Paul Mariani’s The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane

John Burt

The last few years have been extraordinarily rich ones for students of Hart Crane. The poetry of
Crane has always mattered to those who have a serious concern with the powers and possibilities
of poetic language. Even for those contemporaries such as Allen Tate, Yvor Winters, and Edmund
Wilson, who sought to distance themselves from his life and from his vision of the poetic vocation,
Crane’s poetry remained an obsessive issue. Since then it has been Crane, almost above all of the
alternatives, who has represented the claims of a vital if tragic vision of the calling of poetry in the
face of the irony, doubt, and desiccation which always shadowed high modernism.
The last few years have brought forth a new edition of Crane’s selected letters, several able and
insightful volumes of literary criticism, a new Centennial edition of his collected poems, and two
very different new biographies. Paul Mariani’s The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane makes
clear why Crane is so crucial a poet, and why an understanding of his life is so important to an
appreciation of his poetic power and of the avenues for poetry he opened. Mariani’s thoughtful,
detailed, and insightful biography is an excellent model of how to think about the relationship
between a poet’s life and a poet’s art, not only unfolding, completely without reductiveness, the
ways in which Crane’s art grew out of his life, but also capturing Crane’s thought about his art,
what he thought poetry was capable of doing, how he saw his task in the world of the poetry of his
age.
Crane, like Plath (or for that matter like Shelley) a poet of rhapsodic intensity whose quest
for limit experiences and transgressive kinds of poetic knowledge seemed to intertwine poetic
immortality and early death, has sometimes seemed to disappear into his own biography. Crane’s
poetics were a poetics of extremity, and the sometimes self-destructive thrill-seeking — of a sexual
and of a chemical kind — which marked his life has a complex relationship to those poetics.

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Without that life, there could not have been that poetry, and if Crane’s poetry is not about his
specific life, then it’s not about anything. In particular, without his specific sexual experiences,
there might not have been this poetry, and if one doesn’t understand the experiences one doesn’t
understand the poetry; biography answers not only (some) questions about the genesis but also
(some) questions about the meaning of the poetry. But the extreme experiences matter chiefly in
how they motivate poetic insights which, even as they are found only in extremes, must also be
developed with care and discipline if they are to bear poetic witness to that extremity, and the test
of the experience is not anything within the experience itself but only in how it is fleshed out by
poetic craft.
Towards the end of his life Crane’s clearsightedly noted to Katherine Anne Porter that his
drinking did not yield him special access to the secret recesses of poetic inwardness but “was
killing the poet within him,” although he had become helpless to stop himself; “He knew the life
he led was blunting his sensibilities, so that it took greater and greater shocks to himself to feel
anything at all any more, and even then he wondered if he really felt anything” (368). Crane
may have seen through romanticism about alcohol, but he did not see through romanticism about
suicide. Indeed, within weeks of his own suicide, he dwelt upon the suicide of his friend and
publisher Harry Crosby (who, in bed with a girlfriend, blew out his and her brains with a pistol)
as an act of poetic nobility, as the ultimate in limit experiences. (Crane’s own suicide as Mariani
describes it, by contrast, seems more a desperate and panicked improvisation than a poetic gesture.)
About Crane’s sexual adventures, which Mariani’s reports in candid detail, the case is less clear.
For one thing, although Crane clearly had a taste for anonymous risk-taking, picking up sailors in
the dives of Sands St. in Brooklyn, he sometimes corresponded with many of these young men for
a long while afterwards (although the letters are lost), and his relationships with them frequently
had a surprising longevity and tenderness. Mariani treats not only the nights of anonymous sex,
but also the extended affairs of the heart, such as the key relationship with Emil Opffer, and less
extended but nevertheless rich and full relationships with uncomplicated, roundly human sailors
such as Carl Carlsen (who kept a photograph of Crane on his mantel years after Crane’s death)

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(350), or Bob Steward, “upon whom Crane doted with a complex affection made up of lust, a
lyrical tristesse, and perhaps even something like fatherly feeling” (351).
Whatever sexuality meant for Crane, it was clearly not only a matter dark adventure and rough
trade, although those things were part of it. Somehow the intensity which Crane sought whether
in sex, in drink, or simply in sticking his head in the bell of his gramophone as it played his
favorite jazz records over and over, has something to do with the intensity of poetic experiences
that tantalize but transcend articulation, experiences which may incarnate themselves in sexual
forms, and may never lose their sexual character, but which still are fundamentally experiences of
the poetic imagination rather than of the body, except as one conceives of the body itself through
the lens of poetic imagination in the way Whitman or Blake do. Limit experiences such as these
are the sites of a quest for transcendence, for Crane anyway, and have to be understood as a way
of playing the darkest and highest truths on the pulse.
Mariani is an experienced scholar, having written important biographies of William Carlos
Williams and of Robert Lowell, the latter, like Crane, a figure who frequently tempts the vices of
literary biographers. Mariani is also a poet of a high order, moved by some of the deep questions
of poetic meaning and poetic imagination that concern Crane. The result is that Mariani is capable
being fair to both sides of the literary biographers profession, to the life, and to the work. Mariani
assesses the characters and situations of Crane’s life with a justice and a maturity that only comes
from brooding on human nature with one’s own humanity intact, never seeing the actual people
with whom he deals as merely the constructions required in order to generate the poems that Crane
wrote under their influence. And he assesses the poems not only with a poet’s ear for language
and appreciation for technical skill, but also with a poet’s sense that the meaning of the poem one
makes out of one’s experiences might be somewhat larger than experiences themselves. Mariani
also brings to this book his detailed familiarity with the literary culture of the 1920’s, not just who
all the players were and what they were like, but also what the horizon of possibilities seemed to
be in that era, what would have seemed new to these poets, what would have seemed problematic,
what would have seemed daring and wonderful.

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 One sign of the judiciousness that Mariani brings to bear is the roundness he gives to the
figures of Crane’s parents. They were flawed and complicated people, engaged in an ugly and
sometimes rather narcissistic struggle with each other, in which they did not hesitate manipulatively
to enlist their son. Crane’s mother was needy, reckless, histrionic, and unreliable, responding
cruelly to Crane’s admission to her of his sexual orientation. Crane’s father was bluff, shrewd,
coarse, impetuous, selfish, and rather a bully. But in this book Crane’s parents never come off
as merely children or merely ogres, and Crane’s father, hardheaded, limited, and materialistic
as he was, never seems to be merely a Babbitt. Indeed Mariani renders with full justice how
for all of his mystification and ignorance — and for all the numerous betrayals and intentional
and unintentional humiliations he inflicted upon the poet — C.A. Crane did attempt to reach out
toward the end of his own short life to his difficult son. Mariani gives a great deal of substance
to Crane’s relationships with other members of his family, such as his aunt Zell, and with those
who stood in quasi-familial relations with him, such as his long-suffering longtime landlady in
Patterson, New York, Mrs. Turner, or “Aunt Sally,” the caretaker of his parent’s plantation on the
Isle of Pines, as well as indulgent friends such as Charlotte and Richard Rychtarik and his lifelong
correspondent and initiator into the gay subculture of Washington D.C., the Swinburnesque poet
(and State Department bureaucrat) Wilbur Underwood. Mariani gives a nuanced sense of Crane’s
central erotic relationship, with the sailor Emil Opffer, the muse of the sequence “Voyages,” and
he was also able to uncover a substantial amount of circumstantial detail about his passing erotic
relationships. Crane’s surprising, and indeed wrenching, affair with Peggy Cowley over the last
few weeks before he threw himself over the stern of the S.S. Orizaba, is rendered with pathos and
sympathy.
Closer to the intellectual center of the book is Mariani’s treatment of Crane’s sometimes stormy
intellectual friendships, embracing talents as diverse as Waldo Frank, Malcolm Cowley, Caresse
and Harry Crosby, Alfred Steiglitz, Walker Evans, and even H. P. Lovecraft (who surfaces from
time to time in company with Crane’s literary acquaintances, sniffing prudishly about how unpleas-
ant Mr. Crane is when he is drunk and how he is drinking his talent away). Crane’s reputation now

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is as the exponent and avatar of an effervescent and Orphic genius. But he approached the poetry
of enthusiasm of his own day with skepticism, looking askance at self-proclaimed avant-gardists
like Gorham Munson and Matthew Josephson, and distancing himself from the occultism that so
entranced Jean Toomer (and for that matter William Butler Yeats). Introduced by Toomer and
Munson to G. I. Gurdjieff, a Russian mystic and religious philosopher (the Madam Blavatsky of
his age), whose physically vigorous “sacred gymnastics” Crane found fascinating and astounding,
Crane resisted becoming a disciple of what he called (in a letter to Munson) that “birth control,
re-swaddling and new-synthesizing, grandma-confusion movement” (159). Of Dadaism, which
Crane’s friend Matthew Josephson enthusiastically embraced, Crane remarked that it was “little
more than the death rattle of impressionism” (84).
Mariani has a wonderfully vivid grasp of the exotic flora and fauna of avant-garde New York in
the years after the First World War. He gives a hilarious portrait of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-
Loringhoven, who chased Wallace Stevens up the streets of Greenwich Village so ominously that
he would not go below 14th street for years afterwards, who hid in William Carlos Williams’ car
in order to ambush him (prompting him to practice boxing, in case he had to go up against her
again), and who, needing a typewriter, simply walked into Crane’s apartment and took his. She
was, Mariani remarks, the very symbol of Dadaism, “affecting the most outlandish and daring
costumes: coal scuttle hats, and teaballs suspended from her nipples; a head with two different
faces in profile, one yellow, one purple. She sported hats with feathers and ice cream spoons, wore
black vests and kilts, tam o’shanters” (52).
Crane sought out, but seems to have repeatedly been betrayed by, sterner poetic intelligences
like Allen Tate and Yvor Winters, quarreling with them over Eliot (whose breaking of new paths
Crane admired, even as he sought to reject the darkness of Eliot’s poetic ethos) and over Whitman
(whom Crane embraced), but like them turning for inspiration and practical poetics to Donne and
Marvell. Mariani gives a careful account of the famous blowup between Crane and Tate and
Caroline Gordon when they were living together in Patterson, New York, a blowup that had more
to do with Tate and Gordon’s testiness than with Crane’s irresponsibility, but which may also have

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had something to do with their ultimately irreconcilable visions of what poetry is capable of doing.
Indeed, one way of viewing the break between Crane and Tate is to see it as a parting of the ways
over the legacy of Eliot. Crane, like Tate and just about everybody else, had turned to Eliot for
lessons in the craft of poetic modernity, in how to sound and think like a poet of the contemporary
age. But unlike Tate, Crane ultimately rejected Eliot’s worldweariness and his cultural pessimism.
(As The Bridge began to make its way during the darkest days of the Great Depression, Crane
began to have doubts about whether Eliot had been right after all. But most ebullient talents of
the 1920’s had to eat their words during the 1930’s, and Crane’s poetry hangs on The Bridge, not
on his second thoughts about it.) Crane told Gorham Munson just after the appearance of The
Waste Land that the poem represented a kind of perfection, but it was a perfection of death, and
that he would himself seek a resurrection of some kind in poetry, a resurrection of precisely the
kind Eliot seemed to rule out. Like Robert Lowell, whose turbulent relationship with Tate seems
to replay Crane’s story from two decades earlier, Crane came to embrace an orphic ethos only after
having served a strenuous apprenticeship under a very different poetic master. Mariani’s account
of Crane’s vexed relationship with Tate bear fruitful comparison with one of the best recent books
on Crane, Langdon Hammer’s Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-faced Modernism (1993).
One interesting minor theme running though the book is Crane’s unstinting admiration, early
and late, for the lesson and practice of Wallace Stevens, whose ear for connotation and nuance,
whose indirectness, whose strict poetic discipline, and above all whose sense of the still-unspent
spiritual power of the poetic imagination, is akin to Crane’s own. As early as 1919 Crane wrote
of Stevens to Gorham Munson that he was “ a man whose work makes most of the rest of us
quail”(64).
One very un-Orphic feature of Crane’s life as Mariani renders it is the laborious and demand-
ing care he put into his poetry. At the heart of Crane’s poetry is an intuitive power whose element
is expressive freedom. But it is an achieved freedom, which one works one’s way into by thou-
sands of false starts and retraced steps. To write as he did, Crane had to give himself over to a
poetic imagination that went its own path (leaving the poet chasing after it, panting) but always

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holding out the promise of a tonality and a vision that would put one in the presence of what is
always beyond articulation. Following this Alastor-like spirit, in all its freedom, is a demanding
task, something there are a million ways of doing wrong and only one way of doing right. One
would think that the work of an intuitive inwardness in poetry would be easy, since such intuitions
elaborate themselves in freedom. But poetic intuitions are callings, and callings work in their way,
not in ours; the self upon poetic self-reliance relies is obscure and severe, even as it is transgressive
and free. As Emerson remarked of this kind of self-reliance: if anyone think it is easy, let him try
it for one day.
Mariani does justice not only to how hard Crane’s poetry came, but to how critically and deeply
and continuously Crane thought about it, how he sought to frame for himself a kind of modernity
which would avoid the empty experimentalism of Dada while remaining open to spiritual exal-
tations Eliot and his followers believed were already foreclosed. Crane’s poetry is not religious
poetry, but in what (in a letter to Gorham Munson) he called “concrete evidence of the experience
of a recognition,” (206) it becomes the place where one beholds and registers transcendence face
on, in the first person, so that the poem is the cry of an occasion, and the occasion is a revelation.
To front on the event, to hold one’s self open to the occasion (even as the discouraging political
events of the 1930’s seemed to place those possibilities ever further out of reach), was Crane’s task
early and late, and Mariani gives us a nuanced sense of the disciplined scrupulousness with which
Crane approached that task.
Mariani gives not only a clear view of Crane’s ambitions and struggles, but of his poetic tech-
niques as well. Crane’s poems often do not make full denotative sense, and their obscurities moved
Marianne Moore once to agree to publish his poems only if he included a detailed commentary
upon them. What Crane sought was not a statement but an experience opened by words, a moment
of recognition precipitated by, as Crane explained to Moore, “the illogical impingements of the
connotations of words on the consciousness (and their combinations and interplay in metaphor on
this basis)” (191-2). It is this ransacking of resonances that makes Crane’s poetry so powerful, but
also so obscure.

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 Because he understands Crane’s techniques so well, Mariani provides unusually rich readings
of some very difficult poems. He does not exactly explicate or analyze the poems — this may
indeed be something that Crane’s own poetics rule out anyway — but through a kind of luminous
paraphrase Mariani brings one into the penumbra of associations that seemed to be in play in
Crane’s mind as he composed the poem. Mariani’s passages sometimes sound odd out of context.
But if you have Crane’s poems open before you as you read Mariani’s brooding paraphrases, you
can’t help but see how keen an insight he has into those poems. Here is part of Mariani’s comment
on the opening lines of the second part of Crane’s sequence “Voyages:”

— And yet this great wink of eternity,

Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned where
Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflection of our love . . .

This sea, this sea of love, this “Samite sheeted and processioned” sea, unfolding
like some majestic silk scroll laced with moon-reflected silver tracing across its sur-
face, went on and on, even as the voyager traveled deeper and deeper into uncharted
waters, touching the expanse of love’s vastness for the first time. It as a sea whose
surface was like the belly of some sea nymph beckoning in the rise and fall of waves,
some undine, bending and turning before the forces of the moon, regulating and chart-
ing the ageless seasons of the sea, until even the moonlight seemed to join in the
laughter before the wrapt and rapt “inflections” of two lovers. At this height, Crane
underscored, language itself fell away. It was no longer even a matter of will or ego,
he knew, for he had been summoned by forces far beyond his ability to withstand, and
all he could do now was to move as the sea itself gestured. Such love compels and
terrifies, for even in love’s orgasmic completion he tasted his own mortality. After all,
what timebound creature could look upon the face of rapture such as this and live?

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 If one’s first instinct is to call this paragraph overheated, one’s second is to notice that it is
overheated in precisely Crane’s way, and that it brings out the undertones, nuances, sound-echoes,
and implications of the Crane passage at hand. The composition instructor in me hesitates before
paragraphs like this. But I don’t think Crane would have. Actors sometimes keep up an interior
monologue with themselves as they work through a silent action, or they mutter a subtext to them-
selves, running alongside their spoken lines. I think these paraphrases have very much that quality,
and their thinking is very much aligned with the spirit of Crane’s thinking even if they do not have
Crane’s diamond concision.
Crane’s poetry is a poetry of connotations. Enough of these connotations were public for
Crane’s poetry, with all of its obscurities, to persuade its original readers and generations of readers
since. But many of the key connotations — Crane’s allusion to Willy Lescaze’s now famous
drawing of him in the opening section of “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” — were private
(although not so private as to render the poem totally unintelligible without a hint). We may not
know that Crane had the startling eyes Lescaze gave him in his portrait in mind when he wrote in
that poem

Accept a lone eye riveted to your plane,

Bent axle of devotion along companion ways
That beat, continuous, to hourless days—
One inconspicuous, glowing orb of praise.

Indeed, to make sense of the poem it may be enough to know that the poet here describes a gaze
of rapt, more-than-erotic fascination. But when we know the connotation, we know something
more of what that fascination means, and we see the fierce, otherworldly, and laserlike quality of
its focus.
One of the best uses of literary biography is to bring out the broad, densely connected fabric
of nuances and connotations which shadow the words of even the most exoteric poets, never mind
poets of shade and suggestion like Crane. Mariani’s biography of Crane brings out the private
texture of his poems in a way that would make his book an ideal model for later literary biographers

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to follow.

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