THE BRIDGE: A POEM - REVIEW COPY, INSCRIBED TO MALCOLM COWLEY
Paris: The Black Sun Press, 1930. First Edition. Item #5413
One of 25 Review Copies marked "Hors Commerce" in pencil on the colophon, with the publisher's compliments slip laid in. Quarto (27cm); original white card wrappers, with titles printed in black and red on spine and front cover; publisher's original glassine overlay; [110]pp; with three photographs by Walker Evans, each covered by an affixed glassine sheet. Malcolm Cowley's copy, inscribed to him in pencil on the front endpaper by his long-time friend Belle Rosenbaum: "To Malcolm / Because of many tender memories / Belle." Light wear to spine ends, final bifolium (containing the colophon) is loosely laid in, else Fine - bright, white, and without the almost inevitable semi-circular toning at mid-spine; lacking the publisher's original slipcase, though offered here with a handsome custom clamshell case.
Beyond simply being a long poem inspired by the Brooklyn Bridge, The Bridge was, as Crane often explained, his attempt at fashioning a myth of America, a "mystical synthesis" of our country's past, present, and future. While today it is accepted as a complicated masterpiece, the poem's reception at the time of publication was mixed. Reviews were generally positive, but the ones that mattered most to Crane were those from his friends, like Yvor Winters and Allen Tate; their reviews, published prominently in June and July, 1930, were withering, and left Crane feeling deeply wounded.
Herbert Weinstock was the first to review The Bridge (April 12th, for The Milwaukee Journal), followed closely by that of Crane's close friend Malcolm Cowley, in his capacity as literary editor of The New Republic (April 23rd, for the American edition published by Horace Liveright). This copy of the Black Sun Press edition was inscribed to Cowley by Belle Rosenbaum, long-time associate editor under Irita Van Doren at the New York Herald Tribune, and for many years the associate editor of Book Week (later Book World), published by The Washington Post and The Chicago Tribune. She and Cowley were friends for decades, from the 1920s onward, and while the circumstances behind the gift and the inscription are lost to us, some correspondence from Rosenbaum to Cowley survives among his papers at the Newberry Library.
Cowley's relationship with The Bridge and with Crane's literary legacy lasted long after his friend's tragic death in 1932. In his lengthy introduction to The Limited Editions Club publication of The Bridge, Cowley would say the following: "Fifty years after the book was first published, little doubt remains that Hart Crane's The Bridge is a monument of American poetry. Among the longer poetic works I should place it below Whitman's "Song of Myself," but above almost everything else; and this is a judgment shared by many critics...Already The Bridge has survived its author by half a century. It will continue to live by virtue of its bold conception, the splendor of its language, and the almost complete rightness of some of its parts. As compared with other American poets of his time, Crane was a heroic success" (pp.vii-viii). A significant copy in sublime condition. *Special thanks to Cowley scholar Hans Bak for his assistance. Schwartz & Schweik A2; Minkoff A-32. 5413.
Price: $28,500.00