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First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978– 1– 137– 40775– 7 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Munro, Niall, 1979– Hart Crane’s queer modernist aesthetic / Niall Munro. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–1–137–40775–7 (hardback) 1. Crane, Hart, 1899–1932—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Homosexuality and literature—United States. 3. Modernism (Literature)—United States. I. Title. PS3505.R272Z754 2015 811'.52—dc23 2014038554 Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40775–7 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40775–7 Contents List of Figures ix Acknowledgments x Abbreviations and Notes on Sources xiv Introduction: Relationality 1 Writing about “the activity of living” 2 Crane’s modernism 3 Difficulty and queerness 7 Following “different paths to queerness”: interpreting Crane’s aesthetic 11 1 American Decadence and the Creation of a Queer Modernist Aesthetic 16 (American) Decadence 17 Crane’s Decadence: The outsider and aesthetics 19 Crane’s Wilde and “song of minor, broken strain” 25 Crane’s defence of Decadence 28 Forming an aesthetic vocabulary 30 Impressionism and Imagism 32 Hellenism and Walter Pater 35 2 Abstraction and Intersubjectivity in White Buildings 41 Visual influences and the language of art 42 Ekphrasis: An alternative form of literary modernism 44 The challenge to artistic and heteronormative reproduction 48 The further challenge: abstraction 50 Doubleness and the crisis of perception 52 Reality 53 Looking and touching 57 3 Spatiality, Movement, and the Logic of Metaphor 63 Enclosed spaces 65 Utopian spaces? 67 Atopias 71 The queer flâneur 73 The conflicts of cruising 75 A poetics of transgression 79 vii Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40775–7 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40775–7 viii Contents Space deregulated 83 The logic of metaphor, space, and the phatic aspect 85 4 Temporality, Futurity, and the Body 91 Out of time and out of history 91 The “Moment” 97 Negation and futurity 99 The body and temporal gaps 104 Temporal blur 110 Recurrence and sameness 112 Self- consciousness 115 Completion 118 Death and ecstasy 120 Beyond time 123 5 Empiricism, Mysticism, and a Queer Form of Knowledge 125 The difficulties of experience and knowledge 127 Radical empiricism 132 The new materiality 136 A crisis of materiality, sexuality, and language 142 “Hauntology” of the body 147 6 Queer Technology, Failure, and a Return to the Hand 150 Technology and failure 154 Failed technology and queer community 157 Language and difference 161 Technology’s threat 163 Nature and the primitive 165 Making things: The ordinary and a return to craft 167 Conclusion: Towards a Queer Community 172 Unexpected interest 172 Queer reading 174 Reading strategies 176 Embracing surprise 177 A queer modernist community: Crane, H.D., and the reader 178 Notes 183 Bibliography 198 Index 211 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40775–7 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40775–7 Introduction: Relationality With his right hand on the table, fingers bent to show only the first finger and knuckles, and his left hand placed on top of the right, Hart Crane posed for Walker Evans’s camera in 1929– 1930 (Figure I.1). Evans took a number of other photographs of Crane at the time this untitled picture was taken, but in photographing the poet’s hands he empha- sized Crane’s identity as a writer. The pose itself might even suggest something of Crane’s style: self- referential, unexpected, complicated. Yet these aestheticized objects are also instantly recognizable as hands. The arrangement of them draws a viewer to the image and to the hands, either to try and pose their own hands in a similar fashion, with the thumb invisible but the first four fingers in various stages of being bent, or simply to acknowledge that such a gesture could be an affective one of comfort or certainty. The hands therefore suggest something rela- tional, of tactile possibility. Crane’s poem “Episode of Hands” (1920/unpublished) (CP 173)1 is a verbal correlative for Evans’s photograph. It too offers an “unexpected” presentation, as “unexpected interest” gives way to unexpected meta- phor, a transformative moment of homoerotic contact (hands become butterflies and “knots and notches” are “like the marks of wild ponies’ play”) set against the unlikely background of modern technology such as wheels, factory sounds, and factory thoughts. Such contact, born of one moment of daring and surrender (“Suddenly he […]/Consented, – and held out/One finger from the others”), even suggests the illicit (“the thick bed”), and culminates in the creation of a wordless erotic under- standing, as “[t]he two men smiled into each other’s eyes.” 1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40775–7 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40775–7 2 Hart Crane’s Queer Modernist Aesthetic Writing about “the activity of living” Like Evans’s photograph, this poem presents a moment of aesthetic contemplation. It takes its place in a tradition of homoerotic writing, a tradition in which Robert K. Martin gave Crane a significant place in his 1979 book The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry, and for a young writer (Crane was twenty- one when he wrote “Episode of Hands”), the poem is also legitimized by such literary connections. These are most obvious in the poem’s allusions to the “wound dresser” Walt Whitman, whose work is also metonymically represented in the “[b]unches of new green breaking a hard turf,” a phrase reminiscent of Ezra Pound’s mes- sage to Whitman: “It was you that broke the new wood,/Now is a time for carving” (“A Pact” 269). But Crane’s aesthetic is also formed out of this sometimes contradictory environment, indeed it consists of it: the homosexual attraction, the unexpected content and style, the sometimes oppressive modern conditions. Here is a newness (“new green breaking a hard turf”) derived from sexuality, an alternative modernist aesthetic that is developed from conflicting elements and which instead of being guided by an Eliotic “impersonality,” emphasizes the personal and relational. If this too is “unexpected,” it may be because in the past modernism has been dominated by heterosexual and mainly male modes of dis- course and desire, represented by Pound and T. S. Eliot, though Eliot’s sexuality and its effect upon his writing has been the subject of consid- erable discussion. Whilst the reading of Crane’s work through the lens of sexuality is the basis for this book, the notion of “queerness” offers a theoretical and intellectual engagement with modernism that goes beyond sexuality and offers another way of reading modernist texts that sometimes endorses, sometimes challenges modernist formula- tions. Robert K. Martin has written that “Episode of Hands” represents “a strong statement of social and political unity founded on sexual bonds” (The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry 139), and I argue that such striving for unity, or relationality, can be found throughout Crane’s oeuvre. As his career progressed, it became clear to Crane that a form of relationality was always necessary, since readers consistently misread or claimed that they could not read his work. Yet even before this became a serious concern for Crane, I argue that relationality – creating an intimate connection with his reader – was always an essen- tial part of his aesthetic. In her recent book- length discussion with Lee Edelman, the queer theorist Lauren Berlant has suggested ways of understanding relationality that suggest some of what is to be gained by reading Crane in this way. Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40775–7 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–40775–7 Introduction: Relationality 3 In sex, in politics, in theory – in any infrastructure that we can call intimate or invested with the activity of living – we cannot banish the strangeness in ourselves or of anything in the world. While we can point to the impossibility of staying reliable