3.

Out of the Fray

HART CRANE AND MARIANNE MOORE

Before she spent decades living in Brooklyn, the poet Marianne Moore served as the editor of the prestigious New York literary magazine the Dial, in the 1920s. During that time she published a number of Hart Crane’s poems and helped establish his place in the literary world when he was still in his twenties. But he grew angry when Moore rejected some of his work, and even the poems she accepted caused friction. Crane had not yet produced his highest achievement, The Bridge (1930), the epic poem about the Brooklyn Bridge that he published at age thirty, and she was older and had more professional stature. The larger issue was a clash not only of aesthetic viewpoints but of temperament and personality. To friends Crane often painted Moore as an uptight scold, referring to her as the “Rt. Rev. Miss Mountjoy.” (He was not the only one to adopt this opinion of her.) She in turn found him to be emotionally ungoverned, an attitude he probably sensed. In a letter to James Sibley Watson, co-owner of the Dial, she called Crane “vapid and pretentious, not well-reefed.” Moore was an upright woman, private and proper and uninterested in romance or drink; Crane was the opposite in every respect.

In a widely discussed incident that sealed the enmity between them, Moore agreed to take Crane’s “The Wine Menagerie,” but gave it a thorough once-over with the red pen and changed the title to “Again.” Crane agreed to the changes but ranted about it to anyone who would listen. He visited a friend and cried himself to sleep on his bed about the humiliation of the experience. To another couple he complained, “The Dial bought my Wine Menagerie poem—but insisted (Marianne Moore did) on changing it around and cutting it up until you would not recognize it.” Crane was in no financial state to fight—“I would never have consented to such an outrageous joke if I had not so desperately needed the twenty dollars”—and probably resented not only the editing but the powerlessness of his position. Kenneth Burke, who worked with Moore at the Dial, sided with Crane on this point. He quipped that Moore had succeeded in taking all the Wine out of the Menagerie.

Moore had the last word when she spoke of Crane to Donald Hall in an interview for the Paris Review, nearly thirty years after Crane’s death: “Hart Crane complains of me? Well, I complain of him.” Her biographer Charles Molesworth surmises that perhaps she had heard of Crane’s remark, referring to her Dial and Margaret Anderson’s Little Review, that poetry was in the hands of two “hysterical virgins.”

Despite the antipathy and the considerable differences between Moore and Crane, a strain of commonality lay beneath their testy relationship. From the beginning, they both held fast to their aesthetic principles in the face of conflict, sometimes to a fault. They were proud and very particular artists who had high ambitions but were not motivated primarily by approval. And there was some admiration between them as poets, as Moore’s decision to publish him suggests. Speaking about Crane, Moore added in the Hall interview that he had “so much intuition, such a feel for things, for books—really a bibliophile—that I took special interest in him” and that “we [at the Dial] liked him—friends, and with certain tastes in common.” For his part, Crane told a dear friend, even after the “Wine Menagerie” fiasco, that “one goes back” to Moore, as one does to Whitman, Poe, Melville, and Frost, “with renewed appreciation of what America really is, or could be.”

The writer Crane drew from the most was probably Brooklyn’s original bard, Walt Whitman. Echoing Henry Miller, he said of Whitman, “No other American has left us so great a heritage.” When Crane was twenty-three and living in Ohio, the conception of his signature work was already taking shape in his mind. He wrote to a friend, “The more I think about my Bridge poem the more thrilling its symbolic possibilities become, and … I begin to feel myself directly connected with Whitman. I feel myself in currents that are positively awesome in their extent and possibilities.” When the poem came to fruition, it would speak directly to Crane’s forebear, bridging the years between them and trying to find him on the very territory they shared. “Walt, tell me, Walt Whitman, if infinity / Be still the same as when you walked the beach / Near Paumanok—your lone patrol.” (Paumanok was once the name of Long Island, which included Brooklyn, as geographically it still does.) This section of the poem, its literal and conceptual center, goes on to close by suggesting an answer—that yes, the same infinity that ran through Walt outlived his death and runs through Hart.

yes, Walt,

Afoot again, and onward without halt,—

Not soon, nor suddenly,—never to let go

My hand

in yours,

Walt Whitman—

so—

New York City has always attracted those who feel they will never fit inside the confines of their hometowns, and so it was with Crane. In the last decade of his short life, Crane moved in rarefied New York literary circles and lived an extraordinary life while barely scraping by financially. But his upbringing had the outlines of a typical upper-middle-class existence. He was born in 1899 and raised in Ohio by a hardheaded father, a successful businessman called C.A., and a mother, Grace, who loved her son with perhaps too much intensity. (C.A.’s company made candy, and for a time he held the patent on Life Savers, but he sold it off too soon to get truly rich.) Crane mystified his father, who had designs on bringing him into his business, by taking an interest in piano, dancing, and fashion, and above all by spending hours alone with books and a pen. In his youth, a growing antagonism between his parents left Crane in the middle of a bitter situation he neither created nor understood. At fifteen he twice attempted suicide—once by slashing his wrists, then by swallowing all his mother’s sleeping powders. But at seventeen he would rejoice at publishing poems in two serious New York magazines, having announced at age ten that he wanted only to be a poet. He convinced his father and mother to allow him to go to New York by saying he would get himself admitted to Columbia University (despite having quit high school). He never went. Walt Whitman, Henry Miller, and Hart Crane together had not one semester of college.

The single-minded pursuit of art called out to Crane in a frequency his parents couldn’t hear. For a young man who had gone through considerable difficulties at home and at school, he showed remarkable optimism about his prospects. To a friend more than ten years older he wrote, “I have had tremendous struggles.… Thank God, I am young, I have the confidence and will to make fate.” This kind of self-assurance could be considered a characteristic shared by all successful writers, if not all high achievers. But for Crane, as for Whitman and Miller, it played a particularly essential role, allowing him to withstand the resistance and even hostility of the literary establishment. In the eyes of contemporaries, Whitman had no business self-publishing a lewd “barbaric yawp” and sending it around to dignified men of letters. Henry Miller, raised among the rabble on the filthy streets of Brooklyn, had no business crashing the gates with sexually graphic autobiographical romps. Hart Crane had something a bit nearer to the right pedigree, but by all rights he should have become a Cleveland company man with a nice wife and a nice car. Instead he became a gay New York City poet, forever short of money, writing verses that even many of his close friends found hopelessly out of fashion.

In his twenties, Crane lived mostly in New York but flitted elsewhere, often for financial reasons. In the early New York years, while sporadically holding various jobs he didn’t care about, he began cultivating an aesthetic and intellectual identity in unsteady steps, largely through correspondence with writers he had come to know. He would single out a certain author for ardent admiration, be it Joyce, Eliot, or Wallace Stevens, and then, with that phase over, move on to another. A magazine that he’d much admired and that had published him early on, the Pagan, became a “fetid corpse.” He would seek to reconcile somewhat with his father and maintain a stable relationship with his domineering mother, but again and again they would disappoint him—or the other way around. In a brief period back in Ohio he had his first brief gay affair, telling almost no one about it. He was becoming his own person. To look at it another way, though, he was becoming more and more alone.

Crane continued to publish in his early twenties and produced one major work, the three-part poem “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen,” later included in his debut collection, White Buildings (1926). In the first section of “Faustus and Helen,” Crane’s deep affinity with Whitman reveals itself in the combination of a litany of earth-bound, everyday particulars and a soaring, myth-making lyricism. The details that ground the poem are unmistakably urban, and certain of them unmistakably New York: “the memoranda, baseball scores, / The stenographic smiles and stock quotations”; the “druggist, barber and tobacconist”; an invitation to “suppose some evening I forgot / The fare and transfer.” This cataloging of urban ephemera leads to the discovery of Helen of Troy, figure of history and legend, now sitting within reach in a place that calls to mind Times Square: “There is some way, I think, to touch / Those hands of yours that count the nights / Stippled with pink and green advertisements.” An eroticism enters with the sight of Helen’s “deep blush, when ecstasies thread / The limbs and belly, when rainbows spread / Impinging on the throat and sides…”

At the time that he was writing “Faustus and Helen,” Crane, like many of his fellow poets and writers, was coming to grips with Modernism, and in particular with the immense influence of T. S. Eliot, eleven years older than Crane and now achieving widespread recognition. W. B. Yeats, a generation older, had captured in his poem “The Second Coming” (1920) something of the grim spirit that prevailed in the wake of the rending of body and mind brought about by the Great War: “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” Eliot took Yeats’s despair and enriched it, deepened it; he as much as announced the end of Romanticism, to anyone who doubted it. All those involved in poetry had to reckon with the bomb Eliot had dropped, especially after The Waste Land appeared in 1922.

In Crane’s view, Eliot deserved the utmost respect, for he represented the ultimate expression of a certain worldview. But it was not a worldview he shared. “I take Eliot as a point of departure toward an almost complete reverse of direction,” he wrote to his friend the poet Gorham Munson. “His pessimism is amply justified, in his own case. But I would apply as much of his erudition and technique as I can absorb and assemble toward a more positive, or (if [I] must put it so in a skeptical age) ecstatic goal.” Committing himself to a hopeful aesthetic project—and he did remain committed—constituted a considerable act of rebellion at Crane’s historical moment, particularly in poetry. To sound the death knell in art, to shock and awe with destruction, is often considered brave, clear-eyed, but at times it is far braver to open oneself to the charge of naïveté by trying to build a bridge rather than burn it behind you. Walt Whitman and Henry Miller defied the prevailing norms by inviting revulsion, outrage, and censorship. Hart Crane defied them by stepping out of the fashionable depths of despond. To the poet Allen Tate he wrote, “Perhaps this is useless, perhaps it is silly—but one does have joys.… Let us invent an idiom for the proper transposition of jazz into words! Something clean, sparkling, elusive!”

All the draining jobs and poverty of Crane’s early career kept his output low—he was never very prolific—and sometimes left him deeply dispirited. But he held on to his belief in his own vocation, keeping that Whitmanesque “ecstatic goal” in view. From Cleveland he wrote a wild midnight letter to Gorham Munson with “Apologies later!” scrawled in massive letters across the top.

At times, dear Gorham, I feel an enormous power in me—that seems almost supernatural. If this power is not too dissipated in aggravation and discouragement I may amount to something sometime. I can say this now with perfect equanimity because I am notoriously drunk and the Victrola is still going with that glorious Bolero.

When he was invited to read his work at a party along with a number of luminaries, he saw a chance to make an impression, and even terrible food poisoning couldn’t keep him from attending. Marianne Moore read first, in her quiet voice, and Crane followed her, having cured himself with five whiskey and sodas that left him “the picture of health,” he said. Crane’s fondness for alcohol, which for long stretches he viewed as a requirement for a night of writing, would come to play a troublingly central role in his life. Like Whitman and Miller, he valued the body and its pleasures. As for the “sins of the flesh,” well, were they sins? None of them was sure about that.

Crane was twenty-four when he began the great affair of his life with Emil Opffer Jr., a merchant seaman who had connections to the intellectual world. His father, who brought his family from Holland to America, worked as a journalist and as the editor of a Brooklyn-based newspaper for Dutch émigrés. Emil’s brother was a member of the Provincetown Players, a mainstay of the Greenwich Village artistic scene. Crane had a weakness for sailors, and this one had a foot in Crane’s circles. Falling for Emil, Crane wrote a rapturous letter to the novelist Waldo Frank: “I have gone quite dumb with something for which ‘happiness’ must be too mild a term.”

The meeting of Hart and Emil led Crane not only to Brooklyn but to an uncannily perfect spot. Crane was unhappily living in a cheap Manhattan apartment at the time they met, but Emil had a thought: a room for rent had opened up in his father’s building. Emil Sr. lived and had his newspaper office in Brooklyn Heights, at 110 Columbia Heights. It was the westernmost street in the neighborhood, so it had the choicest views of the harbor and the Manhattan skyline. According to Crane biographer Clive Fisher, the house was one of three, 106–110, that were owned by the same man, and he had turned them into an artists’ colony of a kind. The buildings were connected on the lower floors, with an art school in the basement. One observer described the atmosphere as that of “the ‘arty’ middle class,” who liked the company but also appreciated the quiet in the “non–Greenwich Village surroundings.” Another young writer of promise was already renting a room at 110 Columbia Heights. He was on the mend from rheumatism and arthritis and recovering, too, from a minor scandal involving his overt objection to World War I while serving as a soldier on the front. His name was John Dos Passos. While living there, he would begin work on a landmark novel that would put him on the map, Manhattan Transfer.

Crane moved in, relishing the thought of a perch outside Manhattan and in close range of his great subject. He soon told his mother about “the finest view in all America. Just imagine looking out your window directly on the East River with nothing intervening between your view of the Statue of Liberty, way down the harbor, and the marvelous beauty of Brooklyn Bridge close above you and on your right!” As it happened, Crane was now living in the very building from which an ill Washington Roebling oversaw the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Crane eventually took over the same room Roebling had occupied, positioning his writing desk near the very same window where Roebling had positioned his telescope forty-odd years before. Roebling had built the bridge. Now Crane would rebuild it in words.

Years after conceiving of The Bridge, Crane felt himself in a kind of waking dream. The structure he had spent so long thinking about was right there in front of him. “Imagine my surprise,” he wrote, “when Emil brought me to this street where, at the very end of it, I saw a scene that was more familiar than a hundred factual provisions could have rendered it!” The feeling was immensely powerful, bringing out in Crane an almost religious tone: “I believe I am a little changed—not essentially, but changed and transubstantiated as anyone is who has asked a question and been answered.”

*   *   *

“This section of Brooklyn is very old,” Hart told his mother, “but all the houses are in splendid condition.” The first part of the sentence was certainly true. The Brooklyn Heights of his time featured the oldest and some of the most elegant houses in Brooklyn, a legacy of its status as “America’s first suburb.” A number of town houses dating to the mid-nineteenth century still stand—along with a handful from even earlier, as far back as 1820—and the exteriors of most of them are more or less unaltered. The patchwork of streets, elevated on a bluff above the harbor (hence the name), did and still does enjoy a tranquillity occasioned by being a kind of cozy, neighborhood-size cul-de-sac. Bordering it to the east is the distinctly less classy downtown area, where in Crane’s time an elevated train rumbled through what is now Cadman Plaza. The tracks were demolished in the thirties and early forties, and more than three hundred buildings were destroyed to make way for the plaza. Now the imposing slabs of the courthouses, the post office, and Borough Hall surround an often unpopulated and windswept space. Robert Moses, the exceedingly powerful official and builder who changed the face of New York City in the twentieth century, made the spectacularly wrong prediction that Cadman Plaza would “be as much the pride of Brooklyn as the Piazza San Marco is the pride of Venice and the Place de la Concorde the cynosure of Paris.” Walking around there now, you could be in any city of some note but little attraction.

To the north of the Heights is Dumbo; the name is an acronym for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, though the neighborhood lies below both the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges. Now a land of very pricey high-rise condos, in Crane’s time it showed a lowlier face. It was and remains quite distinct from the Heights geographically and architecturally. Crossing between the two means descending or scaling a daunting hill that separates the Heights from the dockside streets and ferry landing that Whitman wandered around and looked upon from the Fulton Street offices of the Eagle.

To the south, the Heights gently slopes down to the busy thoroughfare of Atlantic Avenue, getting a bit less fancy on the way down until Atlantic, the southern boundary of the neighborhood, brings the peaceful feel to an abrupt halt. Cobble Hill, to the south of Atlantic, now resembles the Heights in socioeconomics, but in Crane’s era it was far less exclusive. It housed some of the huge population that relied on Red Hook’s shipyards for work and a Middle Eastern immigrant community, mainly Syrian. (These were the “people of the Levant” that Henry Miller referred to, and their presence is still felt in a cluster of Middle Eastern restaurants and groceries on Atlantic.)

And finally, to the west of Brooklyn Heights is of course the East River, and across it the expanse of Manhattan, laid out perpendicularly as if it positioned itself to afford the Heights the ideal view: Have a look at this. Brooklyn Heights can’t spread, then—there’s nowhere for it to go—and so it retains an exclusive feel; to get in, someone else has to relinquish her spot. Crane was lucky to gain entrance, and, once in, he was outnumbered by those of a higher station in society.

The part of the Heights closest to the river, where he lived, was not as quiet as it is now, because active warehouses and piers lined the water’s edge. Much of the commerce of the Midwest, via the Erie Canal, flowed through the area. Nevertheless, the Heights stood at a remove from the noise, demographically a world away, since it literally overlooked all the action below the bluff it stood upon. The houses were relatively small, three or four stories, mostly, with some elegantly miniature two-level carriage houses as well. Even at a remove from the river view, the streets offered a wide, refreshing view of the sky. The novelist Paula Fox recently described making this discovery upon moving to Brooklyn from the Upper West Side: “As I looked up at it I realized, as I seldom did in Manhattan, that it was limitless, not a roof for a city, not a part of a stage decor, but the heavens.” The houses in the Heights, though, were densely packed together and the streets were narrow, which created an intimacy not unlike what you would find near a town green with a steepled church, in the densest part of a small village. Here you are in America, not “the city.”

Despite the continued existence of fine housing stock, the citadel of white-gloved gracefulness had been showing cracks during the preceding two decades, as Miller suggested with his remark about the “invading swarms.” Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the Heights and Brooklyn at large had resisted the most efficient, and disruptive, modes of transportation. Officials had balked at permitting steam trains, with their noisy churn, belching smoke, and occasional runaway cars, to go right into Brooklyn’s heart, which forced produce and freight to be offloaded to wagons at Jamaica Station in Queens. While Manhattan remade itself to stay at the vanguard of all trends, Brooklyn eyed change warily, to the pleasure of Heights residents.

But in 1908 Brooklyn, now a borough rather than a separate city, saw its subway systems connect up with Manhattan’s. The logical move eased commuting and spurred growth but also brought more and more people to Brooklyn. The hotels in the area filled up and new ones were built. A series of additions made the Hotel St. George the largest in the nation by 1929, with 2,623 rooms. F. Scott Fitzgerald would visit the bar there and also the top-floor restaurant and nightclub at the Hotel Bossert on Montague Street, built in 1909. Brooklyn had become a destination.

Not all the newcomers were up to the usual Heights snuff. But the diversity encroaching on the Heights didn’t put Crane off at all. Just a short walk down the hill to the north and east were the bars his mother wouldn’t hear about in letters home. The infamous Sands Street offered up all-hours iniquities hidden from most of the city’s view. Al Capone, born the same year as Crane, had gone to school a few blocks away, at P.S. 7 at 85 Jay Street, and in his teenage years he was known to stop by the Sands Street bordellos; a persistent rumor has it that it was here he contracted the syphilis that eventually killed him. This was no ordinary red-light district. Locals called it “Hell’s Half Acre.” John Kobler describes the place (with exaggeration?) in his biography of Capone.

Sands Street at night, all night, catered to more robust tastes, as droves of sailors piled ashore, clamoring for liquor and women. It was one of the roughest haunts in the country, the Barbary Coast of the East, where mayhem and murder constantly threatened the unwary.… There were tattooing parlors, gambling dives, dance halls, fleabags with rooms for rent by the hour, and a galaxy of bangled, painted whores, known by reputation in every port of the seven seas, like the Duchess, and Submarine Mary, who had a mouthful of solid gold teeth.

With Emil away at sea a lot and their relationship intermittent, Crane walked down to Sands Street to look for sex, searching for sailors to share in a rendezvous meant not to last. In The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane (1999), Paul Mariani writes that despite Crane’s high-flown social life, as with “Whitman before him, it was among the city’s vibrant teeming masses that he felt most at home.” Cruising was a dangerous pursuit for Crane in a time of rampant homophobia. More than once he came home beaten and bloodied.

Homosexuality did not torture Crane to the extreme degree that it did many others in that era, in part because he moved among the relatively accepting circles of liberal literary New York. Still, it is revealing that he often sought out lovers not among the chattering classes but among men that his friends would never meet. Crane and Dos Passos shared mutual acquaintances, and now as neighbors they occasionally dined together. When Crane was seriously drunk, Dos Passos would try to talk him into turning in for the night. Crane would pretend to be persuaded and then sneak out to the bars. There was a certain shame in it, he thought, and it seems likely that for Crane, the danger of Sands Street felt somehow right; seeking romance ought to be difficult, secret, and capable of ending with a bruised face.

*   *   *

When Crane was living in Brooklyn, and indeed for much of his brief adult life, New York was experiencing an unprecedented economic boom. Money seemed to “roll in the gutters,” he once said. Crane’s twenties were the 1920s, and what a time and place to be that age. It remains true today, I think, that this was New York City’s most glorious decade. The population increased by 1.3 million, to nearly 7 million. (In the eight decades since, it has increased by only about a million more.) Driven by speculation and the proliferation of margin buying, Wall Street generated untold riches. Its denizens lived in blissful ignorance (or denial) of the coming crash. Between 1920 and 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald published his phenomenally successful debut, This Side of Paradise, followed by The Beautiful and the Damned and The Great Gatsby. Along the way he popularized the term “Jazz Age” in the middle of its short but incandescent life. (Gatsby’s warnings about the perils of wealth didn’t resonate at the time; the book didn’t find a large readership until decades later.) New York City’s mayor for the second half of the decade, Jimmy Walker, drank heavily, barely showed up for work, wrote pop songs, and moved in with his mistress at the Ritz-Carlton. He was reelected.

The Ziegfeld Follies captivated Broadway audiences, and the fashion in the shows filtered out onto the streets. Prohibition drove New York nightlife into new underground cabarets, and they welcomed women more than legitimate saloons had—a happy development for all involved. The cabarets drew the jazz scene from Chicago, and Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and company provided a truly American-born soundtrack to city living. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, a major cannon shot of Modernism, came across the Atlantic for a Carnegie Hall American premiere, and George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue made its worldwide premiere in midtown. The Great Migration brought a generation of black artists and writers to Harlem, transforming it into the new center of black culture. The poet Langston Hughes looked on the city’s rapidly changing face and wrote, in 1926, “New York is truly the dream city—city of the towers near God, city of hopes and visions, of spires seeking in the windy air love and perfection.” Indeed, skyscrapers were climbing impossibly high in a dazzling competition, the abstract concept of macho capitalism made into edifices forged out of steel. After a frenzied decade of building, three New York behemoths—the Bank of Manhattan Trust Building, the Chrysler, and the Empire State—claimed the mantle of world’s tallest building one after the other, all within a year. (By the time they were finished, between 1930 and 1931, they were late to the party; the economy had gone to pieces.)

Amid all this hyperactivity, Crane looked on with the classic excitement of the boy from the provinces but also with a great measure of financial and emotional exile. All the dazzle and swing of the twenties jibed with his affirmative vision, his hope of transposing jazz into words. But he couldn’t seem to complete his long-planned masterpiece, The Bridge, and money was a constant problem. Poetry, which rarely paid, was the only thing in life that really mattered. He frequently had to write to his father to hint obliquely that a “loan” would be helpful, a painful task. Sometimes he lacked the subway fare to travel outside the neighborhood.

At a crucial moment he found a very wealthy patron to support the writing of The Bridge, but Crane had no trouble burning through the money, not least on drink. Although he sampled the pleasures of Jazz Age New York—attending concerts of the new music, meeting Charlie Chaplin, taking in the new plays of Eugene O’Neill (a friend he had pursued), visiting exhibitions, and drinking at Village speakeasies—he felt marginalized by his limited bank account. And during his first Brooklyn stint he was still earning his stripes in the literary community, published in prominent magazines but yet to produce a first book.

The most substantial and accomplished work in White Buildings, though, was begun in that lovesick spring of 1924 when he moved to Brooklyn. “Voyages,” a six-part poem, is clearly in large part an outgrowth of Crane’s saving love for Emil Opffer. It is rife with images of swimming and drowning, and its gauzy, undulating style and diction create a disorienting difficulty for the reader. We are at sea, in more than one sense, and so is the young lover whose voice permeates the verses: “Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn / The silken skilled transmemberment of song. / Permit me, voyage, love, into your hands…”

While living on Columbia Heights, Crane was developing a very sensuous relationship to Brooklyn, recorded mostly in numerous letters. In these writings, which find him exploring the streets in all conditions and seasons, we see a joy in a beloved place but also the shadow of a fertile melancholy (particularly in Emil’s absence). Here, in a representative passage, we get a clear sight of the view from his window.

Everytime one looks at the harbor and the NY skyline across the river it is quite different, and the range of atmospheric effects is endless. But at twilight on a foggy evening … it is beyond description. Gradually the lights in the enormously tall buildings begin to flicker through the mist. There was a great cloud enveloping the top of the Woolworth Tower, while below, in the river, were streaming reflections of myriad lights, continually being crossed by the twinkling mast and deck lights of little tugs scudding along, freight rafts, and occasional liners starting outward. Look far to your left toward Staten Island and there is the Statue of Liberty, with that remarkable lamp of hers that makes her seen for miles. And up to the right Brooklyn Bridge, the most superb piece of construction in the modern world, I’m sure, with strings of light crossing it like glowing worms as the Ls and surface cars pass each other going and coming. It is particularly fine to feel the greatest city in the world from enough distance, as I do here, to see its larger proportions. When you are actually in it you are often too distracted to realize its better and more imposing aspects.

Work continued, in fits and starts, on The Bridge in the ensuing years, when he shuttled between disparate places: there were long stays in the countryside in and around Pawling and Patterson, New York; a sojourn on the Isle of Pines off of Cuba (now called the Isle of Youth), where his mother had property; some months in Hollywood (“this Pollyanna greasepaint pinkpoodle paradise”); a visit to Paris that ended badly, due to a worsening alcohol problem; and more city living on a shoestring, with stops in Brooklyn. His emotions about the grand poem vacillated widely and frequently. As he wrote in a letter, his optimistic vision was becoming embattled. All seemed constricted, sterile, contented with a pragmatism that masked futility.

The bridge as a symbol today has no significance beyond an economical approach to shorter hours, quicker lunches, behaviorism and toothpicks.… If only America were half as worthy today to be spoken of as Whitman spoke of it fifty years ago there might be something for one to say—not that Whitman received or required any tangible proof of his intimations, but that time has shown how increasingly lonely and ineffectual his confidence stands.

Crane stayed at 110 Columbia Heights again for a short while in 1927, but the next time he spent a substantial period in Brooklyn came in 1928, after he told Malcolm Cowley, “Tomorrow afternoon I may find a room over on Columbia Hts. if the patron saint of rooming houses (St. Anne, I believe!) is feeling commodious.” He ended up one block away at 77 Willow Street, which was close enough: again he had a view of the river and the bridge. (Truman Capote would later live at 70 Willow, across the street.) The first piece of mail Crane received at his new address was a telegraph from his mother informing him of his grandmother’s death. It was sad news, but not unexpected, and Crane well knew that a five-thousand-dollar inheritance was coming to him—enough to put aside job hunting and finish The Bridge.

Before the money came through, though (it ended up taking some time), he had to take a job. This one came about through help from a friend. After Crane got his foot back in the door of 110 Columbia Heights, in the fall of 1928, he was walking one day down under the Brooklyn Bridge when he came across a young man with a small camera who seemed as interested in the bridge as he was. It turned out their fathers knew each other back in Cleveland. Crane started spending time with the photographer, who had bought his first camera that year and who took a room on Columbia Heights himself. Together they went for walks around the neighborhood, pointing out the sights to each other. Crane’s new friend was Walker Evans, later among the most famous photographers of the century. Evans got Crane hired at the brokerage firm where he had a day job. Crane couldn’t stand “sorting securities of cancelled legions ten years back” while around him executives reaped the market’s 30 percent returns. In a few weeks he made a showy exit scene after arriving at the office at around noon, still drunk and wearing the same clothes as the day before. What reaction Evans had to this outburst is unclear, but he did consent to having one of his remarkable Brooklyn Bridge photos grace the Paris edition of The Bridge.

Stalking out of the job exemplified Crane’s increasingly erratic behavior, driven by booze and an intermittent but severe frustration. One night, after a bout of drinking, he caught a cab back to Brooklyn with Sam Loveman, a writer and friend who was a neighbor. The driver mistakenly took the Williamsburg Bridge and Crane ordered him to stop so he could urinate on the bridge. Back on Columbia Heights, Crane discovered he lacked the money for the fare, leaving it to Loveman to pay. After the driver pulled away, Crane began shouting that he was finished, all used up, and he took off at a run toward his apartment. Loveman gave chase and bounded up the stairs by twos all the way to the roof. Crane had almost reached the edge when Loveman grabbed him and pulled him back, enraged. I’m not writing, Crane explained to Loveman after he’d calmed down, so why live?

But the following year, 1929, Crane finally did finish The Bridge, despite the rough half year in Paris in the interim. As he made the final changes back in Brooklyn (at 130 Columbia Heights now) on the day after Christmas, exhausted by the effort, he must have felt a good deal older than thirty, but thirty he was. Waiting for the book to come out, he moved into a tiny place in the basement at 190 Columbia Heights. Again he found himself penniless, and now, in the wake of the massive stock market crash of October 1929, the hopes of finding a job were even slimmer.

*   *   *

As the title suggests, The Bridge is an expression of the act of connection, not least the connection between the past and the present. One strand running through the verses, often artfully hidden, is the record of one man’s day, beginning with a crossing from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and ending after a crossing in reverse and another look back on the bridge and the river. But this day is surrounded and overwhelmed by the forces of centuries of history. The poem begins with a gorgeous section called “To Brooklyn Bridge” (originally published by Marianne Moore in the Dial) that consists of eleven stanzas, all essentially riffs on a series of images of the great structure, seen from different angles. It is directly addressed to the bridge, as if offering up as tribute a record of years of watching “Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced / As though the sun took step of thee, yet left / Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,—.” The moment of the poem is contemporary: the “I” speaks in present tense and refers to the modern workplace, to “Some page of figures to be filed away; / —Till elevators drop us from our day…” And the cinema, subways, and traffic lights, the visual commerce of the modern city, make appearances. So does a lone man in distress, high on the bridge’s deck: “Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft / A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets, / Tilting there momentarily, shrill shirt ballooning.”

Soon, in the “Ave Maria” section, we are plunged back into America’s dawn, as Crane lays out a scene of Columbus returning to Spain, battered by a storm but bringing word of a new land of Indians: “It is morning there—.” Then we are on the trail of Pocahontas, in a multipoem section called “Powhatan’s Daughter.” But we are awash in this section in a timeless place, as the continuity of the natural world underlies the link that binds together long-separated eras. Crane describes a dawn, viewed through a frosted window, that finds the harbor shrouded in fog, emanating the sounds of foghorns and gongs, until “Cyclopean towers across Manhattan waters” alight—skyscrapers meet ancient myth. And in the next playful poem, Rip Van Winkle turns up on the twentieth-century streets: “And Rip forgot the office hours / and he forgot the pay; / Van Winkle sweeps a tenement / way down on Avenue A,—.” In “The River,” as in the section about Columbus, there is a celebration of journeying not only across time but across space. Crane retraces the steps of the pioneers, traversing the Mississippi, the Ohio, Cheyenne, the Dakotas, but he does so “on the ‘backs’ of hobos,” as he explained in a letter, who are riding the rails of freight trains.

From those marginalized and lowly hobos, the roving eye of the poem, sloshing again into the present, swings to a drinker in a bar by South Street. (South Street Seaport in Manhattan is now a riverside outdoor mall, but in Crane’s time South Street was a gathering spot for sailors and toughs, like Sands Street in Brooklyn.) And then, in “Cape Hatteras,” the South Street drunkard seems to morph into Whitman himself, who once walked the same soil, “our native clay … eternal flesh of Pocahontas.” Whitman is the man to whom “Cape Hatteras” is “a kind of ode,” in Crane’s words, the man he most wants to reach out his hand across time to touch, the man who tended to the nation’s wounded, as the poem suggests. And in The Bridge he is also a lowlife on a bar stool. The dark everyday of the present intrudes again in “The Tunnel.” The subway, the dominant mode of New York’s “to and fro,” is depicted explicitly as “the Daemon,” a wicked, dehumanizing expression of industrial modernity.

The phonographs of hades in the brain

Are tunnels that re-wind themselves, and love

A burnt match skating in a urinal—

Somewhere above Fourteenth TAKE THE EXPRESS

To brush some new presentiment of pain—

The Bridge has by now built its way, though, to “Atlantis,” and here again Crane captures the Brooklyn Bridge, this time at night, with an almost overpowering cascade of words. Now the wires and cables across its span are imagined as an instrument, perhaps a harp, “As though a god were issue of the strings…”

The Bridge is an extremely difficult work. The bridge at its center is made to bear a lot of weight. It stands in for a massive array of connections, accumulated by the poet’s mind over many years. What kept him going over that time was his desire “to handle the beautiful skeins of this myth of America.” Like Whitman, Crane saw in the Brooklyn Bridge a reflection of the nation’s history and ideals and the promise of a new America just now being born. He viewed it as not merely the product of an enormous technical endeavor but the product of an outsize dream. For those who felt alienated by the inexorable advance of technology—the machinations of machines, the defining legacy of the twentieth century—Crane’s answer was to turn a marvel of technology into a metaphor, to make the concrete abstract, to cast the inanimate object as an expression of humanity.

The greeting party for The Bridge in June 1930 did not provide the unanimous praise that Crane might have hoped for. In reviews, Herbert Weinstock, Louis Untermeyer, and especially Granville Hicks bestowed important laurels, but others, including friends, spoke with qualifications. More than a few, like Percy Hutchinson in the New York Times Book Review, were dismayed by the “lack of intelligibility.” Words like that made Crane wince, for he viewed himself as a “social poet.” But Crane could hardly be surprised that he was not taken into open arms, so idiosyncratic and even anachronistic was his vision, and he defended that vision mightily. The poet Allen Tate, in a letter to Crane, laid out an exemplary criticism: “Your vision of American life comes from Whitman, or from the same sources in the American consciousness as his. I am unsympathetic to this tradition, and it seems to me you should be too.” A review Tate wrote went further, calling The Bridge not only incoherent in structure but a “sentimental muddle” of Whitman and “pseudo-primitivism.” Most damningly, Tate cast it as naively romantic and therefore outmoded, dead on the page. “In his rejection of a rational and qualitative will, Crane follows the main stream of romanticism in the last hundred years,” Tate wrote, and he characterized that stream as “dying out.”

We can imagine how sharp the barb must have felt, for what Tate was saying was that Crane had spent years in worship of a false hope. Crane penned a fair but pointed rejoinder in a personal letter, questioning whether it really could be true that he was something like the last romantic, and, more revealingly, whether that in fact represented a criticism: “I shall be humbly grateful if the Bridge can fulfill simply the metaphorical inferences of its title.… You will admit our age (at least our predicament) to be one of transition.” Perhaps, he added, the poem could serve as “a link connecting certain chains of the past to certain chains and tendencies of the future.” In the landmark Crane biography Voyager (1969), John Unterecker notes that some have read Crane’s letter as an admission of certain weaknesses in The Bridge. Unterecker chalks up the concessions to politeness. I hear a different subtext: Crane seems to me to be saying, gently, that if Tate could not see the role and importance of his aesthetic project, then so much the worse for Tate. Crane would hold fast to his viewpoint, even if it cost him acceptance.

In the two years after The Bridge was published, Crane’s personal decline became more and more evident. He did win a Guggenheim Fellowship, which he used to live and work in Mexico, but there the drinking became worse. Late-night arguments landed him again in jail. Friendships ended. He began to feel distant from New York, partly because his fellow writers there were enlisting in the new political wars of the early thirties, while he remained happy to be the apolitical exile artist. A highly unlikely love affair soon arose in Mexico with Peggy Cowley, who was on her way to a divorce from Crane’s friend Malcolm Cowley, the literary editor of the New Republic. It felt preposterous at first but she inspired him and took care of him when he needed it, which was often. Waldo Frank once wrote, imagining a kind of sine curve of Crane’s moods, “The periodicity of his excesses grew swifter; the lucid intervening times when he could write were crowded out. Crane fought death in Mexico.” And he was losing control of the battlefield. After he wrote a will and tried to kill himself by swallowing a bottle of Mercurochrome, Peggy Cowley decided they needed to leave Mexico.

They caught a ship bound for New York, the Orizaba. Crane got drunk and found trouble on the ship overnight, apparently propositioning a male member of the crew. The following day, just before noon, he walked into Peggy’s cabin in pajamas and a topcoat and said, “I’m not going to make it, dear. I’m utterly disgraced.” Accustomed to such remarks, she told him to go get dressed. He agreed and said good-bye, then walked to the stern of the ship, churning off the shore of Florida, and vaulted himself over the rail.

In a life touched by the uncanny and blessed by ironies, here was the darkest irony. Crane’s potent imagery of the overpowering sea in “Voyages,” written during the relatively happy times of the romance with Emil, brings a shiver in light of Crane’s fatal plunge. So, too, does the bedlamite standing on the edge of the bridge, considering a leap.

Hart Crane was thirty-two years old.

In his personal life, Crane was probably too well aligned with the New York City of the 1920s. Of that time in the city, Fitzgerald wrote, “The catering to dissipation set an example to Paris; the shows were broader, the buildings were higher, the morals were looser and the liquor was cheaper; but all these benefits did not really minister to much delight. Young people wore out early.” So it was for Crane, who crashed along with the twenties when the dark thirties came. In his work, however, Crane bucked the tide of his times. The roar of the capitalist economy held no appeal for him, and he set himself against “shorter hours, quicker lunches, behaviorism and toothpicks.” But rather than embrace the pessimism of the poetic age of Eliot, he embraced an “ecstatic goal.” His dramatic death, often mined for meaning, obscures his wider significance; he grew into greatness in an era that was out of step with his ideals.

*   *   *

Marianne Moore spent the twenties surrounded by the same maelstrom of excess, and she was living in the middle of the action, in Greenwich Village. When she had visited Manhattan as a college student, she was enchanted by the breakneck pace. “Dear Family,” she wrote in a letter, “Art is long, but life is so fast I wonder it does not catch up to it.” Becoming editor of the Dial years later pulled her right into the whirl of the literary and artistic community. But in 1929, the year Hart Crane finished The Bridge, his last book, and the year the stock market crash ripped the needle off the phonograph, Moore left Manhattan behind when the Dial folded. It was after that break away from the frenzied center of the literary world that her talent as a poet fully bloomed. Those years were spent in Brooklyn.

Born in 1887, Moore earned a far better education than did Crane, Henry Miller, or Walt Whitman, despite the obstacles women faced at the time. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania in 1909. She had written steadily for the college literary magazine, and though she found writing to be a struggle, she pursued its quiet rewards with determination. Professional publishing interested her, but she knew little about it and was advised to seek secretarial work. (If publishing work represented a somewhat impractical choice for a man, for a woman it was thought to be beyond reach.) So Moore moved back to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the town where she was raised by her mother, Mary Warner Moore. Marianne’s mother had split with her husband in Missouri before Marianne ever met her father. Marianne would choose to be close to her mother, figuratively and literally, for the duration. Her mother died at Brooklyn Hospital in Fort Greene in 1947, a few blocks from their shared apartment.

After college, Moore took classes in typing and shorthand; worked at a summer camp set up by Melvil Dewey (of the decimal system) in Lake Placid, New York; and taught at the Indian School in Carlisle, an institution set up for the benefit of largely impoverished students of American Indian origin. (One of the students was the legendary athlete Jim Thorpe.) She was never happy there, however, and poetry exercised a stronger and stronger pull, even when it went badly and left her in what she called a “black frenzy.” (In a college short story of hers, the narrator feels that “there are times when I should give anything on earth to have writing a matter of indifference to me.”) She continued to place work in a Bryn Mawr magazine, but now Moore was also submitting poems, rather brazenly, to professional publications, several of them in the upper echelon in sales or prestige: the Smart Set, edited by H. L. Mencken; McClure’s; the Atlantic Monthly; the Century.

As Charles Molesworth notes in Marianne Moore: A Literary Life (1990), Moore rejected certain prevailing aesthetic models with remarkable assuredness even in this amateur period. Her comments about contemporary literature of the time reflect a proclivity for the new and untraditional and a point of view growing ever more pointed. There emerged in her work a gently mocking, wry tone with an identifiable ring to it. Asked in a late interview whether her writing style had any literary antecedents, she answered, “Not so far as I know.”

The breakthrough would come on her terms, then, from a somewhat new journal edited by Harriet Monroe called Poetry, which in 1914 snapped up four of her more conventional, rhyming poems and ran them the following year. In 1915, there came an acceptance of three of her more unique verses from the Egoist, where Ezra Pound, living in London, was throwing his weight around as “foreign editor.” The Egoist soon took more of her work, and joining the group were the Lantern and the cutting-edge magazine Others, which also published early poems from Hart Crane within a few years. The editor of Others, Alfred Kreymborg, praised her work as “an amazing output and absolutely original” and quickly became a staunch supporter and mentor. She still “had met no writers,” she later recalled, but against the odds, at twenty-seven she was well on her way.

Flush with her newfound success, in 1915 Moore made another visit to New York, more magical still than the first. This time she came in contact with the Greenwich Village creative community and she toured Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery, 291, which showed the very latest art. By now Moore no longer quite stood in awe of New York. (In fact, at twenty-three she had expressed that she had no desire to settle there.) She came to it, as Molesworth indicates, with a precocious sensibility and with a reputation already secured, albeit among a relatively small group. She did not fit the mold of the provincial type making a wide-eyed pilgrimage, as Hart Crane did in the same period. Prepared perhaps for an unvarnished talent from the sticks, the mainstays of the New York scene encountered someone else entirely. Kreymborg described her as “an astonishing person with Titian hair, a brilliant complexion and a mellifluous flow of polysyllables which held every man in awe.”

A good job offer for Moore’s brother, a Presbyterian pastor, in Chatham, New Jersey, nudged her and her mother closer to New York, as they all moved to New Jersey to be together. Moore’s valuable, eccentric, and wonderfully written letters, a selection of which were finally published in 1997, reveal a family trio so intimately connected that they shared what you might call their own private dialect. Moore was a biology enthusiast and famously an ardent lover of animals, and she, her brother, and her mother used odd, animal-inspired nicknames for one another—among them “Fangs,” “Gator,” and “Fish.” Moore cared deeply about her brother’s and mother’s views of her work, and the two often played some role in her writing process or at least gave her comments after publication. Warner, as her brother was called, remarked about two of her poems from the Dial, “I was … greatly impressed with the fundamental grasp of ‘Life’ in them and expressed too in our own special ‘language’ but so marvelously handled that the ‘aliens’ could and can understand them & enjoy them.” When friction at home did inevitably arise, she was quite capable of holding firm. Her mother noted in a letter to Warner that while many women needed to be loved, her daughter was not one of them.

In fact, Moore had written to her brother from the Lake Placid camp that she had received the attention of some suitors—seven, she said with precision—but they were all decisively rebuffed. In a lifetime of copious published correspondence and poetry, this is one of only a few references to even the possibility of romantic love, let alone marriage.

The stay in Chatham was short-lived; Warner took a commission as a chaplain in the navy and then got engaged to a woman from the Bronx. He found Marianne and her mother a place in New York to stay for a time, at 39 Charlton Street in Manhattan, and then an apartment nearby at 14 St. Luke’s Place, in 1918. This was Greenwich Village, a neighborhood that had already become a hotbed of radical left politics. It would also become, for decades, synonymous not only with a profusion of art and literature but with a burst of what Moore might tactfully have called creative living. During Moore’s time at that address, Theodore Dreiser would live two doors down, at No. 16, while working on An American Tragedy, and Sherwood Anderson would live two doors in the other direction, at No. 12. (Moore seems to have liked Anderson, but called his wife “a crude, undignified curtain-tassel-swinging woman, well meaning but impossible.”) At the time that Dreiser lived there (1922–23), he was still battling the censors over Sister Carrie, published decades before, and a group of his supporters, including Fitzgerald, Mencken, Horace Liveright, and Carl Van Vechten, held at least one meeting on the parlor floor of his house.

Elsewhere in the neighborhood, the Provincetown Players were shaking up the theater scene, providing a more adventurous and less commercial alternative to Broadway; Mabel Dodge’s salon had been serving as a focal point for colorful counterculturalism; obscenity laws and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice provided a target of widespread ire and ridicule; and Edna St. Vincent Millay skipped around town, flaunting her new sexual freedom with her sister in tow, the two of them the talk of all the men in the Village. Millay was beginning her ascent into a kind of renown almost unprecedented for a poet, as readers responded to her beauty and the devil-may-care abandon she famously expressed: “My candle burns at both ends; / It will not last the night; / But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends— / It gives a lovely light!”

In her early thirties, Moore was now in the thick of the action. But she was never quite of the action. She lived with her mother; she was suspicious of liberal politics and the rejection of mainstream morality; she took a job at the dowdy local branch of the public library, and enjoyed it; she thought the Provincetown Playhouse ought to have been called “Plague House.” About Millay, her field’s leading light, Moore had not a word to offer in print, which, in Molesworth’s words, “seems much more a judgment than an oversight.” Not long after Moore’s arrival, she wrote to Pound in early 1919, embracing the Village on very different grounds than many of her contemporaries did: “I like New York, the little quiet part of it in which my mother and I live. I like to see the tops of the masts from our door and to go to the wharf and look at the craft on the river.” Writers all around were diving into the fray; she was looking past it, to the ships in the sea. She enjoyed the energy of the city, but only when it pointed in the direction of general improvement rather than individual pleasure or power. To Pound she added, “I sometimes feel as if there are too many captains in one boat.”

The literati were beginning to celebrate the unusual voice now living in their midst, but she wasn’t sure how she felt about it. In a poem written around this time, Moore wrote:

when you

See a light and mothlike want to

Go in, this is to be said in favor of staying out—

There is danger in being appre

Ciated

It was also in this period that she published the most famous lines of her career, and they, too, show her keeping a wry distance from the art she had chosen. The title of the poem was “Poetry” and the first line, amusingly barbed, was “I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.” But the lines that follow point to the elements of poetry that called out to her: “Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in / it, after all, a place for the genuine.” Thirty years after the poem was published, she maintained that she still disliked poetry “with all my heart: I fear and dread it, and we are estranged from it by much that passes for virtuosity—that is affectation or exhibitionism.” (She didn’t like to call her works poems, preferring the term “observations.”) She hastened to add, though, that sometimes “talent comes to the rescue … and automatically we are helplessly interested.”

Moore was drawn into the tight circle of the Dial in the early twenties, particularly after she met one of its young co-owners, Scofield Thayer, an aesthete and heir whose art collection was valued at $40 million when he died in 1982. The publication was, in Donald Hall’s estimation, “without doubt the most prestigious of the literary periodicals in this country and, many would say, the world.” In earlier decades it had been a forum for socially engaged writers like John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen, but under this new ownership it was becoming more aesthetic and less political. It did not fall into any existing camp, leaving it vulnerable to criticism from all comers, as Molesworth points out. Some blamed its eventual demise on its lack of a distinct point of view, but Moore admired that quality. A 1917 Dial manifesto announced that it would “try to meet the challenge of the new time by reflecting and interpreting its spirit—a spirit freely experimental, skeptical of inherited values, ready to examine old dogmas, and to subject afresh its sanctions to the test of experience.” The words were well suited to Moore.

She published many of her poems in the Dial during this period, and she came to be well known in the literary world—while maintaining a marked artistic independence. To the writer Bryher she wrote, “I must tell the truth and admit that friends are continually writing what I resist, but that fact in no way lessens the keenness of my interest.” In Marianne Moore: The Cage and the Animal (1970), Hall writes, “At a time when American writers were casting about uncertainly for a distinctive new mode of expression, Miss Moore, by virtue of her independent spirit, was pointing the way.” One poem she published in the Dial, in 1921, was “New York,” whose first line, “the savage’s romance,” evokes something of the drama of the place. The poem draws lines of connection between the present and a pre-urban New York, an island with a thriving trade in fur pelts, a land where “the ground [is] dotted with deer-skins.” This harkening back to an untamed past echoes Whitman, who wrote with awe of walking the same ground as Indians who saw only wilderness. Crane showed the same instinct, fixing his attention in The Bridge on Pocahontas and Columbus. Moore’s poem suggests that the essence of New York is not commerce but, as the closing words have it, “accessibility to experience,” a phrase from Henry James. Despite her reclusive streak and her opposition to Village mores, Moore did much to make herself accessible to experience. In a 1922 letter to her brother, she wrote of a single day when she saw the actress Yvette Guilbert in a matinee, went to a tea in honor of the Benét family, attended a reading by Amy Lowell, and visited the studio of Gaston Lachaise.

In 1924 Moore received the Dial Award and in 1925 the magazine hired her and soon made her its editor. Now the demands on her time and energy ramped up even more, as she both took on a full-time job and saw her social and professional cachet rise. As editor she had to contend with satisfying both Watson and Thayer, the two co-owners, even as Thayer was becoming difficult to handle. (At one point Sigmund Freud was consulted about Thayer’s attempts to abruptly fire several employees.) Meanwhile, Moore made a significant mark on the publication. She didn’t yank it in a new direction and she was not authoritarian with her staff—that wasn’t in her nature—but she exercised great control and kept the magazine fresh. She often made surprising editorial choices based on which written work grabbed her and her colleagues with its “intensity,” a favorite word around the office. When Hall asked her what made the Dial so good, she answered, “Lack of fear, for one thing.” About the criteria for publication, she added, “I think that individuality was the great thing. We were not conforming to anything.” Her decision to keep publishing Crane despite their many differences proves the point. Unconventionality sometimes meant rejecting established figures with perhaps too much explanation as to why. This led to an argument by mail with the writer Maxwell Bodenheim, then a star of the avant-garde, who finally wrote to her, “God how I hate you and your mean, unfair, half-blind, apprehensively arbitrarily, literary group.”

While residing in one of the most bohemian zip codes in America and editing an artistically adventurous journal, Moore attended church without fail. She was greatly influenced by her even more religious mother, who felt that her daughter’s writing should serve a larger purpose: “You have a vivid and expanding imagination; see that you put it to the right use.” Moore sought to fulfill this aim and shared little in common with Village creative types who treated faith and decorum as the bourgeois enemy. She always supported the bold and new in art but held the line against the onrush of coarse or sexually explicit content. “Judging by our experimental writing,” she wrote in 1936, “we are suffering today from unchastity, sadism, blasphemy, and rainsoaked foppishness.” At times she crossed the line into prudishness. She took exception to her close friend and protégée Elizabeth Bishop’s use of the term “water closet” in a poem, which she found vulgar (“the heroisms of abstinence are as great as the heroisms of courage,” she told Bishop). But for the most part she took it in stride that she was fighting an uphill battle, and she listened to opposing views. In a remembrance of her Dial years published in 1940, Moore reprinted with admiration a letter she had received from D. H. Lawrence after she turned down some poems among a batch he had sent, while accepting a few others. The letter read in part, “I knew some of the poems would offend you. But then some part of life must offend you too, and even beauty has its thorns and its nettle-stings and its poppy-poison.”

In 1929 the Dial folded. Along with some sadness and regret, Moore felt considerable relief, drained as she was by the stress of running the show. Now she could do things that earlier she could do only by guiltily slipping out of the office on a Friday afternoon, like seeing Charlie Chaplin (also a favorite of Hart Crane’s) in the circus. The end of the Dial was a chance to take a breath, to spend more time with her mother and brother, and of course to write; having published not one of her own poems during her tenure at the magazine, she wanted to return to composing her eccentric, compressed, and careful verses. It was a good time to move to Brooklyn.

*   *   *

Moore had never liked the lack of fresh air and sunshine in her Greenwich Village apartment on St. Luke’s Place, which she felt contributed to the fragility of her mother’s and her own health. And the small-scale charms of the neighborhood were under growing threat as the Roaring Twenties roared and commerce and construction made their boisterous din. The crowds on the sidewalks, the alcohol-drenched parties, the writers new and old seeking her attention—it was like swimming in a river that had once refreshed her but now pulled her in its current too rapidly for comfort. With the Dial years over, she didn’t have to be here. She could step ashore. In the summer of 1929 she vacationed with her mother in Maine, a favorite place, and on August 13 her brother found them a Brooklyn apartment just a ten-minute walk from the Navy Yard, where he was stationed. Moore soon moved in and would live there, at 260 Cumberland Street in Fort Greene, for all of her many years in Brooklyn, an era of tectonic change that spanned from the 1920s to the 1960s. The neighborhood was a bit deeper into Brooklyn than where Crane lived, though within range of a long walk. For a writer at the time, it was a more unusual choice than Brooklyn Heights.

Her apartment building on Cumberland, limestone with a parapet ornamented by lions’ heads, still stands (with an additional story added to the original five). It is less than a block from Fort Greene Park, the sloping green space that Whitman campaigned for and that Henry Miller used as an afternoon reading spot. Miller was probably visiting the park in the first months after Moore arrived. Had they become acquainted, they no doubt would have hated each other. Moore was attending services with her mother at the church around the corner every Wednesday and Sunday. Miller was trying to publish a novel called Crazy Cock.

Miller commented on the gentility and the well-preserved character of the area during his time there, spent mostly a few blocks away, on Clinton Avenue. Now Moore took in the same sights as she settled in, even with the Great Depression descending; the long-standing prosperity of the neighborhood was not so quickly dispatched. Great wealth did not predominate, but the legacy of Pratts, Kingsleys, and Pfizers still made itself felt—in proper modes of dress, for instance, with hats for men and broad skirts for women, and in the ivy climbing the walls of houses whose architecture bespoke solidity. The blocks surrounding Moore’s ornamented limestone building on Cumberland were, then as now, lined with Italianate and Anglo-Italianate row houses, most of them with facades made of brownstone that had been quarried in Connecticut or New Jersey and transported at great expense. Where it meets Dekalb Avenue, Cumberland Street becomes Washington Park, which overlooks the green expanse of Fort Greene Park. Washington Park became one of the most desirable addresses in Brooklyn after the park was rebuilt in 1867 under the direction of Olmsted and Vaux. (The two had completed Central Park, and their already beloved Prospect Park in Brooklyn had recently opened while still under construction.)

Moore and her mother’s expenses were covered mainly by Warner’s support, by the generosity of some benefactors who admired Marianne’s work, and by income from property that her mother had inherited. They lived modestly, in the kind of affordable multiunit building that had been built more recently than the grand brownstones nearby. The church Moore attended, Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, was built in the early 1860s and later supplemented by an extraordinary set of Tiffany stained-glass windows. It was the site of her memorial service in 1972, and it remains in operation.

From the beginning, the move to Brooklyn was a welcome change for Moore and her mother. Compared to the narrow and crowded streets of the Village, the new neighborhood provided far more sunlight and breezes and a sense of space. Marianne liked to play tennis in Fort Greene Park with local kids. Often she would take in the sun from the roof of her building, which afforded a view of treetops and a few scattered pedestrians. As Manhattan became colossal, Brooklyn offered a human scale. Molesworth notes that she remarked to George Saintsbury in 1930 that Brooklyn “seemed to her decorous and leisurely, as the outside world did to her as a child.” She later wrote that in the wake of the move, “Anonymity, without social or professional duties after a life of pressure in New York, we found congenial.” “Decorum,” “anonymity,” “an atmosphere of privacy with a touch of diffidence”—these words that Moore chose to describe her new surroundings she never would have chosen for her Manhattan home.

Brooklyn breathed new air into Moore’s fascination with the natural world. Although hardly a pastoral or even suburban place, her part of Brooklyn was not the massive sculpture of concrete, steel, and tarmac that much of Manhattan was becoming in the era of the race to build the world’s tallest skyscraper. Moore remarked that Brooklyn, often nicknamed “a city of churches,” “might also be called a city of trees.” Time spent in Fort Greene Park yielded an admiration for “the massive branches of elms with the anatomy of oaks”; in one of her typically exact images, she described those branches “emerging black after a shower through a mist of incipient emerald leaves.” Even closer to home, “a linden at our corner diffused in spring just enough perfume, not too much; in autumn dropping its seeds, two on a stem from the center of each leaf.” Birds came to her window and drew her eye. She once wrote a personal essay for Harper’s Bazaar in which she imagined that a crow from Fort Greene Park had adopted her hat for a perch and that she had adopted the bird in return. In the essay, she named the crow Pluto and took him on errands, “although he attracted attention in a drugstore or store like Key Food.”

Moore liked to visit the Prospect Park Zoo and watch nature documentaries at the Brooklyn Institute for Arts and Sciences, today’s Brooklyn Academy of Music. The Brooklyn Institute, where she attended talks and performances by, for example, Thornton Wilder, W. B. Yeats, Igor Stravinsky, and a snake-wielding zoo curator, gave her such enjoyment that “I was pitied at home for not being able to sleep in the building.” The Brooklyn Institute had grown out of the original Apprentices’ Library, founded in Whitman’s childhood with cast-off books collected in a wheelbarrow. Brooklyn had come a long way as a cultural center. In another magazine essay, Moore saw fit to mention not only an “eminent stationer” and “a really literary bookstore” nearby where the young saleswoman “knows what the wanted thing is and where to find it,” but also a particularly fine florist among several “meriting a compliment.” These are the remarks of a woman finding pleasures away from the main stage, in a life of vibrant but smaller proportions.

After moving to Brooklyn, Moore spent a couple of years working in private on her verses and writing criticism, making frequent use of the Pratt Institute’s then public library, before she began to publish her “observations” again. Beginning in 1932, there emerged a slow stream of them, largely written under the sun on the roof of 260 Cumberland. As Hall writes, compared to her earlier work they “seem to come from a gentler hand, more self-assured.” Among these were a number of nature poems, several of them among her most well-received works: “The Jerboa,” “The Plumet Basilisk,” “The Frigate Pelican,” and “The Pangolin.” Each of these is a study, written with occasional delight but constant precision, of an exotic creature. These are very rewarding and also difficult poems. She once wrote, “When an author writes as if he were alone, without thought of an audience … it is this which makes a masterpiece.” But Moore’s reserve and restraint played a role, too. Her desire for the poems to be unmuddied and clear—and she did have that desire—was at war with a fear that she herself would be too readily understood. In these nature poems, self-protection is a central theme, as Moore delineates how her animal protagonists shield themselves against a threatening world. “The Pangolin” begins self-consciously: “Another armored animal—.” So, too, did she armor herself in her writing. In 1951 she wrote in an unusually revelatory letter, “‘Society’ is intolerable—so decadent and pleased to be decadent, that one’s heart fails one. However, since our life depends on immunizing ourselves to externalities that are destructive, we can do it.”

Hall suggests that Moore’s animal studies and other poems from the thirties demonstrate a turn inward that coincided with the changing times and also with the new phase of her life that began with her move to Brooklyn. In the midst of the Depression, as men who had worked furiously in the effort to build the Empire State Building now stood in breadlines, Moore declined to address contemporary social trends. Instead she admired the trees and the birds—timeless subjects—and the slow feel of her neighborhood.

But the literary establishment increasingly responded, no matter how much she tried to put it out of mind. In 1933 she won a major prize from Poetry magazine, and Warner’s words of joy and congratulations must have pleased her greatly: “The Poetry award affects me to the very soul.… Perhaps, the best of it is the reliving of the moments of my den in ‘260’ [Cumberland] when we gathered to read Rat’s po’ms & listen to Mole read them while I gazed at the steeple [of the Presbyterian church] with its star slightly tilted awry & watched pigeons circle the spire, against an azure sky.” In 1935 Moore’s Selected Poems appeared, along with a laudatory introduction by T. S. Eliot. His words did little to sway Moore’s detractors, however, many of whom now found both her and Eliot guilty of standing aside as the world came apart. In the pages of the New Republic, the Nation, New Masses, and other magazines (almost all of them in Manhattan), writers were sounding a call to arms for a more socially engaged poetry in Depression-era America. Ezra Pound, in spirited correspondence, took her to task directly for avoiding politics. While Moore may have felt some pangs of guilt—“I confess … to writing a poem about a persimmon let us say instead of … handing out the dole”—she held firm in this period, as Miller and Crane did, in supporting the value of art that stands outside the fray.

In the forties her work took a more outward-looking turn, speaking more directly, and with more straightforward articulations of private feeling. In 1943 she published “In Distrust of Merits,” an antiwar poem that is often quoted and anthologized. It conveys an anguish over the speaker’s intentional lack of involvement: “I inwardly did nothing. / O Iscariot-like crime!” Moore later disavowed the poem in a sense, granting that it was “truthful” but saying that it was haphazard and even shrill: “It is just a protest.… Emotion overpowered me.” This battle between public expression and engagement on the one hand and reticence on the other continued throughout her career. In 1965 she said she was “much more aware of the world’s dilemma” than she had been early in her career, and in the 1961 Paris Review interview she spoke against obscurity: “I don’t approve of my ‘enigmas.’” Yet she remained committed to withholding, and to studying rather than teaching.

A poet who wrote of the danger of appreciation, she began to experience quite a bit of it. Acclaim for Moore reached its pinnacle after her Collected Poems was published in 1951. She swept the Bollingen Award, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in the same year. The forties had brought her a number of difficulties—a slowing of poetic output, the failure to publish a novel she worked on for years, and, what was worse, her mother’s decline and eventual death in 1947. After these struggles with adversity, Moore was not too saintly to be gratified by this remarkable outpouring of applause. Interview requests accumulated, and invitations to conferences and colleges and teas; she was asked in a letter from the Ford Motor Company to help come up with a name for a new model of car, beginning a correspondence that was published in the New Yorker (Ford called it the Edsel, not one of her suggestions); a devoted Brooklyn Dodgers fan, she published a bit of light verse in support of the team on the front page of the New York Herald-Tribune on the day the 1956 World Series began; she turned up in magazines such as Vogue and Seventeen and was called on for fashion advice; she took up the cause of saving an ailing grand tree in Prospect Park in her poem “The Camperdown Elm,” and so the tree, “our crowning curio,” was saved; George Plimpton invited her to a World Series game so he could write it up for a national magazine; she appeared on the cover of Esquire and even on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.

In short, Moore became a living legend, which brought some of the dangers she had feared. She continued writing, and she remained a poet of originality and independence, but the public flattened her into a charming, eccentric grandmother figure—“a kind of declawed and adorable poetic mascot,” in the apt words of Jeredith Merrin. This distorted view was especially unfortunate because it misrepresented her essential self as a poet. Her sharp aesthetic was eccentric, yes, but not at all in the quaint and grinning way that her new admirers imagined. She was a challenging and uncompromising poet.

Moore likely would have honed her unique voice and held fast to it even if she had never moved to Brooklyn, and the same is true of Hart Crane. But the place did suit them both as artists and as people, as different as they were. Crane found his secret pleasures in the tawdry world of Sands Street, a social universe far removed from his friends. More significantly, he found his perch, in the same building where the Roeblings lived, to write about the great subject and metaphor of his life’s work, the Brooklyn Bridge. From that place in the Heights, just on the outside of the awesome skyline, he deemed it “particularly fine to feel the greatest city in the world from enough distance, as I do here, to see its larger proportions.” To be right in the center of the metropolis, he added, was to be “often too distracted,” and Moore would have readily agreed. For her, the fresher air and the smaller scale of the pleasures she knew in Brooklyn made a ready match not only for her way of writing but for her way of being. In 1960 she wrote, “Brooklyn has given me pleasure, has helped to educate me; has afforded me, in fact, the kind of tame excitement on which I thrive.”