In the October issue of Poetry, William Logan writes about the responses he received to his review of Hart Crane’s Complete Poems and Selected Letters, which ran last year in the New York Times Book Review. As Logan puts it, “I’ve always loved Hart Crane; but I love him in fractions, delighting in half a dozen of those rhapsodic poems long on style and short on sense but finding the rest mystifying as a Masonic ritual.” Perhaps inevitably, some readers took issue with this mixed assessment and wrote in “furious” letters to the editor, leading Logan to conclude, “[r]eviewing Crane, if you don’t review him fondly, is like poking a pencil into a hornet’s nest.”
Little of Logan’s experience will surprise anyone who’s ever expressed a dissenting opinion as a critic, but it can be enjoyable to have a look at other people’s hate mail. And an interesting side issue crops up in the essay about the factual, if not critical, errors that Logan made in his review, all of which fell in the review’s first sentence, “Before Hart Crane’s leap into the Caribbean that fatal April noon in 1932, he folded his jacket over the ship’s rail with impeccable manners. Striking out into the glassy sea, he was seen no more, dying younger than Byron but older than Shelley.”
As Crane biographer Paul Mariani pointed out in his own letter to the editor, that sentence contains three errors: Crane was wearing a light topcoat that day, not a jacket, the sea in question wasn’t the Caribbean but the Atlantic, and the water wasn’t “glassy” but had “sizable waves.”
Logan cedes the first two points but notes there’s conflicting opinion among Crane’s four biographers about what exactly the conditions of the water were that day at noon — which then leads him to a nice consideration of the role of fact vs. fantasy in the summing up of someone else’s life (or is it factual truth vs. truth truth?):
Mariani fails in The Broken Tower to describe the roughness of the ocean (he mentions the “impenetrable waters off which the noon sun gleamed,” which doesn’t sound choppy or rugged); Philip Horton in Hart Crane claims the “sea was mild”; and Clive Fisher, quoting Guggenheim in Hart Crane: A Life, says the sea was “like a mirror that could be walked on.” [In a later version of the review] I changed my “glassy sea” to a “violent wake” (the wake, some think, dragged Crane under). On balance, however, the “glassy sea” seems likely.
In his description of Crane’s death, Mariani was attracted to the captain’s notion that the poet might have been eaten by a shark–“Did he feel something brush his leg, the file-sharp streaking side of concentrated muscle, before the silver flash and teeth pulled him under?” This is sheer moonshine, but a biographer’s fantasies–and gruesome fantasies they are–don’t mitigate the critic’s error of fact. (The biographer then throws some of Crane’s purple prose–or rather purple poetry– back at him: “But this time the calyx of death’s bounty gave back neither scattered chapter nor livid hieroglyph.” The allusion is to “At Melville’s Tomb,” but as prose it sounds like a canceled passage by Sir Thomas Browne.) The aggrieved reader’s fondest delusion is that a critic’s sidelong errors undermine a disagreement about taste; yet don’t we prefer Eliot’s opinions, despite his habitual misquotation, to the arguments of some bozo supported by quotes correct to the last nicety? That doesn’t make the errors less embarrassing.
In the run of things, a small scholarly kerfuffle, but one that’s stayed with me, maybe because it’s suggestive of the two great difficulties of writing — how hard it is to enter other people’s minds, to see the world and think as your characters or subjects do (we don’t know what was in Hart Crane’s mind before he leapt, we can’t even agree on what the sea looked like in front of him), and then to actually write well & with accuracy about what you find there. For example, it is hard to write well and with particularity about the sea — whether it is “glassy” or “violent” or “immense” or “wet.” Here, for what it’s worth, is Herman Melville describing conditions at the outset of Benito Cereno, “The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything grey. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that had cooled and set in the smelter’s mould.”