5 - Hart Crane: tortured with history

Summary

If the American modernist poets can claim a poète maudit, he is Hart Crane. Born in Garretsville, Ohio on July 21, 1899, of well-to-do families of property and business, Harold Hart Crane never made it the American way. His mother, Grace Hart, was sensitive and artistically inclined but not at all prepared to work hard for what she really wanted. Frustrated and emotionally unstable, she demanded a lot of attention from her son, particularly after her marriage broke up in 1916. Devoted to her as her son was (he renamed himself “Hart Crane” to please her), he was to part with her tempestuously in 1928 never to see or be in touch with her again before his suicide in 1932. Crane's father was, by contrast, a successful, enterprising businessman, who very much wanted his son to follow in his footsteps and eventually take over the confectionery factory in Cleveland, Ohio. But Crane wanted to be a poet. In 1916, after his parents' divorce, he took off to New York City, ostensibly to prepare for college, but really to be a poet. To support himself Crane resorted to copy-editing in little magazines, advertising, even at times working for his father. But his inclinations, tastes, and orientations in life never conformed to bourgeois convention, and his needs, whether financial, emotional, or sexual, were always above his means. Excessive about his drinking and reckless about his homosexual adventures in harbors and docks, Crane ran easily into trouble with the police. He even managed to get jailed and savagely beaten at La Santé (the Paris headquarters of the French police) once for having floored a gendarme after a drunken row in a Parisian café.