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In 1894 Stephen Crane imagined imagining himself a boy dressed in the stained and slack garb of a Golden Age, New York City Bowery bum. In university I read Crane's "The Open Boat," and I immediately bookmarked it as one of the best, most complete works of short fiction I had encountered. It read like moving impressionism—every detail somehow blurred, but each sideways metaphor hung awkward and poignant. This past summer I read his famous war novella "The Red Badge of Courage," and was again surprised by the impressionistic prose. Crane's colors are vivid and possessed, yet blurred into an unfocused foreground. The battles more like dreamy tableaus than violent exposes.
Stephen Crane died of tuberculosis when he was 28. He was famous at 24 with The Red Badge of Courage and worked as both a fiction writer and journalist. In "An Experiment in Misery," Crane writes from the perspective of a boy who dresses, for a day, like a Bowery bum to see if he could "discover his point of view or something near it." Without actually dressing as a bum, and simply by imagining himself a young man in a soiled suit with only a few pennies in his pocket, Crane paints, in a few short pages, his impressionistic vision of poverty in the forgotten hovels at the feet of an economic leviathan. The final paragraph crescendoes:
And in the background a multitude of buildings, of pitiless hues and sternly high, were to him embelamatic of a nation forcing its regal head into the clouds, throwing no downward glances; in the sublimity of its aspirations ignoring the wretches who may flounder at its feet. The roar of the city in his ear was to him the confusion of strange tongues, babbling heedlessly; it was the clink of coin, the voice of the city's hopes which were to him no hopes.
He confessed himself an outcast, and his eyes from nder the lowered rim of his hat began to glance guiltily, wearing the criminal expression that comes with certain convictions.Crane's story is a testament to the flexibility of the human mind. I'm often too quick to arrive at a conclusion regarding the matters of my generation—and Crane gives us another option: imaginative empathy. In the coda of his New York City experiment, he concludes:
"Well," said the friend, "did you discover his point of view?"
"I don't know that I did," replied the young man; "but at any rate I think mine own has undergone a considerable alteration."
