Crane’s early poems showed more style than talent, and from the start he was attracted to a brute opacity that left some readers cold:
And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.
It helps only a little to know that this dreadful, pretentious mess was called “Chaplinesque.” One of Crane’s friends later knocked on his door with Charlie Chaplin in tow, and the three went out on the town until dawn. Having learned this, a hundred American poets will begin odes to Angelina Jolie.
Crane was mystified, as most murky poets are, when people found his poems difficult—after all, they were perfectly clear to him. His obscurity was not that of Eliot or Pound, not a layered and allusive language whose intrigues deepened the more one examined it. Crane’s language, when not a matter of tangled metaphors (he mixed metaphors almost more often than he mixed drinks), was a schoolboy code for which an English-Fustian, Fustian-English dictionary would have proved helpful. He came by his obscurity honestly—he didn’t read Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose style might have influenced him, until much too late. When you clear away the clutter from Crane’s verse, often you find only banalities—he flinched from Eliot’s dour observations and pince-nez disillusion, wanting to embody a rhapsodic vision of poetry it was difficult not to glaze with sentiment.
Crane tried on various identities as a young man and failed at most of them. He was frank about his homosexuality only with close friends—his sexual appetites were voracious and involved far too many sailors. (The definitive work on the U.S. Navy’s contributions to cruising has yet to be written.) Crane dreamed of being a poet a lot more often than he sat at his desk and wrote poems; and he was forever complaining in letters that he had no time to write, though he found plenty of time to drink. He conceived his major poem The Bridge as early as 1923 but made only desultory progress toward it. (Remaining drunk all through Prohibition proved surprisingly easy.) It was hard work avoiding real work; but Crane became an expert at writing cadging letters to his divorced parents and playing one against the other.
Forever broke, dramatically threatening to slave away on the docks or drive a truck, Crane took to writing begging letters to millionaires, or at least one millionaire, and got lucky. The financier Otto Kahn, the major shareholder in the Metropolitan Opera, offered to loan him two thousand dollars to write The Bridge (Kahn also backed Gershwin and Eisenstein). The poet was soon ensconced in a shabby house in upstate New York, spending his benefactor’s initial installment as if it would last forever (on snowshoes, as well as wood carvings from the Congo, among other things) and asking for advances on the remainder. Kahn hardly lacked the wherewithal—his fireproof castle on Long Island grew to one hundred thousand square feet in size and his eightyroom Fifth Avenue mansion was stuffed with old masters.
Crane usually bit the hand that fed him, but you have to like a poet whose revelation of his own genius occurred in a dentist’s chair (“an objective voice kept saying to me—‘You have the higher consciousness. … This is what is called genius’”). He told his father that critics believed his first book, White Buildings (1926), would be the most important debut in American poetry since Leaves of Grass. These critics, who happened to be his friends, often loyally judged him by the poems he had yet to write.
Chronically out of sorts, creatively ill (his life would have been far happier after the introduction of decongestants), prone to “enthusiasms” we might now call mania, argumentative, often spectacularly drunk, Crane would have gotten on anyone’s nerves. He had spent most of the millionaire’s thousands when he departed abruptly for his mother’s ramshackle plantation off Cuba (his family owned houses all over the place). There, after much grouching and complaint, he completed half of The Bridge, which he saw not as an epic but as a “long lyric poem, with interrelated sections.”
It would take Crane three more years to finish the poem, spending months in California as companion to a neurasthenic stockbroker, squandering an inheritance from his grandmother on a trip to Paris, his drunkenness meanwhile growing wilder and more uncontrollable. When The Bridge was finally published in 1930, Crane felt betrayed by the mixed reviews it received from his old friends Allen Tate and Yvor Winters, who had begun to have second thoughts, not about Crane’s gifts, but about his ability to profit from them.
Much of The Bridge seems inert now—overlong, overbearing, overwrought, a myth of America conceived by Tiffany and executed by Disney. Crane imagined the Brooklyn Bridge as a mystical symbol for art, for history, for America, for any old thing; in this spiritual version of Manifest Destiny, he threw his poem backward to Columbus and worked forward to the invention of the airplane. The canvas was broad, but its success would have required a language less Alexandrian than Crane possessed. At his best, he stayed just this side of wild-eyed prophesying, though his grandeurs might easily be mistaken for grandiosity:
How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty—
Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
—Till elevators drop us from our day.
This is a beautifully managed passage; but even Crane’s most thrilling lines can be cloying, always an adjective too rich or a noun too boisterous, the most beautiful stanzas naive as history or infused with a crude faith in progress almost embarrassing now. He was drawn to a high-amp schmaltziness he must have taken as the proper emotional tone for a visionary.
Crane wanted to drag the language of Marlowe and Webster into the Jazz Age. Beneath his jewel-encrusted lines, however, the poem seems trivial, its ideas torn from the daily paper or the pages of a high-school history textbook:
While Cetus-like, O thou Dirigible, enormous Lounger
Of pendulous auroral beaches,—satellited wide
By convoy planes, moonferrets that rejoin thee
On fleeing balconies as thou dost glide,
—Hast splintered space!
We have no long poems this close to being great that are greater failures. (Why do American poets so often lose their bearings, and their taste, when writing about America?) The poem’s creaky swiveling through time, its brassy versifying, and its phony slang seem dated now, not because Crane was heavily indebted to The Waste Land (despite frequently disparaging Eliot), but because he learned so little from it. Reading The Bridge is like being stuck in a mawkish medley from Show Boat and Oklahoma—you’d buy the Brooklyn Bridge to make it stop. Critics have often tried to make a case for the poem, for the coherence of its incoherent parts (criticism, like poetry, is often wishful thinking); but The Bridge remains a fabulous architectural blueprint that wanted a discipline Crane could never provide.
The poet’s last year was spent on a Guggenheim fellowship in Mexico (we are lucky he left nothing of his projected epic on the Aztecs). He behaved so badly that his friend Katherine Anne Porter ratted him out to the foundation, which almost terminated the fellowship. In his final months, exhausted and miserable, he began an affair with Malcolm Cowley’s estranged wife, an older woman Crane called “Twidget,” and wrote a homosexual friend that he had “broken ranks” with the “brotherhood.” Perhaps the romance was merely a sign of his boredom and mental exhaustion—it did nothing to slow down his secret pickups and Jack Tar chasing.
The Library of America edition, edited by Langdon Hammer, contains more of Crane than most readers will ever need. The poems take up so little space, this well-edited volume has been pieced out with five hundred pages of letters (Crane was an energetic correspondent though rarely one memorable or even bearable—great correspondents usua
lly don’t whine so much). E. E. Cummings once remarked that Crane’s mind was “no bigger than a pin”; but Crane had a sharp critical temperament that appears to best advantage in his letters: “God DAMN this constant nostalgia for something always ‘new,’” he wrote, and “I detest a certain narcissism in the voluptuous melancholics of Eliot.” The edition’s scattershot notes are helpful, but the chronology of Crane’s life averts its gaze from his athletic philandering and the exact events leading to his suicide—he had been badly beaten during the night by a sailor he had propositioned.
Crane still makes young men want to write poetry—his best lines are extraordinary, even if there are few major poems, or even very good ones. It’s almost un-American not to love some of Crane; but it’s interesting that, when Crane lovers gather, they almost always love the same lines—a few passages from The Bridge and the sequence “Voyages” (and usually only II, III, and VI). These are among the few places where Crane’s rhetoric overcame the leaden gravity of his sentimentality, where his superb ear triumphed over his loopy vocabulary.
And so, admitted through black swollen gates
That must arrest all distance otherwise,—
Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments,
Light wrestling there incessantly with light,
Star kissing star through wave on wave unto
Your body rocking!
and where death, if shed,
Presumes no carnage, but this single change,—
Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn
The silken skilled transmemberment of song;
Permit me voyage, love, into your hands …
Passages like this make people love Crane beyond reason—though even such passages have their share of clumsy phrases (“transmemberment of song”!). I love such passages, but reason reminds me that however brilliant they are they’re not enough. If I may speak like the Red Queen, Crane was so much greater than poets who were lesser, and so much less than poets who were greater.
Crane failed to write the poetry of the American continent Emerson was calling for before the Civil War; if the ideal seems naively nativistic now, the country was once younger and less cynical. Crane was no innovative genius like Whitman; he was perhaps closer to a peasant poet like John Clare, an outsider too susceptible to praise and other vices of the city. Defensive about his lack of education, a Midwestern striver out of a Sinclair Lewis novel, Crane tried to make it among the big-city literary men, a rum in one hand and a copy of The Waste Land in the other. Had beauty been enough, he might even have succeeded.
On Reviewing Hart Crane
If you happen to be a critic, it may come as a shock that not all readers share your opinions. Worse, they write letters to the editor demanding that you be punished for the sins of your reviews. Some magazines and newspapers allow the critic to reply; others feel that, having had his say, he has undoubtedly said more than enough. Why give the critic the last word?
In the case of Hart Crane, there can be no last word. His star has been up and down so often in the three-quarters of a century since his death, it seems unlikely that critic or reader will settle the matter soon. Crane was the great might-have-been of American verse—superbly talented, ambitious as a hammer blow, full of plans and postures and persuasions galore. Most poets have their admirers by the time they arrive at that final mausoleum, the poetry anthology; Crane is one of the few who has votaries and devotees (Sylvia Plath is another). Whatever his flaws, personal or poetic, they pale before what some see as his genius. If you don’t see the genius, all you have left are the flaws.
I’ve always loved Hart Crane; but I love him in fractions, delighting in half a dozen of those rhapsodic poems long on style and short on sense but finding the rest mystifying as a Masonic ritual. In some of his best poems, I merely admire lines, and in some of those lines I merely admire phrases—and yet what phrases and lines and, more rarely, what poems he wrote! When I reviewed Crane’s Complete Poems and Selected Letters for the New York Times Book Review, I was not surprised that some readers objected, since many value Crane even more than Crane valued himself; and he valued himself quite a lot.
Reviewing Crane, if you don’t review him fondly, is like poking a pencil into a hornet’s nest. The Times had room to publish no more than half a dozen letters, which with one exception were furious. You discover a lot about readers from their letters, and most of what you discover leaves you dumbfounded—sometimes, however, you learn a thing or two. The most substantial letter came from Paul Mariani, one of Crane’s biographers. I’m so used to correcting others, I’m delighted when someone corrects me—it’s humbling to be caught in a boneheaded mistake, and critics generally need to eat crow every few months to keep them sane. Mariani noted first that, when Crane walked to the railing of the steamship Orizaba, preparing for his suicidal leap, he was wearing a light topcoat, not, as I had written, a jacket. Second, the sea he leapt into was not the Caribbean but the Atlantic. Last, the sea was not glassy, as I had proposed, but had “sizable waves.”
No error is trivial, but how are such errors made? Out of sheer doltishness, in my case. I can tell a man’s jacket from a topcoat at a hundred yards; but I failed to check my memory against the four biographies I consulted (Peggy Cowley, who was in her cabin below deck, said it was a light topcoat used as a robe and that Crane was wearing pajamas underneath). No doubt I’d fail a final exam in marine geography, but the notion that Crane leapt into the Caribbean came not from me but from his biographer Clive Fisher. He was wrong. I had forgotten the two rules on which all sound criticism is based: (1) take no fact or quotation on trust, and (2) buy a map. Both errors have been corrected.
The biographers disagree, however, about the condition of the Atlantic when Crane jumped. Mariani fails in The Broken Tower to describe the roughness of the ocean (he mentions the “impenetrable waters off which the noon sun gleamed,” which doesn’t sound choppy or rugged); Philip Horton in Hart Crane claims the “sea was mild”; and Clive Fisher, quoting Cowley in Hart Crane: A Life, says the sea was “like a mirror that could be walked on.” I changed my “glassy sea” to a “violent wake” (the wake, some think, dragged Crane under). On balance, however, the “glassy sea” seems likely.
In his description of Crane’s death, Mariani was attracted to the captain’s notion that the poet might have been eaten by a shark—“Did he feel something brush his leg, the file-sharp streaking side of concentrated muscle, before the silver flash and teeth pulled him under?” This is sheer moonshine, but a biographer’s fantasies—and gruesome fantasies they are—don’t mitigate the critic’s error of fact. (The biographer then throws some of Crane’s purple prose—or rather purple poetry—back at him: “But this time the calyx of death’s bounty gave back neither scattered chapter nor livid hieroglyph.” The allusion is to “At Melville’s Tomb,” but as prose it sounds like a canceled passage by Sir Thomas Browne.) The aggrieved reader’s fondest delusion is that a critic’s sidelong errors undermine a disagreement about taste; yet don’t we prefer Eliot’s opinions, despite his habitual misquotation, to the arguments of some bozo supported by quotes correct to the last nicety? That doesn’t make the errors less embarrassing.
I had written that, after the failure of The Bridge, the “hope for a homegrown American epic … has never entirely revived.” Mariani took exception to this, citing the long poems written since Crane’s death by Williams, Olson, Berryman, and Lowell. I hadn’t meant the idea to be contentious—the ruin of The Bridge cast a long shadow over long poems for a long while. In a way, it casts that shadow still. Will we ever have a truly American epic, a poem of American history? (I mean one that’s any good.) I love passages in The Cantos and think Leaves of Grass the foundation of modern American verse, but The Cantos is hardly homegrown (the poem remembers America from London and Paris and Rapallo), and Leaves of Grass is not an epic but a collection of lyrics. Shakespeare’s sonnets are not an epic, either.
The idea of the Great Am
erican Poem no longer seduces young poets the way the Great American Novel, that will-o’-the-wisp, still haunts American novelists. (The Great American Novel has already been written, and it is called Moby-Dick.) Because they have usually failed so badly, we forget how many long poems have been written in this country—who except at gunpoint would reread Delmore Schwartz’s autobiographical epic Genesis, Book One (Book One!) or the leaden historical poems of Archibald MacLeish or Selden Rodman? For Lowell, for Berryman, for many another, the long poem became a scatter of disconnected lyrics. That was Crane’s legacy.
A second letter to the Times, from the poet and editor Daniel Halpern, grumbled that “in this era of conflict, when America can use all the good poetry it can find, it’s dispiriting to encounter a reviewer who uses one of our most important reviewing venues to exercise an organ of bile.” How poets like Crane are going to make readers feel better about a dirty and unpopular war is beyond me; but the unstated premise is even odder—criticizing poets is all right in peacetime; but, when the artillery begins to boom, critics should shut up. Halpern believes that “poetry is what people turn to during times of duress and celebration—marriage, death, 9/11—that is, our rites of passage.” I’m not sure how the destruction of the World Trade Center qualifies as a rite de passage. As for such high-flown hopes for poetry, well, wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?
Halpern groused that “when the Library of America takes on as part of its mandate the showcasing of essential American poets like Hart Crane, we look to our reviewers to address the importance of the poet’s writing, not his lifestyle.” A publisher would be gratified if reviewers assumed that every book under its imprint were beyond criticism. Halpern also reproached me for “disingenuously ignoring the memorable ending” of Crane’s hapless little poem “Chaplinesque”:
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