“Life is awful in Cleveland.”

— Hart Crane, letter to Wilbur Underwood, June 15, 1922
 

Hart Crane, who is famous for having jumped off the back of a boat at age 32 after having been lauded as one of America’s greatest poets, is most often associated with New York. This makes sense: Crane lived and wrote there, after all, and his best-known work, The Bridge, is an epic about the Brooklyn Bridge. It is no surprise that the go-to biography of Crane, Paul Mariani’s The Broken Tower (the basis of last year's motion picture starring James Franco), starts this way: “There was only one city for Hart Crane, and that was New York.”

But this is wrong from the start. It’s a rust belt story, that of Hart Crane. He even has a rust belt name — the name of a piece of heavy machinery — made even more so by the fact that sometimes he would sign his letters “Heart.” Crane was not a New York but a Cleveland poet: a mess of a thing, a striving wreck of promise and all too human failings. Crane was raised in Cleveland and lived much of his short adult life in the city that made his father rich and his mother suicidal. He hated its over-obviousness, its out-to-make-a-buck spirit. “What especially irked him was Josephson’s going gaga over Apollinaire’s celebration of the new: ‘the telegraph, the locomotive, the automat, the wireless, the streetcars and the electric lamp post,’” Mariani writes. “In Paris, such quotidian conveniences might be novelties, to be praised for their abstract design. But in Cleveland, such things were mere practicalities for getting things done or for getting from one point to another.”

Crane hated Cleveland (or so he claimed), but he could not deny its traction. It had a “vulgar honesty” to it that Greenwich Village, already overrun by tourists and poseurs by the time he arrived there, did not. In New York and Washington, D.C., where he lived briefly when his father sent him to open new sales territory, he was often homesick. I have “a terrible vacuity about me and with me and a nostalgia for Cleveland,” he wrote to a friend in 1920. It was not a beautiful place but he was happy there, he said. He returned home, and was relieved to be

back into the usual smoke and tawdry thoroughfares […] Does one really get so used to such things as, in time, to miss them, if absent? I am sure I should not miss factory whistles in Pisa or Morocco, but I frankly did miss them in Washington. Anyway, they were more enlivening (and the people they claim) than anything or anyone that I saw in Washington which seemed to me the most elegantly restricted and bigoted community I ever ventured into.

¤

CRANE’S: A Store That Would Be Distinguished on Fifth Avenue

— sign on C.A. Crane’s candy store in Akron, 1914
 

Hart’s father, C.A. Crane, was a candy man. In 1901, cane sugar was the next new thing, so C.A. watered down maple sugar with it i...