Stephen Crane reports on road rage

Here’s a good rule that I’m about to break: Never talk about a book until you’ve finished reading it.

Paul Auster’s Burning Boy, his new biography of Stephen Crane, is delicious. But I’m disposed to love this book. I like Auster — especially his essays, but also his screenplay for Smoke, a movie that didn’t capture the hearts of millions but that struck me as genius. And Crane was one of the idols of my youth. I remember reading “The Open Boat” as a teenager and deciding that I would write short stories.

Auster’s book is more than 700 pages — a long book for a short life. (Crane died before he was 30.) I’m a plodding reader, and I’m a long way from the end.

But I love this:

When Crane was about 20 he witnessed a case of road rage in New York City.

It was around 1891. A wheel came off a moving van drawn by four horses, clogging a narrow street. As happens in New York, the traffic backed up. But back then drivers rang bells, beat on gongs and whipped the dashboard with car-hooks to express displeasure. Expressions of colorful language were not impeded by windshields, an invention which became common later.

More traffic backed up. Urchins, seeing opportunity in adversity, brought out buckets of beer to sell. Their efforts, while profitable, didn’t do much to solve the problem.

I love this scene because we tend to think that all the great inventions of man, good and bad, occurred within our lifetime. We talk of “social media” as if none existed before the Internet. We can’t imagine road rage before the Model T. But here it is.