New Ways to Kill Your Mother

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,