Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [80]
Like so many young men of his generation, he had spent the last year of the war driving ambulances in northern France. It was a bloody initiation into adulthood for a protected boy. By the time he arrived back in Boston in the spring of 1919 Harry had watched two of his closest friends die in action, as well as numerous others. Narrowly evading death himself had left him convinced that he had been saved by his already idiosyncratic faith in God.
Returning home, Harry reluctantly got back on to the time-honored treadmill where he had left off. Harvard was the accepted next step after prep school, and to please his parents Harry took a two-year wartime degree, honoris causa—the kind of diploma Jay Gatsby claimed to have received from “Oggsford.” In 1921 he moved to New York to start work at the Morgan bank, but the seeds of his flight had already been sown.
Two years earlier, soon after his return to Boston, Harry had fallen in love with Polly Peabody, a married woman seven years his senior. For both it was love at first sight, the kind of passion that sweeps away every consideration before it. Polly was struck at their first meeting by the vividness of Harry’s personality and his combination of wisdom and naïveté: “He seemed to be more expression and mood than man…he was taut as a tangent, his eyes blazed like mica, his mouth was large and it quivered ever so slightly when he was nervous, and his hands were like a musician’s hands, sensitive, compelling.”
Separated from Polly while she tried to repair her marriage—the scandal of a divorce was something neither the Crosbys nor Polly’s family relished—Harry barely made the effort to turn up to the office each morning. He drank so much that his mother offered him $100 to give up for the month of January 1922; the terse entry in his diary on 7 February reads, “Wasn’t worth it.” Finally he handed in his notice. Still hoping to save Harry from a rash match, his mother arranged a job for him in Paris. Harry, delighted to be set free, celebrated by drinking “to Excess” and crashing a friend’s new car “slap-bang into an iron fence.” This was the life he chose: intensity, exile, intemperance, destruction. As Polly said, “any ‘middle’ whatsoever was anathema to Harry.”
Polly—to whom Harry soon gave the invented name, Caresse—came to Paris to marry him later that year. She had found it impossible to return to her old life without him. “Once one has known rapture,” she wrote, “security is not enough.”
Their adopted city, devastated by the war, was battered but still beautiful. With almost an entire generation dead, arriving Americans remarked on how few young people they saw on the streets. But the Parisians, who had survived more than a century of revolutions and two German invasions, still knew how to live. Other refugees gathered in Paris—émigré Russians, rich and debauched Indian princes, discontented, pleasure-seeking English aristocrats, all belonging to crumbling orders of one type or another—and it was into this world of “sparkling cynicism” that Harry and Caresse flung themselves.
In contrast to Europe, America represented everything that was sordid and ugly: industrialized and “pustulant,” stinking of “bananas and cocacola and ice cream.” Harry was, he wrote elsewhere after lunch with two small-minded Americans, “Glad I am déraciné.” As Caresse put it, they were “escapists”: “I became a rebel the moment I married Harry.”
Caresse had two small children by her first marriage, six-year-old Billy and five-year-old Polleen, or Polly. Harry, who hated reality imposing on his life of fantasy and self-indulgence,