July 2, 1899– Hart Crane was born & raised in Ohio. His father was the inventor of Life Savers Candy & his mother was overbearing, flashy, & a hypochondriac. The parents drank, fought bitterly & eventually divorced. The unhappy childhood provided the perfect set-up for a young poet’s successful writing career.
Crane began writing verse as a young teenager, & although he basically self-educated he read the works of the Elizabethans: Shakespeare, Marlowe, & Donne, & the 19th century French poets: Vildrac, Laforgue, & Rimbaud.
Crane finally had enough of family life & dropped out of high school to move to NYC in 1916. He found work as a copy editor & wrote poems for small literary magazines. He often needed to borrow money from his father to survive.
In NYC, he partied with many important literary stars of the era: Allen Tate, Katherine Anne Porter, e. e. cummings, but his heavy drinking & emotional instability frustrated attempts at lasting friendship. Crane admirered the poems of T. S. Eliot, & his own work combined the influences of the modern European writers with a particularly American sensibility inspired by Walt Whitman.
Like Whitman, Crane lived in Brooklyn. With his lover, Emil Opffer, he shared digs at 110 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn Heights. Crane was crazy for the views the house afforded him. In spring of 1924 he wrote:
“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 harbour, & the marvelous beauty of The Brooklyn Bridge close above you on your right! All of the great new skyscrapers of lower Manhattan are marshaled directly across from you, & there is a constant stream of tugs, liners, sailboats in procession before you on the river! It’s really a magnificent place to live. This section of Brooklyn is very old, but all the houses are in splendid condition & have not been invaded by foreigners.”
The Brooklyn Bridge served as the inspiration for his greatest poem, The Bridge (1930), his own answer to Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). During his time, the area below the bridge on the Brooklyn side was known notoriously as a place for homos to meet for sex.
As his work was published, some praised his poetry, but most critics scoffed at it. Crane’s poems has often been criticized as incomprehensible; he was certainly that for me when I attempted to get through his collected works in American Poetry 301 in college. Crane was emotionally crushed by the bad reviews his poems received.
Tormented by his attraction to other men, Crane had a rapturous love affair with Opffer, a Danish sailor, the inspiration for the epic, erotic poem Voyages (1926), the center piece of his first book of published poems, White Buildings.
Crane lived a lifetime of profound problems both social & personal. His failed love life was partly due to his obsession with men from the navy. Ernest Hemingway (they share a birthday) noted:
“Poor Hart Crane, always trying to pick up the wrong sailor.”
His own self-image held back Crane from any real happiness, but booze was the major player in his downfall. Under the influence, he would become flirty, frequently found himself in the wrong situations, at the wrong times. Haven’t we all been in that situation on a lonely Saturday night?
Crane was the guest of Harry & Caresse Crosby, the American couple owned the fine arts Black Sun Press, at their home in the French countryside, Le Moulin du Soleil. Crosby wrote:
“Hart Crane back from Marseilles where he slept with 30 sailors & he began again to drink Cutty Sark. Crane got drunk at the Cafe Select & fought with waiters over his tab. When the Paris police were called, he fought with them & was beaten. They arrested & jailed him, fining him 800 francs & spent six days in prison at La Santé.”
Crane made an attempt to clean up his act & play it straight to please the people in his life. He tried, but he was miserable. Drinking & rough-trade made his life bearable & yet, made it worse.
Crane attempted to marry a girl, Peggy Crowley, the recently divorced wife if his good friend, writer & critic Malcolm Crowley, but everyone knew it was all a conceit.
On April 26, 1932, while on board a cruise ship in the Caribbean, Crane was badly beaten by a crew member that he had made a pass at. The following morning, a friend found him in his room, drunk & inconsolable. She told him to dress for lunch & left. Shortly before noon, Crane was seen on the deck, looking down at the water. Crane yelled out: “Goodbye, everybody!” & then he jumped overboard. His body was never recovered. He was just 32 years old.
Tennessee Williams, the most devoted of all the many writers & artists who venerated Crane, left instructions that his own body was to be buried at sea in the Gulf Of Mexico at the very spot that Crane drowned. Instead, William’s family buried him in St. Louis, the city Williams so desperately tried to escape.
Crane’s life story is a troubled tale of a talented gay man trying to find where he belonged in the world. If he had been born a half a century later maybe Crane would have been able to write & publish his poems with some glimmer of happiness.
His poetry confounds me & his life leaves me circumspect.
From Legend, part of White Buildings (1926):
I am not ready for repentance;
Nor to match regrets. For the moth
Bends no more than the still
Imploring flame. & tremorous
In the white falling flakes
Kisses are,
The only worth all granting
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