USS H-5 (Submarine # 148)
Crewman using a Corona typewriter while sitting on the bar of an "SC Tube" type hydrophone. Taken at San Pedro, California, circa 1919.
Photographed by J. Edwin Hogg, Los Angeles, California.
Note the submarine's fairwater in the immediate background.
U.S. Naval Historical Center Photograph.
"A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene."
Thus Hart Crane in "To Brooklyn Bridge" describes the noon light biting into Wall Street. As a poet, Crane sought "surrender to the sensations of urban life." Out of such sensations, he said, he hoped to forge "a mystical synthesis of America," for which (he told his perplexed patron, Otto Kahn) "one might take the Sistine Chapel as an analogy."
He knew his Whitman "like a book," Robert Lowell has written ....Flung Typewriters.
Crane in love affairs with sailors. He threw typewriters out of windows. "I saw all the trees below his window festooned with the typewriter ribbon," a friend remembers. Still, Unterecker cautions, "if Crane tossed out of windows everything that his acquaintances have him tossing, most of America, half of Europe, and all of Mexico would still be littered with far-flung typewriters."
Friday, Jul. 18, 1969
Bridge and Towers
VOYAGER: A LIFE OF HART CRANE by John Unterecker. 787 pages
Drunk, he was often described as ''a hurricane,'' variously clownish, maudlin, abusive and paranoid.
When his first book, ''White Buildings,'' was published in 1927, Yvor Winters called Crane one of ''the five or six greatest poets writing in English.'' That year alcoholism finally took hold. In a sodden rage Crane threw the typewriter on which he was writing ''The Bridge'' out his window. He struggled painfully to finish the book-length poem during years when his drunken brawls got him jailed in Paris and New York. When ''The Bridge'' finally was published in 1930, the consensus was that Crane had produced a major work, one critic calling it ''the most remarkable attempt at an orchestrated modern American poem since Eliot's 'Waste Land.' '' But H. P. Lovecraft, horrified by Crane's appearance, wrote: ''At the very crest of fame he is on the verge of psychological, physical and financial disintegration.''Even among the carefree New York literary set at the dawn of the Jazz Age, Crane was something of a handful. His writing methodology included wild bouts of drinking and carousing aimed at wrenching the words out of himself and onto the page. He would stomp about his flat, the Victrola cranked up loud, playing the same jazz record over and over, in search of "divine madness." More than once, he heaved his typewriter out the window in exasperation. Bursting from his apartment, he would reel down the city streets, drunkenly shouting into the night: "I am Baudelaire! I am Marlowe! I am Whitman!" Crossing the great bridge by foot, he would cruise the South St. saloons, stuffing nickels into jukeboxes and casting about for a sailor for a one-night stand.
crane
"Also included are two essays that illustrate Delany's unique chrestomathic technique, the grouping of textual fragments whose associative interrelationships a reader must actively trace to read them as a resonant argument. Whether writing about Wagner or Hart Crane, Foucault or Robert Mapplethorpe, Delany combines a fierce and often piercing vision with a powerful honesty that beckons us to share in the perspective of these Longer Views."
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