Hotel de Dream

Edmund White's Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel (2007) is a reverse sequel of sorts to White's earlier historical novel, Fanny: A Fiction (discussed here).  Both novels feature impecunious authors desperately short of cash, and both novels feature unfinished manuscripts.  Fanny Trollope wants her MS to be destroyed, while Stephen Crane's really is destroyed by the man asked to complete it--Henry James, no less.   The female Fanny Trollope treks to America, where she has a passionate but illicit relationship with a former slave; the male Stephen Crane treks to England and the Continent, where he has an illicit and once passionate relationship with a former (and still married) prostitute.  And, like Fanny: A Fiction, Hotel de Dream's title proves more ambiguous than it appears at first glance: the real Hotel de Dream is the bordello in which Crane's "wife" Cora once worked, but it is also the transitory fantasy world inhabited by both its fictional and historical characters.  Moreover, it is the novel-within-a-novel which is literally a "New York Novel," although Crane enjoys reinventing himself as the European idea of an expat New Yorker.  But whereas Fanny traces how characters' dreams consistently collapse from the sheer messiness of human existence, Hotel de Dream's two narratives are far more brutal, even deadly, as Crane's body implodes and his characters' lives disintegrate.

This is an almost stiflingly conventional novel about unconventional people.  While Hotel de Dream is "contemporary" enough in its choice of the novel-within-a-novel format, Sir Walter Scott and James Feninore Cooper would find nothing objectionable in its approach to the historical novel per se (although what they would say about the subject matter is, of course, a different matter entirely).   In the acknowledgments, White mentions the antiquarian research he did for the novel, and indeed the book is thick with the kinds of cultural history/ethnography so beloved by the "classical" historical novelists: occupations, slang (somewhat clumsily handled), gender roles, diseases, and an emerging late-19th c. gay subculture.   At times--especially when the dialogue consists of one definition after another--the novel bogs down in its earnest details, instead of appropriating them for its own purposes.  At other times, however, White does turn conventionality to more interesting purposes. 

Hotel de Dream's novel-within-a-novel dramatizes how the "bohemian" (an epithet he applies to himself) but firmly heterosexual Stephen Crane tries to narrate a story of a "queer little boy tart" (14) and his world within the context of late-19th c. genre conventions.  The narrative shifts between the untitled and unfinished MS, Crane's first-person memories of his encounters with the real-life model for his protagonist, and the third-person world inhabited by Cora and Crane's social circle.   Crane's potential audiences generally inhabit the third-person sections. Unlike the cheap genre novel The O'Ruddy, which Crane ought to be working on in order to pay the bills, the untitled MS represents Crane's last attempt to "write something good--something that would even impress the Master [James]" (47).    But Crane keeps finding that his readers dismiss the novel's formal strengths in order to attack its problematic morality.  Several years before the novel's opening, Hamlin Garland orders Crane to destroy his first go at the novel, because "'if you don't tear them up, every last word, you'll never have a career'" (9).  This conflagration, which turns out to both echo Elliot's real fate and prefigure the second MS' own demise at James' hands, is only the most explicit suppression of Crane's text.  As the novel goes on to insist, most of the (male) characters are perfectly well aware of, even able to "speak" of, people like Elliot--or the transvestites who populate Elliot's world, for that matter.  But turning Elliot into a character removes him from the comfy all-male enclaves within which he can circulate as a joke--or a prostitute--and turns him into a representative of one of New York's many urban cultures.  Being professional means circumscribing one's realism; there are certain things that are too real.  When James destroys the novel at the end, after Crane's death, "career" is no longer an issue, but biography is: "Naturally, you and I both wanted to silence even the slightest rumor that such a dank inspiration ever besmirched our Stevie's genius, characteristically so sunny and virile.  Never fear.  Now his reputation is safe.  We have protected it" (221).  Given Cora's belief in James' own homoerotic obsession with Crane, his decision to press the delete key, as it were, seems suspiciously like both censorship and self-censorship (one notes that possessive "our").  The MS threatens what James sees as the afterlife of Crane's authentically masculine "genius," even though he admits the novel's strengths as a realist text.  In the battle between a free-ranging realism and modern morality, realism loses. 

The novel-within-a-novel draws on yet more conventional genre narratives: in particular, the journey from pastoral to urban life that ends in prostitution, the blackmail plot, and the forbidden love that ends in total self-destruction.  Elliot's existence, however, strains against these conventions, and not just because he is a male prostitute.  His country existence involved extensive physical, mental, and sexual abuse, leveling the moral distance between pastoral and urban landscapes.  And if Crane winds up being non-judgmental about Elliot's life as a prostitute, Elliot himself is perfectly happy with his work; dissonance really only sets in when he finds himself pursued by an Italian gangster, Johnny Presto, who will brook no competition (i.e., his lover, Theodore Koch).  Elliot's horrible disfigurement in a fire set by Presto, inspired by Crane's last fleeting encounter with the real, inexplicably burned Elliot, suggests that there is no way yet to conceptualize lasting love in this world without violence.  (One of Elliot's close friends, the "androgyne" Jennie June, tells Crane about being viciously assaulted by her rough trade lover, and then admits that she is still madly in love with him.)  The ending that Crane sketches for Theodore and Elliot, in which "the two men caress each other while both are looking at the marble boy" (217), leaves ambiguous whether or not the lovers can overcome the memory of Elliot's somewhat downmarket beauty, itself idealized in the marble portrait, to imagine a future existence without that early Elliot.   Near the beginning, Crane muses that "ultimately I was unable to save him" (15) in life, and the fate of his novel suggests that he will not be able to do so in art, either.