Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (and four other works) – Stephen Crane

The Library of America edition devoted to Crane is 1,351 pages long. Besides two short novels (of which The Red Badge of Courage is the most famous), his stories, poems, sketches and journalism are included. This is a large output, considering that he died when he was twenty-eight. Maggie, a Girl of the Streets was his first work, done when he was in his early twenties. It’s a crude effort, one in which the emotions and actions and talk are overblown. Maggie is simply a passive, dumb victim, mainly of a sport called Pete. Jimmy, her brother, is more developed, but he’s no more than a product of his environment. The mother is a caricature of drunken bestiality. I found it funny (and I’m sure it wasn’t meant to be) that when this worst-mother-on-earth learns that her daughter is a fallen woman she goes into fits of righteous indignation: “I bringed ’er up deh way a dauter oughta be bringed up an’dis is how she served me!” Yes, Crane has people talk in a street vernacular – talk on and on. For me it didn’t add realism – it just slowed down the reading. And I was left feeling that though Crane had sympathy for the people of the slums, he didn’t know much about them. Still, this novel has some raw power, some feeling comes across. I would credit him with a talent, but one that needed to be tempered – he’s way too fervent. And he did temper his approach. The Monster and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” are better, but suffer from a peculiar problem: they just stop, as if they were abandoned. “The Blue Hotel” is developed all the way to the end, and “The Open Boat” (based on an experience Crane had) is his most complete and strongest work. These stories show a definite progression; the man was a writer. Who knows what he might have produced? But in his last years he was plagued by financial troubles and ill health, and he died of tuberculosis. 

Bright Lights, Big City – Jay McInerney

“You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.” That’s the opening sentence of a novel that brought the author fame and fortune. The “place” is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge (the “you” isn’t sure where he’s at because it’s six AM and he’s done too much cocaine and drunk too much vodka). Anyway, it’s some cutting edge place (maybe the Odeon?) where the unconventional young glitter and casually do drugs. But we soon discover that the guy is a Loser: he had recently been jilted by his runway model wife and in the course of the novel he’s fired from his job. And then there’s the substance abuse problem. I finished the novel – it’s short and an easy read – although my attitude steadily soured. Bright has a stylish veneer, like those glossy ads in Vanity Fair, and flashy repartee, some humor (though more juvenile silliness, such as the whole ferret episode). But all the characters were no more than props. The guy is a bundle of vague, unresolved problems; he doesn’t have enough substance to emerge as a person I could care about. This lack became especially evident near the end, when McInerney tries to get serious. There’s a lot about the guy’s deceased mother who he misses so much (where did she come from?), and a coda that takes place at dawn with our guy eating a warm, just-baked hard roll – one of the real things in life. My response was a detached cynicism. I guess I’m just not the kind of guy to be reviewing a book like this. So, instead, a few words about  the author. This was McInerney’s first novel, which he wrote when he was twenty-nine; it was the beginning of a career – he went on to write seven more novels (plus some books on wine; he’s a connoisseur). Bright seems autobiographical. Like his guy, McInerney was a fact checker for a famous magazine; like his guy, he had a brief marriage to a model. Maybe, to project to the future, our guy will, like McInerney, sit down and write this novel and become famous and marry three other women (plus have a four year relationship with another model) and live the high life in Manhattan. You know, he’ll find the real things in life. 

Dust Tracks on a Road – Zora Neale Hurston

This autobiography is patchy, to put it mildly. Hurston tells a good bit about her growing up years, but when she becomes an adult there’s no consistent narrative. What we mostly get are opinions – opinions galore. I’m not saying that the book is a failure; on its terms, it’s interesting. And controversial, because her opinions are not what one expects from a black woman who was born in the South in 1891. Her unusual childhood shaped her outlook; she grew up in Eatonville, Florida, which was incorporated as a Negro town. Mayor, town council, shop-owners, citizenry – all Negro. So she was not exposed to Jim Crow. Later, in college, she got a degree in anthropology, which tends to make one avoid generalizations. She didn’t join in the absolutist thinking of many black intellectuals of the time, and wasn’t part of what she called “the sobbing school of Negrohood.” Not once in the book does she display resentment toward whites, or offer up grievances for how she’s treated by them. At Barnard College, by her account, she suffered no discrimination. She had white mentors who help her along in life. The group she’s hardest on is her own race. One extreme example: when she does ethnological research at a lumber camp in Polk County, Florida, she depicts the blacks as a murderous lot; for them it’s a matter of prestige to have killed someone. Zora has her protector, a woman called Big Sweet, who tells her, “I loves to friend with somebody like you. I aims to look out for you, too. Do your fighting for you. Nobody better not start nothing with you, do I’ll get my switchblade and go around de ham-bone looking for meat.” Regarding the slave trade, Hurston writes that what sticks in her craw is that her people had sold other blacks to the whites. She doesn’t believe that whites today have any guilt for what their ancestors did in the past: “I see nothing but futility in looking back over my shoulder in rebuke at the grave of some white man who has been dead too long to talk about.” She’s against blacks seeing things in racial terms, and advocates that all people should look upon one another as individuals. One wonders why she’s espousing these ideas in the way she is. The very fact – one she could not help being aware of in 1942, when Dust came out – is that whites have long discriminated against blacks in many, many ways. The thought arises: in order to get ahead has Zora, throughout her life, been, for whites, the docile, obedient, grateful Negro? There’s what I consider a telling scene. It occurs when she became a “secretary” to the famous and wealthy novelist Fannie Hurst. “Behold her phoning to a swanky hotel for reservations for herself and the Princess Zora and parading me in there all dressed up as an Asiatic person of royal blood and keeping a straight face while the attendants goggled at me and bowed low!” Didn’t she resent how she was being used? She shows no indication that she did. Well, anyway, this book elicited a long review, didn’t it? I also read the entire Wikipedia entry on Hurston. Though she was a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance, she never made much money from her writing, and in her last years she worked as a hotel maid and was on public assistance; she died alone in a charity hospital and was buried in an unmarked grave. A sad end for someone who came across with so much vitality in this book.

Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston

I read this novel after finishing Hurston’s autobiography, in which Eyes was cited as her masterpiece. That word is a hard one to live up to. I thought the book was good, colorful, an engrossing look into the world of black people (there are no whites, which is refreshing). Most of the color comes from the dialect of the characters: “Thank you, Mist’ Starks. You’se noble! You’se de most gentlemanfied man Ah ever did see. You’se uh king!” Dialect is used only when people speak or when Janie thinks, but most of the novel is made up of speech or her thoughts. At times I wondered if Hurston was overdoing this aspect, but she’s making a point: the dialect of the blacks is rich, complex, inventive. As for the content of the book, it’s about the life of Janie. After two marriages in which she finds no satisfaction, Tea Cake comes along and Janie comes alive. He’s funny, fun (“He kin take most any lil thing and make summertime out of it when times are dull.”). And he’s the first man who cares about what she thinks and feels. She’s worried because she’s in her forties, Tea Cake is in his twenties, but he expresses appreciation of her beauty and tells her, “You’se something tu make uh man forgit tuh git old and forgit tuh die.” Though this is a love story, it’s one in which Janie is abjectly dedicated to the man; the few times he misuses her she immediately forgives him. Did I believe in their love? Well, yes, though the abrupt way it’s developed causes it to seem a bit simplistic. At end a hurricane/flood occurs (not described at all well), and in the aftermath Tea Cake dies. Janie returns to her home town and, apparently, subsides into a solitary life of memories. Has a woman been liberated? I think not. Great, a masterpiece? It was to Alice Walker, who wrote that “There is no book more important to me than this one.” I can merely say that I was glad I read it.