William2's Reviews > Hotel de Dream

What’s taken me so long to read Edmund White? What’s that line in Rilke’s Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus? “You must change your life.” That’s how I feel. Such a divine writer is so rare, he recalibrates one’s soul. There’s a fascinating freshness on every page. Great narrative thrust, force, propulsion— call it what you will, it carries me breathlessly along. Stephen Crane is dying from TB. He and his wife Cora, a former brothel keeper, are in Sussex, England, as his last days play out. He’s a very famous American writer, Stephen Crane—see The Red Badge of Courage and his stories, especially “The Open Boat,” “The Blue Hotel,” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”—and he’s visited in his decline by Henry James (the description of James alone is a gem) and Joseph Conrad. Within this novel of Crane’s last days is another novel, which Crane means to be his last; he dictates it to wife, Cora, between bouts of illness. It’s called The Painted Boy, and it’s written ostensibly as a counterpart to his Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. In it a 15 year old boy hooker, benumbed by a childhood in which both father and brothers buggered him senseless, meets thirtyish bank official Theodore who falls in love with him. Fortunately, the kid’s by now taken a liking to anal pleasure and lives with Theodore in an all too brief idyll. But it ends tragically for both of them. Then, just before he can finish The Painted Boy, Crane dies in a sanitarium in Switzerland’s Black Forest.