Customer Reviews

Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby (New York Review Books Classics)

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Wolff wrote this book in reaction to Malcolm Cowley's portrait of Crosby in Exile's Return. Unlike Cowley, Wolff did not find Crosby to be the representative figure for the Lost Generation. He finds Crosby's obsessions with suicide to predate his war service and his interest in the mystic to be Crosby's alone. The book is probably the best possible portrait of a failed poet and wealthy mystic, who happens to have a deathwish, as could possibly be written. So the book is more a study in human pathology than a sociological study of a generation. It's worth reading all the same.

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.

Geoffrey Wolff's famous 1976 biography of Harry Crosby--a minor but spellbinding figure of the so-called Lost Generation--was an ideal book for the NYRB Press to revive and reissue. As a literary figure Crosby was certainly exceptionally minor--he was a dreadful and derivative poet, and his reputedly beautiful editions published by his Black Sun Press are hard to reproduce here (and are indeed not). But his life was as fascinating a tale of early 20th-century wealthy decadence as you could wish. The best part opf the narratiove are the earlier sections, explaining how Harry rebelled against his Proper Bostonian past to pursue a live of drugs, drink, sex and lavish spending in Paris between the wars. The details of what harry did once he threw caution adside and did whatever he felt like tend to become monotonous, as stories of decadence often do (everything blurs together). But Wolff has sensitively framed his narrative, and makes a very persuasive case for why Harry was NOT typical of his generation that actuially makes an intriguing point about the kinds of narratives biographers map onto their subjects' lives. And if Wolff's prose is occasionally somewhat empurpled, it could not be more mete to its subject's temperament.

Vignettes about Harry Crosby may be found in Malcom Cowley's, "Exiles Return"; "Absinthe: History in a Bottle", by Barnaby Conrad; "Published in Paris," by Hugh Ford; and a couple poems in "The Penguin Book of Surrealist Poetry". You may come across Harry Crosby in biographies of D.H. Lawerence, Hart Crane, or James Joyce, and definitely in his wife, Caresse Crosby's "The Passionate Years". All in all, Geoffrey Wolff's biography is a welcome find. I came across an old and forgotten copy of "Black Sun" for $1 amidst thousands of used books at a San Francisco library sale in the "pre-Amazon.com" days when I was blindly searching for more information about Crosby who fascinated me. It was pure luck; or destiny! I had recently read his diary, "Shadows of the Sun" (Black Sparrow Press, 1977) which is the work he is most known for, and is one of the most fascinating & captivating diaries I've ever read. Some reviewers have commented on the "mediocre quality" of Crosby's poems, but read within the context of "Shadows of the Sun" and/or "Black Sun" they melt into perfect harmony with his life. "Black Sun" is the ideal supplement to "Shadows of the Sun", adding unbiased biographical details about Harry, the 1920's, and the wonderful influence Harry and Caresse had upon those they befriended. Wolff did an excellent job researching old letters from various archives, as well as utilizing his orignal diaries as source material - Harry kept assiduous details of his life for posterity's sake.

I'm glad to see that "Black Sun" has been reprinted in this new 2003 paperback, and it contains an afterword by Wolff discussing how and why he chose to write about Crosby. He states that he wouldn't have written about Crosby had he not committed suicide. This is interesting, but not shocking, as that is what pulls everyone into Crosby's story in the first place - he seemed to be on top of the world right up until his tragic end. Yet, none of it was surprising to anyone who knew him. He and his recent mistress, Josephine shot themselves in a suicide pact. The mystery is in the details of how it all exactly transpired, and my personal opinion is that they were drunk, he talked about suicide, she took him seriously, stomped on his wedding ring, took his gun and shot herself first, beating him to the punch, and so leaving him with no escape (he had originally intended to die with Caresse at a predetermined date in the 1940's). The standard theory is that "he shot her" first (she, probably willingly, but unknown), and then, a couple hours later, himself. Indeed, he had discussed death frequently, and it was his own gun that he brought into the New York hotel room that final night in December, 1929. Whatever the actuality of the two suicides, the most fascinating thing about Harry to me (and perhaps to Wolff) is that his death and life were intertwined into a sparkling surrealist poem idealized, and carried out. Harry Crosby was and is a very rare figure in American literature, and gladly, due in great part to Geoffrey Wolff, will continue to remain so. One may take what they will from his brief life, but more than simply some lost peripheral figure from the "bohemian 1920's", Harry was religously devoted to love, truth, poesy, and art. He committed himself to living out his aethetic ideals to the fullest extent possible, making his and Caresse's life together an inspiring firestorm of intense passion.

Carpe Diem.

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.

Perhaps were I around in the 1920's, I would have come under Harry Crosby's spell and considered him an amazing man. Reading this, however, brings one to opposite conclusions. If anything, he comes across as spoiled, petulant, untalented, and psychotic. I fear that this may sway many reviewers' opinion of the book, but I separate biography from subject here and credit Wolff with writing a thorough and satisfying life. If you have any interest in Paris in the 1920's, the Lost Generation, and cameos by a whole raft of interesting players (Archibald MacLeish, Ernest Hemingway, Kay Boyle, etc.), this is worth a go. One thing's for sure: it not only ends, but begins, with a bang.

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.

Geoffrey Wolff is among the most underappreciated novelists writing in English. His biography of his father The Duke of Deception is enthralling. This early biography is not quite up to these standards, is too opiniated, and could used some editing. Nonetheless it shows his flair. It is also full of references to Paris and the famous expatriates of the 20s. Be careful to get a copy without a crumpled back page.

1920's biography of decadence and hedonism. Quite a disturbing read but well worth it.

Are there no more editors? This book is repetitive, much too long, and the organization is confusing. I am never convinced Harry Crosby is worth the time to read his story. As I read, I kept thinking, "Why bother?" Harry's life might be interesting as an example of supreme self-indulgence and self-absorption, but his writing (as quoted) is atrocious! Tighten it up, tell me more about Black Sun Press and some good writers, and less about Harry's decadence-unless you can make it more interesting than this!