Hart Crane’s poetry is usually thought of as dense and obfuscating, and stands before readers like a colossus, an immense Eiffel bridge, on the other side of which huddle a quite small, and strange group of persons who understand him truly. Harold Bloom, Edmund Wilson, Jack Kerouac.
On this side of the bridge, however, we do a different kind of huddling – much less joyous – in which we register biographical recollections of his painful and extreme alcoholism, his dramaturgical, suicide-hop from the stern of a ship ("Goodbye, everybody!“ he called out), and perhaps his relation with Harry and Caresse Crosby, who first published “The Bridge” in their Black Sun Press.
Caresse was bred as a plutocrat, bound in the culture of east coast stricture, but several thousand dollars allowed her to obverse her life and live as a comfortable bourgeois bohemian in Paris. Early bobo. Harry had set a suicide date but contravened it some years earlier than the day he had long-specified. Caresse died in 1970, after another vivid career as a peace activist; the cause was pneumonia related to heart disease. Her autobiography is called The Passionate Years, and the tone suggests that it was written in the quieter hours of her life.
Biographical appreciations of Crane can only decay gravitationally, like satellite orbits, into the remarkable events of his painful life: the suicide, and the obscurity and condensed structure of his writing. The deduction is often made that we, as an English-speaking people, will one day come to read Crane as we do Shakespeare. Perhaps that’s true, but those days seem far off, as we gather round the morbid and depraved campfires of our acculturated, televised lives. Still, one may read of Hamnet’s father’s land holdings, his diet, and his grieving, and in such a way the best access to Crane one presently possesses, is an ability to picture him at the war games maneuvers of his chief avocation. That was croquet, a sport as brutal, noble, and epiphanic as any other, despite its associations with a choked gentility.
Hart would practice alone in the rain, and he would practice alone at 4:00 AM.
The nature and form of croquet wends back in time to various earthlands and young nations where the distinction between leisure and decadence was blurring and then becoming lost. Many of these demographies used peculiar descriptive titling names, often, to us now, vague and evocative and romantic (paille maille, pall mall, trucco, beugelen, klosbaan, jeu de mail, crookey, het kolven, ground billiards, and the madness-inducing and bellicose cross-country game mail a la chicane). Waves of races descended from the hills or washed up on the Breton and Norman beaches over the course of two thousand years, yet no people setting their own cultural references upon the land could eradicate from the soul of whatever denizens the terre was presently habitating, the metaphor upon the beaches of stones and crooks and hoops. These were the same peoples who fashioned cromlechs and henges, and who built circles of stone in which pi equaled three point zero. Versions and inflected iterations of the game, worldwide, appeared and withdrew from common knowledge; today there are over thirty forms of the game extant, a map of which traces the trampling imperialism of the most warmongering nation over the past seven hundred years, Great Britain.
Like the species of bluebird that can hear a tugboat’s low-timbred horn forty miles from the harbor, Crane looked deep into croquet and saw each stage of its evolution, and he felt the differentiated and generalized sentiments that players of the game at its highest level associate with good play. He imagined but could never see the defining and nominative skeleton at work in the bridge or the sea; but he broke the code of croquet‘s chemistry, and articulated the equations of quantum mathematics lying in the non-simultaneous, only partially overlapping transformational events submerged deep within each match. Crane was a devoted reader of Izaak Walton (The Compleat Angler) and Robert Burton (The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up) and also of John Ruskin (Præterita:). He was an intense and worried reader of these liturgical texts; he praised and enucleated the exigeticists‘ explicatory pilgrimage crusades, and he became, for a while, rudderless and mute as he tried and failed in misery to understand the essence of translation. When the habitual form of his personality expressions were tossing and turning in what was probably a factitious thrall to Peggy Cowley, he undermined that romance with his ceaseless chittering, to her, about William Conrad Röntgen, whose work Crane had recently studied, and who, he said, hanged the very moon by discovering and naming the new christ, x-rays. His close friends swaddled him in the counterpane of their love and respect, and the debt he owed them referred to their bestowals of money, food, shelter, publication, and places to spend the weekend, but nothing seems ever to have removed their society from the aspect of their internal meaning he needed to pierce and vivisect. Then in 1932 the brick tower he had built of thousands of discrete units of possibility became compressed and destabilized, and he jumped into the only sea that would have him.
He developed an obsession with croquet, and played with an intensity that troubled his friends. With the constant flushing of alcohol plumbing him, his attention to minimizing the number of knocks of the mallet resembled, or stood in for, an addiction. During the game, and also during his frantic practice, he was totally free of his allergies and his vexations. These hours represented the false dawn of his private Renaissance, and were a time when men and women gamboled in the garden, though in Crane’s particular case, they were also limitless hours and eras of anguish and suffering. He investigated the totality of the ballpaths, and visited wicked vengeance upon the malevolent loopwires of possibility. When forced to the sidelines to towel his sweated forearms or quench himself with iced and spiked lemonade, he looked back with the bitterest scorn upon the set-up, eager to storm again the heart of the affray, and crush whoever had summoned the courage or indifference to contest his possession of yon grassland pitch. As a point of research, you may wish to examine the elaborate and extensive rules of croquet, as well as the cant idioms associated with the game, to more fully appreciate that the poet had entered into a nefarious Bibliothèque Nationale of iteration, assay, and inductive evocation. Within the complexities and subtleties of the game, the hero is but a bunny lost in vast brambles, and the only egress is victory, and that victory must cause another bunny to wither and rot in the bayou morass of having failed and of then definitely being a failure. A loser.
The ancestral ur-game engaged on the Brittany beaches required extremely long, arching whacks of the ball that played against the constant wind and formed archéd rainbows upon the flat sloping sands as the ball followed what seemed to be its instinctual forces back toward the surf. Two iron hoops were placed on the sand, one near the grasslands at the top of the beach, and the other, netted, was near the wet sand of the intermittent waves. This demanded over its one hundred metres or more, a practioners’s sense of slope and wind as a long convexity was drawn upon the seashore coastline. Boys and girls were dispatched to chase and fetch the countless errant attempts, their emotional disposition about this is unknown. Much of the charm was watching as in an awe the vast curl, tracing in the heart the lift and the momentum; it may have seemed like music. Days would pass before an arc passed center-on beneath, and through each hoop, which was the merriness that replaced pothering to see the face of Jesus, and was after all the heart of the matter.
There is a manner by which you and I may project our opinions and derived impressions beyond our time and place, and take everything we might have known about, construed, or misconstrued relating to Hart Crane, and nestle ourselves in what we might take to be the sentiments of his consciousness, at any one point in time, and become ourselves sympathetic with those, his torrents, as when he is practicing croquet in the dimness of the setting moonlight, aching and numb from the ebb tide of alcohol, and awash in the seiche between bitterness and the vain, failed glimmer of having accomplished the forging out of jumbling English, the poetically nuanced line – as to his glorying satisfaction. The heart of the matter is the heart of darkness, as the exhausted Crane attempted vectors and trailhead along the inherited scripts of the sad, sad gloaming. Inside the house his dozing friends heard the click of wooden balls, and the only pattern to be discerned was its seeming endlessness. Meridians without syntax, a Poe-like knocking in the distant gathering dew; the impression of continuance without fulfillment; the hollows and the dusk. Such futility we might feel as longing, or the gnawing hungers of exstressing intransigence, the striving for love’s labor lost, the certainty of predestined ruination, Crane unleavened by fellowship, or the virgin dawn of discovering that merry metaphor, wine and sweet biscuits are the natural language of the humane and earthy Bretons who rejected puny doctrines or papal decrees, in favor of sex, wit, and play. He thought of golf and tennis and Pétanque Marseillaise and Boule Lyonnaise; late Dodgers and late Phillies and late Giants and late Cubbies and late Cardinals gathered like Druids in his conjecture, and clustered round the fire of his fizzling intuition. The mallet in his palms mocked his style; something like evil original sin dwelled in the lords of manors pale, who vanished in jungles black and foul, there to disinherit the children of generative syntax, and poison the well with sub-standard grammars and rotted vernaculars, tides of just words twisted-infelicitous.
American vorticist prose was the rampaging beast within Hart’s chest, a utility (electricity and plumbing) incapacious and inadequate for the job. The multiple swirling whirlpools spun in thunderclouds beyond his ability to merge or market pools of words within, so as to find or express the grace of “swing“ of which oarsmen speak, the coordinated rhythm of simultaneity and rhyming forces. Instead, Crane surrendered his chaos to the Lucian, accelerating pies, and showed us only the often compelling wreckage to which he could not cling, and from which he could never swim, as to a raft, or an island, or the manned skiff that was quite nearby.
The court in the yard of the home of his hosts for the long summer weekend constricted and deformed the fabulous arcs that a vestigial part of an incipient poem in Hart’s mind remembered, in the bright, sunny, airy, and delightful seashore in the Dark Ages, the Breton coast of La Manche. ("Mor Breizh," he whispered; „Armorica.“) The arch was the first magickal wonderment of architecture, mirroring something natural in the human body’s blood arcs; the ball thwacked on the hard sand rolled like a sailing, straining against and for moments exceeding the expectation; a flying buttress, and falconry’s elliptical swoop and flight. Celts in Brittany loved oscillation (the seesaw was first a fad on the far western coast of the Realm of the Francs) and dimensionality is an obvious element in its sport, its heathen celebration, and its miscegenated cuisine. Breton cannabis too contains a singular pharmaceutical that replicates looping flight, and like the peyote in far Apache dunes, creates within the artist arrows peaking near the sun, and the riding of gusts and clouds back to earth. In the dark or in the rain, his friends could not quite see Hart dance, or the crescendo within his whitewater language. Posts and wickets, mallets; this bastardization of gravity’s rainbows. Peenemunde? Mount Saint Michel? Crane read all of Proust twice, and will have imagined that the girls on the beach at Balbec may have played, or may have seen played, arc sur plage. Marcel omits mention.
There are persons who had accustomed themselves to playing croquet with Hart – those of superior equanimity and pity for him – and there are craven persons who played against him only once. The scent of victory, mistaking itself for bravery, erases genteel accord about games played in soft, unprejudiced ways, and, filtered through the maelstroms of Crane’s comprehensive mind, created in him a viscious manner in which he saw no guerdon on top of the mountain but having exploded the vanity of the loser, and becoming himself the chief of all the grail knights quondam and all the grail knights futurus.
Hart Crane’s zeroing in on croquet was the edge of a burning, gem-like flame cut into the heart of the game, where meditations and hypnosis form the pivot of the lonely self, yogic and unalloyed. The ego cult comes to mind. Also the oceanic immensity of intergalactic space.
...into the silver mines, into the vortex, and into the deep deep sea.
But perhaps Crane wasn’t a visionary; his obsessive attention to moving x-rays may only have been the manifestation of the utterest extension of his petulance and megalomania. If that were so, one might have wanted to cry: "Hart! C’mon! The whole world is just a goddamned musée sans murs! Hart! It’s all just a cheap theatre diorama under the Proscenium!" This wish, and this appeal, however, would have forgotten that deep within the genetic soul of man lay the supreme force of desire to blast an opponent’s wooden ball into the far next yard, or perhaps even forever lost into a grim, boggy, and snaky gully.
