Viewing page 2 of 3

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Transcription: [00:04:43]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
--'Star bright, skylight' of Manhattan the way in which America has conquered space and time through construction beams and Brooklyn Bridge,
[00:04:53]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
but he also recognizes that it is a place where you can fall into temptation, where you can go out at night and cruise the city and wake up in the subway,
[00:05:01]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
not quite sure how you got there.
[00:05:03]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Crane is constantly tempted and he constantly succumbs to temptation.
[00:05:08]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Um, he's a man in love with the city, and what he does in his poetry, which is to my mind, is almost singular in American modernists,
[00:05:16]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
is he fuses that attraction and repulsion that says that modern life is both an incredible adventure and also a snare, a trap, in which we fall,
[00:05:26]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
a wh-- a condition in which we can't escape, a predetermined sense that we're damned.
[00:05:33]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And Crane, in the kind of ecstatic of his lyric, is constantly fighting against those two temptations.
[00:05:39]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He works; he publishes a book called "White Buildings" and he works incessantly through the 1920s on his great poem "The Bridge",
[00:05:48]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
which is really a restatement of America, a restatement in many ways of Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass", from the perspective of the early 20th century.
[00:05:58]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Um, as I've indicated, of course, it alludes in its-- 'In the Bridge' alludes to crossing Brooklyn Ferry,
[00:06:05]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
um, again, Walt Whitman's pre-industrial city, the bridge is Roebling's Brooklyn Bridge,
[00:06:13]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
the bridge of the technological future; the most inspiring, in many ways, edifice; the most inspiring, um,
[00:06:20]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
all-conquering structure in the late 19th century, marking the shift from the pre-industrial ferry to the modern bridge.
[00:06:30]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Crane works on this laboriously, capturing again, and I'll read from some of it,
[00:06:36]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
capturing again this notion of damnation and liberation at the same time.
[00:06:45]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And he says just again, the kind of ecstatic, occasionally almost incomprehensible, lyric,
[00:06:52]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
in which-- in which-- in which Crane assimilates the modern city in our place from the middle of the first part of "The Bridge":
[00:07:00]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
"Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,"
[00:07:06]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
"Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan."
[00:07:12]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
"Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky’s acetylene;"
[00:07:19]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
"All afternoon the cloud flown derricks turn …
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still."
[00:07:25]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
"And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon … Accolade thou dost bestow"
[00:07:31]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
"Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show."
[00:07:37]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
"The Bridge" fused this technological achievement fused in his own incredible imagination.
[00:07:42]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Crane, in the meantime (and this is where I'll start to intersect him with Hartley),
[00:07:48]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
is working his way towards an ecstatic appreciation of the world that many other people are also trying to come to grips with.
[00:07:56]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Marsden Hartley, the great Early American abstractionist,
[00:08:00]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
who we see over there around the corner in Berlin 47 developing a style of abstract portraiture.
[00:08:08]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Um, Crane and Hartley had a distant, frequently acrimonious relationship, one in which, um,
[00:08:16]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Hartley, who's about a generation older, censured, badmouthed, and generally criticized Crane
[00:08:24]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
for wasting his talent.
[00:08:27]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
They came from totally opposite backgrounds. Crane, as I said, was wealthy; Hartley was desperately poor.
[00:08:33]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Curiously enough, and you can make of this what you will,
[00:08:37]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Edward Marsden Hartley abandoned the name Edward to adopt his mother's and stepmother's maiden name Marsden,
[00:08:44]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
in much the same way that Hardt Crane abandons Harold.
[00:08:48]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Its sort of the identification with the stepmother or the mother.
[00:08:52]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Again though, the element which I'm interested in is that they named themselves; they became liberated by--
[00:08:58]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
rom their own ancestral background by adopting a name they bestowed on their own individuality.
[00:09:05]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Hartley, born poor, near orphaned, raised, gets again, not unlike Crane, falls in with exactly the right people,
[00:09:15]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
makes it to New York, trains, gets into the Stieglitz Circle, he moves to Germany, falls in love with a German Army Officer,
[00:09:22]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
paints that officer in a series of magnificent abstractions in which biography is hidden
[00:09:27]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
behind the signs and symbols of a modern, flourishing, white-hot technology of Germany.
[00:09:33]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And this element, for Hartley, of hygiene is very important. Hartley is always clean and Crane is always dirty.
[00:09:41]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And this is the sort of basic, personal quarrel between the two of them, the older man, Hartley,
[00:09:45]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
always looking censoriously at the younger man Crane.
[00:09:50]

When Crane would go on a bender and would come home with a Norwegian sailor
[00:09:53]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
who was his-- his-- his most constant lover, Hartley could only tsk tsk.
[00:09:59]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
There's a wonderful photograph of Marsden Hartley at the beach in Nice sometime on the 1920s in which he's wearing the full regalia of-- of spats
[00:10:07]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
and-- and-- and, uh, white duck trousers, and he's sort of sitting like this as if
[00:10:10]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
"Oh, I'm supposed to be on the sand having a good time," but he's really not; he's perpetually uptight.
[00:10:17]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
If Crane is an ecstatic light that burns itself out early, Hartley is the-- is a tortured wanderer in many ways,
[00:10:25]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
restlessly searching for an artistic style that he can make his own,
[00:10:29]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
working his way through his original creation of abstract portraiture to landscapes that, in many ways, look like Cezanne,
[00:10:36]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
um, to-- to-- to desert landscapes that look very much like O'Keefe, and in many ways
[00:10:41]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
trying to break through from a patrimony that he would claim in his own name,
[00:10:45]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
but could not claim artistically for himself.
[00:10:48]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
The two of them intersected as sort of a competing vision of American modernism.
[00:10:53]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Hartley increasingly intellectual, increasingly symbolic and increasingly stylized and abstract;
[00:11:00]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Crane always, again to use Melver's-- Melville's term, "Trying to punch through the face board and ask to get to the essential reality of life,"
[00:11:09]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
the essential essence through a language that becomes more of baroque, more and more flowering, and more and more turned into itself.
[00:11:15]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Crane labors mightily on 'The Bridge'; his great book length poem which contains many more sections than just the one on the Brooklyn Bridge
[00:11:24]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
and in th-- in th-- he finds himself increasingly blocked, um, and he moves,
[00:11:31]

he gets a Fulbright, and he goes to Mexico in the late, in around about 1930.
[00:11:37]

Um ,Mexico seems to, as it did to so many people of his generation, seems to have addled him.
[00:11:44]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
It was hot, it was dry, it was dusty, it was always an invitation to have a drink, it was an invitation to always meet with a stranger passing through.
[00:11:52]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He follows through a rather enigmatic figure of David Siqueiros,
[00:11:56]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
who is later complicit in a plot to kill Trotsky, who is moved to Mexico.
[00:12:02]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Um, and he Crane uh, altogether does not conquer his writer's block, in fact, he seems to make it worse.
[00:12:09]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Compounding this is that, for the first time, he falls in, or at least has a relationship,
-I'm not sure he fell in love-
[00:12:15]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
but he has a relationship with a woman, Peggy Baird; the ex-wife of Malcolm Cowley,
[00:12:22]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
and on the ship going back from Mexico to New Orleans, or actually New York, um,
[00:12:30]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Crane-- There's an episode in which Crane, as he puts it, totally disgraces himself,[00:12:35]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
writing in his diary, and he jumps off the ship, um, in a suicide that his family could never accept.
[00:12:41]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
They built a grave for him in Ohio even though his body was never found.
[00:12:45]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
There's conflicted reports as to whether he looked-- he reached for the life raft or the buoy that was thrown to him.
[00:12:52]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
He nonetheless disappears into the Caribbean, and Marsden Hartley, again not somebody who you would think of as his friend,
[00:13:01]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
not someone who you would think of who would offer a tribute to him,
[00:13:04]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
seems to have been bereft by this loss; he's bereft by a variety of reasons.
[00:13:10]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Hartley, despite his rather crabby disposition, did have an appreciation for genius,
[00:13:15]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
and one of the things he always said about Crane is that Crane had wasted his talent.
[00:13:20]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
It was this element of unfulfilled expectation that drove Hartley mad,
[00:13:24]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
and when Crane dies, and the news gets back to New York,
[00:13:29]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Hartley reverts to a modified style of the abstract portraiture with which he had first made his name in 1912, 1915 in Berlin.
[00:13:37]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And he paints this "Eight Bells Folly: Memorial to Hardt Crane",
[00:13:41]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
and he himself describes it as a mad painting; a painting out of-- Hartley describes it as a mad painting; a painting out of control.
[00:13:49]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And like the German officer paintings, what he does is he abstracts Crane's career into a series of signs,
[00:13:56]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
symbols, and even portents mixing in his own rather imaginative, if not cracked ethno-religious, scheme.
[00:14:03]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And so in it, you see the- the- semi- these- these quadrants which form in many ways;
[00:14:09]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
they are emblematic of the bridge, the suspension bridge, uh, Brooklyn Bridge across from the East River.
[00:14:17]

The stylized boat, it was actually a steam ship that come- came back but nonetheless an allusion here to the pre-industrial past which Crane in fact eschewed.
[00:14:27]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
33 is the year in which Crane-- the age of Crane when Crane died,
[00:14:32]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
and again the coincidence there a that "C 33" refers to the tortured genius,
[00:14:37]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
the tortured gay man Oscar Wilde; the avatar of the homosexual dilemma at the turn of the century.
[00:14:43]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
Um, there is over here "8 bells", refers to Crane going over the side at 12'oclock noon, 8 bells in mariner talk.
[00:14:52]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And here you actually see literally, um, Hartley was a great abstractionist, but he could be pretty literal.
[00:14:58]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
And so you have a ship's bell here with the 8 on it, the eyes are from "Melville's Tomb,"
[00:15:04]

{SPEAKER name="David C. Ward"}
a poem that Crane wrote early, and so I'll read a little bit of: Um--
[00:15:12]

Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2023-06-20 15:55:42 ---------- Reopened for Editing 2023-06-20 17:08:35 ---------- Reopened for Editing 2023-06-20 18:50:47 The transcriptions was not done correctly. Please read INSTRUCTIONS and watch VIDEOS as to the method of placing Timestamps, spacing, etc.. I will reopen to fix it all and insert spacing that is required.'