From 1911 on, Samuel lived with Morris — when not hospitalized: Between Spring and Autumn of 1912, while working in his older brother Adolf’s leather bag shop, Samuel was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Three days after the first of the year in 1913, Jacob died. For six or seven weeks starting in May that year, Samuel was hospitalized at the Montefiore Home, after which he stayed a month or so with his sister’s family in Westerly, Rhode Island, convalescing and working for his brother-in-law in a horse-drawn wagon selling piece goods in Rhode Island and Connecticut. Back in New York, he pursued his writing, painting, and music — when not working at Adolf’s, visiting his friends at the Metropolitan, or going with them to concerts or coffee shops. After seven hospitalizations over four years, early on a muggy summer’s evening in mid-August, 1917, Samuel died, age twenty-three, in the paupers’ hospital on Ward’s Island.
After Samuel’s death, older brother Morris Greenberg gave Fisher five of his younger brother’s notebooks. Morris entrusted them to Fisher in hopes that his younger brother’s art critic friend might get his brother’s poems published — which Fisher did, after a fashion: A year after Greenberg’s death, he printed Greenberg’s poem “The Charming Maiden” in a magazine edited out of Woodstock, The Plowshare of June 1918.
Two and a half years later, in the January 1920 issue, writing under his professional name, William Murrell, Fisher wrote and published an eight-page appreciation and memoir of the young poet, “Fragments of a Broken Lyre”—followed by a selection of ten of Greenberg’s poems.
On that winter evening in Woodstock, three years later in 1923, fascinated by Fisher’s account of Greenberg and his poetry, Crane arranged to borrow the five Greenberg notebooks in Fischer’s possession — at least one of which was a leather-bound, book-sized album, with marbled endpapers (that had belonged to someone named Sidney in 1898, for that is the name and date written in pencil and later erased from the first page, though legible even today), and which Greenberg had half-filled with neat fair copies of his poems for 1913 and 1914. On 19 sheets of yellow foolscap, Crane typed out forty-two of Greenberg’s poems. (Unbeknownst to Fisher or Crane at the time, Daniel Greenberg had preserved another thirty-five pocket notebooks, memorandum pads, and sketchbooks, as well as fugitive papers belonging to his younger brother: these contained, among more memorable items, drafts of a letter from a hospital, more poems, miniature portraits of Fisher and Halprin, as well as various Jewish men seated on benches about the Lower East Side, a stunning view north through the crossed cables of the Brooklyn Bridge, and a sketch of the Judson Church tower done from Washington Square in summer.) Slater Brown recalls Crane actually taking Greenberg’s manuscripts back to New York City on the train with them a little after Christmas; but, as Fisher remembers Crane’s returning them just before leaving Woodstock, Brown is probably confusing Crane’s own typescripts with the originals.
We’ll digress for a few more pages, because, even though they never met, Samuel Greenberg is still an important and poignant figure in the Hart Crane story.
After a page-and-a-half divagation on the differences between the romantic view and the realistic view of the relation between poverty and the artist, “Fragments of a Broken Lyre” goes on:
The case of Samuel Bernhard Greenberg is exceptionally affecting, both in the sudden flowering of his gift and in the pathos of his end: for it is indeed remarkable that a boy of no education or advantages should write such beautiful lyrics as he has done, and it is a sad reflection on our appreciation and hospitality that he died in a public institute for destitute consumptives… Greenberg’s brief story is interesting: born in Vienna of Austrian-Jewish parentage, he was brought to New York when a child, and after a few months in the public schools was put to work in a leather goods factory. At the age of seventeen his inherited tendency to consumption had been so fostered by the dust and confinement of the leather shop that he was told he was too weak to be of any further service there. Then began what he pathetically referred to later as his “freedom” and his “education.”
It was at that time I first heard of Sammy, as we all called him, through a friend [George Halprin] who was giving music lessons to some other member of the Greenberg family [i.e., Daniel Greenberg, Samuel’s oldest brother]. Arriving at the flat on Delancey Street one evening, my friend was much surprised to hear fragments of Chopin’s 2nd Ballad imperfectly yet sensitively played by someone in the inner room. Knowing his pupil had no such delicacy, either of feeling or of touch, my friend inquired who was at the piano, and he was told it was “only Sammy.” My friend entered the twilight room, and distinguished a tall thin figure upon the stool. The boy seemed dull, could not or would not say anything, except, in answer to questions, that he could not read music, that he played by ear only. Upon this my friend offered to teach him, and tried to do so, but made little progress, as the boy found difficulty in focusing his attention, and seemed unable to grasp the more conscious mathematics involved. Nevertheless my friend was much impressed by the boy, and came to tell me about him, and said he would bring him to see me, adding:
“He is uncanny and inarticulate, but there is something wonderful about him.”
And so it proved. When Sammy came to see me he volunteered nothing except that Mr. George Halprin had sent him. But he used his eyes well — took in everything, and waited. I examined him curiously: tall and thin of figure, with a small face framed in wavy, gold-brown hair, a high forehead, two wonderfully nice brown eyes, a rather large wide nose, and a full red mouth which made his chin seem smaller than it actually was. His manner was quiet and his voice gentle. I tried to converse with him, but to no purpose. I then asked if I could help him in any way. His glance immediately fell upon my table.
“You have books?” he questioned.
“Yes,” I replied, “would you like some?”
“You have good books — classics? I have only a little time.”
At that moment I did not realize the significance of his saying he “had only a little time,” but I humored his demand for classics and gave him Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero-Worship, Emerson’s Essays, and an anthology of English verse. I inquired what he had been reading, and was astonished to hear him say:
“The Dictionary.”
And a few months later he brought me a handful of poems — some of which are among the best he has done. I encouraged him to write, and from that time on (until his breakdown some two and a half years later) I saw much of him. His gentle, ingenuous personality exercised a great charm over all who met him, and his early diffident silence gave way to an elliptical, rather epigrammatic style of conversation which was continually surprising his friends by reason of its direct and simple wisdom.
After a further pair of paragraphs on art, the average man, and the civilization that obtrudes between them — and the rare individuals, like Greenberg, who see “both beyond and through” them — Fisher concludes:
Samuel Bernhard Greenberg is of this company, is as frank and mysterious as a child. He is much younger than his years, and much wiser than his knowledge, — for he is of the few rare, child-like spirits which never become sophisticated, yet through mystic penetration surprise our deepest truths with simple ease. Born with a look of Wonder in his eyes, he has never lost sight of the Beauty of the world, nor of the Divinity of its inhabitants: though painfully aware that they themselves have.