Stronger than Death: A brilliant, unsettling Hart Crane study

When Hart Crane met Ernie O’Malley in Mexico City in the Spring of 1931 both men were wrecks. Crane was there on a Guggenheim Fellowship, his intention to write an epic poem of Mexican history unravelling with his life. O’Malley was in search of a path past his memories of war, imprisonment and torture, memories scored into his body in broken feet and bullet wounds. Alcoholic and victimised for his queerness, Crane searched for meaning in the patterns that connected his traumatised, surviving self to a vibrant world that remained forever on the edge of discord. That the two men should meet in Mexico City was a perfect moment of historical chance, the city’s colonial centre built over Aztec ruins in a cosmic act of psychic devastation. Crane and O’Malley were emigres of centuries of civil war, conflicts fought in the mind and body and sometimes given shape in a literature of gathered silences such as haunted them both.

Francesca Bratton’s brilliant and unsettling study of Crane’s last year in Mexico, Stronger than Death, is a sketch of that broken time, and of ours. Crane died in uncertain circumstances a year after he met O’Malley, drowned off a ship off Cuba, but Bratton’s book attends to Crane’s last months without the weight of premonition. Instead, Bratton does something deeper, which is to draw Crane’s emotional turbulence in all its personal dimensions, a process that brings Bratton from the shadows of herself. I have never read a book like this, but how melancholy its freedoms are and how resonant. Bratton’s observations of Crane, mental suffering, and re-entry to the world as being like the sight of the white tip of a rolling wave, are profound, moving and courageous. In his last letter to his son, Crane’s father confessed that “All of us find out that there are certain illusions that we make and later discover that there are strange conditions in our lives”. Stronger than Death traces such illusions with deep feeling and intelligence, making of the strange a familiar, ghostly and present, Bratton awake to Crane’s troubled songs of the taut strings that make of Brooklyn Bridge the air.