SOURCE: "Cultural Revisions in the Twenties: Brooklyn Bridge as "Usable Past"," in The American Self: Myth, Ideology and Popular Culture, edited by Sam B. Girgus, University of New Mexico Press, 1981, pp. 58-75.

[In the following essay, Trachtenberg discusses The Bridge as a landmark of the 1920s cultural and aesthetic vision.]

Hart Crane's The Bridge (1930) has its origins in the twenties. As much autobiography as "myth of America," the poem belongs not only to the decade's syncopated tempos and aesthetic entrancements, but as well to its deep changes and conflicts. The poet's own life in these years of encroaching mechanization, standardization, and consumer capitalism, is the historical ground of the poem, a ground too rarely allowed more than passing notice in criticism. It is characteristic of our criticism that it knows less about history than it does about literary forms and influences, and knowing less about the ground of art, it inevitably knows less about the ideas that inform works of art, and the intrinsic powers that reside within them. We know that the twenties brought a renascence into American art, a flourishing of energies that had been launched in the previous decade. We know too little, however, of how those energies confronted new social and cultural formations, how they were shaped by struggles of artists to realize visions antithetical to their times, especially to the behavioristic model which in these years established itself in the media, in advertising, and in popular and academic social thought.¹

The twenties witnessed a flowering of literary and artistic experiment, an assimilation of European modernism, of Surrealism and Dada, and the achievement of a new speech in the poetry of Pound, Eliot, Frost, Stevens, and Williams. Crane himself breathed deeply in this atmosphere of aesthetic excitement, of jostling manifestoes and doctrines, and The Bridge might be read, as Frederick Hoffman shows, as a typical document of experimentation.² But we need also a way of reading the poem, and understanding the aesthetic production of the period in general, as embodying a resistance to what Crane and other artists perceived as the ultimate menace of modern bourgeois society: its assault on the realm of autonomy, on the very sources of art. For the first time in American life, at least in such coherent form, art began to appear as a separate realm: not merely a vehicle for criticism, but an alternative way of life.

The implicit ambition of modernist art in the twenties was to open a space for itself (as for the daily life of artists and a new intelligentsia in Bohemian colonies) within the larger culture, a culture in which older patterns of gentility and puritan moralism were adapting themselves to new social demands of consumership and technological change. Crane's poem has yet another emphasis, an additional ambition: to alter the larger culture itself, to revise its sense of itself, its dominant values, and especially its idea of its history. As a revisionary epic, The Bridge shares a common project with works of criticism and cultural history by Waldo Frank, Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, Paul Rosenfield, and especially William Carlos Williams—the project of creating a "usable past."³Crane's is the epic statement of this concerted effort, at the heart of which lay (even in the more conventional historical writings of Lewis Mumford) a vision of an aesthetic self, a poetic sensibility, as the true mediator of a true cultural history. How else are we to understand the epic scale of The Bridge except as the effort of the poet to discover himself in all of American history, from Columbus's voyage to the western settlement, from the building of Brooklyn Bridge to invention of the airplane? To discover himself as the redemptive poetic consciousness of the history as a whole, as a totality. Revision of history becomes a mode of self-discovery and self-possession. The poem, like Williams' project to "re-name the things seen" in In The American Grain (1925), is a deliberate act of such revision, a rethinking and recasting of the past into a future represented by the poet's present.

The Bridge strives for transcendence, for a conversion of the everyday into the spiritual, of modern American into a symbol of a new consciousness. Or, in terms the great Dutch historian Johan Huizinga used in his account of the way of life he found in American in 1926, to transform the "transitive culture" of "This, Here, and Soon," into a "transcendental culture."⁴ Crane's method of transcendence is the Romantic fusion of self and world, the planting of the self at the center of his world. His nameless narrator is a Crispin, searching to become "the intelligence of his soil/The sovereign ghost." Crane performed his quest without Stevens' muted comedy of the voyaging imagination, and his poem now seems less reflective upon the dilemmas of the artist in an inhospitable environment (Stevens' comedian learns eventually that "his soil is man's intelligence./That's better.") than a pained reflection of them. The poem insists upon the sovereignty of art, and although its confidence suffers often against appalling evidence of murderous engines, rigid buildings, and the mental prison of billboards and airwaves, it never pauses to question its own aesthetic ideology. Where Stevens investigates and redefines the imagination's ground in reality, Crane defends and asserts the primacy of a Romantic relation to the world as the premise of his "usable past." His stance is defensive without secondary defenses: his singer either floats or sinks, and his world either glows in the radiance of art or dies in the "muffled slaughter of a day in birth."

The Bridge belongs to the twenties also by virtue of what Huizinga might call a "higher naivete": its hope for a purely aesthetic transformation of a world already remade, reconstituted by industrial and corporate capitalism into mechanized space and time. The poem concedes a fully technologized and rationalized world (only fleeting visions of Indian voluptuousness, of "ancient men . . . hobo-trekkers," and of resolute but defeated artists like Melville and Dickinson, evoke historical alternatives to the "elevators [that] drop us from our day"), and its ringing optimism in the final section (only momentarily qualified by the final question: "Is it Cathay . . . ?) seems willed, more programmatic than earned by the cumulative energies of the poem. The hopefulness of the opening prayer ("lend a myth to God")—which has nothing in common with the "transitive" optimism of Overstreet and the hucksters of the age—is charged with aesthetic power precisely because it encloses an anxiety that continues to live irrepressibly throughout the poem. Thus the poem's naivete is "higher," a higher mode of aspiration than the surrender to environment and to machine in the name of adjustment, maturity, and progress everywhere urged in the larger culture.

Crane's defense of art is a defense of an idea of culture, an alternative culture of aesthetic modes of experience. The entire poem, and his entire "usable past" project, rests upon the "naive" belief that such forms might appropriate the machine and subordinate its mechanicalness to human spirituality. His machines are not forms of exploitation or stolen labor power, but modes of experience, capable of aesthetic redemption. Crane's symbol of such a possibility, symbol and pledge of its historical imminence, is of course, Brooklyn Bridge: the paradigmatic structure of an older urban modernity, itself a fusion of science and love, technology and art. The choice of this bridge was not arbitrary; other artists chose it as well in the same years as an arch emblem of modernity.⁵Crane's bridge, like the poem, belongs to the decade. The coincidence of what I am calling re-visions of Brooklyn Bridge in these years, and what lay behind that coincidence, is the phenomenon of cultural revision I will explore here. My own method will be a reconstruction of consciousness: an attempt to recover thesubjective features of the bridge's remarkable hold upon the imagination in the twenties. My purpose is to begin to uncover motives and intentions invested in the revisionary project Crane shared with other aspiring form makers in the twenties: to see if and how their efforts at making a "usable past" suggest a useful lesson for us.

"TO BE, GREAT BRIDGE, IN VISION BOUND OF THEE"

Imagine yourself midway. How you arrive is of no account. Here the looming form takes command, governs every neural response. This visual and kinetic surrender begins what we can call the classic moment of Brooklyn Bridge: the classic moment in the imagination of the bridge. The self is obliterated to a bare eye bound in space. Everything else falls away. Mere walking ceases, and crossing begins: the bridge sweeps the body into the modulated measures of an upward passage, and sweeps the eye into new harmonies of motion and sound. Midway, above, alone. Joseph Stella recounts:

Many nights I stood on the bridge—and in the middle alone—lost—a defenceless prey to the surrounding swarming darkness—crushed by the mountainous black impenetrability of the skyscrapers—here and there lights resembling suspended falls of astral bodies or fantastic splendors of remote rites—shaken by the underground tumult of trains in perpetual motion, like the blood in the arteries—at times, ringing as alarm in a tempest, the shrill sulphurous voice of the trolley wires—now and then strange moanings of appeal from tug boats, guessed more than seen, through the infernal recesses below—I felt deeply moved, as if on the threshold of a new religion or in the presence of a new DIVINITY.⁶

Alone with the bridge: and walking, the city man's customary slice through dense space, ceases, and crossing, the act of piety, devotion, belief, begins. The bridge is now a threshold to a new realm, "as though a god were issue of the strings." "And midway on that structure," writes Hart Crane in his first composed lines, later canceled, toward The Bridge: "And midway on that structure I would stand/ One moment, not as diver, but with arms/ That open to project a disk's resilience/ Winding the sun and planets in its face."⁷ The classic moment achieves its classic form in the opening stanza of the final poem of The Bridge:

Through the bound cables strands, the arching
path
Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings—
Taut miles of shuttling moonlight syncopate
The whispered rush, telepathy of wires.
Up the index of night, granite and steel—
Transparent meshes—fleckless the gleaming
staves—
Sibylline voices flicker, waveringly stream
As though a god were issue of the strings. . .⁸

But surely Crane and Stella and their coreligionists of the bridge in the twenties were not the first to walk across the structure—only the first to single out that experience and build another structure upon it: the first to imagine the bridge in this way: or to make a walk across the bridge an intensified moment in their imagination of what it was like to be alive in America in their day. Others had walked before. Why now does the walk seem a momentous crossing? Why, say, from 1917 to 1930 does the classic moment dominate the imagination of the bridge, as it appears, at least, in painting, photographs, fiction, criticism and poetry?

Let us first understand more precisely the meaning of the classic moment—its historical meaning, its place in the history and in the celebration of the history of Brooklyn Bridge. A usual way of speaking is to say that Crane and Stella and others are part of the history of the bridge: their celebrations additional data in a list of celebrations, reaching from at least the Opening Ceremonies and surrounding hoopla to what promises to come at the hundredth anniversary. We might also say that this history, engaging as it does both an object and responses to it (or a fact and symbolic interpretations of it), belongs to another, broader history: a phase or chapter in the history of the coming of the modern, of the big industrial city, of new styles and new materials of building—and of making artworks. In the usual way of speaking, the classicmoment takes its place as another item to be classified, another response to the bridge and to what it manifestly represents: the stage of urban modernity in the history of American life.

Further: taken as a response to a significance-laden object, the classic moment might be classified as one among many indices to what we call culture: meaning, in normal usage, an interior realm where personal need meets exterior value, combining into a shared picture of the world. We might then study the classic moment and other individual responses to the bridge, along with the bridge itself, to piece together a picture of culture: the object of our scholarship, perhaps our admiration and nostalgia.

But there is a flaw in this way of speaking and of thinking. As Emerson might say, it leaves history outside of me. Culture is not merely the object of my attention, but how I attend to anything, the form and style of my attending, as well as the ingrained decision itself about what is worth attending to. What remains simply an object in my field of vision is not yet part of me, not yet culture: or, if I see something as existing only as an object-in-the world, and do not see that my own way of seeing affects my perception of the object, then I am not yet aware of how deeply cultural a creature I am.

The classic moment is a moment of profound subjectivity, even of privacy. Yet it is profoundly cultural—all the more cultural, all the more profound to the extent that it subjectivizes the bridge itself—that it re-sees or revises the bridge. Through its power of communication the classic moment has revised the bridge for us: not so much into a specific revision, a specific image, but into an unforgettable lesson that any seeing of the bridge, through personal experience or historical document, is a re-seeing, a revision that constitutes and reveals our own cultural being. Does the bridge as a thing have a history apart from a chronicle of physical revision? Any thing is historical only in the role it plays in the life, the total life, of the people it serves. Thus the classic moment is a paradigm of the making of the bridge into a historical object. Granted, this seems to insist upon a paradox, for what is the classic moment of lonely suspension upon the form of the bridge but a severing of ties, a breaking of connections with history? The paradox dissolves, however, when we recognize, as I hope we shall, that the severance is only apparent, a precondition thought necessary by a surprising number of people in the same period for a re-connection with history. Typified by the walk that becomes a crossing, the classic moment is an imaginative history: a discovery that the making of a history is radically subjective, yet (another function of bridging) capable of being shared. To study the classic moment is to study the making of Brooklyn Bridge into history and into culture. It is not another datum we are after, but the most essential fact of Brooklyn Bridge: its role as an event, a symbolic act, in the imagination.

"SOME SPLINTERED GARLAND FOR THE SEER."

"Beyond any other aspect of New York," wrote Lewis Mumford in Sticks and Stones (1924), "the Brooklyn Bridge has been a source of joy and inspiration to the artist." The appeal lay in the visual elegance of the structure: "the strong lines of the bridge," as Mumford writes, "and the beautiful curve described by its suspended cables," and especially the steel work and "the architectural beauty of its patterns." Brooklyn Bridge was among those "great bridges" that surpassed the more "grotesque and barbarous" features of the first age of industrial building and survived as "enduring monuments." "To this day they communicate a feeling of dignity, stability, and unwavering poise."⁹

Dignity, stability, and poise describe well the feeling one has in the paintings of the bridge by Jonas Lie, by Twachtman and Childe Hassam and Bellows and Joseph Pennell—and are not at odds with, but by themselves inadequate to describe the effects of the much different painterly intentions of John Marin, Albert Gleizes, and Joseph Stella. At the time Mumford wrote, a change was already in process in the representation of the bridge in painting—a change measured by the eruption into American painting of modernist styles such as cubism, fauvism, and futurism, but also indicative of a change in the kind of appreciation artists felt for the bridge. We might, of course, consider the change in appreciation and feeling aseffects of the changed notion of what a painting is and how its framed composition relates to an ostensible subject in the world, but that would be to assign to style or mode the power of causing changes in feeling. Feeling and style more likely arise from a common source, and the new styles might also be taken as "answerable" to a new set of feelings and circumstances. Did futurism by itself instigate the revised vision of the bridge in works by Marin and Stella, or did it provide elements of a vocabulary that answered to the revised relation of artist to bridge?

A full cultural history would have to take into account the subtle interplay of forces that intersect and become palpable in any single expression. Here we are looking for the origins or the ground of a changed relation to the bridge I am calling the classic moment: the moment on the bridge when walking crosses over to crossing. In 1954 Mumford comments in a new preface to Sticks and Stones on the fact that he and Hart Crane were at work on their respective treatments of the bridge at the same time: "Our common appreciation of this great work of art became part of a wider movement, which owes so much to the polarizing effect of The Seven Arts and The New Republic, the working toward the creation of a "usable past' for our country."¹⁰ Common to the appreciation of the "wider movement" as well as of Crane and Mumford (and we include Mumford's own long-unknown but recently restored and published play of 1925-27, The Builders of the Bridge) was some variant of the classic moment, the momentous walk and the eye-crossing at midway. Mumford's reference to "usable past" suggests a focus to bring that moment into relation with a common cultural project of the period.

Consider the innocent walk. To cross the bridge on foot, on the elevated promenade, is to know the bridge from the inside: to discover that it has an inside, or a siding of crossing cables and stays which construct the illusion of an enclosure. For the first thirty years or so the bridge was predominantly a walkway: walking across the bridge was the common way of using it. Walking across, getting to and fro, from home to work and back, was a way of marking a precious transition. Rarely were you alone. The bridge, like a boulevard, provided company. There are written records of the innocent pleasure of this promenade, but we no longer read them; they lie buried in old reportage and letters to the editor of the nineties and the turn of the century. But photographs made for stereoscopic parlor viewing tell of the charm of a walk on the bridge, on the civic parade ground in the sky.

This is an older vision of Brooklyn Bridge, before vehicular traffic surpassed the volume of pedestrian traffic in 1916. An older bridge, and its place in the imagination shows it whole, complete, a unitary thing: a bridge between two places, the separate roadways (for walkers and for riders) together serving the multiple needs of city life. The bridge would meet the "interests of the community as well as of the Bridge Company," Roebling explained in his master plan of 1869: a roadway for vehicles and an elevated boardwalk to "allow people of leisure, and old and young invalids, to promenade over the Bridge on fine days, in order to enjoy the beautiful views and the pure air." And in the older vision the towers, "its most conspicuous features," still serve, as Roebling promised, "as landmarks to the adjoining cities .. . entitled to be ranked as national monuments."¹² They stood high above the city, as yet without the defiant challenge of skyscrapers. And thus the older bridge appealed to the eye—an older eye, too, we might say, which saw the world itself as whole, compact, reliable, in a manner much like Roebling's own confident vision. The dominant vision before, say, 1912 was lateral and iconic: a public bridge seen from some clear and impersonal perspective everyone would recognize.

Walking the bridge then must have seemed in its very commonness not especially worthy of remarkable comment. The midway vision, the eye-crossing along mystic strings, had not yet emerged, as true as it might have been to the feelings of midnight crossers, divers, lovers, and other bedlamites. Still thinking of it as contemporary, not a survival of the past (as it appeared to Mumford and his generation) but an immediate forerunner, virtually a breeder of new bridges, new constructions, writers of the Progressive period appropriated the bridge in its monumentally. For Ernest Poole in The Harbor (1915) it is the "Great Bridge," whose "sweeping arch . . . seemed high as the clouds." The novel sets the hopesrepresented by harbor and bridge, hopes "of the power of mind over matter, and of the mighty speeding up of a world civilization and peace, a successful world, strong, broad, tolerant," against the realities of class conflict and social unrest.¹³ The sweeping bridge remains an emblem of hope. As it does in an obscure but intriguing verse drama published in 1913 by the avant-garde house of Mitchell Kennerley. The play, The Bridge, by one Dorothy Landers Beall, is also torn by conflict, between rich and poor, workers and owners, and projects a union of the selfless engineer and the passionate settlement-house worker as a solution to the rifts of the age. Brooklyn Bridge here is "Long Bridge," the sovereign spirit of bridges as such, and it inspires the young engineer to persist in his struggle with the elements, and with labor agitators and crooked businessmen, to raise a new bridge alongside the old. The doubts and anguish of his beloved Hilda give way when she hears "The Spirit of the Bridge" explain:

Do you not see grave bridges, free suspensions,
All woven, builded, swinging in the sunlight
Over the bitter streams of old neglect,
Like a glad-going company of workers
Linking the separate and the little-souled,
The great, the tiny, the unfortunate.

The play concludes with a shining reconciliation between the engineer and his workers, to the tune of Hilda's bright song: "Quick, O Bridge—rise surely—/ Bridges—world-Bridges, span like sympathy,/ Till there are left no bitter gulfs to pass!¹⁴

From an icon of public reconciliation to a private event of mystical eye-crossing: this passage, which occurred between 1912 and 1915, marks a rupture between the old bridge and the new, a rupture at least in the kind of joy and inspiration the bridge offered to artists. As we know, the whole cultural past of America itself took on a new and oppressive look to a growing number of young Americans in the same years, the years of the Armory Show (1913), of Van Wyck Brooks' America's Coming of Age (1915), and of The Seven Arts (1917-18). One of the modes of the new look of things, the new look at the world, was deconstructive: the old integrity of vision, of seeing, begins to dissolve. Marin's swift expressions of visible urban energy in his views of the bridge of 1912 and 1913 are symptoms as well as acute modernist achievements. "I see great forces at work," Marin wrote in the exhibition catalogue to his 1913 show at "291":

great movements; the large buildings and the small buildings; the warring of the great and small; influences of one mass on another greater or smaller mass. Feelings are aroused which give me the desire to express the reaction of these "pull forces," those influences which play with one another; great masses pulling smaller masses, each subject in some degree to the other's power. . . . And so I try to express graphically what a great city is doing.¹⁵

A new idea of the modern itself appears here, in Marin's revisions of the bridge and in his words: a nervous tropism toward the abstract yet concretely emotional structures lurking within the changing city and bursting the seams of conventional realism: the mode not only of earlier representations of the bridge, but correspondingly of the actual making of the original bridge itself.

An impulse to revise, to remake, arose in these years in literary and artistic circles in New York: an impulse that found one coherent expression in a new attention to the American cultural heritage. Sensing a creative anarchy in the American scene—"the sudden unbottling of elements that have had not opportunity to develop freely in the open"—Van Wyck Brooks in 1918 deplored "the lack of any sense of inherited resources" to fertilize and tutor the energies of the young. What passed for culture—the genteel collocations of the chiefly European "best that had been thought and said," and the severely bowdlerized and domesticated version of American literature—had discredited itself, largely by its blatant subservience to the powers of business and industry in this period of heightened conflict. As a result, Brooks wrote, "the present is a void, and the American writer floats in that void because the past that survives in the common mind ofthe present is a past without living value. But is this the only possible past? If we need another past so badly, is it inconceivable that we might discover one, that we might even invent one?"¹⁶ Brooks' call for the invention of a "usable past," a past that would answer the question, "What is important for us?", led to the breaking of new ground in literary study and, especially in the work of Lewis Mumford in the 1920s, in the study ofthe tangible past in architecture and building. It was under the aegis of this impulse to invent, to remake, to discover and forge alternatives to the lame and pallid and defunct culture of their fathers that Brooklyn Bridge appeared in the 1920s as a survival, a historic monument, a link with valuable cultural forces of the past. Crane's use of the bridge as in part a scaffolding for a reconstruction of the cultural past, a retelling of American history, falls properly under the heading of Brooks' "usable past." Part of the attention to Brooklyn Bridge in the period derives from this collective project of discovery, invention, and reconstruction.

But describing it in this way, as invention and revision, we make the project seem too calculating, too programmatic; we miss its urgency and inner sense of need. To look at Brooklyn Bridge and to see it as a monument of industrial heroism and creativity is one thing; to walk across the bridge and take possession of it in a radically subjective way, the way of the classic moment, is another. Is there a continuity of need between the two ways?

Consider in Waldo Frank's novel of 1917, The Unwelcome Man, the first instance in literature of the classic moment:

Before him swept the bridge. He felt that every cable of the web-like maze was vibrant with stress and strain. With these things he was alone. Yet he felt no insecurity, such as the crowds inspired. Beyond, through the net-work of steel, huddled Brooklyn. And below his very feet, tumbled together as if some giant had tipped the city eastward and sent all the houses pell-mell toward the down-tilted corner, lay the wharves and slums of Manhattan. It seemed to Quincy that he was being caught upon a monstrous swing and swept with its pulsed lilt above the grovelling life of the metropolis. Suddenly, the fancy flashed upon him that from his perch of shivering steel the power should indeed come to poise and judge the swarm above which he rocked. The bridge that reeled beyond him seemed an arbiter. It bound the city. It must know the city's soul since it was so close to the city's breath. In its throbbing cables there must be a message. In its lacings and filigrees of steel, there must be subtle words! . . .¹⁷

What are the novel elements here? The hero is alone on the bridge, in a solitude more consoling than the isolation of the city crowds. The bridge permits him to enact his true condition: alone, separate from the shabby and groveling city, poised above, prepared for an access of power lost to him on the streets, in the crowds. The bridge is an arbiter; it stands above; it binds; it judges. And it has a message, a word, which the hero almost hears.

But he rejects the bridge's demanding message, and in the passage that follows he descends the bridge's "unattainable pathway," moves in a panic through the narrow streets, in an effort to "escape the omnipresent Bridge." "Crowds jostled him; cars clashed; machines were braying, shuttling. The taste of New York was bitter on his lips." "Under the Bridge itself he went—looming above him like a curse." Frank made clear the cause of his hero's malaise: he could not face the need to struggle for personal liberation, to find a perspective in which to reconcile the ugliness of the manifest city with the beauty of its wholeness and its potentiality. The bridge offers such a perspective: not merely as a physical platform but as a message, a word.

Frank described his hero as a victim of "the culture of industrialism," and Brooks saw the novel as proof of John Stuart Mill's prediction that industrialism would lead to "an appalling deficiency of human preferences." In the same year Brooks published an essay in The Seven Arts called "The Culture of Industrialism," an essay which, like Frank's novel, sheds light on the inner needs of the quest for a "usable past." "The world over," he wrote, "the industrial process has devitalized men and produced a poor quality of human nature." Industrialism has ruptured the fabric of life; it has cut off sourcesof nourishment from traditional culture, and has demeaned the orthodox "high" culture by turning it over to "the prig and the aesthete." In Europe at least some vestige of the traditional culture remains, and "a long line of great rebels"—Nietzsche, Renan, Morris, Rodin, Marx, Mill—have kept it alive by reacting "violently" against the "desiccating influences" of industrialism. "They have made it impossible for men to forget the degradation of society and the poverty of their lives and built a bridge between the greatness of the few in the past and the greatness of the man, perhaps, in the future."¹⁸ While here in America, "our disbelief in experience, our habitual repression of the creative instinct with its consequent overstimulation of the possessive instinct, has made it impossible for us to take advantage of the treasure our own life has yielded." "The real work of criticism in this country," Brooks continues, is "to begin low," to find and accept "our own lowest common denominator." Then, he concludes in another image suggesting a bridge, a joining of forces around a vital center:

As soon as the foundations of our life have been reconstructed and made solid on the basis of our own experience, all these extraneous, ill-regulated forces will rally about their newly found center; they will fit in, each where it belongs, contributing to the essential architecture of our life. Then, and only then, shall we cease to be a blind, selfish, disorderly people; we shall become a luminous people, dwelling in the light and sharing our light.¹⁹;

"O THOU STEELED COGNIZANCE"

And Crane, in the final walk, the crossing-into-light that concludes The Bridge:

And on, obliquely up bright carrier bars
New octaves trestle the twin monoliths
Beyond whose frosted capes the moon bequeaths
Two worlds of sleep (O arching strands of
song!)—
Onward and up the crystal-flooded aisle
White tempest nets file upward, upward ring
With silver terraces the humming spars,
The loft of vision, palladium helm of stars.

The concluding poem, Crane had written to his patron, Otto Kahn, in 1926, would be "a sweeping dithyramb in which the Bridge becomes the symbol of consciousness spanning time and space."²⁰ And a year later, ten years after Brooks' call for a new structure of experience, a "newly found center," again to Otto Kahn, regarding the kind of "history" the poem will be: "What I am after is an assimilation of this experience [American history], a more organic panorama, showing the continuous and living evidence of the past in the inmost vital substance of the present."²¹ What he is after is "usable past," an act of bridging past and present in a more vital connection than orthodox histories provide.

The coincidence of the figure or trope of bridging in Crane and Brooks is not remarkable: it is a common rhetorical figure for transcendence through connection. Crane's writings, his poetry and prose, are rife with such crossings. But the coincidence of need, the sense of inner division that needs healing, especially a division, a breach that feels both personal and cultural at once: so personal and so cultural that the solution to the problem of "America" appears as the form of the solution to the problem of being: this is worth remarking as a deep feature of the age, or of the life of its estranged and unhappy artists and intellectuals. Especially for Crane, a personal divided consciousness—the "curse of sundered parentage"—became the scene for a symbolic action, a bridging, of cultural consequence. The poem would perform his "essential architecture" doubly or trebly: it would reconnect the American present to the American past in a new, "vital" way; it would reconnect the poet to his personal experience; and it would, by the fusion of these two goals, build a bridge between the poet and his people: between poetry as such and "America." And this theory of multiple connection descends into Crane's poetics, into the very performance and "synergies" of his poetic language.

Among the meanings of Crane's bridge, then, is the rhetorical trope of "bridging," the act of crossing over. A bridge crosses and unites; it mediates, like the priestly function in the word pontiff: mediates between here and there, now and to come. In this function alone, apart from its concreteness as Brooklyn Bridge, the bridge provides fusion, transcendence, healing. It promises connection: simultaneously to earth, here-and-now, and to a realm beyond, a connection that transforms the here-and-now itself into a meaningful pattern of details. In its immediacy as at once bound and unbound, it promises new power of experience.

"History and fact, location, etc.," Crane wrote to Gorham Munson in 1923, "all have to be transfigured into abstract form that would almost function independently of its subject matter."²² Transfiguration is a phase of the bridging act, and the achievement of the "abstract form"—the form of bridge—is its culmination, for now the transcending act can perform its ultimate work: making it possible to see and to experience each discrete detail of "history and fact" as connected to all others, as constituting one totality, which can be named Bridge, and which in its oneness can be named also as One, Thou steeled Cognizance, Deity's glittering Pledge: As though a god were issue of the strings. . . .

But the bridge is also Brooklyn Bridge, a shuttle between two mundane places, an instrument, as Crane put it in a famous despairing letter to Waldo Frank in 1926, of "shorter hours, quicker lunches, behaviorism and toothpicks."²³ Can such a bridge, a crude servant of capitalism, also serve the bridging function, the crossing over that the poet needs? Crane stalled in the making of his poem when this question occurred to him. And the completed poem, with its final apparent apotheosis of the bridge, has troubled many readers as embodying an aesthetic flaw: a confusion of the real bridge, in its multiplicity of function, with the imaginary bridge of transcendence. Does it matter, it is asked, that the bridge of the poem is Brooklyn Bridge? Are we not concerned after all with the revisionary powers and practices of the imagination, not with the bridge of granite and steel, but the bridge of metaphor: not with Roebling's bridge but with Hart's?

The question turns on whether Hart's bridge is a symbol, or a symbolic act: a thing or an event. Consider the striking coincidence between Crane's bridge and Stella's. Some scholars have asked whether Stella's canvases, the Brooklyn Bridge of 1917-18 and the bridge panel of New York Interpreted, of 1922 might not have influenced Crane. Certainly Crane himself was taken with the coincidence of "sentiments" when he wrote to Stella in 1929, and he thought to include one of the paintings (exactly which one remains unclear) as frontispiece to the Black Sun edition of The Bridge. The plan collapsed, apparently for technical reasons, and the poem appeared in 1930 with three tactfully placed photographs by Crane's friend Walker Evans.

The question whether the painter's vision has priority to the poet's must now take into account the contribution of the photographer to the poem. Is the poet's bridge a symbol in the sense of an icon, a physical "shrine," as Stella described his first painting, a symbolic "meeting point of all forces arising in a superb assertion of their powers, in APOTHEOSIS?" It is noteworthy that John Marin considered Stella's painting excessively formalistic: having no more relation with the actual bridge "than if he had put up some street cables and things in his studio—painted a rather beautiful thing and called it the "Bridge.'²⁴ Marin misses the experience of the bridge, precisely what he himself attempted to capture and convey in his The Red Sun, Brooklyn Bridge, of 1922. Stella's paintings, in fact, in their stylization project an idea of bridge linked only by iconic association to the specific Brooklyn Bridge. Partly he calls up associations with popular imagery of the bridge. Although the compositions are dynamic, the geometric formality of the icon freezes the bridge into a static image of towers, arches, and cables. The action of the paintings is not so much crossing as recognizing, and in the recognition, enhancing the actual bridge with heroic energies, raising the bridge above the common experience of it. We look up to Stella' s bridge, as a figurative projection and elevation of the familiar bridge.

Crane, too, in his program for the poem, speaks of the bridge as a "climax," a "symbol of our constructive future, our unique identity, in which is included also our scientific hopes and achievements of the future." Much of the worry critics have displayed toward the poem comes from taking this early (1923) statement too literally. In fact the bridge does not appear anywhere in the poem as a symbol of this sort, a sign which stands for the abstraction "America." Apart from the transfiguration of details of the bridge (through Crane's "logic of metaphor") into elements of the poem's governing "abstract form"—the curve becomes a "curveship," for example, and the span of steel a "cognizance,"—the bridge always appears in its aspect as Brooklyn Bridge: a shuttle for traffic ("Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift/ Unfractioned idiom . . ."), a parapet for bedlamites, a pier under which the poet waits in the bridge's shadow, a walkway ("I started walking home across the Bridge") from which the poet has a vision of clipper ships—and on which he walks his final walk and crossing into a vision of Oneness that may be "Cathay." And Evans' photographs reinforce and elaborate the implications of this literalness of Brooklyn Bridge in the poem.

At the time Evans lived near Crane on Brooklyn Heights, and also knew the bridge as a walker. Presumably at Crane's behest or encouragement, tacit or otherwise, Evans took along a hand camera on one or two of his strolls, and although he published only three of the images in the Black Sun edition, and another (very close to the first Black Sun image) as frontispiece to the first American edition (Boni & Livright, 1930), the entire group (at least those images that survive) make up an ensemble with a consistent inner conception. First, they represent an original photographic representation of the bridge, breaking decisively from the lateral or heroic or iconic views of earlier serious photographers like Coburn or the clichés of commercial views. The view from beneath, of the dark underside of the bridge's floor pinned against the sky, was entirely novel, with no predecessors at all in the popular or naive iconology of the bridge. But the originality of the group lies not only in composition. The bridge here is viewed freshly, in a series of images, as the experience of a specific eye; the vision of each print is the vision of all: a visual possession of the bridge as someone's—a walker's—palpable experience.

The three images accompanying the poem suggest a remarkable coincidence of vision. The first, which faces the opening lines of "Proem," shows the bridge from underneath; the second, dead midway during the poem, faces the lines in "Cutty Sark" in which the poet, walking home across the bridge, envisions a fleet of sailing ships: the exquisite framing of coal barges and tugboat in the photograph works as counterpoint to the poet's fantasy: grounding it in the literal (though aesthetically transformed) experience recorded in the photograph. The final image faces the concluding lines of "Atlantis," where the poet crosses and asks of the transfigured towers and cables and meshwork, "Is it Cathay?" The swinging antiphonal whispers of the last line awaken the lines of the photograph, and together, words and image, ground the question in the living, kinetic experience of crossing the bridge. The poem is then framed by two images of the bridge, and punctuated at mid-point by an image from the bridge. We begin and conclude with Brooklyn Bridge: beginning low, under its piers, and concluding high, eye-crossing amidst the pattern of cables, tower, and stays on the walkway.²⁵

The photographs achieve what Stella's paintings would not: they mediate, or connect, or bridge the poem to the real bridge. They keep before us shifting images of that bridge as the poet's object in the poem—as what he is aware of. Moreover, taken as rhetoric, far more understatedly than Stella's images do, they connect the reader's experience of a real bridge, a specific bridge, with the bridge and the bridging of the poem. They assist the communication of the poem—and reveal what kind of communication Crane wished the poem to achieve.

And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,—
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!

Here, in the opening view of the bridge, it lies across the harbor, anobject of the poet's vision. It is external to him, yet focuses his attention. As an object in "Proem" it reveals itself as possessing a place, a set of connections and relations: to the city, the cinema, office buildings, Wall Street, traffic. Yet it looms above just as it remains connected, and bespeaks a pledge, a promise, that its "curveship" might "lend a myth to God." The curveship and the promise were already prefigured in the "inviolate curve" of the seagull's wings in stanza 1 (but they flicker and are gone), and especially in the progress of the sun crossing the diagonal stays seeming to take step of the bridge, to climb its ascending cables. The motion of sun, free yet restrained by the form of the bridge—bound yet unbound—prefigures the poet's own walk in the concluding section of the poem.

The motion, the walk, the crossing into a visionary vision: these compel the recognition that the bridge is not merely an object, but also a subject, a Thee. Possessed by the kinetic eye and thus transfigured into a personal event, animated by the poet's eye-crossing, it performs the act of bestowing upon the poet what he most urgently needs: the kind of centrality that will make his recovery of experience—personal and historical experience—possible. The pledge of the bridge is not simply (or not at all) to yield itself to the properly devout poet: it promises, in short, a "usable past," and in the fullest, deepest, life-giving sense of the word, it promises "culture."

Simultaneously springing from a ground and joining, the bridge as symbolic act is the very act of culture itself, as Crane and his colleagues understood the term: culture not as a set of objects but culture as an ongoing process of mergings, makings, and crossings toward a totality. The bridge offers what Crane in his programmatic statement of 1924-25, "General Aims and Theories," called "an absolute experience, an experience that will engross the total faculties of the spectator." Such totalizing endows the spectator with centrality: he is the focal point, the organizing center of his own experience. Nothing is superfluous, nothing is missing: "Our imagination is unable to suggest a further detail consistent with the design of the aesthetic whole."

"And I have been able to give freedom and life which was acknowledged in the ecstasy of walking hand in hand across the most beautiful bridge of the world," Crane wrote in 1924, about crossing the bridge with a lover, "the cables enclosing us and pulling us upward in such a dance as I have never walked and never can walk with another."²⁶

As soon as the foundations of our life have been reconstructed and made solid on the basis of our own experience, all these extraneous, ill-regulated forces will rally about their newly found center; they will fit in, each where it belongs, contributing to the essential architecture of our life. Then, and only then, shall we cease to be a blind, selfish, disorderly people; we shall become a luminous people, dwelling in the light and sharing our light.

The evangelical, apocalyptic accents of Brooks' bridging vision come to a fruition in Crane's poem. The poem is not "about" Brooklyn Bridge. It translates the bridge into culture, into the simultaneous possession of world and self the vision of which served Crane and his fellow artists as their high alternative to American "normalcy." The vision still lives in the poem, even if the anticipated luminosity (or even the hope of it) has long since dimmed in the culture: lives not only as a vestige of what historians have called the first decade of our own times, but perhaps also as an inducement. As excessive, exaggerated, and, in their own way, blind to the real possibilities of their everyday culture as Crane and others may have been, they were the first in our era to understand that revision in the light of a universal idea (their "America") was the central condition for a living culture. Insofar as we concern ourselves not only with their vision but with what they failed to see, their enterprise might yet succeed as our own "usable past."

NOTES

¹ These terms are prominent in Johan Huizinga's observations, in America: A Dutch Historian's Vision, from Afar and Near (New York, 1972). I have alsoprofited a great deal from the discussion of technological and economic changes in the 1920s in Martin J. Sklar, "On the Proletarian Revolution and the End of Political-Economic Society," Radical America 3, no. 3 (May-June 1969): 1-41.

² Frederick Hoffman, The Twenties (New York, 1955), pp. 163-239.

³ See Lewis Mumford, "Prelude to the Present," in Interpretations and Forecasts, 1922-1972 (New York, 1973), pp. 110-21. Also, Alan Trachtenberg, ed., Critics of Culture (New York, 1976).

⁴ Huizinga, America, p. 283.

⁵ Alan Trachtenberg, Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol (New York, 1965), surveys much of the relevant material.

⁶ Quoted in Irma Jaffe, Joseph Stella (New York, 1970), p. 58.

⁷ Quoted in Brom Weber, Hart Crane (New York, 1948), p. 425.

⁸ Brom Weber, ed., The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane (New York, 1966), p. 114.

⁹ Lewis Mumford, Sticks and Stones (New York, 1924), pp. 115-16.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Quoted in Trachtenberg, Brooklyn Bridge, p. 74.

¹² Ibid., p. 79.

¹³ Ernest Poole, The Harbor (New York, 1915), p. 193.

¹⁴ Dorothy Landers Beall, The Bridge and Other Poems (New York, 1913), pp. 13-131.

¹⁵ Quoted in Sheldon Reich, John Marin: A Stylistic Analysis and Catalogue Raisonné (University of Arizona Press, 1970), pp. 54-55.

¹⁶ Clair Sprague, ed., Van Wyck Brooks: The Early Years (New York, 1968), p. 223.

¹⁷ Waldo Frank, The Unwelcome Man (New York, 1917), pp. 167-69.

¹⁸ Sprague, ed., Van Wyck Brooks, p. 199.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 202.

²⁰ Brom Weber, ed., The Letters of Hart Crane (New York, 1952), p. 241.

²¹ Ibid., p. 305.

²² Ibid., p. 124.

²³ Ibid., p. 261.

²⁴ Reich, John Marin, p. 148.

²⁵ For an interesting discussion of the function of the Evans photographs, see Gordon K. Grigsby, "Photographs in the First Edition of The Bridge," Texas Studies in Language and Literature 4(1962):4-11. A more general, and suggestive, essay on the appeal of photography to Crane, is F. Richard Thomas, "Hart Crane, Alfred Stieglitz, and Camera Photography," Centennial Review, 1977, pp. 294-309.

²⁶ Weber, ed., Letters, p. 181.