Longer Views (41 page)

If the “floating flower” does stand for the genitals, it's possible that, in Crane's poem, we should read it as female genitals, since Crane has already personified the sea as a woman with, first, shoulders, then palms, and then a “floating flower”; such a reading would simply continue her embodiment. But if the allusion to Joyce is really there, it opens up other possible readings: Crane may be critiquing Joyce's use of the “floating flower” figure for the genitals—saying in effect, it
should
be used for female genitals, rather than for male. But, by the same token, he could be using the relation to Joyce covertly to bisexu- alize his own personification of the ocean—evoking a “floating flower”

so recently and famously used to figure the
male
genitalia.
*

Crane's poem “Emblems of Conduct,” written shortly after his discovery of Greenberg, is an amalgam of stanzas and lines from Greenberg's poems—mostly Greenberg's “Conduct.” But words, phrases, and lines from Greenberg (“gate” and “script” are two words and, finally, two concepts all but donated to Crane by Greenberg) turn up in both
Voyages
and
The Bridge
. Some years later, after he had all but finished
The Bridge's
final section, and very possibly while pursuing Greenberg's readings in Emerson, Crane opened Emerson's “Plato” and, coming upon the paragraph which heads these notes, decided, in a kind of challenge to Emerson's praise of Plato's lack of poetic ecstasy, to rename “Finale,”
The Bridge
's ecstatic conclusion, “Atlantis.”

For if there is one poet who is
not
described by the motto heading these notes—a common-sensical, super-average man—it is Crane!

But this might also be the place to look back, six years before, to
Crane's 1918 meditation on Nietzsche—a defense of the philosopher against those who, with the Great War, would dismiss him along with everything German. In the second paragraph of that astute, brief essay (misleadingly titled “The Case Against Nietzsche”; a more apropos, if clumsier, title would have been “The Case
Against
the Case Against Nietzsche”), Crane mentions that Schopenhauer was (along with Goethe) one of the few Germans whom Nietzsche had any use for at all. It's possible then that the 19-year-old Crane had read through Nietzsche's essay, “On Schopenhauer as Teacher”; the following passage from it may have been—then—one of the earlier texts, if not the earliest, to begin sedimenting some of the ideas, images, and terms that, in development, would become Crane's major poetic work half a dozen or more years on:

Nobody can build you the bridge over which you must cross the river of life, nobody but you alone. True, there are countless paths and bridges and demigods that would like to carry you across the river, but only at the price of your self; you would pledge your self, and lose it. In this world there is one unique path which no one but you may walk. Where does it lead? Do not ask; take it.

Indeed, to examine how Crane's
Bridge
critiques the specifics of this passage is to begin to trace what, in Crane, is specific to his own view and enterprise:

For Nietzsche the bridge is the instrumentality with which one negotiates the river of life. For Crane the bridge
is
life. In her 1978 interview with Opffer, Helge Normann Nilsen records Opffer as saying that Crane often told him, “All of life is a bridge” or “The whole world is a bridge.” The bridge for Nietzsche is the unique and optimal path by which the brave subject can, in crossing it, avoid losing his proper self. One suspects that for Crane a multiplicity of selves can all be supported by the bridge's encompassing curveship—that, somehow, authenticity of self, above and beyond that of authentic poetry, is not in question.

In the Nilsen interview with Opffer, Opffer tells a tale about his own father, also a sailor, “who once jumped from a ship in Denmark just to see how long it would take for them to pick him up.” Crane lived in the building with both father and son—and before his death Emil Senior may have amused both Crane and Emil Junior with tales of this early jape. It stuck in Opffer's mind till he was over eighty; it may well have stayed in Crane's too . . .

When one reads through Crane's letters to his literary friends, his family, his theoretical statements, and his various defenses of his own work, one has the impression that, above all things, Crane wanted to be taken as an intellectual poet. He was as fiercely a self-taught intellectual as a
writer could be. Certainly he was aware that only reading strategies that could make sense of the high modernist works of Eliot and Pound could negotiate his own energetic, vivid, but densely packed and insistently connotative lines.

The argument often used to impugn Crane's intellect—that Crane took the epigraph from Strachy's early Seventeenth Century journals for
Powhatan's Daughter
(Part II of
The Bridge
) from a review by Elizabeth Bowen of William Carlos Williams's
In the American Grain
, where Bowen had quoted and abridged the same lines, rather than taking it from Williams's book directly or from the edition of Strachy's journals that Williams himself consulted—is simply jejune. (From other passages in
The Bridge
, as well as reports from Williams of a letter from Crane [now lost], in which Crane wrote Williams of the use he had made both of
In the American Grain
and also of Williams's poem “The Wanderer” in structuring
The Bridge
, we know Crane read Williams's book all the way through.) Crane took the idea for “Virginia,” in “Three Songs,” from a popular 1923 tune by Irving Caesar, “What Do You Do Sunday, Mary”; and he took the Latin lines at the end of the second act chorus of Seneca's
Medea
for the motto to “Ave Maria” (
The Bridge
, Part I) from a scholarly article in a 1918 issue of a recondite classics journal,
Mnemosne
. What, by the same silly argument, do
these
sources say about Crane's intellect—save that, like many intellectuals, he read lots, and at lots of levels? The point is the
use
he made of those textual allusions and their resonances in his poem—not their provenance or the purity of their sources!

Besides being an intellectual, however, Crane was also a volatile eccentric, often loud and impulsive. A homosexual who, by several reports, struck most people as unremittingly masculine, at the same time he was disconcertingly open about his deviancy with any number of straight friends—at a time when homosexuality was assumed a pathology in itself.

Crane was also—more and more as his brief life rolled on—a drunk.

The last three or four years of Crane's life were largely the debacle of any number of literary alcoholics who died from drink: read Henry S. Salt's biography of James Thomson (B.V.); read Lewis Ellingham's account of Jack Spicer; read Douglas Day on Malcolm Lowry—or anybody on Dylan Thomas. But the resultant biographemes that have sedimented in the collective literary imagination about Crane, from the typewriters thrown out windows, to the poems composed with the Victrola blaring jazz and Crane's own laughter spilling over the music and the racket of his own typewriter keys (but Cowley has told us how meticulously Crane revised those same poems), to the explosive break between Crane and Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon—with whom Crane had been living
for a summer in Patterson, New York, when, unable to take him any longer, they precipitously put him out—to his midnight pursuits of sailors around the Navy Yards of Cleveland, Washington, D.C., and Brooklyn, to the more and more frequent encounters—both in New York and Paris—with the police, as well as, in his last years, various drunken suicide attempts; and above them all are the murky surroundings of his final hours, traveling on the steamer
Orizaba
back to the States from Mexico with his “fiancée,” Peggy Baird (Mrs. Malcolm Cowley, waiting for her divorce papers to come through)—from which the thirty-three-year-old Crane was being deported for still
another
drunken suicide try with a bottle of iodine. After several days of drinking and making a general nuisance of himself on shipboard, on the evening of April 26—Emil Opffer's birthday—a drunken Crane descended into the
Orizaba's
sailors' quarters. He tried to read the sailors his poems—that's one version. He tried to make one of the sailors and was badly beaten—that's another. He was also—probably—robbed; at any rate, the next morning his money and his ring were gone. A sedated Baird had been confined to her room with a burned arm from an accident the day before with a box of Cuban matches that had caught fire. Now, sometime after eleven, in his pajamas and a light topcoat, a disconsolate Crane went to Baird's cabin. Baird said: “Get dressed, darling. You'll feel better.”

As mentioned, it was the day after Emil's birthday. Was Crane perhaps thinking of the tale Emil's father had told . . .?

At about two minutes before noon, wrote Gertrude E. Vogt, a passenger on the ship, many years later to Crane's biographer John Unterecker,

a number of us were gathered on deck, waiting to hear the results of the ship's pool—always announced at noon. Just then we saw Crane come on deck, dressed, as you noted, in pajamas and topcoat; he had a black eye and looked generally battered. He walked to the railing, took off his coat, folded it neatly over the railing (not dropping it on deck), raised himself on his toes, then dropped back again. We all fell silent and watched him, wondering what in the world he was up to. Then, suddenly, he vaulted over the railing and jumped into the sea. For what seemed five minutes, but was more like five seconds, no one was able to move; then cries of “man overboard” went up. Just once I saw Crane, swimming strongly. But never again. It is a scene I am unable to forget, even after all these years.

After Crane's leap from the ship's stern, the
Orizaba
came to a stop, but the Captain figured either the ship's propellers, sharks, or both had finished the poet. The
Orizaba
trolled for him a full hour; the body, however, was not found. But all these images have displaced the less sensational—and
earlier—images called up by the compulsive and omnivorous reader of Frazer, Doughty, Villard, the Elizabethans, Nietzsche, Emerson, Whitman, Dante, Melville, Joyce, LaForgue, Rimbaud, Ouspensky, Eliot, Pound, Frank, and Williams—to cite only a handful of the writers with whose work Crane was deeply familiar by the time he was thirty. Crane was not a reader of formal philosophy—and was quick to say so, when necessary. (From a letter to Yvor Winters in 1927: “I. . . have never read Kant, Descartes or the other doctors . . .” But he
had
read his Donne, Blake, and Vaughan.) His languages were French and nominal Latin; he used both.

The productive Crane was a young man: all but a handful of the poems we remember him for were written before he had completed his twenty-eighth year. But
by
twenty-eight, he had read and thought more about what he'd read than most twenty-eight-year-olds have—even twenty-eight-year-olds headed toward the academy.

The French have their concept of the
poète maudit
for such fellows (many of whom—though not all—were gay). Twenties America had only Flaming Youth and the stodgy old professor—but no template for those between, much less one that encompassed the extremes of both. But those were the extremes Crane's life bridged.

Beginning with his contemporaries Allen Tate and Yvor Winters, the traditional view of Crane is that, as a poet, he was an interesting, monumentally talented, even “splendid failure” (the words come from the final line of a frequently reprinted essay, “Notes on a Text of Hart Crane” by R. P. Blackmur)—a view that began with the uncomfortable perception by Winters and Tate of a correspondence between Crane's homosexuality, his drunkenness, his suicide, and his ideas—especially his appreciation of Whitman—along with his work's resistance to easy elucidation. This view carries through the majority of Crane criticism to this day. It is perhaps presented at its clearest in its current form in Edward Brunner's
Splendid Failure: The Making of
The Bridge (1985). Still, I suspect, Crane's contemporaries could not quite grasp that Crane was often writing a kind of poem that simply did not undertake the task of argumentative (the word they often used was “structural”) clarity, narrative or otherwise, then expected of the well-formed poem. But the primary sign of Crane's ultimate success is the crushing lack of critical attention we now pay to all those poems written at the time that dutifully undertook that task and performed it quite successfully. Among critical works on Crane that have directly taken up this point are Lee Edelman's rhetorically rigorous
Transmemberment of Song
(1987) and Paul Giles's paronomasially delirious
Contexts of
The Bridge (1986). Indeed, after the three major biographies (Horton, Weber, and Unterecker), which give the context of Crane in his times, Brunner's, Edelman's, and Giles's studies of the poems are probably the most informative recent books on Crane's work
per se
.