A Chance Meeting, page 21
Having Crane in the house was a little like having her own worst nightmare living downstairs playing a Victrola at full volume. She was in nearly the same artistic predicament as he was. She’d been in Mexico for a year, supposedly finishing her novel, without, Crane said unkindly, having written a paragraph of it; she was drinking too much; she’d taken up with a man thirteen years her junior, who her friends mostly agreed was distinguished only by his devotion to her; she went raging around; she was destroying her gifts; she quested for sex and love and was never quite satisfied. She was not as far along as Crane by any means, but it was a similar road.
Crane had the good sense to move out, to a house around the corner, though he still got drunk and climbed from his roof over to hers and slithered down the outside of the house, howling with delight while Porter, terrorized, locked herself in the bathroom. Soon after this he came over in the morning, sober, and invited her and Pressly to dinner. He claimed he spent that afternoon carefully preparing and he was wounded when they didn’t come. He drank a bottle of tequila, made the rounds of the local bars, found his way to Porter’s house in a cab whose fare he refused to pay, and began cursing her and the world. Porter later said Crane’s voice when he was drunk “stunned the ears, and shocked the nerves and caused the heart to contract.” It was after this episode that a letter from Porter and the final break came:
You must either learn to stand on your own feet as a responsible adult, or expect to be treated as a fool. Your emotional hysteria is not impressive, except possibly to those little hangers-on of literature who feel your tantrums are the mark of genius. To me they do not add the least value to your poetry, and take away my last shadow of a wish to ever see you again. . . . Let me alone. This disgusting episode has already gone too far.
Katherine Anne
Fourteen days later, Crane had to leave Mexico very suddenly when he got a telegram announcing his father’s death. He was gone for several months, dealing with details of the estate. Crane was a person who never for a minute stopped hearing his parents’ voices in his head, and his father’s death only made that worse—now there wasn’t even the person himself to struggle against. Crane had always assumed that he’d be able to live on his inheritance, when it came, but the Depression and certain of his father’s business decisions meant that there would be very little. By the time Crane got back to Mexico, he was in even worse shape.
It was now September. Peggy Cowley, in Mexico to get a divorce from Malcolm Cowley, had been staying with Katherine Anne Porter after Crane had left. When he came back to Mexico, Crane and Peggy Cowley became inseparable. She moved out farther into the country; he missed her terribly. He went out to visit her for Christmas, and they began to have an affair. He wanted the relationship to be his salvation, and in fact, in its sway, he managed to write one last good poem, “The Broken Tower,” the title of which probably referred to a private expression of theirs, though some of the evidence disappeared. When Grace Crane was going through her son’s correspondence after his death, she decided, in a final act of censorious control, to burn Peggy Cowley’s letters.
The months with Cowley in Mexico were much like the months before—Crane drank mostly tequila and rum and beer; sometimes he would go parading around in a serape like those worn by indigenous Mexicans, not seeming to understand that this might be offensive. He hoped that “The Broken Tower” would bring him some new recognition and a little money, but the editors to whom he sent the poem didn’t respond. Crane and Cowley made a trip to the town of Puebla and visited two of its 365 churches; they saw a Charlie Chaplin movie in a slum in Mexico City. Someone took a photograph of Crane lying in a deck chair, cradling a kitten on his chest. Crane wrote to a friend that he very much liked 1919 by John Dos Passos, the last book he read.
He began trying to kill himself. On one terrifying occasion, he carried to the kitchen table a treasured portrait of himself painted by the Mexican artist David Siqueiros—a friend of his—and he sliced it apart with his father’s razor, beginning with the portrait’s eyes. After he destroyed the painting, Peggy Cowley said he tried to drink a bottle of iodine and then later that night one of Mercurochrome, which a doctor Cowley found pumped out of him. Attempted suicide was a serious crime in Mexico; it became clear to Cowley and Crane that they should think about going.
His money ran out, his Guggenheim was finished, the world was collapsing around him; he and Cowley decided to go back to New York. Marsden Hartley, who had begun his own Guggenheim fellowship in Mexico, remembered trying to persuade Crane to take the train back, sensing, somehow, that he would be more likely to get home alive, but they booked passage on a ship, the Orizaba. They nearly missed the train to the dock, but they got on board. They stopped in Havana; Crane and Cowley were supposed to meet at a restaurant for lunch; somehow they missed each other; there were anxious recriminations. Back on board, Cowley burned her hand when a book of matches ignited as she was trying to light one of them; Crane found her in the doctor’s office; the doctor finally had Crane thrown out. By evening he was shouting outside her door, that blunt, pounding sound; later some of the ship’s officers took him to his cabin and nailed the door shut. Cowley was relieved.
Around one o’clock that morning, Crane broke out of his cabin, went prowling, probably propositioned a sailor belowdecks, got beaten up and robbed for his trouble, and tried to jump overboard but was wrestled to the ground by a steward and locked in his cabin for the rest of the night. He had breakfast with Cowley in his cabin; he was already drinking. A few hours later, he came to her cabin, with a trench coat over his pajamas. He said, “I’m not going to make it, dear, I’m utterly disgraced.” She told him he’d feel better if he got dressed; he said, “All right, dear,” kissed her good-bye, and closed the door after him. And then he went up on deck, walked to the rail, took off his trench coat, folded it neatly and hung it over the rail, paused for a moment, raised himself on his toes once, and vaulted overboard.
Passengers sounded the alarm, life preservers were thrown, boats were lowered, some people thought they saw a hand or an arm in the water, but after a couple of hours the captain called off the search, and the Orizaba went on to New York.
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Katherine Anne Porter, having left Germany—where she was going to dinner parties with people like Hermann Goering, a social life she would later frame as information gathering—and gone to Switzerland, wrote, upon hearing the news, a long, unpleasant letter about the effect Crane’s death was having on her. She concluded that it might be just as well, since now people could focus on the writing of “that living corpse, who wrote his poetry almost in spite of himself, and who, if he had stayed in the world, would have come to worse ends.” Porter was never charitable, but she may rightly have expressed the possibility that Crane already had his death inside him by the time he arrived in Mexico.
Katherine Anne Porter went on and on. In 1939, she published Pale Horse, Pale Rider; she worked through World War II and spent thirty years on her novel, won the Pulitzer Prize for her collected stories, and lived to be ninety years old. Never once in all her long life did she say, “I’m not going to make it, dear, I’m utterly disgraced.”
Porter’s account of Hart Crane would have been different if he had gone back to New York and oscillated in and out of sobriety and written a bad book, and then two really great ones. Marianne Moore would have forgiven him his impropriety, and, when Porter was courting Moore’s attention, she would have dropped Crane’s name as that of someone she had known a long time. Crane would have spent a few evenings at Lake George with Stieglitz, watching the clouds at dusk, and he would have had the chance to see Modern Times and The Great Dictator. He would have attempted to come to terms with World War II, and if he’d defended his political friends against the House Un-American Activities Committee or, also possible, become vehemently anti-Red, then there would have been new allegiances or battles with Porter. His life would have intersected with hers at various points, but his death was for her the thing to be repudiated, the loss of self against which she spent her whole life steeled.
Mexico was a kind of catapult. It shot them both forward. She was a spectacular writer of prose, and he was a thwarted genius, and they both had a gift for the mythic that hardened in Mexico. He retreated, forever, into his legend and his death. She became a famous southern lady and refused to look back. Perhaps he had as much disdain for her choice as she did for his.
23. ELIZABETH BISHOP AND MARIANNE MOORE
ELIZABETH Bishop was quite sure she was going to be late. She fidgeted on the train in from Vassar, took a book from her handbag, tried for a few minutes to read, and replaced it. She pulled out the notebook in which she had written her questions, a notebook she would keep all her life; she added to the list of things she might mention “Book on Tattoo” and underlined the name of one of her favorite poets, “Hopkins.” At last, she gave up and stared out the window. The landscape seemed a little ambiguous; whether the trees were encouraging or daunting she couldn’t quite tell. As the train pulled in, she ran her fingers through her bushy hair, which a friend had recently described as looking “like something to pack china in,” and pulled her hat down upon it. She took up her gloves and her bag and walked out into Grand Central Terminal. It was three blocks from the station to the public library. As she passed a corner tobacconist, she was relieved to see from its clock that she was unusually, surprisingly, on time. She made her way between the great marble lions, up the rest of the stairs, through the heavy doors, and along the sweeping staircase, until at last she arrived at the right-hand bench outside the main reading room, and there, wearing a white shirt and a tie—“vaguely Bryn Mawr 1909,” as Bishop recalled—was Marianne Moore.
The meeting had been arranged by Fannie Borden, niece of the infamous Lizzie Borden. Fannie Borden was the librarian at Vassar and had known the whole Moore family a long time. When, having read every poem by Marianne Moore that she could track down, Elizabeth Bishop had asked at the college library how she might get a copy of Moore’s book Observations, the librarian had surprised her by having one, knowing Moore, and offering to arrange a meeting. Bishop was glad that she hadn’t realized at the time that Borden had sent Moore a number of young women to whom Moore had decidedly not taken a fancy. Moore must, however, have had an intimation that Bishop would be different than these others, or she would have suggested her other favorite meeting place, the information booth at Grand Central Terminal, where conversation was nearly impossible, and one could always make a quick getaway.
Marianne Moore began to talk. “It seems to me,” Bishop wrote in her essay on Moore, “Efforts of Affection,” “that Marianne talked to me steadily for the next thirty-five years, but of course that is nonsensical. I was living far from New York many of those years and saw her at long intervals. She must have been one of the world’s greatest talkers: entertaining, enlightening, fascinating, and memorable; her talk, like her poetry, was quite different from anyone else’s in the world.” Bishop was so absorbed by Moore’s conversation that, when she went back to write about this first meeting, she couldn’t remember if she’d told Moore about seeing Four Saints in Three Acts two weeks before, or what she’d said about Hopkins or whether she’d mentioned tattoos then or later; she wished she’d kept a diary.
That same spring, of 1934, Marianne Moore was at work on her essay “Henry James as a Characteristic American.” Moore might have told Bishop the story she had liked so much in James’s memoir and retold in her essay, the story of Thackeray and the small Henry James, the coat with too many buttons, and his feeling “somehow queer,” a feeling of being an outsider with which Moore seems to have identified. Her close friends T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens, her correspondents for decades, were staking out various American traditions of their own. Moore—who did not follow William James in thinking examples better than descriptions—cared to have Henry James for her American project. Elizabeth Bishop spent her early childhood in Canada and was often away from the United States; she was less invested in the difficulties of defining herself as an American. Bishop, though, was interested in what she called “poetic psychology,” particularly the innovations of Hopkins, who she felt had succeeded in the project outlined by the scholar M. W. Croll of capturing in poetry “not a thought, but a mind thinking.” In her work toward this end, Bishop, too, claimed an inheritance from Henry James. That day, on the bench at the public library, Bishop talked a little bit herself. At the end of the meeting, she was visited by an inspiration and asked Moore if she’d like to go to the circus, not knowing that Marianne Moore never missed the circus.
Her friends thought Bishop’s account of this second meeting hilarious. Moore arrived with two large paper bags containing brown bread to feed the elephants; they were fond of brown bread, she explained. (Bishop later wondered if they might not have liked white bread just as much, and if “Marianne had been thinking of their health.”) Moore had a prized elephant-hair bracelet that her brother had given her; a hair had fallen out. Her plan was that Bishop would give some of the bread to the adult elephants, thereby creating a distraction, while Moore went to feed the babies and got them to bend over so that she could cut a few hairs off their heads. Bishop drew the attention of the guard with her offering for the larger elephants—they did turn out to like brown bread very much—and while they were all trumpeting and waving their trunks and fighting and beating one another away, Moore sawed away at the hairs on the babies’ heads, returning victorious with enough to mend her bracelet.
Shortly after this, Bishop wrote to a friend describing Miss Moore. (They called each other “Miss Moore” and “Miss Bishop” for another two years.) “I’ve seen her only twice and I think I have enough anecdotes to meditate on for years.” Poetry was from the beginning central to the relationship. “Why,” Bishop later wrote of the early revelations of Moore’s work, “had no one ever written about things in this clear and dazzling way before?” For her part, Moore was writing to her brother that she and her mother liked “Miss Bishop better than any of our friends—of the friends we have adopted, & are not beating off. But my whole feeling of enthusiasm is tempered by her tendency to be late.” Marianne Moore was never late; she wore two watches to be sure.
Moore lived with her mother, the redoubtable and devout Mrs. Moore, at 260 Cumberland Street in Brooklyn, and Bishop soon began taking the subway out to visit them together. Bishop was very often friends with women and their mothers. She had grown up motherless; her own mother had been institutionalized when Bishop was five, and Bishop had never seen her again. Mrs. Bishop died in May of 1934, two months after Miss Bishop met Miss Moore.
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In high school and college, her friends called her “Bishop” and “the Bishop,” and, when Marianne Moore proposed that they switch to their given names, Bishop was relieved to finally have someone calling her Elizabeth. She was pleased by the way Moore did it, too: “She came down very hard on the second syllable, Elizabeth. I liked this, especially as an exclamation, when she was pretending to be shocked by something I had said.” Bishop said Moore and her mother were “what some people might call ‘prudish’; it would be kinder to say ‘overfastidious.’” Bishop had her own sense of privacy and didn’t publish some of her love poems for women during her lifetime, but her poetry had a more robust sensuality.
Marianne Moore was Bishop’s earliest advocate and one of the most staunch, placing nearly all of her early poems for publication in magazines and writing an introduction for her work, one of remarkable understanding, that appeared with Bishop’s poems in an anthology of work by younger poets. In this introduction, Moore praised Bishop for her “methodically oblique, intent way of working,” and she stated the principles she could sense coming in Bishop’s poems, though they weren’t yet visible to too many other readers: “One would rather disguise than travesty emotion; give away a nice thing than sell it; dismember a garment of rich aesthetic construction than degrade it to the utilitarian offices of the boneyard. One notices the deferences and vigilances in Miss Bishop’s writing, and the debt to Donne and to Gerard Hopkins.”
Elizabeth Bishop had what Sarah Orne Jewett had called “a wide outlook on the world.” She was unusual among her friends in writing poetry that attended, in its method of conveying landscape, animals, and travel, to the work of British poets and naturalists, and she had, also, a vivid sense of French surrealism and a growing interest in the writing of Latin America. In the years after she first moved to New York, Bishop used to go to the public library every day, past the lions and the bench at which she’d first met Marianne Moore, and through to the reading room, where she sat for hours upon hours. Reading was virtue and solace for Elizabeth Bishop; when she was reading, she knew she was doing her job. She went out to concerts with friends; she came to know Billie Holiday casually; she went one day to hear Gertrude Stein deliver her lecture on “Portraits I have Written and What I think of Repetition, Whether it Exists or No,” but mostly she read. Sitting at the library, she went through all the late novels of Henry James, and she read Charles Darwin, George Herbert, John Donne, and Sigmund Freud. She read herself into an education, and in this, too, she had a model in Marianne Moore.
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After they had been friends for six years, Bishop sent Moore a new poem, “Roosters”—“At four o’clock / in the gun-metal blue dark / we hear the first crow of the first cock.” Bishop described her roosters “marking out maps like Rand McNallys” with: “glass-headed pins, / oil-golds and copper greens, / anthracite blues, alizarins.” Marianne Moore and her mother were so upset by “Roosters” that they stayed up until three o’clock in the morning rewriting it, taking out everything that smacked of vulgarity, particularly a most objectionable reference to a “water-closet.” Bishop kept the poem as she had written it, but she and Moore remained close friends—testament to how loyal and sure they both were. They shared a quality a little different than taste or erudition, something that was not quite tenacity or confidence. Despite many downcast moments, terrible anxieties, protracted illness, and, in Bishop’s case, serious trouble with alcohol, each woman knew what she was looking for.
