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By Root 700 0

duc de Doudeauville, Armand de Rochefoucauld, later their land-lord, whom she described as “short, sandy-haired, full of love and the devil.” Harry also insisted that Caresse occasionally join him in bouts of mutual promiscuity about which, according to a friend in whom she confided, she was loyally uncomplaining but less than enthusiastic. They and two other couples would drive to the Bois de Boulogne at night, draw their cars up in a circle with the headlights on (bizarrely recalling the Ku Klux Klan’s head-lit initiation ceremonies) and swap partners. On hashish-fueled trips to North Africa and the Middle East they paid young girls to dance for them, and sometimes took them to bed. “O God when shall we ever cast off the chains of New England,” Harry wrote after one such episode.

Drugs were another important part of Harry’s rejection of convention. Their circle in Paris was well acquainted with cocaine. Harry’s diary entries record days at Longchamp races accompanied by “much sniffing [cocaine] and taking of aspirin tablets” and Montmartre nights of “oysters and caviare, champagne and whiskey, cocaine and dancing.”

Opium, with its elaborate rituals, its literary heritage and its dreamily hallucinogenic qualities, was Harry’s favorite drug. He first tried it in 1924 and quickly became a regular user. In Morocco he and Caresse bought “four jars of the best brand of Opium” and when they got back to Paris stored them in little Polly’s toy chest. “And the bubbling sound of another pipe and another and another and the round contour of a breast and the touch of delicate fingers delicately gently snow upon snow and the metamorphose into oblivion beyond the beyond,” Harry wrote. “And all day across my soul red icebergs have been drifting like tombs across the sun.”

But for much of the 1920s the most important thing in either Harry or Caresse’s lives, more than the fleeting attractions of narcotics or lovers, was each other and their shared relish for the immoderate, unorthodox life they had chosen. Their black whippet, Narcisse Noir, had gold-painted claws and a gold collar; they named his pearl-pink mate Clytoris. They went on vacation stopping only in places with names of one syllable. To Harry, one friend said, getting lost was “the best hors d’oeuvre for the belated dinner, still far away, the spice of adventure. Any fool can find his way, a poet alone knows how to lose it.”

One spring they walked and hitch-hiked across Europe to Florence. Harry, lithe and elegant as a faun, carried a pack of books and wore his usual dark blue suit, patent pumps and soft shirt, always bareheaded at a time when no gentleman went hatless; Caresse traveled in a tweed suit and lisle stockings. They arrived dusty and ragged at the Grand Hotel on a straw-covered cart carrying Chianti. Thankfully the hotel was expecting them. Their Hermès luggage and a telegram from the Morgan bank with their reservation had arrived just before they did. Within minutes they were being served martinis in an immense marble bathtub.

Harry sought meaning in literary as well as in sensual debauchery, in the writers and works which helped form his own decadent, mystical views: Baudelaire, The Picture of Dorian Grey, Proust and especially Rimbaud. He loved books, words, certain colors, names, list-making. From 1922 he kept a diary, a mesmerizing portrait of his life but at the same time strangely detached and self-absorbed. It was dedicated to his obsessions—ritual, hedonism, gambling for high stakes, the sun and sunbathing, extravagance—and framed an increasingly complex personal philosophy that revolved around sun-worship and an impulsion towards the final, longed-for obliteration into the sun—death, the ultimate escape from reality.

“Life is pathetic, futile save for the development of the soul; memories, passionate memories are the utmost gold; poetry is religion (for me),” Harry wrote in an effort to define his own “Castle of Beauty.” Except for those closest to him, people were almost irrelevant beside his intense interior life. He was utterly elitist and misanthropic