Black Sun, page 16
A profile of the exemplary Montparnassian would include, tauto-logically enough, an affection for cafés of Montparnasse. Harry shunned cafés almost as resolutely as he disliked the seediness of Montparnasse. The typical American in Paris of Cowley’s portrait went there to write. Harry left home to escape his parents, Boston and his lovelorn fix. He intended at the time to make a life of banking, and to return to Morgan’s home office in New York as soon as possible. The typical American exile was from the middle class, and poor; Harry was from the upper class, and rich. The exemplary young American writer actually did little writing in Paris (Hemingway was an exception, of course, but he too was in no way typical of what is called the “expatriate” community); Harry Crosby, once he began to write, wrote steadily and obsessively.
Indeed, when he and Polly first began to dream of living in Paris, the impulse that propelled them owed more to the traditions of the Grand Tour than to the Great Escape. “We can become very cultured and improve ourselves,” Harry wrote her. Later, after he had quit the bank, he began to hunt for and find more magical qualities in the city where he had been living more than two years. On Independence Day, 1924, while Polly was visiting her family in Nantucket, he wrote her from Paris: “O I wish you were here for Paris is the only city in the world with its charm, and its sparkle, and its ceaseless undercurrents of adventure. Aren’t we fortunate Bunny dear to have this as our home? The weariness of the outside world is appalling today and I suppose that we are all tired children awaiting the hour of everlasting sleep—for us in golden blissfulness—for the others I do not know....” And when he and Polly returned to Paris from one of their frequent trips to America or Central Europe or North Africa or the Middle East, it was always with exalted relief, and a sense of homecoming, and Harry would almost invariably write in his diary some sentiment or other of allegiance. (“Paris, and all other lands and cities dwindle into Nothingness. Paris the City of the Sun.”)
Like the bohemian community of the Left Bank (which would never have dreamt of patronizing, even if its members could afford to, such Right Bank haunts as Harry enjoyed: the Ritz and Fouquet’s), Harry’s anti-American credentials were impeccable. He confided to his notebook, and to anybody who might care to listen, that “I doubt if anyone in Boston could do anything which would make a person in Paris even change his expression.” He chafed against his notion of America’s ruling slogan: Not Allowed!
Harry Crosby nevertheless confessed freely to frequent and painful homesickness, and marveled that Polly did not share his longing for Singing Beach and the Essex Links, the foghorn’s moan, the fall of dead New England leaves. But even when most cast down by mal du pays, he could lift himself with work and mischief. Like many another American in Paris, he delighted in putting the sword’s point to the fat American middle class and hearing it squeal. But unlike Malcolm Cowley’s exemplary holiday exile, who would épater le bourgeois from within its ranks, or from below, Harry dropped water bombs of scandal on that hapless, much-abused class of decent folk from above. For Harry Crosby was no bohemian: the sorrows of Mimi, the pallet and the loft, short rations and immature wine attracted him not at all. And unlike his compatriots Harry was at home with the French, with their culture and language. And finally, he was authentically influenced by French writers more than any others—by Rimbaud, supremely, and by Baudelaire and Anatole France and Flaubert. In this he did indeed comform to the image of an American writer at worship in Paris, but he was all but unique in his conformity.
In common with many another American of his age who had refused to steady down and buckle himself into a respectable calling, Harry suffered the contempt of an anxious father, and this could not help—whatever brave face he showed his diaries—but cause him to doubt himself. When his father wrote him that “the idea of you writing poetry as a life work is a joke and makes everybody laugh,” Harry must have been stung. But worse must have been his fear, uttered so bluntly by that same man of the world, that he would be no good at it: “You will be a dismal failure.” Perhaps Harry would have taken solace from the company of a young Canadian, John Glassco, who was at the same time in Paris trying to write and receiving such communications from his father as this rebuke: “You have now been almost two months in Paris, and after further consideration of your project of a literary career I must once more express my disapproval. As you well know, I altogether disapprove of literature as a futile and unmanly pursuit and one that cannot but lead to poverty and unhappiness. I accordingly advise you that your allowance from now on will be halved.”
Archibald MacLeish quit a pretty career at law with Charles Francis Chaote’s Boston firm to come to Paris and write poems: “I was there in a situation that was deadly serious for me. I was over thirty; I’d given up my law practice; although my father and mother were understanding in the most miraculous way, my friends certainly weren’t. There still are people in Boston who regard me in some way as a traitor to old Charles Francis Choate because I worked in his office and then left him. You don’t do that in Boston.” If MacLeish, who knew he was good, and had the encouragement of his parents, felt himself on the firing line, how must Harry have felt? A year after leaving the bank, he was still writing lines in his diary about home (“And the chains of New England are broken and unbroken”) and still wishing to please his father, but fearing he never could. In that spirit, in 1928 he copied out some lines from Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude: “ ‘I couldn’t understand him ... what son can ever understand? always too near, too soon, too distant or too late....’ ”
But he found someone else, a surrogate father, who loved and supported him, encouraged him to quit the bank and to write, gave him books and money and friendship, introduced him to everyone in Paris —French and American, but especially French—whom Harry could hope to meet, and did all this, subverting Stephen Crosby’s influence, from the security of unblemished family credentials. The man, Walter Van Rensselaer Berry, was Stephen Crosby’s cousin, a great and wealthy gentleman in Parisian social and literary circles, a friend to Henry James and Proust, a man whom Edith Wharton loved throughout most of her life.
Berry was born in Paris in July, 1859, the grandson of Gen. Stephen Van Rensselaer of Albany. He grew up in Paris and Albany, went to St. Mark’s and then Harvard (where he was a classmate and good friend of Theodore Roosevelt), graduating in 1881. He took a law degree at Columbia, but soon after he began his practice in New York (where he first met Edith Wharton) he moved to Washington and developed a reputation as a first-rate international lawyer, representing the French and Italian embassies in the United States. Between 1908 and 1911 he served as a judge at the International Tribunal in Cairo. In 1911 he returned to Paris, from time to time took unusually challenging or remunerative cases at law, and acted as president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris from 1916 till 1923, the year that Harry and Polly first met him.
Berry was a lifelong bachelor, despite the clear wish of Edith Wharton that he marry her after her divorce. He was a man of striking elegance, in both manner and bearing, well over six feet tall and thin, with a small, delicate head and thick white hair and mustache. His eyes were set deep, and cold, lidded like a hawk’s, and he had a hawk’s fine beak and menacing attention to details. Caresse Crosby is characteristically casual in her inventory of the facts of his case in The Passionate Years. She has him graduating from Harvard in 1871 (ten years early), and dead in 1928 (one year late), and she recollects that when she and Harry met him he was seventy-six (he died at sixty-eight). But she accurately describes him:
He was enormously elongated, slim as a straw and as sec; his small head poised erect above a high wing collar was birdlike in its sudden turnings and its bright quick glance. His most usual dress was a morning coat of Edwardian cut, striped trousers and highly polished black button shoes. His arms long, and his wrists like pipestems, he could have been exhibited as a sculpture by Lipshitz [sic]. His fastidiousness was part of his general allure. His speech was witty, and his knowledge worldly; his manner with women was most gallant and wicked; and to me he was utterly delightful. I could well understand his amorous successes even with the young belles of the day.
Friends of Edith Wharton were not so enchanted by Berry, and considered him a malign influence upon her. In part, ironically enough, because he would not marry her, and in part because his aloof and rational character was perhaps too strict a governor on her freer inclinations. For her own part, she worshiped him utterly. In her autobiographical account, A Backward Glance, she recalls her struggle with her first book at just the moment Berry entered her life:
Walter Berry was born with an exceptionally sensitive literary instinct, but also with a critical sense so far outweighing his creative gift that he had early renounced the idea of writing. But though he was already a hard-working young lawyer, with a promising future at the bar, the service of letters was still his joy in his moments of leisure. I remember shyly asking him to look at my lumpy pages; and I remember his first shout of laughter (for he never flattered or pretended), and then his saying good-naturedly ‘Come let’s see what can be done,’ and settling down beside me to try to model the lump into a book.
She goes on to credit him as her writing master throughout much of her life.
Berry despised unnecessary ornament, and anything hackneyed. He was a man of patience, with an instinctive aversion to the ungainly detail. Even his enemies, such as Percy Lubbock, credit him with wit, an appetite for work and reading, skill at languages. Lubbock describes him as a “glutton of books,” but maligns his “dry and narrow and supercilious temper.” He could freeze half to death anyone he found vulgar or untutored. In his hauteur he was a Van Rensselaer, sure enough, and once he was safe in the ground people began to charge him with narrow-mindedness, snobbery (it was said of him that when he saw a duchess, he saw two hundred years of duchesses), dogmatism, selfishness, reactionary political principles and an unseemly contempt for Christian doctrines and metaphysics. One of Edith Wharton’s biographers quotes a letter from an unnamed correspondent who admits in his first sentence that he had never met Berry, but unintimidated by such a niggling liability quite happily characterizes him: “He was a lady-killer.... I think he was what used to be called a cad....” He certainly enjoyed the company and attentions of young and comely ladies, but he was, after all, in his sixties at the time he was meant to have been a “lady-killer.” Louis Auchincloss, a more worldly Wharton biographer, prefers the opinion of Lady Ribblesdale, who told him that it was said in Paris, “Unlike some gentleman callers who left their hostess with a baby, Berry left them with a book.”
What is beyond dispute is Walter Berry’s extraordinary erudition and urbanity. He was a close friend of Henry James, who corresponded frequently with him and remarked Berry’s “beautiful...insolently exquisite hand.” Marcel Proust dedicated Pastiches et Mélanges to him. At his death many newspapers noted Berry’s easy access to the French, to princesses and dukes, poets and painters and generals: in his house on the Left Bank, at 53 rue de Varenne (where Edith Wharton had been the previous tenant), he entertained Paul Morand, Paul Valéry, Jean Cocteau, the Duc de Gramont, the Duchess of Marlborough, Marshal Foch, and Harry and Polly Crosby.
In early November of 1923, in the letter to his father saying that Uncle Jack held out no hope of a transfer to New York, Harry first refers to Cousin Walter, with whom he and Polly had had lunch the day before: “He certainly is well educated and what a cynic—but who knows that he may not be an idealist at heart....” Berry had advised Harry to follow his inclination and leave the bank to write, and when Harry jumped at such sound counsel and tendered his resignation a few weeks later, Berry wrote at once to congratulate him: “I’m so glad you chucked the bank! If this keeps up you’ll have better things to your account than fat $$’s—” The friendship was struck, and within a few months Berry, no man for idle effusions, told his sister Nathalie that he wished he had had Harry as his godson. There began a remarkable fraternity between Walter Berry and his cousin, that only ended four years later at Berry’s death, with Harry left in charge of the funeral arrangements for that proud man, and named as residual legatee of Berry’s considerable estate (the money to come to him after the death of Berry’s sister), and confirmed utterly in habits of temper and inclination that had been uncertain before he met Berry.
A measure of Berry’s influence on his twenty-five-year-old cousin can be taken from a letter written to his mother shortly after Berry died. Harry had just had J. P. Morgan to lunch at home on crabes indiens in return for his uncle’s having taken him and Polly several times to dinner while he was visiting Paris. Till Harry met his Cousin Walter, Morgan had been the world’s mightiest citizen in his nephew’s eyes. (In March of 1924, after the House of Morgan under the Dawes Plan loaned France and other war-ravaged countries almost two billion dollars, Harry’s fervor for his uncle reached high water. He wrote his mother on March 14 that “Uncle Jack apparently has saved France. I have always considered him the greatest man in America. Now I rank him about the greatest man in the world. The franc has recovered a great deal of lost ground. Imagine one single man having the power to influence and change the trend of world affairs.”) But now, Harry told his mother, “Uncle Jack is as unstimulating as Berry was stimulating. Uncle Jack is interesting to talk to but he is altogether devoid of that spark which inspires.... I am afraid you will not agree....”
What could Mr. and Mrs. Crosby make of Berry’s advice to their son, running as it did so contrary to their own? They could not deny that Walter Berry was an ornament to the family, a man of the world as well as of the spirit. He certainly took second place to no kinsman, least of all to his cousin Stephen Crosby, in the intimidating range of his friendships, or in the esteem in which he was held by the serious world. He had inherited a fortune, and multiplied it by his work and wit. And yet in all matters touching the conduct of Harry Crosby’s life, he took sides not with the established father but with the dreaming son.
Not that Walter Berry was in any way a rebel, or enemy of social conventions. He cared at least as much as Stephen Crosby what the world thought of him. But rather than submit to his peers’ opinion of him by trying in all things to conform to their expectations of a gentleman’s conduct, Berry mastered their opinion, forced it to conform to his expectations of himself, looked down his elegant beak at the world and caused it to shake in its boots at his certain, disdainful stare; he obliged the world to adore him. He knew who he was, and was pleased. And to know himself, Harry studied the strange man and came to love him. Harry’s other cousin, Betty Beal, who in many things reflects the judgment of Harry’s mother and father, took consolation from Berry’s influence: “I think Walter Berry had a good, and restraining influence on Harry because he didn’t just wipe everything away, and say nothing’s good.”
What Harry—and Polly—brought to this gentleman, what needs of his that they satisfied, may be easily enough imagined. Berry responded to physical grace and beauty, and the young Crosbys had both in abundance. Berry enjoyed flirting with Polly, and enjoyed being teased by her. Harry’s war record would have appealed to his elderly cousin: Berry had been instrumental in bringing America into the war against Germany, and after the war he organized and directed the Union des Colonies Étrangères en France en Faveur des Victimes de la Guerre, which gave money and succor to wounded French veterans. Berry had been made a Commandeur of the Legion of Honor, but he had never himself been in battle, and liked to share the adventures of someone like Harry who had.
Best of all, Harry was unshaped clay, and Berry’s history with Edith Wharton—as her master, inspiration, editor without portfolio, and sometime bully—anticipated his moral and intellectual instructions to Harry, and to a lesser degree to Polly. Soon after he met his Cousin Walter, Harry began to gorge himself on the modern French literary masters so dear to the older man: Valéry, Verlaine, Baudelaire, and above all Rimbaud. Berry suggested that Harry write a biography of Rimbaud, a tribute to the high esteem in which Berry held his young cousin’s capacity as a linguist and critic. And soon enough Harry was consigning cautionary homilies to his notebooks: “It doesn’t do you any good to read if you don’t apply what you read to your work WVRB.”
Most of Edith Wharton’s biographers agree that Walter Berry intimidated and even oppressed her, that in his hatred of anything that sniffed even slightly of the mystical he hounded her away from territories of the imagination she would otherwise have been free to explore, according to her inclination. Certainly he had no such dampening effect on his young, more impressionable cousin, for it was precisely as he was falling under the spell of Berry that Harry began his course of sun worship. One April evening Harry and Polly had dinner with Cousin Walter, and after browsing through his magnificent library, and finding book upon book dedicated to him, Harry listened to his host tell of the five men of five nations who went elephant-hunting in Africa, each of whom wrote a book upon his return: “The Englishman called his book ‘The Elephant, his Life and Habits’; the Frenchman ‘Étude sur l’Eléphant et ses Amours’; the American ‘In Favor of Bigger and Better Elephants’; the German ‘The Metaphysics and World-Weariness of the Elephant’; the Pole ‘The Elephant and the Polish Question.’ And I suppose I should have entitled mine ‘Elephants of the Sun.’ ”
Harry’s growing obsession with the rites and symbols of sun worship joined nicely with Walter Berry’s preoccupation with Egypt, and its art and mythology. Harry longed to learn, and his cousin to teach: what the young man had neglected at St. Mark’s and Harvard he began to mend beneath the Degas nude (to which Harry wished to make love) hanging in his cousin’s dining room. One afternoon, Berry took his disciple to a Manet sale at the Hôtel Drouot, where he bought a lithograph to match “Un Corbeau,” Manet’s frontispiece to the edition of Mallarmé’s translation of Poe which Harry had first read in the library at 53 rue de Varenne. Harry was experiencing literature and its artifacts from a privileged position, close up. On June 17, 1926, he first met Edith Wharton at Cousin Walter’s, and they all took tea “in the dining room (where she wrote Ethan Frome, ‘poor Ethan’ as she called him)—and there was Paul Morand ... and he was heavy and oriental with a pale opium face and there were the young Count and Countess de Noailles, and a pretty Comtesse de Ganay and a Mrs. Hyde and last but not least a delightful Abbé Meugnier who said he wished that someone would invent another sin, he was so tired of always having to listen to the same ones, and who remarked when he saw Narcisse: ‘Mon coeur, c’est tout un jardin d’acclimations.’ ”
