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Poet, Founder Black Sun Press, Dandy, Free-Spirit, Sun-Worshipper, Lothario, Lunatic.
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What heavens opened and blazed, What sisters virtuous, What arrows sprang to mark, The trees so terrible and dark, What years, what hopes, What lions all amazed, What fears disguised, (These antelopes with frightened eyes) What things are these? These are the things that all day long, On things made new, After the sunset has merged with the dawn, I bring to you. These are the things that grow less and less As sleep devours our nakedness...................................................
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"Fascinating", "deplorable", "charming", "wretched"...these are some of the adjectives used to describe Harry Grew Crosby. He existed for just a little more than thirty years. He wrote and published books of poetry, journals and founded the Black Sun Press which published the work of Hart Crane, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound, among others.Harry Grew Crosby was born in Boston's Back Bay June 4, 1898, the son of one of the richest banking families in an area full of rich banking families. Tycoon J.P. Morgan was his "Uncle Jack", and it was taken for granted that Harry would follow in the footsteps of his successful ancestors and spend his days enlarging the Crosby millions. Unfortunately, the first World War intervened, and Harry returned a changed man. He fell in love with Polly Peabody, a wealthy woman in her own right; unfortunately, she was already married. Her divorce, and subsequent trans-continental affair and remarriage to Harry in 1922 scandalized Boston society, but the worst was yet to come. Crosby re-named Polly Caresse, because he thought that Polly was too prim and puritanical a name for his new bride. She was to keep that name until her death in 1970.
Harry was not only a gambler, a womanizer, a drinker and smoker-he was also an incurable spendthrift and he spent a good part of his adult life making lists of ways to improve himself morally. None worked, however; later in life he seemed to resign himself to his dissolute lifestyle. He once sent a telegram to Boston: PLEASE SELL 10,000 WORTH OF STOCK. WE HAVE DECIDED TO LEAD A MAD AND EXTRAVAGANT LIFE. He would organize carriage races in the Paris streets and throw beer-filled balloons from high windows at passers-by.
After a brief stint at his uncle's bank in Paris, he decided to become a writer; needless to say, his career plan was received cooly by his family. In 1928, he inherited Walter Berry's collection of over 8,000 books, and proceeded to devour them. Once he had read a book, he saw no purpose in keeping it, so every morning he would leave with a satchel full of rare books, which he would give to waiters, cabbies, sometimes even sneaking them into antiquitarian bookshops with ridiculously low prices pencilled into them. In 1927, Harry and Caresse founded Black Sun Press, which was to produce beautiful and now much-sought-after editions of Hart Crane, Kay Boyle, James Joyce, Rene Crevel and T.S. Elliot, to name but a few. Needless to say, Black Sun also published a number of Harry and Caresse's works...
Harry's seductive abilities were legendary in Paris, and he kept what amounted to a harem of beautiful and doting young women. Although Caresse may have had reservations, she knew better than to try to restrict Harry' freedom. Besides, she wasn't above a few flings herself...
Harry was obsessed with the sun-his poetry and diaries abound with references to it-quatrains, hymns, sonnets, all dedicated to the solar disk. To him it was a symbol of perfection, freedom, heat, enthusiasm, and destruction. He seems to have focussed more and more on the latter as time went on, but throughout his writing are references to dissolution and suicide. He seems to have made suicide pacts with nearly every woman he was involved with. He was to keep his word. On December 10, 1929, he was found in bed with a neat little .25 caliber hole in his right temple next to a young woman with a matching hole in her left. Harry was still clutching the pistol in one hand, the girl in the other. Even the case-hardened detective noted, "what a beautiful man". And thus ended the life of a passionate, obsessive and vain man.
What I find fascinating about Harry is his boundless energy, his disdain for bourgois morality, his epicurian taste. He was a pioneer in many ways; compare his Assassin with the writings of The Futurists. He had the obsessive and violent nature of an ascetic such as Mishima, but a thoroughly decadent lifestyle which few have matched in our century. And he never gave a damn about what people thought. He left us with some beautiful quotes:
"When I like people immensely, I never tell their names to anyone. It is like murdering a part of them."
"You only upset yourself with your sins, but you upset other people by your confessions"
"My wealth I measure by the things I do without"
"It is disheartening 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 have died in one's bed..."
"Why in hell won't they transact business with gold coins instead of with those filthy germ-ridden paper bills?"This next passage is from Kay Boyles tribute appeared in the June 1930 Transition in which Crosby was remembered by friends. Boyles short stories appeared in the Black Sun Press, and Boyle herself stayed with the Crosbys in Paris. Crosby knew her well enough to cash in some stock dividends on his 1928 visit to New York to help Boyle pay for an abortion. On several occasions notably in letters to his mother ion 1928 and 1929 Crosby described her as "the best girl writer since Jane Austen."....................................................
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.....There was no one who ever lived more consistently in the thing that was happening then. And with that courage to meet whatever he had chosen, with no consistency except the consistency of his own choice, and always the courage to match it. His heart was like an open door, so open that there was a crowd getting into it. And with his mind it was the same way. His protection was not in closing himself up when he found he was invaded, but in retreat. Retreat from knowing too much, from too many books, from too much of life. If he crossed the sea, it was never a stretch he looked upon as wide rolling water, but every drop of it stung in him because he did not know how to keep things outside himself; every rotting bit of wreck in it was heaped on his own soul, and every whale was his own sporting, spouting young adventure. If he went into retreat, into his own soul he would go, trailing this clattering, jangling universe with him, this ermine-trimmed, this moth-eaten, this wine velvet, the crown jewels on his forehead, the crown of thorns in his hand, into retreat, but never into escape. Either they would get out and leave him, the young boy making his own choice, or they would stay inside. But other than this there was no middle way.from Kay Boyle, "In Memoriam Harry Crosby," Transition No. 19-20 (June
1930)
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