Chapter III: Ideas (2)

It is illuminating to compare this Freudian world with the world of Dostoevski. The novelist explores the same Amazonian jungles of the unconscious, made manifest in their most morbid extremes. He, too, has gone down, through the need of an integrating principle that shall transfigure this chaos into truth. His method is the precise opposite of Freud’s. Dostoevski follows the unconscious impulse of men to its irrational source, and he accepts this source as the sole reality, finding in it his God and his values. He rejects as unreal the contradictory world of reason and all the social-moral constructs of reason. This rejected “conscious” world is dream for Dostoevski; the nineteenth-century culture built from it in Europe is false for him; and in the obscurantist ecstasy of what Freud calls the “lowest levels of the id,” the Russian finds his salvation of “waking.” Freud moves toward the irrational source only to reject of it what reason cannot bind; and only such energies of the unconscious as reason can draw back into a world of social conformity will he call “real.” The materials of Dostoevski’s art, made plastic in the great organisms of his novels, are identical with the materials of Freud’s world made into the looser esthetic form of a psychological system.

Dostoevski does not succeed in his absolutist attempt to deny reality to all experience of reason: if the irrational ecstasy is man’s sole waking, there is much sleep in his books, and hence their substance. The same holds with Freud. He would be the first to disclaim victory in his attempt to naturalize all the energy of the id within the domain of reason. There is much “sleep” and much darkness in his system: hence its livingness.

Time and again, Freud is led to limits where he is face to face with Dostoevski’s “real”—the mystic and the occult. “It can easily be imagined,” he says, “that certain practices of the mystics may succeed in upsetting the normal relations between the different regions of the mind, so that, for example, the perceptual system becomes able to grasp relations in the deeper layers of the ego and in the id which would otherwise be inaccessible to it. Whether such a procedure can put one in possession of ultimate truths [there speaks the absolutist devotee of reason] may be safely doubted. All the same, we must admit that the therapeutic efforts of psychoanalysis have chosen much the same method of approach. For their object is to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the superego, ... to take over new portions of the id. Where id was, there ego shall be.”

Freud does not admit the premise of the mystic method, which is, of course, that the cosmic lives within the individual unconscious (the id) so that the following of percepts to their source rounds man’s circle to God. But Dostoevski, typical mystic in revolt against the world of reason, would not see the implication in Freud’s rationalist method: if the findings of reason are universal, reason must be cosmic. This rationalist premise is also mystic, and also irrationally rounds the circle between man and God. Freud, like all the nineteenth-century rationalists, is an unconscious follower of the older, ethical Kant. Dostoevski was a conscious, and hence a more reasonable, mystic. But both groups of absolutists, in their attempt to exclude a part of man’s equipment for finding truth—the one group reason, the other group organic intuition—are doomed to failure. And in Freud, no less than in Dostoevski, this awareness of limitations gives the poignant note of the Titans who are helpless to create a world against the indefeasible God who is the Whole. In all the great nineteenth-century creations, there is this discord between the will and the work. It gives to the pages of Freud a personal vibration that is not the least of their value.

c.

What of the scientific values of Freud’s work? Psychoanalysis is, first of all, a therapy in the treatment of nervous and psychic disorders. Thousands of physicians, for the most part in the Central European and Anglo-Saxon countries, practice it, and seemingly with success. But therapy is the least important aspect of Freud’s work. Most of the ills of personal maladjustment which the Freudian analysis may cure are symptoms of the disorder, economic, social, cultural, of the contemporary world. The right way to overcome them is to attack the disease, not its individual symbols. In this task, the light thrown by Freud on the human psyche is of great importance; the actual relief given to a few persons is immaterial. The time required by an analysis, and the expense, make the method (under our present system) available chiefly to the type of idle woman and parasitic man who are not worth saving at the price of the lengthy effort which the analyst must devote to readjusting them into a morbid world. It would really be better for the whole leisured class, who have supported so many analysts in luxury, to be converted en masse to the Catholic Church. They could all go to Lourdes, whose record of cures is vastly more varied. There is this difference, however. When a patient finds relief at a Catholic shrine, no one is the wiser: the cure has been worked in an invulnerable darkness. But when even the most useless society woman is analyzed by a Freudian, although she may not be cured, the analyst and science know something more about the human soul. Psychoanalysis as a therapy is justified, in so far as the physician is more important than the patient.

Freud, therefore, is within the tradition of his Jewish fathers, to whom Wisdom was never (as it was with the Hindus) an end to be independently attained, but the common fruit of the tree of humane living. Freud, the physician, is moved to heal the suffering of his fellows; and from this humble, socially immaterial ministration has issued a deep knowledge.

I am not qualified to judge the precise final values, as objective science, of the Freudian system. But, of course, objective science has no final values. Despite its assumption of definitive laws, the light of generations makes of the science of any epoch a mere trend or method toward knowledge. That scientific work whose path is followed farther, is good work; and here is its ultimate value. Thus the mathematical science of a Pascal or a Leibnitz is good; and in this sense, it is already clear that the Freudian technology is good. His dicta on any specific problem, such as the origin of neurosis or the setup of the psyche, may be amended. Indeed, Freud has himself refuted several of his early propositions. For instance, he used to hold that in the anxiety neurosis, the repression caused the anxiety, and his analytic experience has now taught him, as indicated in “A New Series of Introductory Lectures to Psycho-Analysis,” that the anxiety comes first, and that its source is a (disguised) actual trauma. In the technique of analysis, this reversal is important. But it reveals at what deeper level than any fact or system lies the scientific value of Freud’s work. Freud’s vision of the soul as an organism in dynamic integration with the physical body, with the social body, and with the historic body of mankind, has given us a _method_. And by this method we have come more close than we had come before to the sources of behavior, to an anatomy of ideas and emotions. Already, the uses of the method have proliferated widely. It has shed light on the social origins of man, anthropological and cultural; and on the problems of character formation without which there can be no science of education and no science of ethics. By its fecundity, the method of Freud’s psychology will perhaps prove to be as good science as the method of Darwin’s biology or of the Marxian historical critique.

I have said that the least value of Freud’s work is its therapy; I may amend this by saying that in therapy lie its greatest evils. Persons who go to psychoanalysis to be cured of neurosis or of a functional maladjustment, inevitably look for guiding values which anciently were given by religion. They seek _a way of life_; and the analyst is placed in the position of spiritual leader. This is not Freud’s claim. He scouts all Weltanschauung beyond the scientific acceptance and ordering of the report of the senses. These rationalists are all naïve in their failure to recognize the limiting dogmatism of their creed. A measuring rod that negates what lies beyond its scope is the sternest of dogmatists. The man who disclaims any individual norm of values, and yet deals with the subtlest problems of human adjustment, implicitly accepts the values that are current and actively rejects what lies outside his measure. The patient is sick because he does not fit into the world as he finds it; the analyst who cures him helps him into this world, which means that he has set up, as the desired norm, the values of the world. If the analyst is not aware of this, his acceptance is merely the more blind and his work upon the soul of the patient the more irresponsible. This is a serious criticism to be made against psychoanalysis from the viewpoint of a world sorely in need of revolution in the domain of values. And it may well be that the maladjusted neurotic of today is closer to the norm of healthy social transformation than the neurotic whom Freudian analysis has made “fit and content” within a society of false individualism and cultural decay.

A more serious, because more philosophical, indictment is that the Freudian system (not the method) makes of mental life a region without polarity with either cosmos or individual person. The explorer Knud Rasmussen once asked an Eskimo, who lived within the ice of the Arctic Circle and whose food was the raw flesh of caribou, “What do you understand by the soul?” And Ikinilik, the savage, answered: “It is something beyond understanding, that makes me a human being.” Freud, the man, would probably agree; Freud, the nineteenth century rationalist, cannot admit of this “something beyond understanding.” He must draw his charts of human behavior, his maps of the mind, without allowance for this “x.” But what if the “x” is needed to produce, from Freud’s hypothetic id and ego, the human being? What if all Freud’s analytic counters, lacking this “x,” do not add up into the synthesis—the actual person? “The id,” says Freud, “is the whole personality and the ego is within it.” But Freud’s id is a chaos of instinct and desire, timeless and spaceless, from which by definition all cosmic connection is excised. How does it manage, out of its anarchic tidings, to throw up the ego and the superego with their cultural cosmic sublimations? Where is the forming factor? Dostoevski, who finds God at the irrational and subnormal source, has a more logical explanation. Jung, the Swiss psychologist, although he lacks Freud’s intellectual genius and although his work is not, like Freud’s, a great esthetic body, is more logical, calling the id the “collective unconscious” and finding there the cosmic seed that can explain the human fruit. You can insert no new element, says Whitehead, in an evolving organism. It must be there at the beginning. Freud, in his rationalist refusal to allow within the id, at least hypothetically, the mystic “x” which can alone explain the flowering from the muck of the intellectual and esthetic capacities of man, meets the tragic fate of all rationalists whose ultimate syllogism proves the irrationality of the rationalist dogma.

But whatever the reader judges to be the validity of the Freudian system or the virtues of his own use of his method, he must know, as he reads the books of Sigmund Freud, that he stands within the presence of true human greatness. Freud, indeed, is one of the supreme intellectual heroes of our time: one of those men who make life more livable for us all through the fact of their existence. In his writings, we sense the heroism of his effort, armed alone by faith in reason, to conquer cosmic continents. We think of the first Spaniards, exploring with the blunderbuss and a Cross, yet giving the Americas to man. Freud, also, with a faith and weapons equally foredoomed, has discovered a new world which, by outliving him, will make him immortal.

_1934_

6. SHERWOOD ANDERSON

One must approach the stories of this storyteller in the spirit of reverence, in the spirit of mystery—as one approaches the child. Let the critical come after. If one begins by analyzing Sherwood Anderson, one will not receive him; and all one’s analysis will go for naught. Let him lodge in us ungrudgingly; not till then let our intellectual questionings have play.

For his tales are a testimony; and they testify to the still infantile revelation of Our America. What would have happened in Europe, if the naïve confessionals of convert Gaul and Frank and Goth had been analyzed before they were accepted? Anderson’s books are a relation of the search for fresh religious values; a groping toward an Apocalypse in our own inchoate terms. Woe to us if we do not nurture this act in the childlike simplicity of the man who gives it!

We shall create a Scripture in our land. And of the stuff of Scripture are the glowing songs of “Winesburg, Ohio,” “A Story Teller’s Story,” the subsequent volumes. Scripture they are not. They are not hard, clear, strong enough for that. They are to our new Scripture that shall be, possibly, as were the lost Songs of Miriam to the subsequent Books of Moses; as the pre-Vedic psalms to the Rig-Veda; as the stammering testimonies before St. Isidore of Christians from the Rhine to the Guadalquivir, to that medieval Scripture of Abélard, Anselm, Aquinas. They are source, a living inchoate source. We must let them speak in us and for us, in order to grow beyond them.

If we fail to accept them, America will turn against them. There are already signs of this revulsion—weakness turned into bravado—in the shrill gestures of young-old men like Ernest Hemingway. We shall have to spew out this false maturity; we shall have to go back and _live through_ Anderson in order to grow beyond our childhood.

From the molder heap of nineteenth-century America rise flames of longing and dance a moment in the air. Then they fall back into the smoke, lost, fetidly lost. There is still too much damp muck for the divine bonfire which America shall be. We cannot yet burn. We can get ready to burn.

Such is the burden of Sherwood Anderson’s books; they are a playing of wistful flames over the muck heap. There have been other flames, hardier, greater. Either they came before our modern muck heap, or they played on its edge. The flames of Thoreau, Melville, Poe, the fire of Whitman, stood clear enough away to cast light to Europe. Anderson’s flame is more modest. But it is at the heart, not at the edge of the molder. It does not light Paris and London; it helps warm _us_. It helps prepare the muck heap for the great bonfire. Its value lies in its inwardness, in its humble staying.

All the tales of this storyteller are little inward-creeping tongues of fire. Anderson himself is a fragment flame flickering through America’s chaos: licking, curling, dancing, smoking, fainting. He is not organic, he has no body and no eyes. He ignites nothing. He warms, he lessens the dank, he cleanses the stench of the muck heap. After, the bonfire.

When we have accepted him, we can place him; and by this means place America. Looking upon this man’s nature, listening to his words, above all to the dull beat of his feet, we realize what a task this is: to make America into a holy land. Elijah and Amos wrestling with their idolaters, the Judges and Prophets swearing to force their pack of stubborn shepherds into the Word of God, had a task no harder than ours who would make America into a luminous land. If you have doubts, here are books to strengthen despair; if you hesitate in your need to transcend despair, here are books to hearten you by their songs of man’s mysterious emergence.

Whence came Sherwood Anderson? and what had he? If this be not God in his blundering step, in his blinded eye, then God is not immanent on earth. Not intelligence, not shrewdness, not cultural purpose, moved this man. To the end he will be deaf, dumb, blind. The Midwest lives in his stories but not in his knowledge of himself. He comes to New York, a man past forty years. Can you say that he saw even one skyscraper, even one person? High men, low men, bitter men and sweet, dance in equal delirium before him. He goes to Europe, a pilgrimage through the detritus of his own youthful readings about Europe. So he has gone through life: so, in a true esthetic form of faint emergence out of chaos, he has created his tales. Creeping flames searching in muck and drench for the dry brand, striving so wistfully hard to catch on, to ignite!

I spoke with a sharp critic from England about “A Story Teller’s Story.” He disposed of it with ease: it lacked form, it lacked clarity of image and thought, it gave nothing of Ohio, nothing of New York; it was vague in picturing the associates of childhood, the transition years; it had no incisive word on the artists encountered in the East. The European mind could not touch the flavor of this revelation. What it saw as muddle is search; what it saw as evasion is honest effort.

Sherwood Anderson used to sing of the gods, the new-old gods coming out of the corn into the streets of Chicago. Primitive gods they were, almost phallic. Mere trunks of power, moving; mere conveyancers of life greyly luminous into the builded blackness of our cities. Sherwood Anderson is such a god, himself. There must be many, ere the new Elohim grow into the new Jehovah.

_1926_

7. HART CRANE

_I dwell in Possibility
A fairer house than Prose,
More numerous of windows
Superior of doors._
EMILY DICKINSON

a.

Agrarian America had a common culture, which was both the fruit and the carrier of what I have called elsewhere “the great tradition.”[3] This tradition rose in the Mediterranean world with the will of Egypt, Israel and Greece, to re-create the individual and the group in the image of values called divine. The same will established Catholic Europe, and when it failed (producing nonetheless what came to be the national European cultures), the great tradition survived. It survived in the Europe of Renaissance, Reformation, Revolution. With the Puritans, it was formally transplanted to the North American seaboard. Roger Williams, Thomas Hooker, Jonathan Edwards; later, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, carried on the great tradition with the same tools, on the same intellectual and economic terms, that had been brought from Europe and that had failed in Europe. It was transplanted, it was not transfigured. But before the final defeat of the Puritan avatar—a defeat ensured by the disappearance of our agrarian economy—the great tradition had borne fruit in two general forms. The first was the ideological art of what Lewis Mumford calls the Golden Day: a prophetic art of poets so diverse as Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, whose vision was one of Possibility and whose doom, since its premise was a disappearing world, was to remain suspended in the thin air of aspiration. The second was within the lives of the common people. Acceptance of the great tradition had its effect upon their character; and this humbler achievement is recorded, perhaps finally, in the poems of Robert Frost.

Frost’s record (“North of Boston,” 1914; “Mountain Interval,” 1916) was already made when the United States entered the War; and the War brought final ruin to the American culture of “free” individuals living for the most part on farms, whose beauty Frost recorded. The tradition which had tempered the persons in Frost’s poems had already, before the Civil War, sung its last high word in the old terms that were valid from Plato to Fichte. And this, too, was fitting, for the Civil War prepared the doom, which the World War completed, of the agrarian class culture. But the great tradition, unbroken from Hermes Trismegistus and Moses, does not die. In a society transfigured by new scientific and economic forces, it must be transfigured. The literature and philosophy of the past hundred years reveal many efforts at this transfiguration: in this common purpose, Nietzsche and Marx are brothers. The poetry of Whitman was still founded on the substances of the old order. The poetry of Hart Crane is a deliberate continuance of the great tradition in terms of our industrialized world.

If we bear in mind this purpose of Crane’s work, we shall be better prepared to understand his methods, his content, his obscurity. We shall, of course, not seek the clear forms of a poet of Probability, like Frost. But we shall also not too widely trust Crane’s kinship with the poets of the Emersonian era, whose tradition he immediately continues. They were all, like Crane, bards of possibility rather than scribes of realization. Yet they relied upon inherited forms—forms emotional, ethical, social, intellectual and religious, transplanted from Europe and not too deliquescent for their uses. Whitman’s apocalypse rested on the politics of Jefferson and on the economics of the physiocrats of France. Emerson was content with the ideology of Plato and Buddha, his own world not too radically differing from theirs. Even Emily Dickinson based her explosive doubts upon the permanent premise of a sheltered private garden, to which such as she could always meditatively retire. These traditional assumptions gave to the poets of the Golden Day an accessible, communicable form; for we, too, have been nurtured on the words of that old order. But in Crane, none of the ideal landmarks, none of the formal securities, survive; therefore his language problem—the poet’s need to find words at once to create and to communicate his vision—is acute. Crane, who began to write while Frost was perfecting his record, lived, instinctively at first, then with poignant awareness, in a world whose inherited outlines of person, class, creed, value—still clear, however weak, in Emerson’s Boston, Whitman’s New York, Poe’s Richmond—had dissolved. His vision was the timeless One of all the seers, and it binds him to the great tradition; but because of the time that fleshed him and that he needed to substance his vision, he could not employ conventional concretions. In his lack of valid terms to express his relationship with life, Crane was a true culture-child; more completely than either Dickinson or Blake, he was a child of modern man.

b.

Harold Hart Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio, July 21, 1899. His parents, Clarence Arthur Crane and Grace Hart, were of the pioneer stock that trekked in covered wagons from New England to the Western Reserve. But his grandparents, on both sides, had already shifted from the farm to small-town business, and Clarence Crane, who had inherited his father’s general store in Garrettsville, became a wealthy candy manufacturer in Cleveland. Here the poet, an only child, lived from his tenth year. At thirteen, he was composing verse; at sixteen, in the words of Gorham Munson, “he was writing on a level that Amy Lowell never rose from.” In the winter of 1916, he went with his mother, who was separated from her husband, to the Isle of Pines, south of Cuba, where his grandfather Hart had a fruit ranch; and this journey, which gave him his first experience of the sea, was cardinal in his growth. The following year, he was in New York, in contact with Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, editors of “The Little Review”; tutoring for college; writing; already passionately and rather wildly living.

At this time, two almost mutually exclusive tendencies divided the American literary scene. One was centered in Ezra Pound, Alfred Kreymborg, the imagists, Harriet Monroe’s “Poetry” and “The Little Review”: the other was grouped about “The Seven Arts.” Young Crane was in vital touch with both. He was reading Marlowe, Donne, Laforgue, Rimbaud; but he was also finding inspiration in Whitman, Sherwood Anderson and Melville. His action, when the United States lurched into the war, reveals the complexity of his interests. He decided not to go to college and by his own choice returned to Cleveland, to work as a common laborer in a munition plant and a shipyard on the lake. He loved machines, the earth tang of the workers. He was no poet in an ivory tower. But also he loved music; he wanted time to write, to meditate, to read. The conflict of desires led him, perhaps, to accept what seemed a comfortable compromise: a job in the candy business of his father.

The elder Crane seems to have been a man of turbulent and twisted power, wholly loyal to the gods of Commerce. He was sincerely outraged by the jest of fortune which had given him a poet for a son. Doubtless, he was bitter at his one child’s siding with the mother in the family conflict. But under all, there was a secret emotional bond between the two, making for the ricochet of antagonism and attraction that lasted between them until the father’s death, a year before the son’s. The candy magnate set laboriously to work to drive the “poetry nonsense” out of his boy. Hart became a candy salesman behind a counter, a soda-jerker, a shipping clerk. He received a minimum wage. Trusted employees were detailed to spy on him, lest he read “poetry books” during work hours. Hart Crane escaped several times from the paternal yoke, usually to advertising jobs near home or in New York. And at last, in 1920, he decided to break with both Cleveland and his father.

His exquisite balance of nerves was already permanently impaired. The youthful poet, who had left a comfortable household to live with machines and rough men, who had shouldered “the curse of sundered parentage,” who had tasted the strong drink of literature and war, carried within him a burden intricate and heavy—a burden hard to hold in equilibrium. Doubtless the chaos of his personal life led him to rationalize the accessible tangent ease from the strain of balance which excess use of alcohol invited. Yet there was a deeper cause for the disequilibrium which, when Crane was thirty-two, was finally to break him from his love of life and to destroy him. Hart Crane was a mystic. The mystic is a man who _knows_, by immediate experience, the organic continuity of his self with the cosmos. This experience, which is the natural fruit of sensitivity, becomes intense in one whose native energy is great; and lest it turn into an overwhelming, shattering burden, it must be disciplined and ordered. A stable nucleus within the self must be achieved, to bear and finally transfigure the world’s impinging chaos. Personally, Crane did not win this synthesis.

But the poet was clearer and shrewder than the man. His mind sought a poetic principle to integrate the exuberant flood of his impressions. The early poems, collected in “White Buildings” (1926), reveal the quest, not the finding. Allen Tate, in his Introduction to this volume, writes: “The poems ... are facets of a single vision; they refer to a central imagination, a single evaluating power, which is at once the motive of the poetry and the form of its realization.” But the central imagination, wanting a unitary principle, wavers and breaks; turns back upon itself instead of mastering the envisaged substance of the poem. That is why, often, a fragmentary part of a poem is greater than the whole: and why it is, at times, impossible to transpose the series of images into the sense-and-thought sequence that originally moved the poet, and that must be perceived in order to move the reader. The mediate principle, coterminous with the image logic of the poem and the feeling logic of the poet, is imperfect. The first lines of the volume:

As silent as a mirror is believed
Realities plunge in silence by....

are a superb expression of chaos and of the poet’s need to integrate this chaos in the active mirror of self. Page after page, “realities plunge by,” only ephemerally framed in a mirroring mood which alas! melts, itself, into the turbulent procession. Objective reality exists in these poems only as an oblique moving-inward to the poet’s mood. But the mood is never, as in imagist or romantic verse, given for and as itself. It is given only as an organic moving-outward toward the objective world. Each lyric is a diapason between two integers of a continuous whole. But the integers (subjective and objective) are almost never clear. This makes of the poem an abstract, wavering, esthetic body. There is not yet, as in the later work, a conscious substantiated theme or principle of vision to stratify the interacting parts of the poems into an immobile whole.

But in the final six lyrics of this volume (“Voyages”) there is the beginning of a synthesis. Its symbolic theme is the Sea. The turbulent experience of Crane’s childhood and youth is fused in a litany to the Sea.

... Sleep, death, desire,
Close round one instant in one floating flower.

The sea, first source of life, first Mother, is death to man. To woo it is to return to death’s simple singleness. This solution from the burden of chaos is like the erotic mysticism of D. H. Lawrence. Immersion—hence loss—of the burdened mystic self in perfect sexual union is a romantic myth, old as the myth of the Sea. It satisfied Lawrence. But Crane was intellectually too strong, and too robust an artist, to abide it. “White Buildings” closes on the unitary theme of surrender. But the poet is ready to begin his quest again.

In 1924, the poems of “White Buildings” written but not yet published, Crane was living in Brooklyn, in range of the harbor, the Bridge, the sea-sounds....

Gongs in white surplices, beshrouded wails,
Far strum of fog horns....

And now, the integrating theme came to him.

The will of Crane in “The Bridge” is deliberately mythmaking. But this will, as we have seen, is born of a desperate, personal need: the mystic _must_ create order from the chaos with which his associative genius overwhelms him. The poem retains this personal origin. The revelation of “The Bridge,” as principle and myth, comes to an individual in the course of his day’s journey; and that individual is the poet. In this sense. “The Bridge” is allied to the “Commedia” of Dante, who also, in response to desperate need, takes a journey in the course of which his need finds consummation.

Lest the analogy be misleading, I immediately amend it. Dante’s cosmos, imaged in an age of cultural maturity, when the life of man was coterminous with his vision, contains time and persons: only in the ecstatic last scenes of the “Paradiso” are they momently merged and lost. Therefore, the line of Dante’s poem is clear, being forth and back in time: and the focus of the action is cogent, being the person of the Poet with whom the reader can readily graph points of reference. Crane’s cosmos has no time and his person-sense is vacillant and evanescent. Crane’s journey is that of an individual unsure of his own form and lost to time. This difference at once clarifies the disadvantageous esthetic of “The Bridge” as compared with that of broadly analogous poems of spiritual search, like the “Commedia” or “Don Quixote.” It exemplifies the role played by the cultural epoch in the creation of even the most personal work of genius.

In “Proem,” the poet exhorts the object of his choice—the Bridge. It shall synthesize the world of chaos. It joined city, river and sea; man made it with his new hand, the machine. Parabola-wise, it shall now vault the continent, and, transmuted, reach that inward heaven which is the fulfillment of man’s need of order. Part One, “Ave Maria,” is the vision of Columbus, mystic navigator who mapped his voyage in Isaiah, seeking to weld the world’s riven halves into one. But this Columbus is scarcely a person; he is suffused in his history and his ocean; his will is more substantial than his eye. Nor does he live in time. Part Two, “Powhatan’s Daughter” (the Indian princess is the flesh of America, the American earth, and Mother of our dream), begins the recital of the poet’s journey which traces in extension (as Columbus gives in essence) the myth’s trajectory. The poet awakes in his room above the harbor, beside his lover. Risen (taking the harbor and the sea-sounds with him), he walks through the lowly Brooklyn streets: but walks with his cultural past: Pizarro, Cortés, Priscilla, and now Rip Van Winkle whose eyes, fresh from sleep, will abide the poet’s as they approach the transfigured world of today. The poet descends the subway that tunnels the East River (the Bridge is above); and now the subway is a river “leaping” from Far Rockaway to Golden Gate. A river of steel rails at first, bearing westward America’s urban, civilization (“Stick your patent name on a signboard”) and waking as it runs the burdened trudge of pioneers and all their worlds of factory and song. The patterning march of the American settlers traces the body, gradually, of Pocahontas; the flow of continent and man becomes the Great River; the huge travail of continental life, after the white man and before him, is borne southward, “meeting the Gulf.” Powhatan’s daughter, America’s flesh, dances and the flesh becomes spirit. Dances the poet’s boyhood memories of star and lake, of “sleek boat nibbling margin grass”; dances at last into the life of an Indiana mother, home from a frustrate trek to California for gold, who is bidding her son farewell; he is going east again to follow the sea. (“Write me from Rio.”)

There are no achieved persons in the universe, barely emergent from chaos, of Hart Crane; and this first crystallization—the prairie mother—is the first weak block in the poem’s structure. Now, with Part Three, “Cutty Sark,” the physical course of the poet (the subway ride has exploded into the cosmic implication of the River) returns to view, but blurred. The poet is in South Street, Manhattan, near midnight: he is carousing with a sailor who brings him in snatches of song Leviathan, Plato, Stamboul—and a dim harbinger of Atlantis. “I started walking home across the Bridge”: there, in the hallucinatory parade of clippers that once winked round the Horn “bright skysails ticketing the Line,” the poet is out again, now seaward.

Part Four, “Cape Hatteras,” is the turning point of the poem. Thus far, we have seen the individual forms of the poet’s crowded day melt into widening, deepening cycles of association. Columbus into the destiny and will of the Atlantic: two lovers into the harbor, the harbor into the sea: subway into a transcontinental railroad, into a continent, into a River; the River into the Gulf; the Indian princess into the Earth Mother, and her dance into the tumult and traffic of the nation; ribald South Street into a vision—while the Bridge brings the clippers that bring China—of Atlantis. Now, the movement turns back toward crystallization. “Cape Hatteras” at first invokes the geologic age that lifted the Appalachians above the sea; the cosmic struggle sharpens into the birth of the airplane—industrial America; the “red, eternal flesh of Pocahontas” gives us, finally, Walt Whitman. “Years of the Modern! Propulsions toward what capes?” The Saunterer on the Open Road takes the hand of the poet. Parts Five and Six are interludes. Part Seven, “The Tunnel,” carries the poem to its climax. The poet, in mid-air and at midnight, leaves the Bridge; he “comes down to earth” and returns home as he had left, by subway. This unreal collapse of bridge into subway has meaning. The subway is the tunnel. The tunnel is America, and is a kind of hell. But it has dynamic direction. In this plunging subway darkness, appears Poe:

And why do I often meet your visage here,
Your eyes like agate lanterns...?

If the reader understand Poe, he will understand the apparition. Of all the classic poets of the great tradition in America, Poe—perhaps the least an artist—was the most advanced, the most prophetic, as thinker. All, as we have noted, were content more or less with the merely transplanted terms of an agrarian culture. Only Poe guessed the transfiguring effect of the Machine upon the forms of human life, upon the very concept of the person. The Tunnel gives us man in his industrial hell which the machine—his hand and heart—has made; now let the machine be his godlike hand to raise him! The plunging subway shall merge with the vaulting bridge. Whitman gives the vision, Poe—however vaguely—the method. The final part, “Atlantis,” is a transposed return to the beginning. The Bridge, in time, has linked Atlantis with Cathay. Now it becomes an absolute experience. Like any human event, _fully known_, it links man instantaneously, “beyond time,” with the Truth.

The principle that Crane sought, to make him master of his sense of immediate continuity with a world overwhelmingly chaotic, gave him “The Bridge”; but in actual life it did not sustain him. The later poems, despite their technical perfection (and with the exception of “The Broken Tower”), mark a retreat to the mood of the last pages of “White Buildings.” The Sea, symbol of the return to a unity of personal abolition, had ebbed while the poet stood upon his mythic bridge; now again it was rising. The periodicity of his excesses grew swifter; the lucid intervening times when he could write were crowded out. Crane went to Mexico, where individual extinction has for a thousand years inspired a cult and a culture. On his return to New York, heart of the chaos in his life, there was the Sea; and he could not resist it. As his boat was bearing him from the warm waters which fifteen years before had given him a symbol, he took off his coat, quietly, and joined the Sea forever.

c.

The beauty of most of Crane’s lyrics, and of many passages of “The Bridge,” seems to me to be inviolable. If I analyze this conviction, I am brought first to the poetic texture. Its traditional base is complex. Here is a music plainly related to the Elizabethan poets. And here, also, is a sturdy lilt like the march of those equal children of the Elizabethans—the pioneers. Although Crane describes a modern cabaret ...

Brazen hypnotics glitter here;
Glee shifts from foot to foot ...

always, there is the homely metronomic, linking him to his fathers. Hence the organic soundness of his verse. Its _livingness_ it owes to the dimension of variant emergence from the traditional music, like the emergence of our industrial world from the base of old America. The entire intellectual and spiritual content of Crane’s verse could be derived from a study of his typical texture. And this is earnest of its importance.

The structural pattern of “The Bridge” is superb: a man moves of a morning from Brooklyn to Manhattan, returns at midnight, each stage of his course adumbrating by the mystic law of continuity into American figures with cosmic overtones, and all caught up in a mythic Bridge whose functional span is a parabola, and an immediate act, of vision. The poem’s flaw lies in the weakness of the personal crystallization upon which the vision rests, as the Bridge is spanned upon its piers. This flaw gets into the idiom and texture. Sometimes the image blurs, the sequence breaks, the plethora of words is blinding. There is even, in the development of certain figures, a tendency toward inflation which one is tempted to connect with the febrile, false ebullience of the American epoch (1924–1929) in which the poem was written. Yet the concept is sound; the poet’s genius has on the whole equaled his ambition. Even the failings in execution help to express the epoch, for it is in the understanding and creating of _persons_ that our rapidly collectivizing age is weakest.

Crane’s myth must, of course, not be confused with the myth as we find it in Homer or the Bible or the Nibelungen. The Bridge is not a particularized being to be popularly sung; it is a conceptual symbol to be _used_. And the fact that this symbol begins as a man-constructed thing is of the essence of its truth for our instrumental age. From a machine-made entity, the poem makes the Bridge into a machine. But it has beauty. This means that through the men who builded it, the life of America has flowed into it—the life of our past _and our future_. A cosmic content has given beauty to the Bridge, and must give it a poetic function. From being a machine of matter, it becomes an instrument of spirit. _The Bridge is matter made into human action._

We may confidently say that this message of “The Bridge” will be more comprehensible in the future (not in the immediate future), when the functionally limited materialism of our collectivist era has, through success, grown inadequate to the deepened needs of a mankind released from economic insecurity and prepared, by leisure, for regeneration. For even as necessity, today and tomorrow, drives most men to think collectively in order that they may survive; necessity, day after tomorrow, will drive men to think personally (poetically, cosmically) in order that their survival may have meaning. When the collectivist era has done its work—the abolition of economic classes and of animal want—men will turn, as only the privileged of the past could ever turn, toward the discovery of Man. But when that time comes, the message of “The Bridge” will be taken for granted; it will be too obvious, even as today it is too obscure, for general interest. The revelation, in Crane’s poems, however, of a man who through the immediate conduit of his senses realized the organic unity between his self, the objective world and the cosmos, will be accepted as a great human value. And the poems whose very texture reveals and sings this man will be remembered.[4]

_1933_

_II. AMERICAN TRAITS_

1. IN DEFENSE OF OUR VULGARITY

If refinement implies spiritual values, vulgarity might be called their _aggressive_ absence. The values need not be individually acquired. They may be traditional, unconscious. They are not necessarily linked to personal traits like morality and learning. The Negro peasant in the Alabama black belt is illiterate and often drunk. But in his native state, he draws from the soil and sky in whose cycles he is seasoned, a grace which is refinement even if it be unconscious like the grace of a flower. Perhaps he is transplanted to some crude mining suburb of Birmingham. Probably, then, he loses his refinement. But if the loss remain passive, if it be not aggressive, he is not yet vulgar. Give him now a shrewd head by means of which he pushes north and lands in Harlem. Teach him that he is a free-born, American citizen on whom it is incumbent to amuse himself in metropolitan fashion. Hand him a little money and a good dose of our contemporary eighteenth-century notion of Equality. Now, his absence of refinement will grow aggressive. He will be vulgar.

We all came from Europe with a modicum of refinement. And the collateral descendants of our forebears have it still in the mines and farms of Britain, in the towns of Germany and Italy, in the ghettos of Galicia. No natural peasant of Europe is quite without it. For this refinement is almost as widespread as vegetation—as perishable, as passive.

Transplanted, we lost this leguminous bloom. But we were not vulgar until we had grown conscious of being great. American vulgarity is the sum of our spiritual loss and of our assertive energy. Were we less lordly, our lack of spiritual values would not make us vulgar. And were we spiritually full, our assertiveness might prove a virtue. Vulgar people exist everywhere. We are perhaps the only nationally vulgar people. And therein dwells not alone our predicament, but our hope.

Surely, this vulgarity is clear in all our words and acts, from Maine to Texas! In my optimism, I would have it no less than universal. I would not be cheated of finding it, wherever America and Americanism wave. Politicians of other lands may be merely corrupt or dull: ours are vulgar. There is naught vulgar about the servant of a European lord. But there is naught more vulgar than an American lackey at post before the barracks of Park Avenue—save the barracks themselves, and the millionaires they house. Our newspapers are vulgar. But so are many of our churches. Witness their aggressiveness, their display of results, their want of the sanctity of silence. Our evangelists are vulgar, being void of vision and full of advertising. But the Menckenites who rail against them are no less vulgar—for the identical reason. Chicago is doubtless vulgar: but so is Ben Hecht who hates Chicago. And the whole land has turned the motorcar into vulgarity’s badge: since it has become an instrument of display, a means of elocuting at so many miles per hour the owner’s social status up and down the country.

Now, if you analyze this universal vulgarity of ours, you will discover in it a constant element of _misplaced effort_. The European servant may be quite as spiritually void as ours; but he is less vulgar because he is less striving: what he lacks is precisely the unfounded aspiration which makes our lackey vulgar. Our advertisements are vulgar because they strive so commonly to be something beyond the nature of advertisements—sermons or homilies, editorials or art. Our newspapers are vulgar because they presume to be arbiters of taste and morals; and our churches are vulgar because they labor for results of the spirit with methods of factory and salesroom.

Run down the list, and it will bear me out. This vulgarity of ours means no intrinsic lack of spiritual will and energy; it means the failure of that good will and energy. We dwell in a confusion of impulses and forms. The spirit is exiled from the deed. The deed hungers vainly for justification by the spirit. That is why we are aggressive. And the spirit lacks body. That is why we are wistful, credulous, neurotic. High energy we have—energy of the kind known as religious. It vaporizes for lack of a container; or it is misapplied in the pushing of old creeds no longer fit to house it. Emptiness grows emphatic because it strives to be full.

Now, all this is the due consequence of our past. For more than three centuries, old forms of thought and life—for the most part hostile to each other—were dumped upon our soil. Not until about 1860 had they all rotted enough to begin to come together; rotted enough for the first tender shoot of a true America to rise from the fecundity of decay. In our outward life, we are still committed to forms of living which our nascent spirit has rejected. We lug around the archaic body of theological pioneers; and by means of it we attempt to stammer out the rounded New World vision of a Whitman. The result, of course, is a botch. The result, also, is a promise. This madness of ours, finding symbols in motors, dramas in football games, art in advertisements, morality in statutes, and sermons in tabloid papers, lacks only a working method to become supremely sane. Deflect this misplaced will to unity into some channel that will hold it; and we shall see how the energy which mothers American vulgarity and American folly can father greatness.

Nor must we forget that all these forms of life in which today we express vulgarity, because they are not proper conduits for the clamorous spirit with which we endeavor to infuse them, are not American at all—are European. We may produce 90 per cent of the motors of the world; we may measure our progress by our physical power: but the machine and the gold-and-iron standard of value are fundamentally and historically of Europe. Our contribution has been not in the form, but in the spirit which _deforms_ it. We have not made the machine: we have made of the machine the carrier of a Dream. Mr. Henry Ford may be more vulgar than M. Citroën of Paris, because he is a tuppenny prophet: but it is the prophet in him, not the mechanic, which is of our land.

The world wistfully senses this. Europe reads the book of Henry Ford and studies the vulgarest of American expressions through a deep instinct and a mastering hunger. It seeks new spiritual gold. It knows—although it may not analyze the knowledge—that our vulgarity is an ore which holds it.

_1926_

2. THE MOVIES AND THE MASSES

The American motion picture is a truly popular art. It has more than one audience, of course: Broadway patronizes it, and Europe, and Africa and Asia. But whereas it could get along without these more decorative plaudits, it depends vitally on the American masses. A film that will please only the capitals and languish in the locals, means little to Hollywood’s master minds. It is the people who count: the workers.

It is, hence, fair to say that the sentiments, attitudes and dreams of the American masses will find, if not flattery and full reflection, at least some harmonious note on the American screen. The makers of our movies are, of course, high middle class, with all the ideals and prejudices of wealth. You may accuse them of “putting across” their standards in their work. But you give them a heroism which they lack, if you suggest that they would go to the length of imbuing their wares with unpopular ideas, just because they believed them. Much as they love success and armies, the makers of the movies would refrain, no doubt, from confessing their weakness in public, if such confession weakened their incomes. After all, these men have made money because they have pleased the public. They will keep their money only so long as they hold off from antagonizing their public. If you find in our motion pictures a set of standards, a gamut of values, not only bourgeois, but actually oligarchic, military, antiproletarian, the reason must be, not alone that these suit the bourgeois fashioner of the films, but as well that they do not too radically displease the proletarian patrons.

What the tastes and standards in the movies are, is plain enough. Films devoted to the depiction of labor or rural life are extremely rare. High life is the average film life. Or life in the rising provincial class which begins with a Ford and attains a Packard. Alternate with this is the romantic cowboy world of the West. But such tales are no more proletarian than those of Wall Street. Here also is a realm of the picaresque, sentimental, admittedly mythic, and aspiring to the one True Value: the money and position of the middle class.

Run over in your mind the movies you have seen in a year. How many dealt honestly with the life of a farmer, of a carpenter, of a factory hand? If the hero began as a mechanic, was he not an automobile manufacturer at the end? If he was a stableboy at the outset, did he not own the stable or marry the girl who owned it, at the fade-out? If Reel One found him a country bumpkin, was he not a magnate ere you left the theatre?

Our movie world, like any theatre of its audience, is a confessional of the masses. And what it seems to mirror very plainly, indeed, is that the achievement of bourgeois status is the heart’s desire of the average toiling man and woman in our country.

This is nothing new. But the obvious conclusion, that this is what the masses really and positively value, is the conclusion we do not wish to make. Worship of big guns, military, financial, social, on which the American movie thrives, is indeed the tonal will of the moviemakers. This is what really moves the businessmen and women who distribute, produce, direct, compose and act our movies. But the true reason why the masses—above all, the plastic sons and daughters of the masses—accept such values is that they have not received a set of values of another kind.

The people must love, must worship, something. What school and church provide them, as substance for their dreaming, has gone so dim that it disappears in the brash glamour of our jungle. The movie gives an idealization of the powers and hungers of daily American life. Empty the people go from church and schoolroom. But the press agent of the silver screen needs only to give a twist to the actual presences of the busy street in order to make the shopgirl a lady and the laborer a millionaire.