An editor might even supply a note to the effect that Crane wrote the cycle of six Voyages as a set of meditations on Emil’s sea-trips away…
We need notes that will give us both the 1926 version of “O Carib Isle,” as well as the later 1929 version, not as a variorum exercise, but simply because they are all but distinct poems, sharing the first few and the last few lines.
We need notes to tell us when and where the poems were written, when and where they were published — and under what title when the final title is not the only one. If the situation in which a poem was written or to which it responds is known and can be explained easily and relevantly, why not note it?
Such information is far more important than notes explaining that, in “Possessions,” Weber has corrected the spelling of “raze” to “rase,” or that, in “Royal Palm,” Marc Simon has corrected the spelling of “elaphantine” to “elephantine”—the sort of note which, in the absence of the other, clutters both Weber and Simon. Nothing is wrong with such textual minutiae. And for the carefully established text, we must be grateful to Simon. This is often a Herculean labor; one praises it as such. But notes on its establishment have no place in an edition devoid of that other information; in its absence, one would have preferred the fine points covered by a “have been corrected without comment” in the editor’s “Note on the Editorial Method.”
Likewise, we are grateful for the added poetic fragments — only noting that it is precisely such fragments and incomplete efforts for which readers generally need more extensive notes.
Both Simon and Weber tell us when the poems were published — and occasionally when written and revised. Maddeningly, however, neither says in what magazines or — far more important — gives us earlier titles. But the assumption that a general poetry reader exists today who will never encounter some article on Crane that quotes a poem in part (and in some earlier form illuminating something in the poet’s development, for that’s what such articles are made of), who will then turn to such an edition to find the final form of the poem in full, is absurd. And it is more absurd to assume that a specific reader who avoids all such articles will still want to know about the poet’s — or a former typesetter’s — misspellings!
In short one wants among the notes for Crane the same sort of information that Edward Mendelson provides as “Appendix II: Variant Titles” in his W. H. Auden: Collected Poems, or that Donald Allen gives us in his notes to The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. When a writer like Pound or Eliot puts together his own collected poems, modesty perhaps excuses such omissions. But if the poet’s work is interesting enough for a second party to undertake the task, what I’ve outlined represents what should be given first priority. And as specialists will know, in no way does that constitute a specialists’ edition. But the assumption that there exists a Common Reader of poetry who comes from no place — and is going nowhere — is, besides preposterous, heuristically arrogant and pedagogically pernicious. That, however, is what Simon’s “reader’s edition” seems to presuppose.
The supplementary prose selections of letters, essays, and reviews that Weber included in his ’66 edition were immensely interesting. I should have thought Simon would have enlarged on them, rather than drop them altogether. (Even with minor poems, juvenilia, and fragments, Crane’s poetic opera omnia are just not that voluminous.) Simon might well have added some of the letters to black writer Jean Toomer that were published in part in Unterecker’s biography: one would have welcomed both the “White Buildings” letter and the “Heaven and Hell” letter — the latter of which threatens to achieve a measure of fame comparable only to Keats’s letter from Hampstead on the 21st of December, 1817, to his brothers George and Tom, on “negative capability.”
It is all too easy to see the avoidance of such notes (or the exclusion of such letters) beginning in a kind of editorial exasperation with Crane’s homosexuality. Where does one draw the line at good taste — more important, where did one draw that line in 1952, when Weber edited Crane’s letters, or in ’66, when he edited the poems? (That’s what both the “Heaven and Hell” letter and the “White Buildings” letter are, after all, about.) To raise the question is, however, immediately to consider the oddly similar suppression by all three of Crane’s major biographers of the fact that, in October 1923, Jean Toomer, after the publication of his novel Cane to critical, if not to popular, success, visited his white friend and supporter Waldo Frank (his and Crane’s mutual mentor) at Frank’s Connecticut home for the first time, whereupon Toomer fell passionately in love with Frank’s wife, educator Margaret Naumberg. The passion was mutual. Weeks later, the two had run off together, hoping to leave America for the Gurdjieff Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at the Chateau du Prieuré in Fontainbleau, France, in order to study with Georges Gurdjieff himself. Only days before Toomer’s actual arrival, however, Gurdjieff died, but Toomer remained to study with Gurdjieff’s disciples, while for months Naumberg wrote him heartfelt letters announcing her imminent arrival. In the end, however, she stayed in America.
The incident was the center of gossip in the Frank/Munson/Crane/Cowley/Toomer circle for months, if not years. But though certainly all three major biographers knew of it, neither Horton, Weber, nor Unterecker mentions it. One must go to recent biographies of Toomer to learn of it at all.
If it came to mean less to Crane once Toomer had given up writing for mysticism, the Crane/Toomer friendship was still an important one for Crane’s early poethood — through, say, 1924. Though Toomer was three years older than Crane, the two were the youngest writers in the group. And heterosexual Toomer was one of the several straight men to whom Crane was (as the post-Stonewall generation would say) out. We know of incidents in which Toomer felt ill-understood by the group — notably by Frank and by publisher Horace Liveright — because of Toomer’s racial make-up. And Crane suggests in that letter to Winters, already quoted, that homosexuality does not mean what Winters seems to think it does. With the speculations of all his friends about the topic rampant in their commentaries and memories, it is fairly certain Crane could not expect much more than superficial understanding there. Both men had reason, then, to feel themselves, however accepted, somehow still aliens in the group. It may well have brought them together. In ’37 and ’48 one can imagine biographers Horton and Weber not mentioning the Toomer/Naumberg affair from feelings of delicacy for Frank — if not for Toomer and Naumberg, all of whom were then still alive. But Toomer and Frank both died in 1967; and Unterecker’s biography appeared in ’69…