Maggie: a Girl of the Streets: and Other Tales of New York (Penguin Classics)

I reread Stephen Crane's "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets" yesterday. It was the first time that I had revisited the book in almost thirty years. Originally, I read Crane's writings in a seminar course which compared his pioneering works to those of Ernest Hemingway. There were common themes in the works of both authors and they both employed a naturalistic style. Crane was more poetic, however, while Hemingway was more workmanlike in his choice of words and phrases.

This tragic story takes place in the slums and the garment district. Maggie is the daughter of two alcoholic Irish immigrants. Her youngest brother dies during early childhood. Her older brother spends his youth fighting rivals in the streets and enduring beatings at the hands of his intoxicated parents at home. In adulthood, Jimmie becomes a teamster and introduces his sister to his friend Pete, a well dressed local bartender. Pete is taken with Maggie's shape and begins courting her. Eventually, Maggie quits her five dollars a week job at the cuff and collar factory and leaves home with Pete. This ill considered decision is the beginning of her ruin. Pete cares nothing for Maggie. She is a only a passing fancy.

Environment determines everything in this sad tale. Alcoholic rages and casual acts of random violence occur on almost every page. Crane employs dialect to reflect the speech patterns of his characters. When Pete abandons Maggie for Nellie, a stylish prostitute, the saddest line of dialogue is Maggie's question: "Where kin I go?" Disowned by her widowed mother, who is herself a frequent defendant in the police courts on account of her drunken behavior, and brother, whose own relations with women are not much better than those of Pete, for having gone to the devil, Maggie begins walking the pavements alone and becomes one of the scarlet legions.

Initially, Crane had to self publish this book since it was considered to coarse and profane to print. It proved to be unprofitable and he gave many copies of the limited first printing away. Unlike "The Red Badge of Courage," there is no place for heroism and redemption in the Bowery streets inhabited by Maggie, Jimmie and Pete. This sad account of an unfortunate woman driven into a life of prostitution is far removed from the nightly celebrations at the opulent Everleigh Club.

It is humbling to think that Crane was capable of creating such a novella while he was scarcely over the age of twenty and that all of his poetry and prose was completed before his death at the age of twenty-eight.

The world of Stephen Crane's Manhattan doesn't exist any more, a fact for which we can be grateful. It's a world where poverty, alcoholism and disease were not only rampant but blamed entirely on the victims.

Crane was no humanist; he was content to record the depravity around him with a keen eye and a cool heart. In his mind man was but passing flashes of cosmic debris, and his New York stories, written in the first half of 1890s and collected here, capture the jagged pieces of life he saw with unblinking candor. "War Is Kind" was the title of a collection of Crane poems; this collection of stories could be called "Man Is Not".

In "When A Man Falls, A Crowd Gathers", we have a tale of urban rubbernecking before the age of the automobile. A man collapses on the street, and a throng soon surrounds him, gaping hopefully for the sight of death and trodding on each other's toes. "An Eloquence Of Grief" covers a young lady accused of prostitution realizing no one cares about her plight in the cold recesses of a busy courtroom.

"The Men In The Storm" sets us amid another throng, this time a huddled mass seeking shelter beneath a blizzard: "Then a dull roar of rage came from the men on the outskirts; but all the time they strained and pushed until it appeared to be impoosible for those that they cried out against to do anything but be crushed to pulp."

That's about the lot of everyone in these stories, sadly, from the title character of Crane's first novel "Maggie" to a small dark-brown dog who finds temporary shelter with a small boy and his thoughtless family. For Crane, originally from upstate New York, Gotham in the last decade of the 19th century was a frightening place, hellish because it placed people in such close proximity to one another.

The stories collected here don't necessarily work in isolation, though "A Dark Brown Dog" remains a sentimental favorite of mine when I feel tough enough to read it and "George's Mother" works very well as a story of a shortsighted woman and her wayward son. But reading them in tandem here gives you a sense for what it was Crane found so fascinating and terrifying. Even a lighter piece like "The Broken-Down Van" feels fabulously unreal in Crane's hands, almost dreamlike in the way the narration jumps around without rhyme or reason among drivers, spectators, drunks, and a cop.

The character of Maggie makes a cameo in "George's Mother, and the book's Introduction by Larzer Ziff states flatly that three of the other stories - "Dark-Brown Dog", "An Ominous Baby", and "A Great Mistake" - also deal with Maggie's family. That seems a reach to me, though it's true Crane's characters feel oddly connected with one another, even when they are of different station. The children in "Mr. Binks' Day Off" have the same first names as Maggie and her siblings, though they couldn't be farther apart socially.

It's been said that Crane was both Naturalist and Impressionist when it came to his art, and that case is well presented in this collection. Miserable as man's condition may be, boring it's not, and Crane is as good a representer of that reality as anyone.

If Edith Wharton captures the snobbery, superficiality, hypocrisy, materialism, and coldness of New York City's turn-of-the-century elite, Stephen Crane reveals the toughness, callousness, brutality, and violence of New York's working class. Ironically, Wharton's Lily Bart and Crane's Maggie Johnson, both romantics moving in anti-romantic spheres, share a similar fate--abandoned by their respective societies.

Unlike Wharton, Crane wrote from a primarily journalistic, dispassionate point of view. The settings, the situations, the speech, and the similes reveal the underbelly of life among the working poor. Maggie opens with "a very little boy," her brother Jim, serving as "champion" of Rum Alley, an aptly named area where life is centered on working, drinking, and fighting.

Maggie and Jim's father can't keep him from fighting because that's all the boy knows, and the torn clothes that his drunken mother bemoans cannot compare to the furniture and crockery damage that occur during their violent marital spats. The father, a drunken brute like his wife, does not understand the irony of his demand when he says, ". . . Yer allus pounding 'im . . . I can't get no rest 'cause yer allus poundin' a kid. Let up, d'yeh hear? Don't be allus poundin' a kid." The infuriated mother responds with increased savagery. "At last she tossed him to a corner where he limply lay cursing and weeping." Jim, Maggie, and even the baby Tommie seem to be as disposable as the rest of the household goods.

Life in the city is lived outwardly, and the strong do not question themselves. While "Jimmie had an idea it wasn't common courtesy for a friend to come to one's home and ruin one's sister," his contemplations of his own actions toward women are cut off by self-absolution before such introspection can lead to self-incrimination. Later, Pete will share this attitude when Maggie attempts, in his mind, "to give him some responsibility in a matter that did not concern him."

Maggie and Jimmie's parents represent an extreme. Everyone knows their family's business, from the residents who share their tenement with its "gruesome doorway" to the group of urchins who waylay the mother as she is ejected from a saloon for "disturbance." The Johnsons' troubles delight the neighbors; the old woman downstairs tells Jim that "deh funnies' t'ing I ever saw" was Maggie "a-cryin' as if her heart would break, she was. It was deh funnies' t'ing I ever saw."

In the midst of this squalor, Maggie does have an inner life. Combined with her romanticism and naïveté, it convinces her that Pete is the height of urbane sophistication as he bullies waiters, telling them to "git off deh eart'." Interestingly, as she toils over "eternal collars and cuffs," Maggie has a daydream that foreshadows Pete's final chapter in the novel; she imagines him with a half dozen women "and thought he must lean dangerously toward an indefinite one, whom she pictured with great charms of person, but with an altogether contemptible disposition."

In Maggie's final appearance, Crane does not use her name, which perhaps answers her question from the preceding chapter: "Who?" She begins her anonymous journey near a theater district, where the affluent emerge from "a place of forgetfulness." Her wanderings on this one night reflect her life over the previous several months, as she leaves behind the bright light and glamor on a trail of rejection that leads ever downward, until she meets a wreck of a human, who follows "the girl of the crimson legions." No longer Maggie, she represents those whose naivete, hopes, and foolish romantic dreams are crushed by the code of toughness that Jimmie fights for at the beginning and the hypocrisy that her lamenting mother exhibits at her fall.

These stories can be hard to read, partly because most of the relationships seem detached or distant at best and bitterly heartless at worst. Maggie's father talks about pounding "a kid" as though they are not his own and have nothing to do with him. Pete is "stuck" on Maggie's shape only until she gets in the way of greater desires. George of George's Mother is happiest when he has made his old mother miserable. At the same time his "friends," whose habits and exhortations have led to his downfall, abandon him, just as he turned on his mother.

Love is a rare visitor to Crane's pages, apparent mostly in the maternal indulgences of George's Mother and the rediscovered affection of Mr. and Mrs. Binks in "Mr. Binks' Day Off." It is only in the countryside of New Jersey that the battling Binkses find a moment in which to express genuine affection: "Mrs. Binks had stolen forth her arm and linked it with his. Her head leaned softly against his shoulder."

Notably, the other loving relationship, between a child and "A Dark-Brown Dog," is marked by the brutality of the one and the submissiveness of the other. Their friendship begins when "the child lifted his hand and struck the dog a blow upon the head"; the dog "sank down in despair at the child's feet." In the world both know, the more powerful must domineer, and the weaker must submit. Living by this simple rule, however, does not guarantee survival.

Crane self-published Maggie, and it is sometimes clear that his work could have benefited from an editor's counsel. For example, similes such as, "The little boy ran to the halls, shrieking like a monk in an earthquake," are ineffective and draw too much attention to themselves. Yet these stories are an amazing accomplishment of observation and writing that make Crane's premature death at age 28 even more tragic.

I enjoyed this book very much, but only read the Maggie part of the story for my English class. If I do end up reading the rest of the book and like it, I would definitely give it five stars! What I did read, I love. It does have a dark, tragic feel to the story, and you really feel sorry for the main character, Maggie. I believe it is true to its genre of realism, but focuses more on the psychological aspect of Maggie and the naturalism branch (meaning how the environment affects her). You can really feel sympathy towards Maggie and her character, so if you're into getting into the personal life of Maggie with a dark aspect, you'll enjoy Crane's novel!

I got this for a class. Interesting read. More than just the Maggie story for your reading pleasures.