NINE THE BLUNDERS OF VIRTUE
Of the 1,134 recorded lynchings of African Americans between the years 1882 and 1899, the lynching of Robert Lewis was the only one known to have occurred in New York State. Those who defended Port Jervis’s reputation in the aftermath of the incident were not entirely wrong in believing their village singularly unlucky; the travesty of the lynching could, after all, have come to pass in almost any small town where an alleged sexual assault by a Black man on a young white woman took place, serving as a trip wire for white men’s racist and gendered insecurities. Once the inquest and the two Orange County grand juries had completed their unproductive work, many relieved village residents took comfort in the idea that what had occurred was aberrational, certainly not Port Jervis as they knew it. Was it not now possible to hope that, as in all things, “bygones would be bygones”?
No one had been held accountable, the last of the out-of-town reporters had gone home, and the surviving principals soon moved away—the McMahons to Boston, the Carrs to Albany. Dr. Van Etten died and was carried with all appropriate pomp and tribute to his eternal rest in Laurel Grove; William Crane eventually moved to California. Ida B. Wells, frustrated by America’s inert response to lynching’s horror, sailed for England in the hope of arousing British opinion, a strategy used effectively by the abolitionists a half century earlier and recommended to Wells by a hero of that movement, Frederick Douglass.
In Port Jervis, local newspaper mentions of the incident eventually diminished, then disappeared, and the town, as if by an unwritten concord regarding the subject, fell gratefully into a collective hush.
Yet a notable signatory to the pact of silence and forgetting had been overlooked: William Crane’s ever-observant younger brother, Stephen. It was understandable—and probably inevitable—that Stephen Crane, a literary artist who derived his imaginative tales from real-world experiences, would not neglect the events of June 2, 1892, and that from his pen an exposé of the village’s darkest hour would make its way into the world.
By the evening William had pushed his way into the center of the lynch mob to try to save Robert Lewis, the Crane family had been prominent in Port Jervis for more than a decade. The Reverend Jonathan Crane’s leadership at the Drew Methodist Church had been as worthy as it was influential, but he died suddenly in 1880, only two years after the family had arrived, and his widow, Mary Peck Crane, moved back to New Jersey, leaving behind several of her older children who chose to remain in Port Jervis. Stephen, then eight, went initially to stay with an older brother, Edmund, who lived with his wife in Sussex County, New Jersey, although he was soon back in Port Jervis, along with his mother and brother Luther, who returned in summer 1880 to live with older brother William, who was seventeen years Stephen’s senior. In addition to being a respected jurist and civic leader with a large, commodious house on Main Street, William was an aspiring lyceum speaker and had presented a talk to the Port Jervis Young Men’s Literary Society titled “That the Intellect of Woman Is as Great as That of the Man.” Stephen and his brother shared a number of interests, including an obsession with the history of the Civil War, a subject in which William was so well versed he gave popular lectures on the Battle of Gettysburg to veterans who’d fought there. William was also an early patron of his brother’s writing career, which began when Stephen was still in his teens.
It is thought William suggested the idea for the title of Stephen’s 1893 novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (“Maggie” having been a childhood Port Jervis neighbor of the Cranes’), a realistic account of a young woman of the Bowery, abandoned by family and friends, who is driven by poverty into prostitution and ultimately to an early death. He also handled for Stephen the paperwork needed to free one thousand dollars from the younger man’s inheritance so that the book could be published in a private edition. Despite the author’s ingenious promotional scheme of paying four men to ride the New York City elevated for a day, each conspicuously reading a copy, the book sold poorly.
His initial literary exposure had come when the New-York Tribune from February through June 1892 published his Sullivan County Sketches, humorous and fanciful recollections set in the countryside northwest of Port Jervis, where the Cranes often went to camp and hunt. While it has never been proved conclusively, it’s likely Crane gathered material for his best-known work, the Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, through his acquaintance with local veterans of the 124th New York Regiment, the Orange Blossoms, who had seen action in numerous battles, including Fredericksburg and Gettysburg, as well as the Battle of Chancellorsville, fought in late April and early May 1863 in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, and which provides the immediate backdrop for the novel. There were scores of veterans resident in Port Jervis, and although Stephen Crane was born six years after Appomattox, he would have had ample opportunity to hear these men’s stories in the village parks, saloons, and barbershops.
“As children they had stood at the corner of Main and Elm and every minute or so seen a man pass wearing the veteran’s cap of the Grand Army of the Republic,” the literary critic Larzer Ziff notes of Crane’s generation. “They had felt the sense of lost adventure, of having been born too late for the stirring events which had reached into every village, however remote, and called forth its young people to do battle.” But Crane was not seduced by sentimental war glory or similar “flapdoodle.” His book relates the travails of a young Union soldier who awakens to the falseness of war’s lauded virtues. The result is a compelling psychological portrait, an antiwar war story the likes of which had rarely if ever been composed, depicting one man’s crisis as he weighs the moral challenge of whether to join or flee carnage so seemingly pointless and absurd. What he had heard in the tales told by his Port Jervis veterans were not memories of victorious charges or cheering crowds, but recollection of old men, thirty years out of uniform, many never healed in body and spirit, whose gaze as they spoke lingered long and unfocused on something far away, visible only to themselves. The author’s gift for reproducing inner monologue and surreal detail lends the work its fierce authenticity.
The Red Badge of Courage was an immediate success upon its appearance in 1895, went on to influence American writers from Ernest Hemingway to Norman Mailer to Michael Herr, and has never been out of print. “At the center of Crane’s myth,” the novelist and critic Ralph Ellison would observe, is “the mystery of the creative talent with which a youth of twenty-one was able to write what is considered one of the world’s foremost war novels when he had neither observed nor participated in combat.”
What story would so original a talent tell of the lynching of Robert Lewis?
Given the intimate quality of life in the village, it’s not unlikely that Stephen Crane and Lena McMahon knew each other, at least by sight. They were approximately the same age; Stephen’s older sister Agnes taught at the Mountain House School when Lena was a student there. An 1882 record of public-school classroom assignments show Lena in Miss Olmstead’s class at the Mountain House and Stephen Crane down the road in Miss Reeves’s room at the Main Street School, which was across the street from Judge Crane’s later residence at 19 East Main, and only a few blocks from where Lena would eventually manage her sweets shop. After a day writing on his brother’s veranda, Stephen might well have ended a late afternoon stroll at the confectionery, dawdling uncommittedly over a dish of Lena’s ice cream, spoon in one hand, cigarette in the other.
Like Lena’s, Stephen’s intellectual promise was recognized early. He knew his letters by age three and, according to family lore, was within a year reading the works of James Fenimore Cooper. Schoolmates would later call him “Stephen Cranium.” Slight of build and often sickly as a child, he compensated with a fierce creed of outdoor life and physical exertion—hiking, boxing, hunting, and baseball. While attending Syracuse University, he started as catcher for the varsity team, where he excelled sufficiently to consider turning pro. “Small, sallow, and inclined to stoop” is how the Midwestern author Hamlin Garland remembered Crane, “but sinewy and athletic for all that … a capital catcher of curved balls.”
Stephen often found Port Jervis too crowded and citified for his tastes and grew to prefer the pine forests at the six-thousand-acre Hartwood Club, located in nearby Forestburgh, New York, a hunting preserve William had helped found. Those who knew him would later recall Stephen writing in a wicker chair shielded behind a large lilac bush on his brother’s porch, or walking swiftly along Main Street early in the morning, head down, lost in thought, on his way to board the Monticello Line train to Hartwood. The novelist Willa Cather’s impression when she met the young author was of someone who “went about with the tense, preoccupied, self-centered air of a man who is brooding over some impending disaster … His eyes [were] the finest I have ever seen, large and dark and full of luster and changing lights, but with a profound melancholy always lurking deep in them.”
Despite his love of the outdoors and strenuous recreation, Stephen, after leaving college without graduating and beginning his career as a freelance journalist, gained a somewhat less wholesome reputation. He smoked constantly, ate abstemiously (his pet peeve was watching others take inordinate pleasure in their food), and developed the untidy habit of scribbling notes in ink on his cuffs. Haunting the Bowery for material, he picked up much of its rough vernacular, and began swearing prodigiously and with a freedom that worried some of his longtime friends.
Crane was as engaged with questions of morality and man’s obligations to self and society as had been his reform-minded parents; however, where they were concerned with people’s lack of self-control and the threats modern life posed to one’s character, Stephen was drawn to contemplate the ways a person is fully revealed in morally ambiguous circumstances and perhaps rises above the instinct for self-preservation. How does one make, or fail to make, virtuous choices in moments of extreme crisis?
This questioning informs many of Crane’s works, and toward the end of his short life it was piqued by the need to capture a story of futile heroism—the march of a lynch mob through the streets of Port Jervis, over the remembered footsteps of his own once-cherished playgrounds, and his brother William’s exemplary stand against an egregious wrong.
Stephen had been in Port Jervis, staying at William’s house, until shortly before the lynching, but had left on or about Decoration Day to return to the Jersey shore, where he was a stringer for the New-York Tribune and contributed occasional pieces to the Asbury Park News. A devoted follower of the day’s headlines, Stephen would have immediately learned details of what had occurred in his hometown, particularly as it involved his brother. He would have been shocked and saddened, for he was fond of Port Jervis, knew intimately the locations connected to the incident, and was acquainted with many of the townspeople the articles mentioned, such as Raymond Carr and his father, as well as Dr. Van Etten, who was one of his brother’s neighbors.
That a “Southern” spectacle lynching of an African American citizen had made landfall in his hometown was deeply troubling, for he saw at once its fearful implication, that, as Wells had written, “the black shadow of lawlessness in the form of lynch law is spreading its wings over the whole country.” It was characteristic of him that he took it personally and felt a moral duty to respond. Likely he rued the fact he had not been there, and in his mind’s eye saw himself at his brother’s side, using his athlete’s body and knowledge of how to land a punch to beat back the mob and help rescue its tormented victim.
Later that summer he sought an assignment from the American News Service to report from the South, perhaps to better understand the phenomenon of lynch law. The bureau rejected his request and dispatched him eventually to cover a drought on the Great Plains, but the Port Jervis lynching remained a preoccupation. The themes of summary justice, mobbism, abandonment, and the loneliness of unjust fate resonate in many of his short stories, including “The Blue Hotel,” “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” “The Open Boat,” and “When Man Falls, a Crowd Gathers.”
That last story is Crane’s most literal published rehearsal of the Robert Lewis lynching, telling of an Italian immigrant who suffers an epileptic seizure and collapses on a Manhattan sidewalk. “It was as if an invisible hand had reached up from the earth and had seized him by the hair,” he writes of the tale’s subject. “He seemed dragged slowly, relentlessly backward, while his body stiffened convulsively, his hands clenched, and his arms swung rigidly upward … Those in the foremost rank bended down, shouldering each other.” Crane adds, “Once they struck a match and held it close to the man’s face. This livid visage suddenly appearing under their feet in the light of the match’s yellow glare, made the throng shudder. Half articulate exclamations could be heard. There were men who nearly created a battle in the madness of their desire to see the thing.”
In early biographies of Crane there are accounts that he also created (and destroyed) a story he called “Vashti in the Dark,” about a young Methodist preacher from the South who kills himself after learning his wife has been raped by a Black man in the forest at night. One of Crane’s biographers, the poet John Berryman, suggests that the author burned the story after it was rejected by publishers. No copy survives. Stephen Crane was a brilliant literary craftsman, but he also wrote impulsively and sometimes turned out short pieces in haste to meet his financial needs. In disposing of “Vashti,” he may have recognized that he had not yet mastered the nuance and perspective that the subject demanded and that he hoped to bring to it.
At the height of his fame following the publication of The Red Badge of Courage, in 1896, Crane became enmeshed in an incident that would expose the very challenges of moral self-measurement he so vigorously examined in his fiction. On the night of September 17, he appeared at the Jefferson Market Courthouse in New York City on behalf of Dora Clark, a young woman of twenty-one he knew through his research into the world of the Tenderloin district, the west side mecca of New York nightlife. Crane had witnessed Clark’s arrest for soliciting on the corner of Broadway and Thirty-First Street and believed, as she did, that the charge was trumped up. Charles Becker, the arresting officer, Clark said, was acting on a grudge held by a fellow officer named Rosenberg whose crass romantic overtures Clark had rebuffed.
Crane, who attended the ensuing hearings, thought of himself as a journalist who transcribed the soul of the New York underworld without actually belonging to it; the police, however, saw instead a literary celebrity out to blacken the reputation of one of their own. “Thin and pale, with straight hair plastered down on a curiously shaped head,” a press account from the courthouse described him, “a young man who does not look brainy, but who has proved he has brains.” Although warned by a sympathetic desk sergeant to back off for his own good, Crane refused to retreat, averring, “I consider it my duty, having witnessed an outrage such as Becker’s arrest of this girl, to do my utmost to have him punished. The fact that I was in her company, and had just left what the detective called a resort for thieves, prostitutes, and crooks, does not bear on the matter in the least. I had a perfect right to be there, or in any other public resort anywhere else in the city where I choose to go.”
Such arrogance, however, played poorly with the police, and he failed to anticipate how his fame might be used against him. He was blindsided by Becker’s attorney, who produced a live witness (a building janitor) who asserted that Crane cohabited with prostitutes and lived off their earnings. Police insisted the writer also smoked opium. The latter claim was bogus, and the others either exaggerated or outright lies, but the publicity had its intended crushing effect. It was an embarrassing comeuppance for a young man from Port Jervis who had, it seemed, gotten in over his head.
If there was any consolation, it was that he had acted honorably, with an automatic generosity of spirit, manfully upholding the belief that “a wrong done to a prostitute must be as purely a wrong as a wrong done to a queen.” As the author of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, he had little choice but to act as he did. But the Dora Clark debacle showed him also that “the inopportune arrival of a moral obligation can bring just as much personal humiliation as can a sudden impulse to steal or any of the other mental suggestions which we account calamitous.” In this instance it hindered his future access to police sources and cost him his budding friendship with the police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, as well as the sense of being at home in New York City.
Crane described his creative process to Willa Cather by saying that even when he possessed factual information, he often chose not to cite it directly but rather to allow his imagination to reorder it. “The detail of a thing has to filter through my blood,” he explained, “and then it comes out like a native product, but it takes forever.” It took five years from the lynching of Robert Lewis for Crane to write The Monster, his highly imaginative novella loosely based on the crime. While casting virtually all the actual details of the incident aside, he presents a gothic horror story set in a claustrophobic small town, making his own use of both the common descriptor “monster” in sensational accounts of allegedly dangerous Black men, and the late Victorian era’s morbid fascination with disfigurement.
The story is set in “Whilomville,” his lightly fictionalized Port Jervis. Henry Johnson, a Black groom and carriage driver, rushes into a burning house to rescue Jimmie Trescott, the young son of his white employer. While he is carrying the child to safety, chemicals stored in Dr. Trescott’s laboratory explode, leaving Henry gravely injured. When Henry is at death’s door, the citizens of Whilomville, Black and white, recall him fondly and praise his heroism; but nearly all, including his fiancée, Bella Farragut, whom he has courted at her family’s house in “Watermelon Alley,” want nothing more to do with him after, with Dr. Trescott’s medical attention, he makes a miraculous recovery. His is “an unwelcome return from the dead,” for he no longer has a face and has become hideous to behold.
Before the fire Henry was a bon vivant, a stylish dresser, a man noticed and remarked upon as he strolled through town; now he has become an apparition. An uproar ensues when he instinctively tries to resume some of his former activities, for his countenance is so dreadful the town cannot bear to gaze upon him, and he is accused of frightening children and young women.
Dr. Trescott’s friend Judge Hagenthorpe pays the doctor a visit to share Whilomville’s concerns. “Perhaps we may not talk with propriety of this kind of action,” he confides,
but I am induced to say that you are performing a questionable charity in preserving this negro’s life. As far as I can understand, he will hereafter be a monster, a perfect monster, and probably with an affected brain. No man can observe you as I have observed you and not know that it was a matter of conscience with you, but I am afraid, my friend, that it is one of the blunders of virtue.
“He saved my boy’s life,” Trescott reminds his guest. “What am I to do? He gave himself for—for Jimmie. What am I to do for him?”
“He will be your creation, you understand,” replies the judge. “He is purely your creation. Nature has very evidently given him up. He is dead. You are restoring him to life. You are making him, and he will be a monster, and with no mind.”
“He will be what you like, judge. He will be anything, but, by God! He saved my boy.”
“Well,” Hagenthorpe says quietly, “it is hard for a man to know what to do.”
One of the blunders of virtue … It is hard for a man to know what to do. Like Dr. Trescott’s determination to cure Henry and care for him, so William Crane forced his way into a mob to stop a lynching and, at least momentarily, brought Robert Lewis back to life. But much as Judge Crane is rudely tossed out of the circle of men intent on lynching Lewis and is accused of disloyalty by old friends, so Dr. Trescott and his wife are made to pay for their moral decency. His patients one by one desert him, and Mrs. Trescott is shunned by society, her husband left to count the unused teacups she had set out for her usual Wednesday ladies’ parlor gathering, as she curls up in an armchair to weep.
Stephen Crane’s story of fear and intolerance “in an environment traditionally associated with neighborliness and good will” takes place in what the scholar of the American short story James Nagel calls “a middle-class utopia,” a country town of contented merchants, churchgoers, and working people, children’s Saturday-afternoon birthday parties, evening band concerts, and a village barbershop habituated by gossipy white men. It is Crane’s “town of Once-upon-a-time [literally the meaning derived from the archaic term “whilom”], the ideal American small town of memory and imagination.” But Dr. Trescott’s miraculous medical interventions force Whilomville to know for real what had previously been a nightmarish figure of journalistic styling and numberless headlines. The Black “guilty monster,” as Robert Lewis was called, in Henry Johnson has become an actual one. Crane pokes beneath the metaphor to expose it as a form of avoidance, to reveal how the vernacular language of race suppresses meaning. Much as slurs and offensive naming serve as power dynamics between peoples, all the terms used by whites to describe Black people, whether cruel, grotesque, or comic, had the effect of dehumanization. By the tale’s end, however, the real “monster” is revealed: it is Whilomville’s intolerance and bigotry, the same blind hatred that William Crane had witnessed as he stood over a trembling, bleeding Robert Lewis.
Although the word “lynching” never appears in the book, it lurks threateningly in the text’s ellipses. When the chief of police comes to tell Dr. Trescott that Henry has been out “scaring everyone,” and Trescott inquires if Henry has been hurt, the officer replies, “No. They never touched him. Of course, no one really wanted to hit him, but you know how a crowd gets. It’s like—it’s like—.” Other allusions to Port Jervis are more literal. “Must say he had a fine career while he was out,” the chief of police says:
First thing he did was to break up a children’s party at Page’s. Then he went to Watermelon Alley. Whoo! He stampeded the whole outfit. Men, women, and children running pell-mell, and yelling. They say one old woman broke her leg, or something, shinning over a fence. Then he went right out on the main street, and an Irish girl [Lena McMahon] threw a fit, and there was sort of a riot. He began to run, and a big crowd chased after him, firing rocks. But he gave them the slip somehow … We looked for him all night, but couldn’t find him.
Later, when Henry is caught, the chief confides, “I thought I’d better let you know. And I might as well say right now, doctor, that there is a good deal of talk about this thing. If I were you, I’d come to the jail pretty late at night, because there is likely to be a crowd around the door.”
Much as Judge Crane was visited by interested acquaintances curious to know his intended testimony in the Lewis case, a delegation of friends arrives to intervene with Dr. Trescott. They warn him his reputation and medical practice are at risk, and suggest Henry be sent to a farm out of town or to a public institution. “It’s the women,” they insist. Henry is no longer a familiar, acceptable presence in the community, but a strange Black man, whose thoughts and intentions cannot be divined. What he is capable of—what he might do—no one can be sure. Yet Trescott ultimately refuses to send him away.
Shunned by all, the Black coachman begins to lose his mind and, having learned to avoid trouble by no longer venturing into town, sits all day on a bench in Trescott’s garden, talking and humming to himself, his face hidden by a veil. In the book’s ultimate scene young Jimmie Trescott and a group of other boys dare one another to approach Henry as he sits motionless. Jimmie, the little boy whose life Henry saved, has taken to exhibiting him to other youngsters. Suddenly the boys move back as the apparition, sensing their presence, rises and mounts a box.
The monster on the box had turned its black crepe countenance toward the sky, and was waving its arms in time to a religious chant. “Look at him now,” cried a little boy. They turned, and were transfixed by the solemnity and mystery of the indefinable gestures. The wail of the melody was mournful and slow. They drew back. It seemed to spellbind them with the power of a funeral.
Henry Johnson has become “a wailing mourner” at his own funeral, writes the literary scholar Elizabeth Young, which “marks the symbolic murder of the Black man by the world that has made him a monster.”
Port Jervians who read the novella when it appeared in Harper’s Magazine, or later in book form, and knew of the Crane family’s connection to the Lewis lynching, would have readily grasped its judgment on the town. William must have informed his brother of that reaction in early 1899, for Stephen responded from his home in England, “I forgot to reply to you about the gossip … I suppose that Port Jervis entered my head while I was writing it but I particularly don’t wish them to think so because people get very sensitive and I would not scold away freely if I thought the eye of your glorious public was upon me.” Stephen held out the promise that he would eventually rejoin his brother and the rest of the family in their hometown. “My idea is to come finally to live at Port Jervis or Hartwood,” he assured William. “I am a wanderer now and I must see enough but—afterwards—I think of P.J. & Hartwood.”
Stephen would never be reunited with the citizens of Port Jervis, so did not learn their opinion of his story firsthand or face their condemnation. He had contracted tuberculosis while living in New York, where the disease was prevalent in the tenement districts he frequented, and then fell ill with malaria in Florida in 1896, a condition which in turn was likely exacerbated by his going to Cuba in 1898 to report on the Spanish-American War. He eventually returned to England, having moved there with his common-law wife, Cora Taylor, in 1897. They had rented a five-hundred-year-old mansion in Sussex known as Brede Place, a rambling manor with no plumbing, heat, or electricity, but a stone fireplace thirteen feet wide. William, aware that Stephen’s health was failing, tried to convince his brother to return to America; however, Stephen chose to remain abroad. He was popular in England, where he was whimsically known in literary circles as the “Red Badger,” and had good and influential friends in Henry James, H. G. Wells, Ford Madox Ford, and Joseph Conrad. His chief objection to returning home likely had more to do with Cora’s past. They had met in Jacksonville, where she had been the manager of a nightclub and an elite bordello, the Hotel de Dream, a fact he knew would embarrass his family and become fodder for the tabloid press.
“I have managed my success like a fool and a child but then it is difficult to succeed gracefully at 23,” Stephen wrote to William shortly after completing The Monster. “However, I am learning every day. I am slowly becoming a man.” By late 1899, his health had deteriorated, however, not helped by his smoking, the couple’s drafty lodgings, and the continual stress of his and Cora’s precarious finances. Diagnosed with pulmonary congestion, Crane was moved in late spring 1900 to a clinic at Badenweiler, in Germany’s Black Forest, where the regional climate was thought to possess curative powers. He died there early on the morning of June 5.
Port Jervis residents have occasionally advanced likely sources for Crane’s reconstruction of their town in The Monster, pointing to several Victorian homes with adjacent carriage houses, homes of once-beloved physicians, and even some specific three-alarm house fires of memory, such as an April 1885 conflagration at the home of Dr. Charles Lawrence, whose son Frederic was a close friend of Stephen Crane’s. Trained as a pharmacist, the physician may well have kept a small chemical lab at the house (which still stands at the corner of Fowler and Ball); and as something of a father figure to Stephen as well as a leader in public education in Port Jervis and a temperance man, he would have made a plausible model for Dr. Trescott.
William Crane’s daughter Helen, in a short memoir of her famous uncle Stephen, recalled that her father believed The Monster was based on a Black coal hauler in Port Jervis named Levi Hume, who had a form of cancer that deformed the flesh on his face. The literary scholar Jacqueline Goldsby, however, suggests that William, while believing the character of Dr. Trescott to be based on himself, remained uncomfortable enough with the book’s connection to the Port Jervis lynching that he, unconsciously or not, put forward his view about Levi Hume, if such a person even existed, deliberately as a way of keeping allusions to Robert Lewis at arm’s length. Stephen Crane had envisioned The Monster as being included, and working in contrast, with the other, more pleasant Whilomville Stories, tales of his hometown and boyhood published in book form in 1900; it would certainly have given that collection a different cast. But after the author’s death, William, as his brother’s literary executor, separated it from the first edition. Judge Crane’s obfuscation about the likely model for the novella’s main character, and his setting it apart from the other localized tales, probably contributed to the century-long delay in scholarly notice being paid the connection to the Robert Lewis lynching, although he was not alone in contemplating other sources for his brother’s last work.
Many Port Jervians thought the character of “Henry Johnson” had emerged from the tragedy of Samuel Hasbrouck and Theodore Jarvis, two Black Civil War veterans struck on July 4, 1879, by a premature discharge from a cannon being used in an Independence Day celebration. Jarvis died from his wounds. Hasbrouck lost an eye and was permanently disfigured, a handicap that did not diminish his prominence in the village, where he served officially as a paid “dog slayer,” shooting unmuzzled strays (including once, by mistake, a beloved pet belonging to George Lea). Hasbrouck’s scarred, unsettling features, encountered routinely by fellow villagers, ensured that the July Fourth accident was not forgotten, as did the rumor that Theodore Jarvis’s ghost regularly walked the towpath at twilight.
Race relations in America at the turn of the twentieth century were themselves a restless and deeply troubled spirit. “[The Monster] continues to fascinate,” writes David Greven, precisely “because of its acute responsiveness to the violence, terror, and sheer incoherence of its national era’s unresolved racial crisis and also essential uncertainty.” Mark Twain, writing during the waning idealism of Reconstruction, sent two young men, one white, one Black, down the nation’s mightiest river in a mutual flight for freedom. A generation later, Black Americans had become marginalized to the vanishing point, and Stephen Crane, in a bravura fictionalization, conjured a Black man who literally cannot be looked at. Ralph Ellison was much taken with Crane’s body of work, terming Maggie: A Girl of the Streets “the parent of the modern American novel,” but he responded with particular interest to The Monster. Who was the character Henry Johnson, after all, if not, like Robert Lewis and the many other victims of racial injustice, an invisible man?
Stephen Crane—along with his brother William and The Monster’s Dr. Trescott—had chosen to confront a question largely evaded in late nineteenth-century America: How should a conscientious white person respond to the most egregious forms of racial prejudice? “Despite the prosperity and apparent openness and freedom of the society, it was as though a rigid national censorship had been imposed—not by an apparatus set up in Washington but within the center of the American mind,” Ellison wrote. “Now there was much of which Americans were morally aware but little which they wished to confront in literature, and the compelling of such confrontation was the challenge flung down to Crane by history.”
It is fitting in a way that The Monster was Crane’s last book. His older brother had done that which intrigued Stephen most: he had, in a moment of supreme mortal danger, chosen to do what was right. Unlike his devout father, Stephen did not possess faith in the inherent virtuousness of human beings; he believed that if there was any good in the world, it must reside in the selfless acts of which we are sometimes capable.
William Dean Howells, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, termed The Monster upon its appearance, “the best short story ever written by an American.” When in 1897 Crane had read parts of the manuscript aloud to close friends in England, however, several were unimpressed, pronouncing the tale weird for its rude juxtapositions of the familiar and the strange and complaining of its lack of resolution.
One such colleague was the American novelist and New York Times London correspondent Harold Frederic, whose reports to the United States of the British popularity of The Red Badge of Courage had helped nurture its fame back home. The subheading of Frederic’s glowing January 1896 New York Times review referred to the book’s youthful author as “An Unrivaled Battle Describer,” and compared favorably the innovative psychological perspectives Crane had introduced to the startling breakthroughs in human motion study achieved in the late 1870s by the photographer Eadweard Muybridge. But he disappointed Crane by labeling the new tale misbegotten and offensive and urging him to destroy it.
Frederic’s opinion was hard to dismiss, as he knew as well as Crane the social and psychological terrain in which The Monster was set; his own popular novel The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896) was a realistic depiction of the impact of modernity on issues of faith in upstate New York, where he had been raised. Crane, who rarely allowed himself to be provoked, vehemently defended his latest creation. He had anticipated the short novel would help ease his financial woes, and he may have felt Frederic, who had earlier urged Crane to pursue reportage rather than imaginative tales, was accusing him of trying to profit from a sensationalized horror story. Crane insisted that readers would not be shocked by the inclusion of a faceless character and would appreciate the “sense” of the story, a portrait of a quintessential American town in crisis. When Frederic broadened his critique to include the Joseph Conrad novel Lord Jim, about the moral lapse of a ship’s first mate haunted by his cowardly abandonment of passengers after an accident at sea, Crane, who prized his friendship with Conrad, erupted, slamming the table and “smashing a luncheon plate.”
The incident caused a lasting rift between Crane and Frederic, although the Times reporter was not the only person to deplore the disfigurement of Henry Johnson. Richard Watson Gilder, the editor of the Century Magazine who had rejected Maggie years before as lacking in sentiment and restraint (in Crane’s opinion “because the story was too honest”), sent the manuscript of The Monster back at once to Crane’s literary agent, saying, “We couldn’t publish that thing with half the expectant mothers in America on our subscription list.”
Conrad, however, had no hesitation in praising Crane’s achievement, remarking, “The damned story has been haunting me … I think it must be fine.” It was soon picked up for publication by Harper’s, which ran the full novella in its August 1898 issue. The following year the book publishers Harper & Brothers put out a Crane collection that paired The Monster with “The Blue Hotel,” about the killing of an offensively behaving foreigner in a Colorado saloon.
Julian Hawthorne (son of the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne) took Crane to task for setting up so awful a conundrum in The Monster and then offering no answer for the dilemma it posed. He dubbed the work “an outrage on art and humanity” and suggested that “something is fundamentally out of gear in a mind that can reconcile itself to such a performance … It is one thing to be humorous when writing a history of the French Revolution, like Carlyle; and quite another to be humorous about the tiny trivialities of a New York country town. Anybody can look down on that, and see the fun of it.”
An unsigned 1901 review in Academy, however, allowed that “if Mr. Crane had written nothing else, this book would have wrested from the world an acknowledgement of his curious, searching gifts, and would have made him a reputation … The quick, nervous, prehensile mind that in an instant could select the vital characteristics of any scene or group, is notably here, and here also in superabundance is the man’s grim fatalism, his saturnine pleasure in exhibiting (with bitter, laughing mercilessness) the frustrations of human efforts, the absurd trifles which decide human destiny.”
If The Monster baffled Crane’s contemporaries, it remained misunderstood by critics and literary historians for many decades. Some deemed it an uncanny tale of a monster and his maker, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or an occult yarn akin to Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (a story Crane hugely admired). Others interpreted it as an indictment of small-town myopia and close-mindedness in the vein of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street.
Ralph Ellison was the first to note the story’s background of racial violence and lynching, writing in 1960: “The Monster places us in an atmosphere like that of post–Civil War America, and there is no question of the Negro’s part in it, nor to the fact that the issues go much deeper than the question of race. Indeed, the work is so fresh that [today’s] daily papers tell us all we need to know of its background and the timeliness of its implications.” The Crane biographers Paul Sorrentino and Stanley Wertheim picked up on Ellison’s suggestion and included news articles about the Robert Lewis lynching in their definitive chronicle of the author’s life published in 1994; two years later the literary historian Elaine Marshall’s essay “Crane’s ‘The Monster’ Seen in the Light of Robert Lewis’s Lynching” introduced an interpretation that has subsequently been built upon by several other scholars, most notably Jacqueline Goldsby. Through the real-world brutality of the Port Jervis lynching, and Crane’s fictionalized allegory of racist paranoia, the facade of the quaint village’s neighborliness is exposed. The Monster reveals “truths not socially accepted for almost another hundred years,” notes the critic Chester Wolford. “The story is, indeed, an excoriation of social conditions for [Black Americans], but more important…, it is an excoriation of all communities, all societies, in all places and times.”
Crane’s aim with The Monster was to offer a compelling fiction that would serve as social critique, echoing in its disturbing imagery the powerful emphases of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. He may not have imagined that nearly a century would pass before the connection between it and the lynching of Robert Lewis would be made, or that the town’s long collective silence about the matter would lend special value to his unearthing of its moral ambivalence surrounding the incident. As Goldsby suggests, “Reading The Monster should lead us to rethink the forms that writing and contemplating history assume, and the kind of cultural work that literature can be expected to do in history’s wake.” Crane’s method of capturing history, allowing “the detail of a thing … to filter through my blood, and then it comes out like a native product,” resulted in a work that is both timeless and memorable. Read alongside the known details of the lynching of Robert Lewis, it resembles a missing page from a family scrapbook, a candid sepia-tone snapshot of Port Jervis, New York, and the United States, on June 2, 1892.