Books: Bridge and Towers

VOYAGER: A LIFE OF HART CRANE by John Unterecker. 787 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $15.

“A rip-tooth of the sky’s acetylene.”

Thus Hart Crane in “To Brooklyn Bridge” describes the noon light biting into Wall Street. As a poet, Crane sought “surrender to the sensations of urban life.” Out of such sensations, he said, he hoped to forge “a mystical synthesis of America,” for which (he told his perplexed patron, Otto Kahn) “one might take the Sistine Chapel as an analogy.”

He knew his Whitman “like a book,” Robert Lowell has written, but Whitman was too great an invitation to incoherence, and “The Bridge” is at times incoherent. Crane admitted that in some of his short lyrics the words were chosen in fits of wine-induced ecstasy to the blare of jazz on a victrola. The idea was that the thoughts would blend and fertilize each other magically. Indeed, a few of the individual lyrics have come to seem as imperishable as Blake’s. But the magic failed, so the 1920 critics said, when applied to the epic that Crane had it in his heart to write.

Flung Typewriters. Today, however, the splendor of Crane’s intention is winning him a more tolerant audience. This is especially true among poets sharing his faith in the word as “object.” It is also true among academic critics like Columbia’s John Unterecker, whose Voyager is the second serious study of Crane’s life to appear since Philip Horton’s adventurous Hart Crane: The Life of an American Poet (1937).

Big, expensive, documented from all sides, Voyager pays Crane the usual tribute of trying to understand him in perspective. This isn’t always easy. The word was actually “made flesh” for Crane in love affairs with sailors. He threw typewriters out of windows. “I saw all the trees below his window festooned with the typewriter ribbon,” a friend remembers. Still, Unterecker cautions, “if Crane tossed out of windows everything that his acquaintances have him tossing, most of America, half of Europe, and all of Mexico would still be littered with far-flung typewriters.” He invaded the lives of his many good friends the way his parents invaded his. The complex emotions of his life, “twisted with the love of things irreconcilable,” make his brief career long in the telling.

Greeting Cards. It appears that to enter into the mysterious personality from which the poems came, as well as the problem of why the poems were so few, it is necessary not only to know Crane but to know his divorced parents as well. His father, a successful self-made candy manufacturer, was the inventor of Life Savers; his mother, unhappy, nervous, was preternaturally possessive. Crane and each of his parents, Unterecker explains, “concerned with immense problems, anxiously kept them from the other two.” Yet each kept “guessing and misunderstanding the motives and actions of the others.” To know this trio requires reproducing hundreds of letters, in which the Cranes destroyed each other in the language of greeting cards. The correspondence is a trial to biographer and reader, especially in view of the sickening domestic sentimentality that surrounded all the Cranes.

As a result of Unterecker’s exhaustive compilation, the reader can begin to interpret and understand the conditions in which Crane’s poetic impulse lived and died. The towers that so often rise in Crane’s verse recall, for instance, the northwest tower room where he played his victrola to drown out “the conversation of mother and grandmother that filtered up from the living room.” This was neither his first nor his last attempt “to isolate myself . . . from the avalanche” of domestic emotion. Eventually, for the sake of “the freedom of my imagination,” he fled from Ohio to New York, then to Paris and Mexico.

Mellow Drama. For the sake of the same freedom, he underlined passages about the divine madness of poets, and educated himself in the modern poets and the influences to which they pointed. When “the steep encroachments of my blood” were not having their homosexual way with Crane, he spent hours teaching his language to do tricks. “Crane in those days,” says Unterecker, “attacked a poem the way hundreds of other young men in Akron were attacking the motors of their fathers’ Fords. He tinkered, calculated, adjusted, balanced. He fussed until it hummed.”

But the family letters followed him everywhere. His father’s pursuing stationery presented two embossed cranes at the top, and at the bottom the motto “In All the World No Sweets like These.” His mother’s reproaches about his ruinous life punished him; her silences bothered him more. The farther he fled, the more homesick he became, and the more violent. He could not take the punning advice of his aunt about his mother, “Don’t worry; think it only mellow drama.” In Mexico in 1932 he attempted suicide; on the way home, he drowned himself. He was 32.

It is necessary not to exaggerate Crane’s madness, and Unterecker’s arduous biography helps avoid exaggeration. A friend remembers that when Crane was drunk, dancing alone to the victrola that seemed to accompany him everywhere, he had “absolute abandon and, at the same time, a certain control of his movements.” A wild and yet tender grace was a quality both of the man and the poet who saw “The moon in lonely alleys make/A grail of laughter of an empty ash can.” That the grace did not last was a tragedy for American letters; that it was there to begin with is important too. Ivor Winters, not Crane’s friendliest critic, offered an ultimate word of admiration: “I would gladly emulate Odysseus, if I could, and go down to the shadows for another hour’s conversation with Crane on the subject of poetry.”