DEAR ALLEN, DEAR DONALD, DEAR HART:

...Two years The correspondence is just that-literary...

...Oh, she mustn't think he's forgotten, not for one minute, that when he was home in Cleveland for a visit she "twitted" him for not paying for his board...

...may his tongue rot in his head for saying it...

...What a cast of characters: the clinical paradigm, stereotype straight out of the clinical literature...

...Often I have come across the most charming, odd apartments in my walks and I like to think of you in one of them, happy with me and Grandma, in a few clean rooms...

...You are a queen and you shall have it too...

...Doesn't he know the value of a dollar-that in the last analysis a man expresses his emotions in beefsteaks...

...Reconciled, that is, until the seething tensions of their lives together and apart across the years explode When he makes the mistake of confessing to her, upon approaching thirty, his homosexuality...

...Broke again, always broke again, he demands money of her...

...Years earlier he had written to his mother: "He is too low for consideration...

...The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate JOHN TYREE FAIN & THOMAS DANIEL YOUNG, eds...

...So keep your head...

...And in a moving passage to his father he writes of the boat ride he had made at last down the Mississippi, a "place I had so often imagined and, as you know, written about in my River section of The Bridge...

...Why has she neglected him...

...That kind of language he understood perfectly...

...DEAR ALLEN, DEAR DONALD, DEAR HART SAUL MALOFF Allen tate, newly arrived in New York in 1924, the halcyon days of Modernism, as a kind of literary emissary from the Fugitive group centered on Vanderbilt University, wrote Donald Davidson his first impressions of Hart Crane, the New York group's greater and protocol chief: "Crane is a peach of a fellow and is treating me royally...

...I hope you can help me out a little as you did last summer...

...Bond-one sinks into the language of commerce...

...It's just a question of your interest in the matter, for I'm not claiming that you necessarily ought to...

...he doesn't want to say it...

...My most devoted love is yours and you are always my dearest sweetheart...

...he writes shortly after arriving in New York...

...for with that hold gone, what is left...

...If your writing could only be a side line," Clarence Arthur Crane writes his boy, "a sort of pleasure to be taken up in the evening, an ideal to be followed as an avocation rather than a vocation...

...But no, oh, no, he can expect no "smoother current" in his life...

...By a stroke of incredible fortune he moved into the very room, when he was living in Brooklyn Heights, from which Washington Roebling had directed the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge half a century earlier from the design of his father, John Roebling...

...When control needs tightening she can always fall ill, and does, seemingly at will...

...Why be scrupulous in one's dealings with unscrupulous people, anyway...

...they need each other...

...Why won't he settle down...

...In the meantime, from the other antagonist of the sundered family romance, Grace Hart Crane is providing her own warmhearted maternal counsel, the ripe fruit of her worldly experience: "You haven't been very confidential with me in that respect," she pouts, having heard from a friend in New York that Hart is in love, "-I do not care how much you are in love, just so you do not marry-You know that would end your writing career and other ambitions...

...To this rending cry for help, for comfort, for love, Hart makes such response as he can dredge up-weak, short-lived but for a change something, though we would not put up bond for its authenticity...

...He's a 160-pounder, strong as an ox, looks like an automobile salesman (at a slight distance) and is proud of his looks...

...and he concludes by flinging the filthy money at his son's feet: "Anyway it is the money that you want so I am enclosing you $50.00...

...Yes, yes, yes, Mother Grace urges him, be diplomatic, be filial-there's money in it...

...She draws back at signing the legal document...

...cry out across the country in pain and sorrow for adoration and fealty...

...In the early years of the correspondence, life with mother is his dream of heaven...

...For out of as snarled an Oedipal tangle as ever there was, Crane, from the time he left his native Ohio for New York City in 1917 at the age of seventeen, using the dissolution of his parents' wretched marriage as his one-way ticket, constructed a persona for home consumption which while no less "real" was wildly at variance with the legendary poete maudit-the hard drinking, cruising, brawling, raffish, erratic homosexual and suicide...

...The letters are tedious, sordid, infuriating, saddening, infinitely depressing-and essential to an understanding of Crane as a man, affording us one profile of the multifaceted portrait which must be pieced together from all available sources...

...if you would only think of it just as men play golf, then I would see things differently...

...the profile he turned west...

...the few good men in the world deserve to meet...

...In this dramatic contest of wills and spirits, we're summoned by all history to ally ourselves with the scapegrace son, the bounder who between mad bouts of boozing and cruising managed to sit still long enough to compose some of the monuments of American poetry-and scoff at the cliche-mongering entrepreneur who knows that his "taste may be quite plebeian" and was good for nothing more than picking up the tab...

...Now the truth is he hates to say this...

...at anybody, but I think it's time you realized that for the last eight years my youth has been a rather bloody battleground for your's [sic] and father's sex life and troubles...

...but they have driven him to such extremity that he is bound to say it, in the name, of course of the truth, which will out: "I don't want to fling accusations etc...

...while in turn the son abuses him for being a "disgruntled, narrow-minded commercialist" and in the same breath begs still more money...

...Clarence Crane's letter is full of deep, tightly-controlled pain, which he has come by, God knows, honestly...

...Resist evil impulse as one may, in writing of Crane it is impossible not to cast oneself in the role of psychoanalyst, or stern elder, or both...

...Money is the tie that binds...

...How I do long for your ultimate, complete happiness...

...I am only quietly waiting-stifling my feelings in the realization that I might as well get as much money as possible out of him...

...I forgot to say," he writes Davidson, "that Hart Crane is living with us-one of the finest men alive-if possible, finer than his poetry...

...He begs her to come to her "anxious son" and she assures him she will try to "come there & have a little home, even if a modest one & you can be happy & so shall I." Remember me, love me, she constantly pleads...

...Now that miniscule aphorism may not set the angels in heaven to singing anthems of joy but in the fetid air of these letters, it is as close to genuine emotion and wisdom one is likely to get...

...Columbia U. Press, $20 later the impression persisted...

...For hours on end Crane sits at his window entranced by the life of the great river, the marvelous arc spanning it, the magnificent city beyond-the "finest view in all America," he writes his mother in a state of high excitement...

...He was nineteen at the time of writing...

...I am coming to see you & I want you to be glad to see me...

...It was one of the great days of his life, he says: "There is something tragically beautiful about the scene, the great, magnificent Father of Waters pouring itself at last into the oblivion of the Gulf...

...Soon after his grandmother's death he and his mother fall to bickering over the inheritance...

...One gets, in fact, true if puzzled affection, good will, fore-bearance, loyalty, rich family feeling, an endless shelling-out of utterly undeserved fifty-dollar checks-and bewilderment, a pitiable inability to fathom the mysterious creature he's spawned...

...He and the Tates were spending the winter, or trying to, in an isolated farmhouse in Patterson, N.Y...

...and, besides, they are co-conspirators in the bloody struggle against the terrible man who was as much her alienated father as his...

...His father, that impossible philistine, either cannot or will not understand...

...Running a parallel course to the mother-son nexus, the letters to his father flow fitfully, a rush of them alternating with long sullen silences...

...On January 5, 1926, the fertilizing dream-work done, he writes his mother: "Yesterday I finally got started into my Bridge poem...

...Italics, needless to say, in the original...

...he continually asks of his son...

...less letters in the usual sense than a running documentary record of the vicissitudes of Tate and Davidson as poets and critics and by extension of the Fugitive group at Nashville (John Crowe Ransom, R. P. Warren, Cleanthe Brooks, Andrew Lytle together with the epistolers), the Agrarians, the once-famous manifesto-symposium I'll Take My Stand, the Southern literary renascence so-called, and by further extension the New Criticism...

...The ill-named Mother Grace Hart is vacuity itself-trivial, whining, primping, vain, simpering, hysterical, wielding however she can the formidable power of weakness, of dependency -on her mother, her former husband, her baby boy, her friends...

...Edgar Guest was his poet of poets and Elbert Hubbard, that babbling fount of homespun counterfeit wisdom, was his prophet and philosopher...

...Instead, all our sympathy flows to the father whose principal sin was that he couldn't make head or tail of his son's White Buildings and that he wants him to succeed to his business...

...The Letters of Hart Crane and His Family must be read with great caution-in conjunction with the standard biographical accounts, principally John Unterecker's authoritative Voyage and Philip Horton's groundbreaking biography, together with Susan Jenkins Brown's affectionate, forgiving memoir and any other source that affords a glimpse of Crane from the outside...

...Son ("Sonny," he sometimes signed himself when he was especially hard up for money- as in "your Sonny," in letters to his father): alternately dutiful and petulant, devoted and coldly uncaring, loving and merciless, obliging and heedless, arrogant and obsequious-and eternally dependent, forever seventeen...

...So the least, the very least, you can do is pay...

...Naturally, Clarence Crane, a candy man who knew all there is to know about beefsteak and chocolate, was more than happy to oblige...

...Clarence, poor sod, reels through the letters like a man who never knew what hit him, counseling to deaf ears, and preaching his little sermons about money and hard work and thrift and common sense because it was the only language he knew, and so to instruct a son was a father's mission in life...

...I will have to bunk with you...

...the demands they make on each other cannot be so readily abandoned...

...Why doesn't he stay with J. Walter Thompson, where Hart was briefly employed as a copywriter, and make a career of it...

...And from now on I hope to have the necessary inspiration to keep steadily at it...

...It was like wakening into a dreamland in the early dawn- one wondered where one was with only a milky light in the window and that vague music from a hidden world...

...In fact, in his letters to Davidson Tate evidently didn't think the episode worth mentioning, for he doesn't so much as allude to it...

...Writing out of a deep depression following the untimely death of his second wife Clarence makes a naked appeal for solace: "Your father has had a blow that has staggered him, and I shall be glad to have you put in some time with me, for I am lonesome enough even under conditions which could not be bettered, or with friends who help all they can...

...Tate was the novelist Caroline Gordon), Crane writes that he can no longer endure life and is thinking of ending it with "powder and bullet...

...And if he should neglect to reserve hotel rooms for her, she tells him...

...Mother: seductive and narcissistic, vaguely arty and vacuous, adoring and demanding, hapless, grasping, hypochondriacal, self-pitying, ineffectual, prone to convenient "nervous" prostrations, a spiteful martyr-eternally dependent, forever a maiden of seventeen...

...Hart (to his mother the middle name, her maiden name, which he adopted at her urging), Harold (to his father, his given name), cut off in decisive ways in puberty, remained cut off in his relations with his parents all his life, truncated- bawling, clamoring to the end for such succor as money can provide...

...He swears never to write or see her again, and he never does...

...Two days later he writes her again: "There isn't much news-only the good news (to me...

...They stink of money and they stink of love gone rotten at the clogged sources of feeling, brackish polluted feeling seeking and never finding the smallest sweet freshet of lifegiving waters...

...Dear Father," Hart replies, "I was very glad to hear from you and it was generous to thus come to my aid...

...They are reconciled after each falling out...

...He was fond of quoting Hubbard to his son: "Sooner or later in your journey through life your affection will be expressed in beefsteak...

...and by suffering his life, at whatever remove, in this immense collection of his letters to his parents (and theirs to him) one earns the right to judge...

...that I've been at work in almost ecstatic mood for the last two days on my Bridge...

...Well, what can one expect of the chocolate king, that candy manufacturer...

...and, inevitably, getting in one another's hair, had reached the boiling-point, on occasion, perhaps for heated words and injured feelings but hardly, one would have supposed, for the final gun...

...We have no record of it, and neither refers to it in subsequent letters...

...V. of Georgia Press, $15 The Letters of Hart Crane and his Family THOMAS S. W. LEWIS, ed...

...Will nobody love her, nobody be glad to see her...

...Why won't he come home and enter the family business...

...These letters are about money and love, about the corruptions of money and love, the monetizing of love and the terrible affective power of money...

...His letters must be augmented by our knowledge of what is excluded from them and its presence presses against, underlies and hovers over the omissions, sanitizing, deceits, concealments and subterfuges which he (and we) always practiced in his letters home...

...but confessed to me late last night that he was a mystic...

...Well, let it be said that if it were not for the emotional turbulences battering his poor heart, he "would be well along in some college taking probably some course of study which would enable me upon leaving to light upon far more readily than otherwise, some decent sort of employment...

...If it hadn't been for you...

...It has been so long since anyone has been glad to see me...

...and as he is "sort of candy-hungry these days," would Father kindly oblige by sending him a "delicious assortment" of Crane's Best...

...When his father berates him severely enough for not getting and keeping a job, Crane sulks, falls silent-or comes back for more money...

...You will surely meet some day...

...Love is a sickness...

...We may imagine the scene and the thick clots of feeling released in her by the now-inescapable knowledge...

...And just as we are softening at the edges he adds, in the same letter, that he is stone-broke as usual and if Father would reach a little deeper into bis pocket it would certainly be appreciated by his devoted son...

...As such, the Correspondence constitutes an important chapter in contemporary literary history and is essential reading for anyone interested in some of its sources...

...He has only fifteen cents in his pocket, he writes her, and "a very empty stomach...

...In rare brief flashes the poet shines through and these are the only exhilarating moments in the endless dross...

...talks incessantly of trivialities and laughs all the time...

...and again to his mother he writes of the enchanting nights and the "distant tink-lings, buoy bells and siren warnings from river craft...

...Indeed, few remain to be written...

...I never felt such range and symphonic power before me-and I'm so happy to have this first burst of substantiation since I had the good luck to be set free to build this structure of my dreams...

...A few months later, in a long anguished, despairing letter to his mother, which is devoted entirely to a detailed description of an unpleasant squabble with the Tates (the then-Mrs...

...Father: the self-made businessman, a candy-manufacturer and hosteler, sermonizing about thrift, hard work, independence, handy with homespun wisdom, bewildered, inadequate, uncomprehending of why any redblooded American boy would want to fool with verses, especially obscure verses that can't possibly turn a dollar, instead of making the world his oyster . . . and yet somehow, improbably, the only sympathetic character in the cast...