Black Sun, page 4
As a child he had gone to Noble and Greenough’s School, which at that time was situated downtown in Boston. In the autumn of 1911, when Harry was thirteen, his parents decided it was time to send him away to St. Mark’s, an hour from Boston, in Southborough. He would have the company there of many friends, of Gardner Monks and Tote Fearing and Ned Bigelow and Brooks Fenno, and he would have an opportunity to observe the manners and mores of children from such far-off territories as New York and Greenwich and Philadelphia’s Main Line and Lake Forest, maybe even Santa Barbara. He wasn’t eager to leave Manchester for what he immediately called The Monastery, but he wouldn’t have dreamt, then, of quarreling with what he knew he was obliged to do.
Years later, in September, 1929, after a happy weekend at the Moulin du Soleil in Ermenonville, just before quitting his country place for Paris, Harry found a magnum of champagne in a corner of the sitting room, where he had overlooked it the night before: “So for good luck I poured it over and rubbed it into my hair as I used to rub sand from the beach into my hair before going to school.” Harry was always a boy who believed he could stop time dead, at just the perfect moment.
3
“From prison to prison ...”
—Harry Crosby’s diary
Saint Mark’s School was founded in 1865 to educate young gentlemen sufficiently in Greek and Latin and mathematics and rhetoric to get them into Harvard College or, in the infrequent instance of a boy’s lesser ambition, Yale or Princeton. Beyond this, the school instructed its boys in good manners and manliness, and above all sought to lead them toward such grace and piety as might be required to secure their admission into a Protestant Heaven. The catalogue assured parents that Southborough (or Southboro, as it is also called) was “singularly free from objectionable features,” and that the “school’s order and management are in conformity with the principles and spirit of the Episcopal Church.” Prayers were said daily, under the charge of the headmaster, Rev. William Greenough Thayer.
Father Thayer had become headmaster of St. Mark’s in 1894, while Harry’s father was president of the Alumni Association. During the ripest era for boarding schools—from before World War I till the decade before World War II—he was one of a patriarchal group of Great Headmasters (Frank Boyden of Deerfield, Endicott Peabody of Groton, Father Sill of Kent, George St. John of Choate, one or two others) who believed that the nation’s best interest was served by the cultivation of a Christian elite. To Dr. Thayer, “distinction of brain and physique, opportunity and personality” were what made “this world worth living in.” The distinction he had in mind must have been between social class and social class rather than between one of his students and another, because personal quirks and singularities were not encouraged at his school, which embraced as a principal virtue the repression of peculiarities, the smoothing of rough edges, the correction of eccentricities.
The fathers of Gardner Monks, Brooks Fenno and Harry Crosby ponied up the tuition of a thousand dollars, and the three chums from Noble and Greenough’s went up to St. Mark’s in the fall of 1911 to take their entrance examinations. The Latin textbook at their old school was markedly different in vocabulary from that at the new, so all three failed the exam in Latin and were obliged to enter as first-formers rather than second; thus they were the oldest members of the class of 1917.
The roster of names from Harry’s time at St. Mark’s reads like an American Almanach de Gotha: Bradlee, Sears, Dewey, Bigelow, de Gersdorff, Pell, Lowell, Codman, de Rham, Whitney, Huntington, Iselin, Winthrop, Beal, Grew, Morgan, Van Rensselaer. On the school’s fiftieth anniversary in 1915, when Harry was a fifth-former, or junior, the trustees issued a report commending St. Mark’s for its excellent works, but taking some note of other people’s criticisms of the place: “Some of the graduates were disturbed because St. Mark’s was becoming more and more a rich man’s school.” These subversives even wanted “competitive scholarships, or something of the sort.” Not a chance. The report committee observed that “similar experiments in other schools had not been markedly successful. The Committee believed very strongly that the influence of the Headmaster was so wisely exerted that the boys at St. Mark’s were in little danger of becoming snobbish, or of laying undue stress on the mere matter of wealth.”
Meantime, the school newspaper and literary magazine, The Vindex, ran advertisements from Brooks Brothers for liveries suitable for “stable, garage, or club,” or for “menservants.” In 1914, an anonymous member of St. Mark’s Missionary Society, unwilling to identify himself perhaps for fear of the ridicule his sentiments would have invited, wrote for The Vindex an article titled “Town and Gown.” He was distressed that his schoolmates lorded it over the local lads, and he proposed, modestly enough, that town boys be invited once or twice a week to use the St. Mark’s gymnasium. “I suppose,” he wrote, “that this proposal will shock and startle some of the more conservative readers of The Vindex.” But he gamely soldiered along, attempting to argue the merits of his notion. His article is a masterpiece of good intentions colored by unconscious condescension, a manual of arms for those who would comprehend the meaning of noblesse oblige:
Here in this town there are many boys who, for lack of proper treatment and of a place where they may get some wholesome exercise and amusement, are forced either to hang about the streets or to visit the cheap shows of Marlboro.... The majority of the boys in this School are the sons of wealthy or well-to-do parents, at any event they are members of the so-called “upper classes.” Many of us will be called to positions of responsibility and importance in various commercial organizations, such as railroads, mines, and newspapers, in our after life. Very few of us will be forced to the misnamed degradation of manual labor, and will consider ourselves superior to and will hold positions of authority over the laboring classes. We are evidently on the verge of another social upheaval, like those which have troubled the course of history since the earliest ages.... It may even break out into the horrors of an inter-class war.... How much better it will be for us to learn to understand the other class now! An understanding of the laboring classes will do much to remedy and smooth over difficulties in the future ... it may do much to prevent the impending cataclysm of socialism
But “the impending cataclysm of socialism” wasn’t much on Harry’s mind, not then, not ever. At school he made no mark as a rebel, reformer, regular fellow, or much of anything. The Vindex shows that he took mandolin lessons, was a timer in a hockey game, managed the Glee Club and gave three (required) extemporaneous speeches. A gregarious leader with his mob at the North Shore, he made no new or lasting friends at St. Mark’s, and some of his classmates recall him best as a loner. His indifference to the boys he found at school is not out of character: he always responded with warmth and generosity to people who surprised him, and no one, no thing, surprised him at St. Mark’s. He took little interest in team sports, just as in his mature life he disdained communal enterprises—unless they were wars, riots or parties. But if he failed to catch fire at St. Mark’s, neither did he entertain a wish to burn the place down. He kept a diary of which only a few pages survive, all from the end of his fifth-form year. The entries show a cheerful boy, empty of introspection, pleased enough with his lot:
Sunday, June 11, 1916: Church. Studied. Got elected to the Boston Dance Committee for the Sixth Form Dance. Missionary Society Meeting.
Monday, June 12, 1916: School. Spring Sports. Got 2nd place in ½ mile run.
Wednesday, June 14, 1916: School. Went in swimming twice. Played 4 sets of tennis in the T[ennis] T[ournament] Doubles. Fenno and I beat Fearing and Thayer 6–3, 6–0. Got 3rd in the 120 yd hurdles and 220 dash junior. Studied for exams. Peach of a day!!!!!!!
Thursday, June 15, 1916: Exams. Got a 60 in Latin and a 55 in Math. In the T.T. beat Harris 6–2, 6–4. Won the junior ¼ mile in 57½ seconds....
Saturday, June 17, 1916: Exams. Got a 61 in English and a 65 in French. Had a haircut. Won the Mile Run doing it in 5min 10sec and got my running stripes. Best day ever!!!
Monday, June 19, 1916: Came down to Manchester!!! Prize Day!!!!! Took a Latin Comp. exam. Swimming. Fenno and I won the S.M. School Tennis Tournament Doubles by beating Fuller & Weld 6–3, 6–4, 6–2. Got a Punctuality Prize for not being late for 2 yrs. Motored home with A. Shaw.
Tuesday, June 20, 1916: Saw Pa. Swimming. Drove the car 40 miles. The new French maid is a queen! Some pep!
Thursday, June 22, 1916: Motored down to New London. Went on board the Corsair.... [Harry does not specify which Corsair he boarded—Uncle Jack’s 250-foot schooner or his twin-screw steam yacht, longer by five feet than a football field.]
The jottings tell Harry’s whole story at St. Mark’s, less a detail or two, and the story is oddly commonplace.
Despite the advantage of his superior age, Harry did not distinguish himself academically. Once only, in February of 1912, was he able to report a good record: “Dear Ma—I ranked second in my form and 18 in the school. I am going to have my hair cut.” Otherwise, his grades were in the cellar: he was graduated from St. Mark’s two places from the bottom of his class, but with perfect marks for conduct and punctuality, and on Prize Day he was awarded a citation for having contrived to arrive at appointments on time to the minute—a virtue he enjoyed for the rest of his life. Still, good conduct and punctuality didn’t make for much to take home to his father. Not that Mr. Crosby would have objected to the boy’s rotten grades, so long as they got him passed along from form to form, and into Harvard.
No, what must have stuck in Mr. Crosby’s craw was his son’s indifferent performance in team sports. Harry had no career in football, nor in hockey, nor in baseball. His classmate, and closest friend at St. Mark’s and at war, Tote Fearing, recollects how things were measured in those days: “The heroes were football players, and Harry wasn’t big enough or strong enough to play football.”
That Harry was good at golf and tennis, and loved to run, hardly mattered. “Running,” as Gardner Monks recalled, “was pretty far down the list of things that were esteemed.” As a boy, Harry would run a mile along Singing Beach every day, and at school he was remembered by Richardson Dilworth, the late Mayor of Philadelphia and Harry’s classmate, for one thing only: “He was a passionate crosscountry runner, and every day we would see him slogging off across the hills by himself, seven days a week, rain or shine.”
Porter Chandler was Gardner Monks’s roommate both at St. Mark’s and at Harvard, and the two alternated academically between best and second-best in their form at school, with Chandler graduating at the top of his class. Chandler remembers Harry as “an amusing companion, with a genius for finding reasons for not doing his homework.” Since Harry took no pleasure from such dreary business as Latin and Greek, he appealed to Chandler for informal tutoring in those subjects, and to Monks for help with science and math. Irregular verbs and the proper use of the subjunctive were sovereign mysteries to him, and he saw no profit to be had in mastering them when another fellow had done so sufficiently to serve them both.
Years later, in 1923, when Harry was at Morgan, Harjes & Co. in Paris, neglecting his banking chores in order to study words in the dictionary and write letters to improve his style, he recalled Porter Chandler: “As the head of the class used to do all my Greek for me at school, and as Goopy used to look after my ambulance for me during the war, so now Vicomte du Mas (deux mots if you please) occupies himself with what work I am supposed to do.”
Gardner Monks had been as close as any boy to Harry before they went to St. Mark’s (“I was constantly in his house”), but once at boarding school the two friends drifted apart. As a child Harry had let himself be steadied by Monks, who had once by only the thinnest margin of time managed to talk him out of setting fire to a house. Monks was responsible and prudent, and must have lost patience with Harry’s antic bursts of energy and his counterpoint stretches of torpor. Once Harry took a one-mile run and invited Monks at the end of it to read his pulse: “Needless to say, it was high, and he swore up and down that he would run no more for fear of damaging his heart.... It is perhaps typical that he hadn’t the foggiest notion as to what would be the normal heart beat at the end of the mile.” Today, looking back, Rev. G. Gardner Monks finds even Harry’s piety “in keeping with his unpredictability: every so often he did things very intensely.”
Tote Fearing had not known Harry as long as Monks had (though the Fearings and Crosbys were close friends in Boston), but his style was better suited to Harry’s. He was, and is, a partisan of plain talk, intolerant of hypocrisy, earnestness and self-importance. He has wit and irreverence; he is a sensualist, and likes to throw people off balance with his candor. He has been called by more than one of Harry’s Boston friends “outrageous,” but always with either affection or envy. He has always placed a great premium on courage and endurance.
Fearing introduced Harry to Edward FitzGerald’s translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the work that joined the Bible in Harry’s literary pantheon, and continued among his touchstones through his life. Omar’s epigrammatic quatrains—passionate and direct, expressive of the kind of pessimistic fatalism that young men use to justify their self-indulgence—seeped into Harry’s fancy, and soon began to control his character. He was, simply, seduced by these verses:
Come fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly—and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.
Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and—sans End.
St. Mark’s was rule-ridden, and a friend recalls that Harry, though not outwardly rebellious, never liked to be “squeezed” by regulations. He called the school “the monastery”—“with complete justice,” in Fearing’s memory. “If we were caught smoking during vacation, we were put on probation, and if we were found smoking at school we were fired. And so it went. It was stricter than anything, stricter than West Point is today.” The school catalogue warned parents that “boxes and packages of all kinds are forbidden without the express permission of the Headmaster. Whenever it is necessary that a boy should go home in term time, the reason must always be stated in advance; but leave of absence will not be granted except under extraordinary circumstances. Important letters and telegrams should be addressed to the Headmaster.” Harry managed, when he felt the urge, to smoke, as well as return to Boston. Years later, he wrote his mother that “home is the only place to be sick in. How I used to rush back from St. Mark’s! Do you remember?”
His parents would come to Southborough one Sunday each month and he would go with them to lunch, but, as Richardson Dilworth correctly recollects, “he never invited anyone else to go along.” He liked even then to be left alone, and would sometimes turn inward, and his mood might darken for reasons no one understood, or cared to understand. Dilworth never saw him again after graduation, but upon hearing that Harry had killed himself he began to think about his old classmate, and ask other St. Markers about him. They could make no sense out of what Harry had become: “It is very clear from Harry’s subsequent career that none of his classmates had any idea such a time bomb was ticking away inside of him.”
“He hates noise,” a friend told his sister Kitsa while Harry was a schoolboy, “and does not care a rush what people say or think of him so long as they leave him alone.” Still, with Tote Fearing, and the gang at the shore, he was energetic, wry, ironic, an inventor of what he must have thought were sophisticated apothegms. His favorite, recollected to this day by four of his friends, was the instruction that “people who live in glass houses should not take baths in the daytime.”
Perhaps under the spell of Omar Khayyám, and subsequently of Schopenhauer, La Rochefoucauld and Wilde, Harry was fatally attracted to epigrams, and in his youth these were either cute or domestically homiletic. When Kitsa was made president of Miss May’s School in 1917, Harry, Polonius-like, wrote her from France a letter that, coming from him, was a thesaurus of hypocrisies. It would be comforting to believe he choked on his laughter while he composed it, but its cautionary tone is typical of his manner during those sad occasions when he succumbed to good resolutions:
That’s damn fine your being president of the school and if you work hard you have a chance to do Miss May’s a lot of good. What you and your class does and how it acts bears directly upon the actions of the rest of the school. If you set a good example it follows that the younger girls will hold to your examples. Therefore take a lot of interest in your new position and don’t let up your interest till next June.... Good luck to you.... Get a good start and keep going—in other words acquire PEP which is the secret of all good work.
The full harvest of Harry’s own PEP made for slight nourishment at his father’s table, so that when war fever began to rise at St. Mark’s as the United States came closer to joining the fight, Harry was in the vanguard of those who wanted to leave school. Beginning with the fall term of his last year, he chipped away at his parents to let him go to battle; he wanted to sail for France on the first tide.
During that term there were lectures on aviation and preparedness, and war maps placed in several buildings on the campus were kept current by the students—whose restlessness during Harry’s final year was so extreme that Gen. Leonard Wood (who had established the camp for officer training at Plattsburgh, New York, to which many St. Mark’s boys went, and who led all men in his eagerness to bring America into the War) sent a telegram urging Harry’s schoolmates not to leave St. Mark’s before the government’s plans were announced. Most families believed their schoolboy sons were too young to go to battle, and urged them to enter college; the majority did their parents’ bidding.
