After the breakup recounted above, Hart returned to Cleveland over Christmas of 1924 to visit his mother — after which he again took up a peripatetic existence.
The eldest of the three young men by a handful of years, Loveman had first met Crane more than half a dozen years before in a Cleveland bookstore. An aspiring poet himself, he had just been released from the army, and the teenaged Crane was enthusiastically looking for books. Whether they were lovers, even briefly, is hard to say. But their friendship continued on and off throughout Crane’s life: Loveman claimed to have received a letter from Crane only two weeks before the poet’s suicide in April of ’33.
Most of us today will recognize that Loveman was writing out of a tradition within which the term “American Literature” was much rarer than it is today. Because Americans wrote in English, their works — especially if important — were considered, at least by Americans of a certain aesthetic leaning, to be part of “English Literature.” The three other things that the contemporary reader is likely to find somewhat anomalous in Loveman’s account — things that the reader may wonder how they fit into the narrative — are, first, the extraordinary passion with which Crane entreats this gay friend — who is, after all, not (at least then) his lover — to be with him; second, the seemingly gratuitous sexism of the swipe at Elizabeth Barrett Browning; and, third, that “verbiage” which characterizes “Hart’s poetry at its weakest” and which Loveman says must be stripped away to reveal the achievement and clairvoyance of the great love lyrics. Bear all three in mind: all three will be contextualized, in their place, as we proceed through these notes.
Crane’s enthusiasm over the then-illegal Ulysses suggests an elucidation of an allusion in “Voyages II,” the next to the last completed poem in the lyric series, that he would have been working on during the time Loveman writes of, or a few months after. (Though the series is clearly a love series, they seem to project — in critic R. W. Butterfield’s words — an air of “searing loneliness,” while the poet’s seafaring lover is away.) “Voyages II,” which opens with that extraordinarily scaler inversion, in which the sea is referred to as “—And yet this great wink of eternity…” (That “—And yet,” functions much like the “Autar epie” at the beginning of the Odyssey’s Book Lambda, which, translated, became the “And then” opening the first of Pound’s Cantos) has sustained the most concerted exegesis of all the Voyages. A. Alvarez claims Crane’s poem to be all affect and devoid of referential meaning — which, to the extent it’s true, only seems to spur the exegetes on. Critics Butterfield and Brunner have suggested that Greenberg’s sea images in poems like “Love” (“Ah ye mighty caves of the sea, there pushed onward, / In windful waves, of volumes flow / Through Rhines — there Bacchus, Venus in lust cherished / Its swell of perfect ease, repeated awe — ne’er quenched,” is the sonnet’s first quatrain, as transcribed by Crane in his manuscript copy. Returning to Greenberg’s manuscript, Holden and McManis read the punctuation notably otherwise) possibly nudged Crane to connect the idea of love and the sea in a poetic series — not withstanding the fact Crane’s current love was a sailor, or the fact of Crane’s general fascination with “seafood,” or his recent reading of Melville. The first stanza of “Voyages II” employs the idiosyncratic word “wrapt”—which also appears in “Atlantis”—suggesting a kind of Greenbergian term halfway between “wrapped” and “rapt.” In earlier drafts of the poem, Crane used the phrase “varnished lily grove” from Greenberg’s sonnet, “Life,” though he eventually revised it out. Philip Horton has told us, in his biography of Crane, that the “bells off San Salvador” in the third stanza (“And onward, as bells off San Salvador / Salute the crocus lustres of the stars / In those poinsetta meadows of her tides, — / Adagios of islands, O My Prodigal, / Complete the dark confessions her veins spell”) refer to a Caribbean myth Opffer had recounted to Crane about a sunken city whose drowned church towers, during storms, sounded their bells from beneath the waters to warn passing ships.
Earlier versions of the poem were much more directly erotic: that third stanza once read, “Bells ringing off San Salvador / To see you smiling scrolls of silver, ivory sentences / brimming confessions, O prodigal, / in which your tongue slips mine — / the perfect diapason dancing left / wherein minstrel mansions shine.”
Crane himself later used the phrase “Adagios of islands” to explain what he called his “indirect mentions”—in this case the indirect mention of “the motion of a boat through islands clustered thickly, the rhythm of the motion etc” (“General Aims and Theories”). Crane was also reading Melville, and both “leewardings” in the second line and “spindrift” in the last have their source — if indirectly — in that novelist of the sea: “The Lee Shore,” Chapter 23 of Moby-Dick, praises “landless-ness” as a road to “higher truth.” And Crane had first used Melville’s term “findrinny” in an earlier draft but, unable to find it in any dictionary, finally settled on “spindrift,” which means the foamy spray swept from the waves by a strong wind and driven along the sea’s surface.
In stanza four Crane’s use of the biblical word “superscription” (that which is written on a coin; an exergue) recalls Jesus’ dialogue from the Gospeclass="underline" “Show me a penny. Whose image and superscription hath it? They answered and said, Ceasar’s… ”
But to review all this is to wander quite aways from Joyce. Today’s reader forgets that a good deal of the controversy over Ulysses’s supposed obscenity (which is why Crane had to have a smuggled copy) centered on the terminal paragraph of the flower-laden fifth section of Joyce’s novel, that Stewart Gilbert designated, in his famous 1930 Ulysses: A Study, “The Lotus Eaters”—one of “those passages of which,” Judge Woolsey would write, nine years later in his decision of December 6, 1933, “the Government particularly complains.” (The other point of controversy was Bloom’s erotic musings during his stroll along the strand in the eleventh episode, “The Sirens.”) In that passage, Bloom (whose nom d’amour is Henry Flower, Esq.), imagines himself bathing and, in his mind’s eye, regards his own pubic hair and genitals breaking the surface of the tub’s soapy water: “… he saw his trunk riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid, floating flower” (Joyce, p. 86). (Writes Gilbert, somewhat disingenuously: “The lotus-eaters appear under many aspects in this episode: the cabhorses drooping at the cabrank…, doped communicants at All Hallows…, the watchers of cricket… and, finally, Mr Bloom himself, flowerlike, buoyed lightly upward in the bath” [Gilbert, p. 155].)
Joyce’s “floating flower,” as a metaphor for the limp male genitalia (“… father of thousands…”), suggests a possible unraveling of another one of Crane’s “indirect mentions” in the penultimate stanza of the second Voyages poem (“her,” here, refers to the sea):