[In the following essay, Irwin focuses on the question of self and national origin in the "Indiana " section of The Bridge.]

Several years ago I published a book called American Hieroglyphics, that dealt with the influence of the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics on the literature of the American Renaissance and used this rather specialized area of inquiry as a means of raising larger questions about the figuration of the self and the search for origins in that form of late romanticism that is nineteenth-century American symbolism. It is this question of origins and their figuration, as posed in the writings of the American Renaissance, that I would like to pursue here into twentieth-century American poetry. One of the most common poetic figures in the English romantic tradition for the quest for origins (whether the origin of the self, of language, or of the human) is, of course, the search for the source of a river. In the wake of the publication of Sir James Bruce's Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (1790), this figure for the pursuit of origins appears in works as various as Shelley's Alastor, Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," Book 6 of Wordsworth's The Prelude, and George Darley's Nepenthe, to name a few. In the American Renaissance the most striking examples of the figure are found in the works of Poe, whether in the unfinished The Journal of Julius Rodman (about a man who explores the Louisiana Territory ten years before Lewis and Clark, looking for, among other things, the source of the Mississippi) or in The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym (about a journey to the polar abyss). One might wonder for a moment what a journey to the polar abyss has to do with the search for the source of a river. The trope linking the two derives from the classical notion of the ultimate circularity of the waters of the earth: the notion that the waters of the oceans flow into the earth through openings at the poles, travel through subterranean passages to the equator, where they issue forth in springs and fountains that are the sources of great rivers that in turn flow back to the seas and thence to the polar abysses. As in any circular system, origin and end coincide, so that the search for the source of a great river can be approached from the opposite direction through a voyage to the polar abyss. (We might recall in this regard that in Book 6 of The Prelude Wordsworth correctly locates the source of the Nile in Abyssinia, and that in Pym the languages which the hero encounters in the vicinity of the polar abyss—Arabic, Coptic, and Ethiopic—are the languages of the Nile valley.)

Perhaps the most notable use of this romantic trope in twentieth-century American poetry occurs in Hart Crane's The Bridge, an epic representation of the search for American origins. Part of the poem's action involves a phantasized journey by its speaker back in time to the pre-Columbian world of the Indians to observe a primal scene of origin in which a people and a land are joined in the sacred marriage of the Indian chief Maquokeeta (whose name means "Big River") and the maiden Pocahontas, symbol of the virgin continent. And the metaphoric vehicle for this return to origin is the speaker's journey down the Mississippi River to the abyss of the Gulf. In his role as native son imaginatively present at, imaginatively participating in, the generation of the American self, Crane found that the work of depicting a primal scene of national origin inevitably involved for him a reassessment of the emotions associated with his personal origin, an examination of the way in which his stormy relationship with his parents affected his imagining of that central scene in which the seminal river pours into the abyss. That Crane understood this quest as a romantic project is clear from his 1930 response to Allen Tate's review of the poem: "The fact that you posit The Bridge at the end of a tradition of romanticism may prove to have been an accurate prophecy, but I don't yet feel that such a statement can be taken as a foregone conclusion. A great deal of romanticism may persist—of the sort to deserve serious consideration."¹

In pursuing this inquiry into the figuration of origins in The Bridge, I want to focus in particular on the "Indiana" section of the poem. In his 1927 letter to his benefactor Otto Kahn, which outlines the plan and progress of The Bridge, Crane, noting that the "Indiana" section "is not complete as yet," describes it as "the monologue of an Indiana farmer; time, about 1960. He has failed in the gold-rush and is returned to till the soil. His monologue is a farewell to his son, who is leaving for a life on the sea. It is a lyrical summary of the period of conquest, and his wife, the mother who died on the way back from the gold-rush, is alluded to in a way which implies her succession to the nature-symbolism of Pocahontas" (L, 307). What interests us in this description of "Indiana" is that the roles assigned to the father and mother in this section as it was conceived in 1927 are reversed in the published version of 1930. In its completed form "Indiana" is the monologue not of a father but of a mother: it is the wife of the Indiana farmer who bids farewell to her son as he leaves for a life on the sea. And, conversely, the parent who dies on the way back from the gold rush is the father rather than the mother. The question, then, is what occurred during the two-year period between Crane's description of "Indiana" in the letter to Kahn and the completion of the poem, to cause this reversal in the roles that had originally been projected for the father and mother.

We know that the single most important event in Crane's personal life during this period was the definitive break he made with his mother in the spring of 1928 and the subsequent reversal in his long-standing opposing attitudes toward his parents. Since at least late adolescence Crane had been close to his mother, who, seeing her own "artistic" temperament reborn in her son, encouraged his poetic career, and either at odds with or estranged from his father, for whom success in business was an ideal inherited from his own father that he had tried to pass on to his son, an ideal in relation to which Hart could never be anything but a failure. When Grace and Clarence Crane's marriage began to fall apart, their son became both a prize to be won and a weapon to be wielded in the battle between them. Crane's alliance with his mother lasted from the time of his parents' divorce in 1917 until the early months of 1928, even though his precarious finances required that he remain on civil terms with Clarence Crane (or C. A. as he was called), to whom he periodically applied for loans. At this period Crane and his mother were both living in Los Angeles. Hart was acting as secretary and companion to Herbert Wise, and Grace was staying with her ailing mother in a bungalow in Hollywood. In February 1928, Hart, perhaps in response to Grace's requests that he introduce her to his Hollywood friends or fearing that she might hear of his escapades, told his mother that he was a homosexual. There are conflicting reports about Grace's immediate reaction to the news, but Crane told a friend that she was "visibly upset" and that "for days afterward she seemed to him cold and contemptuous."² Whatever the truth was, the disclosure of his homosexuality placed an enormous strain on his relationship with his mother, a strain that was soon compounded when, after quitting his job with Wise at the end of February, Crane moved in with his mother and grandmother in mid-March. His grandmother was dying, and Hart spent part of each day serving as her nurse and companion while at the same time coping with his mother's own "nervous collapse." For the next two months the relationship between Hart and Grace steadily worsened. Unterecker describes Crane's

growing conviction that his mother's love for him had degenerated into a brutal possessiveness. . . . Not only did he discover that Grace was jealous of his love for his grandmother; he also discovered—recalling his past—a lifelong pattern of jealousy: Grace "guarding" him from any deep affection for his father, for his other relatives, for the girls whom, in a more conventional boyhood, he might have come to love. . . . She would never voluntarily, he felt, allow him to love anyone other than her; nor, he was sure, would she ever allow him a life substantially independent of her. (p. 540)

By the end of May 1928, Crane was desperate to leave, and after packing surreptitiously for a week, he stole away from the bungalow in the dead of night heading for New York, never to see his mother again. If, as Emerson says, poets write with actions as well as with words, then the route that Crane chose in leaving his mother to return to the east was a symbolic statement whose gloss is to be found in The Bridge. After traveling by train from Los Angeles to New Orleans, he continued by ship through the Gulf of Mexico and up the East Coast to New York. In a letter dated June 14, 1928, written to his father after his return, he gave some indication of the significance of this journey in his description of a day he spent in New Orleans: "The boat ride down the delta of the Mississippi (we were from 10 till 5 p.m. completing it) was one of the great days of my life. It was a place I had so often imagined and, as you know, written about in my River section of The Bridge. There is something tragically beautiful about the scene, the great, magnificent Father of Waters pouring itself at last into the oblivion of the Gulf!"³ In recounting his boat ride on "the great, magnificent Father of Waters" to his own father, Crane evokes this transitional place he "had so often imagined," this threshold where the seminal river pours itself into the oblivion of the gulf, as a "tragically beautiful . . . scene"—a primal scene in a Oedipal tragedy, I would suggest. Pausing in New Orleans at mid-continent, midway in his flight from his mother, Crane recalled the "River section of The Bridge" and the quester's imaginative identification with the hobo Dan Midland, whose body was cast into the Mississippi to descend to the submarine, amniotic world of the Gulf. He may have sensed even then that his eastward flight from his mother would turn out to be a circular journey like all of those in The Bridge, a journey whose turnings would finally bring him back to the oblivion of the Gulf four years later.

In spite of periodic setbacks, Hart's relationship with his father improved steadily after his break with Grace. Hart's new sense of the way in which his mother had turned him against his father was matched by a new willingness onClarence Crane's part to admit that his own life was no model for his son's. In July 1928, the elder Crane wrote Hart:

You and I agree now as never before that your father has made a failure of his life because he has paid too much attention to hard work and not enough to play. I have been too ambitious for things that really did not amount to anything at all. . . . It was born in my father to be saving and energetic. All of my younger life he kept me at it until I got the same impression of things .. . so I kept at it and kept at it. . . . Now, I don't want you to do this way, for I have lived to see the folly of it all. .. . I think you write well, and unquestionably have better than an average ability for it, but no business is any good unless it pays a dividend and if writing does not pay a dividend then you have to do something else. .. . I cannot tell you what to do. On that subject my advice has been all wrong for many years. (L, 627-29).

But while Crane grew closer to his father, he became increasingly hostile toward his mother, until the one he had always loved best came to seem his nemesis. Unterecker describes the elaborate precautions that Crane took during the rest of his life to keep his mother from learning of his whereabouts: "Each flight—prompted always by terror that she might persuade him to return—led to an orgy of drunken escape and complex moves from place to place as, swearing friends to secrecy, he attempted to cover his trail. . . . So long as she lived, he felt, she would continue to hunt him down" (p. 542). It is significant that while Crane was working on The Bridge and its vision of a return to national origin, a return whose anthropomorphic representation was the son's return to the womb of the triple goddess (the virgin-mother-whore Pocahontas), he was fleeing desperately from his own mother. In February 1929, Crane wrote to his friends the Rychtariks from Paris, "My mother has made it impossible for me to live in my own country" (L, 338).

That Crane understood what was involved psychologically in his mother's obsessive attachment is clear from a letter he wrote to Grace's sister-in-law Zell in the late fall of 1928: Grace "is profoundly attached to me, really loves me, I know. But there are mixtures of elements in this attachment that are neither good for her nor for me. Psychoanalysis reveals many things that it would be well for Grace to know" (Unterecker, p. 565). Crane's mention of psychoanalysis no doubt reflects the knowledge of psychoanalytic theory that he had acquired during the fall of 1928 from his friend Solomon Grunberg, who was part owner of a bookstore Crane frequented and who practiced as a lay analyst at the time Crane knew him. Unterecker reports that though Hart "declined Grunberg's offer to explore his mind ('If I let myself be psychoanalyzed, I'll never finish The Bridge!'), he did, on long walks, take advantage of Grunberg's listening silences, his offhand leading questions, his summaries of pertinent "classical' cases" (p. 566). During October and November of 1928, "Hart worried incessantly about his relationship to his mother and father, Grunberg said; and, once, on one of their meanderings, Hart talked about the nightmares he had been having, nightmares that made insomnia preferable to sleep" (Unterecker, p. 566). Unterecker, records two of the dreams that Crane recounted to Grunberg, dreams that not only shed light on Crane's relationship with his parents at this period but also suggest the way in which his differing attitudes toward his father and mother affected his imagining of the primal scene of origin in The Bridge.

Before examining these two dreams in some detail, we should note that Crane's knowledge of psychoanalysis, however slight or simplified, tends to give a dual focus to a psychoanalytic reading of his poetry by raising the possibility that Crane consciously introduced psychoanalytic structures into his poem to shape the biographical material. As a result, a psychoanalytic reading of The Bridge inevitably becomes an exercise in the history of ideas as well, which is to say, becomes by implication a study of the influence of psychoanalysis on the work of an American poet of the 1920s. In what follows, the psychoanalytic discourse moves back and forth across three Cranian "texts" that, in their bearing on the poet's relationship with his parents, exhibit a revealing structural continuity—a poetic text (The Bridge), a biographical text (Crane's life as reflected in his letters and the biographies of Horton and Unterecker), and a dream text (the two nightmares that Crane recounted to Grunberg which Unterecker includes in hisbiography). Though the poetic and the dream texts both involve the encryption of personal material, the level of encryption (the force of repression) is obviously greater in the poetry than in the dreams, for not only was the poetic text certain to be seen by Crane's parents but, to judge from the letters to his father and mother citing salient passages from the poem, Crane actively called it to their attention as part of what appears to have been an oblique form of self-revelation, a veiled exhibition of his deepest feelings about his parents, his personal origin.

The first of Crane's two nightmares, according to Unterecker,

seemed to Grunberg clearly about Hart's father and about Hart's own sense of inferiority. Grunberg said he was sure Hart was well aware of its symbolic content. It involved a river, Hart told him. Hart had somehow gotten into a little boat—a rowboat or a canoe—and was floating down the center of the river. He could see the shores on either side and far in the distance he could hear a waterfall. Though his boat floated along very peacefully, he began to worry as the noise of the waterfall got louder. Finally he became frightened. The boat had picked up speed. At it was swept closer and closer to the waterfall, he suddenly saw, standing on the shore just above the falls, an enormous naked Negro. Hart could not keep his eyes off the Negro's huge penis. Even though the noise of the falls was deafening and he was thoroughly frightened, he kept watching. Suddenly he realized that he was naked, too. The boat was at the very brink of the falls now and he felt himself covered with shame. His own penis was tiny, he knew, as tiny as a baby's, and he forced himself to look at it. (pp. 566-67)

The resonances of this dream both in Crane's personal life and in his poetry are far-reaching and complex. Grunberg was undoubtedly correct in thinking that the dream was "about Hart's father and about Hart's own sense of inferiority," yet we should avoid reading the figure of the black man in the dream as simply and solely an image of Crane's father. He is that, but he is a great deal more as well. Keep in mind that it was less than six months prior to this dream that Hart, in describing his boat ride on "the great, magnificent Father of Waters" to the elder Crane, pointed out that he had previously depicted this "tragically beautiful . . . scene" of the Mississippi "pouring itself at last into the oblivion of the Gulf in the "River section of The Bridge." The relevant part of "The River"—both to Crane's real boat ride down the Mississippi Delta and to his nightmare boat ride past the naked black man on the bank—is obvious. As the body of the hobo Dan Midland, who has apparently been killed in a confrontation with the sinister "Sheriff, Brakeman and Authority," is floating down the Mississippi, Crane describes the river's progress in terms that prefigure his dream:

You will not hear it as the sea; even stone
Is not more hushed by gravity .. . But slow,
As loth to take more tribute—sliding prone
Like one whose eyes were buried long ago

The River, spreading, flows—and spends your
dream.
What are you, lost within this tideless spell?
You are your father's father, and the stream—
A liquid theme that floating niggers swell.

Damp tonnage and alluvial march of days—
Nights turbid, vascular with silted shale
And roots surrendered down of morraine clays;
The Mississippi drinks the farthest dale.

O quarrying passion, undertowed sunlight!
The basalt surface drags a jungle grace
Ochreous and lynx-barred in lengthening might;
Patience! and you shall reach the biding place!

Over De Soto's bones the freighted floors
Throb past the City storied of three thrones.
Down two more turns the Mississippi pours
(Anon tall ironsides up from salt lagoons)

And flows within itself, heaps itself free.
All fades but one thin skyline "round .. . Ahead
No embrace opens but the stinging sea;
The River lifts itself from its long bed,

Poised wholly on its dream, a mustard glow
Tortured with history, its one will—flow!
—The Passion spreads in wide tongues, chocked
and slow,
Meeting the Gulf, hosannas silently below.⁴

That passion is the subject of these lines seems certain, indeed they could be said to represent a double dream of passion consistent with a double identification with father and mother. At the climax, the male Father of Waters "lifts itself from its long bed" to pour into the female Gulf. Crane had enclosed an earlier version of these seven stanzas in a letter to his mother dated June 18, 1927, saying that he hoped she would "enjoy the epic sweep of the thing—like a great river of time that takes everything and pours it into a great abyss" (LF, 584). But prior to this union of male and female, there is a union of male and male as the poetic quester, imaginatively identified with Dan Midland's corpse, enters the Father of Waters. (This same structure—a union, an imaginative identification, of male and male preceding a union of male and female—governs the quester's subsequent fantasized participation in the sacred marriage of Maquokeeta and Pocahontas, to which "The River" leads.)

One of the obvious similarities between Crane's description of the quester's entry into the Father of Waters and his own nightmare of a boat ride down river is that the river in each case is associated with the figure of a black man. In the poem the Mississippi is described as "a liquid theme that floating niggers swell," while in the dream Crane sees on the river bank a naked black man with a "huge penis." Indeed, the image of a huge penis seems to be implicit in the passage from the poem as well: the floating blacks "swell" the paternal stream whose dark "basalt surface drags a jungle grace / Ochreous and lynxbarred in lengthening might" [italics mine] as it moves toward the climactic union with the Gulf. The association of the muddy, brown Mississippi with the figure of a powerful black man is easily understood, and Crane would have found a particularly striking example of this association in a popular Broadway musical of the day. Show Boat had opened in New York on December 27, 1927, and one of the high points of the musical was the song "O1' Man River." (The Mississippi had been much in the news during the spring and summer of 1927 when Show Boat was being readied for Broadway. Its spring flood had been one of the worst in modern times, making that year memorable in the lore of the river. One recalls the opening of "The Old Man" section of Faulkner's The Wild Palms, "Once [it was in Mississippi in May in the flood year 1927]. . . . ") Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein had written "O1' Man River" with Crane's friend the black singer and actor Paul Robeson in mind. The show's producer, Florenz Ziegfeld, had announced the signing of Robeson for the role of Joe as early as December 1926, but because of delays in getting Show Boat into rehearsal, Robeson accepted other engagements and as a result did not appear in the New York production,⁵ though he recorded "0Ã Man River" for Victor Records on March 1, 1928, with Paul Whiteman's Concert Orchestra⁶ and starred in the London production of Show Boat which opened in early May 1928. Charles Morgan, commenting on Robeson's version of "O1' Man River" in The New York Times for May 27, 1928, predicted that his "hymning of the Mississippi" was sure to "become popular."⁷ "01' Man River" became identified with Robeson, and in turn Robeson's image as the archetypal noble black man of the 1920s struggling against the white man's oppressive paternalism became associated with the song. Crane's nightmare about the enormous naked black man on the river bank occurred in October or November 1928, and on November 30, 1928, Crane's friend Herbert Wise took him to see a performance of Show Boat in New York (L, 331), though Crane had undoubtedly heard the record of "O1' Man River" and knew of its dramatic context long before this. In late December, Crane saw Show Boat again in London, visited Robeson backstage, and later spent time with Robeson and his wife in their London home (L, 333). Crane had first met Robesonin 1924 when the actor starred in Eugene O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings, a play "about a negro who marries a white woman," as Crane wrote his mother in March 1924 (LF, 287). To judge from another letter to his mother two months later, the black singer had assumed heroic stature for Crane: "Robeson is one of the most superb sort of people. Very black, a deep resonance to his voice and actor eyes, Phi Beta Kappa, half-back on Walter Camps all-star eleven, and a very fine mind and nature" (LF, 315).

Given the popular practice of imaging the Father of Waters as a powerful black man, it requires no great imaginative leap to read the black man by the river in Crane's nightmare as an encrypted image of Crane's father, which is to say, as an image of the threatening aspect of the father. Yet to understand the full significance of the figure of the black man in Crane's dream, we must consider a crucial passage from his life in which he apparently felt that his father had treated him like a Negro. In January 1920, Hart, honoring his father's wish that he enter the family business, went to work for the Crane Chocolate Company in Cleveland and remained in his father's employ for the next fourteen months. Near the end of February 1921, the elder Crane assigned Hart to supervise a basement storeroom in a Cleveland restaurant that the company owned. Unterecker describes the surroundings:

Across a basement corridor from him were the restaurant kitchens, where Hart delighted in the relaxed, free, good times of the Negro cooks and dishwashers. Grace, when Hart wrote her of his transfer, felt that C. A.'s assigning Hart to this job in this place—particularly because Hart had replaced a discharged Negro handyman—was a deliberate effort to humiliate son and mother; but Hart, lacking Grace's prejudices, managed to thrive on the underground life. For the first time in months he set to work on a poem and in the leisure of his storeroom turned out the first drafts of "Black Tambourine," a study of the store's porter, who, "forlorn in the cellar," seemed caught between two unavailable worlds: lost Africa nothing more than racial memory, and the white, smiling world of the restaurant upstairs barred to him by the world's closed door. (p. 188)

Commenting on the poem in a letter to Gorham Munson, Crane says that "in the popular mind" the Negro has been "sentimentally or brutally "placed' in a "midkingdom . . . somewhere between man and beast" (L, 58). Crane introduces the figure of Aesop into the poem not only to evoke through Aesop's animal fables this world midway "between man and beast" but also to suggest the way in which the slave Aesop transfigured and thus redeemed the condition of slavery, in which men are treated like animals, by the poetic art of fables in which animals behave like men:

Aesop, driven to pondering, found
Heaven with the tortoise and the hare;
Fox brush and sow ear top his grave
And mingling incantations on the air.

(p. 4)

On the morning of April 19, 1921, Crane's father paid a surprise visit to the restaurant where his son worked. Hart had left the storeroom and was having a late breakfast with his black friends in the kitchen. As Unterecker recounts it, "their jokes and stories filled the big kitchen with good-natured laughter, and none of them saw Hart's father descend the basement stairs." The elder Crane "reprimanded Hart, ordered him to return to the storeroom, and, as Hart turned to go, added that since Hart was again living with his mother, he could eat his meals with her, too. Hart interpreted the remark as an attack both on himself and on Grace. He whirled to face his father, threw the storeroom keys on the floor, and, in front of the other help, yelled that he was through with C. A. for good. C. Á., by now as angry as his son, turned white with rage, shouting that if Hart didn't apologize he would be disinherited. Hart climaxed the scene by screaming curses on his father and his father's money and rushing blindly from the store" (p. 198). The following day Crane wrote to Gorham Munson that he had quit his father's employ for good after having "been treated like a dog now for two years" (L, 55). And later he complained that he had "thrown away" two years "at thefeet" of his father performing "peon duties" (Unterecker, p. 200). In view of Crane's evocation of the black's mid-kingdom "somewhere between man and beast" in "Black Tambourine," it seems clear that Crane felt his father had kept him in economic slavery, had treated the poet (Aesop) "like a dog" by placing him among, and equating him with, the descendants of black slaves who depended on the elder Crane's paternal care.

This early equation of the images of son, poet, slave, and black man in Crane's mind helps explain the later association in "The River" of the poetic quester and the blacks as singers. In the passage that immediately precedes the quester's imagined descent into the Father of Waters, Crane evokes the image of the Mississippi in the context of a black spiritual:

Oh, lean from the window, if the train slows
down,
As though you touched hands with some ancient
clown,
—A little while gaze absently below
And hum Deep River with them while they go.

(p. 68)

The opening line of "Deep River" ("Deep river, my heart lies over Jordan") is echoed a few lines later in the description of those who, feeding the river timelessly, "win no frontier by their wayward plight, / But drift in stillness, as from Jordan's brow" (p. 68). (The Mississippi and the Jordan are also associated in the verse of "O1' Man River": the black man says, "Let me go "way from de Mississippi, / Let me go "way from de white men boss, / Show me dat stream called de river Jordan, / Dat's de ol' stream dat I long to cross.") It is worth noting that Paul Robeson recorded "Deep River" for Victor Records on May 10, 1927,⁸ and that Crane, though he began jotting down lines for "The River" as early as July 1926, wrote the bulk of the poem in mid-June 1927 (Unterecker, p. 490). We should also recall that according to an early outline of The Bridge, which he included in a letter to Otto Kahn dated March 18, 1926, Crane planned to make the dramatic speaker of one section of the poem a "Negro porter" on the "Calgary Express . . . singing to himself (a jazz form for this) of his sweetheart and the death of John Brown alternately" (L, 241). The section, which was intended to take "in the whole racial history of the Negro in America,"⁹ as Crane noted in a synopsis, was never written, but traces of it can perhaps be seen in "The River" with its reference to "Pullman breakfasters" (p. 68) and its image of someone leaning from the train to hum "Deep River." At any rate the association of the Mississippi with the song of a black singer is clearly present in the poem even before the crucial stanza in which river, song, and singer merge, as, "lost within this tideless spell," you become "your father's father, and the stream—/ A liquid theme that floating niggers swell." The river is an unending stream of song, a "tideless spell," which is to say, a timeless (magical) spell (incantation, verse, charm [Latin carmina, song]) in which the quester immerses himself and to which he joins his own song. And what the river-song is to the black singer, the bridgesong is to the poetic quester, as Crane makes clear when he echoes this passage from "The River" in the concluding "Atlantis" section: Having addressed the symbolic bridge of the poem as "O River-throated," the quester exhorts his poetic vision: "Atlantis,—hold thy floating singer late!" (p. 116). As the "liquid theme" of the river holds the "floating niggers," so the visionary submerged continent, the mythic land bridge between East and West, is meant to hold the "floating singer." Significantly, the words "niggers" and "singer" are anagrams of one another, an encrypted association that Crane, who describes in "O Carib Isle!" how the temporal erosions of nature "shift, subvert, / And anagrammatize your name" (p. 156), clearly intended. For this anagram, this hidden equation of names, expresses Crane's sense (dating from at least the time of "Black Tambourine") that for white, paternal, commercial America the "singer" (poet) is a "nigger" (slave). The "niggers" and the "singer" are both described as "floating" not only because they expect, in trusting themselves to their songs as a swimmer trusts himself to the water, to be buoyed up and sustained by the creative stream, but also because blacks and poets were considered by commercial America to be economically unstable, to be floaters or drifters. And it is in this regard that the "niggers" and the "singer" are associated with the hoboes in "The River," who are in turnpresented as singers:

Strange bird-wit, like the elemental gist
Of unwalled winds they offer, singing low
My Old Kentucky Home and Casey Jones,
Some Sunny Day. I heard a road-gang chanting so.

(p. 64)

What these associations ultimately suggest is the extent to which Crane in his self-embraced role of son-poet-slave identified himself with the Negro and thus the extent to which the figure of the naked black man in his dream is not just an image of Crane's father but of Crane as well. Indeed, I would suggest that the black man in Crane's dream is the son's idealized image of the union of father and son, a figure that combines in one person the powerful Father of Waters and the floating black singer, the paternal master and the filial poet-slave. If the black is a dual figure who represents the son's idealized attempt to assume the father's power and authority without directly combatting the father (a combat that would involve the son's risking either his own destruction or the destruction of the paternal authority to recognize and acknowledge), then we can understand why, in describing the quester's union with the Father of Waters, Crane says that, "lost within this tideless spell," you become not your father but "your father's father"; for if the father is himself a son (as this image of the "father's father" implies), if he is not his own origin but merely a predecessor caught in the same generational series in which the son finds himself, then a paternal authority based on the father's temporal priority to the son is thereby shown to be circumscribed: Father Time is represented as being encompassed (circularized) by the timeless (m)other. It is this timeless mother, the muse, who has the power to circularize time, to confer generational earliness, paternal authority, and originality through the tideless spell of song. Which brings us to the other dream that Crane recounted to Grunberg.

In contrast to the dream in which the father appears in the symbolic form of a black man, the other nightmare of Crane's that Unterecker records is explicitly about Crane's mother. The dream was so vivid, Unterecker notes, that Crane

had the feeling, long after he was awake, that it was something he had actually experienced. He had gone to bed exhausted, and when he woke up, he was in his old room on 115th Street. He got up, remembering that he had to hunt for something in the attic, and as he stumbled through the dusty attic—half awake—he kept trying to remember what he was looking for. Whatever it was, it was in a trunk. He was sure of that. It was very dark in the attic, but when he found the trunk, there was enough light for him to see that it was full of this mother's clothes. He started rummaging through them, looking for whatever it was he was looking for, pulling out dresses, shoes, stockings, underclothing. But the trunk was so full, it seemed he would never find what he was after. There was so much to look at that when he found the hand, he hardly realized it was a human hand; but when he found another hand and a piece of an arm, he knew there was a body in the trunk. He kept pulling out piece after piece of it, all mixed in with the clothing. The clothing was covered with blood. It was not until he had almost emptied the trunk that he realized he was unpacking the dismembered body of his mother. (p. 567)

I would suggest that this dream expresses, in a series of redundant symbols, the son's desire for a total return to the womb, indeed expresses that desire with a vengeance in its symbolic reduction of the mother's body to a trunk (which is to say, a torso) containing a body that has itself been violently reduced in size in order to fit in this container. Awakening from an exhausted sleep with its suggestion of the amniotic state, Crane finds himself in "his old room" at his maternal grandparents' house on East 115th Street in Cleveland. As an adult, Crane always thought of the house on 115th Street, where he lived from the ages of eight to seventeen, as his family home, and he referred to his bedroom in the north tower of the old Victorian structure as his "ivory tower" (Unterecker, p. 21) and "sanctum de la tour" (Unterecker, photo following p. 48). In a July 1923 letter to Charlotte Rychtarik, Crane reminisced,

When I think of that room, it is almost to give way to tears, because I shall never find my way back to it. It is not necessary, of course, that I should, but just the same it was the center and beginning of all that I am and ever will be, the center of such pain as would tear me to pieces to tell you about, and equally the center of great joys! The Bridge seems to me so beautiful—and it was there that I first thought about it, and it was there that I wrote "Faustus and Helen." . . . And all this is, of course, connected very intimately with my Mother, my beautiful mother whom I am so glad you love and speak about (L, 140).

This dream of the son's return to the home of his mother's mother resembles the structure we noted in "The River" in which the quester, entering the river of time that leads back to the oblivion of the gulf, becomes his father's father. The son attempts to circumvent his parents' generation and its conflicts between mother and father and between parent and child by identifying himself with his grandparents' generation, that prior authority to which his parents were subject, the doting grandparents who are the grandchild's natural ally and his court of higher appeal. In the lyric "My Grandmother's Love Letters" (1920), Crane memorialized his maternal grandmother Elizabeth Beiden Hart in a scenario that anticipates details of his dream. On a rainy night the poet sits in an attic reading "the letters of my mother's mother, / Elizabeth, / That have been pressed so long / Into a corner of the roof / That they are brown and soft / And liable to melt as snow" (p. 6). (One wonders if the letters had been kept in a trunk in the attic?) As he reads these letters that seem as fragile as the snows of yester-year, the poet attempts to journey back through his grandparents' written memories to the world before his birth. Looking at this intimate exchange of correspondence, this written intercourse between his grandmother and grandfather, the poet seems to be imaginatively present at a scene of origin which is, if not more primal than, certainly prior to that of parental intercourse and clearly more comforting to the poet since these letters attest to a love between his grandparents that Crane had begun to feel was originally absent between his own parents, an original absence that seemed to call into question his personal origin.

In the closing lines of "My Grandmother's Love Letters" Crane raises the same question that concerns him in the sections of The Bridge that follow the primal scene of origin in "The Dance": whether, if one is able to journey back imaginatively to the origin, one can then return to the present with that vision of origin intact. The poet asks himself,

"Are your fingers long enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes:
Is the silence strong enough
To carry back the music to its source
And back to you again
As though to her?"

Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.

(p. 6)

The image used to evoke the return to origin—carrying "back the music to its source"—suggests the stream of song flowing to the gulf at the end of "The River"—origin and end, source and abyss coinciding in this circular journey.

It is significant that in the months immediately preceding this dream of finding his mother's dismembered body in a trunk Crane was much concerned with establishing a home of his own. His childhood home on 115th Street in Cleveland (the setting of the dream) had been sold in 1925, and his break with his mother three years later seems to have reawakened and intensified his feelings of homelessness. In early July 1928—some two weeks after his letter describing the boat ride on the "great, magnificent Father of Waters"—Crane wrote his fatheragain, asking for a loan to buy a small farmhouse near Patterson, New York, where he was then living, and offering as collateral the $5,000 bequest from his maternal grandfather that was being held in trust for him until his grandmother's death. Clarence Crane replied that business difficulties made it impossible for him to advance Hart the money at that time. By the end of the month Hart wrote his father that he hadn't "enough cash to even get into New York" and that "at present I haven't a place to lay my head": "I've never felt quite as humiliated. I can't ask you for anything more, and I'm not" (LF, 626-27). Six weeks later, however, Crane's maternal grandmother died, and suddenly, with his financial worries temporarily at an end, it seemed that he would be able to have a place of his own. But at this point his mother intervened. Trying to coerce Hart into returning to California for a reconciliation, Grace refused to sign the papers needed by the bank to release the $5,000 legacy from his grandfather. In November, Crane sent his mother a telegram threatening her with legal action. Grace replied by telegram that she had signed the papers, but threatened in turn to ask Hart's father "to use his influence with the bank against paying him his inheritance on the grounds of his drinking habits" (Horton, pp. 249-50). Interpreting this as a veiled threat to tell his father about his homosexuality, Hart used his inheritance to leave immediately for Europe, feeling that his mother not only had tried to keep him from having a home of his own but also, as he wrote his friends the Rychtariks, had made it impossible for him to live in his own country. Crane subsequently memorialized this conflict with Grace over his grandfather's legacy in "Quaker Hill" where, faced with the sweeping historical question "Where are my kinsmen and the patriarch race?", the quester has to

Shoulder the curse of sundered parentage,
Wait for the postman driving from Birch Hill
With birthright by blackmail, the arrant page
That unfolds a new destiny to fill. . . .

(p. 105)

The curse of sundered parentage—in the sense both of his parents' divorce and of his break with his mother and his previous estrangement from his father—was much on Crane's mind during the months he spent writing the final sections of The Bridge, for the condition of sundered parentage had come to seem an image of the state of the modern American suffering the effects of a spiritual divorce that had shattered an original union between man and nature in the pre-Columbian "nature-world" of the Indians. Because of that divorce of man and nature, the modern American is a son estranged from the maternal body of the virgin continent, a body which, in his frustration, he violates in search of wealth rather than cultivating and making fruitful. Following immediately on the quester's vision of the nature world of the Indians in "The Dance," "Indiana" depicts a characteristic moment in the historical disintegration of that union of man and nature: the deracinating effect that a farmer's abandoning his land to join the Colorado gold rush has on his son who, years later, runs away to sea. The farmer, baffled in his search for gold, died on the way back from Colorado, and the poem's dramatic speaker, the farmer's wife, tells her son the story of his origin as he prepares to leave their Indiana farm.

There can be little doubt that the events of 1928—Crane's break with his mother, his flight and her pursuit through letters, his rapprochement with his father, the battle with his mother over his grandfather's legacy, and his unsuccessful attempt to buy his own home—significantly shaped "Indiana," and these events—along with the nightmares that Unterecker records and what they reveal of Crane's feelings about his father and mother during this period—shed light on Crane's most important alteration of the poem: the reversal that occurred in the roles originally planned for the father and mother in the poem as outlined in the 1927 letter to Kahn. Perhaps the best way to understand the full meaning of this reversal is to recall critics' standard objection to "Indiana." From the first reviews of The Bridge, "Indiana" was singled out as the weakest section of the poem because of what critics felt was its cloying sentimentality. That opinion has generally persisted, supported by the knowledge that "Indiana" was one of the last sections completed and the sense that The Bridge was finished not out of theforce of its original inspiration but under the pressure of bringing to an end a project that had gone on for seven years. That the tone of "Indiana" is sentimental cannot be denied, but what critics have tended to ignore in attributing the poem's tonal lapses either to a momentary failure of Crane's art or to his loss of belief in the project as a whole is that unlike nearly all the other sections of The Bridge, "Indiana" is spoken not by Crane's surrogate, the poetic quester, but by another persona. And, to judge from the other major instance of this device in the poem ("Ave Maria"), one of the purposes of these sections is to characterize their speakers by the form and quality of the poetry they are given to speak. Thus in "Ave Maria" Columbus uses dramatic blank verse of an almost Elizabethan grandeur, while in "Indiana" the mother speaks in the mawkish quatrains of a nineteenth-century popular ballad. In each case the verse form evokes a cultural moment personified by its speaker. Crane uses a similar device in "Virginia," where, as Susan Jenkins Brown has pointed out, he parodies a popular song of the 1920s "What Do You Do Sunday, Mary?" from the musical Poppy to characterize "a little Five-and-Ten salesgirl-virgin letting down her hair from her Cathedral tower [the pseudo-Gothic Woolworth Building on lower Broadway]—but only for her true suitor on her free Saturday."¹⁰ And just as "Virginia" alludes to one popular song, so "Indiana" evokes another, the 1917 ballad "Indiana" (better known by its first line as "Back Home Again in Indiana"), with its imagery of nostalgic longing for a rural childhood home ("The new mown hay—sends all its fragrance / From the fields I used to roam,—/ When I dream about the moonlight on the Wabash, / Then I long for my Indiana home"), as if the twentieth-century ballad expressed the feelings of the runaway son grown older.

In his 1927 letter to Otto Kahn, Crane said that he planned in "Indiana" to allude to the mother "in a way which implies her succession to the nature-symbolism of Pocahontas" (L, 307), but this was at the time when he still thought of the poem as "a lyrical summary of the period of conquest" and still planned for its dramatic speaker to be the farmer whose wife had "died on the way back from the gold-rush" (L, 307). When the roles of the father and mother were reversed, the mother retained her succession to the nature-symbolism of Pocahontas, but this succession was now presented in what, for American literature, has traditionally been an image of generational decline—the figure of the half-breed. Returning from the gold fields, the mother sees "passing on a stumbling jade / A homeless squaw—/ / Perhaps a halfbreed. On her back / She cradled a babe's body" (p.78). In a moment of maternal mirroring the white mother holds up her own son for the squaw to see, knowing "that mere words could not have brought us nearer. / She nodded—and that smile across her shoulder / Will still endear her / / As long as Jim, your father's memory, is warm" (p. 78). One senses that the pioneer mother recognizes in the homeless wandering of the squaw the same rootlessness that sent her husband to the gold fields and will send her son to sea.

It seems clear that in imagining the mother in "Indiana" Crane was influenced by his feelings about his own mother. The scenario of a mother's self-pitying appeal to her son to write her from overseas and to return home before it is too late parallels Crane's own situation at the time too closely for us to doubt this. It also seems clear that the major factor in Crane's decision to reverse the roles originally planned for the father and mother in this section was his break with his mother and the reversal in his feelings toward her. Had Crane kept to his original plan for "Indiana," it would have been virtually impossible for the father as the poem's speaker to present a negative picture of his dead wife as part of his farewell to his departing son. And if much of the point of "Indiana" is the negative characterization of the white mother who symbolizes the degraded maternal landscape of modern America, then the reversal of Crane's earliest feelings about his own mother (which parallels the movement from the mythic dark [m]other in "The Dance" to the historical white mother in "Indiana") left him with the difficult task of preserving the maternal archetype in its original power and reverence while presenting the white mother as a decadent instance of this archetype. Not uncommonly, this kind of ambivalence is handled by splitting the maternal image into a good and a bad half, each separately embodied, and the final version of "Indiana" shows the traces of such splitting. On the one hand, the structure of the poem, considered in the abstract, suggests an idealized version of the womb fantasy: the father is dead without the son's having to kill him, and the mother pleads with the son to return home. No doubt we are meant to see this structure as completing the epicycle of desire begun by "Ave Maria," the poem that leads into "Powhatan's Daughter." There, Columbus at mid-ocean prays to the Virgin Mother to grant him safe return home, and in the final poem of "Powhatan's Daughter," the mother, as if in reply to that earlier episode, pleads with her son, who is running away to sea, to "come back to Indiana." Yet it is equally clear that the pioneer mother envisions the son's return as occurring entirely on her own terms, not a return that grants the son access to original power but one that keeps him forever subservient. From the first stanza of "Indiana," the mother tries to prevent the son's departure or at least to hasten his return by undermining the notion of original power. During the fantasized primal scene of origin in "The Dance," the poetic quester had entreated Maquokeeta, "Medicineman, relent, restore—/ Lie to us,—dance us back the tribal morn" (p. 73), but the mother in "Indiana" begins her song by evoking the loss of that original earliness:

The morning glory, climbing the morning long
Over the lintel on its wiry vine,
Closes before the dusk, furls in its song
As I close mine .. .

(p. 76)

The mother's story opens with an image of closure that is clearly meant to be experienced by her son as a kind of foreclosure: the glory of the morning has past, here in the dusk there is only the fated repetition of unoriginal action. On that disabling note the mother recounts the son's personal origin, the circumstances that led up to his birth on the trail back from the gold fields. The thrust of this account is to show her son the unoriginality of his leaving the farm to go adventuring, to show "How we, too, Prodigal, once rode off, too—/ Waved Seminary Hill a gay good-bye." In addressing her son as "Prodigal," the mother implies that, like the son in the parable, he will return home one day defeated by his own irresponsibility and seeking parental succor, and in so doing confirm his unoriginality in the repetition of his parents' failure. We should keep in mind that Crane was writing "Quaker Hill" with its allusion to the threatened lawsuit against his mother over his grandfather's legacy ("birthright by blackmail") at the same time that he was working on "Indiana" in which the mother tries to act as the mediatrix (or perhaps we should say executrix) of her son's birthright by telling him where he comes from, who his people are, and thus where he belongs and what belongs to him:

You were the first—before Ned and this farm,—
First born, remember—

And since then—all that's left to me of Jim
Whose folks, like mine, came out of
Arrowhead.
And you're the only one with eyes like him—
Kentucky bred!

I'm standing still, I'm old, I'm half of stone!
Oh, hold me in those eyes' engaging blue;
There's where the stubborn years gleam and
atone,—
Where gold is true!

(pp. 78-79)

These lines, filled with an irony unperceived by their speaker, undermine the thing they argue for. The mother tells her son what belongs to him as the "first born," that is, she invokes on his behalf the prerogative of generational earliness, after she has just finished describing the loss of original earliness in the closing of the frontier, the loss of any possibility of being first. The promise of America, of the endless frontier, was the golden promise of an inexhaustible access to the original world. But that was not what the farmer and his wife found in Colorado in 1859 when they arrived at a mining town ("A dreamcalled Eldorado" [The Golden]) that had "no charter but a promised crown / Of claims to stake":

But we,—too late, too early, howsoever—
Won nothing out of fifty-nine—those years—
But gilded promise, yielded to us never,
And barren tears. . .

(p. 78)

Though she professes uncertainty as to whether their failure resulted from being too early or too late, everything else in the poem points to her sense of belatedness. And it is consistent with her misunderstanding of her son that she apparently considers this tale of belatedness, of parents' dreams foreclosed by the closing of the frontier, to be in some way an effective argument for the son's remaining on the farm rather than searching for a new frontier on the sea or in some other land. In "Indiana," then, the mother in mediating a birthright that consists of an absent paternal origin, a lost earliness, functions as a kind of disabling antimuse—neither the origin herself nor the means to a lost original power. And yet it would be a mistake to paint too black a picture of her (particularly since in Crane's color coding the good mother is the dark [m]other). The pioneer woman may be foolish and possessive but she is not intentionally evil, which is to say that Crane's portrait of her, no matter how much it may reflect his personal feelings about Grace Crane at the time, is not intended to discredit the maternal archetype. In terms of Crane's own psychic economy in writing The Bridge, "Indiana" serves in part to separate the image of his own mother (the white woman of materialist America) from that of the Great Mother, the dark woman of the triple aspect (mother-lover-muse) whom he calls Pocahontas, the poet's true mother. What Crane objects to in the pioneer woman is not the excessive character of maternal love, but rather that this mother offers her love only on her own terms, terms that, because they are ultimately selfpitying and self-regarding, reduce the son to being her mirror.

In a letter Crane wrote to his friend William Wright in November 1930, he confessed to being "considerably jolted at the charge of sentimentality continually leveled" at "Indiana." Noting that he "approved of a certain amount of sentiment," he added "Since "race' is the principal motivation of 'Indiana,' I can't help thinking that, observed in the proper perspective, and judged in relation to the argument or theme of the Pocahontas section as a whole, the pioneer woman's maternalism isn't excessive" (L, 357-58). One suspects that Crane was surprised less by the charge of sentimentality than by the fact that it was leveled at the poet rather than the persona. Yet there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Crane's remark that the pioneer woman's maternalism was not excessive within the overall context of his fantasized portrait of the muse-mother and the vision of a total return. Indeed, for the poet-son, the more intense and narrowly focused the muse's love is the better, as long as that love is given wholly on the son's terms. It is in light of this split in Crane's feelings about the figure of the mother that we should interpret his puzzling remark about race being "the principal motivation of 'Indiana.'

Granting that the poem's implicit comparison of the pioneer woman and Pocahontas as mother figures tends to evoke the maternal difference between them as being in some sense a racial difference, I would argue that in The Bridge race functions in regard to the image of the mother in much the same way that it does in relation to the image of the father in Crane's nightmare of the black man on the river bank. Which is to say that since the black and the Indian represented for the white America of Crane's day the world of animal nature as opposed to that of human culture, and since one of the traditional principles of differentiation between nature and culture, between animal and human, is the incest taboo, Crane's symbolic translation of the white father and mother into a black and an Indian respectively circumvents this taboo by placing the objects of desire in an original nature-world where incest does not exist. As the Negro in Crane's dream represents the fantasized incestuous union of father and son, so the Indian maiden Pocahontas in The Bridge represents that of mother and son. And since in each case the idealized figure is drawn from a race that isconsidered by white America to be subservient or inferior (a subservience that evokes for Crane the child's subjection to his parents), their use as symbols of the union of father and son and of mother and son, that is, their elevation to the status of ideals, represents the triumph of the son: it marks these fantasized unions as occurring on the son's terms.

Yet obviously Crane is neither black nor an Indian, and so, as one would expect, in the very process of symbolizing his forbidden desires in these dark figures he obliquely reaffirms the prohibition that gives those desires their significance within a differential system. Here one finds perhaps a further, not to say deeper, significance to that reversal in the roles originally planned for the father and mother in "Indiana." In 1927, when Crane was close to Grace and at odds with his father, it was his incestuous feelings for his mother that had to be repressed (the estrangement from his father served as a sufficient defense against forbidden desires in that quarter), while at the same period it was the ideal of paternal affection and esteem that had to be reaffirmed. Consequently in the version of "Indiana" that he described to Kahn, the mother is absent from the scene (psychically cancelled by death), and the father speaks to the son, presumably to express his love. But in 1929, when Crane was no longer speaking to his mother and had become closer to his father, it was his incestuous feelings for the latter that had now to be repressed (the estrangement from the other parent serving once again as a sufficient defense in that quarter), while it was the ideal of maternal love that had to be reaffirmed. Consequently, in the finished version of the poem the father is absent, and the mother speaks to the son. In this version, however, although Crane projects the son's ideal of maternal love in the abstract form of the poem—that is, in the scenario of a mother pleading with her son to return home in the father's absence—he evokes in the possessiveness of the pioneer woman the real maternal love that he has known.

It may seem that we have spent more time on "Indiana" than its poetic merit warrants. Yet both because of its formal importance as the closing section of "Powhatan's Daughter" and because of the insight that it provides into Crane's juxtaposition of personal and national history in The Bridge as a whole this degree of attention is justified. Indeed, in the latter regard we can see that the autobiographical material which Crane incorporates into the poem is meant to convey his sense of how much this vision, indeed any vision, of a return to national origin depends for its emotional force on the concepts of fatherland and motherland, concepts whose collective force is, in one degree or another, a function of each individual's personal relationship to his parents. That patriotism ultimately derives from the way one feels about one's father, or that the love of the native land, the physical nature of the nation ("native," "nature," and "nation" are all from the Latin natus, "to be born") takes its basic emotional tone from the feeling for one's mother simply means that the most powerful trope for binding individuals to a place and thus to each other has always been the parental image, and that to deal with national feelings about the native land inevitably means dealing with personal feelings about one's parents. For this reason Crane's complex, shifting relationship with his father and mother is part of the very fabric of the poem, both as direct thematic motif and as indirect shaping force. Indeed, inasmuch as Crane had cast himself in the role of the prototypical twentieth-century American poet through his surrogate the poetic quester, he had come to view his successful, overbearing father—the millionaire candy manufacturer who invented the Life Saver and who considered his son's poetic career as a rejection of his own life's work in creating the patrimony of a family business—and his disabling, possessive mother, with her virulent midwestern blend of Christian Science mysticism and Chatauqua artiness, as the prototypical parents of the modern American poet in that they seemed to represent between them virtually every obstacle that the serious practice of poetry would have to confront in this country in this century.

NOTES

¹ Hart Crane, The Letters of Hart Crane, 1916-1932, ed. Brom Weber (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1952), p. 307. All subsequent quotations from this volume will be indicated in the text by the letter L and page number.

² John Unterecker, Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), p. 534. See also Philip Horton, Hart Crane: The Life of an American Poet (New York: The Viking Press, 1957).

³Letters of Hart Crane and His Family, ed. Thomas S. W. Lewis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), pp. 619-20. All subsequent quotations from this volume will be indicated in the text by the letters LF and page number.

⁴ Hart Crane, The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, ed. Brom Weber (New York: Liveright, 1966), pp. 68-69.

⁵ Gerald Bordman, Jerome Kern: His Life and Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 267-77 and 299.

⁶ Brian Rust, The Complete Entertainment Discography from the Mid-1890s to 1942 (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1973), p. 552.

⁷The New York Times, May 27, 1928, sect. 8, p. 1.

⁸ Rust, Complete Entertainment Discography, p. 552.

⁹ Brom Weber, Hart Crane (New York: Bodley Press, 1948), p. 261.

¹⁰ Susan Jenkins Brown, Robber Rocks: Letters and Memories of Hart Crane, 1923-1932 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), p. 111.