Longer Views (40 page)

When, after their conversation that winter night in Woodstock, Crane came to make his own transcriptions of Greenberg's poems, what's important to remember is that Crane went back to Greenberg's actual notebooks, the ones loaned him by Fisher, and thus to Greenberg's exacting and difficult originals—not to Fisher's
Plowshare
revisions. Given the development of Crane's own poetics, as well as Crane's influence on the poetic development of the times to come after him, this is meaningful.

Like most young writers—like many young readers—Crane had already encountered a number of writerly enthusiasms: Nietzsche, Wilde, Rimbaud . . . all of whom had left their marks on his poetry, all of whom had raised questions for the young poet that set his work in interesting tension with theirs. But Greenberg was particularly important—because in many ways he seemed Crane's own discovery, and because the fact that he had been ignored by the greater literary world despite his undeniable verbal energy and poetic vigor made it easy for the then all but unknown Crane to sympathize and identify.

Back in New York City in 1924, after a precarious January and February between 45 Grove Street, 15 Van Nest Place (now Charles Street), and the Albert Hotel on University Place and 10th Street, all in Greenwich Village, Crane finally got another job as a copywriter at Sweet's Catalogue Service, where he worked with Malcolm Cowley.

At the end of the second week of April Crane moved into 110 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn, into a room on the third floor—and, in the course of it, consummated a recently begun affair with a Danish sailor, three years his senior, Emil Opffer (April 26, 1897–19-?), a sometime communications officer and sometime ship's printer. Goldilocks was Crane's sometime nickname for him (and sometimes Phoebus Apollo); Crane's own sexual
nom d'amour
was occasionally Mike Drayton. 110 was Emil's father's building. A one-time seaman like his son, and now editor of Brooklyn's Danish-American paper,
Nordlyset
, Emil, Sr., lived there too.

The relationship began in blissful happiness for both men. Probably during the first two weeks of September 1924, while Emil, Jr., was away on a voyage, Emil, Sr., went into the hospital for an operation, during which—or just after which—he died. On Emil's return from sea, Hart and Emil's brother Ivan met Emil at the dock, broke the news, and took the disconsolate young man home. Now Hart and Emil took over the father's old room, Hart again working on his poetry. Emil went back to sea on another voyage . . .

Eventually the relationship devolved into jealousies, finally to break
up and resettle into a more or less distant friendship, that continued until 1930—the last time the two men saw one another. I quote at some length Crane's close friend, Samuel Loveman, who, in his seventies, wrote this account of the relationship (two years before Stonewall, by the bye) in his introduction to the young critic Hunce Voelker's impressionistic 1967 study,
The Hart Crane Voyages:

[Crane] urged me to come to New York. “I want you to live near me,” he said. “Brooklyn Heights is one of the loveliest places in the whole world. Imagine, the panorama incessantly before one's eyes—a glorification of beauty with the New York skyline always before one, Brooklyn Bridge, ships that come and go by day and night—and sailors. You will never care to live elsewhere, and wherever I may be I shall always return to you.”

He continued to disclose his happiness. “I have met a young man, a seaman, at Fitzi's [Eleanor Fitzgerald, director of the Provincetown Playhouse], and I realize for the first time what love must have meant to the Greeks when one reads Plato. He's a Scandinavian and extremely handsome, yellow-haired and blue-eyed—a real human being. I believe my love is returned. He's at sea now; you must meet him when his voyage is over. I'll never come back to Cleveland. If mother wants to see me let her visit me in New York. For the first time in my life I'm utterly free from the ghastly family bondage and the internal squabbles between Mother and Father. Their divorce seems to have made no difference. Money and me seem to be the sole crux of their dissension. I'll be out of it for good.”

I met Hart's “Greek” ideal on his return from the voyage, and he answered his description—an extremely well-coordinated and attractive youngster, certainly prepossessing but outwardly unemotional, and since Hart was inwardly a veritable cauldron of conflict, I felt that this balance in their friendship was sufficiently warranted. I continued to see him day after day; his later acceleration in drinking was not then present and his sexual promiscuity apparently absent. He had acquired what he claimed to be the first copy of
Ulysses
ever to reach America, smuggled in by a friend [Gorham Munson], and bored me interminably by his insistence on reading it to me aloud. Spirited and certainly assertive on occasions of ordinary conversation, Hart's recitals abutted into a kind of clergical drone. He, on his part, assailed my own way of reading.

Then, the inevitable happened. His friend returning unexpectedly one evening to their apartment at 110 Columbia Heights, encountered Hart's stupid betrayal. There was no explosion, except Hart's ineffectual hammering protestations and attempt at an explanation—then silence. The friendship was resumed; their love never.

Yet in this fulmination of love and disaster, there emerged the creation
of Hart's
Voyages
—poetry as passionate and authentic as any love-poetry in literature. Whether it be addressed to normal or abnormal sexuality matters little. There is nothing to be compared with it, excepting possibly in the pitifully extant fragments of Sappho, the Sonnets of Shakespeare, John Donne's love poems, or Emily Bronte's burning exhortations to an unknown lover. Compared with it, Mrs. Browning's much-belauded saccharine and over-burdened “Portuguese” sonnets, are sentimental valentines. In his
Voyages
, stripped of the verbiage that emphasized so much of Hart's poetry at its weakest, and which is transparently present in many passages of
The Bridge
, the poet of
Voyages
becomes blazingly clairvoyant and achieves astonishing profundity.
Voyages
is a classic in English literature.

After the breakup recounted above, Hart returned to Cleveland over Christmas of 1924 to visit his mother—after which he again took up a peripatetic existence.

The eldest of the three young men by a handful of years, Loveman had first met Crane more than half a dozen years before in a Cleveland bookstore. An aspiring poet himself, he had just been released from the army, and the teenaged Crane was enthusiastically looking for books. Whether they were lovers, even briefly, is hard to say. But their friendship continued on and off throughout Crane's life: Loveman claimed to have received a letter from Crane only two weeks before the poet's suicide in April of '33.

Most of us today will recognize that Loveman was writing out of a tradition within which the term “American Literature” was much rarer than it is today. Because Americans wrote in English, their works—especially if important—were considered, at least by Americans of a certain aesthetic leaning, to be part of “English Literature.” The three other things that the contemporary reader is likely to find somewhat anomalous in Loveman's account—things that the reader may wonder how they fit into the narrative—are, first, the extraordinary passion with which Crane entreats this gay friend—who is, after all, not (at least then) his lover—to be with him; second, the seemingly gratuitous sexism of the swipe at Elizabeth Barrett Browning; and, third, that “verbiage” which characterizes “Hart's poetry at its weakest” and which Loveman says must be stripped away to reveal the achievement and clairvoyance of the great love lyrics. Bear all three in mind: all three will be contextualized, in their place, as we proceed through these notes.

Crane's enthusiasm over the then-illegal
Ulysses
suggests an elucidation of an allusion in “Voyages II,” the next to the last completed poem in the lyric series, that he would have been working on during the time Loveman writes of, or a few months after. (Though the series is clearly a love series,
they seem to project—in critic R. W. Butterfield's words—an air of “searing loneliness,” while the poet's seafaring lover is away.) “Voyages II,” which opens with that extraordinarily scaler inversion, in which the sea is referred to as “—And yet this great wink of eternity . . .” (That “—And yet,” functions much like the “
Autar epie
” at the beginning of the
Odyssey's
Book Lambda, which, translated, became the “And then” opening the first of Pound's
Cantos
) has sustained the most concerted exegesis of all the
Voyages
. A. Alvarez claims Crane's poem to be all affect and devoid of referential meaning—which, to the extent it's true, only seems to spur the exegetes on. Critics Butterfield and Brunner have suggested that Greenberg's sea images in poems like “Love” (“Ah ye mighty caves of the sea, there pushed onward, / In windful waves, of volumes flow / Through Rhines—there Bacchus, Venus in lust cherished / Its swell of perfect ease, repeated awe—ne'er quenched,” is the sonnet's first quatrain, as transcribed by Crane in his manuscript copy. Returning to Greenberg's manuscript, Holden and McManis read the punctuation notably otherwise) possibly nudged Crane to connect the idea of love and the sea in a poetic series—not withstanding the fact Crane's current love was a sailor, or the fact of Crane's general fascination with “seafood,” or his recent reading of Melville. The first stanza of “Voyages II” employs the idiosyncratic word “wrapt”—which also appears in “Atlantis”—suggesting a kind of Greenbergian term halfway between “wrapped” and “rapt.” In earlier drafts of the poem, Crane used the phrase “varnished lily grove” from Greenberg's sonnet, “Life,” though he eventually revised it out. Philip Horton has told us, in his biography of Crane, that the “bells off San Salvador” in the third stanza (“And onward, as bells off San Salvador / Salute the crocus lustres of the stars / In those poinsetta meadows of her tides,—/ Adagios of islands, O My Prodigal, / Complete the dark confessions her veins spell”) refer to a Caribbean myth Opffer had recounted to Crane about a sunken city whose drowned church towers, during storms, sounded their bells from beneath the waters to warn passing ships.

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.