The Contaminated Vision:
The Alcoholic Perspective in Hart Crane’s
“The Wine Menagerie”
The Contaminated Vision: the Alcoholic Perspective in Hart Crane’s
“The Wine Menagerie” was presented at the Sixteenth Annual
Meeting o f the Far West Popular Culture Association/American
Culture Association February 5-8, 2004, Las Vegas, Nevada.
Those who have had much experience with a practicing alcoholic have
very likely been puzzled by his perverse thinking and behavior. Does he suffer
from some kind of short-term memory loss? Why is he perpetually selfvictimized and hell-bent on self-destruction? What accounts for his grandiosity,
his antisocial behavior, and his unresolved conflicts? For that matter, why do
alcoholics in general perpetually hunger for the euphoria of drunkenness, and
why are they obsessed with the dark refuge of a hallucinatory otherworld? Why
do they have such an appetite for power and control, and what of their
fascination with personal annihilation, their dementia, their fear and selfloathing? Why are alcoholics fascinated with the prospect of personal
mutilation, and how much foresight do they have in dealing with the
consequences of their addiction and their inevitable, foggy withdrawal into
drunken oblivion? What of the alcoholic ego, the fascination with grandiosity,
the strange and slanted perspective on society, the assumption of genius,
rebellion, self-indulgence, paranoia, and self-mutilation?
Questions like these would suggest that any study of the alcoholic
mentality will be extremely difficult. While most psychologists might be able to
provide a brief, if not shadowy, outline of the nature of alcoholic thinking, the
most accurate descriptions of the alcoholic mind-set will likely be found in the
confessions and descriptions of the alcoholics themselves. When such
testimonies are presented as literature and are recognized as an integral part of
the American literary canon, they are all the more compelling, if only for their
artistry and the genius of their insights into the disease of alcoholism. Of course,
it should be kept in mind that any study of alcoholic writing must necessarily be
a study of obscurity and insanity in the extreme, and this can be rather
confusing.
When I first read Hart Crane’s alcoholic testament in “The Wine
Menagerie,” for example, I was both perplexed and fascinated, most especially
because I regarded myself as something of an expert on the literature of
addiction. In this case, however, the poem seemed to exceed the usual
parameters of alcoholic writing. The central character in the poem, an emulous,