THE LETTERS OF HART CRANE
_By Brom Weber_
HART CRANE: A BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDY, 1948
[Illustration:
_H. W. Minns_
HART CRANE
(_Taken c. 1921_)]
THE LETTERS OF
HART CRANE1916-1932
EDITED BY BROM WEBER
_The imaged Word, it is, that holds
Hushed willows anchored in its glow.
It is the unbetrayable reply
Whose accent no farewell can know._HERMITAGE HOUSE · NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1952, BY BROM WEBER
_All rights reserved_
_First Edition_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PREFACE
“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.