FAULKNER AND THE SOUTH TODAY
and. with bitterness he finds that it cannot be controlled and ordered or
even thought about in the intimate, vitalizing way in which he knew
and used the past. The language of
Intruder in the Dust
is fatefully in–
dicative of what has happened to him and his vision. Upon a realistic,
contemporary situation he has tried hopelessly, impossibly, to impose the
grandiloquent cadences of
((Absalom, Absalom!"
and nothing could be
more out of key, more jarring and defeating. The rhetoric of that gloomy
marvel cannot give epic grandeur, vast passionate design
to
his parable of
the present. Here everything is real, small, and practical. What we hear,
in spite of every effort to disguise it, is not the old Faulknerian music,
but the sour stutters and complaints of a writer fretting over his new,
urgent, difficult material.
RAW GENIUS, SELF-DELUSION,
AND INCANTATION
Elizabeth Hardwick
HART CRANE. By Brom Weber. The Bodley Press. $2.75.
Mr. Weber has obviously studied the work and life of Hart
Crane with a loving, intense, and intensive patience. As a collection of
materials for the study of Crane his book is valuable. But there are many
faults also: poor writing, poor thinking, and above_all an inadequate
knowledge of other kinds of poetry, a knowledge necessary to a precise
definition of Crane's poetry.
Consider this representative passage from Crane's first book:
And I, entering, take up the stone
As quiet as you can make a man.
...
In Bleecker Street, still trenchant in a void,
Wounded by apprehensions out of speech,
I hold it up against a disk of light-
!,
turning, turning on smoked forking spires
The city's stubborn lives, desires.
One can wonder for years about the third line, about what Crane meant
by speaking of a street as trenchant in a void; and one can decide at
last that he meant
intrenched.
Yet neither here nor elsewhere in Crane
are we dealing with a simple misuse of words. Crane often began with
a definite subject and at times he wrote fine descriptive poetry about
that subject. But the dominant tendency in his work is to go beyond any
meaningful statement to a kind of hallucination of meaning produced
by the misuse of words. It is not merely that the meaning of the poem
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