Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Writings About New York (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (3 page)

During his short professional life Crane traveled the world. He became an habitué of literary salons in Europe, covered wars in the Balkans, Mexico, and Cuba, and wandered the more remote corners of the western United States. But it was always in New York City that he found his métier; it was in the city that he was most at home. After Syracuse University, and a predictably brief stint on a suburban New Jersey newspaper, Crane gravitated to New York, the place that would shape his work, and, as a consequence, subsequent American letters.

Crane was determined to live in the city and to make his living with his pen. Living a bohemian, hand-to-mouth existence, he took to vanishing into the vast netherworld of the city, living among the whores, the drunks, the drug addicts, and the “b’hoys,” the Irish gangster swells of the Bowery. Emerging from this underworld, Crane would have enough material for a freelance newspaper piece as well as other material that would become Maggie:
A Girl of the Streets.
Occasional newspaper work, a small but providential inheritance, and regular handouts from one of his brothers allowed Crane to cobble together a modest living—but it was Maggie on which he had pinned his hopes.

By 1892 Crane had finished writing Maggie. He approached the editor of
Century Magazine,
hoping his story would be serialized in the pages of that august publication. Almost immediately his hopes were dashed. The editor found the manuscript “cruel” and far too straightforward about the awful details of slum life. At the time there was no shortage of literature about the life of the underclass, but it was always couched in the safe terms of moral disapproval, sugar-coating the misery of the wretched, and suggesting that somehow the poor were responsible for their misery. Crane’s matter-of-fact presentation of life in the gutter was, the editor of the
Century
felt, too harsh for its middle- and upper-class readership.

Crane then began that dispiriting trek, so well known to first-time novelists, traveling from publisher to publisher only to have his manuscript rejected again and again. Many of the editors who read Maggie had the same opinion: While there was much to admire in the book, the squalor of the story, the appalling degradation of virtually all the characters, and the coarseness of the language were bound to outrage the “Mrs. Grundys” of the world (the fictional Mrs. Grundy, introduced in Thomas Morton’s 1798 play
Speed the Plow,
exemplifies the negative influence of conventional wisdom) and bring nothing but opprobrium down on the author and by extension his publisher.

Crane then came up with the idea of publishing his book under a pseudonym, and he chose the bland, almost forgettable name of “Johnston Smith.” “You see,” he explained, “I was going to wait until the world was pyrotechnic about Johnston Smith’s
Maggie
and then I was going to flop down like a trapeze performer from a wire, coming forward with all the grace of a consumptive hen, and say ‘I am he, friends’ ” (Stallman,
Stephen Crane,
p. 69; see “For Further Reading”).

That Crane set out to épater
les bourgeois—outrage
the middle class—there can be little doubt. However, the intentionally scandalous nature of the book still left him with the problem of finding a publisher—a problem that seemed insurmountable. Following rejection after rejection, Crane was forced to suffer the ignominy of publishing the work himself, paying a house best known for medical texts and religious tracts to print the first edition
of Maggie.
In 1893 he paid $869 for 1,100 copies of a cheap-looking yellow paperback edition of the book. Johnston Smith, however, had ceased to exist—Stephen Crane’s name appears on the title page. The publisher’s name appears nowhere. Even under the canopy of anonymity the publisher had insisted that the manuscript be bowdlerized to a degree. Some of the rougher language and more violent scenes were removed or toned down. But
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
was still pretty strong meat for its day, and Crane now waited (one senses with a degree of gleeful anticipation) for the hue and cry, the fierce literary arguments, the denunciations from the pulpits of every denomination, that would propel
Maggie
to best-sellerdom and make the young man’s fortune.

Instead, silence. No newsstands or reputable bookshop would take the book on account of its incendiary nature—the only exception was Brentano’s, which took a dozen copies on consignment and returned ten. In desperation Crane took to giving away copies, dozens and dozens of them, and somehow, miraculously, the book found its way into the literary bloodstream, moving from one man of letters to another. When Crane’s spirits and fortunes were at their lowest ebb, he heard through a friend that his book had found its way into the hands of the well-respected author and critic William Dean Howells, who admired the book and announced that he would review it. The friend who gave Crane this welcome news was Curtis Brown, who would later become a prominent literary agent.

Brown remembers: “If Crane had been told that Howells had condemned the book he might have heaved a sigh. But instead, given the welcome news, he seemed dazed. He looked around like a man who did not know where he was. He gulped something down his throat, grinned like a woman in hysterics and then went off to take up his vocation again” (Stallman, p. 71).

But even with the enthusiastic support of the powerful Howells, the 1893 edition
of Maggie
could only be considered a failure. Just the same, the praise of a literary man whose opinion Crane respected seemed to strengthen him and was enough, it seems, to make him “take up his vocation again.”

This vocation led him to write his finest and best-known work, a novel that became an American classic:
The Red Badge of Courage.
Published in 1895 by the eminently respectable publishing house of Appleton and Company, the novel achieved huge sales and vast acclaim from the critics and reading public. Stephen Crane was suddenly thrust into the limelight he had sought, and had become, overnight, a literary figure to be reckoned with. He was also a rich young author, a guaranteed best-seller. As a result
Maggie: A
Girl of the Streets was reissued in 1896, and this time the manuscript was returned to its original state—all of the emendations and coy ellipses were removed.
The Red Badge of Courage
may have made Crane’s reputation, but
Maggie
was first in his heart.

 

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
was the first American novel to render slum life with not only realism but with artistry as well. Late-nineteenth-century readers were no strangers to slum literature—be they crusading works like
The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years’Work Among Them
(1872), by Charles Loring Brace, or moralizing tracts like the Reverend Thomas DeWitt Talmage’s
The Night Sides of City Life
(1878) and
The Abominations of Modern Society
(1872). But never before had a book about slum life been lacking in a moral judgment. Maggie is a simple story, nineteen vignettes of clear, almost photographic realism, and it never bows to the conventions of nineteenth-century literature of the underclass. That is, Crane never imposes any middle-class judgments on his characters, never condemns them, always refuses to judge them. Maggie’s mother, Mary, her husband, Jimmie, Pete, Nell—virtually all of the characters are rendered square on, warts and all, and then Crane steps back as if to say: “Here they are. This is how it is down there. Judge them if you will. I won’t.”

But the slums imposed their own standards of morality. Mary, a drunken harridan, no stranger to the police courts, is counted a more “moral” character than her daughter Maggie. Mary, whose sins are myriad, cruel, even bestial, is a better person than her innocent daughter because Maggie evolves into a sinful fallen woman who has given up her chastity—a step she takes out of desperation, not desire, after constant cruelty and ultimately cruel betrayal.

By my count, Maggie—though she is the title character—has fewer than two dozen spoken lines in the entire book. She is passive and experiences few emotions beyond fear, grief, and anxiety. And yet it is her silence (while the rest of her world is a raucous cacophony of shrieks, oaths, curses, alarms, vendettas, and drunkenness), her tiny attempts to bring a little beauty into her drab world (the pathetic little lambrequin), and her attempts to flee her grim reality at the rough Bowery shows Pete takes her to that make her the most sympathetic character in the book. She is capable of love and yearns to be loved in return. The fallen woman, the reviled girl of the streets, is the moral center of the book.

One cannot help but imagine how far she actually fell. Apart from her brief cohabitation with Pete, Maggie is a most unenthusiastic, not to say inept, prostitute (unlike the accomplished, manipulative Nell) . As we follow her through the streets in the final hours of her miserable life, Maggie (who has ceased to be Maggie and has become, instead, simply “the girl”) has no luck in plying her trade—she is constantly rebuked or merely ignored. On the other hand, one man rejects her because she was neither “new, Parisian nor theatrical”—the “new” suggesting that she must have had enough customers in the past to be known to the visitors of the demimonde.

It seems that the only customer she can find who is remotely interested in her is her last. “... a huge fat man in torn and greasy garments. His grey hair straggled down over his forehead. His small, bleared eyes, sparkling from amidst great rolls of red fat.... He laughed, his brown, disordered teeth gleaming under a grey grizzled moustache from which beerdrops dripped. His whole body gently quivered and shook like that of a dead jelly fish. Chuckling and leering, he followed the girl of the crimson legions” (p. 66).

Who is this grotesque character? Is he merely Maggie’s last trick, a figure so repulsive that after she has serviced him she cannot conceive of falling any lower? Suicide becomes her last and only option. Or, perhaps she didn’t commit suicide at all but was murdered by this hideous character? Crane leaves this question unanswered.

The point is, Maggie dies, and we are shown the paltry effects of this tragic event. In the final chapter of the book, when Mary learns of her daughter’s death, she weeps copiously—mostly for herself, it seems—but the only real detail of Maggie’s short, brutish life she can recall has to do with a pair of shoes the girl wore as a child.

In the most ironic moment of the book Mary “forgives” her little daughter. But forgives her for what? Maggie should be alive to mete out the forgiveness. But she is not, and slum life goes on.

 

Crane’s realistic replication of actual speech is a trademark of his writing. Modern readers might find the almost phonetic speech in
M
aggie: A Girl of the Streets
a little distracting at first, but it is one of the factors that gives the book such impact. Once one has become used to Crane’s rhythmic street patois, the device gives great verisimilitude to the narrative. This exact rendering of spoken English appears mostly in Crane’s writings on slum life. It does not appear at all in “The Open Boat.” And it appears to a lesser—but significant—degree in
The Red Badge of Courage,
where enlisted men speak like enlisted men—lots of dropped “g’s”, “yeh” for you, “jes” for just. But the officers speak as officers are supposed to: like members of the officer class. Their accents and vocabulary would not have been out of place in the drawing rooms of polite society in New York or Philadelphia. The difference in the two manners of speaking throws up a class barrier between the two factions of the same army that is hard to ignore.

But the characters of
Maggie
are all of the same class and speak in the same way. The book is rife with slang, contractions, hundreds of misspellings (“dat” for that, “taut” for thought, etc.), and a torrent of apostrophes acting as stands-in for dropped letters. There is nothing refined about the story, from start to finish, so it would be hard to imagine the tale being told in any other manner. Even the most famous line in the book, as the narrative rises almost to the level of poetry, is composed with strict colloquial realism: Jimmie, “... on a certain star-lit evening, said wonderingly and quite reverently: ‘Deh moon looks like hell, don’t it?’ ” (p. 22). One can’t imagine him or any other character in the novel expressing this heartfelt emotion, this momentary appreciation of beauty, in any other way.

 

George’s Mother
was one of Stephen Crane’s favorite pieces of writing, and he had hoped to achieve signal success with it. In the chronology of Crane’s writing it comes just after
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
and just before—almost simultaneous with—the publication of
The Red Badge of Courage.
Given the proximity in time of
George’s Mother
and
Maggie
, as well as their similar New York slum settings, it is tempting to think of the former novel as some kind of flip side of the latter. It is certainly easy to draw comparisons between the two books. Indeed,
George’s Mother’s
Kelceys and
Maggie’s
Johnsons live in the same building, the warren of tenement apartments situated in the filth of Rum Alley, only a few yards from one another. It’s not difficult to imagine Mrs. Kelcey shaking her head and remembering in her prayers the unhappy Johnson family, just as it’s easy to imagine George witness-ing the brawling and drunkenness going on just a few feet from his front door. We certainly know that he is aware of Maggie, “sweet” on her—yet she is barely aware of his existence, a burden George finds difficult, and which is part of his final undoing.

The two novels are similar in other ways. Both books recount devastating falls from grace that, while heartbreaking, mean nothing to the world outside the fetid slums of New York’s Lower East Side. George and Maggie suffer tragedies that go unnoticed except by those directly affected by them.

However,
George’s Mother
is also quite different from
Maggie,
in tone if not in setting. In the Kelcey household there is none of the howling desperation that is a hallmark of life at the Johnsons, nor are we exposed to the unrelenting filth, chaos, destruction, or coruscating anger that characterizes
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.
Also, the two main characters of
George’s Mother,
Mrs. Kelcey and her last-born (of six) and only surviving son, George, are decent, hardworking, salt-of-the-earth types. It is difficult to see how they deserve the tragedy that will eventually befall them. While such a tragic forecast is easy to make for the Johnson clan, it is almost unthinkable for the Kelceys.