Life of an Unhappy Poet

HART CRANE (452 pp.)--Brom Weber--The Bodley Press ($4.50)

Hart Crane was born in 1899, and committed suicide in 1932.

His admirers considered him potentially one of the greatest American poets. Actually, his poetry was obscure and frequently derivative--lighted by occasional brilliant passages. His fame rests not so much on his actual work as on his standing as a classic example of the frustrated American genius. If a Marxist critic wished for an illustration of the breakdown of culture under capitalism, he could scarcely find a clearer one than the career of Hart Crane.

Machiavellian Father. His life might have been modeled on Poe's. His Methodist father, a well-to-do candy manufacturer, seems to have been not merely an unsympathetic parent, but a capitalist reactionary who delighted in Machiavellian devices to keep his son's talents from flourishing. He put him to work 17 hours a day in a drugstore, with promise of "promotion" to out-of-town selling. When Hart got a sales job, with Washington, D.C. his territory, his father sent him there in the summer when the weather was so hot that the candy in his sample case melted. He got two new accounts.

Hart Crane's mother (he was the only child) divorced her husband, had a nervous breakdown, became an ardent Christian Scientist, exhausted herself working in an antique shop, tried unsuccessfully to compel her son to go to college. His friends were the few emancipated spirits who congregated around Herbert Fletcher's bookshop in Akron, and later the New York and expatriate intellectuals who contributed to the little magazines.

No Escape. Crane's jobs included working briefly in a shipyard, on a newspaper, in a warehouse. In later years, he was a surprisingly able advertising copywriter, and seems to have enjoyed the work. He was paid only $25 or $35 a week, hesitated to ask for raises, and almost never got one. When he planned to run away from civilization to the family plantation on the Isle of Pines in the West Indies, he found that the plantation had been put up for sale.

Often on the verge of complete collapse, making no secret of his homosexuality, he lived in furnished rooms on Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, or Grove Street in Greenwich Village, finding temporary shelter in tumbledown farmhouses, eating his meals at lunch counters and cheap restaurants.

The pattern of his life cooled into finality before he was 25. Says Author Weber: "Having been unable to adjudicate between the claims of poetry and the need to earn his living, Crane found that he could obtain relief by evading the issue. He ... trusted in the natural benevolence of circumstances. . . . The suffering . . . was made tolerable only by his optimism and acceptance of evil as a necessary component of reality. The devices which he had originally employed as tools for innocent purposes--alcohol to stimulate his poetic gift, sexual indulgence for the love which it engendered--became narcotics, less adequate as their grip over Crane grew progressively more overpowering." He wrote his masterpiece, The Bridge, on two grants of $1,000 each from

Lanker Otto Kahn, traveled to California as a rich man's companion, died by jumping from the deck of a steamer that was returning him from Mexico to the U.S.

Futile Defiance. The legend of his life -- the misunderstood poet throwing away his gifts and at last his life in a gesture of futile defiance -- is less an intellectual tragedy than a sort of Greenwich Village Uncle Tom's Cabin. The scenario of his career might have been written by some unknown Marie Corelli of the 1920s who decided that Crane was a modern Edgar Allan Poe and forced his life into that pattern. Readers may feel that Providence is a better dramatist than that. Crane seems to have been cast as The Poet in some play by Eugene O'Neill and to have dutifully acted out the part, railing against civilization and abandoning himself to Dionysiac frenzies, but making his most effective appearance when he cried out in distress against the part that has been assigned to him.

Hart Crane is the first book of 30-year-old Brom Weber. Weber's study, more critical than Philip Horton's Hart Crane (TIME, May 17, 1937), includes new material made available by Crane's mother. Critic Weber is lucid, levelheaded, candid, and seems likely to become a very welcome addition to the small list of serious U.S. critics.

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