Volume 44, Number 16 · October 23, 1997
Going Half the Way
By James Fenton
O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane
edited by Langdon Hammer, by Brom Weber
Four Walls Eight Windows, 562 pp., $35.00
Once Hart Crane had been a young man hanging around the office of the Little Review and getting in the way. He was the teenage son of a recently broken home, whose father was a chocolate manufacturer in Ohio. Soon he became intolerable—not, as in his lonely youth, because of his insatiable thirst for conversation, but because of his thirst. Drink made him aggressive. He wanted a fight. He wanted a fight because he wanted to be humiliated. The humiliations piled up. He sought more of them. People told him in quite plain language how intolerable he had become. Katherine Anne Porter, with whom he stayed for a while in Mexico in 1931 (they were both Guggenheim Fellows at the time), wrote to him after one incident:
Review, 2997 words
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