Boy of the streets

Hotel de Dream
by Edmund White

Seven years before his untimely death from consumption at the age of 28, Stephen Crane published Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. It was 1893 and the time was out of joint for a grimly realistic fictionalisation of the life of a prostitute. Nineteenth-century sensibilities recoiled. Crane enjoyed a succès de scandale, and established himself at the forefront of American literary modernism.

Fellow American author Edmund White — himself no stranger to the succès de scandale — has chosen Stephen Crane as the subject of his new novel. Crane is a cultish writer, largely unknown to British readers. In White’s hands, depicted at the very end of his life, he is a figure of desperate pathos who nevertheless fails fully to engage our sympathies.

White describes Hotel de Dream as a ‘fantasia on real themes’. As Crane dies, he dictates to his wife, Cora, a novella, ‘The Painted Boy’, about a syphilitic rent boy — inspired by a similar novella, ‘Flowers of Asphalt’, which Crane may or may not have begun. White’s novel consists of a framing device — the narrative of Crane’s death — and a story-within-a-story, ‘The Painted Boy’. Both make painful and ultimately unpleasant reading.

Hotel de Dream is either tremendously sad or relentlessly depressing. Crane inevitably dies; Elliott (‘the painted boy’) is gruesomely disfigured in a fire and will also, presumably, die on account of his syphilis. The subject of ‘The Painted Boy’ is longing, that of a married, middle-aged banker Theodore Koch for the scarcely adolescent Elliott. But the narration of that longing is a slow and self-indulgent affair, so that Theodore’s plight — like those of Crane and Elliott — also largely fails to touch us. Respectable Theodore is ruined by his flirtation with ‘unspeakable’ vices; within the context of this novel, the reader could expect nothing less.