Tunnels and Bridges

My birthday gifts arrived incrementally this year, with the gifts from my wife coming from Amazon.com on Saturday, two days late. I had asked for the three-disc recording of William H. Gass reading his novel The Tunnel, and the Library of America’s new Complete Poems and Selected Letters of Hart Crane. When the box arrived in the mail, it seemed too small to contain so much language, even in its digitalized form.

Longtime readers know of my longtime devotion to both writers. Gass I first read in 1968 or 1969 – the beautiful stories in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. His first collection of essays, Fiction and the Figures of Life, I carried in college like a Bible or talisman, with a superstitious regard for its powers to ward off dull prose. Among the so-called metafictionists or post-modernists – Barth, Barthelme, Elkin, Coover, Pynchon, et al. – Gass is the one to whom I have remained most loyal, because of his loyalty to language, its beauties and potentials.

Gass worked almost 30 years on The Tunnel, which Knopf finally published in 1995. As bookmaking, the 652-page, black-white-and-red volume – I bought the first edition as soon as it appeared -- is a work of art. The 45-hour recorded version is put out by the invaluable Dalkey Archive Press, which also keeps the paperback edition of the novel in print. I have never listened to an audio book, so I’m not certain what to expect from the text, the voice or myself, especially over such a long stretch of time. I don’t like wearing headphones and I’ll probably listen to Gass reading with the book in front of me – the discs are keyed to the novel’s pagination. I’m looking forward to this experiment. I listened to several minutes of the opening, and Gass’ voice sounds perfect: Midwestern-flat, plainspoken, no excesses of emoting. Gass recorded the book last year, when he turned 81, in a St. Louis studio. This must have been an exhausting undertaking – the novel is exhausting, and at the same time energizing, to read – but his voice sounds strong, weathered, stoic and definitely not like an octogenarian’s.

The booklet accompanying the discs includes “The Tunnel in Twelve Philippics,” “Structural Description, “Cast,” “Levels of Organization,” and other ex post facto addenda that I suspect are intended as tongue-in-cheek by Gass. I’ve read the novel twice and I can’t see that any of this auxiliary matter contributes much to the experience. My favorite inclusion in the booklet is a black-and-white photo of a benignly gnomish Gass in the recording studio, seated at a lectern, microphone in front of him, text open about three-quarters of the way through, the novelist’s hands flat on the open pages, reading glasses on his nose and another pair on a cord resting on his belly. He is reading. He looks like a preacher – Jethro Furber? -- intoning Scripture.

In his essay about Hart Crane, “The Last Elizabethan,” collected in Facsimiles of Time, poet-critic Eric Ormsby writes:

“Like Whitman, Crane sought a way to praise authentically in the modern world. Could there be a harder task for any poet in a century that George Orwell once likened to `a cesspool full of barbed wire’? And like Dickinson, he struggled mightily to forge a style of tremendous compression in which by a multifoliate image, his `petalled word,’ he might clasp and conjoin all the irreconcilable torments of a lifetime. In reaction against T.S. Eliot, and especially The Waste Land (which for Crane signified an `impasse’), he worked to articulate a voice that was radiantly affirmative while remaining unmistakably modern.”

Ormsby, as usual, is on the money. Few poets give me so much unmediated pleasure as Crane (Shakespeare, Keats, Stevens, a few others). The saddest thing about the new Library of America collection is that of its 850 pages, only 144 are poetry. Crane died a suicide at age 32. The rest of the book consists of Crane’s small body of essays and reviews, and a generous selection of his letters – the best and most essential written by a poet since Keats.

Listen to this stanza from the seventh section of The Bridge, titled, like Gass’ novel, “The Tunnel”:

“O caught like pennies beneath soot and steam,
Kiss of our agony thou gatherest;
Condensed, though takest all – shrill ganglia
Impassioned with some song we fail to keep.
And yet, like Lazarus, to feel the slope,
The sod and billow breaking, -- lifting ground,
-- A sound of waters bending astride the sky
Unceasing with some Word that will not die …!”

“The Last Elizabethan,” indeed – but more Marlowe than Shakespeare. Crane is our necessary poet of the city. This memory is embarrassing but in 1975, while still living in Cleveland, my hometown as well as Crane’s, and working in a bookstore downtown, I had those lines in mind when I wrote a poem that started like this: “The city glowed beneath a dirty cloud.” Sometimes, memory is merciful: I have forgotten the rest and burned the draft decades ago. But that line remains to torment me, in part because of the Crane linkage.

I’m not a collector of knickknacks. My approach to home décor is minimalist (my wife would say “neurotic”). One keepsake I have preserved is a rust-covered nut about six inches across. Tom Zimmie, professor and acting head of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, N.Y., gave it to me. It comes from the Brooklyn Bridge, a relict of the original structure dating from its opening in 1883. I interviewed Zimmie about 15 years ago for a newspaper story. He had been part of the engineering team that evaluated the structural integrity of the bridge Crane called “steeled Cognizance.” In Zimmie’s suburban garage I noticed a heap of rusted iron on the floor. It was 19th-century scrap, leftovers from the work his team had done on the bridge. Would I like a souvenir? I chose the nut because, though it weighs five or six pounds, it’s compact and, because its six sides are flat, it makes an excellent bookend. It’s my palpable connection to Walt Whitman, to the Roeblings pere et fils, and to Crane, whose new volume it’s holding up on my shelf.