but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.
A grail of laughter? A kitten in the wilderness? I failed to quote these lines because they’re embarrassing—I don’t see why they don’t seem embarrassing to Halpern. Crane sent the poem to Chaplin, who kindly acknowledged it. Late one night, a couple of years later, a friend dragged Chaplin to the poet’s apartment. “Having learned this,” I wrote, “a hundred American poets will begin odes to Angelina Jolie.” Halpern claimed that this was “delusional,” a sign of the critic’s “self-importance.” A critic learns that no joke is so obvious someone will fail to get it, but I have it on good authority that seventy-seven American poets have now written such odes and anxiously await the results. Even so, Halpern was right that I hadn’t quoted enough Crane, nor enough of the best of Crane—sometimes a critic sees everything but the obvious, and in revising the review I have included lines from one of the most beautiful of Crane’s poems, “Voyages III.”
One reader accused me of slighting young women when I wrote that Crane made young men want to write poetry—yet I didn’t want to ignore the fact that, in my experience, his audience remains largely male. (I take this as a sign that women have less taste for gassy romantic rhetoric.) Many readers tasked me for writing too much about Crane’s life and too little about his art. Some assumed that I disapproved of his fondness for sailors. During the war, my own father was a sailor on the New York docks; had Crane survived and picked him up for some rough trade, I’d have been flattered. “How many sailors is too many?” asked one reader privately, apropos my remarks on Crane’s love life. The answer is, it’s too many when they start to beat you up.
The book under review consisted of a hundred and fifty pages of Crane’s poetry and more than five hundred pages of his letters. Unlike many poets, Crane stands revealed in biography. It’s difficult to ignore the life when you read the letters, because the messiness of daily living so often interfered with the art. Crane’s wheedling, his inflated self-opinion (wildly in advance of any real achievement), his self-pity, his difficult relations with his mother and father, his plagiarism of Samuel Greenberg—surely these lie at an interesting angle to the art, even if, in the end, we have nothing but the art by which to judge the achievement. Letters should never be taken as gospel. I have my doubts that writing poetry was quite as painful or time-consuming as Crane made it out to be—the complaints to his parents sound like the exaggerations of a young man short of cash and the complaints to his friends like the excuses of an alcoholic. Crane always knew how to play on his reader’s sympathy, at least until he got what he wanted. If the letters are unmemorable as literature, compared to those of Byron, or Coleridge, or Keats, or many another, they are riveting as the record of a striking and fame-hungry young man trying to make his way in New York.
Happy readers are all alike; every unhappy reader is unhappy in his own way. Yet I could not help but feel, knowing how infuriated I had made these lovers of Crane, that I had misunderstood the passions he still excites. There’s something in this poet (in the life as much as the art) that calls forth the protective instinct in his readers, as well as an exaggerated sense of his loss, which Mariani called “unbearably tragic.” Crane’s death was sad, but not tragic—he was the author of his fate in a way few men are, but he was no Oedipus or Hamlet. It’s not just that Crane was young, though poets who die prematurely, especially by suicide, often find readers who believe the world has done them wrong. (Though why not think that in all sorts of ways Crane and Plath did the world wrong?) If he had lived a lot longer and written a lot more, we might think much less of him.
Many readers want vision rather than poetry; cold analysis of Crane’s vague rhetoric, his naive sentiment, and his semireligious adolescent yearning is not to their taste. A reader upset by a review often invokes higher authorities, roughly in this order: his own good taste, the taste of the mob, the taste of other critics, the taste of God—and all except the taste of God were invoked by these letter writers. Crane’s prophetic zeal, his sense of his own destiny as well as that of his country (sometimes he mistook one destiny for the other), seems to give his words numinous meaning:
I feel persuaded that here are destined to be discovered certain as yet undefined spiritual quantities, perhaps a new hierarchy of faith not to be developed so completely elsewhere. And in this process I like to feel myself as a potential factor.
The poem he wanted to write was the Aeneid, to which he compared The Bridge. Some ambitions are disastrous.
The problem with taste is, yours is right and everyone else’s is ridiculous. (I once knew a poet who, no matter how kind the reviews of his work, said that every specific complaint was “wrong.”) Criticism is the exercise of taste under the guise of objective argument—the psychology of taste is such that few readers are perturbed when some mediocrity is praised, but mobs begin lighting torches when their favorites are ignored or damned. Yet criticism is surely most valuable when it argues against the grain—at least, the reader is likely to learn more from it, even if he disagrees down to his horny soles. We are forever grateful to a critic able to put into words something we have only vaguely felt. Barring that, a critic makes himself necessary to the extent that when reading him we whisper, “No! No! No!”
Critics are the sum of their biases—they begin as arbitraries and end as certainties (the course of my own criticism has sometimes been the other way round). You can’t stand that ditherer Coleridge, she can’t stand that whiner Keats, I can’t stand that dry fussbudget Wordsworth, and we all hate Shelley—poets are Rorschach tests. If there’s a negative case for Crane, it lies in all that waxy rhetoric, glossy on the outside and rotten within. Criticism, however put, can never harm Crane in the eyes of the devoted, because what such a critic despises is exactly what those readers adore.
Why make the case at all, then? Doesn’t it harm that uplifting, ennobling, transcendent thing, poetry—the poetry people need and want and deserve, the poetry that in time of war raises the downtrodden spirit, the poetry that comforts the helpless in their distress and in their trial of spirit steels the weak? I once heard an undergraduate, a stack or two over in a faceless library, say plaintively, “What are you going to do about the Jesus in my heart?” What are you going to do about the poetry in my heart? If the critic were meant to offer solace, he would have taken up a different line of work. All he can do is record his feelings for the one or two readers willing to look again at Crane—the critic’s job is not to pat the reader on the head and whisper sweet nothings in his ear.
However captious or confident a critic may be, even the lightest reading of the critical past shows that the mountains of one day may be molehills to another. Critic A and Critic B may disagree so strongly they threaten to cut each other’s windpipes. A year may pass, or a hundred; and another critic will come along and say that A was right about such and such, and B about so and so, but that taken as a whole there was not much difference between them. When I look over the early reviews of Whitman, I agree with almost every obstreperous howl and every quiet reservation, yet mostly the critics missed the point. Such recognitions keep a critic awake at night.
Postscript
This piece almost inevitably called forth letters further letters of protest, which I responded to at some length. Letters from Neil Hampton and Marjorie Perloff were published in the December 2008 issue of Poetry. The arguments of these writers will be implicit in my reply, but Perloff asked specifically what I found “hit-and-miss” in Langdon Hammer’s edition. She also claimed, in reference to my mixed feelings about Crane, that “this reviewer doesn’t care that every important American poet from Robert Lowell to the present or every major critic of the past few decades, beginning with Harold Bloom, has felt otherwise.”
I’m not sure why Neil Hampton would thin
k that I’d waste time “tackling” the “manifest prejudice” of my original review. I still believe every word of it. Since he offers the usual apologetics for Crane’s wearying and often impenetrable obscurity, I assure him that I understand the poet’s argument, or excuses, in his letter to Harriet Monroe on the “logic of metaphor.” I simply disagree with it. (Would anyone, reading Crane’s explication, have pieced out his meaning the same way?) If we took poets at their own valuation and judged them by their own methods, every scribbler would be a genius. As for the connection between Crane and Clare, they were both from the hustings, insecure about their education, and efficient autodidacts. The main difference is that Crane was mollycoddled by wealthy parents. I would be the last to condescend to John Clare, who deserved far better than he got.
If Hampton really believes the lines on Chaplin are genius, there’s no helping him:
And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.
For me, they are as hapless and tone deaf as the schmaltz about the “kitten in the wilderness” and the “moon in lonely alleys” that makes the “grail of laughter of an empty ash can.” In 1921, when Crane wrote them, Chaplin was every bit the celebrity Angelina Jolie is now. We have no equal of Chaplin; but, though Crane was awed by the Little Tramp’s art, let’s not deny it the poet was starstruck. After Waldo Frank had dragged the actor to Crane’s apartment, the young man from Ohio reported to his mother, “I was smiling into one of the most beautiful faces I ever expect to see.”
As my critics have every reason to know, a reviewer has only a limited amount of space in which to shift—in the case of the New York Times Book Review, no more than two thousand words. If I were reviewing Eliot’s poems and letters, I’d be obliged to talk about his life as well as his art—I doubt there would be room for a complete account of the structure of The Waste Land or for close readings of its lines. You wouldn’t know from Marjorie Perloff’s characterization that almost half my original review was spent on The Bridge, both the poem and its composition.
No essay of mine on the subject of Hart Crane would please Perloff; but let me answer some of her questions and, no doubt, confirm many of her suspicions. She seems to understand that many critics, once upon a time, found Crane’s rhetoric hard to bear; but then she asks questions that seem disingenuously naive. Since she asks, I find the Proem of The Bridge stuffed with the excesses of detail, some slight and some more egregious, for which Crane’s style is notorious—among the adjectives, I dislike the religious hint in the bridge’s “inviolate” curve (I like the “chained” bay waters better, as long as I think of them visually and not, as I suspect Crane preferred, “shackled”), the empty rhetoric of the movie house’s “flashing” scene, the over-richness of the “silver-paced” bridge, the melodrama of the “shrill” shirt of the suicide and the “cloud-flown” derricks, and the false piety of “speechless” in the slightly nonsensical line “A jest falls from the speechless caravan.” Among the nouns, Crane is overegging the pudding with his subway “scuttle”; his seagull’s “white rings of tumult”; the exaggeration of the “rip-tooth” of noon light and the sky’s “acetylene”; and, worst of all, his wretched “bedlamite”—is this a real madman, escaped from his “cell or loft,” or just a hapless, fed-up, crazed commuter? I’m not sure what the speechless “caravan” might be; it could be so many things (likely he means just the passing crowd)—but I’m sure Crane would have had some ingenious explanation for it.
Why go on with such dispiriting detail, or try to tease out every banality Crane tortured into verse? I’d start with the lines I once quoted, in which the dirigible, his ungainly symbol of progress (he put his money on the wrong symbol), was ludicrously addressed, “Cetus-like, O thou Dirigible, enormous Lounger / Of pendulous auroral beaches,—satellited wide / By convoy planes, moonferrets that rejoin thee / On fleeing balconies as thou dost glide.” Cetus-like Pendulous auroral beaches? Moonferrets? It’s not that these are obscure, not exactly (the whale-like dirigible lounges on the beach-like, pendulous clouds, surrounded by its convoy of planes that look like, well, moonferrets)— it’s that the rhetoric is so childish and extravagant. With Crane, you either accept such romantic goofiness, along with a host of O thou ’s and thou dost ’s, or you don’t. Alas, I’m not even keen about the symbol at the heart of the poem, the bridge itself—epic poems have been built from unlikely things, but the Brooklyn Bridge is one of the least likely.
I admire Langdon Hammer’s edition, but his notes are hit and miss—there are all sorts of references in the letters left unexplained (the “famous Stevens-35,” anyone?), though similar things are given delicate attention. Shouldn’t we be told that “Menchen” was presumably H. L. Mencken? Younger readers, at least, might need to know who Billy Sunday was. Who is Mr. Charles Brooks, whose book, There’s Pippins and Cheese to Come, Crane recommends? Or Jean Catel? Or Mr. Ely and Miss Bohn? To call Walter Camp merely a “sportswriter” rather stints on his achievements. Why not note that, when Crane pretended to write from the ship Rumrunia, he was joking? And so on. More culpably, Hammer is factually parsimonious about Crane’s borrowings from the manuscripts of Samuel Greenberg for “Emblems of Conduct” (almost entirely composed of lines and phrases from the dead young poet), and in much lesser ways for “Voyages” and other poems. Greenberg is mentioned only twice in the notes, where Hammer leaves a misleading impression about the extent of Crane’s indebtedness. Further, the editor omits the letter Crane wrote to Gorham Munson on December 20, 1923, detailing Crane’s close reading and copying from Greenberg’s notebooks.
I’m sorry if Perloff mistakes my tone as world-weary or condescending, but there’s no helping that—she manages to make even “reasonable” sound like a dirty word. I won’t apologize for mocking, a little, a poet whom so many readers blindly adore. (Had Crane’s taste run to chorus girls instead of sailors, I’d have been no less sardonic—it was the constant self-destructive indulgence that’s worth recording.) Crane was the architect of his own grand disaster. The disaster of the life didn’t ennoble the art—it was responsible for the failure of the art.
I wish Perloff had provided me with a wall chart of “every important American poet from Robert Lowell to the present” and “every major critic of the past few decades, beginning with Harold Bloom.” This is a carefully delimited list—she knows that Crane’s poems have excited hostility among critics, even very great critics, since the books were published. Perhaps I’m out of step with the critics of our day—but is there anything more deadening than a consensus? I’m bemused by a critic who thinks like a commissar, as if something must be true because at the moment everyone believes it. In a stray scan of my shelves, I could not find that two critics I admire, Christopher Ricks and Geoffrey Hill, had written much or anything about Crane (though Hill in some “improvisations” on Crane wrote, “All in all / you screwed us, Hart, you and your zany epic”—his feelings seem mixed). I must assume that Perloff is the victim of her own exaggerations.
As for American poets, Lowell adored Crane, it’s true—though the younger man was a better poet when he had purged his verse of Crane’s influence. But look at Lowell’s own generation. Randall Jarrell was supposed to write a book on Crane yet never managed to get very far. In a review of Dylan Thomas, he wrote, “[Thomas’s poems] mean much less than Crane’s—but when you consider Crane’s meanings, this is not altogether a disadvantage.” John Berryman, though influenced by Crane, said in a letter, “Crane had probably the most useless mind any poet worth mentioning has had.” In a review, he referred to the “successive logical disintegration” of Crane’s poetry. Elizabeth Bishop wrote, after finishing books of letters by Crane and Edna St. Vincent Millay, “I don’t know which is more depressing. I suppose his is, it was all over quicker—b
ut she isn’t quite so narcissistic and has some sense of humor, at least.” Of Crane’s most ambitious poem, “I went through The Bridge all very carefully again, and like it less.”
Nothing I say will convince these critics that Crane was a flawed genius, if a genius at all. I say that he wrote barrels of lovely lines and two or three poems of sustained attention and achievement, but also that he squandered his gifts, falling prey to preposterously silly phrases, heavy-handed rhetoric, sewer-pipe obscurity, and the worst kinds of sentiment—all of which a reader could forgive, if Crane had written more great poetry. What little he wrote will have to be enough, but I think it far littler than these critics who have had the kindness to write. I feel about Crane as the curate did about the rotten egg he had been served, that it was excellent in parts.
The Endless Ocean of Derek Walcott
Poets behave like conquistadors wherever they roam, picking up a new verse form, a lover, some inventive cursing, a disease. Would Byron have been Byron without Italy and Greece? What would Eliot and Pound have become without the hostility of London? Can we imagine Hart Crane without the Caribbean or Elizabeth Bishop without Rio? Derek Walcott has crossed so many borders, his poems read like a much-thumbed Baedeker. To a boy born on St. Lucia, the rhythms and intonations of English verse were a passport to the elsewhere; but they came with a burden—the language of the colonial masters was not the one caught in his ear at home. “How choose,” he wrote, “Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? / Betray them both, or give them back what they give?”
Walcott’s new Selected Poems begins with poems of disturbing self-confidence—amused, self-mocking, mildly self-hating, his youthful work is filled with language that eases itself off the tongue (if some tongues are silver, his must be platinum). A powerful maker of phrases from the start, he adopted the English of an empire that, having once painted the map red, was slowly being dismantled: the ruins of a great house, “Whose moth-like girls are mixed with candledust, / Remain to file the lizard’s dragonish claws. / The mouths of those gate cherubs shriek with stain.”
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