A Century Before Springsteen, Stephen Crane Chronicled Asbury Park

If you saw it from afar, it wouldn’t look any different from the Victorian houses on each side of it, extending down a seaside avenue. On a summer’s day it’s particularly scenic, a historical corner of one town that, in recent years, had grown rapidly. If you were walking down the sidewalk, it might not catch your eye relative to its neighbors unless you noticed the sign out front, directing your attention to its most famous occupant: Stephen Crane.

Crane is perhaps most widely known for his writings about New York City, as well as his short novel of the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage. But there’s another chapter in his life that deserves more attention. At the age of 12, Stephen Crane and his family moved to the seaside town of Asbury Park. New Jersey. As a young adult, Crane received his education writing for his brother Townley and providing dispatches from Asbury Park and the surrounding towns in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Revisiting those works reveals a politically-charged side to Crane’s bibliography—and a fondness for populist provocation that has, for the most part, held up well over the ensuing century.

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Some of Crane’s nonfiction about Asbury Park can more accurately be said to be nonfiction about the Asbury Park area: readers checking out the volume of his collected works where his writings on Asbury Park reside will also find dispatches from nearby Ocean Grove and Avon-by-the-Sea. As befitting their place in his own bibliography, some of them are just what you’d expect from a young reporter—namely, brief sketches of seaside events and write-ups of celebrity visits to the area.

Here can be found brief accounts of science and art, of lectures on faith and parades down the boardwalk. There are also a couple of ghost stories found within Crane’s bibliography, including the memorably-titled “Ghosts on the Jersey Coast” and “The Ghostly Sphinx of Metedeconk.” And Crane drew on his time in Asbury Park for some of his short stories as well, including “The Pace of Youth” and “The Reluctant Voyagers.”

Crane has a complex relationship with the town he was writing about.

After reading enough of his early journalism about the town, it becomes clear that Crane had a gift for an evocative sentence even then, and was capable of blending a wry usage of irony and a hatred of cliche. Two sentences from “Biology at Avon-by-the-Sea” give the reader a cascading series of conflicts and a shifting power dynamic:

In the ignorant mind, the sight of a well-known college professor pursuing a June-bug around the block is apt to arouse a question. But still they go their way, happy and contented, and return the contemptuous glance of the summer youth who knows nothing with the scornful glance of knowledge.

And while Crane’s work from this period isn’t quite as concise as, say, the miniatures found within Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines, they’re not too far removed from there. Both authors blend idealism with cynicism; both combine a great eye for detail with a wary narrative voice. The opening of “Crowding Into Asbury Park” veers into stylized comedy:

Pleasure seekers arrive by the avalanche. Hotel-proprietors are pelted with hailstorms of trunks and showers of valises. To protect themselves, they do not put up umbrellas, nor even prices. They merely smile copiously.

Combine that jaundiced attitude with a penchant for observation, and it quickly becomes clear that Crane has a complex relationship with the town he was writing about. “Asbury Park creates nothing. It does not make; it merely amuses,” he writes in one short piece. And elsewhere: “Asbury Park is rapidly acquiring a collection of machines. Of course there is a toboggan slide.”

The opening of “On the Boardwalk” utilizes a handful of evocative descriptions to describe the boardwalk during the summer. “It is the world of the middle classes; add but princes and gamblers and it would be what the world calls the world,” Crane writes.

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Throughout these writings, Crane displays a keen awareness of class. In describing one seaside event, he writes, “It is said that 20,000 people watched the participants in the annual baby parade as the nursemaids trundled their charges down the walk. It’s an evocative image, but it’s also one where societal inequality isn’t hard to perceive.

Crane’s forays into satire aren’t limited to an ironic tone, however. Much of his opprobrium is reserved for Asbury Park founder James A. Bradley, about whom he writes in the most florid, faux-grandiose terms possible.

James A. Bradley does not meet all incoming trains. He is as impalpable as Father Knickerbocker. It is well known that he invariably walks under a white cotton sun umbrella, and that red whiskers of the Icelandic lichen pattern grow fretfully upon his chin, and persons answering this description are likely to receive the salaams of the populace.

Last year, activists sought to take down a statue of Bradley in Asbury Park owing to Bradley’s racism; one can only imagine that Crane would have been thrilled.

Both Stephen Crane and Bruce Springsteen found Asbury Park to be a kind of muse.

In his introduction to the eighth volume of the University of Virginia Collected Works of Stephen Crane, Edwin H. Cady argues that Crane’s work comes from a radical tradition. Cady cites Crane’s laudatory writings about William Dean Howells—whose own life included advocacy for a Tolstoy-esque Christian socialism.

After he had achieved fame from his writing, Crane returned to Asbury Park and wrote about it in the essay “Asbury Park As Seen By Stephen Crane.” Here, he renews his attacks on Bradley, noting that he “carries his sublimity with the calmness of a man out of debt.” And there’s a reference to a group of men acting “with a confidence born of a knowledge that their fathers work,” which very much reads like the sickest of late-19th-century burns.

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Certain other passages in Crane’s writing anticipate the years to come more than he might have imagined. It’s impossible to read the lines “Great storms create havoc with the heavy planking of the walk nearly every fall,” written about Asbury Park’s boardwalk, and not think of the devastation of Hurricane Sandy earlier this decade.

While Crane is perhaps more fond of irony than Asbury Park’s most prominent chronicler of a century later, there is one surreal point of overlap between their bodies of work. Bruce Springsteen’s 2007 album Magic includes the song “Girls in Their Summer Clothes,” with a chorus that’s all about desire and deflated egos: “And the girls in their summer clothes/ In the cool of the evening light/ The girls in their summer clothes/ Pass me by.”

Over a century earlier, Crane weighed in on a similar theme in “On the Boardwalk.”

“However, the long-famous “summer girl” takes precedence in point of interest. She has been enshrined in sentimental rhyme and satirical prose for so long that it is difficult for one to tell just what she is and what she isn’t.”

Crane then compares the contradictory handlings of this image by “satirists” and “rhymers,” before reaching his conclusion: “At any rate, she is here on the boardwalk in overwhelming force and the golden youths evidently believe the poets.”

Both Stephen Crane and Bruce Springsteen found Asbury Park to be a kind of muse, and both used their work to, as the saying goes, speak truth to power. There, however, the similarity ends—but then, there’s plenty of room for all aesthetics down by the shore.