“Born on the Day of the Dead and died five months before his twenty-ninth birthday, Stephen Crane lived five months and five days in the twentieth century, dying of tuberculosis before he could drive a car or see an airplane to watch a film projected onto a large screen, or listen to the radio, a figure from an obsolete world, a man who was not given the future that awaited his peers, not only the new inventions and designs of these wonderful machines, but also the terrible events of that time, including the death of tens of millions of people in two world wars. Among his contemporaries were Henri Matisse (twenty-two months older than him), Vladimir Lenin (seventeen months older than him), Marcel Proust (four months older than him) and American writers such as G. E. B. De Bois, Theodor Dreiser, Willa Cooter, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood. Anderson and Robert Frost, all of whom continued to work into the new century. Yet Crane’s work, far removed from the traditions of those who preceded it, was so radical for its time that he is now considered the first American modernist, the man to whom we owe chiefly the change in our view of the world through the lens of writing. word”.

Thus begins The Burning Boy, Paul Auster’s last book, which is not a novel, but a biography of an author who lived very little (1871-1900), but as long as he lived, he lived in the red. We owe Crane the first modern anti-war novel (The Red Badge of Courage) and a novel inspired by his response to the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 (On the Front Line). Auster seems to be looking for the Great American Novel (GAN) in himself. But was it ever? Oster told me with an effort in the summer of 2013 at his home in Brooklyn. At the time, I cited “Moby Dick” as an example, and Oster reacted: “Moby Dick” was out of the question as long as Melville was alive. After his death, it was actually discovered. If it’s MAM, then America has definitely done it wrong.” He told me then that someday he would like to write a story about the life of another unsung man, Stephen Crane. Crane never wrote MAM, but it appears to have been a great quintessentially American novel.

Burning Boy is not a typical biography. It is the narrative of a novelist, like Edna O’Brien’s unorthodox biography of T. S. Eliot (published by Nefelis), or Emmanuel Carrer’s Philip Dick (unfortunately not translated into Greek…).

Of course, Crane was not only a writer. And this is what, moreover, attracts Auster. The poetic rush that always accompanied pavement reporting: his first novel, Maggie: A Street Girl (1893), set in the then infamous New York Bowery, was inspired by his field reporting…

We have already written: Crane was impetuous and impulsive, frivolous, but also unexpectedly deep: he gave himself up to his contradictions, combining a superficial approach to journalistic discourse (although he himself was fixated on honing every phrase) with a genuine literary spark, which he forced to dig deeper.

“Maybe it’s time to dig up this burning boy and start remembering him again. His prose still flies with sparks.

Consider that incredible line from his masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), where he speaks of the protagonist’s erratic flight from the battlefield that no one suspected: a man.” Hemingway could have written it, thirty years later or even later. James Jones and Norman Mailer Or take a short Zen poem he wrote just a year before his death: “Man said to the universe: / Lord, I exist!” // “And yet,” the universe replied, “this fact did not create in me / A sense of duty.” It could have been written in the 1950s, at the height of existentialism, but Crane wrote it in 1899. Was he ahead of his time “Or was it his time?” Oster seems to be somewhere in between.

He was born in Newark, like Auster. From the age of four, being self-taught, he read novels, and at six he smoked cigarettes and drank beer (did all this so quickly, how not to die at twenty-nine?). He dreamed of a military career. He dreamed of her as something exotic, adventurous. Oster writes that he actually considered going to the military academy of the same name at West Point, but his brother changed his mind because war was unlikely in their time – so what’s the point of being a soldier? As Oster notes, this did not stop Crane from continuing to focus on soldiers and war. In addition to the iconic “Red Badge of Courage”, in addition to “First Line” (1899), about the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 (which he covered as a correspondent), he wrote dozens of stories with such themes plus more than sixty responses about the war from Cuba , Puerto Rico and Greece.

The crane may have been invented by Oster. She is, according to a well-known stereotype, a fictional character. Hence the burning. But why “boy” and not “man”? But he died at just 29 years old! But that’s not all. He remained a boy in a man’s shell. Oster writes: “He was a nobody, and then he became someone. He was loved by many, hated by many, and then he disappeared. They have forgotten him. They remembered him. They forgot him again. He has been remembered again, and now, as I write the last sentences of this book in early 2020, his books are being forgotten again. It’s dark times in America, dark times everywhere, and with so much going on to undermine our confidence in who we are and where we’re going, maybe it’s time to dig up this burning boy and start remembering him again. His prose still sparkles, his eye is still sharp, his work is still sharp.”

The book was published by Metaichmio, translated by Ioanna Iliadis.