Season of the Body: Essays, by Brenda Miller. Sarabande, 2002.

   By the title of this essay (for which my apologies to Adrienne Rich), I mean to identify the problematic through which Brenda Miller’s Season of the Body and John D’Agata’s The Next American Essay are united (by common concern with language) and divided (by opposite stances toward it). Their opposition, a standard one, can be characterized in various ways: correspondence theory of truth versus coherence theory; the belief that language can tell the truth about, and set right, a life, versus the sense that life is inaccessible and language a veil; the essential explicability of the world versus its inexplicability; Anglo-American analysis versus continental synthesis; confession/ autobiography versus mysticism.

   Neither book presents itself, or seems to think of itself, in quite those terms. Miller’s essays are more self-conscious about exploring the limits our frail, flawed bodies impose on our quest for love; and D’Agata’s collection explicitly aims to legitimize the essay as a genre no less worthy of title than its favored siblings, the novel and the poem. The two books differ in the sorts of evidence they use to make their case. Miller uses the facts of her own life, arranging them into a narrative from which she derives her conclusion(s); D’Agata uses essays by other people as his proof.

   Miller insists that, despite the clarity and force of her wish for it, she doesn’t believe in the adequacy of language to the world. Yet the rest of her book says she does believe, if not in the lexical adequacy of language, an edenic ability to name, at least in the narrative adequacy of language, the ability to tell a true story.

   Miller expresses early and often her wish that language reveal the world. In "A Dharma Name," for example, she gives what could count as the theme of the whole book: "All my life, it seems, I’ve been searching for a name that embodies me without distortion." In that essay, the wish gets expressed literally, through depiction of a ceremony in which Miller, converting to Buddhism, receives her "dharma name." It also gets expressed less directly, as one of the background premises of her conversion to Buddhism. Miller explains that to receive their dharma names, converts "didn’t have to take all five of the Buddhist precepts: only the ones we honestly felt we could keep," adding that she herself took only two of the five vows, one against stealing and the other "to speak the truth as clearly as one can," i.e. to use language only to reveal the world as it actually is.

   Miller’s wish that language reveal the world receives expression elsewhere as well. She concedes belief in "the power of language to clarify," a power she spells out in this way: "If we use the right words, then the world might suddenly align itself, become knowable and good." Failures happen, certainly: sometimes "I want to answer, but from my mouth comes a watery language no one can understand." Successes happen also, and when they do, "it’s a moment of simple communication." Miller considers "simple communication" possible.

   D’Agata denies that possibility. On the very first page of the "To the Reader" preface that introduces the book, he writes: "I know you are expecting . . . facts from nonfiction. But henceforth please do not consider these ‘nonfictions.’ I want you preoccupied with art in this book, not with facts for the sake of facts. A fact," he says, "comes from the Latin word factum—literally, ‘a thing done’—a neuter past participle construction that suggests a fact is merely something upon which action has happened. It’s not even a word that can do its own work. From the same Latin root for fact we get the words ‘artifice,’ ‘counterfeit,’ ‘deficient,’ ‘façade,’ ‘infect,’ ‘misfeasance,’ and ‘superficial.’ ‘There are no facts,’ Emerson once wrote, ‘only art.’ Let’s call this a collection of essays, then—a book about human wondering." Miller wants language to clarify, to put an end to wondering; D’Agata thinks language gets wondering started.

   In his first entry in the book, D’Agata starts by questioning the facticity of facts; then, returning full circle, he ends with the same question in his last entry:

   This classic Oedipal alignment formed the basic emotional component of young Hart’s life, and would hound him with hellish fury until his premature death in 1932. (He was born in 1899.) Like many a sensitive lad, he turned to the arts for solace, announcing, while still in high school, his intention to become a poet. His education was fragmentary; he left high school before graduating. What he came to know of the tradition and craft of poetry was largely self-taught; he was the quintessential autodidact, unencumbered by institutionalized systems of inquiry or interpretation. Those poets who meant the most to him (Marlowe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud), he evaluated on a purely subjective basis, linking himself with them as if they were blood brothers and not marble busts in a pantheon.

   At age 17, he traveled for the first time to New York. "The twelve-hour journey from Cleveland translated [him] to a new city and to what was in effect another life in a different country," says Clive Fisher in his excellent new biography, Hart Crane: A Life. New York at the close of 1916 was feverish and energetic, caught up in the fervor of World War I then raging in Europe. Utilizing his few contacts, young Hart, consumed with adolescent gusto, nipped and fluttered at the margins of the main cultural movements the city had to offer, while living in penury between odd jobs. Nonetheless, he could see his destiny shining steadfastly before him. "I shall really without doubt be one of the foremost poets in America if I am enabled to devote enough to my art," he wrote confidently to his father.

   His mother joined him in May of 1917. She had filed for divorce from her husband, and, seeking emotional consolation from her beloved son, she came to New York. The pattern would repeat itself for the rest of his life; Grace Hart Crane was neurotic and possessive, and in lieu of her husband’s affection, willingly or unwillingly, she ensnared her vulnerable son in a web of guilt and obligation that served to exacerbate his unstable emotions. At times the tone of the letters they exchanged seemed more like that of lovers than mother and son. "Mother, you do not appreciate how much I love you," he wrote to her from New York in February of 1917. "I can tell by your letters that there exists a slight undercurrent of doubt, and I do not want it there. If you could know how I long to see you perhaps that might make some difference."

   Hart’s father, Clarence Crane, was a big man, both in girth and ambition. He did his best to under-stand his difficult son, sending young Hart the occasional check and hiring him to work in his various candy stores when he was down and out. "For all his imperfections, [Clarence Crane] was generous, loyal, and well-meaning," says Clive Fisher, "far from the impatient and philistine ogre repeatedly described by the son who continued to take his money."

   Meanwhile, the young prodigy sought mentors, beginning with Gorham Munson, an editor at Pagan magazine, who published several of Hart’s early poems. Matthew Josephson, Waldo Frank, and Malcolm Cowley followed suit, each in his own way cognizant of the young man’s remarkable gifts.

   While still in his teens, Hart realized that he was homosexual. At first he kept it concealed; later, as his appetite grew, he became profligate. He especially fancied sailors with their sculpted bodies and lack of scruple, whom he picked up in the stews around the New York waterfront. In 1924, he met a blond-haired, blue-eyed Danish mariner named Emil Opffer; the two fell in love and moved into an apartment at 110 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn, with a view of the East River, the harbor, and the Brooklyn Bridge. It was this proximity to the fabled bridge, designed by John Augustus Roebling and constructed in the 1880s by his son, Washington, that eventually inspired Crane to compose his greatest poem.

   After many years of publishing poems in little magazines and reviews, Boni & Liveright brought out his first book, White Buildings, in 1927. The book was enthusiastically received and solidified Crane’s reputation as the most talented young American poet of the 1920s. The boast he had made to his father 10 years earlier had come true.

   By the time White Buildings appeared, Crane was already at work on his masterpiece, The Bridge, a poem he believed would restore vigor and purpose to American poetry, vitiated by the appearance of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), with its air of postwar exhaustion and jejune self-doubt. Thematically, Crane was a jingoist, a yea-sayer, a believer in the infinite possibilities inherent in the energy and potency of the New World, all of which in his fervent imagination was bound up in the interlocking cables, struts, and spans of the Brooklyn Bridge. "What, after all, was The Bridge," declares Clive Fisher, "but an attempt to revive the epic voice which Eliot had pronounced for ever still and to declaim in brave measures the mythic destiny of a land Eliot had found so prosaic as to flee?"

   One of the many strengths of Clive Fisher’s biography lies in its contextual annotation, the concise biographies he gives of Crane’s contemporaries and the older figures who befriended him. Fisher’s readings of the poems are also first-rate, not an easy task with a poet as palpably dense in content and metaphor as Hart Crane. All his poems, Fisher avers, "constituted a sort of covenant"; or as Crane himself described it: "It is as though a poem gave the reader as he left it a single, new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate, but self-evident as an active principle in the reader’s consciousness henceforward."

   Following his early lyrical efforts, Crane conceived of poetry as blocks of beautiful sound, disjointed in conception, rising from the deepest part of the psyche, fused together on paper through the force of a personality hellbent on converting blank verse into a kind of symphonic music. The poem was not just a verbal construct with tight, constricted boundaries but an arena in which anything could occur as it was being constructed; seen in this light, Crane is one of the indisputable patriarchs of "open field" poetry, the progenitor, in our own time, of poets as free-wheeling and diverse as Frank O’Hara, Robert Duncan, and Clayton Eshleman.

   In the face of these professional triumphs, the poet’s personal life rapidly deteriorated. Crane threw his entire self, body and soul, into the act of poetry, frequently working himself into a creative rage accompanied by frenetic jazz on the phonograph. His behavior with his friends became more volatile and boorish, exacerbated by intense bouts of drinking and a feverish sexuality that frequently led to his being kicked and pummeled by men who took exception to his crude solicitations. The charm, generosity, and spontaneity that had once characterized his best behavior, and drew people to him like a cynosure, dissolved into a chronic display of loutish antics.

   The publication of The Bridge in 1929 was greeted largely by accolades, but the question that bedeviled him now was how to follow this great visionary epic? He thought he might try his hand at the conquest of Mexico by Hernando Cortes; bereft of money as usual, he applied and received a Guggenheim fellowship to live and study in Mexico. He arrived in April of 1931 in an alcoholic daze. The entire year he spent there, he wrote only one poem, "The Broken Tower." He visited a few remote Indian villages to soak up the background atmosphere, but mostly he squandered his energies carousing, philandering, and quarreling violently with American acquaintances, such as the short-story writer Katherine Anne Porter.

   Inexorably, like the toll of a bell, the hammer blows began to fall. His good looks and natural vitality dissipated under the onslaught of too much revelry and booze. While he was in Mexico, his father died unexpectedly at the age of 56. He experienced his first heterosexual affair, with Peggy Cowley, Malcolm Cowley’s estranged wife, which, instead of offering him security and stability, plunged him deeper into chaos and despair. The strings were drawing tight around the figure of the one person who could restore American poetry to its Whitmanesque buoyancy and optimism; not only was his own life unraveling at a frantic pace, but the nation was in a terrible depression, which shifted the literary focus from personal aesthetics to social concerns.

   The clincher came in March of 1932 when the Guggenheim Committee, outraged by reports of his riotous behavior, revoked the stipend it had awarded him the previous year. Penniless once again, he set sail on April 24, 1932, from Vera Cruz on board the S.S. Orizaba. The ship stopped at Havana for a few hours, before continuing on to New York. That night his behavior became so obstreperous the ship’s officers had to lock him in his room. He managed to slip out and make his way to the sailors’ quarters, where he was badly beaten. Something must have snapped inside his head. Next morning, he commenced drinking again, directly from the bottle; shortly before noon on April 27, 1932, clad in pyjamas and a light top coat—his face battered, one eye swollen—he walked calmly to the stern of the ship. He removed his top coat, folded it neatly on the rail, and with a surprisingly lithe, athletic move, vaulted over the rail into the deep blue waters of the Florida Straits.