In view of the emphasis I have placed on what I have been calling the scene of writing in Crane’s prose, it seems altogether appropriate that the “exquisite legibility” of his handwriting was often remarked by his contemporaries, and that eyewitnesses were also greatly struck by the manner in which Crane actually produced his texts. Conrad for example later recalled how at Brede Place, after two hours of steady work, “[Crane] would have covered three of his large sheets with his regular, legible, perfectly controlled, handwriting, with no more than half a dozen erasures—mostly single words—in the whole lot. It seemed to me always a perfect miracle in the way of mastery over material and expression.” A few years earlier in New York, Hamlin Garland had been astonished to see Crane “drawing off” his poems “without blot or erasure Every letter stood out like the writing on a bank bill… . He wrote steadily in beautifully clear sript with perfect alignment and spacing, precisely as if he were copying something already written and before his eyes.” (145)
—Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (1987)
