Chapter IV

LIT DE MORT

“To die at the right time.”

—Harry

On September 9, 1929, Harry’s diary noted: “. . . married seven years, and various rites performed: a firing off of the cannon and prayers into the sun from the top of the tower. In the afternoon, I flew—Aviator, Poet, Lover—all for the Cramoisy Queen.” Harry’s latest passion was learning to fly. Each day, he went out to the field at Villecoublay, and by September, he was flying twice a day with his instructor, the French ace Detré.

When D.H. Lawrence heard the news about Harry’s new hobby, he wrote to Caresse: “An aeroplane? Is Harry really tired of life?” The daily commentary in Harry’s diary noted: “The most simple Sun-death is from an aeroplane over a forest . . . down, down, BANG! The body is dead—up, up BANG!!” (In the margin, he repeated the date [31/10/42] on the Moulin tombstone.) In Harry’s view; the accelerated intensity of aerial acrobatics was a beautiful poem.

In the fall of 1929, the world economy was obviously sluggish. A consortium of bankers led by Harry’s Uncle Jack Morgan steadied the Market temporarily, then discreetly retired from the field when the Market hit bottom on November 13.

In Paris, large crowds gathered outside the Bourse. The Paris Herald switchboard was swamped with calls from Americans in Paris trying to keep informed; at Morgan et Cie., businessmen gathered for reassurance, but when word filtered through, it was far worse than expected. Many of the prosperous expatriates queued up at the Embassy for emergency funds to return home. The cafés of Montparnasse emptied, and letters addressed to the patrons’ mail rack at the Dôme piled up, uncollected.

Caresse and Harry heard immediately from Stephen Crosby, but the news failed to inhibit their pursuit of pleasure. They were booked to sail on the Mauretania November 16—not to attend to family business reverses, but to see the annual Harvard-Yale football game. Harry never cared much about football, and Caresse recognized better than anyone that her husband would never rush home to “Drearytown” only to attend the game. One of the “special girls,” the Comtesse de Jumilhac (née Constance Crowninshield), was sailing with them on the Mauretania, and while Harry was exulting in the menage-à-trois on the boat, another Princess cabled “Impatient!”

En route, Harry was also engrossed in making a holograph copy of his latest volume of poetry, Sleeping Together, dedicated to Caresse. The ship rolled unmercifully, but Harry accomplished the task without a blot and presented it to her before they left the ship. Her favorite poem was “In Search of the Young Wizard”:

I have invited our little seamstress to take her thread and needle and sew our two mouths together. I have asked the village blacksmith to forge golden chains to tie our ankles together. I have gathered all the gay ribbons in the world to wind around and around our two waists. . . . I have persuaded (not without bribery) the world’s most famous Eskimo sealing-wax maker to perform the delicate operation of sealing us together so that I am warm in your depths, but though we hunt for him all night and though we hear various reports of his existence we can never find the young wizard who is able to graft the soul of a girl to the soul of her lover so that not even the sharp scissors of the Fates can sever them apart.

Prophetically, the Fates were waiting in the wings to do their dirty business within the fortnight.

The final day in Boston, there was a sortie to the game with Harry’s mother and father. It was bitterly cold, and Harry had a flask in his pocket that his friends in the Ambulance Corps, “The Hounds”, had given him. He and Steve Crosby passed it back and forth. Caresse ominously noted that there was “one small white face in the crowd, turned towards us, far off like an impervious ticking clock.”

After the game, Caresse rushed back to New York alone and checked into Room 2707 at the Savoy Plaza. “You will adore this room,” she wrote to Harry in Boston. “Lying in bed, I can watch the tugs nosing up the East River and the most amazing phallic skyscraper [the Fuller Tower], very straight and proud. I adore you, my darling, darling! I sleep with ‘Sleeping Together,’ but I want quickly to sleep together with you.” She was playing according to the rules of their game, but she instinctively knew that Harry was sleeping together—with someone else.

On December 9, Harry finally turned up in Room 2707, and Henrietta Crosby checked in across the hall. The next morning he made a cryptic entry in his diary: “One is not in love unless one desires to die with one’s beloved . . . there is only one happiness; It is to love and be loved.”

Harry’s appetite was never satiated. After a feast of lovemaking with Caresse, the early sun dazzled the windows of their room, and Harry, the sun worshipper, whispered:

“Give me your hand, Caresse. Our window is open wide. Let’s meet the Sun-Death together!”

“But why, Harry? We have so much to live for.”

“That is why, Caresse. There is too much. I cannot endure it all.”

“We mustn’t!” Caresse answered. “No, But we must leave here, very soon.”

A premonition cast a brief shadow over the morning sun. But Harry always mixed talk of death and love. After the War, he wrote:

“I ponder death more frequently than I do any other subject, even in the most joyous and flourishing moments of my life.” His letters to Caresse were full of that fixation: “I promise with the absolute Faith that we shall be One in Heaven . . . someday Darling,” was a typical closing. “I pray that we shall die together. I can think of nothing more sacred or beautiful.”

Caresse remembered—to the last day of her own life—that she had turned down Harry’s proffered invitation to die. But that day, she had a full schedule of living ahead. She first went to the travel bureau to book their return passage to France on December 13. Then, she rushed off to meet Harry at the gallery on 57th Street where their friend Kay Lane’s sculpture of Narcisse Noir was attracting the attention of critics.

Harry had reached there first.

“Kiss me, Caresse, before I go,” he said. With his left hand, he took off the big horn-rimmed glasses he always wore, and in a characteristic gesture, leaned across Narcisse’s bronze flank to kiss her. He nodded goodbye, and swift as an eagle was gone.

At five o’clock, Caresse met Henrietta at the Savoy to go to Uncle Jack’s for tea, an appointment made by Harry several weeks before. Harry had chosen as a Christmas remembrance a volume that must have caused his uncle amusement—if not further disenchantment. It was a presentation copy of the Black Sun limited edition of Sleeping Together. In spite of the financial holocaust and the incongruous gift, Morgan received the two women warmly. But at 6:15, when Harry hadn’t appeared, they politely took their leave and went back to the hotel.

It was unlike Harry. “We were restless out of one another’s sight,” Caresse admitted. “Harry was forever telephoning to tell me where he was, and neither of us came late to a rendezvous with each other.” Caresse and Henrietta were due to meet Hart Crane at the Caviar Restaurant at 7:30 that evening. On December 7, Hart had given the farewell party for the Crosbys at his Brooklyn Heights apartment, in direct view of the bridge. Some of their old friends were included, but it was planned to introduce the Crosbys as publishers of The Bridge to some of the literary lights on the New York scene—E. E. cummings, William Carlos Williams, the Malcolm Cowleys, and Walker Evans, the photographer who recorded the event. When the party wound down, one of the guests, quite drunk, asked Harry to pick a card from the deck. There was a silent moment before Harry spoke—“Ace of Hearts”—and picked. The Ace of Hearts.

On December 8, Josephine Rotch Bigelow hand-carried an envelope to the Savoy Plaza. The “impatient” Fire Princess was known locally as a “strange wild girl who delighted in saying things to shock people.” Yet only the summer before, at 18, she had married Albert Bigelow, a graduate student of architecture at Harvard and scion of a conservative Boston family, in an impressive society wedding. Bigelow remained stolidly unaware of his bride’s liaison with Harry while traveling in Venice the year before. Harry had introduced her to the opium pipe; she had an ugly temper and mad fits of jealousy. When they made love, Harry confided to his diary, “It was madness, like cats in the night that howl, no longer knowing whether they are in hell or Paradise.” He told Hart Crane that he was already growing tired of her.

The crumpled contents of a yellowed envelope are among Caresse’s carefully preserved papers. A juvenile 36-line poem, “Two Fires that Make One Fire”—an inventory of the enthusiasms Harry shared with the Fire Princess, ends on an ominous chord: “Death is our marriage.” The note attached encapsulated its clear message, “Harry, do you know I love you terribly?” (Caresse noted in faltering hand: “This is the letter Josephine brought Harry the night before . . . she had not left town as she promised.”)

When Caresse and Henrietta Crosby arrived at the Caviar to meet Crane, Harry was not there and had left no message. They exchanged pleasantries during the first course; then Caresse excused herself to call Stanley Mortimer, the painter, an old friend of Harry’s. A telephone call was decidedly against the rules of the game, but she was worried and suspected Harry had gone to Stanley’s studio, his usual site for a rendezvous. Only the devil—or death—could prevent Harry from keeping a firm date with Caresse and his mother.

They discovered Harry and Josephine lying together in the upstairs bedroom off Mortimer’s studio, fully and fashionably dressed, except for their bare feet. The police report noted Harry’s soles, tattooed on the voyage to Egypt with a Christian cross on the left, a pagan sun symbol on the right. Both had beautiful skin like parchment, and eyes sunk beneath strong brows, sensuous mouths with full lips, her dark still-damp curls contrasting with Harry’s ripewheat shock. Harry’s free arm was wrapped around Josephine’s neck, their left hands clasped, like a tableau of a fairy tale Prince and Princess. The Jazz Age Romeo and Juliet appeared to have supped from the same fatal love potion to lie for eternity on Harry’s Lit de Mort:

I shall die within my Lady’s arms

and from her mouth, drink down the purple wine.

In reality, an almost imperceptible bullet hole had pierced his right temple, her left. The Hounds’ flask, half empty, lay by Harry’s side, next to his small pearl-handled revolver. The gold Sun Ring, Caresse’s wedding gift to Harry, was discovered later on the bedroom floor, stomped flat. Josephine had gone first—the coroner reported—Harry followed several hours later. One can only surmise what took place during the several hours when Harry lay alone beside the beautiful, inert girl, trying to find a clue in her silent body to the Summum Amor that awaited him.

E.E. Cummings wrote an appropriate epitaph:

2 Boston

Dolls; found

with

Holes in each other

’s lullaby . . .

The yellowed clippings in newspaper morgues are as obscure today as the event they headlined:

SUICIDE PACT EVIDENT: CROSBY POEMS CLEW

A week later, the story was dropped, save for a discreet notice about Josephine’s interment in Boston.

Fifty years later, Polleen insisted that “in spite of Harry’s crazy ways—crazed by opium and intoxicated with champagne—I am certain that murder was not in his making. More likely, the unstable Bigelow woman called Harry’s bluff, then killed herself. Since there was no other way out of this grim situation, Harry took his own life.”

“All the dancing figures of a world in rainbow colors froze.” Caresse passed through all of the classic symptoms of bereavement: disbelief, denial, grief, and, finally, acceptance. Harry had gone—without leaving a clue, an explanation.

“My puzzle was to know what Harry expected of me? Should I follow him?” (Caresse would not read the police report; she never believed the destruction of the Sun Ring.) According to Kay Boyle, “. . . she was too uncertain of herself, too lost to be able to sort it all out. She existed—with her wonderfully human responses and inexhaustible energy—in the nightmare Harry had lived in, this terrible, terrible hell of his making.”

Caresse finally rationalized that no word at all from Harry was the only way to assure her that they were still and forever, Harry and Caresse. “To explain would have been to destroy. Only his supreme faith in me could have made this departure without words justified. With that as my life raft, I pulled myself back out of the depths into the light again.”

As the shadows lifted, she could see again into places that once had been so dazzlingly bright: “One Way Like the Path of a Star.” “Harry’s life, for me, burnt far too quickly, but one cannot say that it burnt in vain or that its Summum is unrelated to the law of cosmic progression. It had truth, it had beauty, and for me, it pointed a way that I now believe is the path of every life on earth.”

Archibald MacLeish—who sat the death watch with Harry, at Caresse’s request—wrote to Henrietta Crosby: “Those of us who knew Harry, knew that he was always . . . on the side of the angels and against the authority and numbness and complacency of life. . . . Recklessness and freedom of soul are sometimes dangerous . . . but without those fires lighted . . . the world would be a dark and hopeless place.”

Some 20 years later, Caresse sent an unusual essay to Charles Olson, the poet: “In Defense of Suicide, or Planned Death.” In it, she reconciled “the many years I was unable to reexamine my faith in voluntary death.”

Harry Crosby willed himself to die, and I, who was his wife . . . watching this will of his develop into consummation, have come to accept, in the years between, the value of the rightness of his act. During the seven years of an unbelievably perfect marriage [sic], both consciously and subconsciously, I accepted suicide as the Summum Amor to which I was ardently dedicated, and for which I promised I was waiting, though never fully convinced and never quite ready. [emphasis added]. It was to be the almost too beautiful rebellion . . . the answer of sex to spirit and spirit to the unknown—the full transition into love eternal . . . I was momentarily robbed. . . . But I know now that every man has the right to take his own life; “to die at the right time.”

Let each of us be given 70 years at birth—7, as a magical number, and 0, the full circle, as absolute. These years are given to us to mold, to strengthen, to beautify . . . to live each day as though it were our last . . . every hour of life, whether in study, work or rest will be significant . . . the final, or 70th anniversary of our birth will be a great day of rejoicing. . . .