AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED (ALS) to His Mother

Columbia Hts [New York], 16 November 1924. Letter. Creases from folding, otherwise about Fine. Very scarce, closely written two-page AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED with superb content two years before the publication of his first book, WHITE BUILDINGS, to his mother, addressed as "Dear Grace." In part: "Another very active week. Luncheon with someone different every day, -- and nearly always someone to take up the evening. But I have been so interested in several incompleted poems that I've sat up very late working on them, and so by the advent of Saturday felt pretty tuckered out. There's no stopping for rest, however, when one is the 'current' of creation, so to speak, and so I've spent all of today at one or two stubborn(?) lines. My work's becoming known for its formal perfection and hard glowing polish, but most of those qualities, I'm afraid, are due to a great deal of labor and patience on my part. Besides working on part of my BRIDGE I'm engaged in writing a series of six sea poems called VOYAGES (they are also love poems) and one of these you will soon see published in '1924,' a magazine published at Woodstock and which I think I told you about heretofore." Crane than writes a poetic paragraph describing the weather and the river before talking about Eugene O'Neill: "O'Neil [sic] has a new play at the Greenwich Village Theatre -- a tragedy called DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS which I'll see sometime this week. He and Agnes were in town for the premiere and I called on them at their rooms in the Lafayette one evening.... He seems to have Europe in applause more than America. That's true of Waldo Frank's work in France, also, where he has been much translated and more seriously considered, far more so, than here at home. The American public is still strangely unprepared for its men of higher talents, while Europe looks more and more to America for the renascence of a creative spirit." Crane is happy to get his mother's letters and rejoices in her having "a lyric evening," dancing and drinking. "I still like to think of those five o'clock booze parties we had in the office and how giddily I sometimes came home for dinner. You were very charming and sensible about it all, too, and I thank my stars that while you are naturally an inbred Puritan you also know and appreciate the harmless gambols of an exuberant nature like my own. It all goes to promise that we shall have many merry times together later sometime when we're a little closer geographically." He concludes: "My -- but how the wind is blowing. Rain, too, on the window now! There was a wonderful fog for about 18 hours last week. One couldn't even see the garden close behind the house -- to say nothing of the piers. All night long there were distant tinklings, buoy bells and siren warnings from river craft. It was like wakening into a dream land in the early dawn -- one wondered where one was with only a milky light in the window and that vague music from a hidden world. Next morning while I dressed it was clear and glittering as usual. Like champagne, or a cold [?] to look it. Such a world! Love, as always, your Hart." With the envelope hand-addressed by Crane to "Grace Hart Crane" and SIGNED by him with his address. Also with a 1964 invoice and letter from bookseller Henry W. Wenning. An especially significant piece of Crane's extensive family correspondence, this letter has often been reprinted, appearing specifically in Thomas S. W. Lewis (editor), LETTERS OF HART CRANE AND HIS FAMILY (NY: Columbia UP, 1974), on pages 371-373. And while Lewis's Calendar of Letters indicates that the original is owned by Columbia, recent correspondence with Columbia reveals that that published claim is incorrect: this letter somehow escaped Columbia's acquisition of the Crane archive in the 1950s. A key item of Crane's that has been off the market for nearly 60 years. For the four years preceding Crane's suicide in 1932, Grace Crane had not spoken to her son. She nevertheless became his literary executor and devoted her life to promoting his work.