Longer Views: Extended Essays

by Samuel R. Delany

  The city to which the poet in his boat returns in the evening is, however, sordid and lurid. (In the two stanzas describing it—II and III of Part IV, “The Return”—we have the first intimations of what Thomson will publish eighteen years on, in the more powerful, but less Atlantian, City of Dreadful Night.) So once more the poet takes to his boat and returns to the ruined site of the mythic City, to hear the voice again deliver a jeremiad against the greed and evil of urban corruption.

  With this sermon threatening the fall of the real city, The Doom of a City ends.

  The question is: did Crane at some point encounter the two volumes of The Poetical Works of James Thomson, edited and published after Thomson’s death by Bertram Dobell in 1895—where, indeed, he might have found The Doom of a City? As we have said, Crane’s “Proem” at the start of The Bridge makes it almost certain that he knew The City of Dreadful Night. But would his curiosity have drawn him to pursue Thomson back to this Ur-version of that paean to urban psychic disaster—Thomson’s own, twenty-three-year-old’s retelling of the destruction of Atlantis?

  Periodically, starting with his death, there were attempts to establish Thomson as an important canonical poet. But everything from Thomson’s militant atheism and radical politics to his dipsomania and dreadfully sordid final years militated against it—especially during the first-wave attempt, spearheaded by Dobell, in the 1880s and ’90s. (That both Poe and Thomson, in the manner of Novalis before them, were associated with tragic affairs with much younger women is not, as it works toward the moral marginalization of both, without its meaning.) Thomson is a poet a full understanding of whose work hinges not only on Novalis (and Shelley), but also on Heine and Leopardi: he translated significant amounts of both. (Indeed, Thomson’s literary tastes were quite advanced: he championed Whitman, Emerson, and William Blake when all three were majorly controversial figures in England.) But two World Wars, with Germany as the villain (and Italy not far behind), has made English writers with leanings in those national directions less sympathetic to us than they might otherwise be.

  Crane’s essay “The Case Against Nietzsche” (1918) was his own attempt to fight that particular sort of jingoism, which, after the Great War, often seemed a tidal wave of pure anti-intellectualism. But certainly Thomson, with his secret sorrow and tragic life, could have been a poet that Crane in his later years, drinking himself into a poetic silence, as did Thomson, might well have sympathized, if not identified, with.

  The brilliant moonlit evocations of the City that litter Thomson’s earlier poem all through its second quarter certainly put one in mind of the moonlight flooded structure that is the vision behind Crane’s “Atlantis”—the terminal section of his own major poetic series—as if all that was needed between Thomson’s vision of London and the moon-drenched vision of his own Atlantis was, somehow, a bridge . . .

  An early Encyclopedia Britannica article on Thomson that Crane might well have read—I first looked him up the same year I first read Crane, in 1958, the same year I came across a powerful fragment from The City of Dreadful Night in an old Oscar Williams paperback anthology (“As I came through the desert, thus it was / As I came through the desert . . .”)—while generally praising Thomson, closes by chiding him for “the not infrequent use of mere rhetoric and verbiage,” terms we have already heard in our pursuit of Crane.

  But even if there was no direct influence (though there may well be an intentional dialogue), certainly there’s no harm in holding the young Thomson’s moonlit Atlantis up to provide the missing city for Crane’s.

  V

  Like Brom Weber’s before it, Marc Simon’s more recent edition of The Poems of Hart Crane (1986) (with an Introduction by John Unterecker, author of the National Book Award–winning Crane biography, Voyager [1969]), is designated by the editor a “reader’s edition.” (Weber promised a variorum edition, but it has yet to appear.) Simon expands the corpus of Weber’s 1966 edition, The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, by a hefty handful of fragments and incomplete poems, as well as more early and uncollected poems. Simon’s omission of the word “Complete” quietly suggests there may even be other poems to come—possibly some of currently dubious attribution.

  (In 1993 the Simon volume was reissued as Complete Poems of Hart Crane.)

  Weber’s ’66 edition had replaced the hasty 1933 edition, The Collected Poems of Hart Crane, that Waldo Frank had put together (reprinted in 1958 as Complete Poems), which contained Crane’s only two published books, White Buildings and The Bridge, along with a projected third volume, unpublished at Crane’s death, Key West: An Island Sheaf. The current Simon volume is longer than the Frank by more than sixty poems. The problem, however, is that the general poetry reader today is a very different person from the general poetry reader of circa World War I, when the academization of literature began to divide significant writers’ works into specialist and non-specialist editions—the non-specialist edition free of extensive notes and usually printed fairly inexpensively. But—today—the reader who is wholly unconcerned with biography, devoid of interest in, or even knowledge of, the times in which Crane wrote, and who aims to get all her or his pleasure only from an encounter with the bare and unadorned text, is simply an artificial construct.

  Certainly one would like to see The Bridge accorded the textual treatment, with variants and alternate versions and the careful redaction of manuscript and galley markings, that has already been lavished on Eliot’s The Waste Land and Ginsberg’s Howl. But though such an edition is devoutly to be wished, what is needed is a readers’ edition with notes that will allow people who want to read Crane’s poems to pursue the ordinary interests that today’s actual readers of poems have.

  We need an edition with notes that will tell us that “Voyages I” was first written and published as a separate poem, called variously “Poster” and “The Bottom of the Sea is Cruel.” (Critics regularly discuss it under both titles.) We need notes that will tell us that “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen II” was first written as a separate poem, “The Springs of Guilty Song.” We need notes that will tell us that when “Recitative” was first written in 1923 it was three stanzas shorter than the final 1926 revision—and which three stanzas were added! We need a note to tell us that “Thou Canst Read Nothing Except Through Appetite . . .” was a poem Crane typed on the back of a piece of paper bearing a name and address someone had passed him in a heavy cruising venue (the baths? the bridge? the docks?), and that, in order to indicate its nature, long-time friend and confidant, Samuel Loveman, who did the actual textual editing on the poems for Weber’s ’66 edition, gave it the title “Reply,” which is clearly what it is, even if the title isn’t Crane’s. We need notes that will tell us that Crane sent the fragment, “This Way Where November . . .” in a November 1923 letter to Jean Toomer, in which he described it as part of a long poem to be titled “White Buildings,” centering on a catastrophic sexual encounter with a sailor that began at a drunken gathering of friends the night before Crane was to leave to spend the remainder of winter ’23 in Woodstock, New York—and that Crane predicted the poem, when complete, would be unprintable; but that only this fragment survives.

  An editor might even supply a note to the effect that Crane wrote the cycle of six Voyages as a set of meditations on Emil’s sea-trips away . . .

  We need notes that will give us both the 1926 version of “O Carib Isle,” as well as the later 1929 version, not as a variorum exercise, but simply because they are all but distinct poems, sharing the first few and the last few lines.

  We need notes to tell us when and where the poems were written, when and where they were published—and under what title when the final title is not the only one. If the situation in which a poem was written or to which it responds is known and can be explained easily and relevantly, why not note it?

  Such information is far more important than notes explaining that, in “Possessions,” Weber has corrected the spelling of “r
aze” to “rase,” or that, in “Royal Palm,” Marc Simon has corrected the spelling of “elaphantine” to “elephantine”—the sort of note which, in the absence of the other, clutters both Weber and Simon. Nothing is wrong with such textual minutiae. And for the carefully established text, we must be grateful to Simon. This is often a Herculean labor; one praises it as such. But notes on its establishment have no place in an edition devoid of that other information; in its absence, one would have preferred the fine points covered by a “have been corrected without comment” in the editor’s “Note on the Editorial Method.”

  Likewise, we are grateful for the added poetic fragments—only noting that it is precisely such fragments and incomplete efforts for which readers generally need more extensive notes.

  Both Simon and Weber tell us when the poems were published—and occasionally when written and revised. Maddeningly, however, neither says in what magazines or—far more important—gives us earlier titles. But the assumption that a general poetry reader exists today who will never encounter some article on Crane that quotes a poem in part (and in some earlier form illuminating something in the poet’s development, for that’s what such articles are made of), who will then turn to such an edition to find the final form of the poem in full, is absurd. And it is more absurd to assume that a specific reader who avoids all such articles will still want to know about the poet’s—or a former typesetter’s—misspellings!

  In short one wants among the notes for Crane the same sort of information that Edward Mendelson provides as “Appendix II: Variant Titles” in his W. H. Auden: Collected Poems, or that Donald Allen gives us in his notes to The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. When a writer like Pound or Eliot puts together his own collected poems, modesty perhaps excuses such omissions. But if the poet’s work is interesting enough for a second party to undertake the task, what I’ve outlined represents what should be given first priority. And as specialists will know, in no way does that constitute a specialists’ edition. But the assumption that there exists a Common Reader of poetry who comes from no place—and is going nowhere—is, besides preposterous, heuristically arrogant and pedagogically pernicious. That, however, is what Simon’s “reader’s edition” seems to presuppose.

  The supplementary prose selections of letters, essays, and reviews that Weber included in his ’66 edition were immensely interesting. I should have thought Simon would have enlarged on them, rather than drop them altogether. (Even with minor poems, juvenilia, and fragments, Crane’s poetic opera omnia are just not that voluminous.) Simon might well have added some of the letters to black writer Jean Toomer that were published in part in Unterecker’s biography: one would have welcomed both the “White Buildings” letter and the “Heaven and Hell” letter—the latter of which threatens to achieve a measure of fame comparable only to Keats’s letter from Hampstead on the 21st of December, 1817, to his brothers George and Tom, on “negative capability.”

  It is all too easy to see the avoidance of such notes (or the exclusion of such letters) beginning in a kind of editorial exasperation with Crane’s homosexuality. Where does one draw the line at good taste—more important, where did one draw that line in 1952, when Weber edited Crane’s letters, or in ’66, when he edited the poems? (That’s what both the “Heaven and Hell” letter and the “White Buildings” letter are, after all, about.) To raise the question is, however, immediately to consider the oddly similar suppression by all three of Crane’s major biographers of the fact that, in October 1923, Jean Toomer, after the publication of his novel Cane to critical, if not to popular, success, visited his white friend and supporter Waldo Frank (his and Crane’s mutual mentor) at Frank’s Connecticut home for the first time, whereupon Toomer fell passionately in love with Frank’s wife, educator Margaret Naumberg. The passion was mutual. Weeks later, the two had run off together, hoping to leave America for the Gurdjieff Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at the Chateau du Prieuré in Fontainbleau, France, in order to study with Georges Gurdjieff himself. Only days before Toomer’s actual arrival, however, Gurdjieff died, but Toomer remained to study with Gurdjieff’s disciples, while for months Naumberg wrote him heartfelt letters announcing her imminent arrival. In the end, however, she stayed in America.

  The incident was the center of gossip in the Frank/Munson/Crane/Cowley/Toomer circle for months, if not years. But though certainly all three major biographers knew of it, neither Horton, Weber, nor Unterecker mentions it. One must go to recent biographies of Toomer to learn of it at all.

  If it came to mean less to Crane once Toomer had given up writing for mysticism, the Crane/Toomer friendship was still an important one for Crane’s early poethood—through, say, 1924. Though Toomer was three years older than Crane, the two were the youngest writers in the group. And heterosexual Toomer was one of the several straight men to whom Crane was (as the post-Stonewall generation would say) out. We know of incidents in which Toomer felt ill-understood by the group—notably by Frank and by publisher Horace Liveright—because of Toomer’s racial make-up. And Crane suggests in that letter to Winters, already quoted, that homosexuality does not mean what Winters seems to think it does. With the speculations of all his friends about the topic rampant in their commentaries and memories, it is fairly certain Crane could not expect much more than superficial understanding there. Both men had reason, then, to feel themselves, however accepted, somehow still aliens in the group. It may well have brought them together. In ’37 and ’48 one can imagine biographers Horton and Weber not mentioning the Toomer/Naumberg affair from feelings of delicacy for Frank—if not for Toomer and Naumberg, all of whom were then still alive. But Toomer and Frank both died in 1967; and Unterecker’s biography appeared in ’69 . . .

  It’s oddly paradoxical that if one looks at Toomer’s all but inconsequential post-Cane writing, it might seem as though Toomer had turned to study, if not at Gurdjieff’s knee, then at Winters’s—though Kenneth Walker, in his study Gurdjieff’s Teaching (London: Jonathan Cape, 1957) writes of Gurdjieff’s conception of art: “I measure the merit of art by its consciousness, you by its unconsciousness. A work of objective art is a book which transmits the artist’s ideas not directly through words or signs or hieroglyphics but through feelings which he evokes in the beholder consciously and with full knowledge of what he is doing and why he is doing it.” Pursuing that “full knowledge,” Toomer—as did Winters, pursuing his own esthetic program—apparently purged himself of the verbal liveliness which, today, is the principal entrance through which one apprehends the pleasure in his writing; though by the time he broke with Crane, of course, Winters may not have been aware of Toomer’s existence.

  By then many had forgotten it.

  But while one is clamoring for the Crane/Toomer letters, what of Crane’s letters to Wilbur Underwood, Crane’s older gay friend in Washington, D.C., of which we have had only snippets, accompanied by vague editorial suggestions that their subject matter is wholly beyond the pale? Such innuendo is certainly more damaging than any actual human activity possibly recounted could be.

  Finally, just as we need an edition of Crane’s poems with an apparatus that takes in the needs of actual poetry readers, we need a complete letters. (I am not the first person to make the favorable comparison between Crane’s letters and Keats’s.) Nor would it be a bad idea to put together a collection of letters and papers from The Crane Circle on the model of Hyder Edward Rollins’s famous and rewarding 1948 paired volumes around Keats.

  Samuel Bernhard Greenberg’s notebooks, papers, and drawings are currently in the Fales Collection at New York University. Edited by Harold Holden and Jack McManis, with a preface by Allen Tate, a hundred-seventeen page selection, Poems by Samuel Greenberg, was published by Henry Holt and Company (New York, 1947).

  Crane’s manuscripts, letters, and papers are largely stored at Columbia University.

  There are three full biographies of Crane and currently four volumes of letters generally available. Philip Ho
rton published his Hart Crane: The Life of an American Poet in 1937. Brom Weber published his fine, if somewhat eccentric, biographical study of Crane and his work, Hart Crane: A Biographical and Critical Study, in 1948. (Both Crane’s birth- and death-dates are mentioned only in footnotes—added, in galleys, at editor Loveman’s firm suggestion.) Weber also edited The Letters of Hart Crane, 1916–1932 (largely those of literary interest) in 1952 and, as mentioned, The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane in 1966. Thomas S. W. Lewis edited Letters of Hart Crane and His Family in 1974, a book nearly three times the thickness of Weber’s Letters and a fascinating family romance. Hart Crane and Yvor Winters: Their Literary Correspondence (1978), edited by Thomas Parkinson, is another important volume of Crane’s letters and commentary. Robber Rocks: Letters and Memories of Hart Crane, 1923–1932 (1969) by Susan Jenkins Brown (wife of William Slater Brown, formerly wife of Provincetown Playhouse director James Light) contains 39 more of Crane’s letters (there is some overlap here with Weber), as well as five auxiliary letters of the Crane circle. The volume concludes with Peggy Baird’s devastating “The Last Days of Hart Crane,” a reminiscence that makes Crane’s final completed poem, “The Broken Tower,” rise from the page and resonate (a poem whose title, if not the very idea for it, comes from “An Age of Dream,” among the most popular sonnets of Lionel Johnson, another of Crane’s adolescent enthusiasms:* We know the 1915 selection of Johnson with the introduction by Pound was a treasured volume in Crane’s adolescent library)—a memoir that must be supplemented, however, by Unterecker’s “Introduction” to the ’86 Simon edition of The Poems: there Unterecker prints Gertrude E. Vogt’s firsthand account of the talk on shipboard that morning and of watching from the Orizaba’s deck, with several other passengers, Crane’s actual jump from the stern to his death—in a letter that reached Unterecker only after his 1969 biography, Voyager, appeared.