The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane

Amazon.com
In addition to several volumes of poetry, Paul Mariani has also written biographies of major 20th-century American poets: William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman. In his fourth biography, he takes on the life of Hart Crane (1899-1932), a contemporary of Williams who held a similarly pivotal role in the development of American literature's avant-garde. "It would be difficult," Mariani suggests, "to find a serious poet or reader of poetry in this country today who has not been touched by something in Hart Crane's music." (However, at the time, many critics--with some of whom he had strained personal relationships--did not evaluate his work so highly, which contributed in part to Crane's dramatic suicidal leap off a ship at sea.) Crane loved New York, moving there from his hometown of Cleveland as soon as he could; even when financial straits forced him to return home to work for his father, the "white buildings" of Manhattan loomed in his imagination. The Broken Tower does a fine job of recreating the passionate energy and vitality of Crane's life. Mariani weaves lines from Crane's letters and poems into his narrative throughout, and while he does not skimp in his accounts of the poet's alcoholism and promiscuous sex life with other men, he treats these matters simply as components of the poet's complex personality.


From Publishers Weekly
The first account of Crane to embrace his homosexuality and to assess its place in his poetry, Mariani's biography illuminates previously shadowy corners of the writer's life. John Unterecker's Voyager appeared 30 years ago, only a few months before the Stonewall protest helped to galvanize a movement that, by now, has done away with the qualifications and apologies so long applied to gay writers and their work. Mariani, who has written lives of John Berryman, Robert Lowell and William Carlos Williams, does not have Unterecker's (or the first Crane biographer Philip Horton's) advantage of having interviewed many who knew Crane. But he compensates by quoting more extensively, and tellingly, from Crane's correspondence, one of the most revealing and insightful of the literary 20th century. Mariani also has a better grasp on Crane's complex relationship with his parents, especially in his sensitive portrayal of Crane's father (the inventor of Life Savers candy), who heretofore has been treated as a stereotypical philistine. Mariani also clears up many misconceptions about Crane's final despairing months in Mexico and his sole tormented heterosexual affair. The one flaw in Mariani's research is that he has not drawn on the existing collections of the papers of Crane's closest friends and associates, such as Waldo Frank, Yvor Winters and Gorham Munson. All these individuals appear here through Crane's eyes. Perhaps Mariani is compensating for his predecessors' propensity to depict Crane through the recollections of others, but a more balanced approach would have strengthened the book. His occasionally florid style notwithstanding, Mariani does the necessary work of throwing sympathetic light on Crane's sexuality, and makes a convincing case for Crane as one of the greatest American poets of the century. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Mariani, a professor at the University of Massachusetts and a poet himself (The Great Wheel, LJ 3/15/96), has authored biographies of Robert Lowell and John Berryman and was nominated for the National Book Award for his work on William Carlos Williams. No stranger to contemporary American poetry and its antecedents, Mariani now turns to the mythic Hart Crane. Using unpublished letters, manuscripts, and photographs, he pieces together the life and passions of this brilliant yet tormented man whose creative genius left us The Bridge and whose influence still reverberates among poets today. In a work that is readable yet scholarly, Mariani, unlike earlier Crane biographers Philip Horton and John Eugene Unterecker, does not dance around Cranes homosexuality and alcoholism but instead places his self-destructive lifestyle in the context of his writing and balances it against his self-schooled and highly principled concept of poetry and its place in the quotidian. For larger public and academic libraries.Denise S. Sticha, Seton Hill Coll. Lib., Greensburg, PACopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Langdon Hammer
...there is ... something right about Mariani's approach to the poems.... The results, for all their staginess, are helpful readings of famously difficult texts.


Washington Post Book World
A compelling chronicle of artistic triumph and private ruin. . . . No modern American poet possessed greater genius, nor treated it so badly.


From Booklist
The poetry of Hart Crane (1899^-1932) is one of the glories of modern American literature. His rhapsodic poems resound more than any others with the vast positivity of Leaves of Grass, especially in the book-length The Bridge. Crane's life, on the other hand, was a sink of negativity. The child of unhappily married parents, he learned how to become instantly ill in order to disrupt their bickering and draw attention. After their divorce, he alienated his father--who could but seldom did help his feckless, alcoholic, homosexual son--and, eventually, his mother, too. He wrote his best work in his twenties, interrupted frequently by money worries. After 1926, the bottle and sex with sailors largely took over. Finally, he hurled himself into the Atlantic; no remains were ever found. He left an extensive correspondence, thanks to which and to what his friends wrote about him, Mariani, the acclaimed biographer of William Carlos Williams, can trace his life in considerable detail in a centennial biography that reads with the fluency of a good novel. Ray Olson


From Kirkus Reviews
A superbly wrought, movingly told biography of the great American pote maudit, author of the epic The Bridge. While much of the Modernist mainstream, from Eliots The Wasteland to Joyces Ulysses, was suffused by a dark Spenglerian vision of civilizations future, Hart Crane, almost alone, was sustained by more optimistic, transcendent possibilities. Sometimes called the ``last Romantic,'' not least for the characteristic high poetic, even Elizabethan tenor of his verse, Crane believed that his ``visionary . . . possibilities might, just might, reverse that [Americas] downward spiral and in the process revitalize the entire country.'' Well-versed biographer and poet Mariani (Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell, 1994, etc.) has a keen, sympathetic understanding of Cranes tormented character and the predicament of poets in a prosaic age. He also does a remarkable job of explicating Cranes notoriously difficult work and teasing out the substantial autobiographical underpinnings. However, Mariani occasionally lets his prose get carried a little too high on the viewless wings of poesy: for example, ``Summer swept down over the city like a succubus.'' Carefully drawing on a variety of recently-come-to-light resources, he traces Cranes tragic trajectory, from golden boy to working drudge, stealing a few tired hours to write or carouse with his beloved sailors, to his increasing bouts with alcohol, his frequent poverty and instability, and his suicide at the age of 32. It is a compelling story, and Mariani tells it with the kind of insight and psychological acuity worthy of a great Russian novelist. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


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We are lucky that Paul Mariani, a writer with superb narrative gifts and scholarly acumen, accepted this challenge. He has dug deep and well, and the resulting book is remarkable in many ways. Mariani explores the psychic depth of the subject... making fresh connections between the life and work that illuminate both. The Broken Tower will fascinate and edify readers for many years to come. — Pari


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