Review of Hart Crane

王敖

<div class="headline"><span class="headlinetext">Review: Complete Poems and Selected Letters of Hart Crane</span> </div><div class="headline"></div><div><span class="bylinetext">By William Logan <br /></span></div><div class="pubdate"><span class="pubdatetext">Friday, January 26, 2007</span> </div><div class="bodytextdiv"><div class="inlinead"><div align="center">&lt;script type="text/javascript"&gt;[script]null[/script]&lt;/script&gt;&lt;script src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/adj/arts.iht.com/article;cat=article;sz=336x280;ptile=2;ord=9472763611208598?" type="text/javascript"&gt;[script]null[/script]&lt;/script&gt;&lt;script language="JavaScript" src="http://an.tacoda.net/an/13981/slf.js"&gt;[script]null[/script]&lt;/script&gt;&lt;script language="JavaScript" src="http://anad.tacoda.net/cgi-bin/ads/ad13981a.cgi/v=2.1S/sz=300x250a/NZ/60164/NF/RETURN-CODE/JS/"&gt;[script]null[/script]&lt;/script&gt;<a href="http://anad.tacoda.net/ads/ad13981a-map.cgi/SZ=300X250A/V=2.1S/BRC=54298/BCPG41211.65305.74724/" target="_blank"></a><noscript></noscript></div></div><p><b>Hart Crane </b><i>Complete Poems and Selected Letters. Edited by Langdon Hammer. 849 pages. $40. The Library of America. </i></p><p>Before Hart Crane's leap into the Caribbean that fatal April noon in 1932, he folded his jacket over the ship's rail with impeccable manners. Striking out into the glassy sea, he was seen no more, dying younger than Byron but older than Shelley. Not being a seagoing breed, poets rarely die by water - Shelley drowned in a sudden squall; but he had written 1,500 pages of poetry, while Crane left only two very short books and the shards of a third. The hope for a homegrown American epic that died with him has never entirely revived.</p><p>The precocious son of a wealthy Cleveland candy manufacturer (Crane's father created the Life Saver mint but sold the rights cheap), Crane dropped out of high school and persuaded his parents to send him to New York, where he hoped to make his way as a writer. Wearing the scarlet A of ambition, at 17 he confidently predicted that he would "really without doubt be one of the foremost poets in America." In fact, Crane was soon published in some of the best little magazines. He impressed his friends, not just with his bulb-eyed and brutish good looks (there's always room in New York for a handsome boy with manners and a wild streak), but with his canny critical judgment. He was a fan of Pound before "The Cantos" and Joyce before "Ulysses," and was terrified by Eliot before "The Waste Land." As early as 1920 he was recommending, before either had published a book, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore, whom he referred to as "Marion" (Crane's deranged spelling offers one of the quiet comedies of the new Library of America edition of his work).</p><p>Most of Crane's short life was spent scuffling for money. His tightfisted father kept him on an allowance at first, but expected Crane to get a job. The poet tried various fits and shifts, finding employment most frequently in advertising (writing copy for, among other things, a new synthetic leather called Naugahyde), though at times he was forced back to Ohio, where he spent an unhappy Christmas selling candy from an Akron drugstore counter. No doubt his father saw this as his son's first step toward inheriting the family business, but the experiment was not a success.</p><p>Crane's early poems showed more style than talent, and from the start he was attracted to an obscurity that left some readers cold:</p><p><i>And yet these fine collapses are not lies More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane; Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise. We can evade you, and all else but the heart: What blame to us if the heart live on.</i></p><p>It helps only a little to know that this dreadful mess was called "Chaplinesque." One of Crane's friends later knocked on his door with Charlie Chaplin in tow, and the three went out on the town until dawn. Having learned this, a hundred American poets will begin odes to Angelina Jolie.</p><p>Crane was mystified, as most obscure poets are, when readers found his poems difficult - after all, they were perfectly clear to him. His obscurity was not that of Eliot or Pound, not a layered and allusive language whose intrigues deepened the more one examined it. Crane's language, when not a matter of tangled metaphors (he mixed them almost more often than he mixed drinks), was a schoolboy code for which an English-Fustian, Fustian-English dictionary would have proved helpful. He came by his obscurity honestly - he didn't read Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose style might have influenced him, until far too late. When you clear away the clutter from his verse, often you find only banalities - Crane flinched from Eliot's dour observations and pince-nez disillusion, wanting to embody a rhapsodic vision of poetry it was difficult not to glaze with sentiment.</p><p>Crane tried on various identities as a young man and failed at most of them. He was frank about his homosexuality only with close friends - his sexual appetites were voracious and involved far too many sailors. (The definitive work on the United States Navy's contributions to cruising has yet to be written.) Crane dreamed of being a poet much more often than he sat at his desk and wrote poems; and he was forever complaining in letters that he had no time to write, though he found plenty of time to drink. He conceived his major poem, "The Bridge," as early as 1923 but made only desultory progress toward it. (Remaining drunk all through Prohibition proved surprisingly easy.) It was hard work, avoiding real work; but Crane became an expert at writing cadging letters to his divorced parents and playing one against the other.</p><p>Forever broke, dramatically threatening to slave away on the docks or drive a truck, Crane took to writing begging letters to millionaires, or at least hic - The Remix," so Abani imagines a place that is horrifying and tender and absurd in equal measure. But with its uneven tone and meandering story, the book doesn't quite hold together. The language veers from portentous to reportorial, and sometimes falls flat, as in a dull first-date scene between Black and Sweet Girl. As a result the final conflagration carries less impact than it might have.</p><p>Still, these are the missteps of an ambitious writer with an original perspective. In "The Virgin of Flames" he audaciously stakes his claim on a city not his own. And wisely, he doesn't so much try to reveal its hidden side as to give it a costume, or a paint job, of his own making.</p></div>