Epitaph For the Sun

Please sell $10,000 worth of stock.

We have decided to lead a mad and extravagant life.

HARRY CROSBY, scion of a proper Boston family, had already been living a mad and extravagant life for some years when he sent this cable to his irate father. Evidently, it was beginning to pale; just a few moments after he sent the cable, Crosby, a professional eccentric and would-be poet, discontinued his calculatedly scandalous life in favor of a mad and extravagant death. A compulsive seeker after new sensations, Crosby had already exhausted almost everything else in the way of the exotic, the extreme and the self-consciously decadent when he was found in 1929 in a friend's New York apartment clasping his lover, Josephine Rotch, in his arms and a pistol in his right hand. Each had a bullet hole in the temple. Plans for a spectacular death had occupied Harry's mind since his days as an ambulance driver in the First World War. He pursued death as eagerly and as singlemindedly as he had pursued his other passions: alcohol, gambling, opium, women, and literature. Actually, Crosby's death displayed as little taste or originality as his poetry. He certainly succeeded in shocking and enraging Boston, but his other ambitions went unfulfilled.

Henry Sturgis Crosby's early life was as dull and conventional as possible. So was Harry Crosby himself. Throughout his adolescent years at St. Mark's, Harry displayed no sign of the feverish eccentricity that was to characterize the rest of his life. He was a mediocre student, and a mediocre athlete headed for an undistinguished career at Harvard until the war intervened. At 19, he headed for France. His four-year stint in the American Ambulance Corps presumably spurred the development of his macabre sensibility, but Geoffrey Wolff offers virtually no explanation as to why experiences shared by so many young men had such a unique impact on Crosby.

Harry returned home, took a two-year "was degree" at Harvard, and was launched on a banking career by his family. His first major affront to Boston mores was his courtship of Polly Peabody, who was not only several years his senior, but married to the alcoholic son of another of Boston's best families. Harry succeeded in persuading Polly, whom he later renamed Caresse, to divorce Peabody, and wooed her for himself with promises of the bliss of dying together:

I still and always will feel that we are so close and near to each other that Death at any time for us both will bring us such happiness as we've never dreamed of...And someday Darling I pray that we will die together. I can think of nothing more sacred or beautiful.

Harry and Polly removed to Paris to escape the scorn and--even less endurable--dullness of Boston. Harry soon gave up all pretense of banking and decided to become a poet-genius. But it was his wealth and flamboyance which brought him into contact with such authentic literary personages as Hart Crane, Archibald MacLeish, Hemingway, Lawrence and Joyce, some of whose works he later published in his Black Sun Press.

Crosby is sometimes portrayed as the epitome of the entire "literary generation" of the '20s. Wolff argues convincingly against this characterization; even if one accepts the questionable concept of a literary generation, it is difficult to see why Crosby should be chosen as its representative. At best, he symbolized its excesses, its rejection of conventional manners and attitudes, but none of its literary substance.

His own poetry was execrable:

What chance have snakes upon a asphalt road

When giant limousines go sliding by,

Or courtesans resolved to gratify

The lust of lover seeking new abode?

I do not envy the unfriended toad

Nor airships falling from a marble sky...

Wolff, generally quite sympathetic to his subject, drily places this poem "among the most comical ineptitudes in the language." Crosby was, in literature as in other things, a man of great enthusiasm and little discrimination. He approached his reading with the same naivete apparent in his writing, accepting the literature of decadence as a manual for living. His bible for many years was Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. That Crosby's life of debauchery and despair was inspired by books rather than authentic feelings is effete in itself. And many of the maxims he gleaned from Dorian Graywere really only rehashes of Huysmans's A Rebours, which in its turn is often nothing better than warmed-over Baudelaire.

There is something touching in the innocence of a man who, as Wolff explains, thought that because madness and genius are often inextricably related, he could take a "shortcut to genius" by cultivating madness. It is questionable whether Crosby even succeeded at madness. He was never quite comfortable in the life he had chosen for himself, and was always making earnest resolutions to reform. During his cult-of-the-sun phase, which succeeded his Wilde/Huysmans phase, Crosby traveled to Egypt, Constantinople, Beirut and other suitably exotic places. The trip was not a success; "As a worshipper of the sun, he was handicapped by an aversion to heat and to southern parts." Something of his prosaic Boston background apparently survived in Crosby despite his flamboyant efforts to thumb his nose at his heritage.

If revolting against Boston did not inspire Crosby to genuine artistic creation, at least it made him a fascinating and enigmatic figure. Unfortunately, Wolff does little more than establish this. He fails to illuminate the mechanism of Harry's transformation from a conventional boy to a man famous for his quirks. He offers few clues to the sources of Harry's twin obsessions, death and literature. In fact, Black Sun is often nothing more than an inventory of Harry's peculiarities; Wolff's writing is uninformed by any consistent sense of what made Crosby what he was. It may be interesting to know that Caresse, as a debutante, invented a special kind of wireless brassiere (later patented) or that Harry enjoyed showing up at the annual Four Arts Ball in Paris sporting seven live pigeons and green body paint, but the anecdotes seem less engaging as the book meanders on.

Wolff does fulfill his title metaphor, charting Crosby's transit and eclipse. He deftly dispels the romanticized view of Crosby as a lost generation archetype, but his emphasis on anecdotes rather than analysis reduces Crosby's short life to series of bizarre, disconnected incidents. Wolff resurrects Crosby from oblivion, but why he has bothered is never made clear.