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Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel

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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!

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.

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

I really enjoyed this book, Mr White has done a very nice job of creating a novel inside a novel. While it has been a while since I read "Red Badge of Courage" I really felt that Mr. Whites channeling of Mr. Crane was effective and realistic. Overall the novel was very tight and the characters seemed to jump from the page.

This is a brilliant little novel that is a quick read. It contains phrase after phrase of glamorous prose-poetry that aches to be reread and savoured. It is a complex story of the dying Stephan Crane and his race against time to get as many of the details on paper of Elliot's life as a teenboy street-whore in old Manhattan.

There are various narrative voices telling us about Crane's last days and Elliot's life (in the colorful homosexual underworld), both as a real person, and then as a fictional character in something called "The Painted Boy" that Crane is dictacting from his various sickbeds. The details of life in 1900 New York are vivid, especially scenes involving flamboyant drag queens. The vocabulary is sometimes arch and prissy ("glabrous"? "rachitic"?), but the writing is so beautifully sculpted that it is an intoxicating joy to read it. This is rare white marble, not some stiff meringue.

Edmund White is a master of gorgeous word-choice. I kept reading eagerly, hoping for another thrilling phrase, and I was never disappointed. It's like Flaubert meets Capote. It's like Mallarme on absinthe. I was hooked by the gossipy nature of the early pages, when famous names are dropped like bejewelled snowflakes and some juicy bits of information are given. (Even if it's not true, it's worth quoting to friends as accepted history.) The plot builds and you end up with a great page-turner as you wonder what is really going to happen to these vividly-portrayed people during the final pages. We get the sense ahead of time of what will happen to Crane, but it is spellbinding to wonder what happens to Elliot and his keeper, Theodore. The technique of rival plot threads going on during different time-frames (not unlike the film version of "The French Lieutenant's Woman") plus the evocation of a soiled era we probably would not have wanted to live through make this one of the best novels of 2007.

Whether or not the reader accepts the author's hot-house premise (White himself calls the historical evidence for Crane's missing manuscript "uncertain" and "challenging material for a novelist"), the novel's twin stories still don't satisfy completely. Just 220 pages -- White is a quick tale-spinner -- the book's breathlessness is a major fault: realizing this fabrication could collapse at any time, White never lingers on the improbabilities (or awkwardness) of plot, nor seems bothered that the story of "the painted boy" itself becomes an un-Crane-like romantic fantasy at the end. Even considering Crane is dictating from his deathbed to the beloved Cora, very few readers will mistake White's contemporary writing for the real Crane's reporter-like prose.

White does supply a neat twist which would explain the mystery of the "lost" manuscript, and his research into the gay culture of 1890s New York is extensive in detail. He obviously views the gay culture of "Hotel de Dream" as another historical aspect to his own autobiographical work. However the story of Crane's lost manuscript intrigued White as a writer, it would be difficult to find in this short novel more than an interesting idea.


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Edmund White's "fantasia on real themes provided by history" is a book of echoes. Expanding upon an apocryphal story--that Stephen Crane had started, then destroyed a novel about a young male prostitute (a "painted boy")--White envisions his own depiction of the process by which a novelist imagines and writes his fiction. We read of the debilitating misery of Crane's last days alongside the novel he is struggling to dictate to Cora Taylor, the common-life "wife" who once ran "Hotel de Dream," a high-class Florida brothel. White's imaginary and real characters waste away from diseases (the boy from syphilis, Crane from tuberculosis) that will remind many readers of the modern AIDS epidemic. And both the novel and the novel-within-the novel evolve into gritty yet elegiac commemorations of Crane's life and work in the same way that Crane's sketches preserve for us unsentimental portraits of New York street life.

White wisely avoids conjuring the novel as Crane might have written it, and his re-creation of the mythical novel (called "The Painted Boy") is intentionally preposterous. As Cora herself says to Stephen, "It's certainly a bizarre book and not really in your vein, what with the perverts and the criminals and the larceny and the death threats." Although Stephen's response--that "it's not that far from some of my journalism"--is not untrue, anything so sexually charged would have been, at best, privately printed as smut and circulated among a few gentleman friends (as was Mark Twain's "1601" or Cleland's "Fanny Hill"). What we have, then, is a modern pastiche with hints of Crane's style and lingo, a curio by Edmund White written in the American naturalist style of Frank Norris or Theodore Dreiser. The result is not only an unlikely (but believable) love story between a boy and his john but also a chronicle of their inexorable demise. (I was often reminded not only of Crane's "Maggie" but also of Norris's "Vandover and the Brute"). And the fate of this "lost" book allows White to get in a fond dig at Henry James's famously prissy prudishness.

But it's the very real story of Stephen and Cora that serves as ballast. As the couple treks futilely from England to a health spa in Germany, where they hope to find a rest-cure, they encounter or discuss their famous literary friends--Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, and William Dean Howells, among others--and White incorporates this roster as a means of evoking the varieties of Victorian-era fiction. As Stephen's health deteriorates, we descend with him, "the thoughts sputtering through the last intact brain tissue"; his grasp of his surroundings both dream-like and nightmarish, and Cora's attentions both loving and determined. That we know how it all will end somehow makes it all much more powerful, and the book's final chapters comprise one of the most riveting death scenes ever written.

This book contains a short novel within a short novel. The stories overlap and intersect as the dying Stephen Crane dictates the story of a male hustler to his wife as his health deteriorates from end-stage TB. The entire story is built on known facts about Stephen Crane and his wife, Cora, a former whore-house owner in Jacksonville Florida. The house of prostitution was named Hotel de Dream, from which the novel gets its name. However, the shifting of Stephen Crane's consciousness as he dictates the novel to Cora is dream-like in its mixture of reality and fantasy. The Cranes leave Sussex England and make it to the Black Forest in Germany in a last-ditch effort to find a miracle cure for Crane's TB. The love and devotion of Cora Crane to her common-law husband Stephen is mirrored in the love affair between a married business man and a young street male prostitute. In both stories we see devotion pushed to the limits. White bases the novel on the claims that Crane was writing or had written significant portions of a novel about a male prostitute but had been convinced to destroy the document as socially unacceptable, or at least the document may have been destroyed by his colleagues. White also bases the story on Crane's experiences as a journalist and foreign correspondent and development of stories from original sources. Therefore the story of Elliot the male prostitute is mirrored by an interview Crane held with a male prostitute, also named Elliot, for background materials. The short novel is actually more about the fall of an upper-middle class banker who has fallen in love with the young male prostitute than it is about the tragic and rough life of a street prostitute. Devotion in the face of on-coming crisis is the story told within the short novel Crane dictates but it is also the story enacted by Cora as she struggles across Europe, taking dictation from her husband, and desperate to find a miracle cure for the disease that was killing him. Edmund White is to be congratulated for this artful and fascinating short novel, based on historic facts, conjecture, and knowledge of the gay underground. One fascinating short portion of the novel involves a visit to a house of transvestites and transgender individuals, giving the reader some food for thought about how the trans-community survived during various periods of history. White also includes Joseph Conrad and Henry James as characters in this work of fiction. It is here that I had some problems with White's intentions as he turns Henry James into a villainous character. Overall this short novel is well written and highly imaginative with few flaws and many graces.

In Hotel de Dream, Edmund White presents a fellow writer, a fellow-countryman called Stephen Crane. Stephen is well connected, but ill-equipped. We are in turn of the century England. That's old-England, by the way, and we are tuning into the twentieth, not twenty-first century. Henry James drops by occasionally. Conrad sometimes stumbles hereabouts and Arnold Bennett throws in an occasional sentence. But Stephen's social life is hardly hectic. He is ill, tubercular, and in need of treatment. He seeks what might be a last chance, perhaps, to deny or merely postpone the inevitable. A clinic in Germany might be able to offer an answer. If only he had the money.

While his carer, Cora, struggles to meet his needs, Stephen recalls a street-waif in New York. Elliott is in his mid-teens. He sells newspapers and does a little thieving on the side. Prostitution fills otherwise unproductive hours. Stephen further recalls the boy's beauty, his wholly pragmatic approach to securing a livelihood and also his syphilis, a condition for which the writer tries to arrange treatment. Via the germ of memory, Stephen, despite his own failing health, begins to invent a narrative. He writes from his sick bed, his weakness eventually requiring he dictates to his partner.

He tells the story of Elliott's arrival in New York and his introduction to the ways of the street by an Irish red-head boy who is in need of an accomplice. He describes the petty larceny and the occasional servicing of specific services for casual clients that provide the boy with a living. When Theordore, a middle-aged, unhappily-married family man takes a liking to the boy, everyday life takes a different twist. Elliott and his accomplice have just done for Theodore's wallet. The older man, however, hardly notices the loss, so taken is he with the lad's delicate, almost porcelain but ailing beauty. Theodore and Elliott the lad become lovers and Theodore's respectable career as a banker becomes increasingly compromised by the pressure of having to provide with the boy's needs, his own desires and his family's respectability.

Stephen Crane's own condition deteriorates. As he heads to the Continent for last-ditch restorative treatment, he has to dictate his writing to his carer, herself a former brothel owner. And so Edmund White skilfully presents parallel narratives relating Stephen's treatment and decline and Theodore's self-destructive obsession with Elliott. Together, they proceed towards their perhaps inevitable conclusions.

All of this happens in around 80,000 words. Hotel de Dream is far from a long book, and yet it manages to pursue both themes adequately. Edmund White's style is nothing less than beautiful throughout. He is economic with language, but also poetic and in places highly elegant. The book is a real joy to read.

But there remains the problem of the subject matter. Edmund White appears to believe that the homosexual, even paedophilic nature of the writer's fiction is inherently interesting because of its subject matter. Without that, the predictable decline of the writer would be less than interesting. The process was hardly original. After all, Chopin had already trod this path three quarters of a century earlier! And to greater effect! Edmund White does ask some questions about attitudes towards homosexuality, about double standards and also about loveless marriage. But they are questions merely asked. There are only cameos of the detailed scenarios that might suggest answers.

But at the core of Hotel de Dream is the assertion that Stephen Crane is one of America's greatest writers. An early death and an interest in risqué subject matter conspired, however, to keep him from the wider public gaze.

Though Edmund White's book works in itself, it fails to convince the reader of this grand assertion about its subject. To make its point, it would need to be weightier, broader and offer much more evidence. Its apparent self-satisfaction with the mere statement of sexual proclivity falls well short of real substance. But then lives may be substantially less than substance. Hotel de Dream is a captivating read and an engaging, often beautiful study.

It can well be called a "biographical fantasy," but regardless, Edmund White's "Hotel de Dream" is well worth the read, particularly to students of Ameican literary history. In "Hotel," Edmund gives us (fictionally, of course) a dying Stephen Crane, on his way to Germany for some last-minute health remedies.

There have long been rumors of Crane's last and lost work and White has the foundation for a fascinating story along these lines. Crane is credited with one of America's best and literarily important novels (The Red Badge of Courage), as he established in the modern world "realism in the novel," a theme not even remotely (or successfully) achieved before this.

Thus, White gives us a look at what he believes to be the "real" Crane, as he struggles with a form to tuberulosis, and uses flashback to give us some background on this "lost novel" Crane is writing, with the help of his common law wife Cora. "The Painted Boy" tells the story of Elliott, a young male prostitute in New York City, a farm boy abused by his family who runs away to the City to get away, only to find that prostituting himself is the only way to survive.

This "story within a story" is the backbone of "Hotel de Dream" and the idea of such a story seems to hold water. White is very careful not to mar Crane's reputation (he actually takes Crane, the author we all had to read in high school, and humanizes him, honorably). White's ability to use Crane's style of writing (well-paced, terse, to the point) is admirable; in addition, the late 18th-century characters he utilizes seem relatively real, if not tragic.