The Contaminated Vision
65
once so profound and yet so incongruous, float through his stupefied mind,
mock his alcoholic pretensions with their whispering, and confirm his delusions
and defeat. In a final, lonely act of capitulation, he pivots out of the saloon and
wobbles down the street like Petrushka’s valentine:4
“—And fold your exile on your back again;
Petrushka’s valentine pivots on its pin.” (48-49)
The wine menagerie has reduced the poetic Bacchanal to a clinical mechanism
of personal obliteration. Religious images have been decimated to a catastrophic
litter of corpses and waste; and the drinker’s alcoholic disorientation and his
visions of death and absurdity have cast him adrift to spin helplessly in a topsy
turvy world of terror and confusion. He has nothing to show for his drunken
excess (could it possibly be otherwise?), no iota of wisdom, no grandiose
fragment of poetry, no enduring monument—only the presumption of genius
which lies somewhere back in the saloon beneath the rubble of dissolution.
The question remains, however: is this a good poem? If it was meant to
describe the integrity of alcohol in the contemporary creative process, as some
critics would have us believe, it is a failure. However, if the poem is recognized
as a pointed illustration of the confusion, narcissistic depression, insanity, and
self-deception characteristic of the contemporary alcoholic mind-set, then it is
remarkable in its capacity to dramatize the overcharged, ego-centered character
of alcohol-induced fantasies, most especially when they involve issues of
creativity, magnanimity, self-indulgence, and power.
For Crane, as for so many alcoholics, there can be little doubt that a
drinking obsession might have provided a temporary psychological milieu in
which perceptions were sometimes rendered strangely congruent according to
the peculiar assortment of prescriptions he carried around in his head. And yet,
in reading “The Wine Menagerie” it is readily apparent that Crane himself was
fully cognizant of the insanity of chronic intoxication. In this regard, the poem
clearly demonstrates the fallacy of the contemporary addict who imagines that
he is somehow romantically and catastrophically endowed with a more than
usual portion of humanity and creative genius. That, perhaps, is the ultimate
justification for studying this remarkable poem, even as it may be the ultimate
explanation for its extraordinary genius.
Mesa State College
Matts G. Djos
Notes
1 The leopard in the brow might also be interpreted in the more traditional context of
fraud; and, in considering the intoxicant's literary pretensions, the secondary reference is
appropriate.
2 See, for example, Lewis, 195.
3 It is interesting to note Crane’s oblique references to feminine power in at least three
places: the lady who attacks her male companion with “mallet” eyes and a “forceps”