Longer Views (52 page)

We know Crane had some of the Greenberg story wrong. In '23 from Woodstock he wrote to Munson that Fisher had “nursed” Greenberg through his final illness at the paupers' hospital—which was untrue: During Greenberg's terminal weeks on Ward's Island he was attended only by his family and, on his final evening, the sparse and overworked hospital staff. Crane also wrote that Fisher had “inherited” Greenberg's notebooks through “the indifference of the boy's relatives”—equally untrue: Morris had offered the notebooks to Fisher in the hope of getting the poems published. Samuel's family had been as appreciative and supportive of their youngest brother's talents as an impoverished family of Viennese Jews might be. They had always considered Samuel special.

We do not know for
sure
if Crane actually read either Fisher's essay on Greenberg, “Fragments of a Broken Lyre,” in
The Plowshare
or the ten poems published there. (Possibly Fisher just told him about them.) While it's certainly
probable
Fisher showed
The Plowshare
's contents to Crane or at least talked about them, Crane does not mention them in his letters. (Nor does Marc Simon, in the reports of his interviews with Fisher on the topic before his death, recounted in Simon's book
Samuel Greenberg, Hart Crane, and the Lost Manuscripts
, clear up the question.)
But possibly that's only because Fisher did not have a copy of the then four-year-old journal to give Crane to keep.

Besides knowing Samuel for the last seven years of the young poet's life, Fisher had known Morris and Daniel; and he had certainly known of, if he had not actually met, Adolf—which is to say, specific dates aside, Fisher knew pretty much everything my own tale recounts. Only four-and-a-half months after the night that Fisher and Crane had sat up late in Woodstock talking about the tragic poet, Crane might well have remembered all the facts of Greenberg's life he tells in
Atlantis: Model 1924
. The misunderstandings and lacunae in Crane's knowledge, which—in the tale—I've made nothing of, could easily have been the result of drink and the random order of anecdotes around that December night's fire; or even the momentary pressure of a next day's quickly written letter. Why perpetuate them?

In that spirit, I mention: In his transcript of Greenberg's poem “Words,” in the 13th line Crane typed “most” for “must.” I've just assumed that in reading it over Crane recognized his error. In
Atlantis: Model 1924
he quotes the poem correctly.

This study grew—as did, indeed, my novel—out of an observation my father several times made to me while I was a teenager: As late as 1924, just after he first came from Raleigh, North Carolina, to New York City—and shortly thereafter took his first walk across the Brooklyn Bridge—Brooklyn was nowhere near as built up as it is today. Though, indeed, there were clusters of houses here and there, especially toward the water, my then-seventeen-year-old father was surprised, even somewhat appalled, that the road leading from the Bridge in those days decanted among meadows and by a cornfield: he was both surprised and appalled enough to mention it to me, with a self-deprecating laugh at his own astonishment at the time, some thirty-five years later.

The fields—and the corn—are both there (in the seventh and ninth stanzas) in Crane's “Atlantis.”

But there is much more.

The bedlamite from the “Proem” (transfigured first into our superbly articulate Columbus, then, after myriad further changes, into the incoherent, aged sailor of “Cutty Sark”) is, in “Atlantis,” again aloft among the bridge lines, now as “Jason! hesting Shout!” (To “hest,” the OED suggests, from
hātan
—to call upon—is to “bid, command . . . vow, promise . . . will, propose,” or “determine . . .”—all of them obsolete.) The bridge in “Atlantis” spans a world as drenched in language as it is in moonlight: Cables whisper. Voices flicker. An arc calls. History has myriad mouths that pour forth a reply. Ships cry. Oceans answer. Spars hum. Spears laugh (though no traveler, searching that laughter, reads
the “cipher-script of time” linked to it). Hammers whisper. Aeons cry. Beams yell. A choir translates. Sun and water fuse Verbs. And the many twain sing—for over all is song. But Crane's poem limns a world where not only the Poet, but almost every element of it, can apostrophize—can directly address—every other.

The “cordage” is there, from “Voyages I” (as well as a “Tall Vision-of-the-Voyage, tensely spare”), but this time “spiring” rather than “spry.”

The one hitch in this articulating web is that the Bridge cannot speak directly to Love. But Love's white flower—the Anemone (first cousin to Novalis's blue amaranthus)—is the “Answerer” of all. Crane's final exhortation to the Anemone, which seems to sit apposite to (and is surely a metaphor for) Atlantis itself, is to “hold—(O Thou whose radiance doth inherit me) Atlantis,—hold thy floating singer late!” Atlantis, hold the poet's floating attention late into the moon-drenched night. As well, hold him up as he floats on the turbulent waters, the chaos of language, beneath (that will finally receive everything of and from) the Bridge. The terminal question that the poem asks recalls the question that the title—with the poem following it—created (recall it: “What is ‘Atlantis'?”): To what does this Bridge of Fire lead?

Since what the Choir translates the web of articulation into is a “Psalm of Cathay,” many commentators have assumed Crane's question is rhetorical and, as such, the answer is a fairly unconsidered, “Yes, of course . . .”

Often I have felt, however, as though, retrievable from the whisperings referred to by the poem's final sentence with its twin inversions (“Whispers antiphonal in azure swing” / “Antiphonal whispers swing in azure”), Crane all but exhorts us to construct some terminal antiphon of our own:

No, friend: It is Atlantis that I sing.

The reader who can carefully architect an argument leading to such a terminus, above the liquid shift and flicker of Crane's rhetorical suspensions and spumings, has probably had an experience of the poem . . . that masters, that comprehends, that controls it? No, friend. Only one that is, likely, somewhat like mine.

But to articulate such a line in all its inescapable, referential banality is to close off the poem in precisely the way Crane wanted it left open. That openness—one is allowed into it (the Absolute) or not, at one's choice—is a fundamental, if not
the
fundamental, aspect of Crane's implied city, of Dreadful Night, of Dis or New Jerusalem, of God.

—
Amherst / Ann Arbor / New York
November 1992–October 1993

 

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———, ed.,
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———,
The Letters of Hart Crane 1916–1932
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———,
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The Complete Poems of Hart Crane
in 1989.)

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Henry von Ofterdingen
, trans. Palmer Hilty, Frederick Unger Publishing Company, Inc.: New York, 1964.

———,
Hymns to the Night
, trans. Dick Higgins, McPherson & Company: Kingston, 1988.

———,
Pollen and Fragments
, trans. Arthur Versluis, Phane Press: Grand Rapids, 1989.

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, Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1922.

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———,
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