Longer Views (51 page)

An editor might
even
supply a note to the effect that Crane wrote the cycle of six
Voyages
as a set of meditations on Emil's sea-trips away . . .

We need notes that will give us both the 1926 version of “O Carib Isle,” as well as the later 1929 version, not as a variorum exercise, but simply because they are all but distinct poems, sharing the first few and the last few lines.

We need notes to tell us when and where the poems were written, when and where they were published—and under what title when the final title is not the only one. If the situation in which a poem was written or to which it responds is known and can be explained easily and relevantly, why not note it?

Such information is far more important than notes explaining that, in “Possessions,” Weber has corrected the spelling of “raze” to “rase,” or that,
in “Royal Palm,” Marc Simon has corrected the spelling of “elaphantine” to “elephantine”—the sort of note which, in the absence of the other, clutters both Weber and Simon. Nothing is wrong with such textual minutiae. And for the carefully established text, we must be grateful to Simon. This is often a Herculean labor; one praises it as such. But notes on its establishment have no place in an edition devoid of that other information; in its absence, one would have preferred the fine points covered by a “have been corrected without comment” in the editor's “Note on the Editorial Method.”

Likewise, we are grateful for the added poetic fragments—only noting that it is precisely such fragments and incomplete efforts for which readers generally
need
more extensive notes.

Both Simon and Weber tell us
when
the poems were published—and occasionally when written and revised. Maddeningly, however, neither says in what magazines or—far more important—gives us earlier titles. But the assumption that a general poetry reader exists today who will never encounter some article on Crane that quotes a poem in part (and in some earlier form illuminating something in the poet's development, for that's what such articles are made of), who will then turn to such an edition to find the final form of the poem in full, is absurd. And it is more absurd to assume that a specific reader who avoids all such articles will still want to know about the poet's—or a former typesetter's—misspellings!

In short one wants among the notes for Crane the same sort of information that Edward Mendelson provides as “Appendix II: Variant Titles” in his
W. H. Auden: Collected Poems
, or that Donald Allen gives us in his notes to
The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara
. When a writer like Pound or Eliot puts together his own collected poems, modesty perhaps excuses such omissions. But if the poet's work is interesting enough for a second party to undertake the task, what I've outlined represents what should be given first priority. And as specialists will know, in no way does that constitute a specialists' edition. But the assumption that there exists a Common Reader of poetry who comes from no place—and is going nowhere—is, besides preposterous, heuristically arrogant and pedagogically pernicious. That, however, is what Simon's “reader's edition” seems to presuppose.

The supplementary prose selections of letters, essays, and reviews that Weber included in his '66 edition were immensely interesting. I should have thought Simon would have enlarged on them, rather than drop them altogether. (Even with minor poems, juvenilia, and fragments, Crane's poetic
opera omnia
are just not that voluminous.) Simon might well have added some of the letters to black writer Jean Toomer that were
published in part in Unterecker's biography: one would have welcomed both the “White Buildings” letter and the “Heaven and Hell” letter—the latter of which threatens to achieve a measure of fame comparable only to Keats's letter from Hampstead on the 21st of December, 1817, to his brothers George and Tom, on “negative capability.”

It is all too easy to see the avoidance of such notes (or the exclusion of such letters) beginning in a kind of editorial exasperation with Crane's homosexuality. Where does one draw the line at good taste—more important, where did one draw that line in 1952, when Weber edited Crane's letters, or in '66, when he edited the poems? (That's what both the “Heaven and Hell” letter and the “White Buildings” letter are, after all, about.) To raise the question is, however, immediately to consider the oddly similar suppression by all three of Crane's major biographers of the fact that, in October 1923, Jean Toomer, after the publication of his novel
Cane
to critical, if not to popular, success, visited his white friend and supporter Waldo Frank (his and Crane's mutual mentor) at Frank's Connecticut home for the first time, whereupon Toomer fell passionately in love with Frank's wife, educator Margaret Naumberg. The passion was mutual. Weeks later, the two had run off together, hoping to leave America for the Gurdjieff Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at the Chateau du Prieuré in Fontainbleau, France, in order to study with Georges Gurdjieff himself. Only days before Toomer's actual arrival, however, Gurdjieff died, but Toomer remained to study with Gurdjieff's disciples, while for months Naumberg wrote him heartfelt letters announcing her imminent arrival. In the end, however, she stayed in America.

The incident was the center of gossip in the Frank/Munson/Crane/Cowley/Toomer circle for months, if not years. But though certainly all three major biographers knew of it, neither Horton, Weber, nor Unterecker mentions it. One must go to recent biographies of Toomer to learn of it at all.

If it came to mean less to Crane once Toomer had given up writing for mysticism, the Crane/Toomer friendship was still an important one for Crane's early poethood—through, say, 1924. Though Toomer was three years older than Crane, the two were the youngest writers in the group. And heterosexual Toomer was one of the several straight men to whom Crane was (as the post-Stonewall generation would say) out. We know of incidents in which Toomer felt ill-understood by the group—notably by Frank and by publisher Horace Liveright—because of Toomer's racial make-up. And Crane suggests in that letter to Winters, already quoted, that homosexuality does not mean what Winters seems to think it does. With the speculations of all his friends about the topic
rampant in their commentaries and memories, it is fairly certain Crane could not expect much more than superficial understanding there. Both men had reason, then, to feel themselves, however accepted, somehow still aliens in the group. It may well have brought them together. In '37 and '48 one can imagine biographers Horton and Weber not mentioning the Toomer/Naumberg affair from feelings of delicacy for Frank—if not for Toomer and Naumberg, all of whom were then still alive. But Toomer and Frank both died in 1967; and Unterecker's biography appeared in '69 . . .

It's oddly paradoxical that if one looks at Toomer's all but inconsequential post-
Cane
writing, it might seem as though Toomer had turned to study, if not at Gurdjieff's knee, then at Winters's—though Kenneth Walker, in his study
Gurdjieff's Teaching
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1957) writes of Gurdjieff's conception of art: “I measure the merit of art by its consciousness, you by its unconsciousness. A work of objective art is a book which transmits the artist's ideas not directly through words or signs or hieroglyphics but through feelings which he evokes in the beholder consciously and with full knowledge of what he is doing and why he is doing it.” Pursuing that “full knowledge,” Toomer—as did Winters, pursuing his own esthetic program—apparently purged himself of the verbal liveliness which, today, is the principal entrance through which one apprehends the pleasure in his writing; though by the time he broke with Crane, of course, Winters may not have been aware of Toomer's existence.

By then many had forgotten it.

But while one is clamoring for the Crane/Toomer letters, what of Crane's letters to Wilbur Underwood, Crane's older gay friend in Washington, D.C., of which we have had only snippets, accompanied by vague editorial suggestions that their subject matter is wholly beyond the pale? Such innuendo is certainly more damaging than any actual human activity possibly recounted could be.

Finally, just as we need an edition of Crane's poems with an apparatus that takes in the needs of actual poetry readers, we need a complete letters. (I am not the first person to make the favorable comparison between Crane's letters and Keats's.) Nor would it be a bad idea to put together a collection of letters and papers from
The Crane Circle
on the model of Hyder Edward Rollins's famous and rewarding 1948 paired volumes around Keats.

Samuel Bernhard Greenberg's notebooks, papers, and drawings are currently in the Fales Collection at New York University. Edited by Harold Holden and Jack McManis, with a preface by Allen Tate, a hundred-seventeen page selection,
Poems by Samuel Greenberg
, was published by Henry Holt and Company (New York, 1947).

Crane's manuscripts, letters, and papers are largely stored at Columbia University.

There are three full biographies of Crane and currently four volumes of letters generally available. Philip Horton published his
Hart Crane: The Life of an American Poet
in 1937. Brom Weber published his fine, if somewhat eccentric, biographical study of Crane and his work,
Hart Crane: A Biographical and Critical Study
, in 1948. (Both Crane's birth- and death-dates are mentioned only in footnotes—added, in galleys, at editor Loveman's firm suggestion.) Weber also edited
The Letters of Hart Crane, 1916–1932
(largely those of literary interest) in 1952 and, as mentioned,
The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane
in 1966. Thomas S. W. Lewis edited
Letters of Hart Crane and His Family
in 1974, a book nearly three times the thickness of Weber's
Letters
and a fascinating family romance.
Hart Crane and Yvor Winters: Their Literary Correspondence
(1978), edited by Thomas Parkinson, is another important volume of Crane's letters and commentary.
Robber Rocks: Letters and Memories of Hart Crane, 1923–1932
(1969) by Susan Jenkins Brown (wife of William Slater Brown, formerly wife of Provincetown Playhouse director James Light) contains 39 more of Crane's letters (there is some overlap here with Weber), as well as five auxiliary letters of the Crane circle. The volume concludes with Peggy Baird's devastating “The Last Days of Hart Crane,” a reminiscence that makes Crane's final completed poem, “The Broken Tower,” rise from the page and resonate (a poem whose title, if not the very idea for it, comes from “An Age of Dream,” among the most popular sonnets of Lionel Johnson, another of Crane's adolescent enthusiasms:
*
We know the 1915 selection of Johnson with the introduction by Pound was a treasured volume in Crane's adolescent library)—a memoir that must be supplemented, however, by Unterecker's “Introduction” to the '86 Simon edition of
The Poems:
there Unterecker prints Gertrude E. Vogt's firsthand account of the talk on shipboard that morning and of watching from the
Orizaba
's deck, with several other passengers, Crane's actual jump from the stern to his death—in a letter that reached Unterecker only after his 1969 biography,
Voyager
, appeared.

*
Johnson's sonnet, “The Age of Dream” (the second of a pair usually published together, about an all-but-abandoned church; the first is “The Church of Dream”), concludes with the sestet:

Gone now, the carvern work! Ruined, the golden shrine!

No more the glorious organs pour their voice divine;

No more rich frankincense drifts through the Holy Place:

Now from the broken tower, what solemn bell still tolls,

Mourning what piteous death? Answer, O saddened souls!

Who mourn the death of beauty and the death of grace.

Marc Simon is also the author of
Samuel Greenberg, Hart Crane, and the Lost Manuscripts
(Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1978), an invaluable book for anyone interested in Greenberg or Crane or Greenberg's literary loans to Crane—and of which I have made extensive use here.

And now a note for a few special readers: Though my 1995 novel
Atlantis: Model 1924
is fiction, I tried to stay as close to fact as I could and still have a tale:

The lines Crane quotes in the text are an amalgam from early versions of “Atlantis,” all of which were written by July 26, 1923—the summer prior to the spring in which the recitation takes place. (Crane had spent the previous evening with his father, Clarence Arthur, who was visiting the city; he would write his mother a letter later that afternoon and would see his father again the next day.) Crane's work method usually involved sending off copies of his just completed poems, along with letters, to Waldo Frank, Jean Toomer, Gorham Munson, or the Rychtariks. In 1926 he would take the poem up again and between January and August of that year work it far closer to the form present readers of
The Bridge
are familiar with. The final decision to change the title from “Finale” to “Atlantis” did not come till even later.