Longer Views (46 page)

But instead of taking them to the Brooklyn Bridge, the driver takes them to the Williamsburg Bridge at Delancey Street—where, realizing how far off they are, they get out.

In the nighttime plaza before the Williamsburg, Crane urinates on a public monument.

A public monument makes a certain kind of public statement. To urinate on such a monument is, at the very least, to express one's contempt
in the most bodily way possible (short of smearing it with shit) for its sen- tentiousness, its pomposity, its civic pretension—those enunciational aspects traditionally designated by the phrase “empty rhetoric.”

But to recount the above in this way is to point out that we have begun an evening where every event, as narrated by Loveman, one way or another foregrounds a more and more problematic relation with language—specifically with something about its rhetoricity.

Having given up the errant cab, Crane and Loveman decide to walk home, down through the Lower East Side, presumably for the Brooklyn Bridge, to cross over to 110 Columbia Heights by foot. (At the time, Loveman—a published poet in his own right, as well as, later, an editor of some reputation—tells us further on in the interview, John Dos Passos lived in the apartment below Crane's.) Crossing Henry Street, around the corner from the great daily markets of Orchard and Hester, just up from the Fulton Fish Market, they find two men sleeping together in a doorway, legs sticking out. There is the identifying cardboard: “We are not bums,” which reduces Crane to hysteria—as he perceives the comedy of rhetoric at its most referential, stating what the speaker/writer hopes to make obvious in fear of the very misreading the writing presumes to obviate, participating through it in the same pretentious inflation on which, fifteen minutes before, Crane had just emptied his bladder.

It intrigues me that that night's walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, usually such a positive symbol for Crane, and across which he had walked before holding hands with Emil, is elided from Loveman's account. Does the elision suggest that—that night—the Bridge did
not
have the usual uplifting effect on Crane that, often in the past, it had had? Is there anything that we can retrieve from the elision? What, on any late night's stroll across the Brooklyn Bridge in the 1920s, were two gay men likely to see, regardless of their mood?

The nighttime walkways of the city's downtown bridges have traditionally been heavy homosexual cruising areas, practically since their opening—one of the reasons that, indeed, after dark, Crane and Emil had been able to wander across it—holding hands—with minimal fear of recriminations. They certainly could have not walked so during the day.

But perhaps that evening, with his old friend Loveman, on the Bridge's cruisy boardwalk, Crane might have heard the rich and pointed banter of a group of dishy queens lounging against the rail, or, perhaps, even the taunts leveled at them from a passing gaggle of sailors—who often crossed the Bridge back to the Navy Yard, in their uneasy yet finally symbiotic relationship with the bridge's more usual nighttime pedestrians. But even if the bridge were deserted that night, even if we do not evoke the
memory
of language to fulfill the place of
living
language, we can still assume without much strain that the conversation of the two men, at least now and again, touched on those subjects which it would have been impossible for such as they to cross the bridge at such an hour and not think of—in short, something in the human speech that occurred in that elided journey, whether the received public banter of cross-dressers or simply the speculation of Crane and Loveman to one another, is likely to have broached those sexual areas so easily and usually characterized as residing outside of language—at least outside that language represented by the municipal monument, outside that language which claims rhetorical density by only stating the true, the obvious, the inarguable—even as the very act of stating them throws such truths and inarguables into hysterical question. (To indulge in gay gossip, or indeed in any socially private sub-language, unto the language of poetry itself, is at once to take up and to invest with meaning an order of rhetoric the straight world—especially in the twenties—claims is empty, meaningless, and at the same time always suspected of pathology . . .) This, at any rate, is the place we can perhaps also best contextualize the urgency behind Crane's operatically passionate addresses to Loveman in his letter. One begins with the obvious statement that this was pre- Stonewall. But one must follow it with the observation that it was also pre-Matachine Society—which is to say, this rhetoric is from the homosexual tradition that the Matachine Society was both to spring from and (after its radical opening years under Harry Haye) to set itself against: the Matachines, recall, would eventually seek equal rights for homosexuals under the program that claimed homosexual males could be
just like other men
if they tried, and that they did not have to live their lives at such an intense level of passion in their relationships with their love objects and their friends, of the sort represented by Crane's exhortations to his friend Loveman. It is the situation that defined, at the time, a distinct, homosexual male community.

In the first of his
Voyages
, Crane—in that most referential of introductions to that transreferential cascade of poetic rhetoric—had exhorted the young boys frisking with sand and stick and shell:

. . . there is a line

You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it

Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses

Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.

The traditional reading certainly takes that line to refer to the boundary between innocence and sexual knowledge—and, for readers who know of Crane's love for Opffer, specifically homosexual knowledge.

Here we are not beyond referentiality but only into the simple foothills of metaphor. The caresses not to be trusted are those that are too “lichen-faithful,” i.e., clinging, that originate from a breast “too wide,” i.e., from a breast wider than a child's, i.e., a grown man's (or a grown woman's).

But it is also a line of rhetorical referentiality, of referential clarity—a line Crane had to cross specifically to write his love poems, a line beyond which all was music, affect, connotative brilliance—but without reference, a poetic land where the intended topic was always instantly erasable: “nothing but rhetoric.” As a poet working in America, Crane had broached this verbal area all but alone. Wilde, the early hero of Crane's juvenile effort, “C 33,” had doubtless first taught him the form to use in dealing with sex. (“C 33” was Wilde's cell number, when he was imprisoned at Reading Gaol for sodomy. The reader aware of this fact is, as it were, welcomed into Crane's poem; the reader who is not, is excluded from it and finds its subject opaque.) “C 33” was Crane's first attempt to separate his readers into two camps before the topic of homosexuality—in this case by means of homosexual folklore and erudition. But eventually Crane seems to have glimpsed within such practices an entire apparatus for articulating the inarticulable. And since Dada and surrealism were European movements to which he had no real and immediate access, it's no wonder that, from time to time (on such rhetorically problematic nights, when language and the machinery of the night as we have described it had, perhaps too quickly, escorted him there, arm in arm, like Loveman himself), that rhetorical area looked to Crane like a verbal waste land.

How much of this was behind Crane's drunken attempt to leap from the roof, maybe half an hour later—well, we must answer Loveman's interviewer's rhetorical question (“That's what was bothering him”) in the same manner as Loveman:

Silence—before turning to another topic.

The Bridge is
a poem whose “
Proem
” and eight sections fall into two astonishing halves. The first half—“
Proem
”and Part I, “Ave Maria,” throughout Part III, “Cutty Sark”—ranges over themes roughly connected by the concept of Time: history, the present, tradition, youth, age. The second half—Part IV, “Cape Hatteras” through Part VIII, “Atlantis”—recompli- cates many of the same themes by considering them in the light of Space: territory, landscape, the city of lust and love, transportation. The idea
of love—sometimes spoken, sometimes unspeakable—is the Bridge among them all.

The Brooklyn Bridge makes three appearances in the poem, two of them spectacular, one almost invisible. The spectacular appearances are in the introduction (
“Proem
”) and the coda (“Atlantis”). The near invisible one falls at the poem's virtual center, just before the closing movement of “Cutty Sark,” when a veiled account of an unsuccessful homosexual pick-up of a drunken aging sailor concludes with the line, “I started walking home across the Bridge . . .” But a controlling irony of the poem would seem to be that images of the Bridge are, themselves, bridged by images from the land either side of it.

On at least one level, Crane's enterprise in
The Bridge
is majestically lucid. God—or the Absolute—as an abstract idea is too vast for the mind of man and woman to comprehend directly. Such an idea can only manifest itself—and then only partially—through myths. Living in the rectilinear architecture of the modern city, for Crane the curve, the broken arc, most visibly suggested the vastness and transcendence of deity. (That curve was, one suspects, the same Ouspensky-generated curve-of-binding-energy that Crane's friend, black writer Jean Toomer, was so insistent about having represented in the book design—before “Karintha,” “Seventh Street,” and “Kabnis”—of
Cane
[1923].) But the curve of gull-wing or bird flight, of wave crest or sea swell, was too impermanent. So Crane turned to the man-made curve of the Brooklyn Bridge “to lend a myth to God.” Numerous other curves, some enduring, some momentary—from the mazy river's, to the railroad's steel, to the movement of Indian dancers, to that of a burlesque queen's pearl strings shaking at her hip—inform the Bridge's curve with meaning, just as the multiple uses of a word in language determine its meaning in any individual occurrence. And an early reading of
The Bridge
in which we pay attention to curved things that vanish and curved things that remain, in contrast with straight and angular things, equally stable or fleeting, is as good an entrance strategy as any into the further complexities of the poem.

As far as the source of that symbolic/mystic curve in the Ouspensky/ Gurdjieff teachings, it's fair to suppose that Crane had what most of us would regard as a healthy skepticism toward the practical realities of the Gurdjieff movement. In an often reprinted letter of May 29th, 1927, that we have already referred to, Crane wrote to Yvor Winters, who had urged him that poems should reflect a picture of “the complete man”—which completeness, for Winters, seems somehow to have included being heterosexual:

The image of “the complete man” is a good idealistic antidote for the horrid hysteria for specialization that inhabits the modern world. And I strongly
second your wish for some definite ethical order. Munson, however, and a number of my other friends, not so long ago, being stricken with the same urge, and feeling that something must be done about it—rushed into the portals of the famous Gurdjieff Institute and have since put themselves through all sorts of Hindu antics, songs, dances, incantations, psychic sessions, etc. so that now, presumably the left lobes of their brains and their right lobes function (M's favorite word) in perfect unison. I spent hours at the typewriter trying to explain to certain of these urgent people why I could not enthuse about their methods; it was all to no avail, as I was told that the “complete man” had a different logic than mine, and further that there was no way of understanding this logic without first submitting yourself to the necessary training . . . Some of them, having found a good substitute for their former interest in writing by means of more complete formulas of expression have ceased writing now altogether, which is probably just as well. At any rate, they have become hermetically sealed souls to my eyesight, and I am really not able to offer judgment.

But while Crane could frown at their methods, he had read and been impressed with Ouspensky's
Tertium Organum
, and he had gone to the lectures and dance demonstrations—and had taken in a good many of the ideas. Would that Toomer—likely the referent of that unhappy “probably just as well”—had been as able as Crane to maintain a similar distance. Finally, in the letter Crane gets to the homosexuality (Winters had apparently compared Crane positively to Valéry and Marlowe—probably without realizing Marlowe was gay—but warned that Crane might end up like the asexual Leonardo, who started endless projects of genius but finished less than two dozen):

Your fumigation of the Leonardo legend is a healthy enough reaction, but I don't think your reasons for doubting his intelligence and scope very potent.—I've never closely studied the man's attainments or biography, but your argument is certainly weakly enough sustained on the sole prop of his sex—or lack of such. One doesn't have to turn to homosexuals to find instances of missing sensibilities. Of course I'm sick of all this talk about balls and cunts in criticism. It's obvious that balls are needed, and that Leonardo had 'em—at least the records of the Florentine prisons, I'm told, say so. You don't seem to realize that the whole topic is something of a myth anyway, and is consequently modified in the characteristics of the image by each age in each civilization. Tom Jones, a character for whom I have the utmost affection, represented the model in 18th Century England, as least so far as the stated requirements of your letter would suggest, and for an Anglo- Saxon model he is still pretty good aside from calculus, the Darwinian theory, and a few other mental additions.