Black Sun, page 33
Harry was at the highest pitch of excitement to be working with Joyce, and the two got on well together. Joyce in his near-blindness (he was unable to move about his own apartment without stumbling into furniture) and Harry with his near-sightedness (he wore thick glasses in private, but would not be seen in them) shared an eye doctor who had recently died, and they talked of him, and of the Irish tenor Sullivan, whose singing Harry admired, provoking from Joyce some ballads in a high key. Joyce asked Harry to read aloud to him the fragments they would publish, and would then explain what the odd words and phrases meant. Harry confessed that the experience made him “realize how ignorant I am from the scholastic point of view and how sane a writer is Joyce.” Joyce signed Harry’s copy of Ulysses, and then insisted on tying it up in pink paper. Harry was struck by the conventional character and domestic quality of Joyce’s apartment—brown-wallpapered, with a formal portrait of his father above the fireplace—and by his formal manners. The only suggestion in his demeanor of who he was came when Caresse asked him if he enjoyed his work, and he offered “a flash of triumph ... the same flash of triumph when one bets high on a horse and sees him gallop past the winning-post a winner....”
When Joyce came to 19 rue de Lille, he insisted that Narcisse be locked in a broom closet because he feared stumbling across him. Using an enormous electric light bulb to help him see, and a magnifying glass, he made seemingly endless revisions to his work, penciling so many changes on the galleys that Caresse said they came to look “like a bookie’s score card.” Harry took notes while Joyce revised, and later, as he helped his distinguished guest down the stairs, he asked him if he was superstitious.
“Why?” Joyce acked.
“Because you were walking under a skeleton.”
He didn’t mind the skeleton, Joyce said, but he was superstitious about deaf-mutes.
When the final revisions had been made, and Roger Lescaret was setting the book in type, he discovered to his horror that the last page contained only two lines, a printer’s botch. He came to Caresse and asked whether Joyce might be prevailed upon to add eight or so lines, and she laughed in outrage, explaining that the greatest literary master of his age did not add words to fill to space like some hack newspaper reporter, and there was nothing to be done. Lescaret sadly pedaled away on his bike, but next day Caresse found him buoyant; eight lines had been found. Caresse asked him indignantly where they had been found, and Lescaret confessed that he had himself gone to Joyce and begged for them, and that Joyce, without a second thought, had added them.
Harry met Kay Boyle, who had been publishing stories and poems in Transition, when he went to buy a scarf for Caresse at the fabric shop of Raymond Duncan, the brother of Isadora Duncan. Miss Boyle and her daughter lived in Duncan’s colony in Neuilly, and in exchange for a room at the villa, meals of goat cheese and yogurt, and about twelve dollars per month, worked as a salesclerk at his outlet on the rue du Faubourg St-Honoré. Harry was intrigued with her, a beautiful and intense girl, a worshiper of art, a dreamer, at once sharp and hard and bright and a throwback to the glorious days of Romanticism. He rushed home to tell Caresse about her, and later wrote his mother that the Black Sun Press would publish a collection of her short stories, her first published book: “I think she is the best girl writer since Jane Austen—I say this without exaggeration....”
In turn, Harry began to show his work to Kay Boyle. In the fall of 1928, he showed her “Assassin,” and while portions of it bored her—she didn’t say why—she was impressed by the risks the poem took and by the sense that Harry possessed a “certainty of knowing what experiences he was willing to undergo.” Then, in a spectacular misjudgment, she added, “Your particular politics of existence, being so much more consistent—and without complaint—than most, could save at least a generation from despair. If you haven’t the time to do it for ours, wait a bit and do it for the Wretch’s....”
Kay Boyle was twenty-five when she and the Crosbys met. She had been married to a Frenchman from whom she separated, and was beginning to spend time with Laurence Vail, a hard-drinking writer, poet and pilot who had himself been married to Peggy Guggenheim, and was known as “the King of the Bohemians.” Miss Boyle’s poems and stories were preoccupied with disease, early sorrow and death, and just as Harry seemed a breathing embodiment of her sometimes morbid expressions, so did she in her own life adhere to her conception of the poetic manner—messy and soulful, contemptuous of the middle class, of money and conventions. She’d had a daughter by her first marriage, and it was in part on the child’s behalf that she had entangled herself with Raymond Duncan’s ménage.
When the Crosbys left town on a holiday, they let Miss Boyle have their Voisin and driver, and “every morning the long, black elegant car would call for me at the colony, and the chauffeur would open the car door and place a sable lap robe across my knees....” The colony was becoming impossible for her. Raymond Duncan went up and down town wearing sandals and a white toga, preaching simplicity and purity, but it had become clear to Miss Boyle that he was fundamentally an entrepreneur, and a resourceful one, working his brethren at sweatshop wages. She decided to leave the colony, but her daughter was in effect its prisoner, since she had signed her over to its care and influence, so with the collaboration of Robert McAlmon she kidnapped her daughter and took her to the Mill. (Perhaps the kidnapping was actually necessary, but Miss Boyle herself repeats with some amusement McAlmon’s judgment that she, “come hell or high water, had to romanticize every situation.”)
Harry was distressed by the child’s cries and whimpers. In any case, the stay at the Mill was not entirely a success. McAlmon thought Harry remote, found it “difficult to make any kind of contact,” yet also felt his host was “too full of hero-worship (Rimbaud, Verlaine, Villon) and of ecstasies and ideas about experimenting with life in order to harvest all the sensations it has to offer.”
Miss Boyle also has a vivid memory of that stay:
There were too many people at Le Moulin that December afternoon....Whenever I looked at [McAlmon] across the chaos of the great, wide room, where a fire burned in a raised fireplace vast enough to barbecue a steer in, he had the look of a bolting horse in his eye. It was almost always the case in Caresse’s and Harry’s gatherings: one had to hold onto a clear knowledge of what they were seeking and what they had relinquished, sacrificed even, in that search, in order to bypass the people who surrounded them.... But the struggle to keep close to Harry, and to isolate his fanatical purity of spirit in the welter that always pressed upon him, was not an easy thing, and sometimes one gave up in despair.
On the last night of 1928, during McAlmon’s visit, the consequences of their style were almost a year off. Harry received a telegram from Josephine, and it excited him. He wrote that he would like to become a necromancer, that he would like to become a prophet of the sun, that he was a prophet of the sun. He concocted a potent drink for McAlmon that he guaranteed would send his guest into a poetic delirium, or to the hospital. McAlmon drank it: “It did no such thing.” And afterwards, crossing the cobbled courtyard, to go to bed while guests rioted in the main room of the mill, McAlmon turned to Kay Boyle: “ ‘It’s too damned depressing,’ he said; ‘so depressing that I can’t even get drunk. They’re wraiths, all of them. They aren’t people. God knows what they’ve done with their realities.’ ”
16
“The years, after all, have a kind of emptiness when we spend too many of them on a foreign shore. We defer the reality of life, in such cases, until a future moment, when we shall again breathe our native air; but by and by, there are no future moments; or, if we do return, we find that the native air has lost its invigorating quality, and that life has shifted its reality to the spot where we have deemed ourselves only temporary residents. Thus, between two countries, we have none at all, or only that little space of either in which we finally lay down our discontented bones.”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
His realities were his adversaries, and Harry drove against them full bore, fueling his aggression with stimulations of higher and higher octane, burning out his life, refusing to settle for settled embers, drugging himself, multiplying his orgasms, testing death and the sun, reaching for an illumination, a poem or line or word or beat of silence. And in his extravagant disdain for his realities he found an accomplice, a poet sure enough, the real article, Hart Crane. A year Harry’s junior, Hart Crane had been foretelling his self-destruction since he was a boy. It was indispensable to his program, a consuming ambition for himself as a poet that could be achieved, as he believed, only by spending himself into bankruptcy. Three years after they met, just before noon of a sunny April day in 1932, Crane jumped off the stern of the Ward Line’s Orizaba, a day north of Havana and bound from Vera Cruz to New York. The ship was stopped, life rings were thrown out, but the suicide was successful.
Like Harry, Crane believed that poetry was magic, and could be trapped only by recourse to magic, a black alchemy of self-induced exaltation. The trick, as both he and Harry knew, was not infinitely replicable, and as the poet and the trick became indivisible, when the trick failed the poet would vanish in its smoke. By January of 1929, when the two men were introduced by Eugene Jolas, their tricks had begun to fail for each of them. Crane, a homosexual and alcoholic, looked twenty years older than his age. His hair had gone gray, and he was obliged to roam further and hunt harder to bag the sailors whose temporary affections he cherished, and which seemed to deflate his self-regard. He had been precocious in all things. He left his Ohio home when he was seventeen to begin his career as a poet, and once in New York immediately succeeded in making a reputation with Allen Tate, Yvor Winters, Malcolm Cowley, Waldo Frank and Sherwood Anderson. But as he ripened, so did he spoil, quickly and luxuriously.
Crane’s father, the inventor of the candy Life Saver, was a solid and respectable fellow, and thus an embarrassment to his son. His mother was a whining and possessive neurotic with a fixation on her only son. Because of his repudiation of his father, Crane was obliged to live on the charity of friends, and from odd jobs as an advertising copy-writer. He was at the mercy of writing fellowships, and one of these—a grant of two thousand dollars from the banker and philanthropist Otto Kahn—had brought him to Europe, where he hoped to conclude his long poem The Bridge, begun several years earlier when his powers were at full flood.
Crane had been twelve days in Paris when he and Harry met at the Deux Magots. Harry took him and Jolas to Prunier for oysters and wine, and that night read “White Buildings” and was impressed. Four days later, he had Crane to lunch at 19 rue de Lille, and the poet and publisher agreed that for two hundred and fifty dollars the Black Sun Press would issue The Bridge as soon as it was finished. The same day, Crane sent a post card to a childhood friend: “Dinners, soirées, poets, erratic millionaires, painters, translations, lobsters, absinthe, music, promenades, oysters, sherry, aspirin, pictures, Sapphic heiresses, editors, books, sailors. And how!”
Harry invited him to use the Mill as a retreat where he might finish The Bridge. At first Crane merely drank too much, and made great noises as he played the record player at full volume, or shouted aloud his own verses and Marlowe’s. Then, February 3, Harry reported on a “mob for luncheon—poets and painters and pederasts and lesbians and divorcées and Christ knows who.... Kay Boyle made fun of Hart Crane and he was angry and flung the American Caravan into the fire because it contained a story of Kay Boyle’s (he forgot it had a poem of his in it) and there was a tempest of drinking and polo harra burra on the donkeys and an uproar and confusion so that it was difficult to do my work....” Crane managed to seduce a count who was about to be married, and he wrote Malcolm Cowley about the situation:
Have just returned from a weekend at Ermenonville ... where an amazing millionaire by the name of Harry Crosby has fixed up an old mill (with stables and a stockade all about) and such a crowd as attended is remarkable. I’m invited to return at any time for any period to finish The Bridge, but I’ve an idea I shall soon wear off my novelty.... It takes a book to describe the Crosbys—but it has (I mean the connection) already led me to new atrocities—such as getting drunk yesterday and making violent love to nobility. As—was just about to marry, I couldn’t do better, though all agree (including Kay Boyle and Laurence Vail) that I did my best.
Crane did not wear off his novelty, of course. Harry was dazzled by his mischief, just as Crane, something of a snob in matters of blood and money, was bewitched by Armand de la Rochefoucauld and his château’s “marble halls and palace walls,” by the Mill’s frozen pond, busy with titled skaters, and by Harry’s fondness for opium, which he tried but did not enjoy. But even after he had moved into the tower and furnished it to his taste with Harry and Caresse’s personal furniture, even after he had enjoyed for a couple of weeks “all the service that millionaires are used to having” (he insisted on thinking of Harry, and describing him to friends, as “heir to all the Morgan-Harjes millions”), he could not cease fearing that at any moment Harry would chuck him out, during the coldest French winter in anyone’s memory. Crosby, he wrote his friend Waldo Frank, “is highly erratic.”
By contrast to his new friend, Harry was a pattern of stability. Crane was a pugnacious drunk, a furniture-breaker who, after passing through a preliminary dancing and singing stage, would smash a glass or two, and soon become, in Malcolm Cowley’s fine phrase, “as morose as a chained bear in a Russian tavern.” Then his voice would deepen to the pitch of a “foghorn far at sea,” as Caresse recalled, and he would begin to abuse whoever came easily to hand. But never Harry; he was intimidated and pleased by Harry, and regarded him as a kinsman and fellow poet. And nothing Crane did managed to estrange Harry from him. “He is of the Sea as I am of the Sun,” Harry wrote, describing Crane’s poetic preoccupation and foretelling his death. Crane fought with shopkeepers up and down the streets of Ermenonville; Harry smiled. Crane invited a chimney sweep to share his bed in the white-rugged, white-walled, white-quilted guest room at 19 rue de Lille, and the fellow left his hand- and footprints on every surface, ruining the room; Harry and Caresse endured. Caresse found him “dynamite to handle,” and when one night, during a return from the Mill to Paris with Constance Coolidge, he demanded that Auguste stop the Voisin so that he could piss at the headlights, she bit her lip and remembered what she had taught herself about the glories of the poet and the miseries of conventions and manners.
Crane held his belly when he laughed, and he laughed often. He was generous within the limits of his means, giving Caresse a necklace and Harry a pair of moccasins he had bought from a sailor. One day, he gave them both the manuscript copy of one of his finest poems, “O Carib Isle!,” which Harry, with his fondness for rank, declared “one of the five best poems of our generation.” Like most of Crane’s verse, it is elliptical and inward, taking its life from a private symbolic system. Also, it is a poem about death, so that it is tempting, in regard to the surfaces of the two poets’ work, to reach for similarities. But Crane, however elusive his conceits and however misbegotten his attempt, in The Bridge, to counteract what he perceived to be Eliot’s nihilism in The Waste Land, was forever rooting for something substantial, a correspondence between dreams and their objective provocations. Whereas Harry’s verse is truly rootless.
But upon reading “O Carib Isle!” and reacting to it, Harry celebrated Crane’s own derangement of the senses, a calculated derangement they shared with Rimbaud, whom they both idolized. He wrote the author of “O Carib Isle!”:—“Hart what thunder and fire for breakfast ... someday when we are all dead they will be screaming and cutting each other’s throats for the privilege of having it....I am no critic but I know gold when I see it. You write from impulse and imagination not by rules—everyone should of course but they simply don’t....Well give ’em hell....”
Finally, as Crane multiplied his disgraces at the Mill, insulting the servants and the postman, running up huge bills on the Crosbys’ cuff, working on the seduction of the chauffeur, neglecting entirely the business he was born to do, the only excuse for his excess, Harry took measures. He stole Crane’s hobnailed boots (at a stroke fettering the wandering minstrel and saving the abused floors of the Mill), and then his clothes. He brought him paper, a typewriter, a phonograph for the playing of the heavy-beated music by which Crane liked to compose his poems, and delivered to the room where his guest was pent up in the tower of the Mill a case of Cutty Sark. So Crane wrote some verses at last, a few stanzas to be added to the sum of The Bridge, but failed to finish the poem, as he had failed so many times before, and in March left for the South of France.
The next time Harry saw him was in court. On July 9, Kay Boyle sent him a note saying that Crane had been jailed at La Santé prison because of a bar fight at the Café Sélect in Montparnasse. Madame Sélect, the owner and cashier, was as contentious as her customer, and they had disputed his bar bill, which he refused to pay—or rather, with his odd French and wild gesticulations, seemed to refuse to pay it. She called for the police, and Crane fought with them till he was subdued, dragged by the heels down Boulevard Montparnasse, jailed and beaten. The literary community, French as well as American, protested violently, and Harry appeared at the Palais de Justice on July 10 to vouch for his friend’s literary renown, if not for his good behavior: “Hart was magnificent. When the Judge announced that it had taken ten gendarmes to hold him (the dirty bastards, they dragged him three blocks by the feet) all the court burst into laughter. After ten minutes of questioning he was fined eight hundred francs and eight days in prison should he ever be arrested again. [He was also instructed by the magistrate to remain sober during the remainder of his stay in France, which, the court hoped, would be brief.] A letter from the Nouvelle Revue Française had a good deal to do with his liberation.”
