Besides being an intellectual, however, Crane was also a volatile eccentric, often loud and impulsive. A homosexual who, by several reports, struck most people as unremittingly masculine, at the same time he was disconcertingly open about his deviancy with any number of straight friends — at a time when homosexuality was assumed a pathology in itself.
Crane was also — more and more as his brief life rolled on — a drunk.
The last three or four years of Crane’s life were largely the debacle of any number of literary alcoholics who died from drink: read Henry S. Salt’s biography of James Thomson (B.V.); read Lewis Ellingham’s account of Jack Spicer; read Douglas Day on Malcolm Lowry — or anybody on Dylan Thomas. But the resultant biographemes that have sedimented in the collective literary imagination about Crane, from the typewriters thrown out windows, to the poems composed with the Victrola blaring jazz and Crane’s own laughter spilling over the music and the racket of his own typewriter keys (but Cowley has told us how meticulously Crane revised those same poems), to the explosive break between Crane and Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon — with whom Crane had been living for a summer in Patterson, New York, when, unable to take him any longer, they precipitously put him out — to his midnight pursuits of sailors around the Navy Yards of Cleveland, Washington, D.C., and Brooklyn, to the more and more frequent encounters — both in New York and Paris — with the police, as well as, in his last years, various drunken suicide attempts; and above them all are the murky surroundings of his final hours, traveling on the steamer Orizaba back to the States from Mexico with his “fiancée,” Peggy Baird (Mrs. Malcolm Cowley, waiting for her divorce papers to come through) — from which the thirty-three-year-old Crane was being deported for still another drunken suicide try with a bottle of iodine. After several days of drinking and making a general nuisance of himself on shipboard, on the evening of April 26—Emil Opffer’s birthday — a drunken Crane descended into the Orizaba’s sailors’ quarters. He tried to read the sailors his poems — that’s one version. He tried to make one of the sailors and was badly beaten — that’s another. He was also — probably — robbed; at any rate, the next morning his money and his ring were gone. A sedated Baird had been confined to her room with a burned arm from an accident the day before with a box of Cuban matches that had caught fire. Now, sometime after eleven, in his pajamas and a light topcoat, a disconsolate Crane went to Baird’s cabin. Baird said: “Get dressed, darling. You’ll feel better.”
As mentioned, it was the day after Emil’s birthday. Was Crane perhaps thinking of the tale Emil’s father had told…?
At about two minutes before noon, wrote Gertrude E. Vogt, a passenger on the ship, many years later to Crane’s biographer John Unterecker,
a number of us were gathered on deck, waiting to hear the results of the ship’s pool — always announced at noon. Just then we saw Crane come on deck, dressed, as you noted, in pajamas and topcoat; he had a black eye and looked generally battered. He walked to the railing, took off his coat, folded it neatly over the railing (not dropping it on deck), raised himself on his toes, then dropped back again. We all fell silent and watched him, wondering what in the world he was up to. Then, suddenly, he vaulted over the railing and jumped into the sea. For what seemed five minutes, but was more like five seconds, no one was able to move; then cries of “man overboard” went up. Just once I saw Crane, swimming strongly. But never again. It is a scene I am unable to forget, even after all these years.
After Crane’s leap from the ship’s stern, the Orizaba came to a stop, but the Captain figured either the ship’s propellers, sharks, or both had finished the poet. The Orizaba trolled for him a full hour; the body, however, was not found. But all these images have displaced the less sensational — and earlier — images called up by the compulsive and omnivorous reader of Frazer, Doughty, Villard, the Elizabethans, Nietzsche, Emerson, Whitman, Dante, Melville, Joyce, LaForgue, Rimbaud, Ouspensky, Eliot, Pound, Frank, and Williams — to cite only a handful of the writers with whose work Crane was deeply familiar by the time he was thirty. Crane was not a reader of formal philosophy — and was quick to say so, when necessary. (From a letter to Yvor Winters in 1927: “I… have never read Kant, Descartes or the other doctors…” But he had read his Donne, Blake, and Vaughan.) His languages were French and nominal Latin; he used both.
The productive Crane was a young man: all but a handful of the poems we remember him for were written before he had completed his twenty-eighth year. But by twenty-eight, he had read and thought more about what he’d read than most twenty-eight-year-olds have — even twenty-eight-year-olds headed toward the academy.
The French have their concept of the poète maudit for such fellows (many of whom — though not all — were gay). Twenties America had only Flaming Youth and the stodgy old professor — but no template for those between, much less one that encompassed the extremes of both. But those were the extremes Crane’s life bridged.
II
Beginning with his contemporaries Allen Tate and Yvor Winters, the traditional view of Crane is that, as a poet, he was an interesting, monumentally talented, even “splendid failure” (the words come from the final line of a frequently reprinted essay, “Notes on a Text of Hart Crane” by R. P. Blackmur) — a view that began with the uncomfortable perception by Winters and Tate of a correspondence between Crane’s homosexuality, his drunkenness, his suicide, and his ideas — especially his appreciation of Whitman — along with his work’s resistance to easy elucidation. This view carries through the majority of Crane criticism to this day. It is perhaps presented at its clearest in its current form in Edward Brunner’s Splendid Failure: The Making of The Bridge (1985). Still, I suspect, Crane’s contemporaries could not quite grasp that Crane was often writing a kind of poem that simply did not undertake the task of argumentative (the word they often used was “structural”) clarity, narrative or otherwise, then expected of the well-formed poem. But the primary sign of Crane’s ultimate success is the crushing lack of critical attention we now pay to all those poems written at the time that dutifully undertook that task and performed it quite successfully. Among critical works on Crane that have directly taken up this point are Lee Edelman’s rhetorically rigorous Transmemberment of Song (1987) and Paul Giles’s paronomasially delirious Contexts of The Bridge (1986). Indeed, after the three major biographies (Horton, Weber, and Unterecker), which give the context of Crane in his times, Brunner’s, Edelman’s, and Giles’s studies of the poems are probably the most informative recent books on Crane’s work per se.
As Edelman suggests, perhaps the most careful account of Crane’s “failure” is first laid out in Yvor Winters’s quite extraordinary essay, “The Significance of The Bridge by Hart Crane, or What Are We to Think of Professor X?” reprinted in Winters’s 1943 collection, On Modern Poets. There Winters relates Crane’s enterprise to the pernicious and maniagenic ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson via the irreligious pantheism (read: relativism — in “Passage to India” Whitman blasphemes by claiming the poet is “the true son of God”) of Whitman and the glossolomania of Mallarmé. (At least that’s how Winters saw them.) Winters had begun as one of Crane’s most enthusiastic advocates. The two had an extensive correspondence — as well as one warm and productive meeting. But, on the publication of The Bridge in 1930, a growing doubt about Crane’s achievement finally erupted in Winters’s review. Over it, the two men broke. But it is important to realize that the rejection — or at least the condemnation — of Crane, for Winters as well as for many of Crane’s critics, was the rejection and condemnation of an entire romantic current in American literary production, a current that included Whitman and Emerson, with Crane only as its latest, cracked and misguided voice. Those who shared Winters’s judgments, like Brom Weber and R. P. Blackmur, also felt T. S. Eliot was as much of a failure as, or more of a failure than, Crane, and for the same reasons!