The following article, written by George Snyder, is reproduced from his "1904" website.
As is so often the case, some writers become famous. Others die young. Or both.
Brede Place is a 14th century stone manor house built by one of Edward III's knights, rented in 1899 to the writer Stephen Crane and Cora, the woman he called his wife. Crane died the following year.
Moreton Frewen, (nicknamed "Mortal Ruin") a somewhat dissolute gambler, sometime investor and Cowboy in the American West and son of an aristocrat whose properties included Brede Place, must have been glad of the rental income from the Cranes, as Frewen often experienced financial hard times despite having married the "good" daughter of American milllionaire Leonard Jerome (the "naughty" daughter was Jennie who became Lady Randolph Churchill, mother of Winston and mistress of Edward VII). Frewen's offspring, the sculptress Clara Frewen Sheridan, who died in 1970, would inherit Brede Place and is buried nearby. The house is said to be haunted by a sixteenth century maid, among other ghosts.
An invitation to Brede Place was much sought after by the literati while the celebrated author of Red Badge of Courage, dying of tuberculosis, resided there. Those who became the young writer's friends included:
- Joseph Conrad (Nostromo, 1904)
- H.G. Wells ("In the Country of the Blind" published in Strand Magazine 1904, and collected 1911)
- Henry James (The Golden Bowl, 1904)
- J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan, 1904). It was surely at Brede Place that Barrie heard the story of the local East Sussex clergyman who'd lost a hand and had it replaced with a hook -- and hid his dark past as a pirate from his congregation until his bo'sun Smith appeared and had his revenge with the truth.
Let it also be noted that another of Crane's friends, James Huneker, New York music critic and writer (Overtones, a study of Balzac, Flaubert, Wagner, Richard Strauss and others, published 1904), was the (somewhat questionable) source of the story that on his deathbed Crane was writing a novel about a boy prostitute.
Which is in part the subject of Edmund White's new work, Hotel de Dream: a New York Novel, which the writer discussed last night with Michael Silverblatt, host of KCRW's "Bookworm" program as part of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles's series at the Richard Riordan Central Library, downtown Los Angeles.
It was a truly fascinating evening, as always when Michael is talking with a writer, which began with how the two men met -- at Joyce Carol Oates's house -- and included Edmund reading a passage from his novel in which "that old woman" Henry James comes for tea at Brede Place to see the young Stephen Crane and his wife Cora, who like Edmund White, does not care much for Henry James.
At least Edmund seemed not to care for Henry James, which gave Michael a way to draw Edmund into a discussion of sensibilty and style -- James's style versus Crane's, for starters, which led in turn to a discussion of gay writers from James to Genet to Proust to White's work and their respective styles and sensibilities.
The discussion was provocative for a number of reasons, not the least being that Edmund, as part of the generation of gay writers after Stonewall, has helped shape the style and sensibility of gay writing and gay culture in our time. Certainly as he said last night the success of his novel A Boy's Own Story had much to do with timing. In 1982, when the novel came out, there was an audience ready and eager for the work of that informal group known as the Violet Quill Club, which included Edmund as well as Felice Picano (who was in the audience), Andrew Holleran, Robert Ferro, Christopher Cox and George Whitmore. Writers who became famous, or died young, or both. Or who survived and have continued to write and to help shape the style and sensibility of a new generation.
So I couldn't help thinking of Stephen Crane, lying there in that Sussex manor house, dying from his century's equivalent of AIDS, being visited by H.G. Wells and Joseph Conrad and J.M. Barrie and Henry James, and no doubt wondering about his posterity and theirs. He was 28 years old when he died.
There's no evidence that Stephen's ghost haunts Brede Place, of course. But as Edmund knows, watching talented young people die takes its toll on everyone. There is the burden of telling their stories as well as your own. Hotel de Dream is then, at least in part, the story of a writer who tries to pass his story on to another writer to finish.
It was Moreton Frewen's wife Clara (one of the Jerome sisters of New York) who fell in love with Brede Place, a manor house on the Frewen family estate in Sussex, dating from 1350. "In the great hall was a double-sided fireplace; the house possessed its own chapel and a priest's room." When Clara saw it, Brede had been empty for over a hundred years and was falling to pieces, but she saw the possibilities. "They bought the property from Moreton's brother and put the deed in Clara's name to forestall creditors... While awaiting the building work to make the house habitable, they agreed to rent the house to Cora and Stephen Crane. The Cranes lived at Brede until Stephen died, on 3 June 1900, leaving behind large debts." [Elisabeth Kehoe, The Titled Americans: Three American Sisters and the British Artistocratic World into Which They Married, New York, 2004, p. 188-189].
Of the fire in 1979 that ravaged Brede Place, [See previous post], my correspondent Chris McGrath, one of the architects subsequently hired to restore the structure, writes:
The main house was burnt out and the roof destroyed although outside it is much the same. This was replaced with a modern structure to the original shape and a 'great hall' formed more like its early use, [which had been] later floored over. New larger windows were inserted on west and east sides and a new high level gable window facing south, the stone walls were lined inside. Fortunately the chapel was virtually untouched and oddly several thousand litres of fuel oil in the cellar didn't ignite in the fire, which was caused by an electrical fault on a cold snowy night.
You may also be interested in this Brede Place treasure -- a leather-bound, oak-lined stationery box, circa 1900. Whether still available I cannot say, but I'm sure you would agree it would be a charming memento to have of the house in which Stephen Crane lived and died, and whose writerly visitors included Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, J.M. Barrie and H.G. Wells who, at the time when the house lacked amenties like in-door plumbing, looked out a window one cold morning to observe the hillside "studded with melancholy, preoccupied male guests." [Source]
Despite a fire and reputedly quite haunted, however, Brede Place has fared better than Moreton Frewen's other properties, including the lodge he inherited in County Cork which was burned down during the Troubles, or the two-storey log mansion he built on the Powder River in Wyoming which, among other things, boasted such luxuries as a solid walnut staircase. Here, during an ill-fated attempt at cattle-ranching, "Frewen entertained the rich and famous of the Empire with lavish hunting parties... One visitor was the Marquis of Queensberry... Another visitor, later famed as a diplomat, Sir Maurice de Bunsen, successfully stalked and killed the ranch's only milk cow, thinking it to be a skinny bison." [ibid]
Still other guests included Sir Samuel and Lady Baker. "Although Sir Samuel was a noted world explorer, the Queen avoided receiving him due, in part, to the unconventional courtship of Sir Samuel and Lady Baker. Sir Samuel had purchased the future Lady Baker at a slave bazaar in Bulgaria." [ibid, but see also here]
It was not all fun and games in the American West with Moreton Frewen, however. One hunting expedition in 1884 was spoiled by the death of a Member of Parliament, the Hon. Gilbert H. C. "Gilly" Leigh, eldest son of the 2nd Baron Leigh. And the cattle ranching venture proved to be a dismal failure. Frewen left Wyoming in 1885, never to return. As the Cheyenne Sun observed, "Of all the English snobs of great pretensions who flew so high and sunk so low, probably the Frewens are the chiefs." [ibid]. "Frewen's Castle," or what remained of it, was demolished in 1912.
All of which should remind us, if we need reminding, that we never know how things will turn out. Best laid plans, that sort of thing. One can never be certain about what will be lost and what will survive. What disappears and what lasts.
I for one, however, would be very happy with a lovely stationery box. Just so you know.
