Indeed, one “generic” way of indicating a forbidden sexual reference is through the use of a classical metaphor or figure taken from an age or culture less restrictive and repressive. It’s possible, of course, that the congruence of phrases — “floating flower”—between Joyce and Crane was an accident; or at any rate an unconscious borrowing by Crane. But, given Crane’s enthusiasm for the volume at this time, as Loveman recounts it (and biographer Unterecker also attests to Crane’s enthusiasm: Crane arranged for more “smuggled” copies to go to Allen Tate and others; Unterecker calls Ulysses a “Bible” for Crane, all before 1924, and tells us, in his piece, “The Architecture of The Bridge,” that Crane prepared a gloss on the novel, copying out long passages from it for still another friend who could not obtain a copy), it’s far more likely to represent a conscientious bit of intertextuality.
If the “floating flower” does stand for the genitals, it’s possible that, in Crane’s poem, we should read it as female genitals, since Crane has already personified the sea as a woman with, first, shoulders, then palms, and then a “floating flower”; such a reading would simply continue her embodiment. But if the allusion to Joyce is really there, it opens up other possible readings: Crane may be critiquing Joyce’s use of the “floating flower” figure for the genitals — saying in effect, it should be used for female genitals, rather than for male. But, by the same token, he could be using the relation to Joyce covertly to bisexualize his own personification of the ocean — evoking a “floating flower”
so recently and famously used to figure the male genitalia.[34]
Crane’s poem “Emblems of Conduct,” written shortly after his discovery of Greenberg, is an amalgam of stanzas and lines from Greenberg’s poems — mostly Greenberg’s “Conduct.” But words, phrases, and lines from Greenberg (“gate” and “script” are two words and, finally, two concepts all but donated to Crane by Greenberg) turn up in both Voyages and The Bridge. Some years later, after he had all but finished The Bridge’s final section, and very possibly while pursuing Greenberg’s readings in Emerson, Crane opened Emerson’s “Plato” and, coming upon the paragraph which heads these notes, decided, in a kind of challenge to Emerson’s praise of Plato’s lack of poetic ecstasy, to rename “Finale,” The Bridge’s ecstatic conclusion, “Atlantis.”
For if there is one poet who is not described by the motto heading these notes — a common-sensical, super-average man — it is Crane!
But this might also be the place to look back, six years before, to Crane’s 1918 meditation on Nietzsche — a defense of the philosopher against those who, with the Great War, would dismiss him along with everything German. In the second paragraph of that astute, brief essay (misleadingly titled “The Case Against Nietzsche”; a more apropos, if clumsier, title would have been “The Case Against the Case Against Nietzsche”), Crane mentions that Schopenhauer was (along with Goethe) one of the few Germans whom Nietzsche had any use for at all. It’s possible then that the 19-year-old Crane had read through Nietzsche’s essay, “On Schopenhauer as Teacher”; the following passage from it may have been — then — one of the earlier texts, if not the earliest, to begin sedimenting some of the ideas, images, and terms that, in development, would become Crane’s major poetic work half a dozen or more years on:
Nobody can build you the bridge over which you must cross the river of life, nobody but you alone. True, there are countless paths and bridges and demigods that would like to carry you across the river, but only at the price of your self; you would pledge your self, and lose it. In this world there is one unique path which no one but you may walk. Where does it lead? Do not ask; take it.
Indeed, to examine how Crane’s Bridge critiques the specifics of this passage is to begin to trace what, in Crane, is specific to his own view and enterprise:
For Nietzsche the bridge is the instrumentality with which one negotiates the river of life. For Crane the bridge is life. In her 1978 interview with Opffer, Helge Normann Nilsen records Opffer as saying that Crane often told him, “All of life is a bridge” or “The whole world is a bridge.” The bridge for Nietzsche is the unique and optimal path by which the brave subject can, in crossing it, avoid losing his proper self. One suspects that for Crane a multiplicity of selves can all be supported by the bridge’s encompassing curveship — that, somehow, authenticity of self, above and beyond that of authentic poetry, is not in question.
In the Nilsen interview with Opffer, Opffer tells a tale about his own father, also a sailor, “who once jumped from a ship in Denmark just to see how long it would take for them to pick him up.” Crane lived in the building with both father and son — and before his death Emil Senior may have amused both Crane and Emil Junior with tales of this early jape. It stuck in Opffer’s mind till he was over eighty; it may well have stayed in Crane’s too…
When one reads through Crane’s letters to his literary friends, his family, his theoretical statements, and his various defenses of his own work, one has the impression that, above all things, Crane wanted to be taken as an intellectual poet. He was as fiercely a self-taught intellectual as a writer could be. Certainly he was aware that only reading strategies that could make sense of the high modernist works of Eliot and Pound could negotiate his own energetic, vivid, but densely packed and insistently connotative lines.
The argument often used to impugn Crane’s intellect — that Crane took the epigraph from Strachy’s early Seventeenth Century journals for Powhatan’s Daughter (Part II of The Bridge) from a review by Elizabeth Bowen of William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain, where Bowen had quoted and abridged the same lines, rather than taking it from Williams’s book directly or from the edition of Strachy’s journals that Williams himself consulted — is simply jejune. (From other passages in The Bridge, as well as reports from Williams of a letter from Crane [now lost], in which Crane wrote Williams of the use he had made both of In the American Grain and also of Williams’s poem “The Wanderer” in structuring The Bridge, we know Crane read Williams’s book all the way through.) Crane took the idea for “Virginia,” in “Three Songs,” from a popular 1923 tune by Irving Caesar, “What Do You Do Sunday, Mary”; and he took the Latin lines at the end of the second act chorus of Seneca’s Medea for the motto to “Ave Maria” (The Bridge, Part I) from a scholarly article in a 1918 issue of a recondite classics journal, Mnemosne. What, by the same silly argument, do these sources say about Crane’s intellect — save that, like many intellectuals, he read lots, and at lots of levels? The point is the use he made of those textual allusions and their resonances in his poem — not their provenance or the purity of their sources!
34
Herbert A. Leibowitz noted the recall of