Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [84]
The Moulin was a fantasy world, as full of shadows as it was of the sun, and it did not enchant every visitor. The American writer Robert McAlmon spent the last night of 1928 there with the Crosbys and various other revelers and found it “too damned depressing . . . so depressing I can’t even get drunk. They’re wraiths, all of them. They aren’t people. God knows what they’ve done with their realities.” He should have known that reality was not something in which Harry dealt.
Even Caresse had moments of misgiving although she recognized the impossibility of questioning any aspect of her life with Harry. As he desired, she had molded herself to him and there could be no separation save a violent one. More and more they argued, about his lovers and hers, always making up but with the arguments increasingly bitter. “I knew it would be treason ever to wish for a simpler love,” she admitted.
Harry himself was living at an unsustainable peak of rapt intensity. As Kay Boyle said, when Harry was happy “every atom of him [was] radiant—for I’ve never known anyone who could shine with it as he does so absolutely.” In July 1929 he cabled his father: “PLEASE SELL TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS WORTH OF STOCK. WE HAVE DECIDED TO LEAD A MAD AND EXTRAVAGANT LIFE”—as if his life up until that point had been staid and dull. He was pursuing oblivion as ardently as he could: soaking up the sun as if it would absorb him, learning to fly stunts in an airplane, drinking and taking opium and making love with even more than his usual feverishness. “How fast the year has gone the fastest I can remember like a flash of lightning not one vibration of a clock since a year ago and perhaps now I can destroy time,” he wrote.
He was hurtling towards his longed-for destiny. “For the Seekers after Fire and the Seers and the Prophets and the Worshippers of the Sun, life ends not with a whimper [as T. S. Eliot suggested in ‘The Hollow Men’], but with a Bang—a violent explosion mechanically perfect,” he wrote. “While we, having set fire to the powderhouse of our souls, explode (suns within suns and cataracts of gold) into the frenzied fury of the Sun, into the madness of the Sun into the hot gold arms and hot gold eyes of the Goddess of the Sun!”
Harry’s friends indulged his manic eccentricities with varying degrees of tolerance and amusement. Ernest Hemingway sent him a clipping from the New York Times describing a new fad: sun-worship. “The sun is definitely de rigueur…The smartest girls come into town looking like figures molded in old Cordovan leather . . . This new version of an old cult has its fanatics, its would-be martyrs, its metaphysicians who would make philosophic systems out of personal desires.” Others took Harry’s plans for death more seriously. One said that by 1929 he could no longer bear to shake Harry’s hand—his friend had already become a corpse.
Harry had long been fascinated by suicides, drawing up a list of those he admired, including Sappho, Seneca, Jesus (Harry thought him self-martyred) and Modigliani, in a prose poem from 1929 entitled “Sun Death.” For him, choosing the moment one died was a privilege reserved for the strongest, the bravest, those who recognized “the point of finality, irrevocable as the sun,” when the spirit and the body were united in their desire “to be reborn, in order to become what you wish to become, tree or flower or star or sun, or even dust and nothingness.” He was not afraid to die because he believed so strongly in a world to come.
In his earliest letters to Caresse, Harry had spoken of the joy of lovers dying together. Three years after they married he persuaded her to set a date for their joint deaths, writing out a contract which they both