Dreaming in Fiction : THE DOUBLE LIFE OF STEPHEN CRANE: A Biography, <i> By Christopher Benfey, (Alfred A. Knopf: $25; 284 pp.)</i>

Christopher Benfey’s new book on Stephen Crane seems to me mistitled, for it certainly isn’t a comprehensive biography. Benfey himself admits that little is known about Crane, outside of his psychological study of fear, “The Red Badge of Courage,” so any work that claims to show the relationship between his life and art is at best speculative.

That said, Benfey has come up with an arresting theory concerning Crane’s art. The author maintains that unlike other writers who experience life in order to write about what they know (e.g., journalists covering a war so they may later write novel about it), Crane wrote about his subjects first, then went off to experience them in real life to see if he’d gotten it right.

What’s more, Benfey speculates that this state of affairs “is more common among writers than one might guess. . . . We are mistaken when, in trying to understand an author’s career, we take the ‘real life’ for granted, and look for its imprint in the ‘imaginary life’. . . . For surely this is the wrong way around; what solidity, and givenness, there is in a writer’s life exists first in the writings. The problem is to see how the work of art shaped the writer’s life.”

If one finds the theory slightly too clever to stand as a general rule--surely more writers have experienced things firsthand and then written about them than vice versa--it is at least interesting in regard to Stephen Crane.

Crane was born of serious reform Methodist parents--his father, Jonathan Townley Crane, was a minister who wrote tracts warning against the dangers of intoxication and dancing; his mother was a reformer of the same ilk. Earlier Crane biographies, like that of Thomas Beer’s (now discredited as a fake), made much of Crane’s bohemian rebellion against his narrow Methodist upbringing. Benfey admits that Crane’s father was narrow in his views; it wasn’t quite that simple.

Jonathan Crane was in his own way a rebel, a rebel against the confines of Calvinism and that doctrine’s belief in infant damnation. Crane’s father was not interested in histrionics but in social reform, yet he was caught in a sudden wave of born-again-type religiosity (the “Second Blessing” movement) that swept the Methodist Church. Crane’s father was demoted from his position as presiding elder of the Elizabeth district in 1876 and demoted to itinerant ministry. Benfey can only speculate what effect this demotion had on young Stephen, but the interesting thing he may have learned is that writing is dangerous. It could be used “to shock, and provoke.”

Indeed, that is what Crane’s own writing did from the start. He wrote “Maggie, a Girl of the Streets” in order to shock and provoke people, though the book received a poor reception. Benfey says that the book was written in a spurt after the death of Crane’s mother and “apparently before Crane had any direct experience of the metropolis.” Later, Benfey says: “Crane set his first novel, ‘Maggie, a Girl of the Streets,’ in the grim neighborhoods of lower Manhattan. We don’t know exactly when he began to work on the novel, nor do we know much about the circumstances of its composition.” He goes on to say, however, that existing proof does reveal that Crane’s classmates at Syracuse University saw an early draft while he was still a student, before he had moved to New York City, and Crane himself said that he wrote a draft immediately after his mother died. Of course, Crane could have paid visits to New York; Benfey has no way of knowing. In any case, he feels that “ ‘Maggie’ hardly feels like a researched and documented novel.” He says that the book feels like “speculation, dream.”

Interestingly enough, Benfey then tells us that after the book was published, Crane sought out a relationship with a whore named Dora. The idea is then that Crane’s imagination superseded reality, and that he sought out the experiences he wrote about later. He seemed to be living an internal narrative. Dream it up, write it, then go out and see if the reality matches the dream.

Benfey states that most of Crane’s main characters are themselves dreamers, out of touch with reality. Maggie lives in a fantasy world in which she’ll be rescued from her sordid life by a knight in armor, and Henry Fleming lives in a dream of bravery, the kind of thing he would have read in popular war stories of heroism. It isn’t until he actually experiences the carnage of war that he has to face up to his own mortality, and Benfey states that only by being wounded (though it’s an ironic wound: He’s hit on the head by one of his own men) can Fleming realize that he has a body at all, that he is not just the sum of his dream world.

All of this is interesting, but none of it fully explains how Crane managed to write so realistically about the war--especially the battles--never having experienced any of it directly. Other scholars have talked about Crane interviewing Civil War veterans, and have mentioned that Crane’s brother Edmund was a Civil War buff, but Benfey makes light of this. He claims that the novel seemed to come out of nowhere, and that having written it, Crane then became a war correspondent to live out his fantasy, to corroborate his own invention.

This seems to me interesting, but again unproveable. Perhaps Crane read one or two accounts of the war, which were in great number in those days. Perhaps he read a thousand. Perhaps he talked to his brother only a few times about the war; perhaps he sat down with him and asked him a thousand details about the battles. We do know that Crane was extremely fascinated by battles, and later, in Cuba, even acted as a signalman and an aide to one of the officers. It’s just as possible that he did extensive research and never mentioned it. More than one writer has chosen to give the impression that all his material came from his “genius,” when in fact he’s done more than a little research.

Benfey’s analysis of the novel, however, is good. It seems to me exactly right that he mentions the dreaminess and speculative feel of the book, for to my mind that is what separates ‘Maggie’ from all other war novels. I remember the first time I read it in high school. I had an English teacher who talked about the book’s hard-core realism, but it never felt “realistic” to me.

Indeed, there is a dreamy quality to the book, and to most of Crane’s other works. The “Open Boat” is another example. Cited as a masterpiece of naturalism (man facing indifferent nature), the story lacks specificity. The characters all are called by their job names--the oiler, the cook, the captain--one supposes to remark on their universality, but none of them come to life as individuals. Indeed, I always felt that the story was heavy-handed and obvious. It reads like an allegory, or a parable of sacrifice.

Indeed, having read Benfey, it occurs to me that Crane was not all that different from his father. Benfey even says that in J. T. Crane’s religious writings he often used the shipwreck as a metaphor for lost souls (as a Methodist, I can report that I’ve heard that metaphor in more than one sermon) and suggests that Crane may have unconsciously borrowed from his father’s work. Perhaps the apple doesn’t fall from the tree after all.

One closes Benfey’s book with an assorted jumble of emotions. Much of what he says is fascinating, and his thesis does shed light on the artistic imagination. Certainly he’s right in emphasizing the imagination over the reporter in Crane. Still there are obvious gaps in the argument, and as a reader one would like to know more facts. Perhaps someone will unearth more true material on Crane’s life, and we’ll find that he did far more research than Benfey thinks. Still, it seems undeniable that Crane did dream his fictions first, and then played protagonist in his own fantasy as he roamed the world to see if he had concocted anything resembling the truth.

That strikes me as an example of what most writers do. We live inside our heads most of the time, and we are glad to do it. I know as a writer myself, I don’t want to be constrained by facts. In many ways most writers would prefer that there were no facts. Its not just a matter of laziness, a dislike of research. It’s that facts supersede the imagination, and as artists, writers are jealous of facts. If they didn’t exist, then the imagination would be primal. Writers would truly be what they are only metaphorically, gods.

But as Benfey and Crane remind us, facts are like bodies. They exist and to deny them is to deny life itself, so like Crane, we reluctantly put down the pen and light out for the territory.