Earlier versions of the poem were much more directly erotic: that third stanza once read, “Bells ringing off San Salvador / To see you smiling scrolls of silver, ivory sentences / brimming confessions, O prodigal, / in which your tongue slips mine—/ the perfect diapason dancing left / wherein minstrel mansions shine.”
Crane himself later used the phrase “Adagios of islands” to explain what he called his “indirect mentions”—in this case the indirect mention of “the motion of a boat through islands clustered thickly, the rhythm of the motion etc” (“General Aims and Theories”). Crane was also reading Melville, and both “leewardings” in the second line and “spindrift” in the last have their source—if indirectly—in that novelist of the sea: “The Lee Shore,” Chapter 23 of Moby-Dick, praises “landless-ness” as a road to “higher truth.” And Crane had first used Melville’s term “findrinny” in an earlier draft but, unable to find it in any dictionary, finally settled on “spindrift,” which means the foamy spray swept from the waves by a strong wind and driven along the sea’s surface.
In stanza four Crane’s use of the biblical word “superscription” (that which is written on a coin; an exergue) recalls Jesus’ dialogue from the Gospel: “Show me a penny. Whose image and superscription hath it? They answered and said, Ceasar’s. . . .”
But to review all this is to wander quite aways from Joyce. Today’s reader forgets that a good deal of the controversy over Ulysses’s supposed obscenity (which is why Crane had to have a smuggled copy) centered on the terminal paragraph of the flower-laden fifth section of Joyce’s novel, that Stewart Gilbert designated, in his famous 1930 Ulysses: A Study, “The Lotus Eaters”—one of “those passages of which,” Judge Woolsey would write, nine years later in his decision of December 6, 1933, “the Government particularly complains.” (The other point of controversy was Bloom’s erotic musings during his stroll along the strand in the eleventh episode, “The Sirens.”) In that passage, Bloom (whose nom d’amour is Henry Flower, Esq.), imagines himself bathing and, in his mind’s eye, regards his own pubic hair and genitals breaking the surface of the tub’s soapy water: “. . . he saw his trunk riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid, floating flower” (Joyce, p. 86). (Writes Gilbert, somewhat disingenuously: “The lotus-eaters appear under many aspects in this episode: the cabhorses drooping at the cabrank . . ., doped communicants at All Hallows . . ., the watchers of cricket . . . and, finally, Mr Bloom himself, flowerlike, buoyed lightly upward in the bath” [Gilbert, p. 155].)
Joyce’s “floating flower,” as a metaphor for the limp male genitalia (“. . . father of thousands . . .”), suggests a possible unraveling of another one of Crane’s “indirect mentions” in the penultimate stanza of the second Voyages poem (“her,” here, refers to the sea):
Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours,
And hasten while her penniless rich palms
Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,—
Hasten, while they are true,—sleep, death, desire
Close round one instant in one floating flower.
Indeed, one “generic” way of indicating a forbidden sexual reference is through the use of a classical metaphor or figure taken from an age or culture less restrictive and repressive. It’s possible, of course, that the congruence of phrases—“floating flower”—between Joyce and Crane was an accident; or at any rate an unconscious borrowing by Crane. But, given Crane’s enthusiasm for the volume at this time, as Loveman recounts it (and biographer Unterecker also attests to Crane’s enthusiasm: Crane arranged for more “smuggled” copies to go to Allen Tate and others; Unterecker calls Ulysses a “Bible” for Crane, all before 1924, and tells us, in his piece, “The Architecture of The Bridge,” that Crane prepared a gloss on the novel, copying out long passages from it for still another friend who could not obtain a copy), it’s far more likely to represent a conscientious bit of intertextuality.
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.
II
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.
As Edelman suggests, perhaps the most careful account of Crane’s “failure” is first laid out in Yvor Winters’s quite extraordinary essay, “The Significance of The Bridge by Hart Crane, or What Are We to Think of Professor X?” reprinted in Winters’s 1943 collection, On Modern Poets. There Winters relates Crane’s enterprise to the pernicious and maniagenic ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson via the irreligious pantheism (read: relativism—in “Passage to India” Whitman blasphemes by claiming the poet is “the true son of God”) of Whitman and the glossolomania of Mallarmé. (At least that’s how Winters saw them.) Winters had begun as one of Crane’s most enthusiastic advocates. The two had an extensive correspondence—as well as one warm and productive meeting. But, on the publication of The Bridge in 1930, a growing doubt about Crane’s achievement finally erupted in Winters’s review. Over it, the two men broke. But it is important to realize that the rejection—or at least the condemnation—of Crane, for Winters as well as for many of Crane’s critics, was the rejection and condemnation of an entire romantic current in American literary production, a current that included Whitman and Emerson, with Crane only as its latest, cracked and misguided voice. Those who shared Winters’s judgments, like Brom Weber and R. P. Blackmur, also felt T. S. Eliot was as much of a failure as, or more of a failure than, Crane, and for the same reasons!
It is also worth noting that Winters’s piece, while it is far more illuminative of what was going on, because it is more articulate about its anti-Emerson, anti-Whitman, and finally anti-American position (as well as those European currents, like Mallarmé, that Winters saw as supporting it) than many others, was also practically without influence—because it was all but unavailable from the time Winters wrote it until the sixties.