Fiction in Review: “Hotel de Dream” by Edmund White

Even White’s latest effort, his ninth novel, about the death of the young, firmly heterosexual novelist Stephen Crane, features a version of this thesis. Hotel de Dream offers a self-reflexive, at times fully ironical, exploration of friendship. A number of friendships frame the novel’s central action. Crane’s lover Cora, formerly the madam of the Florida brothel from which the novel takes its name, plays the part of the friend who, like the devoted gay friends in The Farewell Symphony (1998) or The Married Man, tends to the dying. For a while Cora refuses to believe in Crane’s impending death and even devises an extravagant plan to take him for a cure in the Black Forest, where he eventually dies. Until the last, Cora remains faithful to Crane’s genius, taking dictation for The O’Ruddy, a novel the historical Crane was in fact working on at the time of his death, as well as for a second, scandalous story he has decided, in White’s account, to write from his deathbed. The story is a recapitulation of a novel he had once started about a boy prostitute but had, on the advice of his close friend, the novelist Hamlin Garland, destroyed. Such advice from writer friends, who are depicted as both fond of Crane and sometimes scandalized by his brazen talent for truth-telling, provides an ironic frame for the idea of friendship explored by Hotel de Dream. Solicitous literary friends make appearances throughout the novel: an earnest William Dean Howells, who has tried to dissuade Crane from expatriating himself to England because “American needs [him]”; a rather prissy Henry James, who while visiting the dying Crane in London stirs Cora’s resentment and offers advice that proves to be, not unlike James’s fiction, nearly perfectly useless; and an awkwardly direct Joseph Conrad, who, on first seeing his tuberculosis-stricken friend in Dover, remarks, though he does not mean to be so brutal, that he can tell Crane will soon be “leaving this world.”

Set during the final days of Crane’s life, the novel brings together three primary strands of narrative: a present-tense narrative set in the winter of 1900, as Crane dictates to Cora and receives literary friends; a flashback narrative recounting his first meeting and subsequent interactions with the boy prostitute, as Crane often slips casually into free-associative reminiscence; and a third narrative, White’s imaginative reconstruction of Crane’s lost novel, which is interwoven into the whole. Much of the metafictional story in which White rewrites Crane, rechristening a manuscript the historical Crane called “Flowers of Asphalt” with the title “The Painted Boy,” takes its cues from Crane’s deathbed reminiscences of the street boy. And yet we often witness Crane departing from what he knows factually about the boy’s history to devise the story as a pure fiction, infused with the urgency of dreams until it takes on the quality of erotic fantasy, as though the arc of bodily desire might negotiate a standoff with death. In the course of “The Painted Boy,” which takes up roughly a quarter Hotel de Dream, White’s Crane seizes on the device of rendering a sculpture of the painted boy’s youthful body, as though art might provide a stay against time. Still, however, convincing such art might be, fashioning immortality according to the old Hellenic model as the product of culture, its achievements are set against the background of untimely dying bodies and remembered acts of friendship that by modest contrast to art’s timelessness seem less intent on looking away from suffering bodies.

Hotel de Dream is in the vein of a new subgenre of literature, namely, the novel about novelists. Descended from the historical novel, in which the author occupies the space and minds of historical persons in order to recreate the contour and texture of historical events, this new subgenre draws also on techniques of the Bildungsroman by which writers such as Somerset Maugham and James Joyce would construe the emergence of a creative personality on the model of the author’s own life. In the novel about novelists, a contemporary author looks back on a peer from the past so as to occupy a particular perspective or to imagine a series of events from the dead author’s life. A stepchild of modernism and, further back, perhaps of romance’s fondness for the twice-told story, the subgenre is a mixture of whimsy and gravitas, based as much on the magnificent audacity of Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil (1945)—which allows us to live the last days of Rome’s epic poet through elegiac, Virgilian thoughts—as on the mischievous fancy of Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography (1933), which conjures Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s bedridden existence through a narrative improvised from within the consciousness of her lapdog.

In the long sweep of the twentieth into the twenty-first century, the novel about novelists flourished most obviously in the climate of postmodernism, not least because it was capable of reflecting the confused imperatives of post-individualist culture. The writer who attempts to ventriloquize a revered predecessor, as say, Raymond Carver does in his story about the last days of Anton Chekhov, offers us both sincere utterance and mock homage. There is a necessary failure inscribed on the project, a limitation on imaginative scope greater even than that which the ordinary historical novel encounters. How could one ever truly approximate or stand in for the voice of another author, for someone who has lived his or her entire life so as to achieve a distinctive voice? That question, posed if only indirectly by almost every novel about novelists, is a version of fiction’s fundamental anxiety about characterization. How can any author claim to speak even for one single ordinary person? Informed by this twofold anxiety, the novel about novelists often searches for the obscure or silenced episodes of an author’s life, the struggle with death or tragedy that levels a life that might otherwise appear ordained, destined for importance. In his 1994 novel The Master of Petersburg, J.M. Coetzee occupies the consciousness of a Dostoyevsky in the grip of a far more ordinary pathology than that for which he is renowned. Coetzee’s Dostoyevsky is coping, though just barely, with the death by suicide of his beloved stepson, sleeping in the same bed his son occupied while a boarder away at school and even seducing the proprietress in a bizarre effort to pry from her additional information about his son’s everyday life. Coetzee’s Dostoyevsky is just barely authorial, as Coetzee apprehends the pathology of extreme grief as reversion to an animal inarticulateness that might belie every act of culture and every authorial ambition. So too, a number of gay writers, most prominently Michael Cunningham in 1998’s Pulitzer Prize winner The Hours, and Colm Tóibín in 2004’s Booker short-listed The Master, have deployed this subgenre to consider the liminal spaces of the normative authorial life, eliciting undercurrents of homosexual desire that for years could not be readily named in the lives of writers such as Virginia Woolf and Henry James, perhaps not even by the historical authors themselves. White’s own Fanny: A Life represented his first foray into this subgenre, and Hotel de Dream represents a strong, slightly more ironical and certainly more reflexive experience in this vein.

The idea for the story of “The Painted Boy,” the novella White composes as if in Crane’s voice, originates in a reminiscence of Crane’s longtime friend James Gibbins Huneker, which is recounted in White’s postface to the novel. According to Huneker, on an evening in the spring of 1894, the year after Crane self-published Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, he and Crane were solicited by a boy prostitute who was both “painted” and “very handsome.” At first Crane “didn’t see what the boy’s game was,” and when he did finally understand he was immediately disgusted, then interested. After pumping details from the boy, Crane soon launched himself into a novel, of which the opening scene, according to Huneker, was “probably the best passage of prose that Crane ever wrote.” When Crane read presumably the same segment aloud to Hamlin Garland, however, Garland was completely horrified.

If we are to believe Huneker’s whimsical recollection, it is unlikely that Crane ever finished the book. White launches his own revisionary reimaginings of Crane by supposing that Crane was pretty far along in his composition of that novel. In Hotel de Dream, Garland has read forty pages of the original manuscript before recommending its immediate destruction in order to preserve his friend’s career. By this one deft stroke, White associates Crane’s scandalous novel with texts such as Hemingway’s first novel, left on a train by his wife, or the monumental novel-in-progress of the great Polish surrealist Bruno Schultz, who died in the Holocaust and whose novel has never surfaced. And if we allow ourselves to indulge the fantasy that such a manuscript, containing some of Crane’s finest writing, might have disappeared from literary history, the loss seem especially poignant on the premise that Crane, dying at twenty-eight he remained in White’s view a largely unrealized talent in American literature. Indeed, by Crane’s self-estimation in Hotel de Dream, he is an author of sturdy, journalistic prose who has never quite found the means or time to produce the literature he might have been capable of. Fully cognizant of his failings, the dying author regrets his disloyalty to the one book that might have provided posterity with a true measure of his talent and so decides to reconstruct the story.

There is a somewhat backhanded compliment to the real-life Crane, founder of American realism, in all of this, one crucial to White’s subtle, metafictional irony in Hotel de Dream. As he also died in Fanny, White choses a writer who is as much a foil to his own customary aesthetic as a suitable vehicle for rendering history. Fanny Trollope, a relatively minor author of over a hundred books, the most famous of which was Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), afforded White the opportunity to reconstruct an obsolete era of American culture through an antiquated if not altogether quaint perspective. Much of the creative energy of Fanny finally resides in White’s talent for replicating his narrator’s limited, sometimes outrageously simplifying powers of observation. Fanny adopts airs of superiority over French and American culture, recounting a secondhand information as if it were perfectly reliable or reporting on what she herself observes without quite understanding what she sees. She fails, all too tellingly, to recognize homosexuality and other forms of illicit or nonmarital liaison in her companions and even her own children. With gently needling irony, White conceives of her son, Henry, as having been sexually ambiguous, courted by a man whom Fanny believes to be enamored of herself. A product of her time but also of her own cultural complex as a philanthropically minded Tory, she cannot come clean to herself about her homosocial fascination with the young radical Fanny Wright. White’s virtuoso imitation of Fanny’s Victorian voice so plumbs ideology as to suggest its quality as performed blindness to one’s beliefs and biases.

In like manner, Crane is anything but an obvious precursor for White’s aesthetic or social vision. Crane, composer of an active prose characterized as much by its crudely ineloquent syntax as by its aggressively colloquial vigor, is also a personage who stands, in the lore of his short, adventurous life and by his legacy in American literary history, for a virile form of heterosexuality. As journalist-cum-author and as a chronicler of war he leads directly to Ernest Hemingway, who thought all of modern American literature began with Huckleberry Finn and Crane’s The Open Boat. Even what is most daring in Crane’s literary experimentation, his blending of naturalism and the techniques of expressionistic symbolism, is intuitively appropriated by Hemingway and made over finally in the style of modernist machismo. White is no fan of Hemingway. In a 1983 review of James Jones, who had styled himself as Hemingway’s protégé while lacking, in White’s view, Papa’s “alternating sadism and self-hatred,” White went out of his way to recall a mean-spirited note penned by Hemingway in response to a request from Scribner’s for a blurb on Jones’s first novel, in which he called Jones “an enormously skillful fuck-up” and predicted and then hoped for Jones’s suicide, before recommending with racist bravado that Jones “suck the pus out of a dead n——’s ear.” There you have it: machismo offering a caricature of itself far in excess of what even its staunchest feminist critic might contrive. Or, as White says, ready for verbal fisticuffs only, “So much for the literary life.” What most deeply offends White about Hemingway’s response is the willful violation of an ethic of literary camaraderie, based on principles of friendship.

Just so, White’s fictionalized Stephen Crane would wrest the historical figure from his legacy as progenitor of Hemingwayesque codes of violence, chauvinism, and competitive identity. Whereas Hemingway’s Crane is the genius behind The Red Badge of Courage and The Open Boat, White’s Crane is the unrealized talent who gave us Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, especially the 1893 version, which no publishing house would touch and which Crane had to self-publish, and the somewhat maudlin novella George’s Mother. And of course, White’s Crane is also the author of a clandestine, possibly suppressed novel about a boy prostitute that, had it survived, might well have altered our entire view of Crane. White, I would conjecture, admires Crane more for his sensibility than for his abruptly paratactic prose, and so also esteems him for his sympathies for the poor and for sexual outliers rather than for his tendency to fall back on melodramatic plots.

There are signs throughout Hotel de Dream of White’s polite reservations about Crane, performed with a kind of dialectical modesty. As White is certainly aware, Crane had champions well before Hemingway, people who admired him as a social chronicler but also as a stylist. There were those, including Hamlin Garland and Frank Norris, who praised Maggie for the authors’ “astonishingly good” or “catching” style. In hindsight such verdicts may seem to have been forged in the envious fire of admiration Garland and Norris must have felt for Crane’s ability to capture the colloquial rhythms of speech and replicate the idiomatic variety and assorted jargon of street language. This is understandable. Crane was a pioneer of journalistic social realism, recording the scene and sounds of the Bowery for Americans who might otherwise not have paid attention to such miseries. In White’s novel, Cora is the spokesperson for this view of Crane, whom she apologetically labels “the great American stylist.” White here plays a subtle metafictional game with his reader that depends on our canniness about American literary history. For Cora’s declarations about the merits of her dying lover are made explicitly at the expense of Henry James, for whom she feels a mildly homophobic disdain. When she learns of an upcoming visit from James, Cora relishes her servant’s exasperation over the prospect of “that old woman coming to bother us again with his hemming and hawing.” Perceiving James’s queer crush on Crane, Cora shortly thereafter remembers a remark from Harold Frederic to the effect that James was “all woman” and feels sanctioned in her disapproval of his affected manner and fastidiousness as well of his writing, which she finds to be full of “art” and falsity, in contrast to the admirable style of Crane, who she describes, in anticipation of Hemingway’s terms of appreciation, as “a man even in his exhausted state.” Simply put, the renowned stylist James is in Cora’s eyes someone who “couldn’t write good clear prose” like Crane. Whose side is White on here—Cora / Crane’s or James’s? Maybe neither, but then again his own penchant for perfectly paced sentences and marvelously cadent syntactical arrangements is more readily associated with James.

Readers are most likely aware of Edmund White’s reputation of nearly thirty-five years as one of the finest living American prose stylists. None other than that master of all late-twentieth-century prose stylists in English Vladmir Nabokov, perhaps White’s favorite writer, crowned the debut novel, Forgetting Elena, a tour de force. Later, with A Boy’s Own Story (1982), White procured an international reputation and came to be praised in France, for instance, as a master stylist in the tradition of Henry James. If one gets the sense from interviews and essays that White would prefer to be associated with Nabokov, Proust, or Jean Genet, still it seems doubtful he would altogether eschew comparison to James, except perhaps with regard to James’s extremely closeted existence. Jamesian prose is often perceived as mannered by today’s standards, but White, as he condemns James through Cora’s biased praise, is implicitly recognizing that Crane’s style, for all its so-called journalistic vigor, also reads as mannered, his plots as melodramatic, his politics as merely sentimental. Even Cora can concede at one point to finding Crane’s “style a bit underwritten,” but talks herself out of any doubts by recalling, in a nod to Garland, Norris, and perhaps William Dean Howells, that “the best critics liked it that way.”

I suspect White wants to have it both ways, following in the mode of Colm Tóibín and indulging in a gentle satire of the priggish James even as he also recognizes, contrary to all Cora’s emphatic proclamations, the superiority of James as a prose stylist. Part of the dialectical routine—as we turn from overt yet defensively motivated criticisms of James the stylist to outrageous scenes in which James fulfills some of the worst prejudices against acting as a repressed, caddish prude—is to get us to a place in which White can imagine the heterosexual Crane as potentially a better friend to gay culture and the transgendered community than James could ever have been. Fully conscious of the element of fantasy at work here, White keeps himself grounded in reality by depicting Crane as slipping in several key moments back into heterosexist prejudice, as in a scene where he asks Conrad about his experience with “inverts” and then speaks rather dismissively of Oscar Wilde, so recently ruined. Cora later reprimands Crane for his lack of sympathy for Wilde, drawing attention to the inconsistency between such an attitude and the story he has begun writing. By clues of this sort we gather that White’s Crane is as much a vision of the author he might have become as a version of the historical Crane. On the evidence of Crane’s progressive attitudes on prostitution, outstripped in Maggie only by his scathing distrust of middle-class morality, White fashions a fantasy of sympathetic heterosexual culture, constructing what modern literary critics would call an “implied author,” one who, though a straight man, can imaginatively adopt as his own the tribulations of a boy prostitute, even approximating the subjective posture of his homoerotic desire.

So great is the apparent intimacy between Crane and Elliott that a man in a bowler, who is in love with the boy, spies on them with obvious jealousy. That jealous older man will become Theodore, the protagonist of the novel ‘‘The Painted Boy,” through whom White brings his artful meditation on the duality inherent in friendship to a perfect pitch by having Theodore serve as an ironic dopplegänger of Crane himself. The full resonance of White’s meditation on the duality of friendship is drawn from his savvy recollection of Montaigne’s “On Friendship.” In that classic essay Montaigne extols the virtue of a friendship so exceptional it might almost defy comparison. He declaims the superiority of his friendship to the feeling of child for parent (based merely in respect) or father for son (contingent on biology). He disparages the association between brothers (necessarily tainted by rivalry), affection for women (since sexual desire is premised on the pursuit of what eludes us), and the dream of companionate marriage (the preservation of which relies almost entirely on constraint and compulsion). Finally, as though confronting the homosocial underpinnings of his own rhetorical extravagance, Montaigne turns his attention for a full three paragraphs to that alternative allowed by the Greeks, which our morality, he suggests, “rightly abhors.” This concentrated anxiety about homosexuality, if intended as yet another rebuttal of a lesser model, has the unwitting effect of enhancing the homoerotic connotation of friendship. Montaigne decides that any virtue the Greeks perceived in homosexual friendship depended on the philosophical, religious, and political benefits derived from its identity as tutelage, as the loved one especially was inspired to a love of spiritual beauty. Even as the Hellenic model of homosexual love becomes rationalized as friendship, friendship is yet haunted by its erotic or physical occasion, as Montaigne cites approvingly the Stoic definition of love as the attempt to “gain the friendship of someone whose beauty has attracted us.”

In “The Painted Boy,” Theodore, a married banker of forty with two children, is compelled by Elliott’s beauty to undertake his first homosexual relationship, with a boy young enough, in keeping with the Hellenic paradigm, to be his son. Upping the stakes of Crane’s gift-giving, Theodore gives the boy presents and obtains a room for him to live in, expecting his generosity to be repaid in sexual favors. Prompted by Theodore, the boy on one occasion recalls the impoverished journalist’s meager present of a cap, but then adds, with a gibe at Theodore’s own erotic motives, “And why should he [Crane] give me things? He doesn’t want anything from me.” Raising here the standard of disinterestedness, defended by Montaigne as the surest sign of friendship, White does not so much prefer Crane to Theodore as remind us that what we are reading is a fiction created by Crane, through which he might well exempt himself from erotic motives even while exploring, if only in fantasy form, a homoerotic terrain with which he is unfamiliar. And yet the effect of his imaginative act is to draw him further inside the homoerotically charged dimensions of friendship. Late in the composition of the novel, Crane stops to ask Cora if his portrayal of Theodore is plausible, if a man who likes boys would act in such a way, whereupon she replies that his story is so real and touching that she wonders whether it is based on real people. Still another time, while she is preparing to take dictation, she teasingly suggests that they go back to their men, since, as she says”, That’s what interests both of us.” Indeed, the metafictional harmony between Crane and his dopplegänger, Theodore, is enhanced by the fact that Crane serves as a spur to Theodore’s jealousy, even causing him to hire a private detective to investigate the daily activities of Elliott.

There is also a harmony, of a mournful sort, in the motives of the two men for undertaking desperate acts of art. Theodore never gets the facts on Crane from the detective, but he does establish that Elliott is prolifically active and receiving treatments for syphilis. Armed with the sad knowledge that the disease is already taking its toll on the boy’s body, Theodore decides to have Elliott pose for a sculpture, so that his beauty might be immortalized; and this desire to arrest time and in effect to commemorate his own desire proves to be the cause of Theodore’s undoing, as Elliott is thereafter stolen from him by an Italian criminal and Theodore himself is subjected to blackmail. Just as important, however, Theodore’s impulse to take refuge in art’s illusory immortality is a version of Crane’s own motive for writing the story. More than four years after he’d known the painted boy, after returning in December 1898 from covering the war in Cuba, White’s Crane spots a boy wearing the cap he’d given to Elliott. The boy’s face is terribly disfigured, and it takes Crane several minutes to realize that the syphilitically scarred face belongs to none other than Elliott himself. But when Crane calls to Elliott, the boy refuses to answer him. The tragic toll of the disease on the boy’s life—what White describes as the “blatant painful fact of his disfigurement”—is what inspires Crane to return to the abandoned story. In other words, like Theodore, Crane has turned to art as a response to the ravages of time and disease, so often metaphors for one another in White’s AIDS-conscious fiction. Art might even stand, however inadequately, as a substitute for what friendship itself cannot preserve.

As a meditation on friendship, then, Hotel de Dream is something less than a lovesong to the possibilities of disinterestedness. White is too enamored of the ironic workings of erotic motive to imagine, as Montaigne had, that friendship might transcend such basic psychic trappings. Of the ending of Hotel de Dream, we might almost say that it involves the performance of art as an act of desperation. In a Paris Review interview from the early 1980s, reflecting on his own struggles with plot, White spoke only half-ironically of his wish to be able to write a potboiler. He comes as close here as he has ever come to delivering on that fancy. The last sixty pages of the novel are the most furiously plotted segment of narrative White has ever written. They include a blackmailing plot tied back to a Mafioso organization, a horrific fire at Elliott’s building, and Theodore’s desperate sorrow over the boy’s purported death before he learns that Elliott survived the fire but was horribly disfigured (the story’s version of the disfigurement by syphilis Crane witnessed in 1898). Such melodrama is set against the unraveling of the thin thread of Crane’s own life, as Cora mourns her dying lover by hungering for answers to the unresolved elements of his story. Henry James makes a cruel appearance at the novel’s end, performing an act of self-hating injustice to Crane’s clandestine book, thus undoing once and for all Crane’s imaginative solidarity with sexual outcasts, almost as though, as in narratives of time travel, White were required to restore history’s repressions and to make sure nothing of the past has been unsettled by our anachronistic perceptions. A lesser novelist could not get away with such compacted melodrama, but White lets the frenzied pace of the story measure Crane’s race against death, making us feel what it is like to compose art against the clock and causing us reflect on the extent to which relationships might be measured by our desperate gestures.

As a novelist, White is far more artful than Crane, his every sentence perfectly balanced, his prose possessed of almost flawless rhythm. I don’t hear, as a few critics have, much ventriloquism of Crane in White’s narrative. If anything, White seems to have caught the spirit of Crane’s artlessness, of that sense of authorship as a duty to render oneself a vehicle for other voices and perspectives. On such sympathetic grounds, a single gesture of charitable kindness enacted on behalf of a fainting boy leads White’s Crane to feel implicated in Elliott’s fate and finally requires from him, unto the last minutes of his life, a transgression of his own heterosexual normativity so as to imagine the boy’s life in all its sordid complexity. White may remain relatively uncritical of a notion of desire that would begin from the aesthetics of physical beauty, but there is also a desperate, dreamlike quality to desire in this novel, which begets gestures of friendship sustained only in the perception of the dignity of persons even when afflicted by terrible suffering and disfigurement. Near the novel’s end Crane wakes up to discover that he has soiled his sheets and begins to sob, and when he confesses his shame to Cora as she cleans him, she reminds him that it’s just his poor body that is failing him, while his ‘‘immortal spirit” remains as “strong and rambunctious as ever.” Like Crane himself, White seems altogether skeptical of Cora’s theology. But the art of friendship, he nevertheless imagines, must be based on the conjecture of such an implausible immortality in the suffering as well as the beautiful person. More perhaps than any living author, White has insisted on making us look on the terrible spectacle of the prematurely dying body to discern there the vestiges of grace, immortal in connotation but altogether humanistic in origin, by which the person might still be remembered. And in Hotel de Dream—in this most self-reflective of all his books, a novel not only about novelists but about the novel itself—White has ultimately converted the telling of a story into an artful act of friendship.

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