It’s oddly paradoxical that if one looks at Toomer’s all but inconsequential post-Cane writing, it might seem as though Toomer had turned to study, if not at Gurdjieff’s knee, then at Winters’s — though Kenneth Walker, in his study Gurdjieff’s Teaching (London: Jonathan Cape, 1957) writes of Gurdjieff’s conception of art: “I measure the merit of art by its consciousness, you by its unconsciousness. A work of objective art is a book which transmits the artist’s ideas not directly through words or signs or hieroglyphics but through feelings which he evokes in the beholder consciously and with full knowledge of what he is doing and why he is doing it.” Pursuing that “full knowledge,” Toomer — as did Winters, pursuing his own esthetic program — apparently purged himself of the verbal liveliness which, today, is the principal entrance through which one apprehends the pleasure in his writing; though by the time he broke with Crane, of course, Winters may not have been aware of Toomer’s existence.
By then many had forgotten it.
But while one is clamoring for the Crane/Toomer letters, what of Crane’s letters to Wilbur Underwood, Crane’s older gay friend in Washington, D.C., of which we have had only snippets, accompanied by vague editorial suggestions that their subject matter is wholly beyond the pale? Such innuendo is certainly more damaging than any actual human activity possibly recounted could be.
Finally, just as we need an edition of Crane’s poems with an apparatus that takes in the needs of actual poetry readers, we need a complete letters. (I am not the first person to make the favorable comparison between Crane’s letters and Keats’s.) Nor would it be a bad idea to put together a collection of letters and papers from The Crane Circle on the model of Hyder Edward Rollins’s famous and rewarding 1948 paired volumes around Keats.
Samuel Bernhard Greenberg’s notebooks, papers, and drawings are currently in the Fales Collection at New York University. Edited by Harold Holden and Jack McManis, with a preface by Allen Tate, a hundred-seventeen page selection, Poems by Samuel Greenberg, was published by Henry Holt and Company (New York, 1947).
Crane’s manuscripts, letters, and papers are largely stored at Columbia University.
There are three full biographies of Crane and currently four volumes of letters generally available. Philip Horton published his Hart Crane: The Life of an American Poet in 1937. Brom Weber published his fine, if somewhat eccentric, biographical study of Crane and his work, Hart Crane: A Biographical and Critical Study, in 1948. (Both Crane’s birth- and death-dates are mentioned only in footnotes — added, in galleys, at editor Loveman’s firm suggestion.) Weber also edited The Letters of Hart Crane, 1916–1932 (largely those of literary interest) in 1952 and, as mentioned, The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane in 1966. Thomas S. W. Lewis edited Letters of Hart Crane and His Family in 1974, a book nearly three times the thickness of Weber’s Letters and a fascinating family romance. Hart Crane and Yvor Winters: Their Literary Correspondence (1978), edited by Thomas Parkinson, is another important volume of Crane’s letters and commentary. Robber Rocks: Letters and Memories of Hart Crane, 1923–1932 (1969) by Susan Jenkins Brown (wife of William Slater Brown, formerly wife of Provincetown Playhouse director James Light) contains 39 more of Crane’s letters (there is some overlap here with Weber), as well as five auxiliary letters of the Crane circle. The volume concludes with Peggy Baird’s devastating “The Last Days of Hart Crane,” a reminiscence that makes Crane’s final completed poem, “The Broken Tower,” rise from the page and resonate (a poem whose title, if not the very idea for it, comes from “An Age of Dream,” among the most popular sonnets of Lionel Johnson, another of Crane’s adolescent enthusiasms:[36] We know the 1915 selection of Johnson with the introduction by Pound was a treasured volume in Crane’s adolescent library) — a memoir that must be supplemented, however, by Unterecker’s “Introduction” to the ’86 Simon edition of The Poems: there Unterecker prints Gertrude E. Vogt’s firsthand account of the talk on shipboard that morning and of watching from the Orizaba’s deck, with several other passengers, Crane’s actual jump from the stern to his death — in a letter that reached Unterecker only after his 1969 biography, Voyager, appeared.
Marc Simon is also the author of Samuel Greenberg, Hart Crane, and the Lost Manuscripts (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1978), an invaluable book for anyone interested in Greenberg or Crane or Greenberg’s literary loans to Crane — and of which I have made extensive use here.
And now a note for a few special readers: Though my 1995 novel Atlantis: Model 1924 is fiction, I tried to stay as close to fact as I could and still have a tale:
The lines Crane quotes in the text are an amalgam from early versions of “Atlantis,” all of which were written by July 26, 1923—the summer prior to the spring in which the recitation takes place. (Crane had spent the previous evening with his father, Clarence Arthur, who was visiting the city; he would write his mother a letter later that afternoon and would see his father again the next day.) Crane’s work method usually involved sending off copies of his just completed poems, along with letters, to Waldo Frank, Jean Toomer, Gorham Munson, or the Rychtariks. In 1926 he would take the poem up again and between January and August of that year work it far closer to the form present readers of The Bridge are familiar with. The final decision to change the title from “Finale” to “Atlantis” did not come till even later.
We know Crane had some of the Greenberg story wrong. In ’23 from Woodstock he wrote to Munson that Fisher had “nursed” Greenberg through his final illness at the paupers’ hospital — which was untrue: During Greenberg’s terminal weeks on Ward’s Island he was attended only by his family and, on his final evening, the sparse and overworked hospital staff. Crane also wrote that Fisher had “inherited” Greenberg’s notebooks through “the indifference of the boy’s relatives”—equally untrue: Morris had offered the notebooks to Fisher in the hope of getting the poems published. Samuel’s family had been as appreciative and supportive of their youngest brother’s talents as an impoverished family of Viennese Jews might be. They had always considered Samuel special.
We do not know for sure if Crane actually read either Fisher’s essay on Greenberg, “Fragments of a Broken Lyre,” in The Plowshare or the ten poems published there. (Possibly Fisher just told him about them.) While it’s certainly probable Fisher showed The Plowshare’s contents to Crane or at least talked about them, Crane does not mention them in his letters. (Nor does Marc Simon, in the reports of his interviews with Fisher on the topic before his death, recounted in Simon’s book Samuel Greenberg, Hart Crane, and the Lost Manuscripts, clear up the question.) But possibly that’s only because Fisher did not have a copy of the then four-year-old journal to give Crane to keep.
36
Johnson’s sonnet, “The Age of Dream” (the second of a pair usually published together, about an all-but-abandoned church; the first is “The Church of Dream”), concludes with the sestet: