Longer Views (50 page)

Back in his twenty-second year, however, in 1857, while still stationed at Ballincollig, Thomson wrote what, today, we must read as a “dry run” for the more famous series (that he would go on to write between '71 and '73, with trips to both the U.S.A. and Spain coming to interrupt its composition). Called
The Doom of a City
, its four parts (“The Voyage,” “The City,” “The Judgment,” and “The Return”) run to some 43 pages in my edition—fifteen pages longer than the 28-page
City of Dreadful Night
. Although Plato's mythic island is never mentioned by name, clearly this is the young Thomson's attempt to tell his own version of the story of Atlantis. (Again, the basic idea may have come from his idol: on a shipboard journey in Chapter III of Novalis's
Ofterdingen
, merchants regale Heinrich and his mother with a tale of Atlantis, in which Atlantis's king is enamored of poetry and his daughter, who rides off and
meets a young scholar in the woods, loses a ruby from her necklace which the young man finds, returns for it the next day, stays to fall in love, retreats to a cave with the young man in a storm, and lives with him and his father for a year before returning to court with her child and the lute-playing young man, for a glorious reunion with the king—a fairy tale whose overwhelming affect is its reliance on time's ability to absorb all intergenerational, or generally Oedipal, tensions, so that the reference to its destruction in the closing line, “
Nur in Sagen heisst es, dass Atlantis von machtigen Fluten den Augen entzogen worden sie
,” [“Only in legends are we told that mighty floods took Atlantis from the sight of man”], falls like a veil between us and a vision of paradise.) In Part I, “The Voyage,” of
Doom of a City
, the despairing poet rises in the middle of the night and takes a skiff that, leaving his own city, brings him over the lightless water—after a brief, but harmless, confrontation with a sea monster—to dawn and the shore of a great and mysterious City. The day, however, grows stormy.

After waiting out the day on shore, here is the City the poet finally finds at sunset:

. . . Dead or dumb,

That mighty City through the breathless air

Thrilled forth no pulse of sound, no faintest hum

Of congregated life in street and square:

Becalmed beyond all calm those galleons lay,

As still and lifeless as their shadows there,

Fixed in the magic mirror of the bay

As in a rose-flushed crystal weirdly fair.

A strange, sad dream: and like a fiery ball,

Blazoned with death, that sky hung over all.

Night descends; and the poet enters the darkened City's gates:

The moon hung golden, large and round,

Soothing its beauty up the quiet sky

In swanlike slow pulsations, while I wound

Through dewy meads and gardens of rich flowers,

Whose fragrance like a subtle harmony

Was fascination to the languid hours.

In the moonlight, he finds a garden of cypress, a funeral come to a halt, and a market. But all the inhabitants are frozen stone instead of living people. He moves on into the City:

My limbs were shuddering while my veins ran fire,

And hounded on by dread

No less than by desire,

I plunged into the City of the Dead,

And pierced its mausolean loneliness

Between the self-sufficing palaces,

Broad fronts of azure, fire and gold, which shone

Spectrally valid in the moonlight wan,

Adown great streets; through spacious sylvan squares,

Whose fountains plashing lone

Fretted the silence with perpetual moan;

Past range on range of marts which spread their wares

Weirdly unlighted to the eye of heaven,

Jewels and silks and golden ornaments,

Rich perfumes, soul-in-soul of all rare scents.

Viols and timbrels: O wild mockery!

Where are the living shrines for these adornings?

The poet explores on, but instead of a populace in the City—

What found I? Dead stone sentries stony-eyed,

Erect, steel-sworded, brass-defended all,

Guarding the sombrous gateway deep and wide

Hewn like a cavern through the mighty wall;

Stone statues all throughout the streets and squares.

Grouped as in social converse or alone;

Dim stony merchants holding forth rich wares

To catch the choice of purchasers in stone;

Fair statues leaning over balconies,

Whose bosoms made the bronze and marble chill;

Statues about the lawns, beneath the trees

Firm sculptured horsemen on stone horses still;

Statues fixed gazing on the flowing river

Over the bridge's sculpted parapet;

Statues in boats, amidst its sway and quiver

Immovable as if in ice-waves set:—

The whole vast sea of life about me lay,

The passionate, the heaving, restless, sounding life,

With all its side and billows, foam and spray,

Attested in full tumult of its strife

Frozen into a nightmare's ghastly death,

Struck silent by its laughter and its moan.

The vigorous heart and brain and blood and breath

Stark, strangled, confined in eternal stone.

The poet continues to regard the urban landscape around him with its stony populace—

Look away there to the right—How the bay lies broad and bright,

All athrob with murmurous rapture in the glory of the moon!

See in front the palace stand, halls and columns nobly planned;

Marble home for marble dwellers is it not full fair and boon?

See the myriads gathered there on that green and wooded square,

In mysterious congregation,—they are statues every one:

All are clothed in rich array; it is some high festal day;

The solemnity is perfect with the pallid moon for sun.

As he finally sees the stony autarch of the city (beside whom crouches the skeleton of Death), the whole, frozen vision, with all its populace turned to stone, lit with a full moon, a series of towering gods appear (Part III, “The Judgment”), and a booming Voice proceeds to judge wanting one aspect of the City after another; and, on each judgment, that section of the City falls into the sea, or is toppled by an earthquake, to be swallowed up.

The judgment on the City begins with—

A multitudinous roaring of the ocean!

Voices of sudden and earth-quaking thunder

From the invisible mountains!

The heavens are broken up and rent asunder

By curbless lightning fountains,

Swarming and darting through that black commotion,

In which the moon and stars are swallowed with the sky.

Finally, only the young poet is spared by the Voice, as one who has sought after truth. The day dawns; what remains of the city is only the good and the pure—which, indeed, isn't very much. The poet regains his boat and returns from whence he came over the blue waters and under the brilliant sun.

The city to which the poet in his boat returns in the evening is, however, sordid and lurid. (In the two stanzas describing it—II and III of Part IV, “The Return”—we have the first intimations of what Thomson will publish eighteen years on, in the more powerful, but less Atlantian,
City of Dreadful Night
.) So once more the poet takes to his boat and
returns to the ruined site of the mythic City, to hear the voice again deliver a jeremiad against the greed and evil of urban corruption.

With this sermon threatening the fall of the real city,
The Doom of a City
ends.

The question is: did Crane at some point encounter the two volumes of
The Poetical Works of James Thomson
, edited and published after Thomson's death by Bertram Dobell in 1895—where, indeed, he might have found
The Doom of a City
? As we have said, Crane's “
Proem
” at the start of
The Bridge
makes it almost certain that he knew
The City of Dreadful Night
. But would his curiosity have drawn him to pursue Thomson back to this Ur-version of that paean to urban psychic disaster—Thomson's own, twenty-three-year-old's retelling of the destruction of Atlantis?

Periodically, starting with his death, there were attempts to establish Thomson as an important canonical poet. But everything from Thomson's militant atheism and radical politics to his dipsomania and dreadfully sordid final years militated against it—especially during the first-wave attempt, spearheaded by Dobell, in the 1880s and '90s. (That both Poe and Thomson, in the manner of Novalis before them, were associated with tragic affairs with much younger women is not, as it works toward the moral marginalization of both, without its meaning.) Thomson is a poet a full understanding of whose work hinges not only on Novalis (and Shelley), but also on Heine and Leopardi: he translated significant amounts of both. (Indeed, Thomson's literary tastes were quite advanced: he championed Whitman, Emerson, and William Blake when all three were majorly controversial figures in England.) But two World Wars, with Germany as the villain (and Italy not far behind), has made English writers with leanings in those national directions less sympathetic to us than they might otherwise be.

Crane's essay “The Case Against Nietzsche” (1918) was his own attempt to fight that particular sort of jingoism, which, after the Great War, often seemed a tidal wave of pure anti-intellectualism. But certainly Thomson, with his secret sorrow and tragic life, could have been a poet that Crane in his later years, drinking himself into a poetic silence, as did Thomson, might well have sympathized, if not identified, with.

The brilliant moonlit evocations of the City that litter Thomson's earlier poem all through its second quarter certainly put one in mind of the moonlight flooded structure that is the vision behind Crane's “Atlantis”—the terminal section of his own major poetic series—as if all that was needed between Thomson's vision of London and the moon-drenched vision of his own Atlantis was, somehow, a bridge . . .

An early Encyclopedia Britannica article on Thomson that Crane might well have read—I first looked him up the same year I first read
Crane, in 1958, the same year I came across a powerful fragment from
The City of Dreadful Night
in an old Oscar Williams paperback anthology (“As I came through the desert, thus it was / As I came through the desert . . .”)—while generally praising Thomson, closes by chiding him for “the not infrequent use of mere rhetoric and verbiage,” terms we have already heard in our pursuit of Crane.

But even if there was no direct influence (though there may well be an intentional dialogue), certainly there's no
harm
in holding the young Thomson's moonlit Atlantis up to provide the missing city for Crane's.

Like Brom Weber's before it, Marc Simon's more recent edition of
The Poems of Hart Crane
(1986) (with an Introduction by John Unterecker, author of the National Book Award–winning Crane biography,
Voyager
[1969]), is designated by the editor a “reader's edition.” (Weber promised a variorum edition, but it has yet to appear.) Simon expands the corpus of Weber's 1966 edition,
The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane
, by a hefty handful of fragments and incomplete poems, as well as more early and uncollected poems. Simon's omission of the word “Complete” quietly suggests there may even be other poems to come—possibly some of currently dubious attribution.

(In 1993 the Simon volume was reissued as
Complete Poems of Hart Crane
.)

Weber's '66 edition had replaced the hasty 1933 edition,
The Collected Poems of Hart Crane
, that Waldo Frank had put together (reprinted in 1958 as
Complete Poems
), which contained Crane's only two published books,
White Buildings
and
The Bridge
, along with a projected third volume, unpublished at Crane's death,
Key West: An Island Sheaf
. The current Simon volume is longer than the Frank by more than sixty poems. The problem, however, is that the general poetry reader today is a very different person from the general poetry reader of
circa
World War I, when the academization of literature began to divide significant writers' works into specialist and non-specialist editions—the non-specialist edition free of extensive notes and usually printed fairly inexpensively. But—today—the reader who is wholly unconcerned with biography, devoid of interest in, or even knowledge of, the times in which Crane wrote, and who aims to get all her or his pleasure only from an encounter with the bare and unadorned text, is simply an artificial construct.

Certainly one would like to see
The Bridge
accorded the textual treatment,
with variants and alternate versions and the careful redaction of manuscript and galley markings, that has already been lavished on Eliot's
The Waste Land
and Ginsberg's
Howl
. But though such an edition is devoutly to be wished, what is needed is a readers' edition with notes that will allow people who want to read Crane's poems to pursue the ordinary interests that today's actual readers of poems have.

We need an edition with notes that will tell us that “Voyages I” was first written and published as a separate poem, called variously “Poster” and “The Bottom of the Sea is Cruel.” (Critics regularly discuss it under both titles.) We need notes that will tell us that “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen II” was first written as a separate poem, “The Springs of Guilty Song.” We need notes that will tell us that when “Recitative” was first written in 1923 it was three stanzas shorter than the final 1926 revision—and
which
three stanzas were added! We need a note to tell us that “Thou Canst Read Nothing Except Through Appetite . . .” was a poem Crane typed on the back of a piece of paper bearing a name and address someone had passed him in a heavy cruising venue (the baths? the bridge? the docks?), and that, in order to indicate its nature, long-time friend and confidant, Samuel Loveman, who did the actual textual editing on the poems for Weber's '66 edition, gave it the title “Reply,” which is clearly what it is, even if the title isn't Crane's. We need notes that will tell us that Crane sent the fragment, “This Way Where November . . .” in a November 1923 letter to Jean Toomer, in which he described it as part of a long poem to be titled “White Buildings,” centering on a catastrophic sexual encounter with a sailor that began at a drunken gathering of friends the night before Crane was to leave to spend the remainder of winter '23 in Woodstock, New York—and that Crane predicted the poem, when complete, would be unprintable; but that only this fragment survives.