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

Abstract

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 Englishand Spanish-language writers. Despite the avant-garde’s spirited awareness of its planetary “simultaneism,” many transnational itineraries seemed to consist in thwarted networks. For example, in 1943, while researching Federico Garcia Lorca’s 1929 year in New York City, Edwin Honig interviewed Angel 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). 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. 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 cliche