cover image The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane

The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane

Paul L. Mariani. W. W. Norton & Company, $35 (492pp) ISBN 978-0-393-04726-4

The first account of Crane to embrace his homosexuality and to assess its place in his poetry, Mariani's biography illuminates previously shadowy corners of the writer's life. John Unterecker's Voyager appeared 30 years ago, only a few months before the Stonewall protest helped to galvanize a movement that, by now, has done away with the qualifications and apologies so long applied to gay writers and their work. Mariani, who has written lives of John Berryman, Robert Lowell and William Carlos Williams, does not have Unterecker's (or the first Crane biographer Philip Horton's) advantage of having interviewed many who knew Crane. But he compensates by quoting more extensively, and tellingly, from Crane's correspondence, one of the most revealing and insightful of the literary 20th century. Mariani also has a better grasp on Crane's complex relationship with his parents, especially in his sensitive portrayal of Crane's father (the inventor of Life Savers candy), who heretofore has been treated as a stereotypical philistine. Mariani also clears up many misconceptions about Crane's final despairing months in Mexico and his sole tormented heterosexual affair. The one flaw in Mariani's research is that he has not drawn on the existing collections of the papers of Crane's closest friends and associates, such as Waldo Frank, Yvor Winters and Gorham Munson. All these individuals appear here through Crane's eyes. Perhaps Mariani is compensating for his predecessors' propensity to depict Crane through the recollections of others, but a more balanced approach would have strengthened the book. His occasionally florid style notwithstanding, Mariani does the necessary work of throwing sympathetic light on Crane's sexuality, and makes a convincing case for Crane as one of the greatest American poets of the century. (May)