Longer Views (43 page)

I also remember, even more forcefully, the lines that, for me—at sixteen—sent chills racing over me and, a moment later, struck me across the bridge of my nose with a pain sharp enough to make my eyes water. It came with the lines from “Harbor Dawn” that Crane the lyricist of unspeakable love had just managed to speak:

And you beside me, blesséd now while sirens

Sing to us, stealthily weave us into day—

. . .
a forest shudders in your hair

For suddenly I realized that “you” was another man!

One should also note, however, I had all but the same bodily reaction to my first encounter—at about the same age—with Ernest Dowson's “
Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae
,” though the object there was clearly heterosexual—a female prostitute.

The point with Crane, however, was that there was a critical dialogue already in place around him, that could sustain the resonances of that response in the growing reader—whether that reader was Harold Bloom or I.

But while nearly everyone seems to have ravaged Dowson's poems for titles
*
(
Gone with the Wind, The Night Is Thine, Days of Wine and Roses, Love
and Sleep
. . .), no dialogue about the significance of Dowson, no argument over the meaning of the tradition he inhabited and developed, remains in place, save a few wistful comments by Yeats, and the bittersweet memoir by J. Arthur Symons that introduces at least one edition of Dowson's poems. What's there is a monologue, not a dialogue. And it is all too brief.

Dowson took his Latin title from the first Ode in Horace's Book IV, in which the poet, near fifty, entreats Venus/Cynara not to visit him with love: love is for the young, such as Paulus Maximus. (“But why,” he asks in the last two stanzas, “is there a tear on my face? I still remember thee in dreams, where I chase after thee, across the green, among the waves . . .”) Horace describes Venus in the Ode as a “cruel mother,” as a goddess “hard of heart”—so that there is a good deal of irony in the line Dowson has chosen for a title, signaled by the placement of “
Bonae
” as far away from its noun, “
Cynarae
,” as it can get: “
Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae
.” (“I am not such as I was under the reign of the kindly Cynara.” The “kindly Cynara” (
bonae Cynarae
) is very much “
Venus tout entière à saprois attaché
”—kindly in the sense that the Eumenides are “the kindly ones.” To praise Dowson's poem for its insight into the realities of love among the worldly, contrasted with the romantic memories of love among the innocent, is to revivify part of the dialogue about him. But though there was
once
a dialogue about Dowson, it is nearly impossible to reconstruct it from, say, the stacks of the twenty-one-story library at the University of Massachusetts—whereas the volumes debating the reputation of Crane, by comparison, practically leap from the shelves.

Another aspect of the dialogue over Crane is that at first it seems, at least to the sixteen-year-old, if not to the ten-year-old, that its questions are transparently easy to resolve. But later, we begin to notice that, even as we, like Yingling, begin to demystify some of these questions, others are revealed to be even more complex. And those questions—what are these poems about? how do they signify and continue to signify today?—invariably take us
to
the poems, not away from them.

But finally it is the dialogue created between the critically enlivened concept of “Crane-the-failure” and the elusive meaning of the poems themselves that sets critics listening intensely—in a way that almost no one today is prompted to listen to Winters or Ridge or Wheelright or Bodenheim, to name a handful of poets whom we turn to, if at all, because we are in pursuit of some insight Crane had while reviewing them, or because he mentioned something they wrote in a letter.

This is dialogue that sustains the new readers of Crane. This is the dialogue that makes old readers go back and reread him.

A reader of Yingling's book with a sense of this, gay or straight, will, after a while, be compelled to observe that however much Crane was marginalized because of his homosexuality, he's a good deal less marginal today than any number of straight male poets of his time—certainly less so than Tate or Winters. Indeed, after Eliot, Pound, and Yeats, the only poet of his era who precedes Crane in reputation is Wallace Stevens—another male homosexual poet.

As it is now, however, that part of Yingling's argument about Crane's reception is open to the counterargument that if Crane had not been the “failure” he was, he might all too easily have been nothing at all!

And that is not a good argument—which is to say it only points up the weakness in Yingling's.

Certainly it's ironic that in 1927 Winters wrote his own poetic series,
The Bare Hills
(which Crane once offered to review), all but unread today, which—though it has its delicate, minor-key beauties—performs with none of the force of Crane's work, possibly because it strives after poetry through a method insistently deaf to the processes and poetic product Winters had excoriated so in Crane. Though Crane did not review it, the reviewers of the day found
The Bare Hills
“austere.” The modern judgment would be, I suspect, if such a judgment could be said even to exist: thin.

In a letter to Winters, responding to Winters's exhortation that the poet be a “complete man,” Crane ends with a warning Winters might well have heeded: “I have neglected to say,” Crane wrote, “that I admire your general attitude, including your distrust of metaphysical or other patent methods. Watch out, though, that you don't strangulate yourself with some counter-method of your own!” For the morality of a text has to do with its use, not its intent—or, even more frequently, its lack of intent to espouse a position that a later time (sometimes only months on) has decided is more ethical than the unquestioned commonplace of an earlier moment. Would that Winters had been able to distinguish a description of a state of affairs—how language works—from a posed poetic methodology!

In a strange near-reversal at the end of his essay “The Significance of
The Bridge
by Hart Crane or What Are We to Think of Professor X?” Winters finally claims for Crane a superiority, both of intellect and poetic aperception, over a generalized “Professor X,” who is cozily in love with
Whitman and the American transcendentalists and simply blind to the dangers in their romantic program—dangers that polluted Crane's poetic enterprise and drove him through (in Winters's judgment) obscure poetry to madness and suicide. (Only a strict New England background, reasoned Winters, plus the fact that he had far less poetic talent than Crane in the first place, kept Emerson from the same disastrous ends.) Claims Winters, Crane understood these ideas in all respects except their mortal flaws and consciously pursued them as such, at least having the courage of his convictions to follow them to the end—which (says Winters) Professor X, who professes to approve them, has not.

The irony of Crane's reputation, however, is that many academic critics—descendants of Winters's Professor X—who, today, have now read their Emerson, Eliot, and Mallarmé pretty carefully and would argue hotly against Winters' reading of them, if not against his reading of Whitman, are still comfortable with the notion of Crane-as-poetic-failure: what they are blind to now is the realization that Crane's “structural failure”
is
—just like Eliot's—his modernism; as it is his continuity with the outgrowth of the romantic tradition high modernism represents.

But how did meaning and mystery work together to communicate the existence, now and again in Crane's poems, of a same-sex bed partner—as it did to me that afternoon in 1958?

One cannot make too much more headway in such a discussion of Crane without some comment on “homosexual genres.” While “genre” may well be too strong a term for them, these are nevertheless forms that, in various ages, various works have taken—forms that have been readable as gay or homosexual by gay or homosexual men and women in their particular times. In various ages these genres change their form. (Indeed, to discuss them fully in historical terms is beyond the scope of such notes as these. To quote Crane: “. . . the whole topic is something of a myth anyway, and is consequently modified by the characteristics of the image by each age in each civilization.”) Most recently however—say, since the 19th Century—the aspect that might be cited as most characteristic of this genre or genres is that they are structured so that straight, gay, male, or female readers and critics can read the homosexuality
out
of them, for whatever reason, whenever it becomes necessary or convenient.

One particular poetic form of this genre (of which
Voyages
is an example) includes treatments of love in which the object of desire is specifically left ambiguous as to gender. This allows critics of one persuasion to read it: “Of course it's speaking of heterosexual desire—since the vast majority of desire is, and the writer has left no positive sign that this portrait of desire is any different from most.” Meanwhile critics of
another persuasion may read it: “Of course it's speaking of homosexual desire. The rhetorical lengths to which the author has gone
not
to specify the gender
is
its positive sign.” Another example of this form is, as I suggested, Crane's “Harbor Dawn” in
The Bridge
.

After the aubade of the first five stanzas, the poem, with its next line, locates itself directly with the lovers in their bed: “And you beside me, blesséd now while sirens / Sing to us, stealthily weave us into day—/ Serenely now, before day claims our eyes / your cool arms murmurously about me lay. . . .” For a total of eleven lines, the poet goes on about his beloved without once mentioning “breasts” or “tresses,” or any other explicit sign of the feminine. About the room we do not even see any of the “stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays” that were so famously piled on the divan in the typest's bedsitter before “the young man carbuncular” arrived in
The Waste Land
's (once notorious because of it) “Fire Sermon.” In the pre-Stonewall late fifties, when “homophobia” was indeed a universal, pervasive, if silent, fear, even this much explicit lack of feminization was as articulate to an urban sixteen-year-old boy as any Gay Rights flier or Act-Up poster today.

My first response was to weep.

Given the tears I swallowed (in order that no one else in the house hear them), that explicit lack may well have had an order of power that, in these post-Stonewall times,
has
no current analogue.

The rubric Crane added to (the right of) the poem after the first printing work to heterosexualize our reading—or, more accurately, to bisexualize it: “. . . or is / it from the / soundless shore / of sleep that / time /// recalls you to / your love, / there in a / waking dream / to merge your seed //—with whom?” (“Merge your seed,” followed by the daring “—with whom?”, certainly suggests two men coming together.) “Who is the / woman with / us [possibly with the poet and the reader, but equally possibly with the poet and the poet's lover] in the / dawn? . . . / Whose is the / flesh our feet / have moved / upon?” The woman is so clearly a spiritualized presence, even a spiritual ground, and the columnar text of the poem is so clearly of the “ambiguous” form mentioned above, that when I first read the poem as a sixteen-year-old in 1958, it never occurred to me that it was anything other than a description of homosexual love, with a few suggestions of heterosexuality artfully placed about for those who preferred to read it that way—which, after all, is what it is.

Even today, when I read over Winters's heterosexual reading of the poem, I find myself balking when he refers to the loved-one as “she” or “her”—having to remind myself this is
not
a misreading, but is rather an
alternate
reading the poet has left, carefully set up
by
the text of the poem, precisely
for
heterosexual readers like Winters—or, indeed, for
any
critic, gay or straight, who had to discuss or write about the poem in public—to take advantage of.

But while a heterosexual reading may find the poem just as beautiful and just as lyrical (that's after all, what the poet wanted) it will not find the poem anywhere near as poignant as the homosexual reading does—because the heterosexual reading specifically erases all reference to the silence surrounding homosexuality for which the heterosexual reading's existence, within the homosexual reading, is the positive sign. But that is one reason the homosexual reading seems to me marginally the richer.

While more common in fiction than in poetry, another homosexual form is the narrative that takes place in a world where homosexuality is never mentioned and is presumed not to exist—but where the incidents that occur have no other satisfying explanation. (To use another phrase made famous by Eliot, they have no other “objective correlative” save homosexual desire.) This is Wilde's
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, Gide's
L'Immoralist
, and Mann's
Tod im Vennidig
. This is Alfred Hitchcock's
Rope
. Again, because homosexuality is implied in such works, not stated, a literalist reading of such texts can always more or less erase it. Such a text—also—is Crane's “Cutty Sark.” That's one I didn't get at sixteen.