B O O K  R E V I E W

Reposted from:
American Book Review 
Volume 36, Number 3, March/April 2015 
p. 16 | 10.1353/abr.2015.0046

This Fabulous Shadow
Philip Herter
Aire Studio
214 Pages; Print, $18.95

To Witness the Last Days
by Brianna Noll

There is a story, told and retold so that fact has blurred into fiction, that Hart Crane took off his jacket, folded it, and hung it over the ship’s railing before he jumped, drunk, to his death. Crane has a certain notoriety in the literary world, loved or loathed by readers, but arguably, stories like this overshadow much of his poetry. As the poet and critic William Logan explains, “Unlike many poets, Crane stands revealed in biography….[T]he messiness of daily living so often interfered with the art.” It seems that suicide marks a poet for this kind of legacy, making their life, rather than their work, the focus of study. But Hart Crane was the son of the man who invented Life Savers candy. He suffered at least one nervous breakdown, and he was not coy about his sexuality. This is the stuff of gossip, and it surrounded Crane in his lifetime at least as much as it does now, eight decades after his death.

In Philip Herter’s This Fabulous Shadow, we see the messiness of Crane’s daily living in close detail as the poet, in Mexico on a Guggenheim fellowship, struggles and fails in his attempt to write a great Mexican epic poem, a companion to his American epic, The Bridge (1930). This summary, along with Herter’s subtitle—The Last Days of Hart Crane in Mexico—might lead the reader to believe that this novel is squarely about the events that lead to Crane’s suicide, a reframing of the familiar narrative. This is, in fact, misdirection. The novel begins by asserting what we already know:

By now everyone who might be interested in the tale of the great poet who roared, then vanished, has heard about the day Hart Crane, drunk as two men, jumped off the steamship Orizaba into the Atlantic Ocean.

The novel’s true focus, instead, is on the witness to Crane’s last days: Crane’s only heterosexual lover, and the novel’s narrator, Peggy Baird. Herter’s novel is ambitious: it is a historical novel, but one that approximates the memoirnovel within a speculative narrative frame. This complex formal choice not only creates a hybrid of prose genres, but also establishes a clear affinity with poetry. Indeed, this is a huge undertaking for approximately 200 pages of text, and while it can, at times, feel disjointed, the form’s ultimate purpose is revelatory, and it will appeal to poets and lovers of poetry drawn to this novel by its subject matter.

Herter locates Crane’s last days in Mexico City within a particular political and cultural context populated by writers and artists as diverse as Katherine Anne Porter and the Mexican communist painter David Alfaro Siqueiros, which works to solidify the narrative’s historical realism. The role of art in politics is debated several times in the novel, most notably by Crane and Siqueiros, which comes to ring ironic as both Siqueiros’s politics and Crane’s art ultimately fail. Siqueiros famously leads an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Leon Trotsky, and Crane struggles to write more than a few stanzas of his great Mexican epic, and even that portion—“The Broken Tower”—is rejected by Harriet Monroe at Poetry. These failures mark the aesthetic and political climate of the early 1930s as much as they signal the climax the narrative. From here, we know what happens to Crane. We are led to focus, instead, on what happens to Peggy Baird.

The novel’s narrative frame approximates the memoir-novel through the first-person narration by Baird, but I say “approximates” because Peggy Baird the narrator is not—indeed cannot be—the Peggy Baird of the story. This narrator is immortal, somehow stuck forever in her cabin on the Orizaba: “This psalm is my escape from time.” In this way, there is a distinct shift between the two Bairds, just as there is a distinct separation, both generically and stylistically, between the story and its narrative frame. The narrative frame speculates that the trauma of Crane’s suicide makes Baird immortal in her grief, which is striking not just in its difference from the historical-realist story of Crane in Mexico, but even more so because of the way it parallels lyric speech, in the way we think of lyric time as a continuous present into which past, present, and future are compressed in the moment of utterance. Baird the narrator echoes this idea of a continuous present:

Chronology is strange. Our time together collapsed like a telescope, folding up neatly from one day to the next until it was small enough to pinch between my fingers, and so big it eclipsed the rest of my life. My time with Hart ran like a river that turned without warning into a flood. And everything we shared shrank down to a voyage, two days and two nights.

Locating her within this continuous present positions Baird the narrator in the space of lyric meditation, and Herter takes this further by imagining this space literally. Just as Baird the narrator sees time compressed into those two days in April 1932, which she relives or otherwise cannot escape, she also sees space compressed into her cabin on the Orizaba:

For me, there’s no getting out of this room of my remembering, so I stay on the inside. Here I have settled, immobile on my iron bed, which is time itself. Here I claim God’s omniscience….It’s a framing device, you might say.

The acknowledgment of omniscience and of framing devices is notably meta, but not inconsistent within a formal choice that also recalls the formal structure of lyric poetry. Herter acknowledges the position of narrator/speaker as highly imagined, even speculative, and further blurs the generic line by demonstrating the similarities between fiction and poetry.

At times, though, the impetus for the novel’s speculative frame is unclear. Baird the narrator sometimes declares her storytelling to be a choice, as in “Here I claim God’s omniscience,” quoted above, and in the opening of chapter two, “To tell it properly I’ll have to give up my own point of view. Forgive me the sin of omniscience.” This suggests that she has chosen, likewise, her immortality, which defines her shift from character to narrator. Yet later, she expresses a lack of choice: she is not “a storyteller free to make things up,” but is instead bound to her fate. Her speculative position, in this light, is an effect of her grief. And while these conflicting explanations may create interesting tension, perhaps suggesting an illusion of choice driven by fate, each is posed too briefly for sufficient development of this paradox.

Nevertheless, Herter’s use of this speculative frame is the novel’s most compelling aspect, particularly in the subtle ways in which it echoes lyric poetry. In addition to the narration paralleling lyric speech and lyric time, Baird the narrator often describes her life as a series of rooms, which recalls the literal meaning of stanza as “room.” Just as Baird’s life is composed of a series of rooms, so, too, is a poem composed of a series of stanzas. And while this might seem simply a neat callback to Crane’s profession, these parallels to poetry have a larger purpose. In describing Crane’s plan for his Mexican epic, “The Broken Tower,” Baird narrates: “All the words weren’t there yet, but how could they be? Conceiving of something so large was a mad enterprise, like walking to China or dancing on a microbe. But the words would arrive.” The words never arrive, not fully. Crane never finishes his great epic poem about Mexico, but Herter’s novel suggests that Crane completes a great lyric poem that meditates on his last days in Mexico. In the end, the novel’s formal choices reveal that Peggy Baird becomes, herself, that poem.

Brianna Noll is a poet and critic completing her Ph.D. in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work appears in 32 Poems, the Kenyon Review Online, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.