Vehicular Networks and the Modernist Seaways: Crane, Lorca, Novo, Hughes

When, amid the convulsions of World War II, a wave of literary historians glanced back at the receding phenomenon of international modernism, they often saw only missed connections and mutual disregard between English- and Spanish-language writers.¹ Despite the avant-garde’s spirited awareness of its planetary “simultaneism,” many transnational itineraries seemed to consist in thwarted networks.² For example, in 1943, while researching Federico García Lorca’s 1929 year in New York City, Edwin Honig interviewed Ángel Flores, director of publications at the Pan American Union and a rare denizen of both US and Spanish-American vanguard circles. Honig reported that Flores tendered only one anecdote about introducing Lorca to Hart Crane, neither of whom was acquainted with the other’s work: “It was almost as if two transatlantic liners had passed each other without signals in the black of night” (14).³

Subsequent biographers have extravagantly embellished the Crane-Lorca meeting by locating it at a South Street dive, where Crane often pseudonymously cruised for sailors, or at Crane’s Columbia Heights apartment, where he often hosted them.⁴ The biographers also fictively claim that the poets discussed Walt Whitman, before each turned to carouse with a sailor or two. Surely, Whitman’s mediating presence is predictable, given how poems like Crane’s “Cape Hatteras” and Lorca’s “Oda a Walt Whitman” exaggerate allegiances to a brotherhood of worldly “camerados.” However, Longfellow rather than Whitman is the uncredited author of the ships-in-the-night cliché that presides over Flores’s original narration of the meeting. As Longfellow writes in “The Theologian’s Tale; Elizabeth”:

Ships that pass in the night and speak each other in passing; Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another, Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.

(267)

Longfellow characterizes the transoceanic imaginary in the age of the steamship as a disjointed system of weak semaphores, obliquities, and doublings, whereas Whitman’s transoceanic tropes often hurry to manifest visibility, presence, and connectivity: “See steamers steaming through my poems” (24), he exhorts readers of “Starting from Paumanok,” just as elsewhere he solicits the global fleets to “Flaunt out visible as ever the various ship-signals!” (220). Flores, in describing the Crane-Lorca relation, does not draw on the Whitmanian idyll of a techno-utopian earth “spann’d, connected by net-work” (348), but rather on Longfellow’s lament for the network that fails to connect. For Crane and Lorca, bridges do not always equate to linkages. Crane’s “The Harbor Dawn” likens poetic confraternity’s “tide of voices,” “fog-insulated noises,” and “signals dispersed in veils” (The Bridge 38). Lorca’s “Ciudad sin sueño (Nocturno del Brooklyn Bridge)” observes the waters below the bridge as a landscape of “barcos mudos” (“silent ships” 66–67).

This essay salvages the cliché of transatlantic liners passing in the night as a figure for the comparative cultural history of modernist poetics, literalizing the trope of passing liners through a fresh enumeration of some archives of shipboard and portside poetry. Reckoning the blind resemblances between Crane (US 1899–1932), Lorca (Spain 1898–1936), Salvador Novo (Mexico 1904–1974), Langston Hughes (US 1902–1967), and others, I propose a divergent history of transnational poetics. Instead of a story of augmented “planetary identity” (Ramazani 61) and “profond aujourd’hui” in the age of a “shrinking world,” it is a story of internationalism flaring intermittently across incongruent registers of discourse and experience in an age of discrepant modernities.⁵ The archive I assemble includes canonical poems scattered throughout Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York (composed 1929, published 1940) and Crane’s White Buildings (1926) and The Bridge (1930), and the fragments he left unpublished at his death, but it also includes forgotten ephemera such as Novo’s Seamen Rhymes (1934), a bilingual chapbook published in Argentina with illustrations by Lorca. And it includes the overlooked run of short lyrics and mock chanteys in the “Water Front Streets” section of Hughes’s The Weary...