Longer Views (45 page)

Crane's feminine iambic couplets, such as

The stenographic smiles and stock quotations

Smutty wings flash out equivocations.

and

Three winged and gold-shod prophesies of heaven,

The lavish heart shall always have to leaven

must recall to the sensitive reader Eliot's near-signature feminine rhymes:

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

For a hundred visions and revisions.

and

Oh, do not ask “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

As well, Crane's generalized apostrophes—

O, I have known metallic paradises

Where cuckoos clucked to finches

recall not only the apostrophe above it but recall equally Prufrock's general claims to knowledge:

And I have known them all already, known them all. . .

And I have known the eyes already, known them all. . .

And I have known the arms already, known them all. . .

Further comparison of the two poems, however, reveals a far greater metric regularity in Crane's verse than in Eliot's (or, if you prefer, a greater metrical variety in Eliot's verse than in Crane's): Eliot often pairs tetrameters with hexameters, now in trochaics, now in iambics (which the ear then tries to re-render into more traditional paired pentameters), where Crane generally relies on blank or rhymed couplets.

With a full seventy years, however, Eliot's variety has finally been normalized and absorbed into the general range of free verse—so that it is almost hard to see his variation today as formal. As Eliot's idiosyncrasies have become one with the baseline of American poetic diction, Crane the occasionally-over-the-top lyricist has metamorphosed into Crane the rhetorical revolutionary.

The study of eccentric figures on the poetic landscape tends to blind us, with the passage of time, to the mainstream that made the eccentric signify as it did. What was the scope of mainstream poetry during the twenties—Crane's decade?

In 1921 Edwin Arlington Robinson's
Collected Poems
, with the award of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, made the fifty-year-old poet, till then all but unknown—though he had been publishing books of verse since the 1880s—into a famous man. Eliot's
Waste Land
(along with Joyce's
Ulysses
) appeared in 1922, but it was a
success de scandal
, not a popular triumph: the talk alone of people who talked of poetry. But then, that same year, so was Amy Lowell's
A Critical Fable
—a humorous survey of the poetic scene since the War, whose title was taken from her forebear, James Russell Lowell's
A Fable for Critics
(1848), both with their
tour de force
introductions in rhymed prose. (That same November in Paris Marcel Proust died, leaving unpublished the last three sections of his great novel.) 1923 saw Edna St. Vincent Millay's
The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems
receive the Pulitzer. 1924 saw it go to Robert Frost for his second book- length collection,
New Hampshire
. That same year, Robinson Jeffers's
Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems
was an extraordinary popular success with the reading public—setting off a controversy over Jeffers's poetic
merit that has not abated. In France that year, a poem touching on many of the same political concerns as Crane's
The Bridge
appeared, a poem which makes an informative contrast with it: St.-John Perse's
Anabase
. (Perse's
Amitie du Prince
appeared the same year.) And in America in '24, Wallace Stevens wrote what was to become one of his most famous poems, “Sea Surface Full of Clouds”—before entering half a dozen years of comparative poetic inactivity. And in 1925 twelve-year-old poet Nathalia Crane's
The Janitor's Boy
appeared, with introductory statements by both William Rose Benét (citing other poetic prodigies of merit, including the Scottish Marjorie Flemming, Hilda Conkling, and Scottish- born Helen Douglas Adam) and Nunnally Johnson—and went through a dozen-plus printings in no time. Robinson's next book,
The Man Who Died Twice
(1925), won him another Pulitzer; the 1926 Pulitzer went, posthumously, to Amy Lowell for
What's O'Clock
(published the same year—also posthumously—as her two-volume biography,
John Keats
). And the following year Robinson received his third Pulitzer for his book- length poem
Tristram
(1927)—which became a bona fide best seller. Poetry best sellers were certainly not common in those years, but they were more common than in ours. In the same year, Millay's verse drama, on which Deems Taylor based his successful opera of the same title,
The King's Henchman
, went through twelve printings between February and September (while in Germany, also in 1927, Martin Heidegger's
Being and Time
appeared, a work whose enterprise can be read as the cornerstone of his earliest attempts to poeticize the contemporary world, against a rigorous critique of metaphysics). That year American scholar John Livingston Lowe first published his exhaustive and illuminating findings from his researches into the early readings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination
. In 1928, Stephen Vincent Benét's novel in verse,
John Brown's Body
, captivated the general reading public. And through it all, the various volumes of Millay, for critics like Edmund Wilson, marked the true height of American poetic achievement.

What characterizes this range of American poetry is its extraordinary referential and argumentative clarity (argument used here in terms both of narrative and of logic)—often to the detriment of all musicality (as well as rhetorical ornamentation) not completely controlled by the regularity of meter and end-rhyme.

This was the mainstream of American poetry Eliot, Pound, H. D., and William Carlos Williams—as well as Crane (and Lowell, while she was alive)—saw themselves, one way or the other, at odds with. And this is the context that explains Loveman's seemingly gratuitous swipe at Mrs. Browning. First, the simple sexism that it represents is certainly at work
in the comment—as it was against Amy Lowell, who worked as hard as any poet to ally her work and her enthusiasms with the new. To deny it would be as absurd as denying the homophobia Yingling found at work in the structure of the reputation of Crane. But, we must also remember, as a traditional poet, Elizabeth Browning was popular, even in the twenties. She was accessible. Thus she was seen to be on the side of referential clarity that those associated with the avant-garde felt called upon to denigrate. But, as is the case with the homophobia directed toward Crane, we must remember that it works not to obliterate the reputation, but rather to hold the reputation at a particular point—which was and is, finally, higher than that of many male poets of the time.

Today, it's the Language Poets whose works wrench Crane out of his position as a lyricist-too-extreme and forces us to reread him as a rhetorical revolutionary. Precisely what has been marginalized in the early readings of Crane—or, at any rate, pointed at with wagging finger as indicative of some essential failure—is now brought to the critical center and made the positive node of attention.

For what is now made the center of our rhetorical concern with Crane is precisely that “verbiage” Loveman would have stripped from the work—those moments where referentiality fails and language is loosed to work on us in its most immediate materiality.

Again and again through Crane's most varied, most exciting poems, phrases and sentences begin which promise to lead us to some referen- tially satisfying conclusion, through the form of some poetic figure. And again and again what Crane presents us with to conclude those figures is simply a word—a word that resists any and all save the most catachrestic of referential interpretations, so that readers are left with nothing to contemplate save what language poet Ron Silliman has called the pure “materiality of the signifier.” It is easy to see (and to say) that Crane's poetry foregrounds language, making readers revel in its sensuousness and richness. But one of the rhetorical strategies by which he accomplishes this in line after line is simply to shut down the semantic, referential instrumentality of language all but completely:

Time's rendings, time's blendings they construe

As final reckonings of fire and snow.

Or:

The Cross, a phantom, buckled—dropped below the dawn.

Light drowned the lithic trillions of your spawn.

The final words—“spawn,” “fire and snow”—arrive in swirling atmospheres of connotation, to which they even contribute; but reference plays little part in the resolution of these poetic figures. Reading only begins with such lines as one turns to clarify how they resist reference, resist interpretation, even as their syntax seems to court them. But to find examples we can look in any of Crane's mature work.

In 1963—the same year I was having the conversation about T. S. Eliot with the aforementioned poet—in France Michel Foucault was writing, in an essay on contemporary fiction, that the problem was not that “language is a certain distance from things. Language
is
the distance.”

Thirty years before, Crane's suicide had put an end to a body of work that—not till twice thirty years later—would be generally acknowledged as among the earlier texts to inhabit that distance directly and, in so inhabiting it, shift an entire current of poetic sensibility in a new direction.

We like to tell tales of how confident our heroes are in their revolutionary pursuits. But it is more honest, in Crane's case at any rate, to talk about how paralyzingly unsure he was—at least at times—about precisely this aspect of his work; though, frankly, in the twenties, how could he have felt otherwise?

In a 1963 interview, Loveman recounted:

Once—I don't know whether I ever told you—he tried to commit suicide in my presence.

We had been out having dinner; he got raffishly high and we went to a lovely restaurant in the Village. No one was there but Didley Digges, the actor, in one corner. Hart waltzed me over to him with a low bow. Then he began to dance mazurkas on the floor. He loved to dance. It was a big room, and we had an excellent dinner. He got a little higher, and when he went out, as usual, he bargained with a taxi driver. He would never pay more than two dollars fare to Brooklyn. And then, usually, because he always forgot that he hadn't money with him, the person with him had to pay it. Through some mishap, we landed at the Williamsburg Bridge. I think there is a monument or a column there and Hart went up and as a matter of rite or sacrilege pissed against it. Then we started across to Columbia Heights. He lived at Number 110. When we got to Henry Street, it was around eleven or eleven-thirty. In one of the doorways we saw four legs sticking out and a sign, “We are not bums.” They were going to an early market and their wagon was parked in the street. Hart became hysterical with laughter. Well, when we got to Columbia Heights,
the mood changed. The entire situation changed. He broke away from me and ran straight up the three flights of stairs, then up the ladder to the roof, and I followed him. I was capable of doing that then. As he got to the top, he threw himself over the roof and I grabbed his leg, one leg, and, oh, I was scared to death. And I said, “You son of a bitch! Don't you every try that on me again.” So he picked himself up and said, “I might as well, I'm only writing rhetoric.”

Here the interviewer comments: “That's what was bothering him.” And Loveman continues:

He could no longer write without the aid of music or of liquor. It was impossible. He had reached the horrible impasse. So, we went downstairs to his room. I lived a couple of doors away. I worried myself sick about him. He poured himself some Dago Red, turned on the Victrola, and I left him.

How important this incident might have been for Crane is hard to tell. Was it a drunken jape, forgotten the next morning? Or does it represent the deep and abiding
Veritas
classically presumed to reside
in vino?
Again, none of the three major biographers utilizes it.

Unterecker characterizes Crane as a “serious drinker” from the summer of '24 on. But drunkenness figures in Crane's letters—and in the apocryphal tales about him—from well before. And as so many people have pointed out, in trying to explain the context of prohibition in cities like New York and Chicago to people who did not live through it, even though alcohol was outside the law, it was so widely available the problem was not how to get it but rather how to stay sober enough to conduct the business of ordinary life!

It was a problem many in that decade failed to solve—Crane among them.

Let me attempt here, however, what I will be the first to admit is likely an over-reading of the evening Loveman has described with Crane—with all its a-specific vagaries.

The night begins in a Village restaurant, with an actor, a speaker of other writers' words. Directly following, a cab driver mangles Crane's (or possibly Loveman's) verbal instructions home: “Take us across the Bridge to Brooklyn . . .”