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newspaper clipping 8 SECTION THREE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, Sun., July 20, 1969 handwritten in top margin Jack: Sinclair Lewis let booze kill him: Hemingway used a shotgun: This guy Jumpt off a ship at 32. line pointing to circled price of reviewed book Why $15.00 for this drop-out from Life? JCD NN photograph of man standing HART CRANE His life illuminates his works Book Week Discovering the 'true' Hart Crane VOYAGER: A Life of Hart Crane. By John Unterecker. Farrar, Straus & Giroux $15 By Frederic E. Faverty

  Like Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde, his flamboyant predecessors, Hart Crane the man  continues to excite more interest than his works.
  John Unterecker believes strongly that the life illuminates the works and, where possible, he shows the interrelationships.  Before the man has faded "into his legend," Unterecker attempts the elusive, and what he knows to be the ultimately impossible, task of discovering the "true" Hart Crane.  All that a biographer can do, he does.  He recreates the 1900-1932 American background.  He uses the family papers, particularly the voluminous correspondence by and to Crane.  And he interviews the surviving friends and acquaintances.
   First, the legend.  Unterecker wants to de-emphasize the impression of Crane as a man who, though a genius, was also a high-school drop-out, a homosexual and a lush, whose "lyric evenings" too often ended with him dead drunk in the streets or engaged in orgies with sailors on the wharves or bums in the park;  the man who, in his binges, insulted his friends and threw typewriters out of second-story windows; the neurotic who, after repeatedly threatening suicide, jumped to his death from the deck of a ship in 1932.
   ALL SUCH EPISODES AND SCENES are subordinated to the main purpose: the picture of the serious artist beset with psychological, social, financial and other problems.  For Unterecker realizes that the anecdote does not always define the man.  It sometimes distorts and falsifies him.
   Unterecker is strongest in his grasp of character.  Crane's family relationships were such a psychological and psychiatric tangle that they would have daunted Freud, Jung and Adler.  To the author's credit, he does not resort to psychiatric jargon.  He allows the participants to analyze themselves and each other in the full and frequent correspondence.  Was the father at fault -- the big business tycoon who could not accept until too late his son's obsession with literature?  Crane himself  says that his relations with his father "are better explained in the science of psychoanalsyis [sic] than in common language."  Why was his beautiful mother unable to sever the umbilical cord?  Why did Crane's love have to turn to hate before he could free himself from her dream of "success."
  As far as possible, Crane is allowed to tell his own story in his lively letters and in relevant extracts from his works, which also serve to explain Crane's theories on art and literature.  He valued personality as highly as ideas in literature.  He was more interested in the sound of words than in their meaning.   He derived more pleasure from reading a thesaurus than a newspaper.  His letters show that he regarded his poetry as the expression of a "vision" to offset the negation of such contemporary works as T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland."
   THE BOOK IS A GOOD EXAMPLE, too, of biography as history.  Especially notable are the vivid and authentic accounts of small-town life in Ohio in the early 20th Century; of Cleveland during World War I and after; of Greenwich Village camaraderie in the 1920s, and of exotic Mexico as seen by Guggenheim fellows in the early 1930s.
   The last chapter, devoted to interviews with Crane's surviving friends -- critic Malcolm Cowley, novelist Waldo Frank, philospher [sic] Mony Grunberg, among others -- was the basis of an instructive program on national television.  Each friend has his own explanation:  a materialistic society, his family or Mexico -- these drove Crane to suicide.
   So, too, on his personality and his contribution to the world.  Frank is impressed most by Crane's "mystic vision."  Charmian von Wiegand remembers chiefly the demonic element in his personality and works.  Unterecker takes no sides.  He presents all the views and allows the reader to form his own judgments.
   
In Italics  Frederic E. Faverly is Morrison professor of English at Northwestern University.

During the summer months book reviews are appearing in Showcase and Wednesday's Family Magazine to supplement special seasonal issues of Book Week. The next special issue of Book Week will appear Aug. 17, and full-scale publication resumes in September.

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