Paul Auster - Burning Boy - Comment.

 

Author, Stephen Crane, was once a household name in the US and Europe. The writer's most famous novel, The Red Badge of Courage, continues to ring a bell for most Americans. Strangely, when you ask anyone who the author is: the response is usually a blank stare. It feels like over a hundred years ago in middle school when I was introduced to this pivotal Civil War novel; many comments Red Badge is the quintessential "war" novel of the 19th century - a novel that ranks with Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. Paul Auster's biography of Crane is not an effort at literary criticism but a deep psychological dive into the artist and an explanation of 'feelings' towards the writer's entire body of work. Burning Boy, more than anything else, is a tribute from one writer to another. 

In Crane's short life, his literary production is off the charts. As a journalist, he was prolific, covering the Spanish American War and others. From what I can glean, Crane's journalism was to keep the wolves from the door. Throughout the writer's life, money was always a problem. Money was only his primary concern when interfering with his writing. One can connect unscrupulous editors and publishers and Crane's laissez-faire attitude to money. It's a wonder it didn't affect his literary output; on the contrary, it motivated him to write more. 

After 2 years of college, he ended up living with fellow artists (all poor) in New York. They would all chip in for food and the rent, helping each other hone their art form. Crane was described by many to be a bohemian, a disheveled young man with his mind only focused on writing. This bohemian persona seemed to stick with him all his life. Near the end of his life living in the UK, the old photographs show a well-dressed gentleman. By then, he had literary renown, but despite his famous short stories and Red Badge fame, he was only a breath away from poverty. 

Stephen Crane is said to write in the style of 19th-century realism and naturalism, and his works are described as impressionistic. At the time, a few prescient readers and critics placed the writer in a different category - one of the American Modernists.

While living in England, he associated and became good friends with the great or soon-to-be famous writers of the time: Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, H.G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad. It appears that Henry James loved the man, and Conrad believed Crane to be a genius and his best friend. Their letters and comments about the young writer are undoubtedly from the heart. 

I was particularly impressed with Crane as the war correspondent. While Red Badge mostly came from his imagination, his reports on the battlefields of Cuba reveal a journalist of remarkable insight, bravery, or an individual unconcerned with death. Crane indeed had wanderlust and the spirit of an adventurer. He was the happiest abroad, writing about different cultures and the terrors of war. 

This intense biography is an actual labor of love: a 19th-century writer and a 21st-century writer in a strange artistic kinship across time. This connection gave the biography a spiritual connection between the writer, subject, and reader. 

It's obvious why the biography is titled Burning Boy. Like the great geniuses of our time, their creative furor burned hard for a short period, only to see their lives burn out too soon.  

A genuinely outstanding biography of one of the great American writers.