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"Minting their Separate Wills": Tennessee Williams and Hart Crane GILBERT DEBUSSCHER Although unusually talkative and candid about his private life, Tennessee Williams was always comparatively reticent about his work. In fact he expressed strong feelings about the need for secrecy in order to protect "a thing that depends on seclusion till its completion for its safety."I Those who expected his Memoirs of I975 to shed light on his writing were therefore disappointed.2 However, he alluded repeatedly over the years to other writers who had deeply influenced him. When pressed for names he never failed to mention Hart Crane, D.H. Lawrence, and Anton Chekhov. The influence ofLawrence and Chekhov has been examined extensively, but that of Hart Crane has been largely neglected by critics. This essay deals first with the indisputable traces of influence: the biographical evidence; the "presence" ofCrane in titles, mottoes, and allusions; the note Williams wrote in I965 for the slipcover ofhis recording ofCrane's poems. Second, it develops a case suggesting that The Glass Menagerie, traditionally considered predominantly autobiographical, owes more to Crane than hitherto suspected. Last, an analysis of the one-act Steps Must Be Gentle provides new perspectives on the influence of Crane in Suddenly Last Summer. I The evidence of Crane's importance to Williams is overwhelming. First introduced to the slim volume of Crane's Collected Poems by Clark Mills McBurney, a poet whom he had befriended in S1. Louis in I935, Williams himself acknowledged his debt in I944 in the "Frivolous Version" of his "Preface to My Poems": "It was Clark who warned me of the existence of people like Hart Crane and Rimbaud and Rilke, and my deep and sustained admiration for Clark's writing gently but firmly removed my attention from the more obvious to the purer voices in poetry. About this time I acquired my copy GILBERT DEBUSSCHER of Hart Crane's collected poems which I began to read with gradual comprehension."3 In this early mention Williams already reserved a special place for Crane, associating him - as he will throughout his career - with "the purer voices in poetry." "Acquired" was, however, a euphemism. In reality Williams had pilfered the copy from the library of Washington University in St. Louis, because it did not, in his opinion, get the readership it deserved. In the "Serious Version" of the same "Preface" that single book is presented as Williams's whole permanent library: "Symbolically I found a lot ofbooks inconvenient to carry with me and gradually they dropped along the way - till finally there was only one volume with me, the book of Hart Crane. I have it with me today, my only library and all ofit." And he says further: " ... I am inclined to value Crane a little above Eliot or anyone else because of his organic purity and sheer breathtaking power. I feel that he stands with Keats and Shakespeare and Whitman."4 Shortly after coming into possession of the Poems, Williams further "acquired" a portrait ofhis favorite poet from a book in the Jacksonville Public Library. He had it framed and took it with him, along with the poems, wherever his bohemian career led him. Out ofthe sixteen allusions to Crane in the Letters to Donald Windham, three are to that treasured portrait.5 In addition to these two tangible reminders of Crane in Williams's surroundings, clear traces of the poet's presence can be found in the plays. In You Touched Me!, the dramatization of aD.H. Lawrence story which Williams wrote in collaboration with Donald Windham in the early forties, there is already a passing reference to Crane. When Hadrian reads at random from Matilda's book of verse, he comes across the lines "How like a caravan my heart - Across the desert moved towards yours!," and he wonders "Towards whose? Who is this H.C. it's dedicated to?"; Matilda shyly replies "Hart Crane. An American poet who died ten years ago.,,6 Besides the explicit reference, the two lines read by Hadrian recall the "speechless caravan" in the fifth stanza of "To Brooklyn Bridge," the piece with which Crane's epic of America opens.7 The motto ofA Streetcar Named...

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