Hotel De Dream [Hardcover]

I only wish I could write this beautifully... Once more Edmund takes you on a journey and you are sat in the room with the protagonist, then in New York with Elliot a century ago. But wherever this book takes you, it is not the room in which you are sat holding a book. My only gripe is that I've already finished the book. Someone wipe it from my memory so I can read it again.

Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was one undoubtedly of the great American novelists with his most famous novel being The Red Badge of Courage, which depicted the American Civil War from the point of view of an ordinary soldier. Crane was noted for his early employment of naturalism, a literary style in which characters were realistically portrayed and often faced bleak circumstances.

However, it is Crane's unconventionality and his sympathy for the downtrodden that forms the core of this truly spectacular novel. Edmund White's intelligent written and beautifully crafted Hotel de Dream indeed focuses on Crane's preoccupation with the oppressed, but it also asks the question of how would such a man have responded to male homosexuality in an era in which gays themselves were considered perverts and deviants, and abominations?

Hotel de Dream begins as the chronically ill Crane, accompanied by Cora Taylor, a former brothel-house proprietor is living in a 14th-century manor house at Brede Place, Sussex. It is the cusp of a new century and Crane, sick with tuberculosis that has been compounded by a recurrent malarial fever that he picked up in Cuba, is planning a trip to a clinic on the edge of the Black Forest in Badenweiler, Germany in order to get out of damp old England with its cold rains and harsh winds.

Lately life in Brede Place has had its ups and downs, and while Cora has certainly been loyal and loving to Stephen, her flighty social and literary pretensions - and her reputation in America - have perhaps contributed to Crane's financial ruin. There's also been far too much entertaining, especially in the form of parties catering to hordes of spongers as well as many of their close literary friends, including Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, H.G. Wells, and the great Henry James.

Cora is anxious for Stephen to get on and make some money by finishing The O'ruddy so they can pay off some of their most urgent debts and take the trip to Germany. But it is the urge to write his final story about a young boy prostitute called Elliott, that he once met while living in Manhattan that most preoccupies Stephen. Feverish with excitement, Stephen demands that Cora must become the filter for the pages that Stephen will now grind out.

Called The Painted Boy, Stephen once wrote forty pages of his "boy-whore" book, but was advised that if he didn't tear them up, every last word, he'll never have a career. Now, however, he's at the end of his life and have nothing to fear and for sure, the story will undoubtedly prove to be a poignant account of the boy's travails and also wonderful new source about the city and its lower depths, because its not just about another boy, "but somehow a "she-male," a member of the third sex."

So begins Crane's tale of his real life acquaintance with Elliot this "painted boy," as he recounts his final trip with Cora from Brede Place, to Dover, and then onto Badenweiler, while also dictating to Cora the fictional story of Elliot's affair with Theodore Koch, a married and middle-aged New York banker. It is though writing about Elliott and Theodore's tempestious affair that Stephen recollects his own encounter with Elliott, this syphilitic, kohl-eyed and heavily made-up sixteen year-old boy, who calls himself a "flame fairy."

Picture the poor Stephen and Elliott, both ill and wounded, and both looking like sick waifs with Stephen's own hacking cough and this boy whore who wears boys clothes and girls' makeup as they traverse the streets of Manhattan, with Elliott determined to teach Stephen how to decipher the city around him. His young muse drags Stephen to the "penny restaurants" where the newsboys eat every evening, to the fairy saloons, the bordellos and the low theatre, and also to visit a wealthy androgyne by the name of Jennie Jones who fascinates Crane with his "big breasts and wide hips."

Meanwhile, the fictional story of The Painted Boy plays out as Crane fanatically dictates it to Cora, beginning on a New York train station where Elliott cruises older men in bowler hats and good wool overcoats. But it is Theodore's ardent obsession with Elliott that ultimately spins the boy's world out of control. Consumed by jealousy and passion, and proud to sacrifice everything for love, Theodore urges to know more and more about this funhouse world that Elliott has been inducted into, his life gradually obscured by all of the "magic-lantern pictures" in his mind of Elliott.

White certainly writes a vivid account of gay life at the turn of the nineteenth century, in a Manhattan full of vice, and glamour and lowlife, "an intersexual world of such fantastic dimensions." Although Stephen Crane never actually wrote a novel called The Painted Boy, White does a terrific job of presenting what might have been as if the author did indeed have a fascination with this all male Victorian world of men loving men.

Vibrant and flamboyant, and teeming with a lyrical beauty throughout, White writes with a passionate commitment to Stephen Crane's life, and to his death. Meticulously researched and seamlessly infusing fact with fiction, Hotel de Dream, is a grand tribute to Crane's creative spirit as all of these colorful characters, both real and fictional, plays out against a nineteenth century propriety and a little-known sexual underworld. Mike Leonard August 07.

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.