Hart Crane does not appear so far to have settled into any exact place in the Modernist poetic pantheon, though he is dead nearly three-quarters of a century. Not that he is unread or ignored - far from it - but he continues to divide opinion in a way which seems strange, almost inexplicable, for a writer of more than two generations ago. In a sense, that may be an oblique tribute to him since his language and style offer a challenge to readers and critics alike and have a nervous, immediate, refracting, writes Brian Fallon
The most illuminating things hereto written about him are probably certain essays by Malcolm Cowley, not only a great critic and man of letters, but someone who knew Crane intimately. Almost too intimately, in fact, since it was with Cowley's painter-wife Peggy that Crane went to Mexico shortly before his death, on a trip funded by a literary scholarship. Crane by this time was virtually an alcoholic, and an awkward, troublesome one too, while Peggy - older than he - had been a hard bohemian drinker for years. Since Crane was aggressively homosexual, it was a strange alliance - perhaps a desperate attempt on his part to attain "normality" as people saw it then, including his egotistical and demanding mother.
After an alcoholic, quarrelsome stay in Mexico, the couple decided to return by sea to New York, their usual stamping ground.
Crane had got the scholarship on the usual understanding that he produce some work, but inspiration seemed to be failing him and presumably he knew and felt it. On the voyage home on the SS Orizaba, he went into the sailors' quarters and made sexual advances there (sailors always attracted him), was rebuffed and beaten up. At noon the following day, April 27th 1930, he appeared on deck with a black eye and wearing a light overcoat over his pyjamas. As other passengers stared, he walked to the stern rail, took off his coat and folded it neatly on the deck, then dropped like a stone into the sea.
His body was never found, though a lifeboat lowered from the Orizaba searched for four hours. In the captain's private opinion, "if the propellors didn't grind him into mincemeat, then the sharks got him immediately."
Crane was only 31, but he had been a literary celebrity for some years and had lived hard, fast and loose, becoming a mesmeric figure in Greenwich Village bohemia. He was born in small-town Ohio, the son of a salesman who later ran a successful chocolate factory, and a spoiled young beauty from Chicago. From the start he was at odds with his parents, while they were at odds with one another and eventually were divorced.
He was precocious in his development and in his teens read and digested the French Symbolists, in particular - later, it became fashionable to compare him with Rimbaud. Attempts to take or keep a job proved abortive, in spite of his father's insistence that he should earn his living, and for some years Crane existed on odd literary earnings, the handouts of a few rich patrons, and the charity and forbearance of his friends.
These were the years of Prohibition, which probably wrecked the constitution of a good many people by driving them into drinking illegal and probably semi-poisonous liquor. Crane drank in speakeasies in the Village and along the Brooklyn waterfront, picking up drunken sailors for sex , and partying orgiastically whenever he could. There was a creative spell in the countryside near Patterson, in New York State, where he worked hard at his poetry but found the local "hard" cider irresistible; and there was also a prolonged stay in the semi-tropical Isle of Pines, in a villa owned by his grandmother, where he got his taste for exotic climes and, more importantly, began his masterpiece The Bridge. Malcolm Morley has written: "I suppose that no other American poet, not even Poe, heaped so many troubles on his friends or had his transgressions so long endured. Scenes, shouts, obscenities, broken furniture were the commonplaces of an evening with Hart, and for a long time nobody did anything about it, except to complain in a humorous way." The real reason he was forgiven was that he had an abounding warmth of affection for the people around him."
CRANE was kind and encouraging to fellow writers, typing out their manuscripts for them and if possible finding publishers or patrons, and he also seems to have been highly intelligent and articulate about his own work. However, his life spiral led almost inevitably downwards and this was not checked by a near-disastrous trip to Paris, where he got himself arrested by the French police, while a stay with the poet Roy Campbell in Provence ended when Crane made clumsy sexual overtures to the local fishermen.
Crane's working methods in themselves were potentially lethal, since he needed the constant stimulus of jazz, or alcholol, or drugs, or even sentimental songs on the gramophone, to keep his inspiration flowing. Contrary to what is often said, he was an ultra-conscientious craftsman who revised his work continually, and The Bridge has an overall sense of form and architecture which proves that his genius was not merely short-winded. But he belonged among the visceral type of American genius - Jackson Pollock was another, and so perhaps was Poe - who seem to give birth to their creations at a fierce cost to their nervous and emotional systems and even, in the end, to their sanity.
Crane consciously sought a "state of ecstasy" which makes him a predecessor of the Beat writers, as well as the heir to the poetes maudits of the Nineties. Burn-out was almost inevitable, and today he survives almost solely by The Bridge and a handful of remarkable but uneven lyrics. Nevertheless, he ranks among the great American poets, and at a time when The Waste Land is increasingly relegated to the universities and at least two-thirds of Pound's Cantos are already a museum piece, The Bridge - both in its parts and as a whole - keeps its place undimmed. It is an astonishing tour de force of heroic Modernism, the kind of large-scale, celebratory work to which the Futurists aspired but never achieved, combining ecstatic lyricism with a hard-boiled urban modernity. And in an age when a kind of mannered neo-classicism was tightening its grip on literature, Crane showed that a true Romantic vision can always be made relevant.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic
Hart Crane: A Life. By Clive Fisher. Yale University Press, 557 pp. £25 sterling