Hart Crane: A Life

Having read Paul Mariani's excellent biography of Hart Crane some years ago, I wasn't sure whether we needed another telling of the life story of the doomed poet whose fondness for alcohol and sailors contributed to his tragic suicide in his early 30s.But Clive Fisher's new biography is superb, and I highly recommend it for anyone who wishes to find out more about this brilliant writer's tragic life.Hart Crane came from a family that gave new meaning to the word "dysfunctional," and the fact that he was homosexual (and self-destructively promiscuous -- "Poor Hart Crane," Ernest Hemingway once said of him, "always trying to pick up the wrong sailor") didn't help matters. He was also one of the worst alcoholics of that notoriously hard-drinking era. It made for a short and unhappy life, but a productive one. Crane wrote some of the most brilliant (and difficult) poetry ever written by an American.Fisher isn't much of a literary critic, and his attempts to explicate such notoriously knotty texts as "The Bridge" are not notably incisive. But when it comes to telling the story of a tawdry but fascinating life, he does a tremendous job. While much of Crane's literary remains were destroyed by his termangent of a mother after his suicide in an attempt to sanitize his reputation, Fisher has found enough to flesh out the picture of an unhappy, self-educated man with a passion for poetry, alcohol and rough trade into an absorbing, if somewhat depressing, narrative. Mariani's is the shorter book of the two, and I'd still recommend it highly, but I think Fisher's is the one to go to if you want to know what this man was all about. The book does have its flaws, though. Fisher mentions Crane's famous Greenwich Village meeting with Charlie Chaplin (the subject of Crane's poem "Chaplinesque"), but seems not to realize that Chaplin described the meeting himself in his "Autobiography" and even quoted the poem in full (Fisher's bibliography doesn't list Chaplin's book). Also, on page 193 Fisher inaccurately refers to Chaplin's film "A Woman of Paris" as "A Woman of Darkness."These minor caveats aside, however, I would recommmend this book to anyone who is curious about the life and work of one of America's finest poets.