In the first of his Voyages, Crane—in that most referential of introductions to that transreferential cascade of poetic rhetoric—had exhorted the young boys frisking with sand and stick and shell:
. . . there is a line
You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it
Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses
Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.
The traditional reading certainly takes that line to refer to the boundary between innocence and sexual knowledge—and, for readers who know of Crane’s love for Opffer, specifically homosexual knowledge.
Here we are not beyond referentiality but only into the simple foothills of metaphor. The caresses not to be trusted are those that are too “lichen-faithful,” i.e., clinging, that originate from a breast “too wide,” i.e., from a breast wider than a child’s, i.e., a grown man’s (or a grown woman’s).
But it is also a line of rhetorical referentiality, of referential clarity—a line Crane had to cross specifically to write his love poems, a line beyond which all was music, affect, connotative brilliance—but without reference, a poetic land where the intended topic was always instantly erasable: “nothing but rhetoric.” As a poet working in America, Crane had broached this verbal area all but alone. Wilde, the early hero of Crane’s juvenile effort, “C 33,” had doubtless first taught him the form to use in dealing with sex. (“C 33” was Wilde’s cell number, when he was imprisoned at Reading Gaol for sodomy. The reader aware of this fact is, as it were, welcomed into Crane’s poem; the reader who is not, is excluded from it and finds its subject opaque.) “C 33” was Crane’s first attempt to separate his readers into two camps before the topic of homosexuality—in this case by means of homosexual folklore and erudition. But eventually Crane seems to have glimpsed within such practices an entire apparatus for articulating the inarticulable. And since Dada and surrealism were European movements to which he had no real and immediate access, it’s no wonder that, from time to time (on such rhetorically problematic nights, when language and the machinery of the night as we have described it had, perhaps too quickly, escorted him there, arm in arm, like Loveman himself), that rhetorical area looked to Crane like a verbal waste land.
How much of this was behind Crane’s drunken attempt to leap from the roof, maybe half an hour later—well, we must answer Loveman’s interviewer’s rhetorical question (“That’s what was bothering him”) in the same manner as Loveman:
Silence—before turning to another topic.
IV
The Bridge is a poem whose “Proem” and eight sections fall into two astonishing halves. The first half—“Proem”and Part I, “Ave Maria,” throughout Part III, “Cutty Sark”—ranges over themes roughly connected by the concept of Time: history, the present, tradition, youth, age. The second half—Part IV, “Cape Hatteras” through Part VIII, “Atlantis”—recompli- cates many of the same themes by considering them in the light of Space: territory, landscape, the city of lust and love, transportation. The idea of love—sometimes spoken, sometimes unspeakable—is the Bridge among them all.
The Brooklyn Bridge makes three appearances in the poem, two of them spectacular, one almost invisible. The spectacular appearances are in the introduction (“Proem”) and the coda (“Atlantis”). The near invisible one falls at the poem’s virtual center, just before the closing movement of “Cutty Sark,” when a veiled account of an unsuccessful homosexual pick-up of a drunken aging sailor concludes with the line, “I started walking home across the Bridge . . .” But a controlling irony of the poem would seem to be that images of the Bridge are, themselves, bridged by images from the land either side of it.
On at least one level, Crane’s enterprise in The Bridge is majestically lucid. God—or the Absolute—as an abstract idea is too vast for the mind of man and woman to comprehend directly. Such an idea can only manifest itself—and then only partially—through myths. Living in the rectilinear architecture of the modern city, for Crane the curve, the broken arc, most visibly suggested the vastness and transcendence of deity. (That curve was, one suspects, the same Ouspensky-generated curve-of-binding-energy that Crane’s friend, black writer Jean Toomer, was so insistent about having represented in the book design—before “Karintha,” “Seventh Street,” and “Kabnis”—of Cane [1923].) But the curve of gull-wing or bird flight, of wave crest or sea swell, was too impermanent. So Crane turned to the man-made curve of the Brooklyn Bridge “to lend a myth to God.” Numerous other curves, some enduring, some momentary—from the mazy river’s, to the railroad’s steel, to the movement of Indian dancers, to that of a burlesque queen’s pearl strings shaking at her hip—inform the Bridge’s curve with meaning, just as the multiple uses of a word in language determine its meaning in any individual occurrence. And an early reading of The Bridge in which we pay attention to curved things that vanish and curved things that remain, in contrast with straight and angular things, equally stable or fleeting, is as good an entrance strategy as any into the further complexities of the poem.
As far as the source of that symbolic/mystic curve in the Ouspensky/ Gurdjieff teachings, it’s fair to suppose that Crane had what most of us would regard as a healthy skepticism toward the practical realities of the Gurdjieff movement. In an often reprinted letter of May 29th, 1927, that we have already referred to, Crane wrote to Yvor Winters, who had urged him that poems should reflect a picture of “the complete man”—which completeness, for Winters, seems somehow to have included being heterosexual:
The image of “the complete man” is a good idealistic antidote for the horrid hysteria for specialization that inhabits the modern world. And I strongly second your wish for some definite ethical order. Munson, however, and a number of my other friends, not so long ago, being stricken with the same urge, and feeling that something must be done about it—rushed into the portals of the famous Gurdjieff Institute and have since put themselves through all sorts of Hindu antics, songs, dances, incantations, psychic sessions, etc. so that now, presumably the left lobes of their brains and their right lobes function (M’s favorite word) in perfect unison. I spent hours at the typewriter trying to explain to certain of these urgent people why I could not enthuse about their methods; it was all to no avail, as I was told that the “complete man” had a different logic than mine, and further that there was no way of understanding this logic without first submitting yourself to the necessary training . . . Some of them, having found a good substitute for their former interest in writing by means of more complete formulas of expression have ceased writing now altogether, which is probably just as well. At any rate, they have become hermetically sealed souls to my eyesight, and I am really not able to offer judgment.
But while Crane could frown at their methods, he had read and been impressed with Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum, and he had gone to the lectures and dance demonstrations—and had taken in a good many of the ideas. Would that Toomer—likely the referent of that unhappy “probably just as well”—had been as able as Crane to maintain a similar distance. Finally, in the letter Crane gets to the homosexuality (Winters had apparently compared Crane positively to Valéry and Marlowe—probably without realizing Marlowe was gay—but warned that Crane might end up like the asexual Leonardo, who started endless projects of genius but finished less than two dozen):
Your fumigation of the Leonardo legend is a healthy enough reaction, but I don’t think your reasons for doubting his intelligence and scope very potent.—I’ve never closely studied the man’s attainments or biography, but your argument is certainly weakly enough sustained on the sole prop of his sex—or lack of such. One doesn’t have to turn to homosexuals to find instances of missing sensibilities. Of course I’m sick of all this talk about balls and cunts in criticism. It’s obvious that balls are needed, and that Leonardo had ’em—at least the records of the Florentine prisons, I’m told, say so. You don’t seem to realize that the whole topic is something of a myth anyway, and is consequently modified in the
characteristics of the image by each age in each civilization. Tom Jones, a character for whom I have the utmost affection, represented the model in 18th Century England, as least so far as the stated requirements of your letter would suggest, and for an Anglo- Saxon model he is still pretty good aside from calculus, the Darwinian theory, and a few other mental additions.
Quoting this letter at even greater length, Thomas E. Yingling in his Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text, a book rich in political insight, is astonished, possibly even bewildered, at the Tom Jones (1749) reference. But I can certainly remember being a teenager, when gay men of letters assumed that the good-natured foundling’s light-hearted promiscuity was a self-evidently coded representation of bisexuality, or even homosexuality.
Here may be the place to mention that a reader taking his or her first dozen or so trips through The Bridge is likely—as were most of its early critics—to see its interest and energy centering in the lyricism and scene painting of “Proem,” “Ave Maria,” and the various sections of “Powhatan’s Daughter”—that is, The Bridge’s first half.
But a reader who has lived with the poem over years is more likely to appreciate the stately, greatly reflective, and meditative beauties and insights—as well as the austere and lucid structure—of the second half:
“Cutty Sark,” with which the first half ends, leaves us, as we have said, with the poet walking home over the Bridge at dawn, as Crane must have walked home many times to 110 Columbia Heights, contemplating the voyages of the great steamers, and probably remembering returning home—if we are to trust the restored epigraph that follows—to Emil. At this point, The Bridge begins its final, descending curve:
“Cape Hatteras” looks to the sky . . .
After the divigation of “Three Songs”—where the theme of sexual longing is heterosexualized for straight male readers (the Sestos and Abydos of the epigraph are two cities on opposite sides of the Hellespont, separated by water, whose literary import is precisely that they are not connected by a bridge, a separation which precipitates the tragedy of Hero, Priestess of Hesperus)—“Quaker Hill” (most cynical of the poem’s sections) looks out level with the earth . . .
With the epigraph from Blake’s “Morning,” “The Tunnel” plunges us beneath the ground for an infernal recapitulation of the impressionistic techniques of the poem’s first half (the fall of Atlantis proper), in which the poet glimpses Whitman’s—and his own—chthonic predecessor, Poe . . .
. . . to leave us, once more, in “Atlantis,” on the Bridge, flooded by the moon.
As a kind of progress report on The Bridge, on March 18, 1926, Crane wrote a letter to philanthropist Otto Kahn, who, a year before, had subsidized him with a thousand dollars.
Dear Mr. Kahn:
You were so kind as to express a desire to know from time to time how the Bridge was progressing, so I’m flashing in a signal from the foremast, as it were. Right now I’m supposed to be Don Christobal Colon returning from “Cathay,” first voyage. For mid-ocean is where the poem begins.
It concludes at midnight—at the center of Brooklyn Bridge. Strangely enough that final section of the poem has been the first to be completed—yet there’s a logic to it, after all; it is the mystic consummation toward which all the other sections of the poem converge. Their contents are implicit in its summary.
“Cutty Sark” was composed shortly after “Ave Maria,” the opening Columbus section; and though it’s possibly that, at first, Crane was not planning to include it in The Bridge, it is almost impossible to read it, right after the earlier poem, without seeing the aging, incoherent, inebriated sailor of the second poem as an older, ironized version—three hundred years later on—of the Christopher Columbus figure who narrates the earlier transatlantic meditation. (Try reading “Cutty Sark” against Whitman’s poem, “Prayer of Columbus,” the poem in Leaves of Grass that follows “Passage to India”—a poem whose importance in The Bridge we will shortly come to.) The five sections of Part II, “Powhatan’s Daughter,” that, in The Bridge’s final version, intervene, dilute that identification somewhat. But the suggestion of the individual’s persistence through history, associated, say, with “Van Winkle,” still holds it open.
In his letter to Kahn, Crane included a plan for the whole Bridge that may well have been growing in his mind for years:
I.
Columbus—Conquest of space, chaos.
II.
Pokahantus—The natural body of America-fertility, etc.
III.
Whitman—The Spiritual body of America. (A dialogue between Whitman and a dying soldier in a Washington hospital; the infraction of physical death, disunity, on the concept of immortality.)
IV.
John Brown (Negro Porter on Calgary Express making up births and singing to himself (a jazz form for this) of his sweetheart and the death of John Brown, alternately.)
V.
Subway—The encroachment of machinery on humanity; a kind of purgatory in relation to the open sky of last section.
VI.
The Bridge—A sweeping dithyramb in which the Bridge becomes the symbol of consciousness spanning time and space.
Shortly Crane wrote even longer outlines of the parenthetical narratives in Part III and Part IV. The following, recalling Whitman’s poem “To One Shortly to Die” and scenes from Specimen Days, Crane titled “Cape Hatteras”:
Whitman approaches the bed of a dying (southern) soldier—scene is in a Washington hospital. Allusion is made to this during the dialogue. The soldier, conscious of his dying condition, at the end of the dialogue asks Whitman to call a priest, for absolution. Whitman leaves the scene—deliriously the soldier calls him back. The part ends before Whitman’s return, of course. The irony is, of course, in the complete absolution which Whitman’s words have already given the dying man, before the priest is called for. This, alternated with the eloquence of the dying man, is the substance of the dialogue—the emphasis being on the symbolism of the soldier’s body having been used as a forge toward a state of Unity. His hands are purified of the death they have previously dealt by the principles Whitman hints at or enunciates (without talking up-stage, I hope) and here the ‘religious gunman’ motive returns much more explicitly than in F & H. [A reference to Crane’s poem “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen.”] The agency of death is exercised in obscure ways as the agency of life. Whitman knew this and accepted it. The appeal of the scene must be made as much as possible independent of the historical ‘character’ of Walt.
And a still later outline for “Cape Hatteras” much closer to the poem as written, reads:
(1)
Cape—land—combination
conceive as a giant turning
(2)
Powerhouse
(3)
Offshoot—Kitty Hawk
Take off
(4)
War—in general
(5)
Resolution (Whitman)
Lines on Crane’s worksheets for “Cape Hatteras”—that stretch of southern New Jersey containing Whitman’s last home, in Camden, and (in the poem) the site of the plane wreckage—not used in the final version of the poem, possibly because they state a problem or a focus of the poem in terms too reductive, include, after the fourth stanza:
Lead me past logic and beyond the graceful carp of wit.
And:
What if we falter sometimes in our faith?
The epigraph for “Cape Hatteras” is from Whitman’s “Passage to India” (which contains the parenthetical triplet, harking back to “Ave Maria,” “Ah Genoese, thy dream! thy dream! / Centuries after thou art laid in thy grave / The shore thou foundest verifies thy dream”). As do most of the epigraphs in the poem, it functions as a bridge between the preceding section, in this case “Cutty Sark” (which, with its account of the unsuccessful pick-up, is the true center of unspoken homosexual longing, the yearning for communication, in The Bridge), and the succeeding, here “Cape Hatteras” itse
lf. With one line fore and three lines aft restored (lines, critic Robert Martin first pointed out, Crane probably expected the sagacious reader to be able to supply for himself), here is the passage from which the epigraph is actually taken: