The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Sh - Stephen Crane [4]
The aspirant was a curious man to look at. Although he was barely twenty-one years old, his face and body were already showing signs of wear and abuse. He stood at 5 feet 6 inches, average for a man of his day. A few years previously, during two unsuccessful semesters at two different colleges, he weighed in at a taut 125 pounds, muscular and agile enough to stand out on a college baseball team. By 1893, however, his strapped diet and unrestrained smoking had taken their toll on the body and abilities that had once attracted the serious notice of a professional baseball club. His complexion had turned sallow. His shoulders on his emaciated frame had begun to droop. Several friends detected an increasing dullness in his blue-gray eyes. Cigarettes and cigars had stained his fingers and teeth with nicotine. He coughed deeply and regularly from the habit. That, plus his poor diet would beset him with a variety of dental problems for the rest of his life. His custom of writing late into the night frequently created dark circles under his eyes during the following day. To those around him, he often looked ill.
Although he preferred a more bohemian lifestyle, especially in the clothes he wore, the young writer did try to spruce up his appearance for the party. These people inhabited a very different social circle than the one he was accustomed to. His usually disheveled hair had been hastily groomed. He did not own a suit suitable for the occasion, so he borrowed a friend’s best outfit. It obviously did not fit him very well, which reinforced his uncomfortable thought that he would be very out of place at such a gathering. On a subconscious level, he feared that this opportunity fitted him as poorly as his suit did. He wanted to be a writer on his own terms; he should control his public persona, not tailor it to acquiesce to the refined expectations of a social circumstance. As much as he admired his host and needed his help, the young man had misgivings about how playing the patronage game might compromise his art.
The journey to his host’s home on the south side of Central Park was a study of the contrast between the haves and the have-nots in turn-of-the-century New York City. His starting point was fraught with failure. Ever since he had moved to the city to pursue his chosen vocation, he had lived in a succession of cheap boarding houses on the East Side. Such environs had provided the backdrop for his early fiction. He particularly liked to disguise himself as a derelict in order to mingle with the denizens of the infamous Bowery district. He had recently finished Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a short novel about how poverty enslaves a woman to a prostitute’s life. When no publisher would touch it (one had called it too “cruel”) , he sold his last bit of patrimony—some stock his late father had bequeathed to him—and used the money to have the story privately printed. In 1893 few people took note of Maggie. Eventually, the young writer gave away a hundred copies and used the remainder as kindling. Friend and fellow writer Hamlin Garland brought the book to the host’s notice. Thus, the aspirant’s “calling card” had been presented.
In contrast, at the other end of his journey on that April day, his destination was distinguished by success. The home of his host was not outlandishly opulent but tasteful and understatedly elegant, befitting his status as America’s most influential man of letters. Unlike the squalor omnipresent on the East Side, this house had a pleasant panorama of a lake situated at the south entrance to Central Park. Every item modestly bespoke eminence and success. The host’s novels attracted immediate interest and financial reward. Only a few years ago, he had published to much acclaim A Hazard of New Fortunes, the most ambitious