New Ways to Kill Your Mother

years he could also list the poets whose work he disliked; they included Milton, Byron, Tennyson and Amy Lowell.

In 1917 his mother suggested that he drop the ‘Harold’ when he published his poems: ‘In signing your name to your contributions & later to your books do you intend to ignore your mother’s side of the house entirely… How would “Hart Crane” be?’ His father disapproved of his interest in becoming a writer: ‘Poetry is alright; your chosen vocation is alright, but when you are living in New York and spending $2 a week for tutoring [in French], out of an allowance of $25, it is not alright; it isn’t as things should be.’

In his late teens and early twenties Crane moved between New York and Cleveland, getting intermittent support, financial and emotional, from one or the other of his parents, and making literary friends, including Sherwood Anderson, whom he admired, and later Allen Tate, Waldo Frank and Eugene O’Neill, and meeting editors wherever he could. He had a number of homosexual love affairs. He read Dostoevsky with considerable interest, and ‘that delightful Moby Dick’, and then a smuggled copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses, writing to a friend: ‘He is the one above all others I should like to talk to.’ Eventually, having worked at odd jobs and published poems in magazines, he went to work for his father’s company. But relations were difficult and Crane severed contact with his father for more than two years. He began working as an advertising copywriter the following year and held jobs in advertising agencies in Cleveland and New York between periods that he devoted to either writing or drinking or both.

Among poets and readers of poetry, Crane established a reputation as the most promising poet of his generation. In 1925, after his father refused to give him an allowance, the millionaire Otto Kahn gave him $2,000 to work on his long, ambitious poem The Bridge. In December 1926 his first book of poems, White Buildings, was published. His drinking increased, as did his erratic wandering and his constant difficulties with his parents. Like most young men of his age he wanted love from his mother and money from his father. Neither parent felt fully able to satisfy his needs, but by doing so sporadically, they seemed instead to magnify certain vulnerabilities in him.

In December 1928 Crane travelled to Europe, seeing Robert Graves and Laura Riding in London and Andre Gide and Gertrude Stein in Paris. He continued working on The Bridge, which was published in a limited edition in Paris in 1930 and subsequently in a trade edition in New York. He moved to New York, where he wore out his welcome in a number of friends’ houses, then back to Cleveland, and then travelled to Mexico in 1931. He was still drinking. On 27 April 1932, while returning to the United States from Mexico aboard the Orizaba, he jumped from the deck and drowned. His myth as the poete maudit, the doomed, wild, homosexual genius, America’s Rimbaud, had begun; his very name was a warning to the young about the dangers and the delights of poetry. It was a myth that even the seriousness and the immense slow force of his poems and the studious tone of many of his letters would do little to dispel.

In April 1917 Crane wrote to his father of his great ambition: ‘I shall really without doubt be one of the foremost poets in America if I am enabled to devote enough time to my art.’ The poetry he intended to write was to be highly wrought and full of self-conscious and hard-won artistry. Although there are times in his work when a word or a phrase seems chosen at random, selected for its sound as much as its sense, his letters emphasize that he was not interested in a dream language or summoning his phrases at random from the well of the unconscious. In January 1921 he wrote to a friend about the Dadaist movement: ‘I cannot figure out just what Dadaism is beyond an insane jumble of the four winds, the six senses and plum pudding.’ And two weeks later he wrote to another friend: ‘There is little to be gained in any art, so far as I can see, except with much conscious effort.’ Later that year, he wrote again: ‘I admit to a slight leaning toward the esoteric, and am perhaps not to be taken seriously. I am fond of things of great fragility, and also and especially of the kind of poetry John Donne represents, a dark musky, brooding, speculative vintage, at once sensual and spiritual, and singing the beauty of experience rather than innocence.’

The following year he wrote to Allen Tate: ‘Let us invent an idiom for the proper transposition of jazz into words! Something clean, sparkling, elusive!’ In these letters from 1922, as he worked on his poem ‘For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen’, he wrote to friends of the sheer effort each line took and the burden of symbolic meaning he was asking the words to carry. ‘What made the first part of my poem so good,’ he wrote, ‘was the extreme amount of time, work and thought put on it.’ In a letter to Waldo Frank in February 1923, he tried to indicate his intentions: ‘Part I starts out from the quotidian, rises to evocation, ecstasy and statement. The whole poem is a kind of fusion of our own time with the past. Almost every symbol of current significance is matched by a correlative, suggested or actually stated, “of ancient days”.’

In an earlier letter, he made clear also that the second part of the poem was ‘a jazz roof garden description in amazing language’:

A thousand light shrugs balance us
Through snarling hails of melody.
White shadows slip across the floor
Splayed like cards from a loose hand;
Rhythmic ellipses lead into canters
Until somewhere a rooster banters.

For anyone in those years writing poems that attempted to fuse deliberate and difficult structure with phrases filled with allusion and symbolic meaning, using rhythms that sought to seduce the reader with a mixture of the subtle and the strident, it was obvious that T. S. Eliot was an example to be welcomed and watched. Crane read The Waste Land as soon as it appeared. He was alert to the power of Eliot’s influence and also to his own need both to absorb and to evade it. ‘There is no one writing in English who can command so much respect, to my mind, as Eliot,’ he wrote. ‘However, I take Eliot as a point of departure toward an almost complete reverse of direction… I feel that Eliot ignores certain spiritual events and possibilities as real and powerful now as, say, in the time of Blake.’

The letters suggest that the poems Crane wrote came only with enormous concentration at times when he managed to make a densely packed music in his poetry that matched or impelled his complex aims in meaning and structure. His work did not come with the same effortless grace with which the poems of William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens, two poets whom he admired, seemed to come, and which allowed them to hold down jobs with ease and have what appeared, on the surface at least, a calm domestic life. The life Crane lived when he was not writing was troubled and messy, as his biographers have described.

For this reason, it is useful to have more than 500 pages of Crane’s selected letters in the same volume as the poems that were published in his lifetime and the unpublished poems. The picture of the poet here is rather less alarming than the one that appears in the biographies. He seems at times almost dull, often thoughtful and responsible, and quite bookish. If his life in the letters is colourful, then the colour comes from the naked quality of Crane’s ambition and the complex sensibility he exposed to his correspondents. His letters also throw real and sensuous light on the actual poems themselves as they were being written. Indeed, when he was not writing to his immediate family, Crane was writing almost exclusively to friends who were poets or who cared about poetry.

Early in 1923 he wrote to a friend about his plans for The Bridge:

I am too much interested in this Bridge thing lately to write letters, ads or anything. It is just beginning to take the least outline, — and the more outline the conception of the thing takes, — the more its final difficulties appall me… Very roughly, it concerns a mystical synthesis of ‘America.’ History and fact, location, etc. all have to be transfigured into abstract form that would almost function independently of its subject matter… The marshalling of the forces… will take me months, at best; and I may have to give it up entirely before that; it may be too impossible an ambition. But if I do succeed, such a waving of banners, such ascent of towers, such dancing etc, will never before have been put down on paper!

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