Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [83]
Harry’s friend Stuart Gilbert never heard him speak harshly or ill of anyone and never saw him refuse a service to anyone. “His only enemies were Mrs. Grundy and Mr. Bowdler.” He was less arrogant than curiously remote, distracted by his unflinching gaze towards the sun. As Gilbert said, Harry “feared the terre à terre, the normal, as most of us fear celestial heights.”
In 1927 Harry and Caresse, who avoided politics and current events and had long since banished all newspapers and magazines except the Nouvelle Revue Française and transition, started their own tiny publishing house, the Black Sun Press. Over the next two years they brought out editions of their own poetry as well as works by friends including Lawrence, James Joyce and Hart Crane.
Harry’s own poems were mildly surrealist, richly decadent and heavily indebted to Rimbaud and e.e. cummings, a fellow rebel against the Bostonian Establishment two years Harry’s senior. The short prose poem “White Slipper” makes reference to several of Harry’s fixations: airplanes; symbolic colors; the sun; Harry’s favorite word, “Yes”: “A white aeroplane whiter than the word Yes falls like a slipper from the sky. You come dancing over the silver thorns of the lawn and by holding up the corners of your rose-and-white skirt you catch the white slipper which I kick down to you from the sun.”
Aware of how privileged he was to be able to afford to pursue his passions, Harry enjoyed supporting struggling writers and artists. The entirely undomesticated Hart Crane wrote much of his epic poem “The Bridge” at the Crosbys’ house just outside Paris, on a typewriter Harry had bought him, in between manic episodes of drinking, making aggressive sexual overtures towards male house-guests and destroying furniture. Later, Crane was arrested for brawling in Paris. Fuming at the fact that the police hadn’t allowed the poet pen and paper in his cell, Harry rushed to pay his fine and vouch for Crane’s good character. What he was most impressed by was the fact that it had taken ten gendarmes to bring the raging Crane in.
Friends unlucky enough not to have modern plumbing were invited over to sink into steaming Floris’s Rose Geranium-scented baths followed by feasts of caviar, alligator pears and champagne. When their friend Kay Boyle, another impoverished and as yet undiscovered writer, found herself unhappily pregnant Caresse hunted down a doctor and Harry paid for the abortion. They left her their grass-green Voisin motor-car, complete with monkey-fur throw for her knees and their notoriously inebriated driver Gus, “an incurable collector of contraventions,” when they went on vacation.
In the spring of 1928 Eugene Jolas, editor of transition, received the following letter from Harry: “I have inherited a little money, and if you approve, I would like to send you $100 (strictly anonymous) for you to send to the poet who in your judgment has written the best poem in the first twelve numbers of transition . But for God’s sake, don’t make a prize out of it. Instead of going to some fathead organization, I should like this small amount to go to someone who will spend it on cocktails and books rather than on church sociables and lemonade. If you accept this, please forget it as quick as possible.”
Tiring of city life in 1928, Harry and Caresse rented from Armand de la Rochefoucauld a mill-house outside Paris where Jean-Jacques Rousseau had once lived. They called it Le Moulin de Soleil. A caravan of glamorous friends arrived and left to a background of repeating jazz records imported from Harlem—“orchestras hot and sweet”—and signed their names on the staircase wall: “poets and painters and pederasts and lesbians and divorcees and Christ knows who,” as Harry gleefully described them. They included Douglas Fairbanks, the exquisite Maharani of Cooch Behar, another girlfriend