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Biography, Volume 3, Number 2, Spring 1980, pp. 132-146 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/bio.2010.0831

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Carol shloss The Lives of Hart Crane:
Revision of Biography

He was lost at sea in April, 1932, and though every suicide is finally
mysterious, Hart Crane's death especially lent itself to legend. He had
been recognized during his lifetime as one of the foremost poets of his
generation. His writing was considered significant, but also controver-
sial, and the controversy was fed by rumor. Crane was a Midwesterner
from Cleveland, Ohio and had come to New York City with the vague
and naive ambition of working, writing, and establishing himself
among other artists. In a broad sense, he realized all of these goals: he
made friends, accompanied them to their country retreats in Patter-
son, N.Y. and to their self-imposed exiles in Europe; he worked inter-
mittently for his father's candy company and at various advertising
agencies. He survived in poverty, but he survived well enough to
write an impressive number of lyrics and a widely acclaimed epic
poem, "The Bridge." However it was not the general outline of his
life that people remembered after his death. He had been known as
"the Roaring Boy," as a loud and extravagant man given in later years
to heavy drinking and paranoid attacks on his friends, as a lost soul
who enacted his sense of doom through a series of sordid, waterfront
affairs. Significantly, or so it was thought, Crane had been fascinated
by the sea, its dangers, and the possibility of passing through the
water's "black, swollen gates" to ecstasy: "Bequeath us to no earthly
shore until/ Is answered in the vortex of our grave/ The seal's wide
spindrift gaze toward paradise." These were lines Crane had written
in youth, and it was easy to see his death as the last line of a poem he
had written years ago—there was an uncanny fitness to his end.
Shloss lives of hart crane 133

Perhaps as a corrective to Crane's extravagant reputation, Henry Al-

len Moe, Secretary of the Guggenheim Foundation, wrote soon after
Crane's death to Mary Doherty, asking her to record everything she
could remember about Hart Crane's final year of life as a Guggenheim
Fellow in Mexico. "Everyone, including myself, agrees that the lives
of poets illumine their work . . . whether we like it or not, ghouls as
well as sound scholars will dig for facts and only you can leave a
record of impeccably accurate detail. . . . Omit no one. Names, dates,
places, happenings, sayings. . . . Do it before you forget."1
Mary Doherty did not respond to Henry Moe's request; the Gug-
genheim archives remain incomplete, but years later she conversed
willingly with Hart Crane's two most diligent biographers—first with
Philip Horton, then with John Unterecker. Both had presumably
been in search of facts, not legends, the "What happened?" "What
was said?" "Who was concerned?" of Henry Moe's initial request;
and judging at least from John Unterecker 's rendering of the life, Do-
herty, as well as numerous others, remembered well. Owing to Unter-
ecker's ten years of labor, Hart Crane's life is probably one of the most
impressively documented in the history of American letters.
Yet even as he closed a nearly eight-hundred-page study, Unterecker
remained uneasy about the veracity of his portrait: he had not known
Crane; memory is elusive and the memory of others especially hard to
evaluate. Though Crane was a talented writer of both flamboyant and
soberly introspective letters, his mother had systematically destroyed
correspondence unflattering to herself. Unterecker had inevitably
missed revealing documents. Aware, too, of the evanescence of his
subject, of the fragility of lived moments, he drew an analogy between
his own biographical efforts and those of the young Crane who had
tried to know his grandmother through "brown and soft" love letters
in an attic. "Over the greatness of such space/ Steps must be gen-
tle. .. . Are your fingers long enough to play/ old keys that are but
echoes?" Unterecker was aware of the limited ways in which it is pos-
sible to know another person, yet the analogy he proposed for himself
is, I think, a misleading one, for through it he asks us to conceptualize
the biographer as someone who approaches a past "reality," the per-
sonal history of his subject, primarily through the help of accumulated
fact. Despite his sensitivity to the unknowable and thus unrepresent-
able nature of some of Crane's experiences, Unterecker posed legend
against fact, and placed his biography in a line of "books that will,
when more facts have been uncovered, supersede this one" (U, 773).
This particular comment is an important one, for it partially identi-
134 biography Vol. 3, No. 2
fies Unterecker's motive in rewriting Crane's biography, and rewrit-
ing it at a time when a critically acclaimed life of Crane already ex-
isted: Philip Horton had had insufficient evidence to counteract the
stereotyped images of Crane as a lost, violent man whose "bias toward
death" was implicit in his earliest poetry and throughout his whole
adult life. One of Unterecker's overt motives, then, was a corrective
one: through better documentation, more persistent sleuthing, to ren-
der a more inclusive, accurate portrait. In this he conceived his role to
be one of an explorer, a voyager through past time, whose completed
trip through ample documentation should result in a full, satisfying
reconstruction of the events, motives, affective life of his subject. The
title of his book, then, Voyager, identifies the metaphor that controlled
his own search as well as the life of Crane. Yet here, too, the analogy
Unterecker has chosen for himself is misleading, for the course of a
life and the procedures of biography have a crucial distinction, even as
posed in these tropological terms: where voyage through life is open-
ended, the destination, except in the ultimate sense, unknown, the bi-
ographer begins with the foreknowledge of his subject's destiny, and
this knowledge inevitably prefigures the scope and direction of his in-
vestigation. To leave the metaphor of voyage behind, any search for
facts is conducted within an interpretive frame that precedes the dis-
covery of information and that shapes it into a hierarchy of signifi-
cance for the biographer. Furthermore, the movement from data to bi-
ography is crucial, and again involves selection and arrangement. The
former is an unprocessed historical record, the latter a narrative prose
discourse with a discernible form. Though Unterecker may see him-
self as rewriting biography because he has uncovered more and better
information about Crane, the accumulation of more copious facts,
even when they are scrupulously collected and delicately evaluated, is
insufficient to account for the distinction between Horton's and Un-
terecker's biographies. The rewriting of this life is not simply a revi-
sion in the interests of accuracy—though it is that—but a revision that
involves a changed attitude toward the nature of explanation itself.
Unterecker's vision of his work proceeds from a concept of realism
that assumes that more and more amassed detail brings one closer to a
reality that precedes the text and to which the text must be faithful.
While it is true that this understanding of realism in biography pro-
vides the boundaries of the biographer's task—the biographer cannot
violate or contradict his evidence—it is not the case, as I hope to show,
that encyclopedic information brings one closer to the subject. No
neutral descriptive language exists; and in the act of composing a con-
Shloss LIVES OF HART crane 135

tinuous prose narrative out of discrete data, no matter how much there
is of it, the biographer reveals the cultural presuppositions that condi-
tion his own interpretive categories. Unterecker, no less than Horton,
writes from a system of postulates, both about the nature of personali-
ty and about the conventions of biography itself, that influence his
choices. These two texts provide excellent material for studying the
issues of revision in biography.
Both biographers are contextualists; that is, they believe that they
can explain events by revealing the specific relationship those events
have to other events, by linking the individual to his socioculturel
present. But of the two versions of Crane's life, Philip Horton's is the
more schematic and the less selfconscious about the reductionist
nature of its explanations. In Horton's hands, Crane becomes, with
time, sullen, desperate, and increasingly victimized by a fate he could
not control. The book is a study in disintegration, written to show that
Crane's final dissolution, his jump from the Orizaba, was inevitable:
"From the moment he set. . . foot aboard the ship in April. . . until
he took abrupt and final leave of the same ship a year later, the story of
his life is also, almost exclusively, the story of his death."2
Yet the inevitability of suicide is not the inevitability of natural
death, and Horton's contention involves him in an elaborate develop-
mental scheme in which the grounds of self-destructive adult behavior
are instilled in youth—in Crane's case, with the result that his growth
is from childhood "cancerous," his psyche like a "festering wound,"
his final vulnerability a logical extension of disease. These metaphors
are not employed in any comprehensive psychological theory, but
they do proceed from an unformulated but inferable concept of the na-
ture of health, so that Crane is represented, repeatedly, as one who de-
viates from that norm. The boy in Cleveland with a propensity for
solitude and reading is seen as "an Ismael skirting the pleasant oases
of free and easy companionship." (H, 3) The same child, coping with
temperamentally unsuited parents and with domestic violence, is por-
trayed as withdrawn, seeking affection and feeling betrayal, already at
this early age experiencing life as a division of impulses that became
"irreconcilables that distorted his life."
Thus the first context of Crane's neurosis is his family, and it is in
his treatment of Grace and Clarence Crane, Hart's parents, that Hor-
ton's narrative posture becomes most clear. It can be said that any
young child is at the mercy of adults, but Horton emphasizes Crane's
helplessness. He is victimized by his parents' marital problems; his
character is distorted and worn out by his anxious participation in
136 biography Vol. 3,No. 2

their arguments. At one time later in his life, when Crane was still
struggling for emotional independence, he wrote to his mother, "I
think it's high time you realized that for the last eight years my youth
has been a rather bloody battleground for your's and father's sex life
and troubles," (U, 132) a letter that tends to confirm Horton's view of
Crane's boyhood. But this helplessness, this portrayal of Crane as vic-
timized, becomes a theme of the book, a salient feature of the author's
perspective. The narrative is, from the beginning, disjunctive in the
mode of satire, in which the author insists on the individual's inade-
quacy, his captivity in the world rather than his mastery of it. A child
who is the product of a broken home is not necessarily consumed by
it. Yet Horton returns again and again to Grace and Clarence as agents
of their son's destruction. When, for example, Crane eventually decid-
ed not to remarry his former wife, Horton chooses not to explain the
choice as rational, but only to observe its presumed effect: Hart's
"spirit [was] inflamed by the old wounds of humiliation and resent-
ment ... his father had again shattered their prospects of stability and
happiness." (H, 52) Though Horton traces clear lines of development
in Crane's life, this view of his subject is never discarded. In each new
context that Horton creates for Crane—New York City, country re-
treats among friends, the wider cultural life of the twenties in America
and Europe—the equivalents of Grace and Clarence Crane exist; and
although Crane was more tied to his parents for both emotional and
financial support than many adults, Horton lets us see the larger
world in which he moved as populated with a host of agents, external
to the self, that actively shaped his fate.
This satiric tendency, then, precedes Horton's accumulation of ma-
terial and accounts for the narrative dynamic of the text. To picture
weakness of this kind requires one to posit a dualistic universe, one in
which the subject is posed inadequately against others, whether those
others be friends capable of betrayal, or a more abstract other such as
an industrial society with materialistic rather than spiritual values.
The biography is structured around conflict: parent against parent,
child against father, young adult against an indifferent industrial
world, living against art, poetry against the materialism of the age.
This tendency to see dualism is extended finally into a crude psycho-
logical theory in which the individual battles not only with the uni-
verse, but with a conflicted self. The antagonist becomes internalized,
yet it remains domineering, hostile, and not subject to control. Thus
Crane can retain a "natural purity," and still be driven to "the blind
alleys of alcohol and sexual debauchery, seeking escape in the most
brutal degradations," (H, 218) because Horton does not consider
Shloss LIVES OF HART CRANE 137

these excesses controllable. These agents of destruction Horton calls

Crane's "fate," and while he offers hopeless conflict as a description
of an actual state of affairs in Crane's life, wie es eigentlich gewesen, it is,
in fact, an element of his own conceptual frame, a manifestation of his
own narrative commitment to write in terms of division and strife
against an overwhelming world.
This commitment to explain by positing dilemma is evident in most
of the biography's major discussions. Hart Crane's life was not an easy
one, nothing in it—love, social position, money, sustained creative
abilities—was assured. Horton renders Crane's anxiety and despair
gently; he suggests that the anger with which Crane met his environ-
ment was warranted. Yet his empathy falters through its reduction of
complex emotions to repeated pattern. Crane's homosexuality is a case
in point.
While he was in Akron, Ohio in 1919, Hart wrote first news of a
lover to his friend Gorham Munson: "This 'affair' that I have been
having, has been the most intense and satisfactory one of my whole
life, and I am all broken up at the thought of leaving him. Yes, the last
word will jolt you. I have never had devotion returned before like this,
nor ever found a soul, mind and body so worthy of devotion. . . ." (U,
163) This letter is like so many others Crane was eventually to write
without the embarrassment of this first admission. "I know now that
there is such a thing as indestructibility. In the deepest sense, where
flesh became transformed through intensity of response to counter-
response, where a purity of joy was reached that included tears." (U,
355) the letters are ebullient; Crane speaks in terms of relationship, of
reciprocated love. Yet for Horton, the correspondence calls for apol-
ogy. He reports it, since it is evidence of a significant proclivity, but to
him, it reveals Crane as "sexually abnormal"; it is the beginning of
"abandoned violence," of "gross substitute^] for true affection." To
me, this is evidence of misreading, of evaluating Crane from the same
bourgeois concept of health that had led Horton to identify a quiet
child who liked to read as Ishmael, the perennial outsider. Having
constituted his subject as debauched according to the standards of
temperance, heterosexual love, financial respectability, his explana-
tion of this phenomenon follows; it is an explanation of illness and of
inadequacy, of past events that overwhelm and claim the freedom of
the present, rather than a positive heeding of temperament: "His ner-
vous system was so inflamed by years of constant strain that he was
probably incapable of sustaining any satisfactory relationship" (H,
810).
I don't want to press the point, except to observe that this methodol-
138 biography Vol. 3, No. 2
ogy makes Crane inevitably the pawn of circumstance. Where contex-
tualist explanations do show the subject always in relation to his sur-
roundings, they do not invariably posit that relationship to be one of
domination. I find this a particularly unsettling approach for the life
of a man whose youthful letters refer so often to his "will to make
fate," a man whose will was expressed in his writing and in his deci-
sion to remain dedicated to writing in the face of indifference and ac-
knowledged threat. One could say, in broad terms that Horton would
accept, that Crane's central problem was alienation, an inability to act
out in the world his beliefs and desires. Even in New York publishing
circles, very few had the insight to support an unknown adolescent
poet from the Midwest. With such a man, any wrestle with the world
must of necessity be internalized, resistance not overt, but a form of
inner violence. This, as I see it, was one of the functions of Crane's
art. His answers to circumstance, both particularly and in a larger
social sense, occurred as poems. Artistry, rather than any observable
conduct, was Crane's expression of his mastery over the world. One of
the serious flaws of Horton's book is his decision to pose art in opposi-
tion to life, instead of seeing it as dynamic in relation to circumstance,
occasioned by and answering experience.
Horton pictures Crane as inadequately trained and temperamentally
unsuited for work as well as exhausted and spent by the jobs he did
find. Not only was it impossible to combine working and writing, but
none of the activities characteristic of the middle class life into which
Hart Crane was born afforded him satisfaction. It is this frustration
that led him, according to Horton, into a personally conceived mysti-
cism, into music, alcohol, and sexual extremes. And it is only in this
realm of heightened sensation that Horton sees any bridge between
Crane's experience and his writing. He places Crane in the tradition
of Rimbaud, a poet for whom writing was dependent upon a derange-
ment of the senses, but Horton is unable to overcome his own ambiva-
lence toward that derangement. In his scheme, mysticism is both a
state of expanded consciousness, a higher level of awareness in which
opposites are reconciled, and conversely, a form of madness. On the
one hand, it is a mechanism of release from otherwise insoluble prob-
lems; on the other, it is a form of degeneracy: "The why and how of
this relation is one of the most obscure mysteries of psychopathology
and art. . ." (H, 82). Since these experiences are both sick and the sine
qua non of artistic creation, Horton has committed himself to an image
of Crane's art as pathological, even though that art is the reason for his
admiration of his subject, the representation of the spiritual values
Shloss LIVES OF HART CRANE 139

Horton apparently holds above the "spiritual blindness and corrup-

tion of materialism," and the reason for writing the biography. His
way out of this dilemma is to see sex, drinking, and mysticism as
forms of escape from the ego, as release from conscious control, and to
see art as a similarly uncontrolled experience. Crane could seek the
stimulation for writing through these various sensuous extremes, yet
he could not determine if his attempts would work. We can see that to
the biographer his subject's genius is a mystery; writing occurs
through a "muse" (H, 230), one must be "possessed" (H, 207) by a
"divine madness" in order to write.
In all of these contentions, Horton is again involved in the ramifica-
tions of his original interpretive frame: he is committed, by the need
to show Crane's suicide as organic, to his subject's weakness. If
Crane's life is a series of insoluble dilemmas, if the individual is
helpless in the world, the recipient of fate rather than the maker of it,
then art, too, must be a form of received experience.
The irony of Horton's narration is that his very method of explain-
ing undermines the sympathy that he has for his subject. He derides
Crane, perhaps unwittingly, for deviating from his own social norms,
and as the biography proceeds, the author's presuppositions become
increasingly apparent. The facts of Crane's life, although they seem
generally to be responsibly gathered, are fitted insistently into a pat-
tern of dualism, ineffectual attempts at reconciliation, and inevitable
doom.
Although the creation of continuous narrative, in history or in biog-
raphy, requires selection and organization of unprocessed data, Hor-
ton's biography is committed, more obviously than many books of this
genre, to patterning themes. The discernment of organizing proce-
dures has led Roy Pascal and others of our contemporaries to the dis-
cussion of biography and self-biography as fiction in the broad sense.
What I have tried to show is that these narratives are amenable to to-
pological analysis in more extended ways. John Unterecker, who re-
wrote Crane's biography in an impressive book published in 1969,
wrote, I am sure, with the intention of correcting the distortions that
ensued from Horton's narrative tactics. In that he produced more data
than Horton was able to uncover, and in that he avoided the intrusive
dualisms of his predecessor, he succeeded. But to suggest that Unter-
ecker has remained committed to facts in a way that Horton was not is
to misapprehend the nature of his revision. Unterecker's life of Crane
is, no less than Horton's, a story with a discernible formal coherence.
When Unterecker began to write his book, or rather when he began
140 biography Vol. 3,No. 2
the investigative work that preceded his narrative, he had an enor-
mous debt to Philip Horton. Not only had Horton spoken to witnesses
who had died in the interim—most notably Grace Crane, Hart's
mother—but he had, by his own sleuthing, provided Unterecker with
a reliable chronology of events. If Unterecker's investigations were ul-
timately more fruitful, it is partly because the extisting text of Crane's
life had established a direction for research. Unterecker acknowledged
this debt willingly, but there is a more extended sense in which his
own biography is not only a fuller reconstruction of Crane's life, but a
book that answers its predecessor, one that takes shape as part of an
implicit dialogue about the nature of biographical explanation. "It is
easy," Unterecker wrote, "to see Hart Crane either as a poet who cele-
brates industrial America or as a poet who is in perpetual rebellion
against the crassness and vulgarity of a capitalist society, a society
symbolized by the uncomprehending businessman father. Some of
Crane's own remarks support both pictures. But, like all simple dia-
grams intended to explain human conduct, both pictures are false"
(U, 143). Clearly remarks like these allude specifically to the reduc-
tionist nature of Horton's descriptions and imply Unterecker's own
commitment to a more complex level of representation. But his book
also contains many covert responses to the existent portrait.
On the simplest level, Unterecker revised Horton's life of Crane
because it was wrong about matters of verifiable fact, because it chose
to omit them, or because new information qualified the meaning of
known data. These corrections can be seen in many small instances, in
which changes enhance the account of "What happened?" on specific
occasions without substantially altering the representation of the com-
pleted life. A case in point involves the reporting of Crane's return to
New York after a period of advertising work in Cleveland. Horton had
remarked that "Crane felt that a definite period of his life had come to
a close and a new one begun which demanded a larger environment
than Cleveland" (H, 145). The inaccuracy of this explantion of
change becomes apparent when Unterecker discloses that Crane had
in reality been fired from his job at Stanley Patno's advertising agency
in early March, 1923. He continues to reveal that this turn of events
had distressed Crane, who had gone to great lengths to see that his
father not learn of his failure. Together with his mother and grand-
mother, he apparently devised a scheme that would make it seem that
he had been sent on a three or four week "business" trip to New York
City, where he would find work and then "resign" his job in Cleve-
land (U, 285).
ShloSS LIVES OF HART CRANE 141

Similarly, Unterecker felt comfortable in revealing the identities of

Crane's homosexual lovers and was able to discuss the nature of their
relationships. These are isolated instances of accurate reporting, but
considered cumulatively, they also qualify the image we have of
Crane's motivations and emotions. In this case, Unterecker reveals
Crane to be a man of complex sensuality, a man for whom sex was not
always debauchery, as Horton would have it, but "open, generous,
buoyant," as well as a search for fundamental human values: "Human
affection, human communication, human love—he knew precisely the
sort of experience he was talking about, an experience that sometimes
involved sex and as often as not didn't" (U, 270). Unterecker acknowl-
edges that many of Crane's waterfront pick-ups were secretly indulged
responses to unhappiness, but he does not arrange them as evidence of
pathology; and by refusing schematization (Horton had remarked, "A
graph of any one of these relationships would show in each case the
same line of declension." [H, 82]), he shows Crane as capable of inte-
grating his experiences and judging them by standards consonant with
his family background. "He was far too much a product of Cleveland
and its moral code to turn against it lightly, and what he could not
help but regard as his own moral transgression was to torture him un-
til the day of his death" (U, 181). Through comments like these, the
man's emotional complexity becomes apparent, his "deviance" as un-
derstandable as heterosexual love in which lust can be the source of
guilt as well as fulfillment.
The fullness of Unterecker's information changes Horton's portrait
in several other significant ways. Horton strains to be even-handed in
his treatment of Crane's parents, for example, but clearly he views
Hart's father as an industrialist with values antithetical to his son's,
without the insight to appreciate art, and by extension, a represen-
tative of the larger society in which Crane failed to make a place.
Unterecker, by finding full correspondence, records of alimony and
child support payment, and evidence of Clarence Crane's own values
apart from his aspirations for Hart, sees him as a man without un-
doubted business acumen, a man who measured success in financial
terms, but who made the effort to retain ties with Hart, who, in turn,
feared his ridicule, sought his approval, and simultaneously rejected
the older man's choices in life. Unterecker's Clarence Crane is part of
a complex dialog between men of succeeding generations, different
temperaments and conflicting values. He is hostile; he is confused by
bohemians; he is eventually generous, but at no time is he simply a
disengaged representative of his class. Where Horton implies his
142 biography Vol. 3, No. 2
neglect of Crane, Unterecker shows specific cases of neglect amid a
documented record of emotional involvement, attempted understand-
ing, and financial support.
The picture of Grace Crane is similarly modified. Instead of a gen-
tle, loving, and suffering mother, she becomes, in Unterecker's hands,
nagging and dependent, a woman who foisted her suffering first on a
boy too young to understand the issues of her sexual maladjustment,
and then on an adolescent with the gallantry to espouse problems that
did not belong to him and that he could not solve. What Clarence
Crane refused to be for his wife, Grace asked her son to become:
escort, companion, confidant, Crane played the role of his mother's
"sweetheart," and though Unterecker eschews formal psychological
interpretation, the biographer clearly sees this transference of depen-
dence as a factor in Crane's homosexuality. Under the conditions
Grace imposed, normal heterosexual love would have constituted be-
trayal.
These changed emphases are important because they point to the
nature of Unterecker's contextualism. He, as well as Horton, explains
by placing his subject constantly in relationship to sociocultural
events, and the importance of family ties has not diminished in the
writing of Crane's life. However, Unterecker understands "context"
to be like a web, a dynamic structure of response and counterresponse
in which the behavior of one individual has fine lines of connection to
consequent decisions of others. There is no doubt that Crane's parents
imposed a difficult series of demands and expectations upon him, but
Unterecker does not portray his subject as their inevitable dupe. He
is, instead, an adult capable of understanding his parents because their
values are to some extent his own. Horton pictures Crane as a misun-
derstood bohemian; he is behaved against, done to. Unterecker shows
Crane acting toward his mother as he chose to act, just as later, when
he came to think that her love had degenerated into possessiveness, he
chose to break ties with her completely. He shows, too, that Crane
valued work because it contributed to his own self-esteem and because
his father, whom he loved and wanted to please, esteemed it more.
These gestures of love and discipline conflicted, according to Unter-
ecker, with Crane's overwhelming desire to write—in this he agrees
with Horton—but the difference is that Unterecker shows conflict to
be internalized and thus potentially subject to individual control. He
shows it to be consonant with self-definition, and indeed a positive
contribution to growth. As Unterecker presents it, Crane was so com-
plex precisely because he retained throughout his artistic life a bour-
geois orientation, because at heart he wanted to be a solid citizen, to
ShloSS LIVES OF HART CRANE 143

experience the securities of home. "That he could not lead such a life
did not lessen his desire for it" (U, 444). Having posited this internal
complexity, the contending claims of family and art, Unterecker ex-
plains Crane's mode of existence as an emotional balancing act, as a
system of interwoven tensions of feeling. Because Crane's impulses
were integrally connected with what he thought his parents expected
of him, Unterecker extends his explanation in terms of acting, in
terms of disguise and masks. Unable to be whole with anyone, he
would be to each what the situation required. To Grace, Crane would
be the concerned and loving companion, solicitous of her welfare even
in letters, normal in his sexual orientation, but without any emotional
attachments that would supersede his love for her. "Do NOT marry,"
she had written to him, and it is significant that Crane's letters to her
are careful not only to hide his homosexuality, but also to conceal any
feelings of relationship stronger than conventional friendship. To his
father, as he was able, he became a businessman. Unterecker describes
Crane in Cleveland before Grace's second divorce as actor par excel-
lence: "Never was his role-playing so intricate as it now became. In
the mornings and afternoons, Hart Crane discussed with his mother
her divorce and his literary career. In the evenings, Harold Crane
discussed with his father C.A.'s business projects and his own pros-
pects in advertising. For of course, at five p.m. every day, Crane
changed not just parlors, but names" (U, 487).
The perceived necessity of the mask, of a series of private and public
personalities, reveals the intensity of Crane's internal conflict and
something of the way he perceived the external demands placed on
him. One could also see in this the measure of his alienation. With
whom can the mask be safely discarded? But Unterecker does not use
the theatre analogy to discuss a teal vs. a constructed self. Instead,
each of Crane's masks expresses a part of an internally whole man who
dealt with his social experience by fragmenting and compartmentaliz-
ing it. Crane was in fact concerned for mother, father, art, and busi-
ness, though not able to deal with all of them at once. "Heavy drinker,
homosexual, unpredictable spendthrift, extrovert, introvert—all terms
accurate to aspects of his personality, false to the man" (U, 735). To
act, in this sense, is to retain responsibility and control, not only of
oneself, but to some degree of a manipulated environment.
This reading of Unterecker's theatre analogy is significant, for he
uses the metaphor persistently, and it indicates his understanding of
the drama of Crane's life. If one considers that Horton wrote in the
mode of satire, then one could say that Unterecker's vision is comic,
for he presupposes a world in which responsibility, effective use of the
144 biography Vol. 3, No. 2
will, and resolution of conflict are all possibilities. He writes of a life
whose main impulse was toward internal integration. Where Horton's
narrative shows Crane to be inevitably overwhelmed by circum-
stances, Unterecker constitutes a world that is potentially manageable,
where disguise is benign and leads to the kinds of confusions that can
be resolved, as they were, for example, in his numerous rifts with
literary friends.
The one place where this narrative consistency falters is in Unter-
ecker's explanation of Crane's art. In all other aspects of Crane's be-
havior, the biographer is concerned to show his subject's accountabili-
ty, but Crane's poetry remains in a separate category, not dependent
on "the muse" or on being "^'possessed" by some external agent, as
Horton would have it, but dependent nonetheless on the selfs ability
to order and stabilize other aspects of the environment. Unterecker es-
tablishes an imaginary hierarchy of psychic activities in which suc-
cessful social relationships precede and influence the practice of cre-
ativity: "When Crane's inner house was in order, he found it easy to
write" (U, 305). "During this month [April, 1927], the barometer of
Crane's feeling—his capacity for work—responds precisely to the tone
of Grace's letters. When she is optimistic, there is real hope that his
poem will again flower. . . . Similarly, it is no accident that immedi-
ately after getting a 'bad' letter from Grace he abandons work on the
poem" (U, 484-5).
Horton was fascinated by the relationship between Crane's poetry,
his drinking, his sexual bouts, and his love of loud music. He elevated
these preferences into a mystic system in which genius was released
only at an extreme level of erotic stimulation. Unterecker sees these
practices only as a way of working up materials, similar to Yeats' con-
structing poems from diaries and spirit messages. For him, Crane's
real artistry began with sober, intricately calculated revision; in this
sense, he was responsible for his writing, but this process could be
sustained only when other problems didn't intervene.
If one accepts Unterecker's correlation of emotional stability and
creativity, then Crane's productivity toward the end of his life should
be an index of his mental well being: aside from "The Broken Tow-
er," one of his major poems, Crane wrote very little that year, even
with the help of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Though Unterecker care-
fully researched the events of Crane's final year of life in Mexico and
found evidence of positive satisfaction—Peggy Cowley and his Mexi-
can home provided him with the middle-class domesticity he had co-
vertly desired—he is forced to show us a man frequently drunk, des-
perate in his lusts, and increasingly violent.
Shloss LIVES OF HART CRANE 145

Yet despite the evidence of a life that was finally uncontrolled and
creativity that was consequently stifled, Unterecker refuses to see the
inevitability of Crane's suicide. Because he had posited Crane's inner
life as a series of balances, the small, immediate event is enough to ex-
plain self-destruction: Crane's jump from the Orizaba may have been
the mistake of a drunken moment or a moment of anger at Peggy Cow-
ley; it may have been an escape from returning to New York City in
the depression; it may have expressed his fear of a creative impasse.
Unterecker only speculates when he knows that certain knowledge is
impossible, but it is clear that the explanation that fascinates him most
is a bizarre version of the traditional resolution of comedy: Crane's
suicide was a positive action, the assertion of will, a marriage to the
sea. The masks removed, mistaken identity revealed, the protagonist
joins the sea that had provided the symbol system of much of his
poetry and that had held for him the means of ecstasy, the passage
through psychic danger to a mystic union with all of life. "Permit me
voyage, love, into your hands."
If the bias of Unterecker's narrative is comic, the author nonetheless
moves at times toward irony. He writes self-consciously, in a way
Horton does not, about the nature of the biographic enterprise, about
the limited ability of the biographer to reconstruct his subject's life.
"But who knows," Unterecker asks at times, "where significance lies?
Perhaps altogether different memories drifted back . . ." (U, 383).
The nature of these comments reveals Unterecker's concern to be with
the uninflected nature of documentation, with evidence that may re-
veal "facts"—what happened, what was said—but not yield the emo-
tional import of the event to the subject himself. While this issue is
centrally important to the writing of biography, it is in a sense a naive
problem. Unterecker does not use irony to indicate the inability of
language to capture the truth of things, nor does he write self-
consciously about the relativism of knowledge. Given the irreducibly
"exterior" nature of facts, Unterecker still maintains that clearer,
more accurate portraiture ensues from the accumulation of more data,
that the proliferation of fact results in an enhanced realism.
To a point, this assertion is true, and I have tried to illustrate the
ways in which Unterecker's revision of Horton's text has brought the
narrative more in line with source material. But Unterecker's glut of
information does not provide a less interpretive life of Hart Crane. In-
formation in itself can be annoying, and it is not self-explanatory or
meaningful, though I presume it was respect for the self-evidence of
documents that led Unterecker to quote so frequently, so fully from
correspondence. However much Unterecker may practice such "seis-
146 biography Vol. 3, No. 2
sors and paste" history, letting the subject at given intervals "speak
for himself," it is the arrangement of materials into a continuous nar-
rative that gives meaning to Crane's life, and, in turn, the formal nar-
rative strategies chosen by the biographer that enable one to properly
decipher these meanings. As I have shown, both biographers reveal
their bourgeois bias by the elements they chose to put into their sub-
ject's context. In this case, it is significant that both stress the family
and individual upbringing as the main arena for Crane's life, rather
than, for example, his class in society, his economic opportunities, or
the attitude of his society toward art. I have chosen to identify Hor-
ton's narrative mode as disjunctive, satiric, and Unterecker's as comic,
but these labels are somewhat arbitrary. They ensue from the percep-
tion of the biographers' fundamentally different attitudes toward the
efficacy of the will, the possibility of effective self-direction in life. If
Unterecker's biography seems more satisfactory to a contemporary
audience, I would like to suggest that it is not so much because it is
more factual, but because his explanatory bias is more consonant with
our own. Horton's determinism is disturbing to a readership accus-
tomed to believing in the viability of self-direction. And this, amid all
his gathering of evidence, is what Unterecker allows Hart Crane.
R. G. Collingwood has said that each age must rewrite its own his-
tory, and the same may be claimed for the execution of biography, al-
though not because we revise constantly in the interests of more accu-
racy. To the contrary, one could argue that while new information
may be uncovered through more persistent investigation, other evi-
dence is destroyed by time: people die, letters are thrown away, docu-
ments are lost. Rather, rewriting occurs in the very simple interest of
comfort. The cultural assumptions that shape the narration and evalu-
ation of lives change, and while it is possible to recognize presupposi-
tions or guiding "fictions" of a preceding generation, it is not so easy
to see our own.

Wesleyan University, Connecticut

notes

1. John Unterecker, Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane (New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1969), p. 771. All other references to this book will be cited in the
text as (U, page number).
2. Philip Horton, Hart Crane: The Life of an American Poet (New York) W. W. Nor-
ton & Company, Inc., 1937), p. 279. All other references to this book will be
cited in the text as (H, page number).