Off the Charts

by Ann Hulbert

  NATHALIA CRANE Credit 4

  To dip into the start of Nathalia’s twenty-four-line iambic meditation on an old book about ancient Chinese reverence for honey is to see why Leamy was disoriented:

  “The History of Honey”—by an aged mandarin,

  And I bought it for the pictures of the burnished bees therein.

  For the dainty revelations, masquerading up and down,

  For the odor of the sandalwood that talked of Chinatown.

  According to the mandarin, the Oriental bees

  Were the first to hoard their honey in the mountain cavities.

  Several couplets on, she swerves from history into a weird little flight of spirituality:

  Imprisoned in this honey, aging as the aeons wane,

  Are the souls of all the flowers, waiting to be born again:

  Every lotus, every poppy, every tulip, every rose.

  And those who sip the honey slip beyond all human woes,

  Dream again of youth’s digressions, index misty ways of joy,

  Turn unto the pagan pastimes of Confucius—as a boy.

  And she closes with a faintly titillating return to her mandarin:

  But the mandarin, he made no map, contented in old age

  To draw the clinging love scenes of the bees on every page.

  There he found an inspiration antedating all the Mings,

  And he got the ancient essence of the very sweetest things.

  If anything, such a “rhythmical, lilting production,” as Leamy described it, suggested an old-school writer—perhaps a grizzled poet with a collection of rare books and a habit of couching sexual themes in birds-and-bees style imagery. It didn’t sound like the work of a cutting-edge young modernist, experimenting with new forms and frankness. It was utterly different from the juvenile poetry then enjoying a vogue, Hilda Conkling’s bucolic free verse, which her mother, the poet Grace Conkling, wrote down as she uttered it.

  An editor of the Brooklyn Daily Times had been as astonished as Leamy was that a young girl had produced the poems he had received. One of them, “The Janitor’s Boy,” was chosen as the title piece in Nathalia’s first book, which came out in 1924. It was the work she was asked to recite for the rest of her life. The childlike poem—with a jaunty echo of “The Owl and the Pussycat” in its ballad stanzas and theme—had an undercurrent that didn’t seem entirely innocent:

  Oh I’m in love with the janitor’s boy,

  And the janitor’s boy loves me;

  He’s going to hunt for a desert isle

  In our geography.

  A desert isle with spicy trees

  Somewhere near Sheepshead Bay;

  A right nice place, just fit for two,

  Where we can live alway.

  Oh I’m in love with the janitor’s boy,

  He’s busy as he can be;

  And down in the cellar he’s making a raft

  Out of an old settee.

  He’ll carry me off, I know that he will,

  For his hair is exceedingly red;

  And the only thing that occurs to me

  Is to dutifully shiver in bed.

  The day that we sail, I shall leave this brief note,

  For my parents I hate to annoy:

  “I have flown away to an isle in the bay

  With the janitor’s red-haired boy.”

  Nathalia was dealing in fantasy, but it wasn’t the usual juvenile kind, with talking animals or fairy rings. Her themes were sex and class. And her assured way with rhyme and meter was astonishing, but disconcerting, too. Her predecessors so far, including Daisy Ashford, the terrible speller, had been quaintly unpolished when it came to form. Prowess like Nathalia’s didn’t just burble up from the unconscious—or could it?

  The Janitor’s Boy strayed from innocent female terrain, too, though much more tamely than Edna St. Vincent Millay had four years earlier, titillating readers in the dawning Jazz Age with “My candle burns at both ends,” and more. It was no surprise that Nathalia’s book provoked a gut response very different from Amy Lowell’s beautiful-natural-and-true test of genius: How unusual! How unnatural! was the tenor of the reception. No one was yet saying, How implausible! But Nathalia had critics on edge. One reviewer emphasized the “lack of childishness” in The Janitor’s Boy. “Strictly speaking, there is not a purely child-poem in the book.” Others were relieved to find intermittent silliness, as in another bee-related effort, which ended “I sat down on a bumble bee, / But I arose again; / And now I know the tenseness of / Humiliating pain.” But they, too, were taken aback by perceptions of a sort that didn’t seem associated with a child’s directness of vision or immediacy of emotion. “The work was alternately juvenile and mature, frivolous and profound, absurd and mystical,” Louis Untermeyer, one of the earliest champions of Nathalia’s genius, wrote later; “it was a mixture but not a fusion.”

  Barrie’s preface to Ashford’s novella had set a precedent of sending children’s work into the world with an expert chaperone. Nathalia’s debut had three, all awkwardly promoting her while doing their best to protect her. In his foreword, the poet and soon-to-be Saturday Review editor William Rose Benét’s assessment was in tune with Untermeyer’s view, though more stringent. He dismissed much of her work as proving “nothing except that she is a little girl with a lively fancy.” But he saw glimpses of “the thing we call poetry” in her instinct for metaphor and memorable phrasing. Above all, he was struck by the depth of Nathalia’s thought in several poems. Her repertoire extended beyond Ming culture and erotic shivers to aesthetic ruminations. Benét singled out these couplets from “The Blind Girl”:

  In the darkness who would answer for the color of a rose,

  Or the vestments of the May moth and the pilgrimage it goes?

  …

  In the darkness who would cavil at the question of a line,

  Since the darkness holds all loveliness beyond the mere design.

  “These lines and the meditation from which they spring were the spontaneous phrasing and the natural meditation of—a child of ten,” he marveled. “…Strange insight for a comparative infant!”

  Benét thought it unlikely that “she can possibly realize the philosophical implications of her best poems,” but that didn’t detract from their power. He wasn’t about to predict her future, which was also the message of Nathalia’s two other chaperones—Leamy of the New York Sun, who wrote an afterword, and a reporter who met her early on and contributed a testimonial. She was a little girl who played with her dolls and with the janitor’s boy, and who wrote when and what it pleased her to write. How refreshing in a jaded time. She should be left alone to continue to do just that, wherever it led. It was clear they were crossing their fingers.

  A year and a half later, in September 1925, shortly after Nathalia’s twelfth birthday, her second book of poems, Lava Lane, came out. This time the work stood alone, accompanied only by an advertisement that announced she had been invited to be an honorary member of the British Society of Authors, Playwrights, and Composers, presided over by Thomas Hardy. It was a distinction, her publisher claimed, shared by no other American poet since Walt Whitman. The news made headlines. So did reports that Nathalia’s father might be absconding with sizable royalties. Corrections to both soon appeared. Sales of the two books hadn’t earned anyone a fortune. And Nathalia wasn’t being specially celebrated. It turned out that Clarence Crane had merely paid the standard dues to join a group that otherwise had no admission criteria. “Looking shyly out at the world,” the Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted of Nathalia, “there was a wistful and haunting quality to the child’s face that went directly to the heart.”

  Nathalia’s publisher, Thomas Seltzer, removed the honor from ads, but by November he had a better—and accurate—claim to generate publicity: this fascinating young talent had become the post–Daisy Ashford “Literary Storm Center.” Open the new book to the title poem, and the vocabulary was already staggering: cicatrix, peris, ferneries, parasa
ngs, fane. The biblical and historical allusions piled up quickly: Bel and Balthazar, Theban pylons, lines like “I am an ancient lady / Cross-legged upon a dais / Reading of Cleopatra, / Lesbia, Phryne and Thais.” Could an eleven-year-old—whose teachers said she wasn’t remarkable, and whose parents, one article noted, hadn’t gone beyond high school—really have written these poems? The same article quoted Nathalia’s own publisher saying, “I am as much mystified as anybody. Nathalia Crane is either a miracle or she is the most colossal hoax in history.” Or perhaps there was a third alternative. “Sometimes I wonder if Nathalia Crane is not a medium.” Seltzer emphasized that he refrained from grilling this fragile girl on the sources of her more gnomic creations, for fear of making her “self-conscious.” That, all agreed, was fatal to innocence.

  The notion of Nathalia as a medium gathered momentum. Childish insight, channeled through solicitously attentive elders, had great allure. Peter Pan was proof of that. “A poet is continually trying to recapture the vision which a child has instinctively,” Untermeyer said in his romantic vein. “A child sees the world fresh. The rest of us are dull; we have lost that first freshness.” Tapping back into it purified adults. And what about the other way around—mature insight channeled through a singing girl? Untermeyer, Nathalia’s staunch defender and by now an acquaintance, endorsed the basic idea: like all children, she had inherited “the wisdom…of the race” and had the rare gift of expressing it for elders who had lost their spiritual bearings. Others were more perplexed about “how a child could absorb so much of grown-up life.”

  Nathalia, gawkier now than the slight girl whose quaint habit of curtsying had often been mentioned, was still reassuringly childlike in her inability to shed any light on her powers. Words “just come” to her was her standard line to reporters, whom she mostly avoided. Prodded about how such “big words” made their way into her poems, she curtly responded, “They always fit.” But two women from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle strode into the Cranes’ small Brooklyn Heights apartment (they had moved from Flatbush) for a fuller interrogation. What did the author of that line about roses in darkness possibly know about the physics of prisms? Nathalia at first clammed up, then countered by asking why she couldn’t have taken a rose into a dark room. The visitors raised other points, and before leaving, they posed the question perhaps foremost on their minds: “Nathalia, tell us what you know about Sex.” Nathalia was silent for a long time, then got up and went over to the poet Jean Starr Untermeyer, who was there with her husband, and cried quietly on her shoulder.

  Nathalia’s inquisitors were not the only ones who had decided that Nathalia couldn’t account for her creations because she was merely a conduit, not for unconscious insight, but for a conniving grown-up. The honorary president of the Poetry Society of America, the ancient poet Edwin Markham, suggested that “Nathalia Crane” was, as Time put it, “born upon the back of a menu card.” She was an invention cooked up by Untermeyer, Benét, perhaps the frothy novelist Faith Baldwin, and Edna St. Vincent Millay over coffee in Manhattan. They denied it. Eager to fan the commotion, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle opened its pages to other views.

  Among the most elaborate was a psychoanalytic reading by the opinionated poet and writer Clement Wood, who had weighed in earlier. He diagnosed Nathalia’s father as a Svengali figure. According to his theory, Clarence Crane’s own failure as a young poet (a book he had written at about thirty went nowhere) had inspired a sort of Oedipal rejuvenation through his daughter. Wood had the frustrated father all but dictating to Nathalia poems that unconsciously confessed to his crime of usurped creativity. A panel of experts—literary and psychological—was proposed to assess Nathalia and pronounce on the plausibility of her feats. Upon reflection, Clarence decided to spare his daughter the ordeal, which raised further doubts. All the agitation, not least Wood’s, itself cried out for a diagnosis: Which aroused more fascinated alarm, the spectacle of parasitic men or of precocious girls? In an era of feminist ferment, when flappers had their elders on edge, the Crane story tapped into both at once—never mind that Nathalia gave every sign of being a surprisingly old-fashioned daddy’s girl.

  Clarence’s semi-séances with his daughter were evidently something they both loved, but those who knew the odd man dismissed the idea that he was telling her what to write. It’s impossible to know how much of an editor he was, or needed to be. Nathalia was an enthralled audience, and she had an uncanny ear. Such a child may well need no prodding to produce lots of semiderivative work. Young Mozart began by churning out plenty of that (and Leopold, while portraying his son as divinely inspired, surely tinkered as he transcribed the boy’s earliest creations). In the realm of imaginative literature, Barrie evoked adult-child collaboration as, ultimately, a merging of visions. “The following is our way with a story,” an autobiographical narrator in one of his books explains, describing his coauthorship with a young boy. “First I tell it to him, and then he tells it to me, the understanding being that it is quite a different story; and then I retell it with his additions, and so we go on until no one could say whether it is more his story or mine.”

  In fact, that kind of intense reciprocity doesn’t seem to have been the rule in Nathalia’s Brooklyn Heights apartment, tiny and overheated though it was. (“The windows were never opened and the phonograph was never off,” Untermeyer remembered.) There was more chaos than claustrophobic, child-centered hovering. Clarence was not the “new father” type, advised by interwar experts to take conscientious note of his child’s healthy social and personal adjustment. By the standards of the time, he was an old parent, and “prematurely aged by lingering traces of gas.” He clearly lacked a psychologizing bent as he held forth, stoked by cigarettes and coffee. “The Cranes were at their best when things were most feverish,” Untermeyer wrote—the music loud, the phone ringing, Clarence declaiming about the nobility of war and the delusions of progress, Nelda yelling from the kitchen, “the parrot Sinbad screaming vituperatively.” Nathalia was soaking it all up, including the sense that you could run with any outlandish, outdated idea that might strike you.

  But she also had her own pastime, literally in the middle of it all: her favorite dictionary, which along with several others was out on the floor. A reporter once got Nathalia talking, and she revealed a little about the world she found there. “I read them for hours,” she said:

  They have so many fine words I never heard before; words that make me want to know them and love them. Yes, I love words, sweet words and noble words, too, because each word has a soul. How do I know that? Why, I just feel it. They come to me and I get to know them, like precious friends.

  She was like a stamp collector, a jigsaw puzzle adept, only with words. Those were Untermeyer’s analogies, and a more stereotypically girlish hobby might shed light, too. Words were partly a kind of dollhouse play, impelling her to make up stories, set in different eras, which entailed rearranging the furniture to go with particular rhythms. New words inspired new tales and new settings, incorporating things her father spouted, which she then explored in her encyclopedia, packed with yet more unfamiliar words. The possibilities must have seemed endless, and at nine she got immersed. Clarence was around, and Nathalia was doubtless pleased that he was entranced. But he also knew better than to interrupt her when she was beating out her lines.

  The press storm died down without a consensus on girl genius but with Nathalia on a new private school path. During the turmoil of the fall, the principal of the Brooklyn Heights Seminary awarded her a recently endowed scholarship to the progressive institution. Her new benefactors judged it an ideal setting for “this gifted girl” because it was “in type the smaller modern school that devotes itself to the full development of the individual student.” The educational landscape had evolved since Nathalia’s prodigy predecessors had coped with bumpy improvisations—early intensity for the Boston boys, catch-up tutelage for Henry Cowell, in-and-out-of-school irregularity for them all. Carefully paced progress, under enlighte
ned auspices, was a new ideal, at least for the lucky few who could afford it. Such an alternative seemed especially timely for a girl whose creative powers had been deemed a little outré.

  Untermeyer had worried about the encroachments of poets, publishers, and professors as child writers matured. But earlier incursions by the press hadn’t occurred to him, nor had invitations from solicitous private schools, where the whole point was for the young to be “moulded by well-meaning teachers.” That was just the domesticating of untamed talent he prided himself on warning against. On the brink of adolescence, Nathalia certainly did receive a big dose of attention, and she was becoming a more self-conscious, ambitious writer. Then again, of course she was. She was getting older, and her dealings with Untermeyer (who didn’t think to add anthologists to his list of influences to beware of) revealed a writer who was trying with surprising self-assurance to hold her own with her elders.

  When he included some of her poems in his 1925 revision of his Modern American Poetry, tinkering with the last line of one of them without telling her, Nathalia responded like a pro. First she flattered him and his wife, whose own “wonderful” poems also made it into the collection. Then she praised his presumptuous editing, doing her best to claim ownership. She sounded, at twelve, like a fellow seasoned critic. “But Oh, you are so cunning in verse making,” she wrote. “You know very well what it was—you knocked out two foolish words in the last line of The Blind Girl and put in the winged things and made it right….The ‘better things’ sounded like a prayer meeting,” she said, with a wry dig at her own sentimentality. “Sir Louis,” as she sometimes addressed him, had made the hackneyed into something haunting: