The letters of Hart Crane, 1916-1932

“Of the poets who came into prominence during the 1930’s in America, none is more likely to achieve an immortality than Harold Hart Crane.” So write Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska in their recent, authoritative History of American Poetry. The extraordinary quality of Crane’s poetry and the tense drama of his brief life make such an observation valid and inevitable. It is amply supported in an indirect sense by the amount of devoted attention which Crane has received in the twenty years since his death by drowning in 1932. Waldo Frank’s edition of the Collected Poems appeared in 1933. The first full-length book on Crane, Philip Horton’s Hart Crane, came in 1937. Eleven years later, in 1948, the editor’s Hart Crane was published. Meanwhile, magazines, anthologies, and critical volumes have given substantial space and consideration to the poet.

It seems fitting then, and necessary too, that the correspondence of this outstanding writer be presented now. Crane’s letters exist in scattered condition: some in magazines, others in the appendices of books, still more in libraries and private collections. Many have already been lost, because of carelessness, wartime events, or other factors. But apart from such matters as preservation and compilation, there are the human revelations and literary merits which distinguish Crane’s letters and make this collection desirable. Seldom has a man laid his heart bare as does Crane in these documents, seldom with the passion and skill which he so masterfully infused into his poetry as well. It seems undoubted that many of these letters will before long find their way into anthologies of great letters and prose.

The large quantity of letters written by Crane may be ascribed in part to the geographical gulf which separated him from those to whom he believed he could honestly announce his thoughts, emotions, and meaningful experiences. As soon as it became possible to enjoy closer contact with once-distant friends, he stopped writing to them. Thus scores of letters were sent to Gorham Munson from November 1919 to the early spring of 1923, at which time Crane joined Mr. and Mrs. Munson in New York. Thereafter, few letters were received by Mr. Munson, except in rare instances when either of the two men had left the city, or when Crane had an urgent need for communication which could not be satisfied with speech. In the case of friends like Slater Brown and Malcolm Cowley, where friendship was initiated and continued with social intercourse hardly ever broken by physical separation, only a handful of letters exist as a result.

As happens with some of us, many letters were the perfunctory expressions of a sense of obligation. An explanation of this character must often be assigned to a series of letters written to one person, or to a particular letter. It is as mundane sometimes as insistence by the poet’s mother that he write her several times a week and make sure to send her a special delivery letter timed to reach her punctually each Sunday morning. In this class, too, must be placed those letters occasioned by Crane’s failure to pay a debt, his desire to make amends for a squabble, and similar causes.

But far more compelling than distance or propriety as the dominant force behind Crane’s prolific composition of letters was an emotional impulse which drove him to discharge so much expressive energy in a non-poetic form: his acquisitive need for sympathy, pity, understanding, affection ... a need accompanied by the belief that these responses could be evoked with a persuasive explanation in words. Let us not confuse this poignant situation with dishonesty or a huckster’s fraudulency. Crane was, after all, a poet to whom language was paramount. The outcome was that even those of his letters which had been intended as geographical bridges, or as duties, speedily found themselves converted into detailed and uninhibited recitations and exhortations. Examining the letters to his mother in this light, to choose one instance, we can understand why, despite the profound mutual misunderstanding of which each was aware, Crane persisted in alternately cajoling, threatening, and informing a basically-unresponsive correspondent.

The resultant rich character of Crane’s letters, in terms of factual data and emotional subtleties, has enveloped them with a completeness calling for little amplification or clarification in the form of notes. These have consequently been held to a minimum. When Crane, for example, announces a decision, he bathes it in such a sea of rationalization and background that its origins, its validity, and its likely conclusion are all too evident to the reader. One is, indeed, encouraged to speculate whether the tremendous amount of energy involved in the production of so vast a profusion of details for even the most trivial of communications did not drain away some of the feeling and thought that might more happily have been incorporated in poems.

Strangely enough, however, it is apparent that the quantity and quality of Crane’s letters were not negatively, but positively related to his poetic output. A correlation of the letters with the history of Crane’s productivity reveals that it was precisely during periods of great poetic fertility and well-being that his most evocative and profound letters were composed. An illustration of this symbiotic relationship between the poetry and the prose, surely a phenomenon which demonstrates how organic and deep-seated was the urge for literary expression animating him, is the remarkable series of letters written to Gorham Munson between 1919 and 1923, when Crane perfected his control of a mature, individual language and music and composed some of his most striking lyrics. The highly-charged group of letters which Crane sent off to Waldo Frank from the Isle of Pines in 1926, while so feverishly engaged in molding several brilliant sections of The Bridge, is another relevant example.

The self-sufficiency of Crane’s letters has made it less disappointing for the editor to be unable to include correspondence addressed to him, or to make extracts from it, as a complementary balance and check. Because of Crane’s peripatetic career, letters he received were left behind in the boarding houses, steamship cabins, and hotels wherein he spent his days. A more drastic reduction in the number of remaining letters was apparently accomplished by his impetuous habit of destroying letters from people with whom he had severed relationships on an unfriendly note. Finally, the irregular and careless storing and handling of Crane’s papers after his death has had its own inevitable results.

The responsibility to be exercised in the task of organizing the letters of a tempestuous and controversial man like Hart Crane, is as much a matter of human judgment as it is a familiarity with the canons of scholarship. Crane conformed less, overtly at least, to the dominant mores of his age than probably any of his contemporaries. The leitmotif was restless deviation--whether aesthetic, social, religious, or sexual. The record of his days vibrates with an explosive terror and repose--elated, wretched, violent, Rabelaisian--which find dynamic outlet in his letters. Insofar as Crane’s letters will serve to develop a self-portrait and contribute toward an understanding of three decades of our American past, no harm can be accomplished by a forthright presentation.

The editor, therefore, has not suppressed any portions of Crane’s letters which might disturb the genteel or excite the prurient. Those who have studied Crane’s poetry with perception know how richly studded it is with the imagery, symbolism, and themes of love. As this preface was being put into final form, the editor received a copy of Dr. Paul Friedman’s “The Bridge: A Study in Symbolism” (The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Jan. 1952). After discussing such writers as Wilder and Kafka, Dr. Friedman, one of the few psychoanalysts who displays a genuine concern for literary values, goes on to say: “It implies no irreverence toward Crane’s poetic sensibility to introduce these [psychological] concepts. The sexual imagery in his poetry is overt, undisguised.” Of the “Voyages” series, Dr. Friedman writes: “Here the psychoanalyst could hardly be more explicit than Crane himself.” Under no circumstances could the wealth of background experience and emotion which produced the alternately-pessimistic and ecstatic love poems of Crane conscientiously be omitted from a volume of his letters. One of the great love-poets of our time, few men have been so tyrannically governed by a chronic need to love and be loved. One need only observe in these letters how Crane’s disinterest in poetry and his torpid creativity after 1929 were affected by a new and surprising love relationship. Miraculously rejuvenated, as it were, he wrote “The Broken Tower,” one of his best poems.

The course of a man’s life is inextricably linked with his fellows. For Crane in particular, relationships with other people were among the most weighty problems with which he had to cope. The letters uncover a pattern of tragic and repetitive failure which cannot help but influence our response to his statements about men and women. As one views the past with the advantage of hindsight, the fact is inescapable that almost everyone with whom Crane had close contact eventually became estranged from him in greater or lesser degree, though from a distance they may have continued to admire certain of his qualities. This held true for his literary as well as non-literary associates. All too often, it was Crane’s vigorous egocentricity, his self-destructive behavior, which impelled a shocked and helpless friend to seek protective cover, to avoid Crane as gracefully as possible. Yet, far more frequently, those who drifted within Crane’s orbit became the unwitting centers of emotional dramas in which fantasy was as powerful a constituent as reality. The fantastic distortion which blurred some people for Crane must be attributed to his insecurity, his sexual inversion, his resentment against those who could or did help him, his alcoholism, his paranoiac misrepresentation of motives and events, his hysterical existence ... in short, to the complex of neuroses which finally burgeoned forth during the last year of his life into what was probably a full-scale psychopathic state. Of course, this does not deny that Crane was probably also the victim of envy, misunderstanding, and distaste for his poetry and personality.

With these considerations as a guide, the editor has not thought it necessary to delete those of Crane’s comments which reflect unfavorably upon the works or persons of artists or other public figures, especially where such comments are balanced elsewhere in the letters by favorable remarks. History, in any event, does not take kindly to being expurgated or twisted for special purposes, no matter how laudable the intention. The editor has been encouraged in his respect for honesty and frankness by Gorham Munson, Editor of Hermitage House, who has interposed no stipulations although he figures prominently in a variety of ways in the letters. The procedure has been different if it seemed that Crane’s observations would psychologically or socially harm any living person or the close surviving relatives of a dead man. In such cases, and they have been few, either the offensive material, or names and data which might identify an individual, were omitted.