New Ways to Kill Your Mother (34 page)

Early the following year in New York, Crane met and fell in love with Emil Opffer, three years his senior, who worked in the merchant marine. Opffer found him lodgings at 110 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn in a house inhabited by Opffer’s father, who was a newspaper editor, and other bohemians and artists. (John Dos Passos lived in the building for a while.) Crane wrote to his mother and grandmother about his new quarters: ‘Just imagine looking out your window directly on the East River with nothing intervening between your view of the statue of Liberty, way down the harbor, and the marvelous beauty of Brooklyn Bridge close above you on your right!’ It was as though he had walked into his own poem. ‘I think,’ he wrote to Waldo Frank, ‘the sea has thrown itself upon me and been answered, at least in part, and I believe I am a little changed – not essentially, but changed and transubstantiated as anyone is who has asked a question and been answered.’ Again he wrote to his mother and grandmother about the view:

Look far to your left toward Staten Island and there is the statue of Liberty, with that remarkable lamp of hers that makes her seen for miles. And up to the right Brooklyn Bridge, the most superb piece of construction in the modern world, I’m sure, with strings of lights crossing it like glowing worms as the Ls and surface cars pass each other going and coming.

He confided to his mother about the poems he was writing:

There’s no stopping for rest, however, when one is in the ‘current’ of creation, so to speak, and so I’ve spent all of today at one or two stubborn lines. My work is becoming known for its formal perfection and hard glowing polish, but most of those qualities, I’m afraid, are due to a great deal of labor and patience on my part … Besides working on parts of my
Bridge
I’m engaged in writing a series of six sea poems called ‘Voyages’ (they are also love poems) … I feel as though I were well arranged for a winter of rich work, reading and excitement – there simply isn’t half time enough (that’s my main complaint) for all that is offered.

In 1925 Crane moved home to Cleveland for a time and then to Patterson in upstate New York, where he shared a farmhouse with Allen Tate and Tate’s wife Caroline Gordon before he fell out with them with much bitter correspondence and recrimination, some of which reads like high comedy. He desperately needed somewhere to work on his long poem before the money Otto Kahn had given him ran out. And just as his move to Brooklyn seemed to come as a piece of almost uncanny good fortune, allowing him to inhabit parts of the poem as he conceived of them, now he made another move that was to provide him with images, metaphors and suggestions fully matching the grandeur of his design. He had appealed to his mother to allow him to go to her property on the Isle of Pines, where he had not been since he was sixteen. She was at first uneasy about the idea, feeling, among other things, that he would disturb the housekeeper, but soon she relented. In early May 1926 Crane voyaged towards the scenes of some of the later sections of
The Bridge
.

Slowly, in what seemed like an undiscovered country waiting for its Columbus, he began to work, reading, planning his poem further, and then writing:

Here waves climb into dusk on gleaming mail;

Invisible valves of the sea, – locks, tendons

Crested and creeping, troughing corridors

That fall back yawning to another plunge
.

Slowly the sun’s red caravel drops light

Once more behind us … It is morning there –

O where our Indian emperies lie revealed
,

Yet lost, all, let this keel one instant yield!

He worked on some of the earlier as well as the later sections, including ‘Atlantis’. He wrote to a friend in New York: ‘I’ve been having a great time reading
Atlantis in America
, the last book out on the subject, and full of exciting suggestions. Putting it back for 40 or 50 thousand years, it’s easy to believe that a continent existed in mid-Atlantic waters and that the Antilles and West Indies are but salient peaks of its surface.’

In August 1926 he wrote to Waldo Frank: ‘I have never been able to live
completely
in my work before. Now it is to learn a great deal. To handle the beautiful skeins of this myth of America – to realize suddenly, as I seem to, how much of the past is living under only slightly altered forms, even in machinery and such-like, is extremely exciting.’

He sent the sections of
The Bridge
as he finished them to editors and friends. On 22 July he sent Marianne Moore his poem ‘To Brooklyn Bridge’ for
The Dial
(which she accepted); it would be the prologue for his long poem. Two days later he wrote to Waldo Frank: ‘That little prelude, by the way, I think to be almost the best thing I’ve ever written, something steady and uncompromising about it.’ Its last two stanzas read:

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;

Only in darkness is thy shadow clear
.

The City’s fiery parcels all undone
,

Already snow submerges an iron year …

O Sleepless as the river under thee
,

Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod
,

Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend

And of the curveship lend a myth to God
.

Crane was well aware that an epic poem could not be written in America in the 1920s. Such a poem would, he knew, because of its very ambition, be doomed to failure or something close to failure. This idea seemed, most of the time, to excite him. He was, it is important to remember, a poet in his twenties. At times he saw that the symbols would not carry the weight he gave them. ‘The bridge,’ he wrote to Waldo Frank in June 1926, ‘as a symbol today has no significance beyond an economical approach to shorter hours, quicker lunches, behaviorism and toothpicks.’

But in other letters, including ones to Frank, and especially one written fifteen months later to his patron Otto Kahn that set out the grand design of the poem, he seemed to feel no doubt about the importance of his project. ‘
The Aeneid
was not written in two years,’ he wrote to Kahn, ‘nor in four, and in more than one sense I feel justified in comparing the historic and cultural scope of
The Bridge
to that great work. It is at least a symphony with an epic theme, and a work of considerable profundity and inspiration.’

Like many young poets, he wrote home once his first book had appeared wondering what they would make of it. He wrote to his mother: ‘I’m very much amused at what you say about the interest in my book out there in Cleveland. Wait until they see it, and try to read it! I may be wrong, but I think they will eventually express considerable consternation.’

His father was not impressed. As late as 1928, when
The Bridge
was almost finished, he suggested that his son learn a trade. But Crane was still adding to his store, discovering, for example,
Gerard Manley Hopkins early in 1928. ‘It is a revelation to me – of unrealized possibilities,’ he wrote to Yvor Winters, who seemed to admire his work, and with whom he had a fascinating correspondence until Winters reviewed
The Bridge
harshly, thus ending what had been a close literary friendship.

Crane seemed to derive energy and immense pleasure from travel. His letters from France and Mexico are filled with delight, even though it is clear that he was drinking a great deal in Mexico. It was there in 1932 that he broke rank, as he put it, with the ‘brotherhood’, and began an affair with Peggy Cowley, who was in the midst of a divorce from Malcolm Cowley. ‘I think it has done me considerable good,’ he wrote. ‘The old beauty still claims me, however, and my eyes roam as much as ever. I doubt if I’ll ever change very fundamentally.’

Once
The Bridge
was finished and published, Crane continued working on a number of shorter poems, including ‘The Broken Tower’:

The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn

Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell

Of a spent day – to wander the cathedral lawn

From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell
.

In Mexico he had been on a Guggenheim fellowship that ended on 31 March 1932, when he said to a friend, ‘I’m just plain Hart Crane again.’ He was unsure whether he wanted to remain in Mexico or return to the United States. The problem, as before, was money, and this problem now became more severe when he learned that his inheritance from his father’s estate would be much less than he had expected, not enough to live on. His stepmother wrote to him on 12 April:

Nothing can be paid from the estate account to you in the way of your bequest … and there isn’t any income from stocks to speak of. We are not making any money from our different businesses. The only thing we can do is to give you an allowance from my salary each month, and that I have made arrangements to do.

Crane was drinking wildly and behaving erratically but still spoke of plans for future work. It was clear because of the freedom he had won during his travels and his high ambition as a poet and also because of his constant drinking that he was in no state to go back to New York and work again in advertising, or make his living in any way. He spoke of suicide and, it was reported, made a number of wills. Eventually, it was decided that he and Peggy Cowley would sail back to the United States on the
Orizaba
from Veracruz. After a stop in Havana, it seems that Crane was badly beaten up on the ship in the early hours of 27 April. One of his fellow passengers, Gertrude Berg, saw that ‘he had a black eye and looked generally battered’.

Close to noon that day he appeared on deck. ‘He walked to the railing,’ Berg remembered,

took off his coat, folded it neatly over the railing (not dropping it on deck), placed both hands on the railing, raised himself on his toes, and then dropped back again. We all fell silent and watched him, wondering what in the world he was up to. Then, suddenly, he vaulted over the railing and jumped into the sea … Just once I saw Crane, swimming strongly, but never again.

Although lifeboats were lowered, there were no further sightings of the poet. One of the most brilliant first acts in American literature had come to an end.

Tennessee Williams and the Ghost of Rose

Although Henry James’s sister, Alice, was five years his junior, they were the closest among the five James siblings. In her biography of Alice James, Jean Strouse has written:

Alice and Henry shared throughout their lives a deeper intellectual and spiritual kinship than either felt with any other member of the family. Within the family group the second son and only daughter were more isolated than any of the others … What bound Henry and Alice together was a … profound mutual understanding. Henry had withdrawn early from the competitive masculine fray to a safe inner world.

As a way of escape Henry James found his ‘safe inner world’ through reading and writing; this was not available in the same way to Alice. Henry created a vast imaginative terrain that he inhabited with considerable determination, independence and strength of will; his only sister, on the other hand, became a reverse image of him – she was a weak patient, dependent on others, suffering from ailments not easy to name and impossible to cure. Henry James did not keep a personal diary and nowhere set down his dreams and fears, but it is clear from his letters about her, especially when she arrived in England in 1884 and after her death eight years later, that Alice’s fate and her suffering preoccupied him a great deal while he also worked hard and managed a varied and busy social life.

Just as it is possible to read the character of Rosie Muniment, the witty invalid, in
The Princess Casamassima
as a version of Alice James, we can also read the children Miles and Flora in
The Turn
of the Screw
, written three years after Alice’s death, as versions of the two James siblings, Henry and Alice, who both lived unmarried and in exile in England, oddly abandoned and orphaned and, in certain ways, emotionally unprotected. In February 1895 James wrote in his notebook the idea of a

possible little drama residing in the existence of a peculiar intense and interesting affection between a brother and a sister … I fancy the pair understanding each other too well – fatally well … [They] abound in the same sense, see with the same sensibilities and the same imagination, vibrate with the same nerves … Two lives, two beings, and one experience.

Although he never wrote this story, the notebook entry is fascinating for anyone interested in James’s nonchalant masculinity and Alice’s neurotic inertia, as it is for anyone looking at the richly complex emotional and creative life of Henry James and the diaries and letters of his sister Alice.