Longer Views: Extended Essays

by Samuel R. Delany

  * 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:

  Gone now, the carvern work! Ruined, the golden shrine!

  No more the glorious organs pour their voice divine;

  No more rich frankincense drifts through the Holy Place:

  Now from the broken tower, what solemn bell still tolls,

  Mourning what piteous death? Answer, O saddened souls!

  Who mourn the death of beauty and the death of grace.

  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.

  Besides knowing Samuel for the last seven years of the young poet’s life, Fisher had known Morris and Daniel; and he had certainly known of, if he had not actually met, Adolf—which is to say, specific dates aside, Fisher knew pretty much everything my own tale recounts. Only four-and-a-half months after the night that Fisher and Crane had sat up late in Woodstock talking about the tragic poet, Crane might well have remembered all the facts of Greenberg’s life he tells in Atlantis: Model 1924. The misunderstandings and lacunae in Crane’s knowledge, which—in the tale—I’ve made nothing of, could easily have been the result of drink and the random order of anecdotes around that December night’s fire; or even the momentary pressure of a next day’s quickly written letter. Why perpetuate them?

  In that spirit, I mention: In his transcript of Greenberg’s poem “Words,” in the 13th line Crane typed “most” for “must.” I’ve just assumed that in reading it over Crane recognized his error. In Atlantis: Model 1924 he quotes the poem correctly.

  This study grew—as did, indeed, my novel—out of an observation my father several times made to me while I was a teenager: As late as 1924, just after he first came from Raleigh, North Carolina, to New York City—and shortly thereafter took his first walk across the Brooklyn Bridge—Brooklyn was nowhere near as built up as it is today. Though, indeed, there were clusters of houses here and there, especially toward the water, my then-seventeen-year-old father was surprised, even somewhat appalled, that the road leading from the Bridge in those days decanted among meadows and by a cornfield: he was both surprised and appalled enough to mention it to me, with a self-deprecating laugh at his own astonishment at the time, some thirty-five years later.

  The fields—and the corn—are both there (in the seventh and ninth stanzas) in Crane’s “Atlantis.”

  But there is much more.

  The bedlamite from the “Proem” (transfigured first into our superbly articulate Columbus, then, after myriad further changes, into the incoherent, aged sailor of “Cutty Sark”) is, in “Atlantis,” again aloft among the bridge lines, now as “Jason! hesting Shout!” (To “hest,” the OED suggests, from hātan—to call upon—is to “bid, command . . . vow, promise . . . will, propose,” or “determine . . .”—all of them obsolete.) The bridge in “Atlantis” spans a world as drenched in language as it is in moonlight: Cables whisper. Voices flicker. An arc calls. History has myriad mouths that pour forth a reply. Ships cry. Oceans answer. Spars hum. Spears laugh (though no traveler, searching that laughter, reads the “cipher-script of time” linked to it). Hammers whisper. Aeons cry. Beams yell. A choir translates. Sun and water fuse Verbs. And the many twain sing—for over all is song. But Crane’s poem limns a world where not only the Poet, but almost every element of it, can apostrophize—can directly address—every other.

  The “cordage” is there, from “Voyages I” (as well as a “Tall Vision-of-the-Voyage, tensely spare”), but this time “spiring” rather than “spry.”

  The one hitch in this articulating web is that the Bridge cannot speak directly to Love. But Love’s white flower—the Anemone (first cousin to Novalis’s blue amaranthus)—is the “Answerer” of all. Crane’s final exhortation to the Anemone, which seems to sit apposite to (and is surely a metaphor for) Atlantis itself, is to “hold—(O Thou whose radiance doth inherit me) Atlantis,—hold thy floating singer late!” Atlantis, hold the poet’s floating attention late into the moon-drenched night. As well, hold him up as he floats on the turbulent waters, the chaos of language, beneath (that will finally receive everything of and from) the Bridge. The terminal question that the poem asks recalls the question that the title—with the poem following it—created (recall it: “What is ‘Atlantis’?”): To what does this Bridge of Fire lead?

  Since what the Choir translates the web of articulation into is a “Psalm of Cathay,” many commentators have assumed Crane’s question is rhetorical and, as such, the answer is a fairly unconsidered, “Yes, of course . . .”

  Often I have felt, however, as though, retrievable from the whisperings referred to by the poem’s final sentence with its twin inversions (“Whispers antiphonal in azure swing” / “Antiphonal whispers swing in azure”), Crane all but exhorts us to construct some terminal antiphon of our own:

  No, friend: It is Atlantis that I sing.

  The reader who can carefully architect an argument leading to such a terminus, above the liquid shift and flicker of Crane’s rhetorical suspensions and spumings, has probably had an experience of the poem . . . that masters, that comprehends, that controls it? No, friend. Only one that is, likely, somewhat like mine.

  But to articulate such a line in all its inescapable, referential banality is to close off the poem in precisely the way Crane wanted it left open. That openness—one is allowed into it (the Absolute) or not, at one’s choice—is a fundamental
, if not the fundamental, aspect of Crane’s implied city, of Dreadful Night, of Dis or New Jerusalem, of God.

  —Amherst / Ann Arbor / New York

  November 1992–October 1993

  Works Consulted

  Blackmur, R. P., “New Thresholds, New Anatomies: Notes on a Text by Hart Crane,” in Language as Gesture, by R. P. Blackmur, Harcourt Brace and Company: New York, 1952.

  Bloom, Harold, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism, Oxford University Press: New York, 1982.

  ———,“Hart Crane’s Gnosis,” in Hart Crane: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Allen Trachtenberg, Prentice-Hall: Englewood Cliffs, 1982.

  Brown, Susan Jenkins, Robber Rocks: Letters and Memories of Hart Crane, 1923–1932, Wesleyan University Press: Middletown, 1969.

  Brunner, Edward, Splendid Failure: The Making of The Bridge, University of Illinois Press: Urbana and Chicago, 1985.

  Butterfield, R. W., The Broken Arc: A Study of Hart Crane, Oliver and Boyd Ltd.: Edinburgh, 1969.

  Clark, David R., ed., Critical Essays on Hart Crane, G. K. Hall and Co.: Boston, 1982.

  ———, ed., The Merrill Studies in The Bridge, Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company: Columbus, 1970.

  Crane, Hart, The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, ed. with an Introduction and Notes by Brom Weber, Anchor Books, Doubleday and Company: Garden City, New York, 1966.

  ———, The Letters of Hart Crane 1916–1932, ed. Brom Weber (Copyright 1952, by Brom Weber), University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965.

  ———, The Poems of Hart Crane, ed. Marc Simon, Liveright Publishing Corporation: New York, 1986. (Reissued as The Complete Poems of Hart Crane in 1989.)

  Dembo, L. S., Crane’s Sanskrit Charge: A Study of The Bridge, Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1960.

  Dowson, Ernest, The Poems of Ernest Dowson, With a Memoir by Arthur Symons, John Lane Company: New York, 1919.

  Drew, Elizabeth, Poetry: A Modern Guide to Its Understanding and Enjoyment, Dell Publishing Co., Inc.: New York, 1959.

  Edelman, Lee, Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane’s Anatomy and Rhetoric of Desire, Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1987.

  Eliot, T. S., “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in Selected Poems, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.: New York, 1936.

  ———, “The Waste Land,” in Selected Poems, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.: New York: 1936.

  ———, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. with an Introduction by Frank Kermode, Harcourt Brace & World: New York, 1936.

  (Fisher), William Murrell, “Fragments of a Broken Lyre, A Note on a dead and unpublished poet, With ten selected poems following,” The Plowshare, January 1920 (Woodstock, 1920).

  Gilbert, Stewart, James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study (first published 1930), Vintage Books: New York, 1955.

  Giles, Paul, Hart Crane: The Contexts of The Bridge, Cambridge University Press: New York, 1986.

  Greenberg, Samuel, Poems by Samuel Greenberg: A Selection from the Manuscripts, edited with an Introduction by Harold Holden and Jack McManis, Preface by Allen Tate, Henry Holt and Company: New York, 1947.

  Hammer, Langdon, Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism, Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1993.

  Hazo, Samuel, Smithereened Apart: A Critique of Hart Crane, Ohio University Press: Athens, 1963.

  Horton, Philip, Hart Crane: The Life of an American Poet, The Viking Press, Inc.: New York, 1937.

  Johnson, Lionel Pigot, The Collected Poems of Lionel Johnson, Second and Revised Edition, ed. Ian Fletcher, Garland Publishing, Inc.: New York, 1982.

  Joyce, James, Ulysses (First published in the U.S., 1934), Vintage Books: New York, 1961.

  Kerman, Cynthia Earl, & Richard Eldridge, A Hunger for Wholeness: The Lives of Jean Toomer, Louisiana State University Press: Baton Rouge, 1987.

  Laughlin, James, Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts: A Selection from the Work of Samuel B. Greenberg, edited and with a commentary by. New Directions: Norfolk, 1939.

  Lewis, R. W. B., The Poetry of Hart Crane: A Critical Study, Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1967.

  Lewis, Thomas S. W., ed., Letters of Hart Crane and His Family, Columbia University Press: New York, 1974.

  Loveman, Samuel, “Introduction,” The Hart Crane Voyages, by Hunce Voelcker, The Brownstone Press: New York, 1967.

  ———, “A Conversation with Samuel Loveman,” Hart Crane: A Conversation with Samuel Loveman, eds. Jay Socin and Kirby Congdon, Interim Books: New York, 1963.

  McKay, Nellie Y., Jean Toomer, Artist: A Study of His Literary Life and Work, 1894–1936, The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1984.

  Nilsen, Helge Normann, “Memories of Hart Crane: A Talk with Emil Opffer,” Hart Crane Newsletter, Vol. II, No. 1, Summer 1978.

  Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen, trans. Palmer Hilty, Frederick Unger Publishing Company, Inc.: New York, 1964.

  ———, Hymns to the Night, trans. Dick Higgins, McPherson & Company: Kingston, 1988.

  ———, Pollen and Fragments, trans. Arthur Versluis, Phane Press: Grand Rapids, 1989.

  Ouspensky, P. D., Tertium Organum: A Key to the Enigmas of the World, Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1922.

  Parkinson, Thomas, Hart Crane and Yvor Winters: Their Literary Correspondence, University of California Press: Berkeley, 1978.

  Poe, Edgar Allan, “Drake and Halleck,” Edgar Allan Poe: Representative Selections, with Introduction, Bibliography, and Notes, eds. Margaret Alterton and Hardin Craig, American Book Company: New York, 1935.

  Riffaterre, Michael, Semiotics of Poetry, Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1978.

  Salt, Harry S., The Life of James Thomson (“B.V.”, author of “The City of Dreadful Night”), Arthur C. Fifield: London, 1905.

  Schaefer, William David, James Thomson (B.V.), Beyond “The City,” University of California Press: Berkeley, 1965.

  Shaw, George Bernard, The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Neibelung’s Ring (first published 1898), Dover Publications, Inc: New York, 1967.

  Simon, Marc, Samuel Greenberg, Hart Crane, and the Lost Manuscripts, Humanities Press: Atlantic Highlands, 1978.

  Socin, Jay, & Kirby Congdon, eds., Hart Crane: A Conversation with Samuel Loveman, Interim Books: New York, 1963.

  Sugg, Richard P., Hart Crane’s The Bridge: A Description of Its Life, The University of Alabama Press: Tuscaloosa, 1976.

  Thomson, James, The Poetical Works of James Thomson (B.V.), ed. Bertram Dobell, 2 Vols., London, 1895.

  ———, The Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery: Selected Prose of James Thomson (B.V.), ed. William David Schaefer, University of California Press: Berkeley, 1967.

  Toomer, Jean, Cane (first published by Boni & Liveright, 1923), ed. Darwin Turnder, W. W. Norton: New York, 1988.

  Unterecker, John, Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 1969.

  ———, “The Architecture of The Bridge,” The Merrill Studies in The Bridge, ed. David R. Clark, Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company: Columbus, 1970.

  Voelcker, Hunce, The Hart Crane Voyages, with an “Introduction” by Samuel Loveman, The Brownstone Press: New York, 1967.

  Weber, Brom, Hart Crane: A Biographical and Critical Study, The Bodley Press: New York, 1948.

  Winters, Yvor, “The Significance of The Bridge, by Hart Crane, or What Are We to Think of Professor X,” On Modern Poets, New Directions: New York, 1943.

  Wordsworth, William, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” The Selected Poetry and Prose of Wordsworth, ed. Geoffrey Hartman, New American Library: New York, 1970.

  Yingling, E. Thomas, Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text: New Thresholds, New Anatomies, The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1990.

  * Herbert A. Leibowitz noted the recall of Ulysses’s “Floating Flower” in “Voyages II” in Hart Crane: An Introduction to the Poetry (Columbia University Press: New York, 1968, p. 100); but I
learned of it only after this book was in production.

  * Crane also supplies his range of titles: Tennessee Williams’s play Summer and Smoke takes its title from Crane’s poem “Emblems of Conduct” (indeed from the only three lines in the poem Crane apparently did not take from Greenberg); the title for Agnes de Mille’s ballet Appalachian Spring comes from, appropriately enough, Crane’s “The Dance”; Jim Morrison of The Doors took the title of his song “Riders on the Storm" from Crane’s “Praise for an Urn”; and Harold Bloom’s study of romantic poetry, The Visionary Company, takes its title from Crane’s last poem, “The Broken Tower.”

  Appendix

  Shadows

  Criticism of science fiction cannot possibly look like the criticism we are used to. It will—perforce—employ an aesthetic in which the elegance, rigorousness, and systematic coherence of explicit ideas is of great importance. It will therefore appear to stray into all sorts of extraliterary fields, metaphysics, politics, philosophy, physics, biology, psychology, topology, mathematics, history, and so on. The relation of foreground and background that we are used to after a century and a half of realism will not obtain. Indeed they may be reversed. Science-fiction criticism will discover themes and structures . . . which may seem recondite, extraliterary, or plain ridiculous. Themes we customarily regard as emotionally neutral will be charged with emotion. Traditionally human concerns will be absent; protagonists may be all but unrecognizable as such. What in other fiction would be marvelous will here be merely accurate or plain; what in other fiction would be ordinary or mundane will here be astonishing, complex, wonderful. . . For example, allusions to the death of God will be trivial jokes, while metaphors involving the differences between telephone switchboards and radio stations will be poignantly tragic. Stories ostensibly about persons will really be about topology. Erotics will be intercranial, mechanical (literally), and moving.