Hotel De Dream: A New York Novel [Paperback]

 

 

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Having never read Stephen Crane before I was wondering if there would be parts of this book, a fictionalized version of the end of Crane's life, that would fly over my head. But my fears weren't realized as I found myself engrossed in the world that White creates here, with his dreamy, poetic sentences and spot-on and unique metaphors.

The book follows Crane as he lays dying and dictates his last novel to his wife, Cora. The novel relates the tale of a boy prostitute in New York in the late 19th century. I found that the novel-within-a-novel part of the book was my favourite part and I looked forward to reading the dictated passages. White perfectly portrays the era (well, to my knowledge) in his language and story. It was interesting learning of prostitutes and brothels in that time period, and the general attitudes toward homosexuality.

This is a heartbreaking, yet beautiful little book.

Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was one undoubtedly of the great American novelists with his most famous novel being The Red Badge of Courage, which depicted the American Civil War from the point of view of an ordinary soldier. Crane was noted for his early employment of naturalism, a literary style in which characters were realistically portrayed and often faced bleak circumstances.

However, it is Crane's unconventionality and his sympathy for the downtrodden that forms the core of this truly spectacular novel. Edmund White's intelligent written and beautifully crafted Hotel de Dream indeed focuses on Crane's preoccupation with the oppressed, but it also asks the question of how would such a man have responded to male homosexuality in an era in which gays themselves were considered perverts and deviants, and abominations?

Hotel de Dream begins as the chronically ill Crane, accompanied by Cora Taylor, a former brothel-house proprietor is living in a 14th-century manor house at Brede Place, Sussex. It is the cusp of a new century and Crane, sick with tuberculosis that has been compounded by a recurrent malarial fever that he picked up in Cuba, is planning a trip to a clinic on the edge of the Black Forest in Badenweiler, Germany in order to get out of damp old England with its cold rains and harsh winds.

Lately life in Brede Place has had its ups and downs, and while Cora has certainly been loyal and loving to Stephen, her flighty social and literary pretensions - and her reputation in America - have perhaps contributed to Crane's financial ruin. There's also been far too much entertaining, especially in the form of parties catering to hordes of spongers as well as many of their close literary friends, including Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, H.G. Wells, and the great Henry James.

Cora is anxious for Stephen to get on and make some money by finishing The O'ruddy so they can pay off some of their most urgent debts and take the trip to Germany. But it is the urge to write his final story about a young boy prostitute called Elliott, that he once met while living in Manhattan that most preoccupies Stephen. Feverish with excitement, Stephen demands that Cora must become the filter for the pages that Stephen will now grind out.

Called The Painted Boy, Stephen once wrote forty pages of his "boy-whore" book, but was advised that if he didn't tear them up, every last word, he'll never have a career. Now, however, he's at the end of his life and have nothing to fear and for sure, the story will undoubtedly prove to be a poignant account of the boy's travails and also wonderful new source about the city and its lower depths, because its not just about another boy, "but somehow a "she-male," a member of the third sex."

So begins Crane's tale of his real life acquaintance with Elliot this "painted boy," as he recounts his final trip with Cora from Brede Place, to Dover, and then onto Badenweiler, while also dictating to Cora the fictional story of Elliot's affair with Theodore Koch, a married and middle-aged New York banker. It is though writing about Elliott and Theodore's tempestious affair that Stephen recollects his own encounter with Elliott, this syphilitic, kohl-eyed and heavily made-up sixteen year-old boy, who calls himself a "flame fairy."

Picture the poor Stephen and Elliott, both ill and wounded, and both looking like sick waifs with Stephen's own hacking cough and this boy whore who wears boys clothes and girls' makeup as they traverse the streets of Manhattan, with Elliott determined to teach Stephen how to decipher the city around him. His young muse drags Stephen to the "penny restaurants" where the newsboys eat every evening, to the fairy saloons, the bordellos and the low theatre, and also to visit a wealthy androgyne by the name of Jennie Jones who fascinates Crane with his "big breasts and wide hips."

Meanwhile, the fictional story of The Painted Boy plays out as Crane fanatically dictates it to Cora, beginning on a New York train station where Elliott cruises older men in bowler hats and good wool overcoats. But it is Theodore's ardent obsession with Elliott that ultimately spins the boy's world out of control. Consumed by jealousy and passion, and proud to sacrifice everything for love, Theodore urges to know more and more about this funhouse world that Elliott has been inducted into, his life gradually obscured by all of the "magic-lantern pictures" in his mind of Elliott.

White certainly writes a vivid account of gay life at the turn of the nineteenth century, in a Manhattan full of vice, and glamour and lowlife, "an intersexual world of such fantastic dimensions." Although Stephen Crane never actually wrote a novel called The Painted Boy, White does a terrific job of presenting what might have been as if the author did indeed have a fascination with this all male Victorian world of men loving men.

Vibrant and flamboyant, and teeming with a lyrical beauty throughout, White writes with a passionate commitment to Stephen Crane's life, and to his death. Meticulously researched and seamlessly infusing fact with fiction, Hotel de Dream, is a grand tribute to Crane's creative spirit as all of these colorful characters, both real and fictional, plays out against a nineteenth century propriety and a little-known sexual underworld. Mike Leonard August 07.

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