Here the interviewer comments: “That’s what was bothering him.” And Loveman continues:
He could no longer write without the aid of music or of liquor. It was impossible. He had reached the horrible impasse. So, we went downstairs to his room. I lived a couple of doors away. I worried myself sick about him. He poured himself some Dago Red, turned on the Victrola, and I left him.
How important this incident might have been for Crane is hard to tell. Was it a drunken jape, forgotten the next morning? Or does it represent the deep and abiding Veritas classically presumed to reside in vino? Again, none of the three major biographers utilizes it.
Unterecker characterizes Crane as a “serious drinker” from the summer of ’24 on. But drunkenness figures in Crane’s letters — and in the apocryphal tales about him — from well before. And as so many people have pointed out, in trying to explain the context of prohibition in cities like New York and Chicago to people who did not live through it, even though alcohol was outside the law, it was so widely available the problem was not how to get it but rather how to stay sober enough to conduct the business of ordinary life!
It was a problem many in that decade failed to solve — Crane among them.
Let me attempt here, however, what I will be the first to admit is likely an over-reading of the evening Loveman has described with Crane — with all its a-specific vagaries.
The night begins in a Village restaurant, with an actor, a speaker of other writers’ words. Directly following, a cab driver mangles Crane’s (or possibly Loveman’s) verbal instructions home: “Take us across the Bridge to Brooklyn…”
But instead of taking them to the Brooklyn Bridge, the driver takes them to the Williamsburg Bridge at Delancey Street — where, realizing how far off they are, they get out.
In the nighttime plaza before the Williamsburg, Crane urinates on a public monument.
A public monument makes a certain kind of public statement. To urinate on such a monument is, at the very least, to express one’s contempt in the most bodily way possible (short of smearing it with shit) for its sen- tentiousness, its pomposity, its civic pretension — those enunciational aspects traditionally designated by the phrase “empty rhetoric.”
But to recount the above in this way is to point out that we have begun an evening where every event, as narrated by Loveman, one way or another foregrounds a more and more problematic relation with language — specifically with something about its rhetoricity.
Having given up the errant cab, Crane and Loveman decide to walk home, down through the Lower East Side, presumably for the Brooklyn Bridge, to cross over to 110 Columbia Heights by foot. (At the time, Loveman — a published poet in his own right, as well as, later, an editor of some reputation — tells us further on in the interview, John Dos Passos lived in the apartment below Crane’s.) Crossing Henry Street, around the corner from the great daily markets of Orchard and Hester, just up from the Fulton Fish Market, they find two men sleeping together in a doorway, legs sticking out. There is the identifying cardboard: “We are not bums,” which reduces Crane to hysteria — as he perceives the comedy of rhetoric at its most referential, stating what the speaker/writer hopes to make obvious in fear of the very misreading the writing presumes to obviate, participating through it in the same pretentious inflation on which, fifteen minutes before, Crane had just emptied his bladder.
It intrigues me that that night’s walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, usually such a positive symbol for Crane, and across which he had walked before holding hands with Emil, is elided from Loveman’s account. Does the elision suggest that — that night — the Bridge did not have the usual uplifting effect on Crane that, often in the past, it had had? Is there anything that we can retrieve from the elision? What, on any late night’s stroll across the Brooklyn Bridge in the 1920s, were two gay men likely to see, regardless of their mood?
The nighttime walkways of the city’s downtown bridges have traditionally been heavy homosexual cruising areas, practically since their opening — one of the reasons that, indeed, after dark, Crane and Emil had been able to wander across it — holding hands — with minimal fear of recriminations. They certainly could have not walked so during the day.
But perhaps that evening, with his old friend Loveman, on the Bridge’s cruisy boardwalk, Crane might have heard the rich and pointed banter of a group of dishy queens lounging against the rail, or, perhaps, even the taunts leveled at them from a passing gaggle of sailors — who often crossed the Bridge back to the Navy Yard, in their uneasy yet finally symbiotic relationship with the bridge’s more usual nighttime pedestrians. But even if the bridge were deserted that night, even if we do not evoke the memory of language to fulfill the place of living language, we can still assume without much strain that the conversation of the two men, at least now and again, touched on those subjects which it would have been impossible for such as they to cross the bridge at such an hour and not think of — in short, something in the human speech that occurred in that elided journey, whether the received public banter of cross-dressers or simply the speculation of Crane and Loveman to one another, is likely to have broached those sexual areas so easily and usually characterized as residing outside of language — at least outside that language represented by the municipal monument, outside that language which claims rhetorical density by only stating the true, the obvious, the inarguable — even as the very act of stating them throws such truths and inarguables into hysterical question. (To indulge in gay gossip, or indeed in any socially private sub-language, unto the language of poetry itself, is at once to take up and to invest with meaning an order of rhetoric the straight world — especially in the twenties — claims is empty, meaningless, and at the same time always suspected of pathology…) This, at any rate, is the place we can perhaps also best contextualize the urgency behind Crane’s operatically passionate addresses to Loveman in his letter. One begins with the obvious statement that this was pre- Stonewall. But one must follow it with the observation that it was also pre-Matachine Society — which is to say, this rhetoric is from the homosexual tradition that the Matachine Society was both to spring from and (after its radical opening years under Harry Haye) to set itself against: the Matachines, recall, would eventually seek equal rights for homosexuals under the program that claimed homosexual males could be just like other men if they tried, and that they did not have to live their lives at such an intense level of passion in their relationships with their love objects and their friends, of the sort represented by Crane’s exhortations to his friend Loveman. It is the situation that defined, at the time, a distinct, homosexual male community.
In the first of his Voyages, Crane — in that most referential of introductions to that transreferential cascade of poetic rhetoric — had exhorted the young boys frisking with sand and stick and shelclass="underline"
The traditional reading certainly takes that line to refer to the boundary between innocence and sexual knowledge — and, for readers who know of Crane’s love for Opffer, specifically homosexual knowledge.
Here we are not beyond referentiality but only into the simple foothills of metaphor. The caresses not to be trusted are those that are too “lichen-faithful,” i.e., clinging, that originate from a breast “too wide,” i.e., from a breast wider than a child’s, i.e., a grown man’s (or a grown woman’s).