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to read many ofHart Crane's mature poems is to apprehend some truth or sense that lies beyond explicit utterance. This reticence is integral to the elusive beauty ofhis lyrics but it also functions as a reminder ofthe early world the poet knew, a world where parental actions were unsettling as well as bewildering and where explanations, ifsupplied, seemed to leave a lot unsaid. (15) Crane aspired to a form "so thorough and intense as to dye die words themselves widi a peculiarity of meaning, slightly different maybe from the ordinary definition ofdiem separate from the poem" (122). He awaited inspiration: "Oh! it is hard! One must be drenched in words, literally soaked widi them to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment" (136-37). To do so requires time, and earning a living was an intractable problem for Crane, whose practical and successful father wrote to him poignantly: "If your writing could only be a side line, a sort ofpleasure to be taken up in the evening ... if you would only diink of it just as men play golf, then I would see diings differently" (211). Crane's boyhood friend and creditor William Wright suggested that Crane support himself by teaching (436), as had Winters, but die option wasn't available to a high school dropout (324). Fisher writes ofCrane with the greatest sympathy and manages to avoid being drawn into the poet's emotional maelstrom by balancing his sympathy with a cool irony and detachment that keep die biography balanced and contribute to the sense ofan inexorable trajectory that holds its complexities togedier. He comments for instance of "Recitative" that "ifTate was unable to understand die poem, at least its audior could console himselfwith die diought diat his parents would never grasp it either" (204), and later that "it was dull to diink of sitting in a library, especially when he could carouse around Mexico City with a newly befriended drunk" (455). The poems are the major events of the life, and The Bridge is its climax as a life that was much too short and peaked much too early in a pattern that, in Fisher's account, fuses the intricacies of life and those of art. %fc David R. Johnson. ConradRichter: A Writer's Life. University Park, PA: University ofPennsylvania Press, 2001. 407p. Victoria Ramirez Weber State University Carl Richter ( 1 890- 1 968), novelist and regional writer ofthe American West, also authored a little-read treatise on human consciousness and alternative spirituality : Human Vibration: The Mechanics ofLife andMind. He struggled and clearly suffered in order to support his family with his writing. Unlike more popular 82 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * FALL 2003 Reviews American authors such as Cather, Steinbeck, or Hemingway, fame eluded Richter and circumstance threw him into debt, making him at times despondent. Fortunately for us, Richter was also a compulsive diarist who charted the ups and downs ofhis marital, professional, scientific, artistic, and spiritual lives. A native New Yorker unfamiliar with Richter's writing, I was drawn to David Johnson's biography, ConradRichter:A Writer'sLife. As a budding storywriter and teacher of the novel form, I discovered diat I was learning from the challenges and disheartening rejections Richter faced as he honed his craft. The record ofhis correspondence with interested editors willing to help him with close critiques constitutes a treatise on how to write marketable narrative. Johnson's well-paced chronological approach offers us a context for the intense intellectual, artistic, and spiritual questioning permeating Richter's diaries and fiction. And Johnson succeeds in offering us the family context behind the emotional disturbances that wracked Richter's life, at times keeping him from writing . Morbidly private and so shy that he refused to speak in public, Richter searched for answers to some oflife's largest, most unanswerable questions, such as whether God is a universal principle oforder. Richter's meditation on the purpose of human suffering and its part in a divine plan, parallels his fiction interests—stories featuring strong-willed characters who succumb neither to physical nor psychic despair. Johnson sketches for us the complex portrait of a young man both ambitious and dogged...

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