Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby

Summary (from the publisher): Harry Crosby was the godson of J. P. Morgan and a friend of Ernest Hemingway. Living in Paris in the twenties and directing the Black Sun Press, which published James Joyce among others, Crosby was at the center of the wild life of the lost generation. Drugs, drink, sex, gambling, the deliberate derangement of the senses in the pursuit of transcendent revelation: these were Crosby's pastimes until 1929, when he shot his girlfriend, the recent bride of another man, and then himself.

Black Sun is novelist and master biographer Geoffrey Wolff's subtle and striking picture of a man who killed himself to make his life a work of art.

 

Review: "PLEASE SELL $10,000 WORTH OF STOCK. WE HAVE DECIDED TO LEAD A MAD AND EXTRAVAGANT LIFE" (4).

 

Born in 1898 to a wealthy and prominent Boston family, Harry Crosby did indeed live a mad and extravagant life. He hated conventions, was famously generous, and never imperious. He hated holidays because "they were arbitrary periods of freedom which were given rather than taken, and because they were occasions for artificial merriment" (104). He always dressed in black and was repelled by the touch of strangers, although he had numerous lovers and sincerely claimed to love both his wife and several other women at the same time. Harry considered himself a sun worshipper, intrinsically linked love and death, and despite his seemingly fickle devotion was found charming to his many lovers and to anyone upon whom he cast his attentions. He introduced Hemingway to "lion tamers and clowns at a Spanish circus temporarily in Paris" (182) and got drunk with William Carlos Williams and then with E.E. Cummings, "whom he met in a hotel lobby" (268).  Causing a great scandal and his family's anger, he finally convincing his great love Polly to divorce her first husband and marry him, then recreated her with the new name Caresse. Harry was a prolific poet, but by all accounts not a very good one. He is best known for his socially shocking death and for establishing the Black Sun Press that published books by Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Crane, Pound, Proust, MacLeish, and Kay Boyle throughout the Twenties.

 

At the age of 31, Harry scandalously killed his lover Josephine (another man's wife) and then himself in an apparent joint suicide, although no note was left behind. Yet Harry, through his writings and conversations, had many times declared his intent to die young and by his own hand; "he never let up with his talk of death and love, the two always mixed in his imagination, with mutual suicide apprehended as the most sublime of couplings" (83).  Harry and Josephine both made their intentions clear over and over. The night before their death, Josephine brought Harry a letter. The last line read "Death is our marriage" (285). Harry finally found a woman willing to do what Caresse would not - immortalize their love through mutual suicide.

 

In many ways, Harry achieved what he intended through his death - he immortalized his life and his writing. Indeed, the author admits that his interest in writing this very biography was largely spurred by the way that Harry died. Yet Harry's story feels very unfinished, if for no other reason than the almost endless list of literary ambitions Harry left incomplete: "He had plans for a novel, with dialogue 'crisp and epigrammatic,' whose heroine's life was to be 'built upon the fact that once upon a time she had sold a bouquet of roses to the Queen of Roumania.' [...] He fiddled with his diary, intending to translate it into a cohesive autobiography, and perhaps to embellish it with fantasy. He planned to write a biography of Rimbaud. He considered a play based on Walter Berry's life. He wanted do write an essay about Polia Chentoff and her work, and to extend into a book-length monograph the essay on sun dials he had written for his mother..." (277).

 

It's hard to summarize Harry's life, because while very short, it was filled with frantic activity, great exploration, and numerous well known individuals. I truly enjoyed reading about his nearly unbelievable life story, although I enjoyed the chapters covering his writing and providing in-depth analysis of his poems and writing ability far less intriguing.

 

Stars: 4