Fiction:American writer Stephen Crane was a witness, he died young, and in spite of his career as a journalist, his literary reputation rests on one book, The Red Badge of Courage, which was published in 1895.
It is a masterpiece of psychological realism and places Crane alongside 19th-century US literary masters such as Hawthorne. It tells the story of a raw recruit, Henry Fleming, and his experiences during the American Civil War. In common with Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), it is one of those rare war classics you never forget. Encounter it first when you are young and it changes your life; return to its doomed humanity as an older person and you will weep bitter tears.
Not bad considering that the closest the New Jersey-born sickly son of a Methodist minister got to battle was when serving as a war correspondent in Mexico, Greece and Cuba. Of that hectic time in Havana, White presents Crane's common-law wife Cora quietly recalling that "he'd hidden in that city for three or four months, away from her, away from everyone". After a stint covering a three-week war in Puerto Rico, "he'd sneaked back to Havana and filed stories from that old, sinful, rotting city". Crane and Cora have been through a great deal together; both were reporters, albeit of contrasting status. As White's speculative, quasi-biographical novel opens, they are both participants in Crane's painful final illness.
This is an odd, almost eccentric book, a narrative within a narrative. Crane is dying - and knows it. Cora, the former brothel keeper, is desperate to keep him alive, and they share a project; Crane is telling what he knows will be his final story and Cora is writing it all down, eager not only to finish but to discover what happens. White sets the scene. In 1897, Crane moved to England, where his novel is even more revered than it is back home. Crane has become friendly with Joseph Conrad and has settled in Brede in Sussex. According to Leon Edel, biographer of Henry James, the Crane home was "an eight-mile bicycle run from Lamb House". Admittedly, by then Crane must have been long beyond cycling anywhere. But he was famous and was, at least in the biased opinion of loyal, loving Cora, a far greater genius than James.
Death stalks Crane throughout the book, but White somehow retains his characteristic lightness of touch and playful handling of literary references and historical detail.
IN WAYS, THIS is a book that could also have been written by the British writer Peter Ackroyd. For White, it is his second excursion into the historical genre and follows the barbed though amusing Fanny: A Fiction (2003). Based on the life of the mother of Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, that daftly engaging romp revealed yet another aspect of the versatile White, who approaches his natural interest in literature, history and biography with lively irony. Fanny Trollope in old age has become a literary sensation for writing a critical attack on the US. Now she is tackling the biography of an old friend and rival, which itself becomes an exercise in score-settling.
White's lively prose, invariably graceful, as deliberate as it is throwaway, is almost conversational, and always marked by his candour, humour and humanity. These are among the qualities he brought to his major study of Jean Genet - as much an exploration of 20th-century French intellectual life as a literary biography - and also his more recent monograph on Proust.
White is also an American writer who stepped beyond the pale - he lived and worked in France for more than 20 years, although he recently returned to New York and now teaches at Princeton - lucky students.
Before all of that, though, he became the major living - and surviving - writer of the US's 1980s gay literary movement. Between 1979 and 1981 he worked on A Boy's Own Story. It is his story, one about a Midwest boyhood dominated by the agonies of being an outsider. White's tone ensured that this was any boy's story, and such was its appeal that it became an immediate classic. For White it was far more specific; from Ohio, he had gone to boarding school in Michigan, where a fellow classmate, another future writer, Thomas McGuane, would later remember White openly clowning about his sexuality. But McGuane also recalled that it was the same White who had introduced him to Proust.
Defiance has never entered White's world. Instead he has proved a master of ironic self-abasement, marked by humility, humour and vulnerability.
His observations are shrewd, yet his hurt is obvious. These are the qualities that make his work so appealing. Such was the success of A Boy's Own Story that he was encouraged to continue his personal odyssey in The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988). In it, White records his passage from being a furtive outsider in the Midwest to a knowing participant in New York's gay scene. Both accounts are not only beautiful, they succeed in being bizarrely uplifting.
With The Farewell Symphony (1997), the final volume of his autobiographical trilogy, White achieved the impossible. No one else could have captured all the pain and terror, the anger and pathos of the medieval plague that devastated the gay community with a Biblical ferocity. The Farewell Symphony could have proved an endurance test, but that 500-page novel, for all its candour and often graphic description, reads as an elegy. Above all, Edmund White, who always acknowledged Christopher Isherwood as his influence, has brought gay fiction out of the margins and into mainstream literary fiction, opening the way for writers such as David Leavitt and Michael Cunningham.
IN ANOTHER MAJOR White work, The Married Man (2000), Austin, a middle-aged American living in Paris, begins an affair with a young, married French man. Their romance becomes a tragedy that culminates in a heroic odyssey. Hotel de Dream never approaches the emotional force of The Married Man. But White does succeed in winning much sympathy for Cora, whose love and pride in her young husband and his genius are convincingly evoked. Where the new novel does well is in its literary flourishes.
White presents Crane as a writer intent on his artistic legacy. This final story, The Painted Boy, is based on a young newsboy that Crane had met in the street. Crane remembers noting "there was also something hard-eyed and disabused about Elliott that touched me. I suppose there's nothing more appealing than a small person who is in obvious pain but unreachable. Whose child's heart is still alive, still beating inside a block of ice. I had the strong impression that I could look through the ice to see it, trailing its veins and arteries, pulsing not with contractions but with light."
The narrative is divided between Crane's musings, the conversations with Cora and the extracts from the immediately predictable work in progress, The Painted Boy. In it, Elliott becomes an object of sexual obsession for a respectable middle-aged banker, Theodore, who decides he wants a statue of the boy. This results in disaster.
But then, the story within the story, although it places the book back in White's familiar territory, is not all that relevant. The real story is Crane. Who was he? And how close does White's imagined character come to the real-life enigma? It is true that Crane emerges as a modern - there is little sense of period about him. But White does catch some sense of a seedy New York from another era. And of course, true to what now appears an established trend, there is a walk-on part for Henry James, who restores some element of ambivalent order.
There are elements of melodrama, there are traces of burlesque, and flashes of White insight. Hotel de Dream is not the best of White. Yet there are wonderful touches, such as the description of Joseph Conrad: "His eyes were pinpoints of trouble, his mouth a flat line of pain, his shoulders so strong and high that he appeared to have no neck at all. He entered the room as if he'd just been asked to ascend a throne . . . His skin was sallow and the lines in his face spoke of long night watches on the ship of art." Crane is a man with a date with death and a hunger for immortality. All of this is conveyed with the ease, good-natured knowing and humanity of the companionable Edmund White.
In highlighting Crane, he has fulfilled yet another service to readers.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Hotel de Dream By Edmund White Bloomsbury, 226pp. £14.99