Longer Views: Extended Essays

by Samuel R. Delany

  SERENADE IN GREY

  Folding eyelid of the dew doth set

  The cover remains in the air,

  And it rains, the street one color set,

  Like a huge gray cat held bare

  5

  The shadows of light—shadows in shade

  Are evenly felt—though parted thus

  Mine eyes feel dim and scorched from grey

  The neighboring lamps throw grey-stained gold

  Houses in the distance like mountains seen

  10

  The bridge lost in the mist

  The essence of life remains a screen

  Life itself in many grey spots

  That trickle the blood until it rots

  A good sized box with windows set

  15

  Seems like a tufted grey creature alive

  Smoothly sails o’er the ground

  Like the earth invisible in change doth strive

  Black spots, that rove here and there

  Scurry off—float into the cover

  20

  Spot of gray—were close together

  When color mixes its choice, a lover.

  SBG 1914

  Now, Fisher’s Plowshare version—with Fisher’s “slight” changes of “a word or an expression”:

  IV SERENADE IN GREY.

  The soft eyelid of the dew doth set,

  Yet the cover remains in the air,

  And it rains; the street one color set,

  Like a huge grey cat, out there.

  5

  The shadows in light, the shadows in shade,

  Are evenly felt, though parted thus.

  My eyes feel dim and weak from the grey,

  And the nearby lamps throw gold-stained dust.

  Houses in the distance like mountains seem,

  10

  The Bridge is lost in the mist,

  And life itself is a warm grey dream

  Whose meaning no one knows, I wist!

  A long black box within a window bound

  Seems like a furry creature alive,

  15

  And is, as it smoothly glides o’er the ground,

  Like the earth which in viewless change doth strive.

  Black spots, that flit here and there,

  Scurry off—disappear in the cover.

  Two spots of grey—were close together,

  20

  When color mixes to choice—behold a lover!

  (The McManis and Holden version of 1947 is somewhere in between my transcription and Fisher’s emendation, though it does not alter any of Greenberg’s actual words—only punctuation marks.) The sort of “fix-up” Fisher imposes (if not McManis and Holden) is out of favor today—though Emily Dickinson suffered similar “corrections” practically until the three-volume variorum edition of her complete poems in 1955. What is notable about Fisher’s emendations is that, while here and there a comma may, indeed, clarify Greenberg’s initial intentions, the general thrust of his changes is to take the highlight off the word as rhetorical object and to foreground, rather, coherent meaning.

  All poetry—good and bad—tends to exist within the tensional field created by two historic propositions:

  As Michael Riffaterre expresses the one, on the first page of his 1978 study The Semiotics of Poetry: “The language of poetry differs from common linguistic usage—this much the most unsophisticated reader senses instinctively . . . poetry often employs words excluded from common usage and has its own special grammar, even a grammar not valid beyond the narrow compass of a given poem . . .”

  The opposing principle for poetry has seldom been better put than by Wordsworth, writing of his own project in the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Pastoral, and Other Poems” in the 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads: “. . . to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as possible, in a selection of language really used by men . . .”

  Now, in the very same sentence in which he upholds the difference between poetic and ordinary language, Riffaterre goes on to remind us that “. . . it may also happen that poetry uses the same words and the same grammar as everyday language.” And on the other side of a semicolon, in the same sentence in which he extols the “language really used by men,” Wordsworth reminds us that poetry tries, for its goal, “at the same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way . . .” Presumably this secondary task is accomplished by unusual language.

  The question then is not which is right and which is wrong, but which is primary and which is secondary—and how primary and how secondary. At various times over the last two hundred years the perceived relation between them has changed. The ministrations of a Fisher (in the case of Greenberg) during the late teens of the century currently ending, or of a Higginson (an early editor of Dickinson) during the ’90s of the previous century, merely document where the tensions between them had stabilized at a given moment.

  The archaic forms, the inversions, as well as the specialized vocabulary were, in the first third of the twentieth century, simply part of poetry’s specialized language. And although they would be almost wholly abandoned by poets during the twentieth century’s second half, even a high modernist such as Pound was using them as late as The Pizan Cantos (1948): “What though lov’st well remains.” “Pull down thy vanity!”—though, after that, even in the Cantos, they pretty much vanish.

  As written, Greenberg’s “Serenade” gives the effect of an observation so exact that, now and again, because of his strict fidelity to the observation process, we cannot tell what is being observed; this effect is as much a result of the poem’s incoherencies—where we cannot follow the word to its referent—as it is of those places where the conjunction of word with referent seems striking. In Fisher’s revision, things run much more smoothly—and, I suspect for most modern readers, much less interestingly. Violences at both the level of the signifier (e.g., “mine eyes feel dim and scorched from grey”) and of the signified (e.g., the rotting blood) are repressed—and with them, the sense of rigor cleaving to whatever writing process produced the poem. Both Fisher and Holden/McManis strive to clear up the ambiguity of the antecedent of “though parted thus”—though, under sway of Empson (Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1935), the modern reader is likely to count that ambiguity among the poem’s precise pleasures: Is it the shadows of light and shadows in shade that are parted . . . or the eyes? Greenberg’s undoctored text (or less doctored text: even letter-by-letter, point-by-point transcription involves judgments; and who can say what doctoring Greenberg himself would have approved had he been able to see his poems through the ordinary channels of copy-editing and galley correction usually preceding print) generates a sense that, for all the strained rhymes and inversions, that process is one of intense energy, rigor, and commitment. This vanishes—or at least becomes much less forceful—after Fisher’s changes.

  When, after their conversation that winter night in Woodstock, Crane came to make his own transcriptions of Greenberg’s poems, what’s important to remember is that Crane went back to Greenberg’s actual notebooks, the ones loaned him by Fisher, and thus to Greenberg’s exacting and difficult originals—not to Fisher’s Plowshare revisions. Given the development of Crane’s own poetics, as well as Crane’s influence on the poetic development of the times to come after him, this is meaningful.

  Like most young writers—like many young readers—Crane had already encountered a number of writerly enthusiasms: Nietzsche, Wilde, Rimbaud . . . all of whom had left their marks on his poetry, all of whom had raised questions for the young poet that set his work in interesting tension with theirs. But Greenberg was particularly important—because in many ways he seemed Crane’s own discovery, and because the fact that he had been ignored by the greater literary world despite his undeniable verbal energy and poetic vigor made it easy for the then all but unknown Crane to sympathize and identify.


  Back in New York City in 1924, after a precarious January and February between 45 Grove Street, 15 Van Nest Place (now Charles Street), and the Albert Hotel on University Place and 10th Street, all in Greenwich Village, Crane finally got another job as a copywriter at Sweet’s Catalogue Service, where he worked with Malcolm Cowley.

  At the end of the second week of April Crane moved into 110 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn, into a room on the third floor—and, in the course of it, consummated a recently begun affair with a Danish sailor, three years his senior, Emil Opffer (April 26, 1897–19-?), a sometime communications officer and sometime ship’s printer. Goldilocks was Crane’s sometime nickname for him (and sometimes Phoebus Apollo); Crane’s own sexual nom d’amour was occasionally Mike Drayton. 110 was Emil’s father’s building. A one-time seaman like his son, and now editor of Brooklyn’s Danish-American paper, Nordlyset, Emil, Sr., lived there too.

  The relationship began in blissful happiness for both men. Probably during the first two weeks of September 1924, while Emil, Jr., was away on a voyage, Emil, Sr., went into the hospital for an operation, during which—or just after which—he died. On Emil’s return from sea, Hart and Emil’s brother Ivan met Emil at the dock, broke the news, and took the disconsolate young man home. Now Hart and Emil took over the father’s old room, Hart again working on his poetry. Emil went back to sea on another voyage . . .

  Eventually the relationship devolved into jealousies, finally to break up and resettle into a more or less distant friendship, that continued until 1930—the last time the two men saw one another. I quote at some length Crane’s close friend, Samuel Loveman, who, in his seventies, wrote this account of the relationship (two years before Stonewall, by the bye) in his introduction to the young critic Hunce Voelker’s impressionistic 1967 study, The Hart Crane Voyages:

  [Crane] urged me to come to New York. “I want you to live near me,” he said. “Brooklyn Heights is one of the loveliest places in the whole world. Imagine, the panorama incessantly before one’s eyes—a glorification of beauty with the New York skyline always before one, Brooklyn Bridge, ships that come and go by day and night—and sailors. You will never care to live elsewhere, and wherever I may be I shall always return to you.”

  He continued to disclose his happiness. “I have met a young man, a seaman, at Fitzi’s [Eleanor Fitzgerald, director of the Provincetown Playhouse], and I realize for the first time what love must have meant to the Greeks when one reads Plato. He’s a Scandinavian and extremely handsome, yellow-haired and blue-eyed—a real human being. I believe my love is returned. He’s at sea now; you must meet him when his voyage is over. I’ll never come back to Cleveland. If mother wants to see me let her visit me in New York. For the first time in my life I’m utterly free from the ghastly family bondage and the internal squabbles between Mother and Father. Their divorce seems to have made no difference. Money and me seem to be the sole crux of their dissension. I’ll be out of it for good.”

  I met Hart’s “Greek” ideal on his return from the voyage, and he answered his description—an extremely well-coordinated and attractive youngster, certainly prepossessing but outwardly unemotional, and since Hart was inwardly a veritable cauldron of conflict, I felt that this balance in their friendship was sufficiently warranted. I continued to see him day after day; his later acceleration in drinking was not then present and his sexual promiscuity apparently absent. He had acquired what he claimed to be the first copy of Ulysses ever to reach America, smuggled in by a friend [Gorham Munson], and bored me interminably by his insistence on reading it to me aloud. Spirited and certainly assertive on occasions of ordinary conversation, Hart’s recitals abutted into a kind of clergical drone. He, on his part, assailed my own way of reading.

  Then, the inevitable happened. His friend returning unexpectedly one evening to their apartment at 110 Columbia Heights, encountered Hart’s stupid betrayal. There was no explosion, except Hart’s ineffectual hammering protestations and attempt at an explanation—then silence. The friendship was resumed; their love never.

  Yet in this fulmination of love and disaster, there emerged the creation of Hart’s Voyages—poetry as passionate and authentic as any love-poetry in literature. Whether it be addressed to normal or abnormal sexuality matters little. There is nothing to be compared with it, excepting possibly in the pitifully extant fragments of Sappho, the Sonnets of Shakespeare, John Donne’s love poems, or Emily Bronte’s burning exhortations to an unknown lover. Compared with it, Mrs. Browning’s much-belauded saccharine and over-burdened “Portuguese” sonnets, are sentimental valentines. In his Voyages, stripped of the verbiage that emphasized so much of Hart’s poetry at its weakest, and which is transparently present in many passages of The Bridge, the poet of Voyages becomes blazingly clairvoyant and achieves astonishing profundity. Voyages is a classic in English literature.

  After the breakup recounted above, Hart returned to Cleveland over Christmas of 1924 to visit his mother—after which he again took up a peripatetic existence.

  The eldest of the three young men by a handful of years, Loveman had first met Crane more than half a dozen years before in a Cleveland bookstore. An aspiring poet himself, he had just been released from the army, and the teenaged Crane was enthusiastically looking for books. Whether they were lovers, even briefly, is hard to say. But their friendship continued on and off throughout Crane’s life: Loveman claimed to have received a letter from Crane only two weeks before the poet’s suicide in April of ’33.

  Most of us today will recognize that Loveman was writing out of a tradition within which the term “American Literature” was much rarer than it is today. Because Americans wrote in English, their works—especially if important—were considered, at least by Americans of a certain aesthetic leaning, to be part of “English Literature.” The three other things that the contemporary reader is likely to find somewhat anomalous in Loveman’s account—things that the reader may wonder how they fit into the narrative—are, first, the extraordinary passion with which Crane entreats this gay friend—who is, after all, not (at least then) his lover—to be with him; second, the seemingly gratuitous sexism of the swipe at Elizabeth Barrett Browning; and, third, that “verbiage” which characterizes “Hart’s poetry at its weakest” and which Loveman says must be stripped away to reveal the achievement and clairvoyance of the great love lyrics. Bear all three in mind: all three will be contextualized, in their place, as we proceed through these notes.

  Crane’s enthusiasm over the then-illegal Ulysses suggests an elucidation of an allusion in “Voyages II,” the next to the last completed poem in the lyric series, that he would have been working on during the time Loveman writes of, or a few months after. (Though the series is clearly a love series, they seem to project—in critic R. W. Butterfield’s words—an air of “searing loneliness,” while the poet’s seafaring lover is away.) “Voyages II,” which opens with that extraordinarily scaler inversion, in which the sea is referred to as “—And yet this great wink of eternity . . .” (That “—And yet,” functions much like the “Autar epie” at the beginning of the Odyssey’s Book Lambda, which, translated, became the “And then” opening the first of Pound’s Cantos) has sustained the most concerted exegesis of all the Voyages. A. Alvarez claims Crane’s poem to be all affect and devoid of referential meaning—which, to the extent it’s true, only seems to spur the exegetes on. Critics Butterfield and Brunner have suggested that Greenberg’s sea images in poems like “Love” (“Ah ye mighty caves of the sea, there pushed onward, / In windful waves, of volumes flow / Through Rhines—there Bacchus, Venus in lust cherished / Its swell of perfect ease, repeated awe—ne’er quenched,” is the sonnet’s first quatrain, as transcribed by Crane in his manuscript copy. Returning to Greenberg’s manuscript, Holden and McManis read the punctuation notably otherwise) possibly nudged Crane to connect the idea of love and the sea in a poetic series—not withstanding the fact Crane’s current love was a sailor, or the fact of Crane’s general
fascination with “seafood,” or his recent reading of Melville. The first stanza of “Voyages II” employs the idiosyncratic word “wrapt”—which also appears in “Atlantis”—suggesting a kind of Greenbergian term halfway between “wrapped” and “rapt.” In earlier drafts of the poem, Crane used the phrase “varnished lily grove” from Greenberg’s sonnet, “Life,” though he eventually revised it out. Philip Horton has told us, in his biography of Crane, that the “bells off San Salvador” in the third stanza (“And onward, as bells off San Salvador / Salute the crocus lustres of the stars / In those poinsetta meadows of her tides,—/ Adagios of islands, O My Prodigal, / Complete the dark confessions her veins spell”) refer to a Caribbean myth Opffer had recounted to Crane about a sunken city whose drowned church towers, during storms, sounded their bells from beneath the waters to warn passing ships.