[Rarebooks] FS: Superb Handwritten Letter from Hart Crane to His Mother

[Charles Agvent]

CRANE, Hart. AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED (ALS) to His Mother. Columbia Hts 
[New York], 16 November 1924. Very scarce, closely written two-page 
AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED with superb content two years before the 
publication of his first book, WHITE BUILDINGS, to his mother, addressed 
as "Dear Grace." In part: "Another very active week. Luncheon with 
someone different every day, -- and nearly always someone to take up the 
evening. But I have been so interested in several incompleted poems that 
I've sat up very late working on them, and so by the advent of Saturday 
felt pretty tuckered out. There's no stopping for rest, however, when 
one is the 'current' of creation, so to speak, and so I've spent all of 
today at one or two stubborn(?) lines. My work's becoming known for its 
formal perfection and hard glowing polish, but most of those qualities, 
I'm afraid, are due to a great deal of labor and patience on my part. 
Besides working on part of my BRIDGE I'm engaged in writing a series of 
six sea poems called VOYAGES (they are also love poems) and one of these 
you will soon see published in '1924,' a magazine published at Woodstock 
and which I think I told you about heretofore." Crane than writes a 
poetic paragraph describing the weather and the river before talking 
about Eugene O'Neill: "O'Neil [sic] has a new play at the Greenwich 
Village Theatre -- a tragedy called DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS which I'll see 
sometime this week. He and Agnes were in town for the premiere and I 
called on them at their rooms in the Lafayette one evening.... He seems 
to have Europe in applause more than America. That's true of Waldo 
Frank's work in France, also, where he has been much translated and more 
seriously considered, far more so, than here at home. The American 
public is still strangely unprepared for its men of higher talents, 
while Europe looks more and more to America for the renascence of a 
creative spirit." Crane is happy to get his mother's letters and 
rejoices in her having "a lyric evening," dancing and drinking. "I still 
like to think of those five o'clock booze parties we had in the office 
and how giddily I sometimes came home for dinner. You were very charming 
and sensible about it all, too, and I thank my stars that while you are 
naturally an inbred Puritan you also know and appreciate the harmless 
gambols of an exuberant nature like my own. It all goes to promise that 
we shall have many merry times together later sometime when we're a 
little closer geographically." He concludes: "My -- but how the wind is 
blowing. Rain, too, on the window now! There was a wonderful fog for 
about 18 hours last week. One couldn't even see the garden close behind 
the house -- to say nothing of the piers. All night long there were 
distant tinklings, buoy bells and siren warnings from river craft. It 
was like wakening into a dream land in the early dawn -- one wondered 
where one was with only a milky light in the window and that vague music 
from a hidden world. Next morning while I dressed it was clear and 
glittering as usual. Like champagne, or a cold [?] to look it. Such a 
world! Love, as always, your Hart." With the envelope hand-addressed by 
Crane to "Grace Hart Crane" and SIGNED by him with his address. Also 
with a 1964 invoice and letter from bookseller Henry W. Wenning. An 
especially significant piece of Crane's extensive family correspondence, 
this letter has often been reprinted, appearing specifically in Thomas 
S. W. Lewis (editor), LETTERS OF HART CRANE AND HIS FAMILY (NY: Columbia 
UP, 1974), on pages 371-373. And while Lewis's Calendar of Letters 
indicates that the original is owned by Columbia, recent correspondence 
with Columbia reveals that that published claim is incorrect: this 
letter somehow escaped Columbia's acquisition of the Crane archive in 
the 1950s. A key item of Crane's that has been off the market for nearly 
60 years. For the four years preceding Crane's suicide in 1932, Grace 
Crane had not spoken to her son. She nevertheless became his literary 
executor and devoted her life to promoting his work. Creases from 
folding, otherwise about Fine. (#021418) $20,000

https://www.charlesagvent.com/pages/books/021418/hart-crane/autograph-letter-signed-als-to-his-mother

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