James Franco spotlights the subject of his latest movie, The Broken Tower: 20th-century poet Hart Crane.
The man himself was decades gone when Robert Lowell ventriloquized him in a bitter poem: “;When the Pulitzers showered on some dope / or screw who flushed our dry mouths out with soap, / few people would consider why I took / to stalking sailors, and scattered Uncle Sam’s / phony gold-plated laurels to the birds.”; Hart Crane jumped to his death from a ship in April 1932, a few months shy of his 33rd birthday, on his way back from Mexico to a friendless New York. Why did he jump? He had been betrayed by intimates such as Yvor Winters and Allen Tate, who had disparaged his book The Bridge, eight years in the making. He had been waiting for an inheritance from his father, a millionaire candy manufacturer—the man who invented the Life Saver, ironically—and had just learned that the family fortune had been sucked away by debt. In a dark period he had sought emotional support in an affair in Mexico with Peggy Cowley, ex-wife of Malcolm Cowley—the man who would revive Fitzgerald, put Faulkner back in print, and edit On the Road. It is presumed to be Crane’s only heterosexual affair, in a lifetime of drunken one-night romps. Now he was on his way back to New York and to a likely future writing advertising copy—soul-crushing work for a man who was trying to touch the spirit of his age.
His poetry was damn difficult, and he knew it. The poems are thick with metaphor, high diction, and compulsive allusions to myth. Not for Crane the accessible American idiom of a William Carlos Williams. He loved Whitman and filled his poetry with references to the modern era, but he wrote more like an Elizabethan. Nobody got it. People still don’t get it, at least not without effort. Crane had his acolytes—Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Tennessee Williams. The latter two seemed drawn as much to his homosexuality as to his visionary language. But Lowell? Crane was a rebel, and Lowell was attracted to that. When Lowell mentions the dope who won a Pulitzer, he’s speaking of himself.
Lowell’s poem has little to do with Crane’s work per se. It appears in his book Life Studies, a collection that ushered in the era of confessional poetry. The poem is about Crane himself—about being unappreciated, gay, a romantic in an age of modernism. All of this comes through powerfully in Paul Mariani’s biography The Broken Tower—the inspiration for a movie I’ve made, with the same title. Crane loved movies, and actually likened himself to Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, downtrodden but skillfully using (and disposing of) the mechanisms of the industrial age. Poetry is not a form that is easily adaptable to film, and Crane’s is denser than most. The trip from the page to the screen is a long one. But what is most vital in Crane is the way he lived and his devotion to his work. That is what Lowell saw, and what Ginsberg and Williams saw, and what a movie can embody. And it is what I have tried to capture on film nearly 80 years after Crane’s death.
http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/features/2011/06/james-franco-hart-crane-slide-show-201106#intro