Burning Boy by Paul Auster

Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane
By Paul Auster
Henry Holt, 2021

It’s been almost five years since Paul Auster’s big, ambitious 2017 novel 4321, but his new book is not another novel; it’s Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane - a biography of the Red Badge of Courage author, complete with all the scholarly trappings. 

There’s a certain bug-under-glass fascination factor whenever one famous author writes a biography of another. Concerns come crowding. Is the book some kind of weird, protracted vanity project? Does the writer-biographer’s own style and voice so conflict with the writer-subject’s style and voice as to make any communication between the two (and hence with the reader) impossible? Or are the styles and voices so in sync as to make the whole exercise redundant? Can a writer-biographer possibly bring anything worthwhile to the discussion that hasn’t already been brought there by actual experts in the subject? 

It seems dicey, and yet the literary record is full of successes. The Life of Charlotte Brontë is many readers’ favorite Elizabeth Gaskell book; John Gardner’s biography of Chaucer, for all its flaws, is a brainy delight; more recently, Madison Smart Bell’s Child of Light, a biography of his fellow novelist Robert Stone, was beautifully done. 

Burning Boy is certainly another such success. Auster makes it clear at the outset that he hasn’t intended to write some kind of jargon-laden scholarly monograph. Instead, he writes that the book is intended as an introduction to the life and work of Stephen Crane for readers who know “little or nothing” about him. The vast majority of those readers will encounter Crane through his written work - most likely The Red Badge of Courage or Maggie: A Girl of the Streets - and Auster wisely decides to meet those readers over the printed page of such books, rather than in the rows and boxes of some Crane archive in the bowels of the New York Public Library. “What I have wanted to do is communicate something about the experience of reading Crane and how it feels to encounter his work for the first time - a raw and direct response to what is sitting in front of us on the page, the words themselves, and the thoughts and images the words provoke in us as we move from one sentence to the next,” Auster explains. “A writer’s approach, if you will, the nuts and bolts of how it’s done …”

Along the way, he takes much more than simply a writer’s approach. Throughout his highly detailed study of Stephen Crane’s life, he relies mostly on Paul Sorrentino’s Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire and Stanley Wertheim’s extensive critical writings on Crane, writings that, as Auster puts it, follow “a dozen attempts by others in the previous ninety-plus years, beginning with Thomas Beer’s half-baked semifictionalized travesty from 1923.” (If there are any remaining fans of Beer’s once-revered book, that ought to settle their hash). But although his narrative of Crane’s short and incredibly eventful life is very lively, far more lively than any previous life of this author, the book’s consistently strongest element is the one Auster himself has already touted: one writer dramatically encountering another writer at work on the page. This happens over and over in the book; Auster will present a chunk from some Crane book, like this quick moment from Maggie:

“What?” said the woman, her mouth filled with bread.

“Mag’s dead,” repeated the man.

“Deh hell she is,” said the woman. She continued her meal. When she finished her coffee she began to weep.

Then he’ll react to what he’s quoted, with that reaction ranging from purely visceral to highly detailed. And no matter what you might think of Auster’s own fiction, his reactions to Crane’s writings are invigoratingly thoughtful, the kind of genuine appraisals that will prompt even long-seasoned Crane aficionados to return to his work. Take the beginning of his reaction to that little snippet above:

This is extraordinary. A hundred things have happened in eight short sentences, and they have happened so fast that it’s almost impossible to read slowly and deliberately, sentence by sentence, with brief pauses between the sentences in order to digest the full import of what they contain. The prose can be choppy and disjointed, an unpredictable style that stuns and stings rather than charms, and because it does not induce the spell created by the grand, flowing novel of earlier decades, works by Dickens or Balzac or Tolstoy, you cannot curl up on a sofa and settle into a book by Crane. You have to read him sitting bolt upright in your chair.

This kind of electrically honest stuff is the real heart of Burning Boy, the thing that makes it a curiously indispensable Stephen Crane biography, passionately different from anything else that’s appeared about this writer. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.