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'The Broken Tower: The Life Of Hart Crane' by Paul Mariani

New biography examines Hart Crane’s genius for poetry, tragedy

Sunday, June 27, 1999

By Samuel Hazo

	The Broken Tower: The Life Of Hart Crane By Paul Mariani Norton $35.00

All biographies of Hart Crane are destined to be measured against Philip Horton’s brief but conclusive “Hart Crane: The Life of an American Poet,” published in 1937.

Brom Weber wrote a biographical and critical study in 1948, and John Unterecker wrote the voluminous “Voyager” in 1969.

Now that Crane’s centenary is upon us, Paul Mariani has written what is presumably a more thorough biography than Unterecker’s, if such is possible. But Mariani is a master biographer (as well as a literary critic and poet), and the effort he put into this book is evident from the first page to the bibliography.

Tracing Crane’s life from Garrettsville, Ohio, to the deck of the S.S. Orizaba from which he made a suicidal leap into the Caribbean in 1932 (his grave in Garrettsville is simply marked “Lost at Sea” since the body was never recovered), Mariani documents the poet’s passage in all its anguish and tragedy.

This moved from crisis to crisis between Crane and his parents as well as between Crane and friends like Alan Tate and others. To say that Crane was a trial to his friends would be to put the most charitable light on his behavior.

A poet of unique genius when his talent and inspiration were absolutely compatible (and a poet who sounded like someone imitating Hart Crane when they were not), Crane in his private life was hardly an exemplar. Somehow Crane remained faithful to his genius even though his promiscuous homosexuality, inconsiderateness and raucous drunkenness moved him inexorably toward his own undoing.

To interpret Crane’s poetry in light of his homosexuality, as Mariani sometimes does, is to assume that life and literature (a poet and his poetry) have a one-to-one relationship. This is incorrect in essence.

The vision of “The Bridge,” Crane’s masterwork, in which Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge becomes the dominant symbol in American culture and is compared with the medieval cathedrals and the pyramids at Giza as triumphs of the human imagination, owes nothing to sexual orientation as much as it owes to poetic genius.

Despite the claim by Mariani (as well as by Allen Ginsberg and even by Crane himself) that he is in the direct tradition of Walt Whitman, I am not sure that he means this in a personal or poetic sense. The fact remains that homosexuality was never Crane’s subject, as it occasionally was for Whitman and frequently for Ginsberg.

In his deservedly famous essay “The Art of Poetry” in 1929, Crane neither mentions nor alludes to it, but he makes copious references to Coleridge, Dante and others, including Whitman and Stravinsky. He was primarily concerned with the vision of America itself, as well as with those shorter epiphanies that became his superb lyrical poems.

This is one reason in my view why Crane will ultimately be regarded as a more cosmic poet than either Whitman or Ginsberg. I feel that Mariani, the humanist and poet, realizes this, but the constraints of writing a biographical study in the 1990s may have blurred his focus slightly.

Mariani has done a creditable job in delineating the main features of Crane’s life, and he does not shy away from considering such difficult poems as “The Wine Menagerie” and “Cape Hatteras.” His book certainly belongs with those of Horton, Unterecker, Dembo, Sherman Paul, Alfred Hanley and R.W.B. Lewis.

Hazo is director of the International Poetry Forum, State Poet of the Commonwealth and the author of “Smithereened Apart,” the first book-length study of Hart Crane.