Things in Little Boxes
Hart Crane’s White Buildings
White Buildings by Hart Crane
Hart Crane’s first book of poems is more obviously a collection than The Bridge. It’s more dissociated, looser. Individual ideas are entertained fully for only a couple of stanzas and then disappear, never mentioned again. Those big themes return over and over, of course. An obsession with death; a vague interest — truncated and unreal because Crane was gay — perhaps even unconvincing — with female beauty. And the sense that life in the first half of the last century was speeding up, perhaps, and becoming more chaotic, more tawdry, more worthy of looking at sideways.
What this collection lacks that The Bridge had is a sense of place. Some of the poems are set at places. One of them — one of the most famous Crane ever wrote — is billed as surveying Herman Melville’s tomb. But even then, place is lost. It’s amorphous. Melville wrote of the sea; and so though his body rests in the land, it is not there where what’s left of him resides. ‘The Voyage,’ too (a poem in many parts), is at least in the realm of metaphor about the sea: the immense and swirling sea, its currents, its storms, its terrible, violent beauty. And Crane’s very real feeling — something he put into practice, the last thing he did — that we are all swept into its depths at some time or other. Old or young. Fairly or not. With or without justice.
The Bridge is so immense it is a different thing — it’s all one hefty work, communicating so much, everything issuing forth from a pen that seems never still, from an intelligence that tries to comprehend all of life, ancient and modern, in a single glimpse.
If The Bridge is mostly a display of dazzling sweep and breadth, White Buildings is yet another side of Crane. It has him more metrical, dealing in more conventional forms. His poems are brief, concise. They’re economical.
No doubt there are partisans for both sides of the poet. The Bridge is large and sprawling. It’s ambitious. In it, we see Crane wearing the borrowed clothes of who he may have lived to become: a chronicler of immensity, perhaps a little like Melville. The writer, possibly, of a national epic.
White Buildings does not give something like that away. Crane in this book is fastidious, even fussy. He packs things into boxes, ties them up neatly and leaves.
The only two extended efforts in this book include ‘The Voyage.’ And that poem is so multifarious it may not be considered one thing. It’s the journey of a life, of a soul. With diversions, with confusion, with much changing and ever different. Travel through the physical world and past it, out of it, into death. It is one thing in the same way that a long life by an organism answering to a single name is all one thing — sometimes, we might say, only technically.
This is not a single piece at all. Like a cut stone, it has many sides. It could be cut down further.
The other large work in this collection is ‘For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen,’ an imaginary suite on the union hinted at in Doctor Faustus, where the doctor, granted supernatural powers by his Luciferian tempters, decides to summon up from Hades the real form of Helen — Helen, whose beauty, and whose infidelity, precipitated the Trojan War.
Faustus asked for her; used his demonic powers to call for her. Perhaps just in curiosity. Who could resist the opportunity to inspect beauty that is a byword, that is proverbial?
That is the setting. But Crane shifts and mutates it. Is this the story from the Faust legend, we think, or is this taking place in an indeterminate time, a time beyond clocks and numbered years? Does Faust walk among us, with our trains and trams and electrical wires? Is this the world he has brought long-dead Helen to inspect, to see if it takes her fancy?
Here, Crane’s verse is at its most allusive and sprawling. We’re treated to so many asides, to blind alleys. The reader is frequently lost. Not always, one might suspect, by design.
We have marks of horror. The narrator calls out: ‘religious gunman!’ — ‘eternal gunman.’ Perhaps the horror of the Faust story, of the ticking, racing clock, given more modern form. That someone’s, or something’s, sure to get you, any moment now.
The poem, like all of Crane’s poems, is about death. The pointlessness — obvious but hard for any to grasp — of life in those few flat years before arriving at the abyss.
And yet, there is the countervailing thing. The idea that the now may well matter. Simply because the body, soon to be nothing, soon to be dust, is still besieged by emotions — the brain wired up for electrical signals, all of which have a greater effect on a real, measurable consciousness than a muscle twitching to the pulses of the battery.
Crane sometimes struggles to express those emotions that make life so bittersweet. That make so many people cling to life. Possibly expecting a suicide to justify existence is asking too much. But this is where his poetry most obviously fails.
I said earlier that because Crane seems sexually uninterested in women — he had one relationship with a woman (Peggy Cowley) as opposed to many, we assume with men — he does not write with particular ability about the love and lust a man might feel for a woman. It seems almost trite to say of his Faust poem that the subject here is not just a woman, not any woman, but the woman said to be the most beautiful ever born.
In Marlowe’s play, the exquisiteness of Helen’s looks does not disappoint. She is all that is hoped of her and more. And yet Crane is almost uninterested. His descriptions of Helen — even if they are filled with morbid imagery — are so fleeting. ‘At your deep blush, when ecstasies thread / The limbs and belly, when rainbows spread / Impinging on the throat and sides....’
This could have been written about a man. And possibly it was. There’s no sin in that — but it dampens Crane’s theme, diminishes his effects, misuses, at least a little, his immense and unrepeated talent.