IN SEARCH OF THE “REAL” STEPHEN CRANE (or, Tales of a Literary Sleuth) Excerpts from the Opening Plenary Session National CEA Conference, Charleston, SC April 6, 2000 By Paul Sorrentino Virginia Tech

Conference Speaker Paul Sorrentino

INTRODUCTION:

It is a pleasure and an honor for me to talk to you about Stephen Crane. In many ways it’s ironic that I am doing so, for when I was in high school, my worst subject was English, and the last thing I wanted to do was become an English teacher. Even more ironic is the way I first learned about Crane. In my junior year in high school, I was required to read a novel a month and to deliver an oral report on it to the teacher. Unfamiliar with all of the novels we could choose from, I asked a neighbor for help, and he said, “Ah, yes, I think I have one of these books on your list—Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street.” So I took the next 30 days to read this 450-page novel.

When it came time to give my report, I dutifully went to my teacher, who asked a few questions, stared out the window, then said, “your grade’s a 75.”

As I left the teacher’s office, a friend of mine said, “what did you get, Paul?”

I replied, “75, but I don’t know why.”

“Oh, that’s too bad. I got a 92 for reading something called The Red Badge of Courage.”

When I asked him to show it to me, I immediately noticed one thing: At about 150 pages, it was a lot shorter than Main Street. And the following month when I went to give my report on The Red Badge and received a 92 also, I thought, “hey, maybe shorter is better.”

After my junior year, I paid no attention to Crane until I came to Virginia Tech. Having just completed a dissertation that dealt with theory and cultural ideas, I looked for a research project I thought would be quick and easy—and decided to write a biography. Because I wanted to spend only a few years on the project, I looked alphabetically at names of people who hadn’t lived very long. When I got to the letter C, I stumbled upon Crane, and when I realized he hadn’t made it to 30, dying instead at 28, I thought, “hey, maybe shorter is better once again.”

A PROPITIOUS DISCOVERY:

That was 20 years ago, and I’m just starting now to write the biography. In the meantime, though, I have been fortunate to collaborate with another Crane scholar, Stanley Wertheim of William Paterson University, and together we have been exploring Crane’s life and work for the past two decades. In doing so, I have also been extremely lucky in becoming involved in two literary adventures in search of the real Stephen Crane that have, I think, affected Crane scholarship in some small way. Let me tell you about them: One left me stranded in Hawaii; the other led to Stan’s and my unearthing a major fabrication that has affected American literary history regarding the 1890s.

My first adventure involved a long-lost book and manuscript collection of Crane material owned by a Naval Commander named Melvin H. Schoberlin. Schoberlin had begun amassing material in the 1930s and ’40s for a biography of Crane, but his military duties delayed the project. Commander Schoberlin boasted to scholars that he had several hundred photocopies of letters to, from, and about Crane, including a number of originals; manuscripts of Crane’s stories; reminiscences about him; and countless other documents; but when scholars asked for proof of the existence of the collection, he refused to show it to anyone, first citing that it was in storage, later stating that, given the amount of work he had done to amass it, he wanted, understandably, to be the person who used it.

The noted literary critic R. W. Stallman, however, refused to take no for an answer. In correspondence with Schoberlin, he argued that because he was editing Crane’s letters for publication, he should have access to the collection. Commander Schoberlin, crusty sailor that he was, would have nothing to do with the irascible Stallman, who saw Schoberlin’s abandonment of the ship of scholars as simply an act of Crane mutiny.

By the time Stanley Wertheim and I came along about 35 years later, we treated allusions to the Schoberlin collection hesitantly, for no one was certain of its existence and location. Nonetheless, when I received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in 1983 to edit Crane’s correspondence, I began looking for the collection. As I traveled from one research library to another, I found clues that convinced me that Schoberlin had, indeed, assembled material at a time when the books, manuscripts, and correspondence of Crane—an almost-forgotten writer—were readily available at a low price. In one case, for example, Schoberlin got an inscribed first edition of one of Crane’s books in exchange for what its owner valued more, a bottle of scotch.

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After more research, I discovered that Commander Schoberlin had died in 1977, that his widow was living in Hawaii, and that she had his collection in storage. During several phone calls, she spoke freely about gardening, education, and the weather; but when I mentioned the collection, she hesitated to discuss it because of the memories it evoked of her late husband. She had made a deathbed promise to him to keep the collection intact, and now she was faced with its disposition.

After more correspondence and phone calls, Mrs. Schoberlin finally said to me, “You can come out. You might not find anything you’re looking for, but you can come out.”

With only a couple of weeks before my fellowship was up and I had to return to teaching, I flew to Hawaii. Meeting me at the airport was Mrs. Schoberlin, a gentle-looking woman barely five feet tall, wearing a long-flowing dress. Incongruously, however, once she got behind the wheel of her eight-cylinder Oldsmobile, her left elbow propped on the rolled-down window, she pushed her way through traffic like a seasoned cabbie, honking the horn and shouting to get people out of the way.

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The car ride was my first surprise of the day. The second occurred moments later, shortly after I arrived at her house. There, set up for me, were a table and chair; beside them lay a dozen large boxes. Understandably concerned about the safety of the collection, Mrs. Schoberlin watched me closely—as did two massive 100-pound dogs, one on each side of me only inches away. Though incredibly tired from 14 hours of travel, I felt a tremendous sense of elation and anticipation. Here I was in a position other scholars had thought about for 40 years.

Within minutes of opening the first box, I knew I was looking at materials no scholar other than Commander Schoberlin had ever seen—manuscripts, letters, inscribed books, research materials—everything I had hoped for. By the end of the first day, as I was leaving to go to my hotel room, Mrs. Schoberlin said, “I hope you’ll come back, and, oh, by the way, the dogs must like you because you’re the first visitor they haven’t attacked.”

As I examined the collection during the next 10 days, I became increasingly aware that it was the largest known private collection of Crane materials in existence. My excitement, though, was tempered by my concern for its future, for the collection was being stored in old cardboard boxes extremely vulnerable to bugs and humid tropical weather. Those of you who have worked with manuscripts know that improperly stored documents are certainly subject to the environment, and materials in the collection were already showing signs of deterioration.

I knew that I had to talk with Mrs. Schoberlin about the future of the collection. If she wanted to keep it, I could help her store it properly; if she wanted a tax write-off, I could arrange for her to donate the collection to a library; and if she wanted to sell it, I could help her with that as well, for I had arranged for a private benefactor to buy it and donate it to Syracuse University, where Crane had gone for a semester and which already held a major Crane collection. Thus, I was on the phone daily with my contact at Syracuse, alerting him as I went through the collection as to what I thought it was worth. Simple one-page letters from Crane, if they were sold separately, could easily have brought $2000 each, and one four-page letter was worth $10,000. Of course, from the point of view of a scholar, I had found a literary pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The original letters and manuscripts certainly made the collection valuable, but to a scholar one priceless document was the draft of Schoberlin’s biography, which contained important biographical details that existed nowhere else in the collection—indeed nowhere in Crane scholarship. Because of his failing health, Schoberlin had known he could not finish his biography and instead wrote a note saying, “Someday a young Crane scholar will come and be able to use my collection.” Hoping that I might be that person who would finish the biography, Mrs. Schoberlin told me to take the manuscript to my hotel room and read it. I did so reluctantly, because there was only one copy, and I was concerned that something might happen to it.

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After studying the manuscript for two days,  I took a break and did what other tourists were doing—visited the sites, went to the beach, and climbed Diamond Head. Returning cheerfully to the hotel, I discovered that someone had broken into my room. My immediate thought was that the manuscript had been stolen and that the newspaper headlines would read, “Ex-Virginia Tech Professor Loses Credibility/Crane Scholars Say, ‘Paul Who?’” Fortunately, the thief was not a literary scholar. The bad news, though, was that he had stolen several items, including my plane ticket and checkbook, and had canceled my plane reservation. Stranded in Hawaii, unable to rebook my flight, I called my department head to say that I might miss the first few days of class. As you might expect, this was a novel excuse to him. He had heard people say they couldn’t teach a class because they were sick, their alarm clock didn’t go off, or their car had broken down, but never had someone said he was stranded in one of the top vacation spots in the world.

To my relief, the airline eventually got me on another flight, but the only available one for weeks required that I leave almost immediately, which meant that my ticket was extremely costly. I quickly packed, told Mrs. Schoberlin of the sudden change in events, and asked if I could photocopy part of the collection. Within a couple of hours of my departure, we were driving all around Hawaii, with priceless Crane documents in hand, looking for a copying machine. The story has a happy ending, though, for Syracuse University bought the collection shortly thereafter, and Mrs. Schoberlin had the assurance that her husband’s scholarship would not be forgotten. My own personal adventure also ended happily. After hearing about it, United Airlines reimbursed me for my ticket, and the proprietor of a hotel in Hawaii mailed me my checkbook, which he had found behind a rubber tree in his lobby. When I asked him whether this was an odd occurrence, he replied nonchalantly, “Nah, this happens all the time. Thieves are always throwing stuff behind my tree.”

ANOTHER DISCOVERY, OR LITERARY MYTH DEBUNKED:

Another of my literary adventures involves the discovery of a major literary fabrication. As Stanley Wertheim and I edited the correspondence of Crane for publication (Wertheim and Sorrentino, Correspondence of Stephen Crane, 1988), we struggled with an important source of information, the writings of Thomas Beer.

An acclaimed writer in the 1920s and ’30s, Beer wrote novels, critical studies, and approximately 130 short stories for the Saturday Evening Post. He even influenced such writers as William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But to Crane scholars, Beer’s most influential work is his pioneering biography of Crane, which was published in 1923. Sparsely documented, it contains much of what has passed for the basic facts of Crane’s life. Beer quotes approximately sixty significant letters from Crane, the originals of which have never surfaced. Scholars have long questioned the reliability of the letters but accepted them, as well as numerous incidents and characterizations in the biography, because no evidence existed to prove the falsehood of Beer’s assertions.

Stan and I found evidence, however, that Beer had altered the chronology of Crane’s life, invented incidents, and composed letters allegedly from Crane. The pattern of fabrication is evident from the onset. Letters supposedly written by Crane are quoted in an early draft of the biography, then substantially revised in a later draft to fit scenarios involving other people, who, it turns out, are themselves apparently fictional.

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Because of these fabrications and deceptions, Stan and I concluded that facts and documents for which Beer is the only source should be ignored in Crane studies. The implications of this conclusion are enormous, for every biography of Crane and scores of articles and books have relied heavily on Beer for evidence. Previous interpretations of Crane’s personality, his literary career, and the relationship between his life and art will be considerably challenged by these exclusions. The proverbially elusive Stephen Crane will seem more elusive than ever. . . .

[In my presentation I discussed Beer’s methods for gathering information, gave examples of how a reliance on the biography has skewed critical interpretations, and suggested the extent of his damage to the study of Crane and American literary history in the 1890s. Currently, I am preparing for publication a longer version of the part of my talk describing this damage. For a detailed discussion of a handout I distributed giving examples of how Beer “wrote” a number of Crane’s letters, see Wertheim and Sorrentino, “Thomas Beer,” 1990.]

Works Cited

Wertheim, Stanley, and Paul Sorrentino, eds. The Correspondence of Stephen Crane. 2 vols. New York: Columbia UP, 1988.

———.  “Thomas Beer: The Clay Feet of Stephen Crane Biography.”  American Literary Realism 22 (Spring 1990):2-16.

Paul Sorrentino is editor of Stephen Crane Studies.

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