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.

Victorian Girls on the Loose in Paris.

An Adventure in the art capital of Europe.

                                         A class at the Ecole des Beaux Arts

The significance of artistic Paris in the last decade of the nineteenth century is difficult to overestimate. Writers and painters flocked there from all over Europe in search of greater freedom and opportunity; the launch of the Salon de Refusés and proliferation of dealers and smaller galleries offered a tantalising glimpse of avant-garde success unthinkable at home.

The 1880s and 90s had seen the star of Impressionism eclipsed by the likes of Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cezanne; new techniques were being explored by Symbolists, Synthetists, Primitivists and Expressionists. Anything seemed possible in artistic terms. The exciting experiments of the Fauves and Cubists lay in the future. Others were drawn by depictions of Bohemian life by popular authors such as George Du Maurier, Eugene Sue and Emile Zola as well as the comparatively low prices of studios, alcohol and café meals. This was the absinthe era. A spell in one of the Parisian art schools was seen as the way to develop skills in paint and colour and learn from the masters long before Roger Fry’s 1910 “Manet and the Post-Impressionists” exhibition at the Grafton Galleries brought them to the attention of a broader section of English society.

 The lure of fin-de-siecle Paris for young English women, was that of employment, love and artistic experience in a city where they could escape the strictures of the parental home. Three such girls who went off in search of adventure were recent Slade school graduates, Ida Nettleship, Gwen John and Gwen Salmond. Yet in 1898, they were the lucky ones. While Ida’s parents were supportive of her artistic endeavours and Gwen Salmond’s financial support eased the passage for them all, Gwen John had to fight to join her friends, falling out with her father in the process. Many women with Parisian ambitions met with initial resistance as their Victorian parents saw the trip as little more than an opportunity to misbehave. Kathleen Bruce, a sculptor who visited the city in 1901, wrote “…to say that a lass perhaps not out of her teens had gone prancing off to Paris to study art was to say that she had gone irretrievably to hell” and the undeniable freedoms encouraged by the relaxed atmosphere of late café hours was equally as attractive as the opportunity to study at one of the academies. There were understandable fears that the great masters might corrupt their students, leading at best to heartbreak in the case of Gwen John and Auguste Rodin; and at the worst, ruin.

                      Female arts students drawing from life at the Slade, London

First, they took rooms in a cheap hotel while they searched for lodgings but quickly moved on to rooms on the outskirts of the Latin Quarter at 226 Boulevard Raspail, which Ida wrote to reassure her mother was “a very old lady style of pension…looking down on a boulevard with rather brown rustling plane trees and cafes” on the “delightful” side of the river. However, they then found what they were looking for on the fifth floor of 12 rue Froidvaux; a wide leafy avenue in the cheaper Montparnasse district, which they mis-spelt as Froidveau and mis-translated as “cold beef”. The ground floor was a café but a separate side door gave them a degree of privacy and quiet, the balcony with “good views” overlooked the cemetery and the toilet was of the old variety, which required water being thrown down it. The elderly female concierge was “very high in character” and strict about visitors; “les dames, oui, mais les monsieurs? Non ! Jamais,” information which Ida was keen to pass on again to her mother: “all this is rather amusing but it will show you it is a respectable place.” It cost 900 francs, but Ida worked out their combined finances, planned for basic living expenses and decided they could afford it for three months. What finally swung them in its favour was its proximity to the Louvre and Julian’s Academy.

Their studio was basic and had clearly seen better days but the girls had great plans; “half the wall is covered with brown paper, and when we have spare time and energy we are going to cover the other half,” Ida wrote, but spare time was lacking amid their busy schedule of gallery visits, sketches and exploring the narrow streets for shops selling art supplies. They ate at an anarchists’ restaurant, from which some of the waitresses became their models; at breakfast they read Shakespeare’s history plays and out in the street, kept an eye on Parisian fashions; evenings often became dressmaking sessions, based on what they had seen in the department stores. Gwen John produced an “Interior with Figures” which shows Ida in an historically-inspired creations, wrapped in a heavy pink shawl and full, ruffled skirt. When her father Edwin John visited, he took exception to a dress of Gwen’s, modelled on a picture by Manet, which he claimed made her look like a prostitute.

Gwen John's Interior with figures, showing Ida in the pink dress

Next, they had to enrol in an art school. The nearby Julian’s run by Benjamin Constant, was the girls’ first choice but it was very expensive and with thirty pounds remaining in her budget for fees, Ida considered the cheaper Académies Colarossi or Delécluse. However, she soon heard of the new Académie Carmen, which had opened up near the Luxembourg gardens at 6, passage Stanislas. It was run by Carmen Rossi, a model of Whistler, who would be undertaking some of the teaching: originally Rossi charged the female students twice the amount as the men, but Whistler soon discovered this and put a stop to it. At first, only Gwen Salmond with her sixty pounds for fees, could afford to enrol but she generously paid for Gwen John to attend as an afternoon student, while Ida enrolled under Laurent at Colarossi’s. Writing a pamphlet on the lure of the city in 1902, Clive Holland reflected the popularity of their choices; “a year or two at Julian’s, the Beaux-Arts or Colarossi’s is worth a cycle of South Kensington with its ‘correctness;’" by 1900, one in three students of the Beaux-Arts was a foreigner.

Perhaps the artistic highlight of the girls’ Paris sojourn was their contact with Whistler. He was coming to the end of a distinguished career (he died in 1903) and his reputation was sufficient to cause a stir among the students when the new Académie Carmen opened the autumn of 1898. The school rules were strict, even more than those of the Slade; the sexes were segregated into different studios, there was to be no drawing on the walls, no smoking, no singing, even no talking, which made it very unpopular with male students who soon rebelled against what they considered an unnecessarily draconian stance. A head student, the massier or massiere, was appointed to handle student matters and maintain the list of rules pinned to the wall: during part of 1899, this post was held by an English girl, Inez Bate who had achieved favour by painting exactly as Whistler taught. Taking orders from a young woman only irritated some of the male students further though and the class became predominantly female. Largely, the girls were happy to be presided over as part of a dedicated band; Gwen Salmond explained “Whistler is worth living for,” a “first rate master who knows how to teach,” “very beautiful and just right” and even Ida rushed to his defence, rebutting attacks on his teaching as “stupid and unkind.” In his later autobiography, her husband reminded Whistler of Ida when the two men met again in London; “I mentioned Ida Nettleship, who had been his pupil in Paris, had posed for him and was now my wife. Mr Whistler spoke of her with much sympathy, asking me to make her his compliments. Influenced by Whistler, Paris and a new found freedom, that autumn was a “most promising time,” full of inspiration and hope; in her letters home, Ida describes them as almost intoxicated with the possibilities of art; “we all go suddenly daft with lovely pictures we can see or imagine and want to do."

Whistler at work

Yet the fees were expensive and the girls were not making any money. All too soon, the dream had to come to an end. Reality beckoned. The Parisian interlude was never meant to be permanent, rather a glorious finishing process before the real business of life began. Returning to England, Ida was forced to confront the question of her future. Within the year, she would marry the flamboyant Augustus John, yet the marriage would be a troubled one. Paris would remain, for her, as an image of a better time, to which she longed to return. When she did go back and try to make a life for herself, a few years later, it was not with her husband, but with his other mistress and their combined brood of children.