All you need is love
Charlotte Moore
CORA CRANE by Paul Ferris HalperCollins, £1 7.99, pp. 295, ISBN 0002261391 ora sits at the bay window, writing, in a fat manuscript book with a lock, about a man she once married ... and wishing in the nicest possible way that he was dead.' At the beginning of this novel, Cora, former madame of the Hotel de Dream, Jacksonville, Florida, finds herself alone and lonely in Surrey, England, where she has no social, financial, legal or emotional status. Her lawful husband, the one she wants dead, is too concerned about his reputation to grant her a divorce. Her 'real', common-law husband is Stephen Crane, an American adventurer, acclaimed author of The Red Badge of Courage. He is the love of Corn's life, but his wanderlust has driven him to report the war in Cuba, beyond her reach.
'Some of this story is true', asserts Paul Ferris by way of a preface. Stephen Crane is, of course, still a fixture on university reading lists for American Literature. Cora, older than Stephen, waited for him, got into debt for him, installed him — briefly — in Brede Place, a beautiful mediaeval house in Sussex, played hostess to literary friends like Conrad, Henry James and Ford Madox Ford, and outlived him. It was TB, not war, that carried Crane off at the age of 28. Cora returned to America and brothel life, but Ferris doesn't follow her. His novel concentrates on the months of her life when Crane was in Cuba, on her friendship with Kate, a similarly compromised literary mistress, and her entanglement with Hooper, a sexually repressed detective who, in his attempts to investigate her life, unravels far more about his own.
'Real' characters, like Joseph Conrad, rub shoulders with characters invented to pull the story into shape. Ferris is as adept at mingling fact and fiction as he is at conjuring the fuggy dark-brown atmosphere of fin-dc-siècle England, a world of bicycles and opium dens, cigars and oil-lamps. But the 'truest' thing about the book is Cora herself. She is a survivor, a manipulator, a woman obliged to live, not altogether successfully, on her wits. In her
lover's absence, she beds another man for money, which doesn't materialise, and infiltrates her father-in-law's funeral in disguise in an equally unsuccessful attempt to wrest a divorce from his bereaved son. But Ferris makes us feel her palpitating heart beneath the ruthlessness. She has staked her all on love, on the chance that love is more than an apparition, and the reader can't help hoping she'll be proved right.
The prose matches Cora's restlessness and rootlessness. Paragraphs are short and disjointed, scenes change frequently, conversations are little more than scraps. This can be disconcerting. Minor characters are not always sufficiently firmly fixed; wraithlike, they tend to drift off into insignificance. But the core of the novel is solid enough. Ferris has a lot to say about respectability and morality in lateVictorian England, about Jamesian tensions between the old world and the new; about the holiness of the heart's affections and the thankless task of hitching your wagon to the star of troubled genius. Cora Crane is a bold and largely successful attempt to persuade fiction to play midwife to hidden history.
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