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The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane

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In a short, wild, and mostly unhappy life, Harold Hart Crane (1899-1932) became -- Hart Crane -- a major figure in 20th Century American poetry whose reputation has grown with time. His life became the stuff of legend. Hart Crane left an unhappy home at the age of 17 to live in New York City and follow his dream to become a poet. Without any formal education -- he did not finish high school -- he used his inborn gifts and wide reading to quickly become important to New York's literary culture and community. His first book, White Buildings, is a collection of short, difficult imagistic poetry. His second book, The Bridge, is a lengthy poem offering a mystic, highly personal account of America, its past and its future, using the Brooklyn Bridge is its chief symbol.

Crane's life was one of excess. From late adolesence, Crane drank heavily. He spent a great deal of time in underworld sex picking up sailors in the harbors of New York, all the while trying to conceal his sexual identity from his parents. Towards the end of his life, his behavior grew increasingly violent and self-destructive. He was jailed on several occasions in New York, Paris, and Mexico. Near the end, he did have what seems to be his only heterosexual relationship with Peggy Cowley, the divorced wife of the critic and publisher, Malcolm Cowley. Crane committed suicide when he returned with Peggy Cowley from Mexico in 1932 by jumping off the deck of a ship. He was all of 32.

Published in 1999, Mariani's biography commenmorates the Centennial of Crane's birth. It gives a good detailed account Crane's life. The poetic focus of the book is The Bridge. (some critics see White Buildings as the stronger, more representative part of Crane's work.) Mariani shows how Crane conceived the idea of his long poem and how he worked on it fitfully over many years. He also shows the difficulty Crane had in completing the work at all -- given his alcoholism. sexual promiscuity, difficulty in supporting himself, and bad relationship with his separated parents. But complete the work Crane did. It presents a mythic, multi-formed vision of the United States stretching from the Indians to our day of technology. There is much to be gained from this poem. I have loved it for many years and Mariani's discussion of the poem and its lenghty creation is illuminating.

Crane was a romantic in his life and art. Frequently, Mariani refers to him as the "last romantic", but this is an overstatement. I was reminded both by Crane's dissolute life and by his work of the beats -- particularly of Kerouac -- and the vision of America that they tried to articulate. With a Whitman-type vision of a mystical America encompassing all, the beats share and expand upon the romanticism of Hart Crane.

Mariani's book covers well Crane's tortured relationship with his parents. It includes great discussions of literary New York City and of Crane's friends. It shows well how Crane was captivated by New York. We see Crane going back and forth between Clevland, New York, Paris, Mexico and Hollywood in a short overreaching life. But most importantly, we see the creation and legacy of a poet. Mariani does well in describing the poems and in reading these difficult texts in conjunction with the poet's life and thought.

Crane's literary output was not extensive. Several of his poems are part of the treasures of American literature. These poems include, for me, "Voyages" (a six-part love poem from the White Buildings collection), "At Melville's Tomb" and other lyrics from White Buildings, The Broken Tower, Crane's final poem, and, of course The Bridge.

Mariani gives a good account of Crane. As with any biography of this type it is not definitive. I hope it will encourage the reader to explore and reflect upon Crane's poetry and achievement.

This is an extremely readable and enlightening bio of one of our greatest poets. The book falters slightly at the end, failing to surpass Unterecker's description of the last days in Mexico. There are also patches of purple prose and an apparent tendency to play fast and loose with the facts. Mr. Mariani makes many minor errors (e.g. Waldo Frank's City Block is a novel; H. P. Lovecraft was from Providence RI and the quotes are from his letters; Aaron Copeland was not present at the Greenwich Village party at which Crane read; etc.). He appears to have embellished, as well, as when he "quotes" Samuel Loveman as he foils a Crane suicide attempt. Mariani has invented the dialog. He also fails to note that the elderly Loveman was notoriously unreliable--the entire episode may be a fabrication. Taken individually, these errors mean little. Taken collectively, they indicate that this book must be approached with caution from a scholarly perspective. But it still makes a great read.

An extremely well written biography of Hart Crane, America's first great modern poet, recreates a fascinating time in the US when the artists of New York lived in cold water flats and drank prohibition liquor (Crane seems to have drank the most). The author deals with Crane's homosexuality as an integral part of his art (as it should be) which apparently has not been the case up until now. My only complaint is that there is too much made up dialogue between Crane and his friends. After awhile you begin to feel you have entered the land of fiction instead of biography. The author presents Crane's horrible relationship with his tyrannical father as the cause of much of his short life's misery.

The Broken Tower: Paul Mariani

I was somewhat surprised to read that actor James Franco's upcoming new movie is based on Professor Paul Mariani's biography of Hart Crane, The Broken Tower. I wondered why Franco would want to play the role of a poet most readers of poetry find far too opaque even to attempt to decode; his masterpiece, The Bridge, is a poem that for most of us needs to be read and studied with a learned guide, one like Mariani. I had read Mariani's biography of Crane when it was first published in 1999. It was not the first of Mariani's biographies I'd read: I read his definitive biography of William Carlos Williams, a masterpiece of research; his biography of Robert Lowell as well as his biography of John Berryman. I knew he was without doubt America's finest biographer of poets, as well as a fine poet himself. I also knew him to be a dazzling teacher, having studied with him one summer, and finally I knew him to be one of our finest critics of poetry, the equal of Dr. Helen Vendler with whom I also studied.
And now out of nowhere, his biography of Hart Crane has now been made into a movie staring one of Hollywood's hottest young actors, who, by the way, is seeking a doctorate in English literature. So with my interest piqued, I decided to reread Mariani's The Broken Tower. I noticed other reviewers have taken Mariani to task for some minor errors, about which I could care less. Few books enter the world without mistakes. His are not major. What is major is his knowledge and appreciation of the life of a complicated, brilliant poet who was also an alcoholic and a homosexual. Not once in the whole biography is Mariani judgmental about either issue. He treats Crane as he would any other man, his drinking and sexuality not condemned, not even a smidgen of criticism, this from a Catholic writer who also teaches at a Catholic college. For such objectivity I must applaud Mariani--not all biographers are objective!
I cannot help comparing Mariani with Helen Vendler. She is a brilliant critic but her approach to poetry is quite different from Mariani's. She cuts open a poem with the precision of a surgeon whereas Mariani employs his critical skills as a stethoscope, listening for the heartbeat of a poem. And this is splendidly apparent in The Broken Tower: he not only admires Crane's poetry but he also loves it, and he is not afraid to wear his own heart on his sleeve. And as a reader, I too, on my second reading, have now come to admire Crane. Because of Mariani's sensitivity to Crane's difficult, tortured life and his illuminating exegesis of his poetry, especially that of the very difficult The Bridge (meant to be a "mystical synthesis of America"), I want again to return to Crane, to give him another read because I never really won an understanding of his verse. It is difficult verse, but Mariani has proven to me, at least, that Crane is indeed one of our greatest poets, and we Americans should value him. There was a time in our history when we did not value Walt Whitman, but matters in that regard have suffered a tremendous sea change, and Crane is the true heir of Whitman, so I must take up the challenge to read him.
Finally, I now understand why Franco wants to act the role of Crane. Mariani captures the poet's dramatic, turbulent life, his alcoholic binges, his Dionysian parties, his winning charm and good looks, his conflicted relationship with his parents, his many love affairs and liaisons, his friendships with some of our finest artists, including Eugene O'Neill, Allen Tate and the photographer Stieglitz, and many others. And above all, he captures his devotion to his art: for Crane, life's meaning was to be discovered in poetry, and like a devout priest, he dedicated his life to his "divinity": the poem.
To return briefly to the issue of Crane's homosexuality. Mariani so sensitively and non-judgmentally addresses it, that it makes me wonder why he did not do the same with his last biography, of Gerard Manley Hopkins, in which he pretty much ignores the priest/poet's homosexuality. I wish he hadn't. His is still a fine biography, but it does not address the whole man, which is what he accomplishes with Crane in The Broken Tower, a biography I feel readers will find fascinating. Mariani knows how to make a poet and his verse come alive--
Robert Waldron, author of The Secret Dublin Diary of Gerard Manley Hopkins

When Mariani gets deep into discussion of particular poems, his language often becomes so compressed and allusive that it reads like a diary of Mariani's own history with Crane's poetry. And like many diaries, it is simply not understandable to an outsider.

I expect that Mariani does not want to reduce the richness and complexity of Crane's work, and this is admirable. I also think that perhaps he expects his readers to have read at least one of the earlier biographies of Crane. And perhaps an English Ph.D. would follow more of Mariani's un-explicated allusions than I did (though I have done some graduate work in English). But I was often frustrated by this book, because while Mariani clearly knows a great deal about Crane's work and its literary and biographical contexts, he often fails to explain what he knows in a way that can be understood.

I had read the author's biography of John Berryman and enjoyed it, although I never could find the house Berryman was to have lived in when he taught at the University of Cincinnati. This biography was also very enjoyable and despite Crane's alcoholic behavior and excuse-making I was able to feel sorry for him. But there were a few "facts" reported that can't be right - H.P. Lovecraft a Cleveland native! And Harry Crosby was 7 years younger than his wife, not older. Crosby was in his early 30's when he died, he wasn't 40 years old when he met Crane. Minor, I know but they cause me to wonder - is anything else wrong?

I bought this book because I was having difficulty with understanding some of the passages in "The Bridge". Also, I wanted to know more about Hart Crane himself. Wow! I got a full plate with this biography by Paul Mariani. I ran the gamut of emotions reading this honest, solidly researched biography. The author offers his penetrating insights into Hart Crane as a poet and as a man. Occassionally Mariani's language gets flowery when discussing Crane and his considerable impact on poetry. That is easy to do considering the subject and his truly romantic view of his craft and the world. A brilliant job by Paul Mariani!

I arrived at Mariani's 1999 biography after first revisiting his subject's poetry in THE COMPLETE POEMS OF HART CRANE (2000). As a literature student in college, I sometimes confused Hart Crane (1899-1932) with Stephen Crane (1871-1900), the author of THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE (1895). After reading Mariani's memorable biography, however, I doubt that I'll ever confuse the Cranes again.

Crane's life, Mariani observes, is "the stuff of myth" (p. 424). Crane lived in a "broken world," and was haunted with demons throughout his short life. He was the child of a troubled marriage, and spent "twenty-five years . . . quibbling" with his parents incessantly (p. 324), before being rejected by his "hysterical" and "nagging" mother (p. 301). Along the way to his rise as a poet in his twenties, Crane was a "slave" to one miserable job after the next (p. 67), and a voracious reader (p. 62). Mariani's book follows Crane, struggling with his writing, and "living the life of the roaring boy, drinking nightly and cruising the Brooklyn and Hoboken docks after sailors, only to jump from a ship at the age of thirty-two" (p. 424).

Eugene O'Neill, E. E. Cummings, Charlie Chaplin, Garcia Lorca, and William Carlos Williams make appearances in Crane's biography, and there are "shadows," too, in the "broken tower" of his life--Blake, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Hopkins, and "Brother Whitman."

Crane's poetry is not easy, but worth the effort, and this fascinating examination of Crane's writing in the context of his troubled life is revealing.

G. Merritt

Born in Ohio, 100 years ago..died same day as E Hemingway.This bio is most significant treatment ever published. We have a 2 day observance in Pittsburgh in July at Andy Warhol Theatre/museum & hope author is avaiable--to sign his book there