The Brooklyn Bridge as Muse
CRANE, Hart; Walker EVANS (photographs). The Bridge: A Poem. Paris: The Black Sun Press. 1930.
8vo. Original printed wrappers with fold-over flaps, within glassine jacket, printed in red and black and with black woodcut sun to rear wrapper, housed in the publisher’s silver paper-covered slipcase; pp. [100]; printed in red and black, three tipped-in photogravures by Walker Evans with glassine and tissue guards (see below); a few small chips to glassine at spine and extremities (with small loss at foot of spine); subtle repairs to slipcase with some wear to corners and edges; internally fine.
First edition, no. 154 of 200 copies on Holland paper, of Crane’s poems using the Brooklyn Bridge as the central symbol of an epic ode to America, accompanied by some of the earliest photographs by Walker Evans and printed at the Black Sun Press, the Parisian English-language publishing house founded in 1927 by American expatriates Harry and Caresse Crosby.
Crane (1899–1932) is a singular figure in American poetry, seeking a Whitmanesque voice in the era of high Modernism. The Bridge, his most significant work, constructs an optimistic response to Eliot’s The Waste Land, which he admired greatly but found too bleak, finding hope where Eliot saw only despair. This is sadly ironic given Eliot’s long life and Crane’s suicide at the age of thirty-two (the poet had jumped off the USS Orizaba into the Atlantic en route to New York from Vera Cruz). Particularly vibrant are the opening poem, ‘To Brooklyn Bridge’; ‘National Winter Garden’, on the Houston Street burlesque; and the five-part ‘Powhatan’s Daughter’, including ‘Van Winkle’ (in which Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle awakens not in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, but amidst the Brooklyn tenements of the twentieth century).
The Black Sun Press published the early works of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, and Ernest Hemingway, among others. The press was one of the longest-running of its kind, closing only in 1970 following Caresse Crosby’s death. The present volume, printed in hand-set Dorique type, was published by Caresse Crosby shortly after Harry Crosby’s suicide at the age of thirty-one: during a trip to New York to celebrate the completion of The Bridge, Crosby shot and killed himself and his lover, Josephine Noyes Rotch.
This edition, dedicated to Crane’s patron, the philanthropist, collector, and investment banker Otto H. Kahn, is listed as being ‘for sale at the bookshop of Harry F. Marks’, the Black Sun Press’s US distributor, at 31 West 47th St.
The Missouri-born photojournalist and photographer Walker Evans (1903–1975) – best known for his Great Depression-era photographs for the Farm Security Administration and the Resettlement Administration – had helped Crane find work as a file clerk on Wall Street in 1928, and their fathers had been acquainted beforehand. ‘Evans had taken up photography in earnest in 1928, and Crane, whose interest in the medium had been awakened and nurtured by his friendship with Alfred Stieglitz, occasionally joined the artist in his explorations of Brooklyn, the waterfront, and lower Manhattan’ (Trachtenberg, p. 187). His striking photographs ‘call attention to the bridge itself as a physical object, as a palpable presence in the poem’ (ibid., p. 185).
Connolly 64; Minkoff A-32; Rowe B1; Schwarz and Schweik A2. See Trachtenberg, Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol (1979).
SKU: 2121209