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National Winter Garden
- Fordham University Press
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national winter garden Outspoken buttocks1 in pink beads Invite the necessary cloudy clinch Of bandy eyes. . . . No extra mufflings here: The world’s one flagrant, sweating cinch.2 And while legs waken salads in the brain3 You pick your blonde out neatly through the smoke. Always you wait for someone else though, always—4 (Then rush the nearest exit through the smoke). national winter garden: A burlesque theater operated by the Minsky brothers at Houston Street and Second Avenue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Crane was a habitué, along with many other writers and artists of the era. The burlesque scene in the New York of the 1920s has been thoroughly documented by Gordon A. Tapper, to whose book The Machine That Sings many of the details in these notes are indebted. Tapper argues persuasively that traditional readings of ‘‘National Winter Garden’’ as a portrait of debased femininity, the latterday corruption of Pocahontas, proceed from the mistaken assumption that Crane was repelled by burlesque. In fact, he was a fan, and enough of one to be noticed by Morton Minsky himself, who wrote of the family establishment that ‘‘We were getting a pretty classy clientele. . . . Regulars at that time included . . . the writers John Erskine and John Dos Passos [and] the columnist Walter Winchell. Such distinguished commentators as Robert Benchley . . . and George Jean Nathan were loyal attenders, as was a shy poet named Hart Crane, who wrote a poem in our honor’’ (69). Although a certain anxiety about the female body does haunt ‘‘National Winter Garden,’’ much of the poem’s apparently demeaning language has to be read as bawdily framed appreciation, a means of participating in the transgressiveness of the striptease. Many intellectuals of the period treated burlesque in these terms. The scene was also popular with homosexuals, perhaps because of its irreverent play with the trappings of gender and sexuality. Part of that play involved comic rhyming, a patter that, as Tapper observes, Crane mimics in describing the performance. 1. The use of ‘‘outspoken’’ to indicate the exposure of the dancer’s buttocks is linked with the denial of ‘‘extra mufflings’’ two lines later to mark the exposure of her body more generally ; her near nudity metaphorically becomes a form of candid speech, a ribald, burlesque version of the word made flesh. 2. The cinch, literally a saddle belt, is the dancer’s g-string. In circling her body, it identi- fies her flesh with the world, that is, with the globe, especially as circled by sailing ships or by the navigational lines of latitude and longitude. In another sense, this world of flesh is a ‘‘cinch’’ in the sense of easy success and sexual availability. 3. ‘‘Salads in the brain’’ may echo the ‘‘salad days’’ of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, referring to her youthful affair with Julius Caesar (Antony and Cleopatra, 1.5), as well as Yeats’s description of Aphrodite (with reference to his own inamorata, Maud Gonne): ‘‘It’s certain that fine women eat/A crazy salad with their meat’’ (‘‘A Prayer for My Daughter’’). 4. Compare Eliot, from The Waste Land: Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded 93 Always and last, before the final ring 9 When all the fireworks blare, begins A tom-tom scrimmage with a somewhere violin,5 Some cheapest echo of them all—begins. And shall we call her whiter than the snow?6 Sprayed first with ruby, then with emerald sheen7 — Least tearful and least glad (who knows her smile?) A caught slide shows her sandstone grey between.8 Her eyes exist in swivellings of her teats,9 17 Pearls whip her hips, a drench of whirling strands Her silly snake rings begin to mount, surmount Each other10 —turquoise fakes on tinseled hands. I do not know whether a man or a woman. (‘‘What the Thunder Said,’’ ll. 360–65) 5. The tom-tom simultaneously refers to the sound of Indian drums and to the drums in a jazz combo. The lines recall Eliot’s ‘‘Among the windings of the violins,/And the ariettes/ Of cracked cornets,/Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins’’ (‘‘Portrait of a Lady,’’ ll. 29–31). 6. Snowy whiteness was, of course, a clichéd image of female chastity; here the rhetorical question receives its...