What Stephen Crane was after, and what the New York Journal encouraged in its reporters, was to go beyond passive "reporting" of the news to making it. "The Journal, as usual, ACTS," Hearst once boasted, "while the representatives of ancient journalism sit idly by and wait for something to turn up." This ambition neatly fit Crane's write-it-then-live-it temperament . . .

The events of the night of September 15, 1896, are still obscure, but Crane's hand in them was probably far more active than has been thought. According to the Journal (in its headnote to Crane's own account of the night's events, published the following Sunday), Crane, after sitting in on the proceedings at the magistrate's court, "had seen but a kaleidoscopic view of the characters who passed," and now "he must know more of that throng of unfortunates; he must study the police court victims in their haunts." So he arranged to meet two chorus girls at a Turkish smoking parlor on West Twenty-ninth Street. (Two, one assumes, to reduce the impression of an assignation -- the kind of "bird and bottle supper" that was chic at the time.)

The women accompanied Crane a few blocks uptown to the Broadway Garden, a popular resort, where he interviewed them for his Journal series. Before they left, at 2 A.M., they were joined by Dora Clark, an acquaintance of one of the women. Crane escorted one of the chorus girls to a cable car, and returned to find the other two women being placed under arrest by a policeman. The policeman had spotted them from the vestibule of the Grand Hotel, and accused them of soliciting two men who had just passed by. Convinced of their innocence, Crane claimed that one of the women, the chorus girl, was his wife, but it was a defense he couldn't use twice. Against the advice of fellow reporters and of commissioner Theodore Roosevelt (an acquaintance of Crane's and an admirer of The Red Badge Of Courage), Crane testified that morning in Dora's behalf, before Magistrate Robert C. Cornell at the Jefferson Market Courthouse.

The weird and dreamlike circularity of these events gives one pause. One feels, obscurely,that Crane orchestrated the whole departure from and return to Magistrate Cornell's benign bench. And of course the good magistrate, after noting that Crane was no stranger to the court, sent the parties home: Dora justified, the arresting officer Charles Becker humiliated, Crane looking like a gentleman and glad to portray himself as such in the Sunday spread allotted to his "Adventures of a Novelist." In that rather arch report Crane refers to himself throughout as "the reluctant witness," when of course he wasn't anything of a kind.

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