As written, Greenberg’s “Serenade” gives the effect of an observation so exact that, now and again, because of his strict fidelity to the observation process, we cannot tell what is being observed; this effect is as much a result of the poem’s incoherencies — where we cannot follow the word to its referent — as it is of those places where the conjunction of word with referent seems striking. In Fisher’s revision, things run much more smoothly — and, I suspect for most modern readers, much less interestingly. Violences at both the level of the signifier (e.g., “mine eyes feel dim and scorched from grey”) and of the signified (e.g., the rotting blood) are repressed — and with them, the sense of rigor cleaving to whatever writing process produced the poem. Both Fisher and Holden/McManis strive to clear up the ambiguity of the antecedent of “though parted thus”—though, under sway of Empson (Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1935), the modern reader is likely to count that ambiguity among the poem’s precise pleasures: Is it the shadows of light and shadows in shade that are parted… or the eyes? Greenberg’s undoctored text (or less doctored text: even letter-by-letter, point-by-point transcription involves judgments; and who can say what doctoring Greenberg himself would have approved had he been able to see his poems through the ordinary channels of copy-editing and galley correction usually preceding print) generates a sense that, for all the strained rhymes and inversions, that process is one of intense energy, rigor, and commitment. This vanishes — or at least becomes much less forceful — after Fisher’s changes.
When, after their conversation that winter night in Woodstock, Crane came to make his own transcriptions of Greenberg’s poems, what’s important to remember is that Crane went back to Greenberg’s actual notebooks, the ones loaned him by Fisher, and thus to Greenberg’s exacting and difficult originals — not to Fisher’s Plowshare revisions. Given the development of Crane’s own poetics, as well as Crane’s influence on the poetic development of the times to come after him, this is meaningful.
Like most young writers — like many young readers — Crane had already encountered a number of writerly enthusiasms: Nietzsche, Wilde, Rimbaud… all of whom had left their marks on his poetry, all of whom had raised questions for the young poet that set his work in interesting tension with theirs. But Greenberg was particularly important — because in many ways he seemed Crane’s own discovery, and because the fact that he had been ignored by the greater literary world despite his undeniable verbal energy and poetic vigor made it easy for the then all but unknown Crane to sympathize and identify.
Back in New York City in 1924, after a precarious January and February between 45 Grove Street, 15 Van Nest Place (now Charles Street), and the Albert Hotel on University Place and 10th Street, all in Greenwich Village, Crane finally got another job as a copywriter at Sweet’s Catalogue Service, where he worked with Malcolm Cowley.
At the end of the second week of April Crane moved into 110 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn, into a room on the third floor — and, in the course of it, consummated a recently begun affair with a Danish sailor, three years his senior, Emil Opffer (April 26, 1897–19-?), a sometime communications officer and sometime ship’s printer. Goldilocks was Crane’s sometime nickname for him (and sometimes Phoebus Apollo); Crane’s own sexual nom d’amour was occasionally Mike Drayton. 110 was Emil’s father’s building. A one-time seaman like his son, and now editor of Brooklyn’s Danish-American paper, Nordlyset, Emil, Sr., lived there too.
The relationship began in blissful happiness for both men. Probably during the first two weeks of September 1924, while Emil, Jr., was away on a voyage, Emil, Sr., went into the hospital for an operation, during which — or just after which — he died. On Emil’s return from sea, Hart and Emil’s brother Ivan met Emil at the dock, broke the news, and took the disconsolate young man home. Now Hart and Emil took over the father’s old room, Hart again working on his poetry. Emil went back to sea on another voyage…
Eventually the relationship devolved into jealousies, finally to break up and resettle into a more or less distant friendship, that continued until 1930—the last time the two men saw one another. I quote at some length Crane’s close friend, Samuel Loveman, who, in his seventies, wrote this account of the relationship (two years before Stonewall, by the bye) in his introduction to the young critic Hunce Voelker’s impressionistic 1967 study, The Hart Crane Voyages:
[Crane] urged me to come to New York. “I want you to live near me,” he said. “Brooklyn Heights is one of the loveliest places in the whole world. Imagine, the panorama incessantly before one’s eyes — a glorification of beauty with the New York skyline always before one, Brooklyn Bridge, ships that come and go by day and night — and sailors. You will never care to live elsewhere, and wherever I may be I shall always return to you.”
He continued to disclose his happiness. “I have met a young man, a seaman, at Fitzi’s [Eleanor Fitzgerald, director of the Provincetown Playhouse], and I realize for the first time what love must have meant to the Greeks when one reads Plato. He’s a Scandinavian and extremely handsome, yellow-haired and blue-eyed — a real human being. I believe my love is returned. He’s at sea now; you must meet him when his voyage is over. I’ll never come back to Cleveland. If mother wants to see me let her visit me in New York. For the first time in my life I’m utterly free from the ghastly family bondage and the internal squabbles between Mother and Father. Their divorce seems to have made no difference. Money and me seem to be the sole crux of their dissension. I’ll be out of it for good.”
I met Hart’s “Greek” ideal on his return from the voyage, and he answered his description — an extremely well-coordinated and attractive youngster, certainly prepossessing but outwardly unemotional, and since Hart was inwardly a veritable cauldron of conflict, I felt that this balance in their friendship was sufficiently warranted. I continued to see him day after day; his later acceleration in drinking was not then present and his sexual promiscuity apparently absent. He had acquired what he claimed to be the first copy of Ulysses ever to reach America, smuggled in by a friend [Gorham Munson], and bored me interminably by his insistence on reading it to me aloud. Spirited and certainly assertive on occasions of ordinary conversation, Hart’s recitals abutted into a kind of clergical drone. He, on his part, assailed my own way of reading.
Then, the inevitable happened. His friend returning unexpectedly one evening to their apartment at 110 Columbia Heights, encountered Hart’s stupid betrayal. There was no explosion, except Hart’s ineffectual hammering protestations and attempt at an explanation — then silence. The friendship was resumed; their love never.
Yet in this fulmination of love and disaster, there emerged the creation of Hart’s Voyages — poetry as passionate and authentic as any love-poetry in literature. Whether it be addressed to normal or abnormal sexuality matters little. There is nothing to be compared with it, excepting possibly in the pitifully extant fragments of Sappho, the Sonnets of Shakespeare, John Donne’s love poems, or Emily Bronte’s burning exhortations to an unknown lover. Compared with it, Mrs. Browning’s much-belauded saccharine and over-burdened “Portuguese” sonnets, are sentimental valentines. In his Voyages, stripped of the verbiage that emphasized so much of Hart’s poetry at its weakest, and which is transparently present in many passages of The Bridge, the poet of Voyages becomes blazingly clairvoyant and achieves astonishing profundity. Voyages is a classic in English literature.