Death's Stunt Man

By John Skow

BLACK SUN by GEOFFREY WOLFF 367 pages. Random House. $12.95.

Harry Crosby, a wealthy Bostonian of good family and, from his relatives' point of view, regrettable literary pretensions, painted his toenails red one December afternoon in 1929 in a Manhattan apartment he had borrowed from an artist friend. He lounged in bed a while, swigging Scotch companionably with his mistress, Josephine Rotch Bigelow, a beautiful young married woman from another prominent Back Bay clan. Then, apparently with her enthusiastic approval, and in the best of moods, he killed her with a pistol, and a couple of hours later shot himself. The soles of his feet were found to be tattooed with crosses and a sun symbol.

The tabloids had an explanation: Crosby wrote poetry. Boston seemed to blame temporary insanity, dating the onset from 1922, when he quit his job with the Morgan bank in Paris, took up the literary life there and renamed his wife, Polly Peabody, "Caresse." His writer friends--he knew Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, Kay Boyle--were not surprised by the toenail paint or the tattoos. Harry did that sort of thing. What did raise an eyebrow or two, briefly, was the suicide. It seemed that Harry meant what he had said.

As Geoffrey Wolff reports in this thoughtful and very readable biography, Crosby, who was 31, had been promising for years to commit suicide. He spoke and wrote about death in the dreamy, love-struck manner of a man talking about the sloop he is going to buy when he finishes putting his kids through college. To honor death, he wore a black carnation in his buttonhole. He saw suicide as a triumphant adventure, as a poet's most splendid poem, as a giggle, as a glorious stunt and especially as an explosive union with the godhead of the sun.

Crosby worshiped the sun seriously. He chanted hymns to Ra (though he also read Bible verses and apparently maintained some belief in a conventional Christian afterlife). He had talked Caresse into pledging to commit double suicide with him. They had their union with the sun all worked out. On Oct. 31, 1942, when the earth was to be at its nearest to the sun in several decades, they were going to jump out of an airplane together. Then their bodies were to be cremated, taken for a second airplane ride and scattered over a forest. But Harry talked seductively about death to many women. They thought he was being literary. With Josephine Rotch Bigelow, he found someone as reckless and wasteful as himself.

Mummified Hands. Crosby was a minor figure in the literary '20s, and if he had not written his own gaudy death scene he would be disremembered now as a spoiled rich boy who gave good parties and wrote bad poetry. He worked very hard at literature, after he discovered it, and raised the level of his poems from wretched to mediocre. But he had no gift for language, and he was trapped in the modish but sterile conviction that if he clothed his mind in the rags of madness, he would become a seer.

What he became was an engaging fool, love's prankster and death's stunt man. He roistered naked at parties, slept four in a bed with Caresse and all comers, amused her children from a previous marriage by dropping balloons full of beer from a hotel window. At Luxor, he bought three mummified hands with rings on their fingers from a beggar who must have known Crosby was coming. He loved his mother, but raged at proper Boston, making sure that Boston knew about all of his affronts.

Crosby had served with great courage driving ambulances during World War I, as had Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passes and E.E. Cummings. So had Malcolm Cowley, who in Exile 's Return wrote of Harry's outrageous life and death as the exemplar of the Lost Generation. With the Ambulance Corps, Cowley reasoned, Crosby saw death at first hand, but as a spectator. The alienation that followed showed itself in his move to Paris, his flouting of convention, his devotion to art, and in what Cowley saw as his final demoralization. Biographer Wolff takes mild issue with this, objecting that Crosby was not demoralized when he killed himself, and that since he was unique, he was not a proper symbol of anything.

What then is the point of inflating an interesting footnote to the dimensions of a sizable book? The answer, certainly, is gossip. Writers can be silly about money, sex and success. But unlike bankers and dentists, who may be equally foolish, writers put it all down in their novels and memoirs. No lessons are to be drawn from Crosby's trivial and exotic life. Wolff does not pretend other wise. His book is a pure, self-indulgent, historical amusement.

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