more alive than the anonymous crowds, in a relationship of mutual harm.

 The men in the storm, in the story of the same title, huddle in a homogenous mass in the rain while they await the opening of a shelter. The snow is a malignant force, as if the crowd’s lowly status makes it a justifiable target; it “seeks out men’s meagre hiding places,” and “skilfully beats in among them,” making their faces “tingle and burn” as if attacked by “a thousand needle-prickings.” In the belief that they deserve their fate, the men are “silent” and “impassive” in the blizzard, like “statues of patience” or the animalistic “sheep in a winter’s gale,” protected by each others’ bodies. They are spectators, marginalised by the city, blaming themselves, although Crane is clear that their failure lies outside themselves; they cannot “perceive where they had failed, what they lacked to be thus vanquished in the race;” a race that is markedly contrasting with their current statue-like patience. Until the shelter opens, these men are literally and metaphorically going nowhere.

                                      "Night in Gotham Court," 1894, Riis.

In his 1893 novella “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets,” Crane presents a young woman whose frail charms were destroyed by forces beyond her control. Maggie had many real life precedents but Crane many have drawn upon two specific girls whose stories had become urban legend. In the 1850s, Missionary workers in the Five Points district encountered Maggie Carson, disfigured by smallpox and the “sweet,” “lady-like,” “flaxen haired” Maggie Ryan, both of whom were taken off the streets and found “positions” with “good” families. Their tales were blended by the New York Tribune into that of “wild Maggie,” to underline the effects of environment upon the development of character, a theme picked up by other philanthropic writers of the time.

Cruel treatment causes Crane’s young Maggie; “a small ragged girl;” to retreat; her “side glances” betray a “fear of interruption” while she eats like a “pursued tigress,” her features “haggard from weeping,” her eyes “gleaming with fear.” Her tenement home is a hellish vision: a “dark region” of a “careening” building containing “gruesome doorways.” Odours of cooking assault the senses and overcrowding contributes to the sense of a constant audience and precarious existence: the building “quivered and creaked from the weight of humanity stamping about in its bowels.”

Sexual temptation proves to be her downfall.  The cheap Bowery beer hall and theatre create the illusion of splendour and a fictional ideal of values. She is seduced by a cheap simulacra of Parisian culture: an orchestra of women in yellow silk, boys in “costumes of French chefs,” chandeliers and “fancy cakes,” losing herself in calculation of the “cost of the silks and laces.” Her seduction is easily accomplished, followed by her descent into prostitution and death. Maggie’s suicide is associated with the “gloomy” darkness of the river. The reader’s last glimpse of her is gliding Ophelia-like among “wet wanderers in attitudes of chronic dejection,” towards “tall black factories” lit only by the occasional beam of light. Prostitution has cast her into the lowest echelons of society, among men with “blotched features,” “shifting bloodshot eyes and grimy hands.”

                                           "A Little Mother" c1890, Riis 

Grim as these details are, Crane’s intention was to provoke social change. In contrast with the jolly rags-to-riches tales by uplifting authors like Horatio Alger, he did not shy away from delving into the lowest depths of the city to explore exactly how terrible life had become for those on the margins of society. The “ghoulishness” some of his privileged readers accused him of, was actually bravery. The timelessness of his world-wearied, neglected characters serves as an unpleasant reminder of the inequalities of today’s society. Modern parallels of his stories can be found living in equally appalling conditions on the streets of our cities.

Crane’s life was regrettably short. He produced the novel which made his name, “The Red Badge of Courage” at the age of twenty four and succumbed to tuberculosis four years later. In that short space of time, he worked as a war correspondent during the Spanish-American conflict and lived with a brothel-keeper in Sussex, befriending Conrad and H.G.Wells. He worked feverishly, was frequently ill and poverty-stricken. His death at the age of twenty-eight curtailed the flowering of a major literary genius and potential social reformer.

No place for the Innocent.

"The Great Gatsby" and F.Scott Fitzgerald’s New York.

Published in 1925, the decadent romance of The Great Gatsby remains as alluring and elusive as ever. It is a tale of lost illusions, almost hagiographical, as narrator Nick Carraway deifies his dead friend in a way that speaks volumes about his devotion and causes some critics to question his sexuality. By the novel’s end, adultery, accidental death, betrayal and murder leave the naïve Carraway longing to return to the simpler, family-oriented life he had previously struggled to escape. The louche sophistication of New York, with its casual liaisons and broken promises cuts to the heart of the American Dream, of which Carraway is made a victim by his fundamental sense of fair play and loyalty. As Gatsby’s disciples fade away, only he is left, to organise the funeral and meet the dead millionaire’s father: it is a bitter lesson for a young man.

In a moment of poignant realisation, Carraway concludes his story with a lament for an idealised pre-Lapsian American landscape; an old, innocent life of fresh air and nature. Adopting the perspective of the Seventeenth Century Dutch settlers for whom the old island “flowered,” with a “fresh green breast,” stilling them in an “enchanted moment” of “aesthetic contemplation,” he regrets the country’s metaphoric lost purity and his own more recent awakening. This nostalgia for the vision of a clean, bright motherland offers a bittersweet message at the end of the novel: he sees the national impetus for self and social betterment, the belief that “tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further…” as self-defeating. The American Dream is an elusive grail, its capture elliptically suggested “one fine morning” but never realised, making the Platonic quests of “modern” (1920s) Americans as futile as “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”  It is upon this flawed, irretrievable vision that Carraway pins the failure of Gatsby’s vision; his warning “you can’t repeat the past” cannot correct his friend’s blindness to the dark side of his dream: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.” Ironically the greenness of the light inviting Gatsby to pursue his dream is a false, man-made version of the true verdant landscape of the country’s innocence.

But perhaps there is more to Carraway’s yearnings. As a Mid-West American, he is an outsider, a social migrant and his ruminations are underlined by the experiences of migrants and immigrants of all nationalities, whose presence swelled the districts of central New York in the decades either side of the turn of the last century: by 1900, six out of every ten children in the city were not native born. They flocked to the city to escape poverty and persecution, dreaming of a better life where a nobody could rise to become president. Anything was considered possible in the socially-mobile new world, a dream voiced by Carraway as Gatsby’s car passes over the Queensboro’ bridge, but his “anything could happen” springs from the seemingly magical possibilities that wealth and privilege can bring, inspired by the “wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world” of the “sugar lump…city seen for the first time.”  At the other end of the social scale, vast crowds flocked to take advantage of an economy that was years ahead of Europe, sometimes to find the reality was just as harsh as that they had left behind, complicated by the territorial warfare of over-crowded tenement districts, such as those photographed so powerfully by social reformer Jacob Riis.

 Fitzgerald’s view of the city is elitist and selective; a distorted fantasy of opportunity which contradicts some evocations of New York at the time, such as Henry Roth’s “Call it Sleep,” and the short stories of Anzia Yezierska, whilst later works like E.L.Doctrow’s “Ragtime” attempt to unite these seemingly disparate halves. Using a similar narrative of awakening, Doctrow fiercely undermines his child narrator’s innocence, following “there were no negroes. There were no immigrants,” a page later with; “apparently there were negroes. There were Immigrants.” A certain tense inversion of expectations is sensed as Gatsby’s car travels over the Queensboro’ bridge, passed by a limousine driven by a white chauffeur “in which sat three modish negroes…the yolks of their eyeballs rolled towards us in haughty rivalry” but this only causes Nick amusement, as do Tom Buchanan’s pronouncements about the threat to the “Nordic race.” Carraway’s and Fitzgerald’s concerns do not lie with the immigrants; it is simply a struggle that pits them against each other and Nick’s lack of solidarity with them is part of his essential detachment. He has come to the city in search of excitement, on the flimsy pretext of a dull job and the marriage of his cousin Daisy. Secretive and reticent, he serves as the foil to Gatsby’s ebullience: the rest of New York can take care of itself.

                                Robert Redford as Gatsby in the 1974 film

There is a tone of jaded sophistication in the fey Daisy Buchanan’s early inertia and existential wondering; “what’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon…and the day after that, and the next thirty years.” Even though the Great War was physically and emotionally removed from the characters of East and West Egg, there is a sense of Americans having come through differing periods of personal crisis. Carraway looks back with nostalgia to the regimented simplicity of conflict; “I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever;” Gatsby’s uniform allowed him to access a social set that he was usually denied, with cataclysmic results and even Daisy stresses recent suffering; “I’ve had a very bad time…and I’m pretty cynical about everything.” These blithe hints at traumas, real or imagined, partly explain the exhaustive hedonism of the era but do not excuse its excesses, as this pain is never fully developed for the reader and subsequently appears less real than the pain of love, or social disillusionment. The pangs of the rich are in stark relief to the real suffering of those struggling to make ends meet in the hinterland between New York and the mansions of West Egg.

Fitzgreald creates a similar no-mans land in the T.S.Eliot inspired wasteland lying between the playgrounds of the rich in “The Great Gatsby”. The location of the valley of ashes stresses not only the economic dependence of the Wilsons but the equally real practical dependence of figures like Gatsby and the Buchanans upon this silent, grey underclass of mechanics, butlers and servants who facilitate their world. To travel from West Egg to New York, the motorist has no choice but to pass through this powerful memento-mori landscape, hurrying as if it could infect them; even travellers by train cannot escape it; “the motor road hastily joins the railroad…so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land.” The valley of ashes has an active malevolent force, a compulsive power that could pull travellers off their path, to be absorbed in the quagmire of greyness; its terror lies in the fact that death appears to be its life force, it flourishes on death, self-regenerating, Greek-myth style, with an army of ashes “growing” like wheat into a landscape of the “grotesque,” a colourless mockery of the real, vibrant life Fitzgerald contrasts through Gatsby’s identification with the colour yellow. In this barren inert world, life itself requires “a transcendent effort.” Its inhabitants are “ash-grey men,” even Wilson, showing the “faintly handsome” traces of former health has become “spiritless and anaemic.” He is enveloped by a symbolic “white dust,” which also veils “everything in the vicinity” and blends him into the “cement colour of the walls.” Tom Buchanan’s arrival brings the possibility of life, measured by the transference of colour; “a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes,” but the only other glimmers of pigment; the billboard eyes; are “dimmed” by weather and “paintless days.” The incongruity of Myrtle Wilson’s presence is made apparent through opposites; she is colourful, “smouldering” and “sensuous” in comparison with the “ghost” of a husband she walks through. Her physical vitality and her association with Tom make her immune to the all pervasive “white dust” but this is deceptive, for in drawing away from what she perceives to be death, she propels herself towards her own violent demise. Both Myrtle and Gatsby are classic over-reachers whose hectic efforts to live life to the full result in their own inevitable destruction.

This “solemn dumping ground” acts like a cancer or tumour on the healthy surrounding world. Its efforts are all feeble and sickly; it is its own graveyard; “occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest.” This bathetic reminder of death as the necessary result of life, essential for regeneration, shows the reader how the colourful charismatic lifestyle of West Egg is brought full circle; the valley of ashes provides the cars and fuel and reclaims them after use; a powerful metaphor for the human life cycle, attributing the garage and the billboard eyes with a higher sense of the purpose and ultimate end of all life. It is the valley of ashes, which reminds us that death is the great leveller, regardless of morals and wealth. The drawbridge over the “small foul river” forces the passing cars to sit and wait in enforced contemplation of the “dismal scene” for up to half an hour. The very randomness of this descending trap itself echoes the unpredictable call of death and the ever-present sense of doom that permeates the entire landscape of the novel. Fitzgerald’s emphasis on the lack of control the motorists have over their period of waiting clarifies how the innocent are equally as likely to become trapped as the guilty.

Nick Carraway finds the bleakness of the valley of ashes almost impossible to accept. He romanticises what he finds distasteful until reality later shatters his illusions; “this shadow of a garage must be a blind…sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead.” Carraway’s belief in the treasure trove, the secret wealth hidden away from the grim reality is based on stories of gangsters and luxury in New York, a romance that quickly fractures when it breaks through Gatsby’s fragile idyll. A similar dishonesty oozes from the furnishings and artefacts of Tom and Myrtle’s New York apartment. Myrtle’s indulgences, paid for by Tom; gossip magazines, a puppy, cold cream and perfume; indicate her ultimate goals of luxury, to which Tom is her passport. In possession of these, having twice changed her clothes and arriving at her “long white cake” of an apartment, she casts off her previous role as easily as an actress, “throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighbourhood.” Inside the flat, the “tapestried furniture” covered with Fragonard-style swing images echo a lost grandeur and social aspiration that belies the adulterous and brutal reality of their relationship. Myrtle’s furnishings smack of the desperate hopes of fabricating herself a new identity. Her uneasy social status is reflected in the ambiguity of other details; the photograph that tricks the eye, the dog biscuit “decomposing apathetically:” it is among these trophies of refinement that Tom breaks her nose. Even Carraway’s deteriorating perceptions mirror this subjectivity; “either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn’t make any sense to me.” His seemingly innocent pseudo-religious read; “Simon called Peter,” was in reality a contemporary work of soft pornography. The surreal, elliptical break down of narrative at the end of this chapter, propelling him from the bedside to the four o’clock morning train, reminds the reader of the fluid nature of the city and the existence of pockets of resistance to the general climate.

Carraway’s relationship with New York, is that of observer rather than real participator: in Myrtle and Tom’s flat, his impulse is to “get out and walk Eastwards towards the park through the soft twilight” and imagines himself “within and without,” looking up from the “darkening streets,” his “enchanted” attraction and “repulsion” echoing the dual nature of the city. New York is more alive for Nick than it is for Gatsby: location has a more powerful pull than people; he leaves behind his family for adventure in the West and fails to make any real personal connections, save that with Gatsby which only gains real significance as a result of Gatsby’s death, elevating him to the status of biographer. He drifts in and out of a half union with the morally ambiguous Jordan, while other incidental cast members remain unnamed; the “friend,” “other clerks,” and “girl who loved in New Jersey” are far less real than the “racy adventurous” city, with its bittersweet polarity of crowded “enchanted metropolitan twilight” and “haunting loneliness.” One of a crowd of dislocated, drifting “young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life,” Carraway feels the voyeuristic thrill of the observer and the “sinking heart” of the outsider. His New York is a glamorous composite of hotels, parties, restaurants, bright lights and the bustle of crowded streets and theatre goers, where people “hurry towards gaiety,” a grown up playground where the dark side can be sensed by not visualised.

Even though Nick Carraway recognises the city as “superior” to the “sprawling swollen towns beyond the Ohio,” he eventually decides to return home to the West, possessing some deficiency that made him “subtly unadaptable” to Eastern life. In retrospect, the city becomes “haunted,” “distorted beyond (his) eyes’ power of correction,” “a scene by El Greco,” both “conventional and grotesque,” devoid of lustre. One of his final images is the highly symbolic scene of men in dark suits carrying home a jewelled woman in white; no one knows the address “and no one cares.” For Carraway, the city is rotten at the core, infected by the disease of inertia and callous irresponsibility that has pervaded the glittering exterior.  The urban landscapes of “The Great Gatsby” are vibrant and complex in character, sustaining layered moral networks of goodness and innocence alongside vice and villainy. They are also highly subjective, shifting environments, constantly being reassessed and redefined with varying degrees of success by those who experience them from within and without. Their identities and distinct characteristics, influenced by global and local affairs are shown by the disillusioned narrator as able to permeate life in a more profound and lasting way than many human relations can. As Nick discovers, it is no place for the innocent.