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Introduction: Relationality 1 American Decadence and the Creation of a Queer Modernist Aesthetic

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Introduction: Relationality 1 American Decadence and the Creation of a Queer Modernist Aesthetic Notes Introduction: Relationality 1. All subsequent references to “Episode of Hands” are from CP 173. All first refer- ences to poems give the year(s) of writing and revision, followed by the year(s) of publication, separated by a slash. Dates are as given in Marc Simon’s 1986 edition of The Complete Poems of Hart Crane. 2. In Transatlantic Avant- Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism, Eric B. White has explored the successes and failures of this striving for synthesis in his discussion of the relationship between the Young Americans and the expatriate avant- garde as it appeared in the pages of little magazines such as Secession and S4N. See, in particular, 140– 54. 3. The best guide to Crane’s appearances in various little magazines is The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Volume II, North America 1894– 1960, which discusses many of the publications I mention during the book. A number of these magazines have been digitized by the Modernist Journals Project, directed by Robert Scholes and Sean Latham, and they can be consulted online: http://modjourn.org/index.html 4. Although he does not name it as such, Edward J. Brunner provides a genetic reading of the “Voyages” sequence (and a more detailed one of the develop- ment of The Bridge) in Splendid Failure: Hart Crane and the Making of “The Bridge” ( 35– 55). Brunner makes no reference to Crane’s sexuality, and refers instead to an ungendered lover. 5. Giles makes extensive use of dictionaries to develop his argument that the guiding principle behind The Bridge is the pun. He uses a slightly different edition of the 1909 dictionary, the New International Dictionary of the English Language, whereas the edition I use, Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary: An American Dictionary of the English Language, was published “for the trade” in 1909. 6. It is not clear which edition Crane used, though Cowley’s comment that Crane referred to ‘Webster’s Unabridged,’ suggests that Crane might have used the same edition from which I am quoting. In addition, since this edition was published for the trade, it is possible that Crane might have encountered it in the course of his advertising career. Indeed, Cowley places his recollec- tion, which Clive Fisher locates in the summer of 1924, in the context of the workplace where Crane worked as a copywriter (Fisher 229). 1 American Decadence and the Creation of a Queer Modernist Aesthetic 1. There is some debate over which label, “Aestheticism” or “Decadence,” to place on the work of the writers of this period, particularly those of the 183 184 Notes 1890s. Previous critics have used aestheticism and decadence as synonyms, as Karl Beckson chooses to do in his anthology Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s: An Anthology of British Poetry and Prose, or alternately placed a forward slash between “Decadent/Aestheticism” and combined the two terms in “Decadent Aestheticism” as Laity does (“Editor’s Introduction” 427). In her valuable “Introduction” to the anthology Decadent Poetry from Wilde to Naidu, Lisa Rodensky suggests that “[t]o handle such confusion, perhaps one could separate late- century decadence from late- century aestheticism, such that the former would concern itself with the lurid subject matter and the latter with questions of form and style. One could, after all, reduce ‘decadence’ so that as a term it would take in only the most perverse work” ( xxiii– xlviii). I choose to use Decadence as a term to describe Crane’s influences because, unlike Aestheticism, it encompasses a number of the key ideas that most affected Crane: the concept of decay as it was attributed to the decline of classical periods of history and culture, and the concept of perversity or alternative sexuality from the normative. Yet it also denotes, as Rodensky observes, “an unexpected discipline and rigour, an obsessive refinement – of language, of sensation; it attempts to capture a fleeting impression in exact and exacting language” (“Introduction” xxiv). As the chapter goes on to sug- gest, these Decadent concerns were prominent in shaping Crane’s aesthetic. 2. John Unterecker, in his description of Laukhuff’s store, explains how impor- tant the shop was, not just to patrons, but to local artists and writers: “it was evident from the beginning that the bookstore had in it the makings of an informal educational institution. Any time of day one could drop in on what became a kind of continuing seminar. The chairs at the back of the store were always occupied, though the occupants varied from hour to hour. Here litera- ture became a living force as ideas were debated and styles of writers analyzed” (47). For more details about Laukhuff’s store and Crane’s links to it, see Gladys Haddad, “Laukhuff’s Book Store: Cleveland’s Literary and Artistic Landmark.” 3. The connections between Crane’s work and French Symbolism are well known, particularly his links with Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, and Stéphane Mallarmé, and I do not rehearse them during this chapter. For the most recent of these, see Irwin, 371– 83. 4. See “Plea of Justification Filed by the Defendant in Regina (Wilde) v. Queensbury” in Appendix A of H. Montgomery Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde, 323– 27. 5. For examples of the kind of responses to Wilde’s trials, see Greenberg, 392– 93. 6. All subsequent references to “The Moth that God Made Blind” are from CP 167– 69. 7. The image of “ sea- daisies” also suggests the flower and sea imagery of H.D., whose connection with Swinburne Cassandra Laity has discussed at length in H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Gender, Modernism, Decadence. See, for example, 48– 51. 8. Although he told Yvor Winters in 1928 (OML 359) that he had not encoun- tered Gerard Manley Hopkins’s work previously, Crane’s poetry does bear similarities to that of the Victorian poet, especially in its use of sound pat- terning and surprising diction. See Brian Reed 21– 23 for an exploration of this connection. Notes 185 9. The line appears in Book VI, line 743. In the Commentary to his edition of the Aeneid, R. G. Austin offers this translation: “we endure, each of us, a personal ghostly treatment” (228). 10. This and all subsequent references to “Modern Craft” are from CP 142. 11. Both poems originally published in Silhouettes (1892), and reprinted in Rodensky, Decadent Poetry, 40. 12. As just one example among several cited by David F. Greenberg in The Construction of Modern Homosexuality, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain “confirmed the thirteenth- century death penalty for male homosexuality, but brought the sanction into line with Roman precedent by changing the penalty from castration followed by stoning to burning at the stake” (302). Ferdinand and Isabella, the patrons of Columbus’s 1492 trip across the Atlantic, appear prominently in the “Ave Maria” section of The Bridge. 13. Originally published in the Chameleon (December 1894), and reprinted in Rodensky, Decadent Poetry, 190– 92. In the poem, the character of the “Love that dare not speak its name” is set alongside the character of “‘true Love, [who] fill[s]/The hearts of boy and girl with mutual flame.’” (192). In “Modern Craft,” Crane plays on the idea of there being “two loves,” ques- tions the idea of “true Love,” and adopts the imagery of flame. 14. Sinfield argues that in fact, “it was in late 1894, only a few months before the trials, according to Holbrook Jackson, that ‘serious rumours about [Wilde’s] private life and habits became more persistent in both London and Paris’. And still not everyone believed them. W.B. Yeats, who knew Wilde well, thought he was unjustly accused when the trials began” (2). 15. Although the warder’s narrative was certainly published in Bruno’s Weekly, it is not clear from the subsequent reprint of the document that Freeman- Ishill’s “Tribute” prefaced it or not. 16. This and all subsequent references to “C33” are from CP 135. 17. Crane is also making ingenious use of the “femme fatale,” which Cassandra Laity suggests is a key trope of Decadent writing (see H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siècle, 115– 49). Here, this figure – as a trope of his writing or as his muse – has betrayed Wilde, becoming his jailer. 18. In reading the Wilde trials in this way I follow Alan Sinfield, who argues that “the trials helped to produce a major shift in perceptions of the scope of same- sex passion. At that point, the entire, vaguely disconcerting nexus of effeminacy, leisure, idleness, immorality, luxury, insouciance, decadence and aestheticism, which Wilde was perceived, variously, as instantiating, was transformed into a brilliantly precise image. […] The principal twentieth- century stereotype entered our cultures: not just the homosexual, as the lawyers and medics would have it, but the queer” (3). 19. Crane’s enthusiasm for Ulysses was tremendous: he was an early subscriber of the copies printed in Paris in 1921, but when the Little Review was taken to court in 1920 under obscenity laws and the book’s publication banned in the United States, he was forced to ask his friend Gorham Munson to smuggle his copy into America, telling him “I must have this book!” (OML 73). 20. “Joyce and Ethics” is reprinted in CPSL 199– 200. 21. In an article from his continuing series about Nietzsche in the Little Review, George Burman Foster asserted that “[a]t bottom, the decadent seeks to escape the diremption of the modern man between the individual and the social, by 186 Notes affirming the former and negating the latter. The individual, the social cell, detaches itself from the whole organization, from the social body, without considering that he thereby dooms himself to death.
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