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| Harry & Caresse Crosby |
A personal note by
Stuart Gilbert published in
transition (Paris, June 1930) 6 months after Harry Crosby's suicide. Gilbert was a literary scholar and translator - he assisted in the translation of
Ulysses into French and was also a friend and correspondent of Joyce. This affectionate memoir of Crosby was not (until now) available on the web.
“ Let us suppose, ” Montaigne has written, “ that a plank is fixed between the twin towers of Notre Dame Cathedral, quite wide enough for a man to walk along it; however great may be our philosophical wisdom, however staunch our courage, they will not embolden us to walk that plank as securely as we should, were it resting on the ground.”
The mere thought of that dizzy walk in air between the skyey towers, above Our Lady’s pinnacles, was enough, a later writer tells us, to make some of Montaigne’s readers blanch and sweat with fear. And yet how jauntily you and I parade that selfsame plank when it is laid out on the pavement of normal experience, little plainmen who rarely lift eyes above
the shop windows and studiously avert our gaze from the insistence of the sun!
Harry Crosby could stroll that dizzy, aerial plank as easily, as carefree,as though he were walking down a garden alley of his country home;not that, through defect of imagination, he ignored the danger, but because he knew and welcomed it. If he ever felt a qualm of vertigo, it was, I imagine when he tried to walk the plank laid out on terra firma, that safe and sensible promenade of whimpering “ hollow men". He feared
the terre a terre, the normal, as most of us fear celestial heights. Seeing Harry Crosby for the first time, one was at once impressed by the lithe, faunal elegance of his poise, but most of all, perhaps, by the curious remoteness of his gaze. In the Parisian salon where we first met he seemed out of place, unseeing, as though his eyes, by some trick of long-sightedness or a queer Roentgen quality of their own were watching some aerial pageant across the walls, out in the blue beyond. Such aloofness was almost disconcerting at first; "a difficult man," one thought, "and perhaps an arrogant man," and turned for solace to the Marie Laurencin
flowers, pink and blue petals of artificial light glimmering from the wall. But, when one spoke to him, there was nothing aloof, nothing of arrogance, in Harry Crosby. An expert in the conversational vol plané, he could descend without the least gesture of condescension from his eyrie and
talk lightheartedly of the latest recipe for cocktails and the dilative influence of limp Parisian ice on their gay Gordon hearts, or of his latest trouvaille in New York ‘slanguage’.
I never heard him speak ill, or harshly, of any individual -and that is
to say much ; his only enemies were Mrs Grundy and Mr Bowdler, legendary
types. He never refused a service to a friend or even an acquaintance,
and his generosity was unbounded, whether it was a case of paying the fine
of some reveller whom the local police had sequestrated or of saving a
poet on the rocks.
Clearest, perhaps, of my memories of Harry Crosby is an interminable
automobile drive from a country village where I was staying, to Saint-
Dizier, where transition is printed. Summer was ending and from vineyards
stripped of a record grape-harvest (the wine of 1929 will yet be talked of
when you and I are dead) wraiths of night mist were creeping to blur the
pale French roads.
Found in Transition 16-17 (a double issue that appeared in June 1929 in Paris) this modernist manifesto/ proclamation…some of the signers like Harry Crosby, Eugene Jolas (Transition's editor) Kay Boyle, Hart Crane are well known and some like Leigh Hoffman and Douglas Rigby are almost unknown.
