Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel [Hardcover]

Edmund White (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 4, 2007

In a damp, old Sussex castle, American literary phenomenon Stephen Crane lies on his deathbed, wasting away from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight. The world-famous author has retreated to England with his wife, Cora, in part to avoid gossip about her ignominious past as the proprietress of an infamous Florida bordello, the Hotel de Dream. In the midst of gathering tragedy, Crane begins dictating what will surely be his final work: a strange and poignant novel of a boy prostitute in 1890s New York and the married man who ruins his own life to win his love.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A biographical fantasia, White's latest imagines the final days of the poet and novelist Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage), who died of TB at age 28 in 1900. At the same time, White also imagines and writes The Painted Boy, a work that he has Crane say he began in 1895, but burned after warnings from a friend. Crane dictates a fresh start on the story to his common-law wife, Cora Stewart-Taylor. Interspersed within White's impressionistic account of Crane's life, The Painted Boy tells the tale of Elliott, a ganymede butt-boy buggaree. Once a farm boy used by his widowed father and elder brothers like a girl, Elliott escapes to New York and begins a new life as a street hustler. Crane, dying overseas, asks that someone skilled and open minded complete the novella. The wry Cora, in her earlier career as a madam at the Jacksonville, Fla. Hotel de Dream, has some ideas of who among Crane's friends fits the bill. Though White's research and marshaling of slang are impressive, The Painted Boy approaches the sexual frankness of porn and reads improbably. But as White's book(s) build up steam, readers will let go of misgivings, caught up in Elliott's tragic love life and Crane's apocalyptic end. (Sept.)
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From Bookmarks Magazine

Rumors of Stephen Crane’s last, lost work have been around for ages, and they give Edmund White an excellent excuse to practice his well-honed brand of invented history in his 19th novel. Problems arise, however, with the overreaching story within a story. The tale of a country boy turned rent boy may have been shocking at the turn of the last century, but it will raise fewer eyebrows today. And it doesn’t do justice to the rich literary talents of Stephen Crane or, for that matter, Edmund White. Luckily, the critics agreed that the gripping, desperate finale of Hotel de Dream contains some of White’s best writing and that the depictions of Crane and Cora, plus a cameo of Henry James, are also very well done.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; 1 edition (September 4, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060852259
• ISBN-13: 978-0060852252
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #927,432 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

96 of 99 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best book published so far this year., September 4, 2007

By 

I. Sondel "I. Sondel - lover of the arts" (Tallahassee, FL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel (Hardcover)

Alright, if you've read my previous Amazon book reviews, then you know I'm a sucker for literary novels that feature historic literary figures - "The Hours," "The Book of Salt," "The Swimming Pool Library." Add Edmund White's "Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel" to that list.

The writer Stephen Crane is dying of TB. His common-law wife Cora, the former proprietress of the Hotel de Dream, is trying everything she can to prolong the inevitable. The two have taken up residence in Sussex and journey to the Black Forest in search of a cure. Theirs is the central love story, and White renders it with an uncommonly subtle intensity.

It has been claimed by Crane scholars that he had written, at least in part, a novella of a young male prostitute called "Flowers of Asphalt," which he destroyed at the urging of fellow writer Hamlin Garland. White picks up the strands of this lost tale and runs with it. On his death bed Crane's mind wanders back to his encounter with Elliott, a painted boy, and becomes consumed with finally dictating the boys tragic story.

I'll not disclose any more of the story. I will say that this is a beautiful prose work by a genuine master of his craft. I haven't read anything by Crane in decades. However, his "Red Badge of Courage" remains vivid in my mind. Has White captured Crane's "style," his "voice"? There are so many variables that such a question becomes moot. This is after all Crane dictating from his fevered deathbed. Is the story within a story pornographic? Not at all. The sexual relationship between Elliott and his middle-aged suiter is told frankly. It is the honest depiction of one man's obsessive love, and the havoc and chaos that follow. Would Crane have ever been able to publish such a work? Probably not. However, this story is presented as his last consuming passion, and as such wasn't subject to his good or rational judgement. I found this to be a brave and exciting work of imaginative fiction. Bravo!

52 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Lost Language of Crane?, September 9, 2007

By 

H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel (Hardcover)

Edmund White's latest novel HOTEL DE DREAM is as good as anything he has ever written and the best thing he has published since THE MARRIED MAN. It is, in White's own words, his "fantasia on real themes provided by history." Near the end of Stephen Crane's far too short life (he died of tuberculosis at twenty-eight), according to his friend the critic James Gibbons Huneker, he started a novel about a boy prostitute based on a lad he and Huneker had met on the streets of New York but Hamlin Garland convinced him to destroy the manuscript. Mr. White has taken that bit of information, whether real or apocryphal, and has run with it. He acknowledges in his "postface" that Huneker may have been less than honest or a "fabulist." Whether Crane ever began such a novel or not, Mr. White has given us an account of the final days of writer of two of the great pieces of American literature, the novel THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE and the short story "The Open Boat," and a re-creation of a fragment of a Crane novel THE PAINTED BOY, both of which are completely believable. That Stephen Crane who by all accounts was heterosexual could write so convincingly and successfully about a syphilitic, impoverished sixteen-year-old boy prostitute is no stretch since he wrote so brilliantly about war without ever having seen combat (THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE), and sympathized with the downtrodden (MAGGIE, A GIRL OF THE STREETS). White's fiction, on the other hand, is often autobiographical. He certainly could use his own sad experience in caring for a dying lover to create the touching, poignant scenes between Crane and his companion Cora-- not actually his wife since she couldn't find her second husband to divorce him. Crane describes dying as "'When you come to the hedge--that we all must go over--it isn't bad. You feel sleepy and you don't care.'" But he almost immediately, so humanly, contrasts his own condition with that of the healthy Cora: "She was partly playing the clown to keep up his spirits, but on another level she seemed perfectly sincere that he was somehow being indulged. Did she seriously not know how every movement stripped him of another erg of energy. . . She was this great strapping thing with the solid legs and firm breasts, the golden hair. . ." White through his character Crane writes of the uncrossable gulf between the sick and the well: "She [Crane's nurse] was a healthly, smug animal, and she looked on his illness as if it were an exception rather than the rule, something queer and other than the fate she would undergo sooner or later. She'd turned his pain and physical disarray into an aspect of her profession."

As always with Mr. White's writing, there is a torrent of evocative details. Horses' hooves are as "big as dinner plates." Antimacassars are as "dainty as ocean foam." His characters are firmly lodged in their own time and place, the 1890's in New York, England and Germany. Mr. White has done his homework-- he gives credit to the writer George Chauncey-- on the slang used by "inverts," as homosexuals were called during this period of American history. Crane and the boy Elliott's visit to a transvestite house of prostitution is at once both funny and sad as the novelist learns what phrases like "Betty Bracelets," "Lily Law," and "the color of his eyes" mean. Both Henry James and Joseph Conrad make visits to the dying Crane. No American writer's prose style could be more different from Stephen Crane's than that of James. Edmund White, on the other hand, stands in the tradition of both these great American writers since he has proven over and over that he is the master of both straight-forward prose but also language as dense and elliptical as anything Henry James ever wrote.

HOTEL DE DREAM -- the actual name of a Jacksonville bordello run by Cora Crane-- is not to be missed.

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Painted Boy: Resurrection from the Deathbed of Stephen Crane, October 21, 2007

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Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel (Hardcover)

Edmund White, gratefully, is a prolific writer, a gifted man of letters who has become one of America's more important authors. While much of Edmund White's oeuvre is about gay life, he does not confine his talent to the one topic: he is a brilliant biographer, a fine man of research, and a poet with prose. HOTEL DE DREAM: A New York Novel is his latest foray into fictional biography and for this reader the book succeeds on every level.

The short novel is ostensibly a 'biographical' account of the sadly brief life of novelist Stephen Crane, a nineteenth century literary giant who is best known for THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, but who also wrote a few other short novels and story collections. Basing the concept of this novel on both fact and fantasy, Edmund White gives us the last days of Stephen Crane's life, a tortured existence as he succumbed to tuberculosis, nursed by his beloved mistress Cora, an ex-Madame who had run a bordello in Florida called the Hotel de Dream. Crane had in fact befriended a poor youth who happened to be a male prostitute infected with syphilis: White takes this fact and uses it as a unique approach to explore the mind of Crane, using the fragment of thought that Crane was planning to create a story 'Flowers of Asphalt' based on the sad lad as the impetus for this brilliant book, the composition of a final novel called 'The Painted Boy.'

The novel deals with myriad aspects of Crane's life, but in the end it focuses on Crane dictating to Cora a 'fictionalized' story about a married banker, Theodore, who becomes enamored with a teenage, poor, syphilitic hustler named Elliott, only to find that his coming to grips with buried secrets of lust (tenderly satisfied by the very lovable Elliott) plunges him into a downward spiral that ends with a series of tragedies that parallel Stephen Crane's own consumptive death from tuberculosis. As Crane lies dying he shares his ideas for the conclusion of the story with the stalwart Cora, asking her to present the manuscript to Crane's respected colleague Henry James to complete after Crane dies. The story ends with a surprise that traces a circle to the beginning: the period of the turn of the century simply was not the time a story such as 'A Painted Boy' could be published.

Edmund White's ability to create a novel within a novel in such a fascinatingly credible manner is matched only by his gift for writing some of the most beautiful prose before us today. He understands character development, he knows the agony of personal tragedy, and his intellectual honesty dissects history so smoothly that his novel feels like true biography. And yet he takes the time to pause for moments of writing that are so touching they make the reader reflect with respect: 'He glanced down and saw that his sheet was stained yellow. He must have pissed himself. He started to cry. So it's come to this, he thought. He'd gone back to infancy and incontinence - with this difference: an infant has everything ahead of him and a loud tamtam is beating in his heart with anticipation, where as he, Stephen, felt the rhythm slowing into a valedictory murmur./ He was so ashamed of himself.'

HOTEL DE DREAM is a brilliant little novel and should please lovers of historical fiction as well as readers who long to find tomes of gleaming, eloquent writing. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, October 07