1: Letter Left on a Dressing Table

Harry Crosby and his wife arrived in New York during the first week of December 1929 and Hart Crane gave a party for them in his room on Brooklyn Heights. It was a good party, too; Harry smiled a lot---you remembered his very white teeth---and had easy manners and, without talking a great deal, he charmed everyone. On the afternoon of December 10 he borrowed the keys to a friend's studio in the Hotel des Artistes. When he failed to answer the telephone or the doorbell that evening, the friend had the door broken down and found Harry's body with that of a young society woman, Mrs. Josephine Bigelow.

The double suicide was a front-page story, but the newspapers could find no reason for it and the police had no explanation to offer. Harry was young, just six months past his thirty-first birthday; he was rich, happily married and, except for a slight infection of the throat, in the best of health. All the usual motives were lacking. He had lost a little money in the stock market but did not brood about it; he had love affairs but spoke of breaking them off; he was not dissatisfied with his progress as a poet and a publisher. Nor did he suffer from any sense of inferiority: people had always liked him, all his life had moved in pleasant ways; and he lay there now beside a dead woman in a borrowed studio.

He left behind him no letter, not even a final scrawl.

This deliberate silence seemed strange to the police. They knew that suicides usually give some explanation, often in the shape of a long document addressed to wife, mother or husband, insisting that they had done the wisest thing, justifying themselves before and accusing society. Poets in particular, among whom suicide is almost an occupational disease, are likely to write final messages to the world that neglected them. They insist on this last word---and if Harry Crosby left none, he must have believed that his message was already written.

He had been keeping a diary---later published in three volumes by the Black Sun Press in Paris---and, in effect, it takes the place of a letter slipped into the frame of the mirror or left on the dressing table under a jar of cold cream. It does not explain the immediate occasion, does not tell why he chose to die on that particular afternoon after keeping a rendezvous and sharing a bottle of Scotch whisky. But the real causes of his deed can be clearly deciphered from this record of things done, books read and ideas seized upon for guidance.

And something more can be deciphered there. It happens that his brief and not particularly distinguished literary life of seven years included practically all the themes I have been trying to develop---the separation from home, the effects of service in the ambulance corps, the exile in France, then other themes, bohemianism, the religion of art, the escape from society, the effort to defend one's individuality even at the cost of sterility and madness, then the final period of demoralization when the whole philosophical structure crumbled from within, just at the moment when bourgeois society seemed about to crumble after its greatest outpouring of luxuries, its longest debauch---all this is suggested in Harry Crosby's life and is rendered fairly explicit in his diary. But it is not my only reason for writing about him. Harry was wealthier than the other pure poets and refugees of art: he had means and leisure to carry his ideas to their conclusion, while most of the others were being turned aside, partly by the homely skepticism that is instilled into the middle classes and partly by the daily business of earning a living. He was not more talented than his associates, but he was more single-minded, more literal, and was not held back by the fear of death or ridicule from carrying his principles to their extremes. As a result, his life had the quality of a logical structure. His suicide was the last term of a syllogism; it was like the signature to a second-rate but honest and exciting poem.

But there is one question raised by his life that his diary doesn't answer. How did he first become entangled in the chain of events and ambitions that ended in the Hôtel des Artistes? His background seemed to promise an entirely different career.

Henry Grew Crosby was born in Boston on June 4, 1898; his parents lived toward the lower end of Beacon Street. His father, Stephen Van Rensselaer Crosby, was a banker; his mother, born Henrietta Grew, was the sister of Mrs. J. Pierpont Morgan. Harry attended St. Mark's, an Episcopalian preparatory school, where, being too light for football, he ran on the cross-country team. He graduated in June 1917. With several of his classmates he immediately volunteered for the American Ambulance Service in France. . . . Boys with this background had an easy path to follow. St. Mark's was popularly supposed to lead, after four years at Harvard, to Kidder, Peabody and Company, the Boston bankers (just as Groton School led to Lee, Higginson). Then, after a proper apprenticeship, the young man moved on to New York, where his parents bought him a seat on the Stock Exchange; he might end as a Morgan partner. Alternatively, he might study law and become the attorney for a big public utility; or he might enter the diplomatic service and rise to an ambassadorship, like Harry's cousin Joseph Grew; or he might retire at the age of thirty-five and live on his income and buy pictures. The American high bourgeoisie takes care of its sons, provided only that they make a proper marriage and don't drink too much. What was it that turned Harry aside from the smooth road in front of him?

I think the answer lies in what happened to him during the war, and particularly in one brief experience to which he alludes several times in his diary, but without explaining it fully. The whole story is told in his war letters, privately printed by his parents---incidentally they are exactly like the war letters of fifty other nice American boys of good families which were printed in the same pious fashion. On November 22,1917, Harry was at a dressing station in the hills near Verdun. While he was waiting to drive an ambulance full of wounded men to the field hospital at Bras, a shell burst in the road; the boy standing next to him was seriously wounded. Harry helped to put him into the ambulance and drove back toward Bras through a German barrage. There was one especially bad moment when the road was blocked by a stalled truck and Harry had to wait for minute after minute while shells rained down on either side of the road.

The hills of Verdun [he noted in his diary on the tenth anniversary of the adventure] and the red sun setting back of the hills and the charred skeletons of trees and the river Meuse and the black shells spouting up in columns along the road to Bras and the thunder of the barrage and the wounded and the ride through red explosions and the violent metamorphose from boy into man.

There was indeed a violent metamorphosis, but not from boy into man: rather, it was from life into death. What really happened was that Harry died in those endless moments when he was waiting for the road to be cleared. In his heart he felt that he belonged with his good friends Aaron Davis Weld and Oliver Ames, Jr., both killed in action. Bodily he survived, and with a keener appetite for pleasure, but only to find that something was dead inside him---his boyhood, Boston, St. Mark's, the Myopia Hunt, a respectable marriage, an assured future as a banker, everything that was supposed to lead him toward a responsible place in the world.

At first he didn't realize what had happened. He went back to Boston after the war and tried to resume his old life. He entered Harvard in the fall of 1919; he made the cross-country squad and was almost automatically elected to the societies, waiting clubs and final clubs ---which a young man of good family was supposed to join---Institute of 1770, D.K.E., Hasty Pudding, S.K. Club, A.D. Club. But he wasn't much interested, he wasn't a nice boy any longer, and after two years he seized the opportunity of being graduated with a wartime degree, honoris causa. Under protest he took a position in a bank, but stayed away from it as much as possible and drank enough to insure himself against the danger of being promoted. He read, he fell in love, he gambled, and on January 1, 1922, he began his diary.

"New York," the first brief entry reads, "New York and all day in bed all arms around while the snow falls silently outside and all night on the train alone to Boston." He went back to his abhorrent desk---then, on February 7, "Mamma gave me a hundred dollars for going a month without drinking. Wasn't worth it." On March 12, "Have not been to the Bank for five days." On March 14, "Resigned from the Bank," and on March 21:

Mamma has secured for me a position in the Bank in Paris. Happier--- One of my wild days where I threw all care to the wind and drank to excess with 405--- Result of being happier. At midnight drove old Walrus's new automobile down the Arlington Street subway until we crashed slap-bang into an iron fence. A shower of broken glass, a crushed radiator, a bent axle, but no one hurt. Still another episode to add to my rotten reputation.

Shadows of the Sun---the title under which the diary was published---is better than these early notes suggest, but it won't ever be ranked as one of the great autobiographies. Such works have usually been distinguished either by the author's outward observation of people or else by his ability to look inward into his heart. Harry Crosby looked hard in neither direction. Like so many other poets of our age, he was self-centered without being at all introspective, and was devoted to his friends without being sympathetic---he did not feel with people or feel into them. The figures that recur in his diary---Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, Archibald MacLeish, Caresse (his wife), his parents, the Fire Princess, the Sorceress, E. E. Cummings, Kay Boyle ---all remain as wooden as marionettes: they do things, they move their arms, raise glasses to their lips, utter judgments about one another, but you cannot see the motives behind the actions and the words. Rather than the people, it is the background that finally comes alive.

But this rule has one exception. Harry Crosby himself, though at first he seems as mechanical as the other figures presented in his story, ends in an unexpected fashion by impressing his personality upon you and half-winning your affection. You begin with the conviction that he was a bad poet, a man who dramatized himself, and most of all a fool. Without ever abandoning those ideas you gradually revise them, and are glad to admit that he was an appealing fool, a gallant fool, a brave, candid, single-minded and fanatically generous fool who bore nobody malice. He was not a weakling. Indeed, you come to feel that his strength was what killed him: a weaker man would have been prudent enough to survive. He had gifts that would have made him an explorer, a soldier of fortune, a revolutionist: they were qualities fatal to a poet.

Yet even in this profession where he didn't belong he wasn't altogether a failure. It is true that his early poems were naive, awkward, false, unspeakably flat; it is true that he never acquired, even at the end, a sense of the value of words. But he was beginning to develop something else, a quality of speed, intensity, crazy vigor---and a poem need not have all the virtues to survive; sometimes one virtue is enough. As for his diary, I think there is no doubt that it will continue to be read by those lucky enough to get hold of it. It isn't a great autobiography, no, but it is a valuable record of behavior and a great source document for the manners of the age that was ours.

And it is something else besides, an interesting story. It tells how a young man from Back Bay adjusted himself to another world---how he got married, went to Paris and threw up his job in an American bank there---how he traveled through southern Europe and northern Africa, observing the landscapes, if not the people, with a sure eye---how he lived in an old mill near Paris and entertained everybody, poets, Russian refugees, hopheads, pederasts, artists and princes royal---how he returned to New York, lived too feverishly, became completely demoralized. . . .But it is not the mere story of his life with which we are concerned. Let us see what his problems were, and how he tried to solve them, and how the answers that he found led him inevitably toward one conclusion.

2: City of the Sun

His boyhood and its easy aspirations being dead within him, Harry Crosby was left after the war with nothing to live for and no desires except an immoderate thirst for enjoyment, the sort of thirst that parches young men when they feel that any sip of pleasure may be their last. But his boyhood life, though dead, had not been buried. He was like a blackboard from which something had been partly erased: the old words had to be wiped clean before new ones could be written; all that Boston implied had to be eradicated. Then, too, he had to find a new home to take the place of the one he was bent on losing. His war experience had to be integrated into his life after the war. . . . Problems like these were difficult, but they could be solved ambulando, as he went along. His really urgent problem was to find immediately a new ideal, a reason for living.

He tried to find it in books. In the midst of banking, lovemaking and drinking, he read devotedly, with the sense of new vistas opening out before him. Almost all the books he admired were those belonging to the Symbolist tradition and to what I have called the religion of art.

He began by sampling the more popular works of this category: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Laurence Hope's Songs of India, then, rising to a higher level, Les Fleurs du Mal, which he read easily in the original, having improved his French while in the army. In all these books he found quotations that seemed to explain or ennoble his private misadventures. Thus, after smashing old Walrus's car in the Arlington Street subway, he wrote that his youth, "to quote Baudelaire, n'est qu'un ténébreux orage, traversé ça et la par de brillants soleils!' After a love affair, he quoted E. E. Cummings: "I like my body when it is with your body, it is so quite new a thing." His knowledge of literature was widening. He read and approved T. S. Eliot until The Hollow Men appeared; then he became indignant at the idea of the world's ending "not with a, bang but a whimper." He read Rimbaud and was enraptured. He read Huysmans' A Rebours, and was so impressed by the hero's making a trip to London without leaving the Rue de Rivoli that he essayed an equally imaginary voyage at sea. He read Van Gogh's letters. On reading Ulysses, he wrote, "I would rather have seen Joyce than any man alive"; and again the following year:

Today I saw Joyce three times ... he was walking slowly (felt hat overcoat hands in pockets), lost in thought (Work in Progress) entirely unaware of his surroundings. Somnambulist. And in me the same emotion as when Lindbergh arrived. But what is the Atlantic to the oceans Joyce has crossed?

He was not only reading these men, and later meeting such of them as survived in Paris, and even publishing their work; he was also reading the books that critics had written about them to expound their philosophies. Thus, from Arthur Symons' essay on Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, he quoted with approval: "Become the flower of Thyself. Thou art but what thou thinkest: therefore think thyself eternal.... Thou art the God thou art able to become." Again, from another essay by the same critic: "And the whole soul of Huysmans characterizes itself in the turn of a single phrase, 'that art is the only clean thing on earth except holiness.'" He looked up many of his favorite authors in the Encyclopædia Britannica and went to the trouble of copying a passage about Flaubert:

This ruddy giant was secretly gnawn by misanthropy and disgust of life. This hatred of the bourgeois began in his childhood and developed into a kind of monomania. He despised his fellow men, their habits, their lack of intelligence, their contempt for beauty, with a passionate scorn which has been compared to that of an ascetic monk.

Gradually out of his favorite books the materials for a new ideal of life were being assembled: he wrote that he was beginning "to lay the foundation for my castle of philosophy (not to be confounded with my inner or inmost (to be exact) Castle of Beauty) ":

Life is pathetic, futile save for the development of the soul; memories, passionate memories are the utmost gold; poetry is religion (for me); silence invariably has her compensation; thought-control is a necessity (but is disloyal in affairs of love); simplicity is strengthening (the strength of the Sun); fanatic faith in the Sun is essential (for the utmost Castle of Beauty).

Outside the ivory walls of this castle was a landscape devastated as if by a hostile army. "Machinery has stamped its heel of ugliness upon the unromantic world." America in particular was pustulant with "civic federations . . . boy-scout clubs . . . educational toys and its Y.M.C.A. and its congregational baptist churches and all this smug self-satisfaction. Horribly bleak, horribly depressing."--"This damn country" seemed to be run for children and "smelt, stank rather, of bananas and Coca Cola and ice cream." Even Europe was failing before the invader. "Industrialism is triumphant and ugliness, sordid ugliness, is everywhere destroying beauty, which has fled to the museums (dead) or into the dark forests of the soul (alive)." The only safety lay in strengthening one's defenses. "The gorgeous flame of poetry is the moat and beyond, the monstrous (and menstruous) world, the world that must be continually beaten back, the world that is always laying siege to the castle of the soul."

Whatever happened in the outside world (with the exception of a few heroic and individual feats, like Lindbergh's flight and Alain Gerbault's voyage in an open boat) was absolutely without interest to the soul inside its castle. Harry didn't even read newspapers (sometimes he glanced at Paris-Sport to learn the racing results). He was "bored by politics (full of sound and signifying nothing)." So strong were his defenses that not only machinery and mediocrity but also the commonest human emotions were barred out. No living impulse, no creative force, could cross his moat of fire. In his safe donjon where the larders were stocked with golden memories and bank dividends, he threatened to be transformed into something not so much superhuman as dehumanized.

"I hate children," he wrote. "Rose up in my wrath and fired all three servants," he wrote. "Christ, how I hate servants." People in general were like vermin. "Depressing to consider the ugly bodies that have washed in one's bathtub, to imagine the people who have been born, who have made love, or who have died in one's bed, or to. know that myriad unclean fingers have soiled the pages of one's favorite book." Again: "There arc too many people in the world and Mount Etna is erupting and thousands of lives are lost. Let them be lost. Let them be lost."

People were tolerable only if they were of his own age and belonged to his social class or to the world of letters. The others threatened to arouse his pity and he tried to avoid them. "Bank banquet," he wrote. "A dismal affair. Poor people trying to enjoy themselves are more pathetic than rich people trying to have a good time, for the poor are utterly defenseless where the rich are sheltered by their cynicism."---"The tragic sadness of the pleasures of the poor!" he wrote on a Fourteenth of July after watching them dance in the streets of Paris. "Glimpses of the underworld, the restless, sweating underworld, the rabble seeking after happiness (O Jesu make it stop) and how much more beautiful the full moon turning to silver the garden of the pavilion."---"I hate the multitude," he wrote. "Je suis royaliste and to hell with democracy where the gross comforts of the majority are obtained by the sacrifice of a cultural minority." And again, more briefly and significantly, "I am glad that France has taken the Ruhr." The religion of art was not without having its political sequels.

It also had its sequels in action: of this there can be no doubt whatever. Long ago, in the course of the prolonged debate about life and literature and censorship, it used to be said that art and morality existed in different worlds, that nobody was ever improved or corrupted by reading a book. But Harry advanced a different idea in a bad sonnet to Baudelaire:

Within my soul you've set your blackest flag
And made my disillusioned heart your tomb,
My mind which once was young and virginal
Is now a swamp, a spleenfilled pregnant womb.

His disillusioned heart and spleen-filled mind were delighted with The Picture of Dorian Gray, which he read for a second time. He particularly enjoyed

. . . its sparkling cynicism, its color idealism and its undercurrent of dangerous philosophy Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once and is done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification.... The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it" (tempest of applause).

This was written on July 19, 1924. On July 21 came the sequel:

The sun is streaming through the bedroom window, it is eleven o'clock and I know by my dirty hands, by the torn banknotes on the dressing table, by the clothes and matches and small change scattered over the floor that last night I was drunk.... This the result of reading Wilde. Blanche. Rhymes with Avalanche.

His reading of Baudelaire and Wilde was of course not the only or the principal cause of his wining and wenching and gambling for high stakes: the war had already given him a taste for strong pleasures. What his reading did was to supply him with moral justification for a course he might have followed in any case. It also supplied him with maxims: Live dangerously! Seize the day! Be in all things extravagant! Money troubles are never fatal, une plaie d'argent ne tue jamais (not even when starving? Harry wondered, but put his doubts aside). Finally his reading supplied him with a goal to be attained by debauches --ecstasy! "The human soul belongs to the spiritual world and is ever seeking to be reunited to its source (the Sun). Such union is hindered by the bodily senses, but though not permanently attainable until death, it can be enjoyed at times in the state called ecstasy when the veil of sensual perception is rent asunder and the soul is merged in God (in the Sun)." Stimulants were an aid in achieving that condition: alcohol, hashish, love and opium were successive rites that led toward a vast upsoaring of the spirit; they served as a Eucharist.

Such was the religion of art, not as it was found at its best in the books of a great writer like Joyce or Valéry or Proust, but as it existed more typically in the mind of a young man home from the war, whose education had been interrupted and whose talent was for action rather than contemplation. Even to Harry Crosby, it was not entirely harmful: it gave him a sort of discipline in his debaucheries; it even ended by teaching him to write. But it prevented his interests from expanding, his life from broadening; it protected him from any new, reinvigorating currents that might have come to him from any other social classes than his own tired class; it condemned him to move in only one direction, toward greater intensity, isolation, frenzy, and finally toward madness. For that, too, was imposed on him by the religion of art. "I believe," he wrote in the midst of a short credo, "in the half-sane half-insane madness and illuminism of the seer." He quoted from Symons and from a resume of Schopenhauer: "Social rules are made by normal people for normal people, and the man of genius is fundamentally abnormal."---"The direct connection of madness and genius is established by the biographies of great men, such as Rousseau, Byron, Poe, etc. Yet in these semi-madmen, these geniuses, lies the true aristocracy of mankind."---"Applause," he added, "of Suns crashing against Suns." He had set himself the goal of going crazy in order to become a genius. He was the boy apprenticed to a lunatic.

So he had found his way of living, such as it was; he had found his two castles of philosophy and beauty, one within the other, like wooden eggs from Russia. It still remained for him to find a home, and to lose the dead traces of the old home that persisted in his mind.

More than anything else in Harry Crosby's diary, his attempt to eradicate Boston has the elements of high farce. To him Boston was "a dreary place (dreary, drearier, dreariest).... No concentration here, no stimulus, no inner centrality, no exploding into the Beyond, no Sun. It is the City of Dreadful Night, a Target for Disgust." He not only fled from the abominable city, and the ideals upheld by it, and the country containing it: he also resigned from the Paris bank because it reminded him of the one where he had worked in Boston. Often he congratulated himself on having evaded

... the horrors of Boston and particularly of Boston virgins who are brought up among sexless surroundings, who wear canvas drawers and flat-heeled shoes and tortoise-shell glasses and who, once they are married, bear a child punctually every nine months for five or six years and then retire to end their days at the Chilton Club. Christ, what a narrow escape, far narrower than the shells at Verdun.

And yet he couldn't get Massachusetts out of his blood. Particularly on mornings-after, the images of his childhood became vivid and desirable. Thus, on the day that followed the Quatz' Arts ball of 1923, there was "Bed," he wrote, "and no banking ... and a vague mal du pays for Singing Beach and Myopia Links and the Apple Trees in the Fog." After Dorian Gray and the Blanche who rhymed with Avalanche, he bitterly longed

... for the sunbasking on Singing Beach, for the smell of the woods around Essex, for the sunset at Coffin's Beach, for the friendliness of the apple trees.... I would even like (for me tremendous admission) a small farm near Annisquam with a stone farmhouse looking out over flat stretches of sand toward the sea. The hell you say.

But he had only to meet a few of his fellow countrymen and this longing disappeared. "Two Americans for luncheon," he noted three months later:

One thought that every gentleman should knock down every Negro he meets (and every Negress? Knock up?) and the other considered love a form of indigestion---it certainly would be for him. Glad I am déraciné. Ubi bene, ibi patria.

In the search for that fatherland where everything was best, he traveled through Brittany, the Basque coast, Italy and Spain. At Biskra, on the northern edge of the African desert, it seemed to him that he had finally escaped from ugliness and industrialism:

There are Arabs coming into town on diminutive donkeys (not coming into town in diminutive Fords) and there is a tiny Tofla tending her goats in a deserted palm garden and there are crumbling walls and sun-baked houses and a certain sluggishness and it never rains and the sun gives health and all one needs are dried dates and bread and coffee (and of course hashish) and a straw mat in a bare room of stone ("a man's wealth should be estimated by what he can do without") and we, walk to the Café Maure and smoke hashish (to the amusement of the indigènes) and we see the village sheik in a black and white burnous and a little Negress accroupie in his path (no self-consciousness here)....

That evening Harry and Caresse went to a house opening off a dark alleyway to watch a little naked Arab girl do a danse du ventre:

... little Zora removing layer after layer of the most voluminous garments, the last piece being a pair of vast cotton drawers such as clowns wear, and which was gathered about her slender waist by a huge halyard. Then she begins to dance, slowness at first with curious rhythms of her ventre and then convulsive shiverings (two matchless breasts like succulent fruit) and wilder the music and more serpentine her rhythms and her head moves forward and backward and her body weaves an invitation and we went home to the hotel and O God when shall we ever cast off the chains of New England?

The following morning he wrote, "And the chains of New England are broken and unbroken---the death of conscience is not the death of self-consciousness." Biskra had not produced the desired effect. Eight days later he was back in Paris---"Paris, and all other lands and cities dwindle into Nothingness. Paris the City of the Sun."

Here, he decided, he would spend his days; this Sun-City would be his spiritual home. In June he faithfully attended the races; in August he went driving off to Deauville to play baccarat and bask on the beach; in October, his favorite month, there was racing again near Paris; there were visits to booksellers and picture galleries, and long exhilarating walks in the Bois, and friends in for cocktails---he was entering into the life of the city and meeting not only exiles like himself, young writers like Hemingway, MacLeish, Kay Boyle and Hart Crane, but also French artists and noblemen. As the years passed by he saw less often the little stone farmhouse near Annisquam and heard less often "the sound of the Fog Horn booming through the Fog"; there was nothing to remind him of his dead boyhood. Yet he was beginning again to be restless and dissatisfied.

In truth the Paris in which he had chosen to live was not the only Paris. It was one among many cities that bore the same name and were built one inside the other like Harry's castles of philosophy and beauty. It was the Paris of the international revelers and refugees. It was the Paris symbolized by the famous House of All Nations, to which Harry paid a formal visit

... and saw the Persian and the Russian and the Turkish and the Japanese and the Spanish rooms ... and the bathroom with mirrored walls and mirrored ceilings and a glimpse of the thirty harlots waiting in the salon and there was the flogging post where men came to flagellate young girls and where others (masochists) came to be flagellated.

It was the Paris of drugs and sexual perversions:

Z is busily preparing a pipe, deftly twisting the treacly substance over a little lamp while Y paler than I have ever seen her reaches out white hands like a child asking for its toy. . . .

A great drinking of cocktails in our bathroom---it was too cold in the other rooms---and there were eleven of us all drinking and shrieking and we went to eat oysters and then to the Jungle where there was a great drinking of whiskey and mad music and life is exciting nowadays with all the pederasts and the lesbians---no one knows who is flirting with whom.

It was the Paris of the Bal des Quatz'Arts, which Harry always attended:

At eight the Students begin to appear---more and more and more (many more people than last year) and the Punch Bowl is filled and the Party has begun and soon everyone is Gay and Noisy Noisier and Noisiest toward ten o'clock and seventy empty bottles of champagne rattle upon the floor and now straight gin Gin Gin Gin like the Russian refugees clamoring for bread and everyone clamored and the fire roared in the hearth (roared with the wine in my heart) and the room was hot and reeked with cigarette and cigar smoke with fard and sweat and smell of underarms and we were all in Khmer costume ... and at eleven we formed in line in the courtyard (I with the sack full of snakes) and marched away on foot ... and at last exhausted into the Salle Wagram (snarling of tigers at the gate snarling of tigers inside) and up the ladder to the loge and up another ladder to an attic and up an imaginary ladder to and into the Sun and here I undid the sack and turned it upside down and all the snakes dropped down among the dancers and there were shrieks and catcalls and there was a riot and I remember two strong young men stark naked wrestling on the floor for the honor of dancing with a young girl (silver paint conquered purple paint) and I remember a mad student drinking wine out of a skull which he had pilfered from my library as I had pilfered it a year ago from the Catacombs (O happy skull to be filled full of sparkling gold) and in a corner I watched two savages making love (stark naked wrestling on the floor) and beside me sitting on the floor a plump woman with bare breasts absorbed in the passion of giving milk to one of the snakes.

This was the crazy Paris which, to its own people, seemed the innermost city: in truth it was the outmost and the youngest. It was not the Paris of Villon or Cyrano or Rameau's famous nephew, who were wastrels too, but in a different fashion. It was a Paris that began to flourish under the Second Empire, when the landlords and suddenly enriched speculators of all Europe came flocking toward a world capital where they could spend their profits and be ostentatious in their vice. From year to year this Paris became more feverish and gilded-but there was a time after Louis Napoleon fell when it suddenly ceased to exist.

"Wonderful indeed," wrote Karl Marx in 1871, "was the change the Commune had wrought!"

No longer any trace of the meretricious Paris of the Second Empire. No longer was Paris the rendezvous of British landlords, Irish absentees, American ex-slaveholders and shoddy men, Russian ex-serf-owners and Wallachian boyars. No more corpses at the Morgue, no nocturnal burglaries, scarcely any robberies; in fact, for the first time since the days of February 1848, the streets of Paris were safe, and that without any police of any kind. "We," said a member of the Commune, "hear no longer of assassination, theft and personal assault; it seems, indeed, as if the police had dragged along with it to Versailles all its Conservative friends." The cocottes had refound the scent of their protectors---the absconding men of family, religion and, above all, of property. In their stead, the real women of Paris showed again at the surface---heroic, noble and devoted, like the women of antiquity.

But this was only an interlude. Soon the police and its Conservative friends reoccupied Paris, after executing thirty thousand of the inhabitants. Soon the burglaries began again; soon the wealthy exiles reappeared on the boulevards; and for half a century their special city continued to grow.

Its population, however, had changed since the World War. The Russians still formed part of it, but they no longer had any ex-serfs to provide them with incomes---the Irish absentees had disappeared, after losing most of their estates---the British landlords, with heavier taxes to pay, were living at home---the Southern ex-slaveholders were dead and their descendants had joined the middle classes. Their places in the international set had been taken by the sons and daughters of Northern bankers, by Swedish match kings, by Spanish grandees---and also by strange new people, Chinese mandarins and war lords, Egyptian cotton growers, Indian maharanees, even a sprinkling of Negro kings from Senegal. Their places were also taken by a few French nobles, who had formerly despised these refugees, but were now beginning to feel akin to them, as refugees too, uprooted from the life of their own country. Indeed, all these people had this in common, that they lived at a great distance from their sources of revenue; that their money came to them, not smelling of blood, sweat and the soil, but in the shape of clean paper readily transformable into champagne and love. They were spending it faster and faster, but also more aimlessly. In everything they did there was now an air of uncertainty and strain. Something, the war, the Russian Revolution had given them a sense at their order was crumbling and that they belonged to a dying world. Cartoonists used to depict them as skeletons dressed in banknotes.

This was the world and the city that Harry Crosby had chosen for home. He never quite belonged to it. He too was marked for death, but he was not yet a thing of bones and paper; he had too much sinew not to grow tired of his fellow townsmen. Toward the end, a note of fatigue and disgust with Paris began to creep into his diary; he was beginning to be irritated by the people always crowding about him. "Really the stupidity of the French is beyond imagination."---"And I hate the English Jesus how I hate the English so damn bourgeois and banal."---"I like New York much better than Paris." It was becoming evident that the home he had so joyously chosen, after destroying the traces of his boyhood, was not to be his home after all. Perhaps he could find a new home in New York. Or else, if that failed him---

He had meanwhile another problem to solve. In addition to a way of living and a home that had served him temporarily, he needed also a faith and a ritual. Poetry in itself was not enough: he wanted something beyond it, a transcendent symbol he could celebrate and adore.

The symbol he chose for himself was the Sun.

I don't know how he came to make this choice. He may have done so arbitrarily, during his boyhood; in any case he already regarded himself as a sun-worshiper before beginning his diary. He tried from the beginning to dignify his faith by finding historical parallels, and was delighted to learn that the Peruvians, the Persians, the Egyptians and many other ancient peoples had also worshiped the sun; he memorized the names of their sungods and adopted some of their rituals. In those religions, however, the sun had usually represented a principle of fertility: it was what caused the wheat and maize to grow and thus preserved and symbolized the life of the tribe or nation. Harry's sun-worship was something different, a wholly individual matter, a bloodless, dehumanized religion without community or fraternity or purpose. Yet he fanatically clung to it and, at least toward the end, believed in it sincerely.

It seems to have stood for many different things. Sometimes it was nature-worship---"I am a mystic and religion is not a question of sermons and churches but rather it is an understanding of the infinite through nature (Sun, Moon and Stars)." Sometimes it seemed to be light-worship. Sometimes it was plainly self-worship, Harry himself becoming a sun-symbol---"Today read in Schopenhauer that the center of gravity (for me the Sun) should fall entirely and absolutely within oneself." It was often body-worship---one of the rites that Harry invented for himself was sun-bathing, preferably on top of a tower, until his whole body was "sunny-golden" and until he "exploded into the Sun." Still oftener it was sex-worship---"My soul today is a young phallus thrusting upwards to possess the young goddess of the Sun." He gave sun-names to the women he loved, so that his union with them symbolized a union with the sun itself.

His faith was also a refuge from ugliness and industrialism---"I believe in the Sun because the Sun is the only thing in life that does not disillusion."

But his transcendent symbol was something else besides, something that wasn't clear in his own mind but stands forth unmistakably to the reader of his diary. Because the Sun was at the center of his life---because the center of his life was empty, no living impulse being able to cross the moat of fire with which he had surrounded himself, and because, ever since that day at Verdun, death ruled as master in his inmost castle---because of all this, and by a simple process of transference, the sun became a cold abyss, a black sun, a gulf of death into which he would some day hurl himself ecstatically, down, down, downwards, falling "into the Red-Gold (night) of the Sun ... SUNFIRE!" His worship of the Sun became the expectation of, the strained desire for, "a Sun-Death into Sun."

The truly extraordinary feature of Harry Crosby's life, the quality that gave it logic and made it resemble a clear syllogism, was the fashion in which all the different strands of it were woven together into the single conception of a sun-death.

Take the first strand of all: take the war. Harry often mentions it in his diary; he dwells on it with a horrified fascination that becomes almost love. Yet he never mentions the historical causes or results of it, never seems to regard it as a struggle among nations for survival and among industries for markets. To him it was a blind, splendid catastrophe that meant only one thing, death. It was kept fresh in his mind by symbols like his dead friends, his nearly fatal adventure at Verdun, the Unknown Soldier, the military graveyards, always by corpses---and since these deaths were fine and courageous, were good deaths, the war itself was good.

Here are a few of his reflections on it:

February 1, 1925.---Above all, we who have known war must never forget war. And that is why I have the picture of a soldier's corpse nailed to the door of my library.

November 22, 1925.---All day in the streets the hawkers hawk their wares ... and at night in a glass of brandy a toast in honor of the day (the day of the barrage at Verdun, the day S was wounded).

There will always be war.

November 11, 1927.---Armistice Day... day that for me is the most significant day of the year ... before going to bed I smoked my pipe and drank two glasses of brandy, To Oliver Ames Junior (killed in action) to Aaron Davis Weld (killed in action).

One Fourth of July in Paris, he attended the unveiling of a statue to Alan Seeger and heard the reading of his "Rendezvous with Death":

At the end, to the triumphant sound of trumpets, troops at attention defiled past the grandstand: Foch, Pétain, Joffre, Mangin, Poincaré, Millerand and our uninspiring Ambassador. Very impressive, very significant, as all such things are to those who went to war. Stood with the small contingent of members of the Field Service, and afterwards we were invited to the Elysée Palace to meet Millerand and Mangin (how the poilus used to shake their fists at him and call him le Boucher).

This comment is, in Harry's own words, "very impressive, very significant." He had more or less consciously taken the side of Mangin the Butcher against the common soldiers whose lives were thrown away at Mangin's orders, whose bodies were melted down into the row of medals that Mangin wore on his left breast. He had taken the side of death against life; now he was preparing to act upon his choice. By committing suicide, he was rejoining his dead friends, his only true friends, and was fulfilling the destiny marked out for him at Verdun.

But just as his war service led him toward this end, so too did his study of the Symbolist poets and philosophers; they were still his guides. Out of his reading came the idea that the achievement of individuality was the purpose to seek above all others ---the highest expression of the self was in the act of self-annihilation. Out of his reading came the idea that ecstasy was to be attained at any price---death was the last ecstasy. Out of his reading he learned to admire and seek madness---what could be crazier than killing oneself ?---and learned that life itself might be transformed into a work of art rising to a splendid climax---"to die at the right time." His suicide would be the last debauch, the final extravagance, the boldest act of sex, the supreme gesture of defiance to the world he despised.

He had been seeking a home without really finding it. Death was his permanent home.

Even the religion of his boyhood resumed a place in his life when he learned that the birthday and high feast of Christianity was really the winter solstice, the birthday of the sun, and reflected that Jesus Christ, in a sense, had committed suicide. In the pursuit of death, all the strands united, aphelion and perihelion, boyhood and manhood, Boston and Paris, peace and war ---all his conflicts were resolved. For the first time Harry Crosby became fully integrated, self-sufficient, complete.

During the summer of 1928 he spent a month at the Lido. All afternoon he would swim or he basking in the sun among the almost naked pretty girls; at night he danced or drank champagne or read. His reading, like his dissipation, had now acquired a purpose; all of it pointed in one direction, thus:

July 2.---A reading about Van Gogh and the delirium of his vision ... Van Gogh the example of triumphant individuality Van Gogh the painter of suns the painter of that Sun which consumed him and which was responsible for his final madness and suicide. A Sun-Death into Sun!

July 6.---Tonight in Nietzsche I read a significant passage: "Die at the right time." Die at the right time, so teacheth Zarathustra and again the direct 31-10-42. Clickety-click clickety-click the express train into Sun.

It must have been during the same exalted month that he wrote a prose poem, "Hail: Death!" which was published in the September 1928 issue of transition:

Take Cleopatra! Take the Saints and Martyrs! ... Take Nietzsche: "Die at the right time," no matter where you are, in the depths of the coal pit, in the crowded streets of the city, among the dunes of the desert, in cocktail bars, or in the perfumed corridors of the Ritz, at the right time, when your entire life, when your soul and your body, your spirit and your senses are concentrated, are reduced to a pinpoint, the ultimate gold point, the point of finality, irrevocable as the sun, sun-point, then is the time, and not until then, and not after then (O horrors of anti-climax from which there is no recovering!) for us to penetrate into the cavern of the somber Slave-Girl of Death . . . in order to be reborn, in order to become what you wish to become, tree or flower or star or sun, or even dust and nothingness, for it is stronger to founder in the Black Sea of Nothingness, like a ship going down with flags, than to crawl like a Maldoror into the malodorous whorehouse of evil and old age.

In those days Harry Crosby seemed at the greatest possible distance from old age and decay, at the very perihelion of his youth. His physical condition was excellent, in spite of dissipation: he was all muscle and sinew and his skin was burned so red that Frenchmen took him for a Red Indian. He was taut with energy, burning with desire; he was swimming, dancing, drinking, making love, writing mad poems; and all the time he was laying plans for his final extinction. It was to take place on October 31, 1942---this date had acquired a symbolic meaning. With Caresse he was to fly an airplane over a forest and jump out. There was to be no funeral---"I do not want to be buried in the ground. I want to be cremated.... Take my ashes clean and white, ascend above New York at dawn and scatter them to the four winds."

All during the summer and autumn of 1928 these plans were taking shape. And during the same months Harry was enjoying himself with terrifying gusto:

September 4.---Read about the Synapothanomenos or band of those who wanted to die together formed by Anthony and Cleopatra after the battle of Actium and I should like to have influence strong enough to lead a band of followers into the Sun-Death.

November 7.---Perhaps in my soul I shall become great because I have Sun-Thoughts and this autumn I am very happy. It is very rare to be so very happy.

December 22.---I read in my notebook ... that Aphelion in astronomy is the point of the orbit of a planet at which it is most distant from the Sun (the City of Dreadful Night); that the most simple Sun-Death is from an aeroplane over a forest (31-10-42) down down down down Bang! the body is dead--- up up up up Bang !!!! the Soul explodes into the Bed of Sun (pull over us the gold sheets Dear).

One of his friends, a gifted poet, said that he could no longer bear to shake his hand. Harry had so definitely fixed the date of his death, had made up his mind so firmly, had died in anticipation so many times, that he was like Lazarus with the death-smell about him: shaking his hand was like shaking hands with a corpse---and yet what a lively, lustful, laughter-seeking corpse, with gold pieces in his pocket, hands always moving, teeth gleaming white and the glint of sun on his skin---a corpse already in winding-sheets, pleading for faster music as he screamed his triumphant dirge:

For the Seekers after Fire and the Seers and the Prophets and the Worshipers of the Sun, life ends not with a whimper, but with a Bang---a violent explosion mechanically perfect ... while we, having set fire to the powderhouse of our souls, explode (suns within suns and cataracts of gold) into the frenzied fury of the Sun, into the madness of the Sun into the hot gold arms and hot gold eyes of the Goddess of the Sun!

3: The Revolution of the Word

Logically that was the end of Harry Crosby, his problems and his way of solving them. But there is still one question to be answered. He had determined to commit suicide at a certain time, in a certain way. Why did he kill himself thirteen years before his chosen date, in a borrowed New York apartment, in the arms of a young woman he did not meet until after his plans were already shaping themselves?

In part this question can either be answered from his diary, like the others, or else need never be answered. But also in part---and this is the most interesting feature of it and the reason Harry Crosby becomes a symbol---it carries us outside his own story, that of a minor poet, into the history of an era about to end. A curious change took place in him. just as his life had gradually narrowed down to himself, so now, in his last year, it began to widen, to touch upon the international world of literature, finance and high society, before once again contracting to "a pinpoint, the ultimate gold point, the point of finality, irrevocable as the sun, sun-point."

In November 1928 he made a voyage to America. "Gangplanks are thrown down," he noted in his diary, "and there is a great pushing and crowding and stepping on people's feet and there is a great sign No Smoking Allowed and I shout at Caresse and I go through the customs my pockets stuffed with opium pills flasks of absinthe and the little Hindu love books." Well stocked with contraband to protect him against the rigors of this semi-foreign and miraculous country, he stepped out into the streets of New York at the height of the financial boom, the building boom, the buy-on-easy-installments boom---"New York gold city of the Arabian Nights towering into the gold of the Sun."

But before enjoying the pleasures of the city, he had to make a duty-visit to Boston, which as always he found sunless and dreary. He attended the Yale game in New Haven; that was a distraction. In those years the big college football games served as almost the only mass demonstrations of the American upper bourgeoisie. The Harvard-Yale game of 1928 was the biggest of all, the hardest to get tickets for, the most befurred, extravagant, silver-flasked, orchid-dotted and racing-car-attended. Between the halves a gray squirrel somehow got loose on the field and was pursued by a drunken man in an enormous coonskin coat; I remember that the scared animal seemed more human than the eighty thousand people who shrieked while it was being caught. Harry Crosby mentioned the squirrel in his diary; then shortly he was in New York again.

I love New York," he wrote, "a madhouse full of explosions with foghorns screaming out on the river and policemen with shrill whistles to regulate traffic and the iron thunder of the Elevated and green searchlights stabbing the night." Once again as in wartime he had the thirst for pleasure that comes as a foretaste of death; a danger self-imposed had produced on him the same emotional effect as the German shells. His diary begins to reveal a straining of all the senses toward a sustained and almost incoherent ecstasy, a mingling of "whisky sours, Twin Suns crashing, the feeling of just before snow, the winter lawns, the Red Heart rum, the little ears, the fingers and toes the underclothes the ivory and the rose the winter snows, the green searchlight like a finger touching the breast of the night." There were a few days when he seems to have found the genuine madness for which he had been seeking. One thing is certain, that he enjoyed himself too intensely and paid an unexpected price for his pleasures by becoming dependent on the world by which they were provided. No longer able to exist without them, he lost his self-sufficiency and began to grow demoralized.

On the boat returning to France he felt lonely for the young American woman whom he called the Fire Princess. He had for the first time the sense of anticlimax that he always feared. And on Christmas Eve he noted in his diary, "Paris is dead after the madness of New York."

He tried instinctively to fill his life again, with love and literature His diary often refers to meetings with the Sorceress and the Lady of the Golden Horse and there was still the Fire Princess, who paid a visit to Paris. At the same time he was seeing more of Eugene Jolas, the editor of transition.(13) Harry contributed more poems and prose to the magazine, helped it financially, too, and after the spring issue of 1929 he became one of the advisory editors.

Transition was the last and biggest of the little magazines published by the exiles. There had been many of them: Gargoyle (which was Greenwich Village in Montparnasse), Broom (at first art-for-art's sake, then machine-loving), Seccession (Dadaism tempered with pedantry), the Transatlantic Review (hardboiled and Midwestern, though an Englishman was the editor), This Quarter (intense and angry like its founder, Ernest Walsh, who was dying of consumption), Tambour (half French), the Little Review (which moved from Chicago to New York to Paris before it died), Exiles (Ezra Pound's more or less personal organ)---there must have been others, too, but those were the more important. Toward the end it was getting hard to tell them apart, except by their typography; they had much the same contributors.

Transition began as a repository for all the types of writing that had already appeared in the little magazines. Since it had more space---often it ran to three hundred pages after becoming a quarterly---even more types were represented, with good writing of most types and bad writing of all. Angry, sophisticated, high-spirited, tired, primitive, expressionist, objective, subjective, incoherent, flat, it included everything that seemed new; rhapsodies to the machine were printed side by side with poems of escape from the machine, while Functionalism, Surrealism and Gertrude Stein all nudged one another. But that was chiefly in the beginning., As the magazine continued, it began to work toward a policy of its own, one that would combine the editor's three principal admirations: for Rimbaud (the hallucination of the senses), for Joyce (the disintegration of the English language) and for the Surrealists (the emphasis on dreams and on the "autonomous" imagination).

Harry Crosby was present at meetings where this policy was discussed. On April 3 he noted:

The Jolases appeared and we discussed the future of transition. A policy to be based on Une Saison en Enfer, a policy of revolution, of attack, of the beauty of the word for itself, of experiment in painting, in photography, in writing, of a tremendous campaign against the philistines, of explosions into a Beyond, and then we all four went to Pruniers to eat oysters and drink Anjou.

The campaign was launched in the June issue, in the form of a "Proclamation" signed by sixteen writers. It begins: "Tired of the spectacle of short stories, novels, poems and plays still under the hegemony of the banal word, monotonous syntax, static psychology, descriptive naturalism, and desirous of crystallizing a viewpoint, we hereby declare that"---but the document is worth quoting in full. It is funny; and it sets forth the doctrines that writers were willing seriously to uphold in that year when even the craziest little magazines were saner than the Stock Exchange.

There are twelve propositions:

1. The revolution in the English language is an accomplished fact.
2. The imagination in search of a fabulous world is autonomous and unconfined.
3. Pure poetry is a lyrical absolute that seeks an a-priori reality within ourselves alone.
4. Narrative is not mere anecdote, but the projection of a metamorphosis of reality.
5. The expression of these concepts can be achieved only through the rhythmic "hallucination of the word."
6. The literary creator has the right to disintegrate the primal matter of words imposed on him by textbooks and dictionaries.
7. He has the right to use words of his own fashioning and to disregard existing grammatical and syntactical laws.
8. The "litany of words" is admitted as an independent unit.
9. We are not concerned with the propagation of sociological ideas, except to emancipate the creative elements from the present ideology.
10. Time is a tyranny to be abolished.
11. The writer expresses. He does not communicate.
12. The plain reader be damned.

(Damn braces! Bless relaxes ... Blake)

I have since talked with several of the persons(14) who put their names to this portentous document. Some of them never really understood what it said; they had simply liked the bombastic tone of it. Hart Crane was ashamed of having signed it; he said he was drunk. Jolas believed it word for word, and so did Harry Crosby. In his literal-minded fashion, Harry set out to apply it: he damned the plain reader and wrote hallucinated poems that expressed himself and communicated nothing. But the tenth of the propositions impressed him more than the others. In the midst of dissipations now grown frantic and aimless, he kept repeating that time was a tyranny to be abolished.

That was the year the Crosbys entertained. They were living in an old mill on the estate of the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, just near enough to Paris so that they could never be sure who would drop in for an afternoon call prolonged till midnight---Douglas Fairbanks, the Polignacs, a man with dogs to sell, a double brace of assorted royalty or Hart Crane with a bottle of Cutty Sark and a sheaf of poems under his arm---always there was a coming and going, a great laughing and shrieking:

February 3.---Mob for luncheon---poets and painters and pederasts and lesbians and divorcees and Christ knows who and there was a great signing of names on the wall at the foot of the stairs and a firing off of the cannon and bottle after bottle of red wine.

May 4.---En repos at the Moulin Caresse and I are a little like the shock troops in the war who were often en repos because they often attacked.

That was the year when anything was expected to happen, and did, and wasn't very exciting after all. It might be Hart Crane arrested for knocking down a policeman and kept a week in prison, where "the dirty skunks in the Santé wouldn't give him any paper to write poems on, the bastards"---Harry helped him get out and gave him passage money back to New York; or it might be a scandal casually repeated--"Today P appeared for a cocktail he told us of how Iudira made almost a million francs in Cannes at baccarat and he told us of a men's party he had given in London where the Negro orchestra and the waiters and the guests all raped each other"; or it might be simply "ping-pong and people arriving and more plunging in the pool and Max Ernst was here and Ortiz and the usual raft of royalty"; and then, after the shouting and the drinking, "everyone departed Parisward and C and I were left alone together. What a relief!" But they weren't often alone that year. Usually they rushed off with their guests, all in big motorcars, hurrying to the Chateau, to Paris, to the races, to Deauville for the bathing, driving at eighty-eight miles an hour on the straightaways, piling up into ditches in the fog, often all blind drunk including the chauffeurs.

It was a life that required more and more stimulants to make it livable. There was alcohol always; there was the acting on sudden impulses; there were drugs---"I mustn't take any more of those opium pills they play hell with one"; there was love taken as a drug---"In the evening gin fizzes color of green and silver and the Sorceress girlish like a young actress feline as a puma she is even more feline and amorous by night and now that we are together would that we might vanish together into sleep and . . ."; then, after the stimulants had produced a state of intolerable tension, there was the need for other drugs to assuage it, for "Passifloreine to make me less nervous."

Always, everywhere, there was jazz; everything that year was enveloped in the hard bright mist of it. There were black orchestras wailing in cafe's and boîtes de nuit, radios carrying the music of the Savoy ballroom in London, new phonograph records from Harlem and Tin Pan Alley played over and over again, "Organ Grinder," "Empty Bed Blues," "Limehouse Blues," "Vagabond Lover," "Broadway Melody"--"After supper everybody went over to the party at the Chateau but I stayed and played Vagabond Lover on the graphophone and sat in front of the fire drinking and thinking of fire princesses and sorceresses until I got quite tight (second bottle of champagne) and danced and shouted and branded myself with burning coals from the fire (Fanatic) and at last fell asleep under the zebra skin in the corner by the cider barrel." In the morning there would be more jazz---"We play (taking turns at winding the graphophone) the Broadway Melody from before breakfast till after supper (over a hundred times in all)"; and when the records wore out there were new ones to take their places, new orchestras hot and sweet, jazz omnipresent and always carrying the same message of violent escape toward Mandalay, Michigan, Carolina in the morning, one's childhood, love, a new day. Everywhere was the atmosphere of a long debauch that had to end; the orchestras played too fast, the stakes were too high at the gambling tables, the players were so empty, so tired, secretly hoping to vanish together into sleep and . . . maybe wake on a very distant morning and hear nothing whatever, no shouting or crooning, find all things changed.

Everybody had money that year and was spending it. Harry had money too, but was living far beyond his comfortable income; he was committing what is regarded in Back Bay as the unforgivable sin of drawing against his capital. Already on January 11 he had written his father "to sell $4,000 of stock to make up for certain past extravagances in New York." Again on May 28 he noted, "sold $4,000 of stock enjoy life when you can." And on July 19, "after innumerable sherry cobblers we stopped at the post office and sent the following cable to the family, 'Please sell $10,000 worth of stock---we have decided to lead a mad and extravagant life." This time the family, instead of complying, sent him heartbroken cables. He answered in an eloquent letter that "for the poet there is love and there is death and infinity and for other things to assume such vital importance is out of the question and that is why I refuse to take the question of money seriously."

Yet he took the getting and spending of it seriously enough. Eternal and infinite things were being forgotten in the general demoralization of his age, of which Harry was a part, a unit scarcely distinguishable now from the others. Like his friends, he tried to recoup himself at baccarat. Like his friends, he gambled more desperately on the races, no longer able to confine himself to the system he used to follow, of betting a thousand francs on a chosen horse "to win," but instead plunging at random, following hunches, doubling and tripling his bets to make up for his losses and always falling farther behind. Like his friends, too, he visited fortune tellers to inquire about the future that had become more disturbing since he was no longer able to control even his own part in it. But everybody was a fortune teller that year; everybody knew of a stock that was sure to go up. "To the Bank," Harry wrote, "where I saw a racy girl in black to whom I talked (she turned out to be a sort of cousin) and we went to the Ritz for champagne cocktails and before leaving she gave me a tip on the stock exchange (I sent a wire to SVRC)."

Meanwhile it seemed to him that all the time he was growing stronger, was developing himself:

August 10.---Il faut se développer ... and today I advance by destroying statistics. This just as I was getting into the car to go to Deauville I had a gin ginger ale and I ran back and went upstairs and tore up pages of statistics who in hell wants to keep track of the number of drinks he has drunk (it ruins drinking) or the number of cigarettes smoked or the number of cold baths taken or the number of sun-baths or the number of orchids sent or the number of times I have made love. Harra-Bourra statistics are destroyed and now Deauville for the beach for bacardis for baccarat and tonight I won two hundred dollars at cards.

August 11.---How fast the past year has gone the fastest I can remember like a flash of lightning not one vibration of a clock since a year ago and perhaps now I can destroy time as I have destroyed statistics.

Merely by yielding to the madness of his class and age, he produced in himself the illusion of new power. He was like a swimmer who, after battling the current, turns and swims with it in a magnificent burst of speed and vigor, each of his strokes being multiplied three times by the power of the stream, congratulating himself, moving faster, till at last the cataract. As he drew near the edge of it, he once more began thinking about death. But the phrase he had often quoted from Nietzsche, "Die at the right time," was giving way to another maxim. He now wrote:

"The first of October is the day I should like to die on, only not this year. But I must remember what Jolas said, 'that time is a tyranny to be abolished.'" With a knife or a pistol, anywhere, with anyone, he could instantly abolish time.

4: To Die at the Right Time

The rest of his story was told in the New York newspapers of December 11. "Henry Grew Crosby, 32 years old"---the Times began with an error, for Harry was really 31, but the rest of its facts were accurate---"of a socially prominent Boston family, and Mrs. Josephine Rotch Bigelow, 22 years old, the wife of Albert S. Bigelow, a postgraduate student at Harvard, were found dead about ten o'clock last night, each with a bullet wound in the head, in the apartment of Crosby's friend, Stanley Mortimer, Jr., a portrait painter, on the ninth floor of the Hôtel des Artistes, 1 West 67th Street.

"The couple had died in what Dr. Charles Norris, Medical Examiner, described as a suicide compact (I should like to have influence strong enough to lead a band of followers into the Sun-Death). The police believe that Crosby, in whose hand they found a .25 Belgian automatic pistol, had shot Mrs. Bigelow and then turned the weapon on himself. There were no notes and the authorities were unable to obtain information pointing to a motive for the deaths."

According to the Herald Tribune, the two of them lay fully clothed in bed (in the Bed of the Sun). "Crosby's left arm encircled the woman's neck"---suddenly the Fire Princess had become simply the woman---"and was clasped in her left hand. They lay facing each other, a blanket drawn up to their shoulders (Pull over us the gold sheets Dear)."

"There was a bullet hole in Mrs. Bigelow's left temple and another in Crosby's right temple (having set fire to the powderhouse of our souls). His right hand clutched a small-caliber automatic pistol of foreign manufacture (life ends not with a whimper, but with a Bang--a violent explosion mechanically perfect)."

The newspapers of the following day added a few more details to the story. But time went on for them if not for Harry, and on the third day his death was not mentioned at all, being crowded out by other news. Stocks had suddenly fallen an average of 4.42 points, the worst break since November 12. In Chicago Charles M. Schwab declared that American business had never before been "so firmly entrenched for prosperity as it is today." And the country, indeed, was still enjoying the aftermath of the boom; department stores were getting ready for their biggest Christmas. There was a civil war in China; there were halfhearted negotiations for reducing the German debt. And Harry Crosby? Back Bay was scandalized but unchanged by his career. E. E. Cummings, whom he so admired, wrote a funny and cryptic poem about the Fire Princess and Harry; he called them

Jack Wheelwright,(15) another Back Bay rebel, wrote a longer poem about Harry Crosby and the Wise Men of Boston, setting one against the others with equal ridicule. By way of tribute there were a dozen page in the next issue of transition, with praise and regrets from Crane, MacLeish, Kay Boyle, Jolas and Stuart Gilbert. That was all. For months and years he wasn't mentioned any more except in the conversation of those who had known him intimately. But time went on, more quickly now, it seemed, and Harry was remembered again by others. His death, which had seemed an act of isolated and crazy violence, began to symbolize the decay from within and the suicide of a whole order with which he had been identified.

Things had changed everywhere. The lost generation had ceased to deserve its name; the members of it had either gone under, like Crosby and Crane after him, or else had found their places in the world. The postwar era had definitely ended and people were saying that it had given way to another prewar era. Paris was no longer the center of everything "modern" and aesthetically ambitious in American literature. The little exiled magazines were dead: there was only transition, the sturdiest of the lot, that still appeared sporadically.(16) The little magazines of the new era were being published in Brooklyn, Beverly Hills, Chicago, Davenport, Iowa, and Windsor, Vermont. Most of them were full of class-conscious "proletarian" writing: that was the new mode.

The exiles and refugees of art were all of them home again.

Though they had fled from machinery, they had continued to live on the profits of machine production, or else to live on the demand for luxuries of the people who received those profits, which amounted to the same thing. For, when the factory wheels stopped turning, and wages dwindled away, and dividends, after first being raised "to restore confidence, shrank in their turn, the whole tide of middle-class migration turned backward over the Atlantic. Those of brief culture and unsteady fortunes went first, then the richer ones, then the bank clerks and portrait painters and reporters for American newspapers abroad who had depended on the presence of expatriated wealth ---then, after the banking crisis of 1933 and the depreciation of the dollar, the stream became a flood: Majorca, Bali, Capri and the Riviera were emptied of Americans. People reappeared in Manhattan who hadn't been there since the days of issues and arguments that everybody had forgotten; even Harold Stearns, the Young Intellectual of 1922, was back in New York.(17) The returning refugees began by talking about things out of the past---how America was lacking in real culture and cursed with puritanism, and how nice it was to sit at a sidewalk table sipping one's drink and letting the world glide by---but nobody had time to listen, an soon the exiles, too, were caught up in the new life, were adopting political doctrines and preparing to carry them into action, were perhaps marching in demonstrations of the unemployed.

They had silently abandoned the creed that had guided and sustained them on their long pilgrimage abroad. The religion of art was dead, not only in spirit and inner logic, but this time in practice also. Its saints were either being neglected, or else, like Joyce and Gertrude Stein, they were becoming popular authors, best-sellers in New York, no longer venerated by an esoteric cult. The new young men weren't planning to follow in their footsteps.

In spite of its faults and failures the religion of art had left behind it a rich heritage. It had greatly enlarged the technical resources available to all writers, even to those who were determined to be proletarians or social realists. Poetry would not again be the same as it was before Rimbaud, or fiction what it was before Proust and Joyce. For all artists the religion of art was better than having no religion at all. Even if they were not gifted enough to become saints or prophets of the religion, it furnished them with ideals of workmanship that were, in effect, moral ideals and that gave them a steady purpose in the midst of their dissipations.

On the other hand the religion of art had failed when it tried to become a system of ethics, a way of life. During the 1920s all the extreme courses of action it suggested had been tried once again, and all its paths had been retraced---the way of dream, the way of escape, the ways of adventure, contemplation and deliberate futility had all been followed toward the goal they promised of providing a personal refuge from bourgeois society, an individual paradise. But once more, and this time inescapably, it became evident that all those extreme courses were extreme only as ideals: in life there was always a sequel. The young man who tried to create a vacuum around himself would find in the end that he could not support it. He would find that the real extremes were not those of Axel's lonely castle, or Gauguin's Tahiti, or Van Gogh's fanatical trust in the Sun: they were inertia, demoralization, delusions of persecution and grandeur, alcohol, drugs or suicide. And he would find, too, if he was more observant and less stubborn than Harry Crosby, that even as a theory of writing and painting the religion of art inevitably led into blind alleys. It led to abstract paintings so purified of any human meaning that they were valuable only for their workmanship and appropriate only as decorations, as patches of color and design to brighten a modernique bar; it led to Valéry's conception of art as a leisure-class sport for the benefit of those too sedentary to play polo; it led to the disheartening spectacle of James Joyce spending three days in elaborating a single sentence containing words of Finnish derivation and ending with the word "finish" as a key to future scholars who might or might not be interested in unraveling his meaning---the author of Ulysses wasting himself on erudite puns and crossword puzzles. Along this path there was nothing more to be found. The search itself was ending, and a new conception of art was replacing the idea that it was something purposeless, useless, wholly individual and forever opposed to a stupid world. The artist and his art had once more become a part of the world, produced by and perhaps affecting it; they had returned toward their earlier and indispensable task of revealing its values and making it more human.

But the changes in aesthetic ideals and in manners of life were merely the symptoms of a vaster change. Behind the religion of art was the social system that made it possible---the system that encouraged false notions of success and a mistaken form of reaction against them; the system that uprooted artists and workers from their homes, that produced the Wall Street boom and financed the middle-class migration to Europe.. Now the system itself was threshing about in convulsions like those of the dying. A financially bankrupt world had entered the age of putsches and purges, of revolutions and counterrevolutions. Harry Crosby, dead, had thus become a symbol of change. It was not so much that he had chosen the moment for suicide as rather that in his disorganized frenzy the moment had chosen him. In spite of himself he had died at the right time.