Black Sun, page 2
Crane was astounded, and chanted a line from one of Harry’s poems about the Nile: “‘Let the sun shine! And the sun shone!”’ Crane believed that he recognized a poet in his friend, who was his own man, who gambled and was quick to choose and to act, who could never be argued from a course he had set himself. Before the party wound down, Crane and the Crosbys decided they weren’t yet ready to say goodbye to one another, and Harry invited his host to join them for dinner and the theater three nights later. They would see the tour de force called Berkeley Square, a comedy in which Leslie Howard returned from the dead to have a look at a later generation. The play was a touch slick for Crane’s taste, but he accepted the invitation. Harry’s mother was to be in New York, across the hall from Room 2707, and despite Crane’s eccentricities—or more likely because of them—Harry wanted her to meet his most recent literary discovery.
Harry’s mother and Caresse hurried back to the hotel from Morgan’s house. There had been no word from Mr. Crosby, the clerk said. Distracted and alarmed, the ladies dressed for dinner and hoped that Harry would at least show sufficient courtesy to join them at the Caviar. Hart Crane was already there when they arrived, and he too was puzzled. Harry’s mother kept the talk flowing; she was gracious, not one to buckle easily or to spoil a gentleman’s meal by her nervousness. But Caresse could not force herself to eat. Harry went where he willed, and for as long as he willed, but he always told her what he was up to, at least in general terms; he would not upset her needlessly, and even less would he treat his mother with such disrespect. After the first course had been withdrawn, Caresse left the table to telephone Stanley Mortimer at his mother’s apartment, a communication out of keeping with the rules of distance and propriety she and Harry played by. But she was badly troubled, and Mortimer agreed to pop over to his studio and look around for Harry.
The headlines next morning added up the lurid sum: TRAGEDY & DISGRACE. Decades later, a distant cousin of Harry’s, Clark Grew, read something at Harvard about his notorious kinsman, and from curiosity asked his grandmother about the poet, till then unknown to him: “She just froze when I mentioned his name. She was in New York with my grandfather to go to the theater, and they came out of the theater at eleven o’clock, and there was some guy selling the local rag: ‘Extra! Extra! Poet found dead in apartment with Boston girl!’ My grandfather turned to my grandmother and said: ‘We will never mention his name again.’ And they didn’t.”
Since it was almost 10:00 before Mortimer found them, the story was not likely to have hit the streets by the time the theaters let out, but Mrs. Grew’s recollection was surely accurate in its drift, if not its details. For years Harry had thumbed his nose at Boston, and at his own people, and at first they had tried to understand him, and possibly even accommodate themselves to his oddities for a time, till he found himself. But he did not find himself, and would not listen when some of them warned him that he was drifting toward shoal water. Now this ... this infamy, a humiliation past the reach of forgiveness. For many in his family he was deader than dead, a nullity, a never-should-have-been, a never-was.
They were discovered lying together in the bedroom upstairs off the balcony, beneath a silk coverlet and dressed except for their bare feet. Mortimer had reached the studio shortly after 9:30 and tried the door: it was bolted from inside, and no one answered his knock. He called for the building’s superintendent, who broke in with a fire ax. Harry was gripping in his right hand, as though for dear life, a .25 caliber Belgian automatic. There was a bullet hole in his right temple, and a bullet hole in her left temple. His free arm was wrapped languidly around her neck, and their left hands were clasped. They faced each other. She was still wearing her orchid.
Among his clothes police found the Cunard Line steamship tickets he had bought that morning for his return home with Caresse. And in cash, $523.75. And several artifacts fashioned from the gold in which he had invested so heavily with his metaphors. These objects were translated by the language of the death report into: “yellow metal chain containing 17 parts, one yellow metal letter A.” Most resonant of all, they found Harry’s sun-ring, which he had sworn to Caresse never to remove. This “yellow metal ring” was found on the bedroom floor, stomped flat.
The police also found a telegram from Josephine, addressed to Harry on the Mauretania: CABLE GEORGE WHEN YOU ARRIVE AND WHERE I CAN TELEPHONE YOU IMMEDIATELY. I AM IMPATIENT. In his pocket was another cable from another girl; it said simply, YES, Harry’s favorite word. The police noticed that the toenails of Harry’s bare feet had been painted bright red, and that the soles of his feet were tattooed with a Christian cross on the left and a pagan sun-symbol on the right.
Caresse would not go to the studio to witness the carnage. Instead she telephoned Archibald MacLeish, who was in town from his Massachusetts farm to see his friends from Paris. She begged MacLeish to take charge; when he was admitted as Mrs. Crosby’s ambassador to the ninth floor of the Hotel des Artistes, the first man he noticed was Dr. Charles Norris, the medical examiner: “He was pacing up and down like a tragic figure in a Sherlock Holmes story. ‘That’s quite a friend you’ve got there.’ He was fascinated by Harry’s looks, thought he was wonderful-looking.” Norris told MacLeish that Harry had let himself live at least two hours longer than Josephine.
If Harry and Josephine had dreamt they would be married by blood, they could never have imagined to what degree their death would polarize their survivors. Albert Bigelow knew his wife had been murdered, and Josephine’s friends supported the widower’s judgment. Hadn’t Mrs. Bigelow said to some of them only a few weeks earlier that her married life was “terribly happy”? And hadn’t she been in high spirits that very morning when she left the Park Avenue apartment of Margaret Burgess, an old school chum with whom she was staying? And why shouldn’t her spirits have been high? Hadn’t she made an enviable match with Albert Bigelow? He was handsome, intelligent, young and enormously popular. Besides, Mr. and Mrs. Burgess had planned a party in her honor for the very night she died, and she had seemed to look forward to it; surely she would not have selected the night of a party in her honor to fulfill a suicide contract ...
On the other hand, one of Harry’s lady cousins thought he had been misled and ruined by Josephine, merely a “passing fancy” for him. One of Harry’s closest friends, Gretchen Powel, had had lunch with him the day of the bloodletting, and her recollection supports the notion that Josephine was merely a “passing fancy”: “Harry said the Rotch girl was pestering him; he was exasperated; she had threatened to kill herself in the lobby of the Savoy-Plaza if he didn’t meet her at once. He agreed to see her, reluctantly.”
What puzzled the police, and impelled the newspapers to write follow-up stories through the week, was the absence of a suicide note. The newspapers looked high and low—very low—for clues to what that note would have said had Harry only been thoughtful enough to write it. They tried disappointed love, with a boost from Stanley Mortimer: the couple had died of frustration; Society, barring their divorces for the purpose of marrying each other, had killed them. Then alcohol was tendered as a likely suspect, since it was known that the lovers had finished most of a bottle of Scotch together. (The papers never thought of headlining drugs, though this would not have led them much further than love or drink.) It was suggested that immoral times had killed the couple—that European influences had pulled the trigger twice. (“Mr. Crosby, who had lived several years in Paris, held suicide preferable to life in America.”) The New York Daily News put its theoreticians to work and reached a novel conclusion regarding the cause of Josephine’s death:
CROSBY POEMS CLEW IN DUAL DEATH
Passion Verses Secret Reading of Slain Bride
The story, a crazy-quilt of fictions, would have pleased and amused Harry, for it suggested that the poet is a wizard of deep powers who can lead his beguiled readers where he will:
A Puritan of the Puritans, the 22-year-old June bride ... neither smoked, drank, nor used cosmetics more extensively than a touch of rouge at her lips. Yet at the climax of an affair with the 35-year-old [sic] Crosby which, as far as her friends were concerned was absolutely clandestine, she was found in death beside a lover who wore a black carnation in the lapel of his jacket, and whose toes, tinted a flaming crimson, peeped from beneath a coverlet.
Crosby’s poems of passion, whose mood was as exotic as some of their author’s preparations for death, were found by members of the amazed family in the home of her aunt....
Harry certainly believed that poems could seduce and transform; perhaps they could even destroy. Years earlier, he had composed a histrionic sonnet on the subject of his own “dissolution,” and had titled it after one of his own dark influences, “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 Of things abominable ...
The better to solve the mystery of the gunshots, the Daily Mirror consulted authorities on aberration: “Profoundly moved by the double tragedy which carried the Byronic Harry Crosby, society esthete and Great Lover, to his death ... psychologists yesterday [December 11] probed further into the young man’s writing, seeking there some new reason for the rash adventure.”
Now they were getting warm. Indeed, Harry’s writing was no more nor less than a prolonged suicide note; he had often, and in every imaginable manner, composed its thesis: Death was “the hand that opens the door to our cage the home we instinctively fly to.” Death was a “Golden Future” and “a land where nothing was amiss.” By his writings he instructed himself in it, arranged its form, provided for himself the whip to lash him home. It inspired him, literally; breathed life into him. Death was a goal he ran toward full tilt. He was a poet of final stanzas, or so he liked to believe, and that last shot was no more than a punctuation point, a dot smaller than his smallest fingernail, a hard period, full stop.
Harry’s experience of art, and its most dangerous risks and sensations, was deep. For the sake of art, it was his preposterous ambition to translate himself from a Boston banker into a genius. He studied geniushood as his school friends studied the conventions, or contract bridge, and he decided, with terrible calculation, to short-cut his way to genius by way of madness. Harry Crosby is an entire laboratory wherein may be studied the terminal consequences of the religion of art. Almost alone among the outlaw artists of his time, he translated every aesthetic notion—so long as it was sufficiently wayward, outré and violent—into acts. In his heart he lived a dangerous metaphor: Art is magic. The magician is a god. Gods can do anything, and never mind the cost.
But literature, art, like Josephine, was only Harry’s accomplice in murder. Death had been his master long before he began to write, even before he began much to read. He loved death. And during those two hours alone with his still lover and himself and his odd, familiar friend, Harry must have studied the dead girl, trying to find in her smile some clue to where he was about to take himself. A clerk at the Savoy-Plaza believed he saw Harry wandering in the lobby while his mother and wife were at tea with J. P. Morgan, just after he had fired the first shot. More likely the clerk had seen a phantom; more likely Harry simply lay beside Josephine trying to recollect himself, so that he would finally know, before he finally left, where he had been.
2
A BOSTON BOY
Harry Crosby was born at home in Boston’s Back Bay in 1898, June 4, under the influence of Gemini, whom we represent as the twins Castor and Pollux, whom Egyptian astrologers represent as a pair of goats, whom Arabian astrologers represent as peacocks. Geminis are said to be quick and restless, mutable, not to be depended upon. Harry’s mother was a pious Christian and would not have interested herself in such a vulgar and pagan custom as belief in planetary influences. Still less would his father, who kept his eyes on the ground, who would have hooted down such notional nonsense as faith in lucky stars. But both of them, Henrietta and Stephen, believed in the shaping power of lucky circumstances, in the predisposition of people born into a favorable setting to rise high and let their light shine down on others. Harry’s parents provided in abundance what they regarded as fertile nurture—money, position, authority and generosity.
A convention, often tiresome, calls upon biographers to precede an account of the subject’s childhood with a genealogy, taking the relentless inventory of his great-aunts and infamous cousins. But in Harry’s instance a table of pedigrees, distinguished name upon distinguished name, is fundamental to his story. Harry’s ancestors, Van Rensselaers and Grews and Morgans, at first inspired him, then reproached him, and finally shamed him, as he shamed them. His destiny was in hostage to their ambitions and judgments, and they never willingly paroled him from the genetic prison into which he was born. When at last he broke out, the carnage was awful.
By his birth certificate he was fashioned Henry Sturgis Crosby. His maternal grandfather was Henry Sturgis Grew, a Bostonian much admired for his philanthropies, who had married the owner of another name prized in Boston, Jane Norton Wigglesworth. (The Sturgis line was patrician enough, but soon after Harry was born his parents elected to change his middle name to Grew.) Henry Sturgis Grew had a son, Edward, and three daughters. Elizabeth Sturgis Grew married Boylston Adams Beal, of Boston; Jane Norton Grew married John Pierpont Morgan, Jr., of New York; Henrietta, named for her father, married Stephen Van Rensselaer Crosby, of Albany, whose bloodlines were no less noble than his wife’s. His maternal grandfather was Gen. Stephen Van Rensselaer, the last patroon. The family had received from the Dutch government in 1629 a land grant of twenty miles along the Hudson River, and they ruled it like a duchy. Stephen Crosby’s mother was the great-granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton, from whom his father too was descended. They also shared descent from a Revolutionary War general, Philip Schuyler, who became a United States Senator. William Floyd, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was Stephen Crosby’s paternal great-great-grandfather.
Col. John Schuyler Crosby, Stephen’s father, was much publicized for his exploits as a soldier and big-game hunter. He served heroically in the Civil War with McClellan in the Army of the Potomac, and during the Indian campaigns with Sheridan and Custer. He was Governor of Montana from 1882 to 1884, and he liked to shoot bear and buffalo in the company of his friend Bill Cody. In Albany, where his son was born in 1868, he and his wife stood high.
Stephen Van Rensselaer Crosby went to St. Mark’s School, graduating in 1887, and then to Harvard, graduating four years later. At St. Mark’s he won the Fearing Athletic Prize; he was short and light, but he was also tough and determined: he played football and baseball, and ran on the track team. He prized excellence, and at St. Mark’s and Harvard, in his time as in Harry’s, excellence in athletics was valued above all excellences. At Harvard, Stephen Crosby was captain of the baseball team; as a freshman he tied for victory in the one-hundred-yard dash; as a junior he was treasurer of the Track Association and won the half-mile run; as a senior he coached the freshman football team and was a halfback on the undefeated varsity team, which scored 555 points to its opponent’s 12.
Although there is no published evidence to support it, the impression left upon people who knew him much later in life was that Harry’s father had been “quite a football star at Harvard,” that “he had made some phenomenal run that established him forever as one of the great backs of Harvard’s history,” that he was the “lightest fellow ever to play football for Harvard.” Whatever his success at the game, it nourished him; his niece, Betty Beal, said he “lived on it.”
Stephen Crosby was plucky, he wasn’t odd, and his social credentials were impeccable. Accordingly, he was elected to several Harvard Clubs: Deke, Hasty Pudding, the Institute of 1770 (the latter two weren’t yet joined), and finally the A.D. As Bentley is to Rolls-Royce, so is the A.D. Club to Porcellian (and St. Mark’s to Groton), as good as the best, perhaps even better than the best because quieter in the announcement of its excellence. He never ceased to take an interest in the A.D. and its members: his loyalties were deep and persistent, and when he left Harvard (having achieved the distinction of being named Third Marshal of his class), he gave the football stadium its first automatic scoreboard. He worked for the Boston & Albany Railroad at home for a year after college, and then left for Boston where he joined F. S. Mosely, a brokerage and old-line investment banking firm, retiring after thirty-five years, just ten months before Harry died.
As a man he had grown nervous, explosive, tightly coiled, sometimes distant but more often sociable, always generous with gifts. He liked the ladies, and was easy among men, at least among those of his taste and class. He intimidated some of Harry’s kinsmen and chums (“He used to scare me to death,” in the memory of a female cousin), and a few, thinking him cruel or indifferent or uncultured, didn’t like him at all. But people liked to be liked by him. He went about wearing a silver whistle attached to a silver chain, and when a comrade said something that amused him, within the bounds of clubly decorum, he’d blow it, and his friends, pleased with themselves, would laugh. He was supremely clubable, and despite the misfortune of his birth beyond the territorial frontiers of Boston, he was taken into that city’s sanctum sanctorum, the Somerset Club. Stephen Birmingham has written that John Marquand’s election to that club meant more to him than the critical and commercial success of his books, more even than his Pulitzer Prize. Steve Crosby would have taken his own election for granted.
