Driving home from the Midwest, I stopped in Garrettsville, Ohio, to visit the Crane family plot, where there is a memorial to the oblique, tortured, intensely American poet Hart Crane, who is one of my liberators. From the start, I was drawn to poems that resisted my intelligence. And in the poems of Hart Crane I found this resistance especially exciting because they were by a homosexual often writing about love. Pain glitters on the edges of them.
When I arrived, it was raining lightly and the purple rhododendrons were drinking thirstily. Honeybees climbed inside the plush blossoms, and cicadas made a loud, intense, zigzagging sound that radiated outward from the landscape.
On April 27, 1932, after a night of drinking in the seaman’s quarters—where he’d been beaten up and lost his wallet and ring—Crane, in his pajamas and overcoat, walked the promenade deck of the Orizaba, sailing from Mexico. Exhausted, shaken, embarrassed, he hardly paused to observe the polished sea before removing his coat and vaulting over the ship’s railing into the foaming wake. A loud clangor of bells followed. Life preservers were thrown into the water. One of the passengers or crew saw an arm swimming strongly in the white froth. Lifeboats were lowered and crisscrossed the sea for more than an hour searching for Crane, but the crews working their oars fervently discovered no body, so Captain Blackadder called off the search, and the ship continued on its course northward from Vera Cruz toward New York City.
After Crane vanished, postcards arrived which he’d mailed to friends from Havana, where the ship had docked: “Am going back to Cleveland to help in the business crisis.” “Very pleasant journey. Shall write you when I get in the upper latitudes.” Though Crane’s body is part of the sea now, his name, dates, and “LOST AT SEA” are carved onto the gleaming granite marker for his father. The precocious, shy son would never inherit the family candy manufacturing business. Crane’s father, a fiercely practical, Horatio Alger-like figure, had invented the Life Saver, the candy with a hole in the middle.
I was relieved Crane’s marker wasn’t near his depressed, lonely mother, who’d lived vicariously through her artistic son, and whose neediness had the power to disturb him so profoundly that they were estranged in the last years of his life. A week after his death, Grace Crane wrote in a letter to a friend: “About three years ago, we had a cruel experience which has separated us ever since…” And fifteen years after his death, her ashes were thrown from the Brooklyn Bridge—an act of love from beyond the grave. I was also relieved there was no gaudy, religious statuary at the family plot. It was a landscape out of Wordsworth or Thoreau, where a love of nature begins in childhood, and “wifeless,” “runaway hobo-trekkers” are forever searching.
Garrettsville is not a cosmopolitan center. It was late morning when I arrived, and Main Street was bathed in a sepia glow. I don’t know when it had ceased breathing, but everything seemed contained within a bell jar, an excellent metaphor for the struggles men and women must overcome in life. Still, I felt a nostalgia standing on the ground where Crane had stood when he’d come home for his father’s funeral, an event that had “severely affected” him, according to the report (“Poet’s Death Linked with Loss of Father”) in the New York Times published on April 29, 1932.
Garrettsville appears quite vividly in early poems like “Porphyro in Akron”:
The “little town” looked authentic and poignant, as if its colors had been applied with a dry brush. And when the sun emerged, it gave everything a hymnlike, dignified shape, making me think of Charles Burchfield’s beautiful painting “The Three Trees,” hanging at the public library in Salem, Ohio, where readers nap at the library tables and a policeman meditates in the corner.
It’s the raw fact of trees that Burchfield focusses on in his canvas. And his three large elms with their heads growing together seem to have an almost telekinetic halo, calling to mind Emily Dickinson’s enigmatic poem “Four trees upon a solitary acre”:
In her trenchant commentary on Dickinson, the critic Helen Vendler writes: “Dickinson asks: What do the Trees do in the world? They exhibit no describable Action. They merely ‘Maintain’ (a transitive verb used intransitively); they maintain themselves in place. Who are their daily visitors? The Sun and the Wind…”
During my long winter in Ohio, I, too, had simply maintained my place. “Silence and a gentle gloom” had been my daily visitors “in that antarctic blaze” (Crane). And then, at last, spring arrived outside the little porch of my wood-frame house.
A kind of brain fever moved through me as I drove across Ohio and Pennsylvania toward my home in Boston. It was as if I were coming to life, like an insect or tree. The raw fact of my body breathed again. And I felt joy thinking of the elms still standing in Massachusetts after a half century of their blight spreading across America. Hasn’t someone confected blight-resistant elms by now that spring up “like a fountain” (Longfellow)?
I know it sounds foolish, but I would do very well as a tree: giving shade, watching the lives of others drift past—as in slow-motion film—permitting little arms and legs to climb over me.
When I stopped at a car wash to rinse the dust and pollen from my Honda, I loved how the water sprayed horizontally into the glass, as if spraying into my face, and then some marvellous gooey pink and blue foam covered everything.
When I emerged, the land before me no longer seemed in darkness, and I drove on “quite dumb with something for which ‘happiness’ must be too mild a term” (Crane, in a letter to Waldo Frank).
Photographs courtesy of Henri Cole.
