Modernist literature is anti-modern society. Most poetry and major novelists of the 20th century inveigh against the machine age, the superficiality of popular entertainment, the corruption of commercialism and urban manners. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land is typical, along with Yeats' nostalgia for Byzantium and Irish myth, Ezra Pound's fulminations, Allen Ginsberg's Howl. Kafka's modernity is a bureaucratic horror; Hemingway's a code of stoic disillusionment; Dos Passos a panoramic indictment. Proust is a memorial for the passing away of elegance; Evelyn Waugh's hilarious satire hits the same target. The magic of the past would be the plumb line of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Against this cohabitation of stylistic innovation and anti-modern disgust, Joyce's Ulysses stands out as celebration. Dublin is ennobled by its resonances of mythic voyaging. This most astounding outpouring of modernist style asserts that humanity is everywhere and fundamentally worthy.
This same claim is put forward even more explicitly by Hart Crane. He spent most of the 1920s composing a long poem to the Brooklyn Bridge over the East River to Manhattan, at its time considered an engineering masterpiece. In 1929, he wrote: "The function of poetry in a Machine age is identical to its function in any other age, and its capacities for presenting the most unique synthesis of human values remain essentially immune from any of the so-called inroads of science... For unless poetry can absorb the machine, i.e., acclimatize it as naturally and casually as trees, cattle, galleons, castles and all other human associations of the past, then poetry has failed of its full contemporary function... It demands, along with the traditional qualifications of the poet, an extraordinary capacity for surrender, at least temporarily, to the sensations of urban life."
The Bridge is symbol and gateway to world history. America is a privileged site for tracing the resonances of sea voyages and prairies, red Indians and white intruders, an archeology of the land and its peoples now mounting with skyscrapers. The millenia of religion are not dead, but echoed in Crane's anachronistic refrains: the very first section after introducing the "Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge" is titled "Ave Maria" -- a prayer uttered by Christopher Columbus as he awaits a tomorrow landing, counting signs "the jellied weeds that drag the shore."
Repeatedly throughout the poem Crane lapses into the language of the King James Bible, "and saw thee dive to kiss the destiny..." He addresses the bridge: "Of stars Thou art the stitch and stallion glow/ And like an organ, Thou, with sound of doom--" But this is hardly the poetic archaizing one finds in Keats. Crane is full of colloquialisms, heard speech of the streets: "if/ your don't like my gate why did you/ swing on it, why didja/ swing on it/ anyhow--"
In a section called Van Winkle we get:
"And Rip Van Winkle bowing by the way,--
'Is this Sleepy Hollow, friend? ...
And Rip forgot his office hours,
and he forgot his pay;
Van Winkle sweeps a tenement
way down on Avenue A--
Crane's poem is a flowing blend, a deliberate interlarding of [brackets] and italics and ALL CAPITALS and section-introductory quotations:
The seas all crossed,
weathered the cape, the voyage done...
WALT WHITMAN
Does it work? You have to read several pages out loud to find out. Hart Crane was an extremely deliberate poet, spending six years between 1924 and 1930 on this 60-page poem sequence. Every word, every placement on the page has been weighed and calculated, read aloud, chanted. His audiences were the avant-garde writers of New York and their rural hangouts, among whom his declamatory style was their principal entertainment, its rhythms infectuous-- until Hart got too drunk, started smashing up furniture, and eventually slunk away for solitary walks in the dark.
Crane is hard to quote, hard to excerpt, because every line, almost every phrase is quotable. In parts of The Bridge, the significant words are so packed in that you don't know where you could pull it apart. But further on, there are narrative sections, soliloquies, walk-throughs at more normal pace -- it is, after all, a poem of the ordinary massed into an epic.
For all the density of verbal detail, the poem is architecture, visible enough in its numbered table of contents. At first we meet the bridge (as Crane saw it from his apartment on the river): "And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced..." Then we meet Columbus, Powhatan's daughter Pocahontas, Rip Van Winkle awakening from a dream of Pizarro and Cortez and Captain John Smith, with further vistas of rivers, dance, love songs and Quaker women. Rounding off the poem are a section "The Tunnel", a walk through the street sounds of Manhattan, down into a subway, and coming up back in Brooklyn, having traced the path of the bridge beneath the river bed. And finally, a closing section called "Atlantis"-- the mythical civilization sunk in the Atlantic-- but here, finally, a description of what the Brooklyn Bridge looks like. In fact, Crane wrote the first section on the bridge, and the "Atlantis" conclusion, earliest in his composing; mapped out what would be fitted into this framework, and spent years fitting it.
"Through the bound cable strands, the arching path
Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings,--
Taut miles of shuttling moonlight syncopate
The whispered rush, telepathy of wires...
And through that cordage, threading with its call
One arc synoptic of all tides below--
Their labyrinthine mouths of history
Pouring reply as though all ships at sea
Complighted in one vibrant breath made cry--"
The tension cables of the suspension bridge are stroked like a harp, a Pythagorean music, a sail for all the voyages from Argonauts and Odyssey to the Cathay trade, the Cutty Sark, the South Seas beach-comber-- always the same myth, triumphantly united with today's Machine.
The core of the book is the section halfway through, "Cape Hatteras." Of course, the place where the Wright brothers first conquered the air, depicted under the sign of Walt Whitman--- that other good-hearted extoller of contemporary life. And not without trepidation; the aerial aces of World War I evoke ever-present death:
"-- pilot, hear!
Thine eyes bicarbonated white by speed, O Skygak, see
How from thy path...
Thou sowest doom thou hast nor time nor change
To reckon-- as thy stilly eyes partake
What alcohol of space... Remember, Falcon-Ace,
Thou hast there in thy wrist a Sanskrit charge
To conjugate infinity's dim marge--
Anew..."
"Our Meistersinger, thou set breath in steel;
And it was thou who on the boldest heel
Stood up and flung the span on even wing
Of that great Bridge, our Myth, whereof I sing!
"Years of the Modern! Propulsions towards what capes?...
And now, as launched in abysmal cupolas of space,
Towards endless terminals, Easters of speeding light--
Vast engines outward veering with seraphic grace
On clarion cyinders pass out of sight
To course that span of consciousness thou'st named
The Open Road..."
"My hand,
in yours,
Walt Whitman--
so--"
Does it still hold? A century later, Hart Crane's prediction, or hope, for the poetry and the significance of the Machine age, seems failed. Our literature is anti-modern modernism, angry satire, or light-weight escape (space age adventure films reiterate the Middle Ages with light sabers and unshaved ruffians filmed in misty Ireland). Poetry has greatly receded from T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas, and Hart Crane is just a name in history books.
And yet, has it all been downhill? Surely not, in this Half-Century of Women, of all manner of liberations. And banal and ordinary and annoying as are airlines, you can open your window shade over the Southwest desert, and see a Salvador Dali landscape of cloud shadows on the painted geology. Hart Crane's paean to the Wright Brothers still rings true, if you look for it.
And can his hopeful lines encompass our future, when Machine threatens brain and human empathy?
Can we have another Joyce, another Whitman, another Hart Crane?
