Crane, Nathalia, 1913-1998

<p>Nathalia Crane didn’t just type when she sat down at her typewriter in the book-strewn Brooklyn apartment where she lived with her father, Clarence, a war veteran in his fifties, and her much younger mother, Nelda, who had married him straight out of high school. She beat time with her foot and sometimes took a hand off the keys to slap out a rhythm. Her usual good cheer disappeared, her father said of the frail, big-eyed child who at nine had begun to compose her poems this way. “When she is writing she becomes a different girl,” he told a reporter after her first book of startlingly accomplished poetry, The Janitor’s Boy, came out in 1924, the year she turned eleven. “She frowns and is concentrated and will not permit any one to interrupt her.”</p>

<p>Most young bookworms—off in a corner, eyes glued to the page—don’t churn out pages themselves. But the small child who does is bound to pique curiosity. Nathalia’s parents assumed she was blissfully unaware of it, but she belonged to what one critic called a “renaissance of creative genius in girlhood” as the 1920s arrived.

Many adults sat down at their typewriters to muse about this “epidemic,” the term that often surfaced in the press. All across war-weary Europe, the poet and anthologist Louis Untermeyer noted as the decade began, prodigious child artists—working with paints or in clay, or with words on the page—were suddenly winning praise. He was especially excited to see that “America has rushed into the fast-filling breach” with young writers, mostly female. He was also pleased to note that scientists were perplexed by the phenomenon. No “army of professional educators, statisticians, eugenists [sic], psychologists,” bent on early testing and accelerated training, could presume to chart this fresh form of genius. Child writers, then as now, came trailing clouds of imaginative spontaneity their elders could only envy. Untermeyer joined a chorus of calls to draw sustenance from these creators and their wonder-tinged creations. Communing with them was a cure for what ailed a disenchanted age.</p>
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Straightening up the family’s Flatbush apartment one day in late 1922, Nathalia’s mother threw some stray typed pages into the trash she sent down the dumbwaiter—only to be met by wails from Nathalia, then nine, in search of her “songs.” The household did not come to a stop. Nelda Crane told her daughter, with an apology and a little impatience, to put away stuff she wanted to save. She had been aware that Nathalia was spending lots of time taptapping behind her bedroom door. Whatever she was up to seemed to make her feel better, so Nelda hadn’t paid much attention. This was her husband’s terrain, though his style of doting wasn’t finely attuned either.

Nathalia’s father had taught her to type before she entered first grade at seven, not long after he had returned from the Western front, where he had been wounded and gassed; that was the last in a long string of combat adventures that had begun with his enlistment in the Spanish-American War a decade or so out of high school. Along with the typing lessons, Nathalia got endless stories. Clarence Crane was an avid raconteur, and though his wife probably didn’t need to encourage father-worship in their only child, who would blame her if she did? Nelda, still in her twenties, was no doubt thrilled to cede her place as his rapt listener. In an ornate monotone, often by candlelight, Clarence regaled his daughter with tales of battle and aired an autodidact’s old-fashioned opinions on poetry and a generally dim view of the modern world, along with a fervent belief in the superiority of women. He also read poems aloud, rarely venturing past Kipling. And he answered the constant questions of an unusual child drawn to unusual books. Nathalia wasn’t an avid reader in general (and initially not much of a student), but she adored her two-volume Standard Dictionary of 1895. Her next favorite was Johnson’s Universal Cyclopedia of that same year, missing two of its eight volumes, those covering F through Mos. </p>
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When Nathalia brought two new poems to her father a few days after her mother’s faux pas, he was very impressed, as he told it, but wanted a more expert view. He suggested she send them to an editor at the Brooklyn Daily Times whom he knew vaguely from his short stints at various copy desks before reenlisting when the United States entered the First World War. There was a flurry of attention at the Times, and Nelda started sending out more of Nathalia’s work, some of which was apparently published without further fuss. So a year later, when Edmund Leamy, the poetry editor of the New York Sun, accepted a poem that Nathalia was said to have sent on her own, he had never heard of her. He assumed the author was an adult. After all, in his experience, no “child would ever submit any work from his or her pen without adding the words ‘Aged __ years.’” And “The History of Honey,” rhythmical and ingeniously rhymed, bore no obvious literary mark of immaturity. Nor was there girlish handwriting to supply a clue. When Leamy invited this new contributor named Nathalia Crane to drop by to confer about another poem and have lunch, he mistook her mother for the poet. Flustered to learn that “Miss” Crane was the “little, long-legged, bright-eyed child,” he forgot about the promised meal, as Nathalia noted years later.
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An editor of the Brooklyn Daily Times had been as astonished as Leamy was that a young girl had produced the poems he had received. One of them, “The Janitor’s Boy,” was chosen as the title piece in Nathalia’s first book, which came out in 1924. It was the work she was asked to recite for the rest of her life. </p>

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The Janitor’s Boy strayed from innocent female terrain, too, though much more tamely than Edna St. Vincent Millay had four years earlier, titillating readers in the dawning Jazz Age with “My candle burns at both ends,” and more. It was no surprise that Nathalia’s book provoked a gut response very different from Amy Lowell’s beautiful-natural-and-true test of genius: How unusual! How unnatural! was the tenor of the reception. No one was yet saying, How implausible! But Nathalia had critics on edge. One reviewer emphasized the “lack of childishness” in The Janitor’s Boy. “Strictly speaking, there is not a purely child-poem in the book.” Others were relieved to find intermittent silliness, as in another bee-related effort, which ended “I sat down on a bumble bee, / But I arose again; / And now I know the tenseness of / Humiliating pain.” But they, too, were taken aback by perceptions of a sort that didn’t seem associated with a child’s directness of vision or immediacy of emotion. “The work was alternately juvenile and mature, frivolous and profound, absurd and mystical,” Louis Untermeyer, one of the earliest champions of Nathalia’s genius, wrote later; “it was a mixture but not a fusion.”
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A year and a half later, in September 1925, shortly after Nathalia’s twelfth birthday, her second book of poems, Lava Lane, came out. This time the work stood alone, accompanied only by an advertisement that announced she had been invited to be an honorary member of the British Society of Authors, Playwrights, and Composers, presided over by Thomas Hardy. It was a distinction, her publisher claimed, shared by no other American poet since Walt Whitman. The news made headlines. So did reports that Nathalia’s father might be absconding with sizable royalties. Corrections to both soon appeared. Sales of the two books hadn’t earned anyone a fortune. And Nathalia wasn’t being specially celebrated. It turned out that Clarence Crane had merely paid the standard dues to join a group that otherwise had no admission criteria. “Looking shyly out at the world,” the Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted of Nathalia, “there was a wistful and haunting quality to the child’s face that went directly to the heart.”</p>
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Nathalia’s publisher, Thomas Seltzer, removed the honor from ads, but by November he had a better—and accurate—claim to generate publicity: this fascinating young talent had become the post–Daisy Ashford “Literary Storm Center.” Open the new book to the title poem, and the vocabulary was already staggering: cicatrix, peris, ferneries, parasangs, fane. The biblical and historical allusions piled up quickly: Bel and Balthazar, Theban pylons, lines like “I am an ancient lady / Cross-legged upon a dais / Reading of Cleopatra, / Lesbia, Phryne and Thais.” Could an eleven-year-old—whose teachers said she wasn’t remarkable, and whose parents, one article noted, hadn’t gone beyond high school—really have written these poems? The same article quoted Nathalia’s own publisher saying, “I am as much mystified as anybody. Nathalia Crane is either a miracle or she is the most colossal hoax in history.” Or perhaps there was a third alternative. “Sometimes I wonder if Nathalia Crane is not a medium.” Seltzer emphasized that he refrained from grilling this fragile girl on the sources of her more gnomic creations, for fear of making her “self-conscious.” That, all agreed, was fatal to innocence.</p>

Nathalia Clara Ruth Crane (11 August 1913 – 22 October 1998)was an American poet and novelist who became famous as a child prodigy after the publication of her first book of poetry, The Janitor's Boy, written at age 10 and published two years later. Her poetry was first published in The New York Sun when she was only 9 years old, the paper unaware that she was a child. She was elected into the British Society of Authors, Playwrights, and Composers in 1925[2], written up in The American Mercury[3] and later became a professor of English at San Diego State University.[4]

After the publication of her second volume of poetry, Lava Lane, poet Edwin Markham implied that the publications were probably a hoax, stating "It seems impossible to me that a girl so immature could have written these poems. They are beyond the powers of a girl of twelve. The sophisticated viewpoint of sex, ...knowledge of history and archeology found in these pages place them beyond the reach of any juvenile mind."[citation needed]

Crane was dubbed "The Brooklyn Bard" by the time she was 13 and became part of the Louis Untermeyer poetry circle during her late teens, with Untermeyer contributing an introduction to her 1936 volume Swear by the Night & Other Poems.[4] He was an early promoter of her work, stating, "some of the critics explained the work by insisting that the child was some sort of medium, an instrument unaware of what was played upon it; others, considering the book a hoax, scorned the fact that any child could have written verses so smooth in execution and so remarkable in spiritual overtones" and that "the appeal of such lines is not that they have been written by a child but by a poet."[citation needed]

She is supposedly related to Stephen Crane, author of The Red Badge of Courage, and the "well-known publicist," Dr. Frank Crane.[2

Nathalia Crane, poet and teacher, was married Dec. 13 in San Diego, Calif., to Peter O'Reilly, a professor of philosophy at California State University in San Diego. The bride lectures on poetry and world literature there.

California Superior Court Justice Hugo Fisher performed the ceremony in his chambers. Dr. and Mrs. Stanley N. Weissman attended the couple.

The bridegroom, who was ordained a Roman Catholic priest, is a former assistant professor of philosophy and past chairman of the campus chapter of the United Federation of College Teachers at St. John's University, where he was a leader of a strike in 1966. Faculty members were seeking a greater voice in university affairs.

Mrs. O'Reilly, widow of Vete George Black, is the daughter of the late Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Porter Crane of New York and Brooklyn. Her father was a newspaperman. The bride's first volume of poetry, “The Janitor's Boy,” and another work, “Lava Lane,” were published in the early nineteen‐twenties. She also is the author of two novels and a dozen other books.

Mrs. O'Reilly, a 1931 graduate of Brooklyn Heights Seminary, studied at Barnard College and attended the Universities of Madrid and Granada and the Sorbonne. She graduated from the Gemological Institute of America in Los Angeles. The couple will live in Spring Valley, Calif.

Nathalia Crane (1913–98) U.S. poet Nathalia Crane caused a minor sensation when she published her first collection of poems at the age of 11. That collection, The Janitor’s Boy (1924), was followed by several others before Crane’s popularity faded.

Nathalia Clara Ruth Crane was born on August 11, 1913, in Brooklyn, New York. She began writing at an early age and spent a lot of time reading, including classics such as Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) and English short-story writer Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894). When Crane was nine years old, her father sent one of her poems to the New York Sun, and the newspaper editors, unaware of the author’s age, published her first poem. Within the next few years, Crane became the darling of the literary world, and her popularity—highlighted by her young age and childlike innocence—was controlled and molded by various newspapers. Crane attended the New Jersey College for Women (now Douglass Residential College, a part of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey) and Barnard College.

Some of Crane’s other collections of poems include The Singing Crow (1926) and Venus Invisible (1928). In addition to poetry she wrote The Sunken Garden (1926), an account of the ill-fated 13th-century Children’s Crusade to the Holy Land, and an adult novel, An Alien from Heaven (1929). Crane was an English professor at San Diego State College for many years. She died on October 22, 1998, in San Diego, California.