MARCH/APRIL 2007
Grand Failure
Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected LettersEdited by Langdon HammerThe Library of America, $40 (cloth
Calvin Bedient
For
Hart Crane’s first book of poems, the slender White
Buildings (1926), there was a whole bouquet of reviews to
die for. True, the owlish Edmund Wilson was not impressed: “almost
something like a great style, if there could be such a thing as
a great style which was, not merely not applied to a great subject,
but not, so far as one can see, applied to any subject at all.”
But he was outnumbered by the reviewers who trumpeted Crane’s
arrival: Waldo Frank, Yvor Winters, Mark Van Doren, Archibald
MacLeish, Matthew Josephson, and still others—several of
them already Crane’s friends.
It may not have been all to Crane’s
good that his advent was greeted with so much rapture and so little
circumspection. (“Not since Whitman,” intoned Frank
in The New Republic, “has so original, so profound
and . . . so important a poetic promise come to the American scene.”)
Crane’s belief in himself, already huge, ballooned astronomically.
In his next book, The Bridge, he exhumed the United States as
a “mystic” topic and tried to make a go of it, though
it was some 60 years too late for that; and before he committed
suicide at the age of 32, he had still more immodestly moved on
to “a poetic drama on Cortez and Montezuma.”
Crane didn’t know how to restrain himself (we find the same pattern in his drinking). For all one knows, he might have developed if he’d remained longer in the shadows; but he rooted out praise—for instance, excitedly sending his literary friends first drafts of mere beginnings of poems, like a child showing his mother the first strokes of a drawing—and finding it, not least in letters, incited him to still greater efforts.
But as to White Buildings:
if half of it is just so much talented piano practice, some of
it is downright astonishing. Witness the two opening stanzas of
“Praise for an Urn,” and the fifth, quoted here:
Still, having in mind gold hair,
I cannot see that broken brow
And miss the dry sound of bees
Stretching across a lucid space.
Perhaps “dry” and “lucid” have never been more beautifully used. “Lucid” lyricizes the summer, while “dry” passes ominously through its air. Similarly, even as the sentence, with its extraordinarily distinct monosyllables, stretching long vowels, and stretching, buzzing s’s stretches through the four lines, the frequent line breaks parse it dryly. Here, elegy finds dignity in being dry-eyed.
Even the frequently anthologized
six-part sequence “Voyages,” for all its banality
about mortality and its sentimentality about love—barely
disguised by Symbolist verse that, as Verlaine prescribed, is
“plus vague et plus soluble dans l’air”—Crane
struck off a few lines genuinely in the grand style,
and this at a time when such a style was already all but antiquated.
Of the sea: “her undinal vast belly moonward bends.”
And how to resist “The seal’s wide spindrift gaze
toward paradise”? Not to overlook “Permit me voyage,
love, into your hands,” which movingly resists being pulled
out into an evenly measured pentameter, “voyage” and
“into” being understandably in a hurry.
But it’s only an itty-bitty slip to pass from that “toward paradise” or that “your hands” into emotional twaddle, and Crane, far younger in his poetry than in his criticism, sometimes so slipped. At his worse, he’s cloying. Like Pound, he didn’t completely modernize his idiom, but he lacked Pound’s hard, clean carving, his annealing exactitude. His thees and thous are impossibly lofty, his diction and syntax occasionally puffed like a periwig. He could be mawkish: “Eyes tranquil with the blaze / of Love’s own diametric gaze, of love’s amaze!” And hammy: “let thy waves rear / More savage than the death of kings.” All too elevated: “distinctly praise the years.” (Yet beware: a steady diet of Crane can make the language of even some of his great contemporaries seem thin and easy. It’s all in what the ear gets used to.)
Not that Crane wasn’t, withal, modern. He belonged to the great sestet of American Modernist poets who, T. S. Eliot aside, sought to correct our puritanical leanings—the other four being Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Gertrude Stein. But if Crane is the slenderest “classic” among them, it’s not only because he died young but also because of the distortions fostered by his too great trust in “emotional dynamics” and his inordinate ambition to synthesize, round and about America, space, time, and knowledge.
Before looking further into what
went simultaneously grand and wrong with Crane—mostly wrong—we
might note that much of his first book escaped the later desperate
exaggeration. The subject Wilson failed to see in it is, often,
pity, caritas, in variations on Eliot’s “infinitely
gentle / Infinitely suffering thing” (a phrase from “Preludes”
that Crane echoes in his letters). Though Crane out-lunged the
emotion in The Bridge, it forms much of the distinction
of White Buildings.
True, it was held suspended in the second poem, the over-snappy anthology favorite “Black Tambourine,” whose “black man in a cellar” is hinged, as Crane hinted in a letter: he can be viewed as either racially backward or a social victim. A purer example is “My Grandmother’s Love Letters”: the letters are read in an attic to the sound of rain on the roof—“such a sound of gently pitying laughter.” “Chaplinesque” implies that it requires “meek adjustments” to “Have heard a kitten in the wilderness” or seen “The moon in lonely alleys make / A grail of laughter of an empty ash can.” And, not to exhaust all the examples, “Repose of Rivers” solemnly returns to what Crane notes might so easily have been bartered away, a landscape of “singular nestings,” the beavers’ “stitch and tooth.” In short, Crane wrote from and about an enabling humility, rich in sympathy and affection.
But then ambition struck. (In fact,
it was announced already in the congested sequence “Faustus
and Helen,” where Crane is effusive about classical beauty—Helen—and
a dematerializing longing—Faustus—and takes on Eliot’s
pessimism with a bardic “yes,” even anticipating the
metaphor of the bridge in the line “The imagination spans
beyond despair.” Of the six Modernists, Crane soon talked
the biggest talk, after Stein: “I’m on a synthesis
of America and its structural identity now, called The Bridge”
(letter of February 20, 1923); “bound to be a magnificent
thing” (letter of April 18, 1926). And indeed, he alone
assumed all three of the huge American Modernist topics: American
nature, American history (or culture), and American religion.
To that end, Crane’s long
sequence The Bridge (1930) elevated Brooklyn Bridge and
the Mississippi, steel and water, as equal and like emblems of
God: on the one hand, God’s transcendence (for this, however,
look chiefly to the bridge) and, on the other, God’s immanence
(for this, look especially, but not too closely, to the river).
The bridge necessitated that God be structurally sound and now,
whereas the river equated God with the Gulf, as a destination.
It was a lot to ask, this bridging of divine structure and a divine
pooling. But Crane thought that the across and upward directions
of the bridge justified the totalizing symbolism. Just empathize
with them; follow your Western emotions, the Faustian souls’
love of infinity, of whence and whither in the world of light.
Such was the telescope through which Oswald Spengler taught Crane
to look in The Decline of the West.
In a letter to Waldo Frank (January 18, 1926), Crane boasted that “the bridge in becoming a ship, a world, a woman, a tremendous harp . . . seems to really have a career.” In fact it was anything his immediate religious impulse wanted it to be: at once process and product, a pre-, present- and post-becoming, a future-anterior summation, “arc synoptic of all tides below.” “Unto us lowliest sometime . . . descend,” he pled, humorlessly. “Cognizance” gave the bridge intelligence; “O Love” gave it heart; “Bridge of Fire”—well, it’s all too much. The bridge as a mere (and splendid) piece of engineering groans under the stress of Crane’s Faustian requirement that it become “the symbol of consciousness spanning time and space,” and then some (letter of March 18, 1926).
A dualist despite himself, Crane
couldn’t see the world in a grain of sand or heaven in a
wildflower; he had to hammer both into the bridge. Whitman (who
is passionately apostrophized in The Bridge) made the
rowdy American scene continuous with the unnamable, which, in
German Romantic fashion, was always “still becoming”;
but for Crane the combination was like walking on stilts with
the two footholds at different heights: a lift up, clomp, a let
down, clomp. The division shows itself in The Bridge’s
vacillations between urban naturalism (“the toothpaste and
the dandruff ads”) and, in antithesis, high symbolism, or
metaphor cut loose from fact, though intended as an antidote to
dualism. (There’s actually a range of styles, but this isn’t
the place to detail them.) Whole poems in The Bridge
are just the ordinary, dressed up. In other of the poems, by contrast,
Crane’s “choiring” practice scatters the poetry’s
intelligence into a mishmash of images and a splash of affects.
At times the lines even hurt one’s body to read. Crane was
especially hard on the eyes—for example, those “Slit
by . . . fins of light” and “propelled” by them
while they, the eyes, “Pick biting way up towering looms
that press / Sidelong with flight of blade on tendon blade,”
like no loom ever known before (“Atlantis”).
The Bridge is ardent in
its tone, heartfelt in its metaphysics, and distant and heartless
where Whitman was all humanity. Emptying out historical specificity,
Crane’s “visionary company of love” floats in
the remote-inane, distant from Whitman’s “breed of
life.” Compared to what acceptable “Love” is
a man’s bridge-facilitated suicide like a party (“shrill
shirt ballooning, / A jest falls”)? Crane’s somewhat
evangelistic Orphism looks as far forward as his election of Native
America as our national “myth” looks to the past (“dance
us back the tribal morn!”). Present humanity itself is a
sort of excrescence. Even our religious men, hobos “riding
the rods,” are “Blind fists of nothing, humpty-dumpty
clods.” Always already, life belongs up ahead, pouring into
God. The Bridge? “Terrific threshold of the prophet’s
pledge.”
Meanwhile, America’s actual, terrible history is occluded. For instance, to get the American past into “myth,” Crane identified the continent with Pocahontas, who was, let us recall, as Crane did not, a member of a trod-upon people: “whose is the flesh our feet have moved upon?” is a statement of desire, not of guilt. In addition, the American seer (the model, of course, being Whitman) is to “merge” his “seed” with her. This is disastrous; it’s mythmaking as narcissism.
The amazing elegist, if minor poet,
of White Buildings went on to write only one real contender
for the triple crown of Nature/Culture/God, namely “The
River,” by far the best poem in The Bridge. It’s
flecked with sentimental falsities (“And hum Deep River
with them while they go”) and pomposities (“And few
evade full measure of their fate”), and like the rest of
the sequence it barters the souls evoked in White Buildings
for mere caricatures (“O Sheriff, Brakeman and Authority”),
flattening the folk out in its ambition. But it’s Crane’s
grandest Whitmanian anthem to the American continent and his best
effort at uniting history with God:
The River lifts itself from its long bed,
Poised wholly on its dream, a mustard glow
Tortured with history, its one will—flow!—
—The Passion spreads in wide tongues, choked and slow,
Meeting the gulf, hosannas silently below.
In context, this conclusion to
“The River” is magnificent: the complex orchestration
of the actions—the lift, the hanging poised, the flow, the
spreading, the meeting, the hosannas—all this is suitably
dizzying. “Mustard” is the mot juste—as
bitingly right as it is unexpected. Even the diapason of the rhyme
works a magic. But just what the river is, if not in itself “history”
(which tortures it) is a puzzle. If something is already
transhistorical, perhaps it is only meeting more of itself at
the gulf? In effect, all of itself? But ours is not to think about
the matter at all; ours, says the verse, is simply to feel . .
.
More convincing, because not in
dreamy debt to religious terminology, is the fine description
of the river’s mid-career:
You will not hear it as the sea; even stone
Is not more hushed by gravity . . . But slow,
As loth to take more tribute—sliding prone
Like one whose eyes were buried long ago
The River, spreading, flows—and spends your dream.
Crane’s inveterate anthropomorphism (easy source of pathos) creeps in: unconvincingly, with those buried “eyes.” But the writing is astonishingly beautiful.
Crane’s iambic pentameters
could indeed “slide prone”—in fact, more smoothly
than anyone else’s. And his tone could be stunningly hushed
and hushing, as here and in his best poem, “Repose of Rivers,”
and other poems in White Buildings, especially “My
Grandmother’s Love Letters” and “At Melville’s
Tomb”; and his rhyme deep-pulling, as, above, with “sea”
and “gravity,” which answer each to each in the eighth
syllable of their respective lines.
All in all, Crane’s reputation,
like that of Shelley (an influence) and Dylan Thomas (influenced),
seems destined to keep fluctuating, subject, as it is, to inevitable
suspicions of the poet’s immaturity, his weakness for what
Shelley called “high talk.” Crane’s ambition
remains at once exemplary and a caution—on the one hand,
a routing of the usual timid poetic gestures and, on the other,
self-disassembled by a hardly-reflected-upon religious element,
which made some of his lines moon-blind. “Reverence,”
he wrote at age 20, is “the source of all light,”
and he never changed his mind. His anti-intellectual enthusiasm
encouraged the figurative hash and tonal disaster of parts of
The Bridge. (Crane, by the way, foresaw that The
Bridge might prove “distinguishedly bad”—letter
of March 5, 1926).
The new Library of America edition of the poems, which handsomely re-consecrates Crane as part of the American canon, isn’t an altogether happy volume, because, through no fault of the editor, Langdon Hammer, there aren’t enough strong poems to counterbalance the great bulk of the correspondence (557 pages’ worth), and the reviews are few, and the essays fewer.
The letters themselves require
some slogging through: as a quasi-narrative of Crane’s adult
life, they form a slow, slow story. Crane could be full of himself,
and his prose polysyllabically pretentious (though least so when
addressed to some of his sharp-eared peers, for instance Yvor
Winters and Allen Tate). Even so, he proves to have been an affectionate
man and a remarkably astute, properly exacting literary critic
(even if he called Yvor Winters’s line “your thighs
that seethe interminably” a “beautiful dynamic metaphor”).
He was somewhat given to lecturing his parents about their conduct
and his literary correspondents about their work; but, as to this
last, the great thing is that he cared: he served the arts. Though
he never finished high school, he began to read extensively and
deeply on his own while still something of a kid, and he precociously
developed the highest standards—writing at 19, for instance,
brilliant little essays on Nietzsche and Joyce; and in 1922, a
year older than the century, he was an excited reader of the new-hatched
Ulysses and The Waste Land.
In short, his critical prose is
admirable, and his letters provide often good and occasionally
first-rate company:
I’ve been toasting my feet at an electric stove, a kind
of radio heater that I have in my room, and glancing first at
the bay, then with another kind of satisfaction at my shelves
of books and the writing table—for a long time unable
to think of anything but a kind of keen sensual bliss, that
is in itself something like action—it contains so much
excitement and pleasure.
(Letter of October 21, 1924)
In the course of writing White
Buildings, Crane set out to save the nation’s soul. Whitman
had so set out, and perhaps the effort needs to be made again
and again. But in his most relaxed moments, Crane forgot the collective
afflatus, dropped the beaded and starry mantle of American bard,
and stripped down to save his own. <
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