July 20, 1969
The Terrible Details of Hart Crane's Life -- Necessary to an Understanding of His Poetry
By HELEN VENDLER
VOYAGER
A Life of Hart CraneBy John Unterecker
n its almost 800 pages of misery and exaltation, John Unterecker's remarkably truthful biography of Hart Crane keeps up a momentum provided in part by the passion of its subject but in part as well by a powerful accumulation of mesmerizing detail. Crane's life, short as it was, was full of events -- travels, jobs, publications, encounters, displacements, parties, visits; it was also full of people -- family, friends, lovers, writers, editors, patrons.
These alone would fill a lively biography. But the interest that Crane's life holds for us goes far beyond his entourage and his changes of scene. He is an exemplary figure, illustrating Keats's assertion that the poet's life is a continual allegory, and that his works are the comments on it.
Crane's blighted infancy represents as fated a conjunction of unstable heredity and unsettling environment as any novelist could imagine. He was born in Hartesville, Ohio, in 1899. His mother was monstrous, his father callous, and together (before their divorce when he was 17) they were horrendous: "I don't want to fling accusations, etc., at anybody," Crane wrote to his mother when he was 20, "but I think it's time you realized that for the last eight years my youth has been a rather bloody battleground for your's and father's sex life and troubles."
The most pathetic years in Crane's life were not his final derelict ones in New York and Mexico with their lurid episodes of drink and anger, but the early ones when he tried, with touching and doomed efforts, to teach his parents to act sensibly toward him and toward each other. He wrote painfully youthful letters of earnest advice and tactful encouragement to his greedy hysterical mother, and letters of self-explanation and a princely honor to his uncomprehending businessman father. To "shoulder the curse of sundered parentage" finally proved too much for him, and when he finally realized that he had a "birthright by blackmail" only, he cut himself off entirely from his cannibalistically possessive and self-righteous ("I made no demands") mother.
Never was the family romance more gruesome than with the Cranes, and if there is any criticism of emphasis to be made of Unterecker's book, it is that in attempting to redress the balance of earlier biographies of Crane (notably Philip Horton's invaluable 1937 account) and show that Crane's father was not quite the ogre he has seemed until now, Unterecker hesitates to tip the scales too far in the other direction and flatly call Grace Crane an evil woman. He prefers to see her as a nervous "case" (which she certainly was) not entirely responsible for her unforgivable hatreds, scenes, dramas, demands (a special-delivery letter every Sunday was the least of them), recriminations, accusations and withdrawals.
What is astonishing (and probably finally inexplicable) in Crane's career and what Unterecker, to his ultimate credit, so thoroughly remembers through all the sometimes petty, sometimes grim events of Crane's later life (when he was variously jailed, beaten up and robbed during his episodes of drunkenness and homosexual soliciting) -- is that Crane never lost an essentially seraphic vision. It was at once a vision of love, which made Crane's "Voyages" the greatest contemporary American love poem, and a vision of poetry, realized most wholly in his long quasi-historical poem, "The Bridge," which he began in 1923 and published at last in 1930.
The highest praise one can give to Unterecker's biography is that it remains true in its spirit to Crane's own "autobiography" as we have it in the poems, notably in the last poem, "The Broken Tower":
And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.
Crane's desperate choices -- of lovers, of jobs, of locales, of family alliances -- are chronicled here in meticulous and almost unexpurgated form. For the first time, in this carefully documented year-by-year account, it becomes clear, or as clear as it is ever likely to become, just what Crane was doing month by month, just when he composed certain poems, just where he was living in all his restless changes, just what his disputed income and outgo of money amounted to, just what the stages in his relations with his parents were.
Unterecker publishes and sets in order innumerable facts unknown or imperfectly known or improperly weighed in earlier biographies, and he fleshes out his facts with an overwhelming and absorbing mass of uninhibited Crane family letters, most of them published here (like the accompanying photographs) for the first time, along with valuable letters and recollections from Crane's friends and acquaintances. The portrait of the man that results from such rich material is a decently complex one, and not a cardboard figure.
Unterecker has admirably resisted two "literary" temptations: to write a running commentary on the poems and to carry on a debate with unfriendly literary critics. There are unobtrusive words here and there on the substance of certain poems, chiefly so that readers can understand passages quoted from letters, but that is all; and though Crane has been violently patronized (for "romanticism," for "sentimentality," for "lack of political commitment," for "moral delinquency," and so on), Unterecker's implied view is that Crane, through his own words, is his own best defender.
Unterecker has also resisted a third temptation: the too simple analysis of Crane's personality and of the evolving shape of his life. A more overtly analytic biography might have had a more streamlined or more symmetrical look; but it would compress the poet into a theory, or into a false exemplar of the "poete maudit." To those critics who disapprovingly decided that Crane's poetry was "disorganized" because his life was, R.P. Blackmur tartly remarked that nobody's life could have been more disordered than Baudelaire's, and that no critic yet has thought of accusing Baudelaire of incoherence.
The material for any number of theories is available in this long book, and Unterecker has preferred to put the information at our disposal (including one interesting summation by a lay analyst who knew Crane well), and let us, if we choose, formulate theories of our own. When Unterecker does express opinions, they are temporary ones. This biography may belong somewhat to the tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner" school -- but "tout comprendre" is not a bad motto for any biographer to work under, after all.
Robert Lowell has called Crane "the Shelley of our age," but he could as well have named him our Marlowe or our Keats. The spectacle, private and public, of Crane's life exists and is of importance to us as a context or as "imaged Word" which is, as he said, unbetrayable -- by his life or by his critics. His poetry, though not always visibly linked to his biography, can finally only be completely understood against the events of his life -- his frightened childhood, his travels with his mother, his perpetual jazz-playing phonograph, his "new thresholds, new anatomies" revealed by alcohol, his frustrated affection ("I dreamed nothing so flagless as this piracy"), his apartment with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge ("How could mere toil align thy choiring strings?"), his repeated months in the tropics ("the tarantula rattling at the lily's foot") -- the list is endless. In the end, shortly before he drowned himself during his return voyage from Mexico, he wrote, paradoxically, that at 32 he held his life complete: that in his pulse he heard "what I hold healed, original now, and pure."
Sympathy, respect for fact, and an even greater respect for the spirit which imagined "Voyages" and "The Bridge" have produced this life of Crane. In it Crane himself justly appears, through his turbulent life of alternating radiance and suffering, as above all the resolved and driven writer, re-thinking and revising his difficult poems, willing in his personal simplicity and directness to explain them to an unprepared world, and never forgetting, even in the last alien and volcanic disintegration in Mexico, the conviction he had had since the age of fifteen that he was born to be a poet. His interfering family, his lack of schooling, the Depression, his erratic life, were all hostile to his genius, but nothing could stifle it permanently until he himself gave up his exhausting counterattack.
Mrs. Vendler teaches at Boston University. Her "On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens's Longer Poems" will be published this fall.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/07/18/specials/crane-voyager.html
