The associations of Hart Crane with American drama deserve attention. Along with Emily Dickinson and D. H. Lawrence, Crane  was one of the formative influences on the sensibility of Tennessee Williams, who is said to have stolen a copy of Crane’s first book, White Buildings, from a university library, had it bound in white leather, and carried it with him religiously for many years (Leverich 156).¹ Certainly, Crane has been the stuff of legends since his suicide in 1932, when he jumped from the Orizaba, returning to the United States after his Guggenheim in Mexico. He was almost thirty-three. He has been variously perceived as the most gifted poet of his generation, an obscurely profound symbolist, a midwestern Rimbaud; sometimes as a poetic might-have-been, whose major opus, The Bridge, failed at everything except occasional lyric brilliance; and sometimes as a negative moral example whose Romantic fascination lingers in the inevitable way his aestheticism and willful self-indulgences of homosexuality and alcoholism combined to destroy him. “Let my lusts be my ruin, then, since all else is a fake and a mockery” (Crane, Letters 250). Much that is poetic in Williams derives from Crane, such as his paradoxical spiritual intuitions, whether ecstatic or becalmed, of what the body longs and grieves for, and his grasp of love and loneliness.

But Hart Crane’s connection to American drama really begins with Eugene O’Neill, a connection worth exploring not only for its historical interest, but also for the light this history casts on both writers and on much twentieth­century literature. Crane and O’Neill have weathered critical storms. Their endurance has helped define literary modernism in this century. Parallels and affinities therefore help to clarify in retrospect what has been at stake on the literary battleground, particularly regarding a kind of deep poetic realism or mystical realism, if you will, that we associate with Crane, O’Neill, Williams and numerous other Romantic Modernists. The primal violence and waste we have come to see as virtually definitive of the twentieth century emerges with a special poignancy seen against the background of this tradition.

First, a brief sketch of the Crane-O’Neill relationship. Sue Jenkins and James Light, a director at the Provincetown Players, introduced Crane to O’Neill in 1923 (Unterecker 327). O’Neill read Crane’s poems and invited him to the home he shared with Agnes Boulton in Ridgefield, Connecticut, for weekend visits, where a good deal of hard cider was drunk, and where O’Neill once put Crane up for a week when he was between advertising jobs— Crane was a copywriter. Associates Crane and O’Neill had in common at this time included Kenneth Burke, E. E. Cummings, Allen Tate, Jean Toomer, Malcolm Cowley, Gorham Munson, and Waldo Frank. There were also two Danish brothers, Emil and Ivan Opfer, whom Eleanor Fitzgerald, business manager for the Provincetown Players, employed from time to time. Emil Opfer, a merchant seaman and, incidentally, a friend of tenor Lauritz Melchior, was Crane’s lover for whom he wrote the famous “Voyages” sequence.

However, the central event of the Crane-O’Neill friendship occurred when Crane was trying to find a publisher for White Buildings. Horace Liveright, of Boni and Liveright, agreed in 1926 to publish the volume if O’Neill, a well-known figure by that time, would agree to write an introduction. O’Neill agreed reluctantly, feeling underqualified as a critic of modern poetry. Apparently, Crane composed his excellent manifesto, “General Aims and Theories,” as an aid for O’Neill. And Allen Tate sent O’Neill a model essay on Crane’s poetry, which Tate offered to allow O’Neill simply to sign as his own. O’Neill did compose an introduction which contains much of Tate’s material but chose not to publish it.

O’Neill wrote to Crane and to Liveright, apologizing for his inadequacies as a critic and agreeing to write a personal endorsement for the book jacket, which reads the same on the back cover of today’s paperback edition as it did in 1926: “Hart Crane’s poems are profound and deep-seeking. In them he reveals, with a new insight and unique power, the mystic undertones of beauty which move words to express vision.” Allen Tate did the honors with an introduction for Crane’s book, also still in print. The whole story of O’Neill’s role in getting Crane into print is told in meticulous detail by Marc Simon in a 1991 volume of the Eugene O ’Neill Review, along with a clear text of O’Neill’s unpublished introduction and a transcription of the original document.

O’Neill’s description of Crane’s poetry could as well apply, of course, to his own plays. And a comparison of the two artists reveals many parallels. Both were alienated as young people from violently troubled homes. Crane was used by both parents as a pawn in vicious marital battles that ended in divorce. Failing to placate one without offending the other, he left his Cleveland home to make his way in New York at the age of seventeen, determined to be a poet. O’Neill spent his youth in Catholic boarding schools, “protected” from the scandal of his mother’s morphine addiction. Both struggled oedipally against their fathers, whom they identified with the American success ethic, a force to be overcome. Crane’s father was a candy manufacturer, the inventor (ironically, in light of Crane’s death) of LifeSavers, to whom Crane once wrote, “Try to imagine working for the pure love of simply making something beautiful—something that maybe can’t be sold or used to help sell anything else, but that is simply a communication between man and man, a bond of understanding and human enlightenment—which is what a real work of art is” (Unterecker 348). And O’Neill’s father represented all that the playwright considered tawdry in the “Broadway Show Shop.”

Both men were mother’s sons. Crane took his mother’s maiden name, “Hart” (with its attendant pun), at her suggestion, and O’Neill called himself “Sea Mother’s Son.” And both were prodigal sons—Crane with his compulsive sexual escapades and O’Neill by virtue of following brother Jamie through the bars and brothels of New York. Both were engaged in the process of destroying and recreating themselves. Both attempted suicide at a young age. Crane succeeded. In 1912, when O’Neill contracted tuberculosis, life gave him a second chance. Literature was for each man his own form of salvation from personal unhappiness buried at a deep level of unconsciousness, from family conflicts that were irresolvable, and from socio-economic or historical patterns embedded in those families—in Crane’s case middle-American bourgeois narcissism and in O’Neill’s Irish-American high-spirited misery.

Both Crane and O’Neill were autodidacts, Crane’s formal education stopping with high school and O’Neill’s after a disastrous freshman year at Princeton. Yet both aggressively pursued their own personal educational goals, Crane through the literary magazines in New York and O’Neill through voracious reading on his own. Both were, to some extent, anti-intellectual in the sense that they sought the company of natural, uneducated men—in both cases, sailors: Crane with his cruising and O’Neill in his voyages, until he bottomed out in Buenos Aires. Both men expressed affection—as D. H. Lawrence did—for what they saw in the working class as childlike acceptance of life and fate. In their introduction to O’Neill’s letters, Travis Bogard and Jackson Bryer put it well: O’Neill “displays little interest in abstract literary theory or in the intellectualized social life of the critical and literary fraternity of his time” (2). Crane and O’Neill were both, in their ways, mavericks.

Their literary practices were intensely private, tending to create a split between inner and outer selves. Crane’s poetry has always seemed hauntingly obscure, but it now seems to have been deliberately puzzling. In his day and right through the 1970s, The Bridge was read as attempting to reaffirm Whitman’s celebration of American democracy, countering the “negativity” of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and incorporating modern technology. But critics had trouble with Crane’s vision of American history: it seemed sketchy and sentimental. They suspected that underneath, all Crane had to offer was rhetoric that reached for modern-sounding verbal special effects (Tate 235). Today, The Bridge has fared better than critics of Crane’s generation. Paul Giles has recently discovered layers of Joycean word play of staggering complexity, which Crane never more than hinted at in his lifetime (Giles 9). “Series on series, infinite,” Christopher Columbus muses as he stares at the ocean waves in “Ave Maria.” Now we can hear the goddess Ceres in those lines and see the American fields of grain. “The loft of vision, palladium helm of stars,” we read in “Atlantis” as a description of the sky. But now we also behold Pallas Athena, the silver metallic element stars resemble, and the “star” performers at the Palladium Theater. In recent readings of Crane’s poetry, the Brooklyn Bridge is sometimes a transcendent power arising from technology, but sometimes equally a deconstructive mockery of economic exploitation: “Prophet’s pledge” may be no more than “profit’s pledge.” The spirit resides in Crane’s vision much more ambiguously than his early critics imagined, whether they were champions or detractors. His private struggles, as man and artist, endured in the ambiguous, manifold ways any life does.

Thomas E. Yingling has developed a queer reading of Crane that critics of the poet’s day could not have imagined. Indeed, Yingling argues persuasively that philosophical condemnations of Crane’s poetry often masked homophobia. Crane does not celebrate a universalized quest for self in The Bridge that is identifiable with nationalism, but a fragmented struggle in which “subjectivity is constructed through loss, displacement, and oppression” (34). The good news is that this kind of messiness, concealment, and loneliness is exactly true to life—everyone’s life in the affirmative vision of Crane’s poetry—until the norms of mendacity gain the upper hand. And so, paradoxically, the homosexual in Crane simultaneously escapes bankrupt institutionalized masculine identities and the demonized status of the other. O’Neill said of The Iceman Cometh, “There are moments in it that suddenly strip the secret soul of man stark naked, not in cruelty or moral superiority, but with an understanding compassion which sees him as a victim of the ironies of life and of himself. Those moments are for me the depth of tragedy, with nothing more that can possibly be said” (413). These words could easily be describing a famous passage like this from “The Broken Tower,” Crane’s last poem:

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.
(Complete Poems 193)

Passages like this in Crane and numerous moments in The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night represent some kind of absolute ground zero of human vulnerability, when individual consciousness falls back on an O’Neillian “hopeless hope,” a paradox of total personal concealment that is at the same time a heart-stopping communication of lyric brilliance. Tennessee Williams would pick up such moments and develop them into scenes in which two strangers help each other make it through the night.

O’Neill was as private an artist as Crane. He wrote in a minuscule script that only Carlotta could decipher. And he was proverbially taciturn, encouraging his critics, like Crane’s, to oversimplify his work—as overly pessimistic or simply as a dramatization of Freud. But after all the experiments with masks, spoken thoughts, split characters, myths, and tragedies, O’Neill came finally, posthumously, in Long Day’s Journey into Night to reveal that all his plays had grown fairly directly in retrospect out of his own private life. Striking this note, he seemed to summarize a century of modern American drama, as if he had written the American play. One’s life is all one has—this is comment enough on the country that had sold its soul and its dreams.

The style of mystical realism Crane and O’Neill were developing was an enterprise for the future. The fact that Crane never explicated the buried puns in his work suggests the possibility that one day his poetry would have a resurrected life. And O’Neill knew the country was not ready for The Iceman Cometh immediately following American victory in World War II, just as he wanted Long Day’s Journey into Night published only after his death. The humbling American experience of Vietnam, the assassination of some of the country’s most idealistic political leaders, the bitter struggles over civil rights, the weakening of the institutions of marriage and family, the pervasive challenge of damage control in the wake of drug and alcohol abuse—so many troubles of the twentieth century have prepared the soil for the seeds of a better understanding of the bitter Romantic ironies of Crane and O’Neill. From today’s standpoint, Crane and O’Neill seem to be expressing the many ways personal suffering goes unacknowledged in a fast-moving world that lacks compassion and comprehension.

What is required to live in such a world was identified in 1817 by another mystical realist, John Keats, as “negative capability”: “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason [. . .]” (Keats 1209). Crane and O’Neill were dedicated to a Keatsian discipline of art, in a way, expressed by Crane’s central symbol, the Brooklyn Bridge, visible as a masterpiece of engineering by John and Washington Roebling, father and son. The Brooklyn Bridge embodied for Crane affirmation, contradiction, and achievement, a suspension bridge expressing what Louis Rukeyser of Wall Street Week used to refer to as “the triumph of hope over experience.” What made suspension bearable for Keats was, of course, beauty, especially in its devastating aspects. Keats continues in the passage quoted above, “with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all considerations.” Many an O’Neill performance has been saluted with the strange praise, “devastating!” What is the balance Crane and O’Neill strike between joy and despair? It is the terrible beauty of pain. As Emily Dickinson said, “I like a look of Agony, / Because I know it’s true—” (110).

The aspect of O’Neill’s drama that most resembles Crane’s poetry is its frank acceptance of pain which is inescapable and unresolved. There is a terrible inevitability about the suffering O’Neill holds up for his audiences to contemplate, just as there is a terrible beauty that crystallizes in the form of his plays. The sailors in his early sea plays are lost and never found. Yank in The Hairy Ape and Brutus in The Emperor Jones experience personal destruction simply as a final crescendo of humiliation and defeat. His strong characters, usually women, are strong because they can acknowledge their pain without consoling illusions. Anna Christie is a burned-out prostitute who is cracking up. Her energy as a character derives from her ability to admit that fact, which her father and future husband deny. Nina Leeds in Strange Interlude gains control of her three men because she can live with the guilt and loss of Gordon Shaw her whole life. That pain never goes away.

The characters in The Iceman Cometh are all sharply visible to us because of a cross each cannot put down. Each character hurts in a particular, unrelieved way. The depth of Jim Tyrone’s suffering is gradually revealed in A Moon for the Misbegotten until he is shattered before our eyes in heart­racking sobs. Josie Hogan’s loneliness, though seemingly less disturbing than Jim’s guilt, never abates. Room 492, the place of existential loneliness in the gritty hotel lobby of Hughie, will always be there for us, always. Perhaps most interesting of O’Neill’s characters is his portrayal of his own mother in the figure of Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night. Her condition worsens throughout the play. It seems at first a normal human expectation for the audience, coming to know and care about each of “the four haunted Tyrones,” to hope that they will find some way to help each other solve their problems. Our dread increases as we gradually realize this is not going to happen. At the end of the play, Mary is worse off than ever. Mothers, in the popular perception, are supposed to care for others and heal their wounds. They are the source of life. She is the source of death. The powerful originality of Long Day’s Journey into Night lies in the fact that the last scene, the last moment of the play, represents a total defeat for everyone.

Crane’s image for pain is the mirror. So is O’Neill’s. In “Legend,” the first poem of White Buildings, the poet looks in a mirror and contemplates all that has been lost and what remains.

LEGEND

As silent as a mirror is believed
Realities plunge in silence by.

I am not ready for repentance
Nor to match regrets. For the moth

Bends no more than the still
Imploring flame. And tremorous
In the white falling flakes
Kisses are, —
The only worth all granting.

It is to be learned—
This cleaving and this burning,
But only by the one who
Spends out himself again.

Twice and twice
(Again the smoking souvenir,
Bleeding eidolon!) and yet again.
Until the bright logic is won
Unwhispering as a mirror
Is believed.

Then drop by caustic drop, a perfect cry
Shall string some constant harmony, —
Relentless caper for all those who step
The legend of their youth into the noon.
(Complete Poems 218)

The past is a legend that endures alongside all the contradictory realities of the present. Innocence and experience co-exist in a painful “cleaving”— meaning both “to split or separate,” as in “to cleave a path through the forest,” and, contradictorily, “to adhere, cling,” as in “to cleave to that which is good.” Like many Crane poems, “Legend” describes a passage through the pain of experience—a repetitive, stoic endurance that finally yields a new, higher innocence, a Hegelian synthesis of innocence and experience perhaps, but not an escape from pain (Combs 44). Crane describes the process of staring down his legend as a “caper,” a criminal escapade, a moment of truth like the shoot-out at high noon in a western movie. One could paraphrase the poem this way: looking in a mirror, one sees a mask, a persona, but one had better find the courage to see it realistically, without self-deception. Tennessee Williams used the last lines of “Legend” as his epigraph for Sweet Bird of Youth. And the poem immediately brings to mind scene 9 of A Streetcar Named Desire, when Mitch, under the influence of Stanley Kowalski, tears the paper lantern off Blanche’s light bulb, forcing her to admit that she is older and more experienced in life than she had led him to believe.

The poem also invites comparison with those scenes in A Touch of the Poet when Con Melody poses before the mirror wearing his military uniform and recites Byron. At the beginning of the play, he is struggling to maintain his legend as soldier and lover in spite of the encroachments of age, economic failure, and drunkenness. By the end, he is striving to erase his image— “bleeding eidolon” by killing his beloved mare, adopting the brogue he had suppressed, and disappearing into his bar to live out the remainder of his life with his down-and-out cronies. In this way he hopes to free his daughter Sara to experience her own youthful legend—that of a Princess born in a castle— and marry the wealthy Simon Harford. Ironically, Sara mourns the loss of her father most just when he has eclipsed his youthful self for her sake.

The pain Crane and O’Neill represent emerges against the background of a modernist interpretation of America. Crane believed that the “world [was moving] in transition from a decayed culture toward a reorganization of human evaluations” (Complete Poems 218). He also felt that in America there were “destined to be discovered certain as yet undefined spiritual quantities, perhaps a new hierarchy of faith not to be developed so completely elsewhere” (219). Enduring the pain of disillusionment for him meant performing a kind of cultural work, building a bridge to some as yet undisclosed future. It was a form of faith. O’Neill believed that America had sold its birthright and was worshipping the golden calf of superficial happiness. For him, as for Flannery O’Connor, unrelieved pain was just about all that could bring modern bourgeois lives back into focus. O’Neill’s bigger than life characters—ordinary modern people with fates like those of Greek tragic heroes—compensate two deadly modern tendencies: the denial of pain and the preference for unreality over reality. It is fascinating how often one hears from students reading O’Neill for the first time that his characters live in illusions and would be better off accepting “reality.” Though what realities in an O’Neill drama anyone would wish to accept is a mystery to me.

Crane is a great poet of the sea, as is O’Neill in his way. This stanza from the “Voyages” sequence contains an example of what Crane meant by the “logic of metaphor.” “Adagios of islands” expresses the feeling of being in a boat and proceeding slowly through a series of islands (Complete Poems 221). Crane described this phrase as a “bit of relativity.”

And onward, as bells off San Salvador
Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,—
Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.
(Complete Poems 36)

The sea—and all its liquid avatars in Crane and O’Neill, including alcohol— is the magic in the poetry and plays: enchantment, transformation, Eros, the unconscious, love and death. But developing the dark theme of pain, we must also say it is the place of no return. “Voyages,” like Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking,” tells a story of love and loss, the dawning awareness of mortality, and the birth of art. In O’Neill’s plays, when the sea is invoked, or its presence felt, an encounter with finality is occurring. The monologues heard in the Bottom of the Sea Rathskeller of The Iceman Cometh, Edmund’s mystical experiences at sea recalled in Long Day’s Journey into Night, and the persistent foghorn that haunts that play are islands of consciousness. They are sobering, arresting moments, like those islands in the Crane poem, when something is passing and passing away, bringing together forever the observer and the observed. What witnesses to this passing is the work of art, which glimpses eternity.

The finality Crane and O’Neill conjure in their works may feel like an Orphic mystery, but it is really as mundane as it is undeniably “real.” After Crane’s death, the father he could never make enough money to impress lost his candy business in the Great Depression. Crane’s proud mother ended her life scrubbing floors. O’Neill’s father, after playing the Count of Monte Cristo three thousand times, died with Eugene at his bedside (O’Neill 76). The more industrial-technological advancements and their ambiguous economic opportunities play with people’s minds, the more irrepressibly will Romantic irony, which Georg Lukács calls “tragicomic defiance,” flicker in some form. “The great thing is to Live and Not Hate,” Crane said (Unterecker 354). Surely O’Neill saw beauty flickering and shining in the poems of this kindred spirit. And that is why we have the story of an introduction that never quite happened.