Longer Views (47 page)

Quoting this letter at even greater length, Thomas E. Yingling in his
Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text
, a book rich in political insight, is astonished, possibly even bewildered, at the
Tom Jones
(1749) reference. But I can certainly remember being a teenager, when gay men of letters assumed that the good-natured foundling's light-hearted promiscuity was a self-evidently coded representation of bisexuality, or even homosexuality.

Here may be the place to mention that a reader taking his or her first dozen or so trips through
The Bridge
is likely—as were most of its early critics—to see its interest and energy centering in the lyricism and scene painting of “
Proem
,” “Ave Maria,” and the various sections of “Powhatan's Daughter”—that is,
The Bridge's
first half.

But a reader who has lived with the poem over years is more likely to appreciate the stately, greatly reflective, and meditative beauties and insights—as well as the austere and lucid structure—of the second half:

“Cutty Sark,” with which the first half ends, leaves us, as we have said, with the poet walking home over the Bridge at dawn, as Crane must have walked home many times to 110 Columbia Heights, contemplating the voyages of the great steamers, and probably remembering returning home—if we are to trust the restored epigraph that follows—to Emil. At this point,
The Bridge
begins its final, descending curve:

“Cape Hatteras” looks to the sky . . .

After the divigation of “Three Songs”—where the theme of sexual longing is heterosexualized for straight male readers (the Sestos and Abydos of the epigraph are two cities on opposite sides of the Hellespont, separated by water, whose literary import is precisely that they are
not
connected by a bridge, a separation which precipitates the tragedy of Hero, Priestess of Hesperus)—“Quaker Hill” (most cynical of the poem's sections) looks out level with the earth . . .

With the epigraph from Blake's “Morning,” “The Tunnel” plunges us beneath the ground for an infernal recapitulation of the impressionistic techniques of the poem's first half (the fall of Atlantis proper), in which the poet glimpses Whitman's—and his own—chthonic predecessor, Poe . . .

. . . to leave us, once more, in “Atlantis,” on the Bridge, flooded by the moon.

As a kind of progress report on
The Bridge
, on March 18, 1926, Crane wrote a letter to philanthropist Otto Kahn, who, a year before, had subsidized him with a thousand dollars.

Dear Mr. Kahn:

You were so kind as to express a desire to know from time to time how the Bridge was progressing, so I'm flashing in a signal from the foremast, as it were. Right now I'm supposed to be Don Christobal Colon returning from “Cathay,” first voyage. For mid-ocean is where the poem begins.

It concludes at midnight—at the center of Brooklyn Bridge. Strangely enough that final section of the poem has been the first to be completed—yet there's a logic to it, after all; it is the mystic consummation toward which all the other sections of the poem converge. Their contents are implicit in its summary.

“Cutty Sark” was composed shortly after “Ave Maria,” the opening Columbus section; and though it's possibly that, at first, Crane was not planning to include it in
The Bridge
, it is almost impossible to read it, right after the earlier poem, without seeing the aging, incoherent, inebriated sailor of the second poem as an older, ironized version—three hundred years later on—of the Christopher Columbus figure who narrates the earlier transatlantic meditation. (Try reading “Cutty Sark” against Whitman's poem, “Prayer of Columbus,” the poem in
Leaves of Grass
that follows “Passage to India”—a poem whose importance in
The Bridge
we will shortly come to.) The five sections of Part II, “Powhatan's Daughter,” that, in
The Bridge's
final version, intervene, dilute that identification somewhat. But the suggestion of the individual's persistence through history, associated, say, with “Van Winkle,” still holds it open.

In his letter to Kahn, Crane included a plan for the whole
Bridge
that may well have been growing in his mind for years:

Shortly Crane wrote even longer outlines of the parenthetical narratives in Part III and Part IV. The following, recalling Whitman's poem “To One Shortly to Die” and scenes from
Specimen Days
, Crane titled “Cape Hatteras”:

Whitman approaches the bed of a dying (
southern
) soldier—scene is in a Washington hospital. Allusion is made to this during the dialogue. The soldier, conscious of his dying condition, at the end of the dialogue asks Whitman to call a priest, for absolution. Whitman leaves the scene—deliriously the soldier calls him back. The part ends before Whitman's return, of course. The irony is, of course, in the complete absolution which Whitman's words have already given the dying man, before the priest is called for. This, alternated with the eloquence of the dying man, is the substance of the dialogue—the emphasis being on the symbolism of the soldier's body having been used as a
forge
toward a state of Unity. His hands are purified of the death they have previously dealt by the principles Whitman hints at or enunciates (without talking up-stage, I hope) and here the ‘religious gunman' motive returns much more explicitly than in F & H. [A reference to Crane's poem “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen.”] The agency of death is exercised in obscure ways as the agency of life. Whitman knew this and accepted it. The appeal of the scene must be made as much as possible independent of the historical ‘character' of Walt.

And a still later outline for “Cape Hatteras” much closer to the poem as written, reads:

Lines on Crane's worksheets for “Cape Hatteras”—that stretch of southern New Jersey containing Whitman's last home, in Camden, and (in the poem) the site of the plane wreckage—not used in the final version of the poem, possibly because they state a problem or a focus of the poem in terms too reductive, include, after the fourth stanza:

Lead me past logic and beyond the graceful carp of wit.

And:

What if we falter sometimes in our faith?

The epigraph for “Cape Hatteras” is from Whitman's “Passage to India” (which contains the parenthetical triplet, harking back to “Ave Maria,” “Ah Genoese, thy dream! thy dream! / Centuries after thou art laid in thy grave / The shore thou foundest verifies thy dream”). As do most of the epigraphs in the poem, it functions as a bridge between the preceding section, in this case “Cutty Sark” (which, with its account of the unsuccessful pick-up, is the true center of unspoken homosexual longing, the yearning for communication, in
The Bridge
), and the succeeding, here “Cape Hatteras” itself. With one line fore and three lines aft restored (lines, critic Robert Martin first pointed out, Crane probably expected the sagacious reader to be able to supply for himself), here is the passage from which the epigraph is actually taken:

Reckoning ahead O soul, when thou, the time achiev'd,

The seas all cross'd, weather'd the capes, the voyage done,

Surrounded, copest, frontest God, yieldest, the aim attain'd,

As filled with friendship, love complete, the Elder Brother found,

The Younger melts in fondness in his arms.

It's arguable that the elided homosexual (and incestuous) resolution of the epigraphic passage confirms the homosexual subtext of the previous section, “Cutty Sark,” as it makes a bridge between “Cutty Sark” and “Cape Hatteras.”

The “Sanskrit charge” in the Falcon Ace's wrist (again in “Cape Hatteras”), critic L. S. Dembo had opined, is another reference to the Absolute, via the passage following the epigraphic lines in Whitman's poem:

Passage to more than India!

Are thy wings plumed indeed for such far flights?

O soul, voyagest thou indeed on voyages like those?

Disportest thou on waters such as those?

Soundest below the Sanskrit and the Vedas?

Then have thy bent unleash'd.

Note the development of “Cape Hatteras” from Crane's initial narrative outline to the poem as written:

In Crane's poem as outlined, it's a dying southern
soldier
who calls to Whitman for aid and absolution. The poem is conceived as a narrated
dialogue
between them. At the end, deliriously the soldier calls out to the departed Whitman . . .

In Crane's poem as realized, it's a very pensive
poet
(who has, yes, lived through the Great War; there is reference to the Somme—as Whitman lived through the Civil War—and Appomattox), who calls to Whitman. And instead of a death-bed dialogue, the poem is now the poet's reflective
monologue
—with only the plane crashes at its center providing a specific thanatopsis. At its end, however, deliriously, the
poet
calls to Whitman . . .

“[T]he eloquence of the dying man . . . is the substance of the dialogue,” Crane wrote in his outline: in the monologue as written, Crane has expanded that “substance” into the entire poem. Its ironies are still in place—or even further recomplicated: the reason that the yearned- for cleaving of hands cannot ultimately take place at the end of the poem as we have it is because Whitman, rather than the soldier, is dead. What remains of Whitman is the eloquence his language and vision have given to the poet/narrator.

In 1923 Crane had read and been impressed by
Nation
editor Oswald Garrison Villard's recent biography of John Brown. And, in the outline, under the title “Calgary Express,” he wrote:

Well don't you know it's mornin' time?

Wheel in middle of wheel;

He 11 hear yo' prayers an' sanctify
,

Wheel in middle of wheel

The “scene” is a pullman sleeper, Chicago to Calgary. The main theme is the story of John Brown, which predominates over the interwoven “personal, biographical details” as it runs through the mind of a Negro porter, shining shoes and humming to himself. In a way it takes in the whole racial history of the Negro in America. The form will be highly original, and I shall use dialect. I hope to achieve a word-rhythm of pure jazz movement which will suggest not only the dance of the Negro but also the speed-dance of the engine over the rails.

And from the time of the briefer outline for “Cape Hatteras” he left this interesting sketch for “Ave Maria,”
The Bridges
opening section: