Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby

Anyone who thinks Crosby led a "minor" life doesn't get it. Harry Crosby, the founder of Black Sun press, led an astonishing existence and was a premiere member of the avant-guarde "suicide club" founded by Baudelaire and carried through Lautrec, Jarry and Charles Cros. I knew I was going to love this book when I read in the first chapter about the cable Harry and his wife Caresse sent to Harry's rich Boston family: "Please send $10,000 immediately -- have decided to live a wild and extravagant life." Very few people are able to create their own realities and inhabit them as fully as Crosby -- his determination recalls not only Jarry but even earlier figures like William Blake. Wolff's writing is superb: his sense of narrative and description are pitch-perfect without sacrificing detachment or sinking into the realm of hagiography. It is a fascinating portrait of a man who lived his life to the fullest through his love of Art.

Curiously, given Harry's infatuation with Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray throughout much of his life, it was a dictum of Wilde's that Uber-Critic Harold Bloom says he would have engraved above the entrances to the English Departments of every institution of higher learning if he had his way, to wit: "All bad poetry is sincere." that kept coming to my mind throughout the reading of this book. But, note, this dictum does NOT imply its converse: "All sincere poetry is bad." - An important distinction, this. - For Crosby's poetry is nothing if not sincere and, taken out of the context of his life, is bound to seem tawdry, fantastical or sloppy. In other words, it does indeed seem quite bad. But taken in the context of this life, it assumes another hue entirely. As Wolff puts it, his poems were more "testaments" than poems qua poems. All his writings on suicide, the worship of the Sun, et al seem pallid and lifeless until one realizes through the reading of this book that he lived these words. He didn't merely write them. Upon this realization, (dare I say it) they suddenly BLAZE to life. The best aspect of the biography for me is that there is no attempt at some sort of psychobabble analysis in the study of a character that surely invites it: Not one "Id," "Ego," "Oedipus Complex," "Jungian Archetype," et blah, blah, blah. Wolff deftly narrates the life-story of this fantastic, wealthy, sybarite with his literary ambition as he lived it through his short, kaleidoscopically decadent and unbalanced life. But, given all this, there is a prodigal consistency to his life worthy of symbolic logic, right up to the end. Thus, to me, reading this book was brisk and refreshing (pace to the Puritans). Near the end of the book, Wolff quotes Mrs. Powell as saying that all Harry's extravagant talk was "just literary." To her, it surely must have been. But as Wolff points out, "For Harry, of course, the locution `just literary' would have been oxymoronic." In contrast to all the "Lost Generation" writers and artists and jabberers for whom the whole scene was "just literary," to Harry, every word (Indeed, every letter) was wriggling with the blaze of life and........death. HE MEANT IT.

Geoffrey Wolff's bio of the poet, publisher, and mystic Harry Crosby is a terrific read as well as a singularly important contribution to the unfortunately slender body of scholarship on Harry Crosby. Despite persistent popular and academic interest in 1920s literary Paris, Crosby & the Black Sun Press are generally ignored completely or dismissed as marginal. This is truly puzzling. Wolff's biography, while certainly not uncritical, nevertheless does take the man seriously and offers an absorbing account of the life & work of a true original.