Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane'

By Collister Hutchison

It is sometimes difficult when writing about a biography to concentrate objectively on the book itself, resisting involvement in the life and work under study. Yet perhaps the highest compliment one can pay the biographer's patient and precise exploration is to be drawn into it completely enough to understand all life better.

Again and again while reading Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane, by John Unterecker (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; $15), I found a painting of water lilies by Claude Monet coming to mind, or rather a heightened appreciation of what the painter did with the lilies to waken thoughts of the darkness on which all beauty floats, the tangle of stems rooted in slimy mud below, uneasily acknowledged parallels. The book's title helps. Like the titles "Ulysses,' "Everyman, " "Pilgrim's Progress,' it gives a hint of where the book will lead, what the author had in mind.

THE MANY students and young writers drawn to Hart Crane both before and

of 10 years have helped Unterecker bring alive again the poet buried in the myth almost 40 years ago.

He follows sympathetically the small-town boy always trying to escape from his own limitations, venturing down increasingly dangerous pathways where his arrogant and bitter scorn of respectability betrayed the reality of the bond with it. "The Bridge" is significantly prefaced by Satan's answer to Jehovah's "Whence comest thou?" in the first chapter of the Book of Job: “From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.”

All boys, however, head home at last and Crane in his wanderings tried over and over to find an abiding place where he could settle down and write. In these pages John Unterecker has given him the one he could never provide for himself where, let us hope, the man and his problems at rest, readers will at last turn to his poetry.

MONET and Unterecker would have failed both their work and its purpose if we had been left only with thoughts of tangled roots and mud. Like all artists worth the name they were celebrating beauty. Crane was celebrating beau, ty. His bills, brawls and birthdues, like the Person from Porlock who came on business and interrupted Coleridge's poetry were incidental to the joy and sureness of his gift. Robinson Jeffers says in "Second Best":

The pallid pursuit of the world's beauty on paper Unless a tall angel requires it, is a pitiful pastime.

Tall Angel and Person from Porlock. Establishing an equilibrium between the claims of the two is the struggle whose, blessing is to be worth it. In varying ways and varying degrees it is a universal conflict bearing witness to the "sundered parenthood" of mankind. That is why in John Unterecker's patient and perceptive study of Hart Crane we learn something about all lives, even a bit about our

own.

after his death, often for the

wrong reasons, are middle-

aged citizens today with

Hart Crane

their early enthusiasms and allegiances probably put aside. John Unterecker's interest was different and his searching study is different.

He alone found a source of Crane's difficulties in the small-town traditions born in the marrow of his bones. (The Cleveland the poet knew was little less provincial than the Garrettsville where he was born.) Respectability and paying one's way were taken for granted. If you borrowed a cup of sugar you paid back two. The small-town boy in Crane was always, troubled about his debts. The poet in him knew the greatest debt was to his genius and that the are irreconcilable.

two kinds

HE NEVER doubted his genius. Joyce Cary says, “AH writers have and must have, some picture of the world and of what is right and wrong in that world. And the greatest writers are obsessed with their theme. They're sure they're right and their message would save the world." Unterecker's Voyager has this certainty of power and purpose.

"It is to the pulse of a greater dynamism that my work must resolve. Something terribly fierce and yet gentle," the poet says. In "The Fernery" he calls himself a "nephew to confusions." Not the son of confusions. The poet must. believe that the true parent of mankind is unconfused whether he calls it law, order, beauty or God, and the obsession of the major poet is positive, hopeful, essentially pure.

•

TO UNTERECKER'S everlasting credit, through all the burden of detail demanded by such a study in depth, he addresses himself primarily to the poet's theme, its essential purity and joy. With commendable impatience he writes, "Altogether too much, it seems to me, has been made of the poet's homosexuality." And we know that this is not to be an exposure of the "roaring boy" for exposure's sake, written with a shrewd awareness of human curiosity and a shrewd eye on sales.

This massive, under-keyed, often tedious biography with equal avoidance of halo treatment and moral judgment steadily affirms that it was not because Crane was a homosexual drunkenly cruising waterfront bars but in spite of it that he wrote some poetry of such quality "the world will not willingly let it die."

CONSEQUENTLY, the man who emerges from these 1 pages emerges also from the myth, an ordinary man but with extraordinary dreams and drives. Twenty-four pages of illustrations, many of them previously unpublished and hundreds of newly discovered letters collected over a period