Caresse Crosby Page 5

  Harry, who as usual had no idea how many francs were in the Morgan Bank account, promised to draw a check for the total balance if Armand would sell the Mill to them on the spot.

  “Right now?” Armand asked, incredulously.

  “Yes!” replied the impulsive Harry. Since he never carried a checkbook, he wrote an IOU on the nearest blank object at hand—a white cuff ripped from Caresse’s shirtwaist. (He once used a plate for the same purpose at Zelli’s, one of their favorite bars. The bemused waiter took it, without comment, to be cashed at the Place Vendôme the next morning.)

  Henceforth the Moulin du Soleil became the Crosbys’ country retreat. To Caresse, the three buildings built around a courtyard were reminiscent of the Adirondack camps she had loved as a child, save for the 19th-century stagecoach, with Gare du Nord painted on its side in large red letters, in the courtyard. A white palisade fence ran along the front of the quadrangle, where five donkeys cropped the grass and sunflowers stood guard. At the front gate, signposts like the spokes of a wheel pointed to the different paths through the forest. The locals claim that the forest of Senlis is so vast that a man can ride through it to Germany without ever leaving its shade. The most often-used path led to the old well, the Poteau du Perth, to which Harry ritualistically walked the half-mile, every morning and night. In spring, the sweet scent of lily-of-the-valley was almost overpowering.

  To the left of the main building, the old mill survives today, though the great water wheel has rotted away. Even in the 1920s, the stream that once activated the mill wheel was overgrown and silted up, but the water still flowed in a pleasant trickle. Polleen recalled that “our swimming pool was no larger than two postage stamps, and most unappetizing to swim in, because all sorts of marine life and slimy bugs infested the brown, murky water.”

  The millstones, like mantic rings, rested on the granary floor. The old washroom and cellars were turned into a vast kitchen, adjoining which was the bedroom of the local gravedigger and his wife, Monsieur and Madame Henri, whom Harry, with his lugubrious wit, hired as loyal retainers. The Henris’ duties were endless: to look after a dozen disintegrating rooms, a garden, five donkeys, two dogs, a parrot, a cheetah, 15 pigeons—and the usual weekend complement of ten or more guests. No wonder that M. Henri walked three miles to the village every day for his measure of cognac.

  The center building—the former stable—became the dining room. Its rafters, manger, and hay boxes were left intact under a Roman villa-type roof. The trestle-table rested on uneven cobblestones, and Polleen remembered forever shoving pieces of crusty French bread under its legs to keep the table from wobbling. Inside the entrance, under the staircase, visitors were asked to sign their names with colored paints on the whitewashed wall, which served as an impromptu guest book. (D.H. Lawrence scribbled a Phoenix next to Salvador Dali’s interlocked “I’s.)

  On the first floor were the master bedroom, a guest room, and the only bathroom, installed by the Crosbys; such amenities were unknown at that time in rural France. Under the arched roof of the attic was another small room where the bats made their home, “hanging upside-down over whoever slept there. On crowded weekends, that was usually me,” Polleen recalled. “I had to leave the window open wide at night, otherwise the bats couldn’t get back out. They would swirl ’round the room with high-pitched screeches, swooping over my head and banging into the window panes!”

  This tiny room opened onto a small terrace where Harry communicated with the Sun God Ra. A slab of dove-grey marble grave marker—inscribed with the Harry/Caresse cross, their dates of birth, and their (projected) date of death—was placed atop the tower where the sun struck first.

  Harry had selected the date—October 31, 1942—when the earth would be closest to the sun at the perihelion. By age 44, Harry predicted he would have had enough; he didn’t like the idea of lingering on, after the party was over. He was obsessed “to die at the right time,” quoting Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra.”

  •

  Le beau monde and les boulevardiers soon discovered the Mill, and poets and artists were invited for longer stays to complete their creative work. At one time, the then-unknown poet Hart Crane was installed in the tower with a bottle of Cutty Sark and a ream of paper, condemned to work on his monumental opus, The Bridge. According to Harry’s diary: “Hart Crane here, and much drinking red wine; he reads aloud from Tamberlaine, and is at work on his long poem. . . .” At that time Crane was young and cocky, “stocky and bristly, rather like a young porcupine,” Caresse described him. “He had gusto and a Rabelaisian laugh” and was a welcome guest at the weekend parties. He stayed on at the Mill for three weeks, faithfully attended by Monsieur and Madame Henri.

  In Polleen’s childhood memoirs, she recalled: “M. Henri liked to eat snails, collected in profusion from the garden plot. . . . One evening, when the escargots were being prepared for dinner, M. Henri bellowed from the floor below, ‘Mais il est fou . . . il est fou!!’ [He is crazy!] Crane had invaded the kitchen and stamped out the snails, presuming they were the larvae of butterflies!

  Hart was inspired by the “solitude of the place,” and for the first time in many months, worked consistently until he delivered a draft of the “Hatteras” section to the Black Sun Press. Harry prophetically predicted its success:

  Hart, what thunder and fire for breakfast! By Christ, when you read something like that, all the dust and artificiality and bric-à-brac are swept magnificently aside. . . . Someday, when we are all dead, they will be screaming and cutting each other’s throats for the privilege of having it. . . . I am no critic, but I know gold when I see it!

  Later, in the season of daffodils, Frieda and D.H. Lawrence were guests. The previous winter, on the Crosby’s trip to Egypt with Harry’s mother, Harry had discovered a first edition of The Plumed Serpent in a Cairo bookstore. He avidly read it, sitting cross-legged on the deck, as the boat plied slowly up the Nile. He proclaimed it the most inspiring novel since E.E. Cummings’s great work about the war, The Enormous Room. Quoting: “I without the Sun that is back of the Sun am nothing,” he rushed off an enthusiastic letter to Lawrence in care of his London publisher, describing the impact of the strong Egyptian rays on his psyche and proclaiming his faith in the Sun God, Ra. He hoped that Lawrence might have a story on the same theme for a Black Sun Press Limited Edition, and promised in payment $20 gold pieces, “the eagle and the sun.” Lawrence and his wife Frieda (daughter of the German flying ace Baron von Richthofen) were invited to bask in the sun at Le Moulin du Soleil.

  Also in Cairo that winter—on Leap Year day, February 29—Caresse discovered the Sun Ring that was to become Harry’s wedding band, “the eternal circle, the letter ‘O’” to endure forever. (She was told it had been stolen from King Tutankhamen’s tomb.)

  Soon after the Crosbys arrived back in Paris, they received a large brown envelope postmarked Florence, enclosing a manuscript of the short novel, Sun. Lawrence noted in the attached letter that he hoped it would be printed as written, unexpurgated. Lescaret immediately began setting the type, to be printed on fine Holland van Gelder paper, with the title emblazoned on a cover of “sunburnt red.”

  The Crosbys were quite accustomed to unannounced guests on their doorstep, so it was no surprise when a curly-haired painter, Bill Sykes—a friend of Ted Weeks, Harry’s old comrade from the Ambulance Corps—arrived at the rue de Lille. Sykes limped up the long flight of stairs, and took off his low tan shoes in front of the roaring fire. Out fell the promised “golden eagles,” smuggled from the States following Harry’s urgent request.

  Harry carefully wrapped and placed the coins in an empty Cartier box, as an afterthought adding another treasure from his ample stock. Then he rushed off to the Gare de l’Est to put them aboard the Rome Express. The first “honest man” he saw, leaning from the First Class window; was a starchy, Chesterfield-coated Englishman, who promised to deliver the package to Lawrence. (Har
ry’s instincts were sound. He had unknowingly entrusted his treasure to the Duke of Argyll.)

  Lawrence replied warmly:

  My wife went to Florence yesterday and brought back the Queen of Naples’ snuff box and the pieces of gold, to my utter amazement. I’m sure you’re not Croesus to that extent, and . . . what right have I to receive these things? . . . How beautiful the gold is! Such a pity it ever became currency. One should love it for its yellow life, answering the sun . . . I feel almost wicked with it! For the first time I know what embarras de richesse means . . .

  Soon thereafter the Lawrences turned up at the Mill. Harry and Lawrence disagreed on almost everything at their first meeting, except their mutual love of the sun. Harry wrote: “He is direct, I am indirect; I am a visionary, I like to soar; he is all engrossed in the body and the complexities of psychology.” For his part, Lawrence perceptively saw in Harry “a glimpse of chaos not reduced to order . . . but chaos alive.”

  Caresse took Lawrence for a turn in a donkey cart, with a shawl tucked over his knees, his collar turned up and soft hat pulled over his ears. He liked to sit for hours on the sun terrace using the gravestone as a backrest, hoping to cure an ominous, hacking cough. He reflected later that “Harry was really so well, physically . . . and my nerves are healthy, but my chest lets me down . . . So there we are, Life and Death in all of us. . . .”

  Caresse described Frieda as “upholstered, petulant, and full of pride.” She played the gramophone all evening, which put Lawrence’s nerves on edge until—in a fit of exasperation—he smashed record after record over her head. (Some years after D.H. and Harry both were gone, Frieda wrote to Caresse: “It’s all so vivid to me, that weekend. They were both such vivid creatures, Lorenzo and Harry. I see you in the sailor suit and the [sun] bracelet Harry gave you.”)

  Almost every weekend at the Mill was festive, “an unreal atmosphere,” as Polleen described it. “We had no electricity and no telephone, so attempts were made to communicate with Paris by carrier pigeon.” Soon, the news flew around when there was to be a party at the Moulin du Soleil. Harry recorded a typical weekend—and what Hart Crane called “the new atrocities”—in his diary:

  Mobs for luncheon—poets and painters and pederasts and lesbians and divorcées and Christ knows who and there was a great signing of names on the wall at the foot of the stairs and a firing off of the cannon and bottle after bottle of red wine and Kay Boyle made fun of Hart Crane and he was angry and flung The American Caravan into the fire because it contained a story of Kay Boyle’s (he forgot it had a poem of his in it) and there was a tempest of drinking and polo harra burra on the donkeys, and an uproar and confusion so that it was difficult to do my work. . . .

  A small cannon, mounted near the front gate, was fired in lieu of a starter gun, as a party of very reluctant guests were forced to mount the frisky beasts and race down the homemade track.

  Champagne flowed more abundantly than water at the Mill, and the weekend nights usually ended in orgies (perhaps not enchantée in the eyes of young Polleen):

  The top floor of the Mill was one large room (once the hayloft) with a huge fireplace at the far end, and two sofa beds on either side; zebra and bear skins covered the floor. There were candelabra and oil lamps, but the wood fire gave out most of the light. When night fell, the guests would retire to this hayloft, and out came the roulette wheel, the horse-racing games. The dice rattled, the wheel spun, and great bottles of champagne were uncorked. Couples intertwined on sofas beside the fireplace . . . helped along by opium, a large jar of which was kept in my toy box. This brown sticky stuff with a funny smell, I was told on no account to touch!

  Of the rich tradition of drug lore in literature, Harry had sampled a large portion, from De Quincey’s Confessions to Cocteau and Rimbaud. Opium was his drug of choice, a quick trip to Nirvana, and smoking it in his pipe became “almost a religious act, almost a prayer.” Caresse tells us that only once did she accompany Harry in the ritual of the pipe, which they observed “in a most sybaritic manner.”

  Stories circulated among the bourgeois neighbors about the scandalous orgies at the Mill, “but I presumed it to be a fairly ‘normal’ way of life, if one belonged to the artistic and smart sets of those times,” Polleen observed. Salvador Dali, also a frequent visitor, described the Mill’s allure: “A mixture of Surrealists and society people came there, because they sensed that in the Moulin, things were happening”—that’s where the action was.

  Caresse collected titles, and even royalty appeared on the cobblestoned doorstep. GEORGE (of England) added his name to the whitewashed entrance wall; the Prince joined a stagecoach race from Mill to Chateau (not without crashing into a tree), accompanied by a great ringing of bells and firing of cannon. America’s royalty, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, entertained the houseguests on a glorious October afternoon: Mary read palms and told fortunes, while Fairbanks, in full costume (with white spats), swung on a rope from hayloft to courtyard.

  Somewhere, sometime, the music had to stop. The Golden Years, the passionate years, ended in ’29. For many, they ended with the Great Depression. For the Crosbys (as Harry predicted), they ended with a .25 caliber, pearl-handled Belgian revolver.

  Chapter IV

  LIT DE MORT

  “To die at the right time.”

  —Harry

  On September 9, 1929, Harry’s diary noted: “. . . married seven years, and various rites performed: a firing off of the cannon and prayers into the sun from the top of the tower. In the afternoon, I flew—Aviator, Poet, Lover—all for the Cramoisy Queen.” Harry’s latest passion was learning to fly. Each day, he went out to the field at Villecoublay, and by September, he was flying twice a day with his instructor, the French ace Detré.

  When D.H. Lawrence heard the news about Harry’s new hobby, he wrote to Caresse: “An aeroplane? Is Harry really tired of life?” The daily commentary in Harry’s diary noted: “The most simple Sun-death is from an aeroplane over a forest . . . down, down, BANG! The body is dead—up, up BANG!!” (In the margin, he repeated the date [31/10/42] on the Moulin tombstone.) In Harry’s view; the accelerated intensity of aerial acrobatics was a beautiful poem.

  In the fall of 1929, the world economy was obviously sluggish. A consortium of bankers led by Harry’s Uncle Jack Morgan steadied the Market temporarily, then discreetly retired from the field when the Market hit bottom on November 13.

  In Paris, large crowds gathered outside the Bourse. The Paris Herald switchboard was swamped with calls from Americans in Paris trying to keep informed; at Morgan et Cie., businessmen gathered for reassurance, but when word filtered through, it was far worse than expected. Many of the prosperous expatriates queued up at the Embassy for emergency funds to return home. The cafés of Montparnasse emptied, and letters addressed to the patrons’ mail rack at the Dôme piled up, uncollected.

  Caresse and Harry heard immediately from Stephen Crosby, but the news failed to inhibit their pursuit of pleasure. They were booked to sail on the Mauretania November 16—not to attend to family business reverses, but to see the annual Harvard-Yale football game. Harry never cared much about football, and Caresse recognized better than anyone that her husband would never rush home to “Drearytown” only to attend the game. One of the “special girls,” the Comtesse de Jumilhac (née Constance Crowninshield), was sailing with them on the Mauretania, and while Harry was exulting in the menage-à-trois on the boat, another Princess cabled “Impatient!”

  En route, Harry was also engrossed in making a holograph copy of his latest volume of poetry, Sleeping Together, dedicated to Caresse. The ship rolled unmercifully, but Harry accomplished the task without a blot and presented it to her before they left the ship. Her favorite poem was “In Search of the Young Wizard”:

  I have invited our little seamstress to take her thread and needle and sew our two mouths together. I have asked the village blacksmith to forge gol
den chains to tie our ankles together. I have gathered all the gay ribbons in the world to wind around and around our two waists. . . . I have persuaded (not without bribery) the world’s most famous Eskimo sealing-wax maker to perform the delicate operation of sealing us together so that I am warm in your depths, but though we hunt for him all night and though we hear various reports of his existence we can never find the young wizard who is able to graft the soul of a girl to the soul of her lover so that not even the sharp scissors of the Fates can sever them apart.

  Prophetically, the Fates were waiting in the wings to do their dirty business within the fortnight.

  The final day in Boston, there was a sortie to the game with Harry’s mother and father. It was bitterly cold, and Harry had a flask in his pocket that his friends in the Ambulance Corps, “The Hounds”, had given him. He and Steve Crosby passed it back and forth. Caresse ominously noted that there was “one small white face in the crowd, turned towards us, far off like an impervious ticking clock.”

  After the game, Caresse rushed back to New York alone and checked into Room 2707 at the Savoy Plaza. “You will adore this room,” she wrote to Harry in Boston. “Lying in bed, I can watch the tugs nosing up the East River and the most amazing phallic skyscraper [the Fuller Tower], very straight and proud. I adore you, my darling, darling! I sleep with ‘Sleeping Together,’ but I want quickly to sleep together with you.” She was playing according to the rules of their game, but she instinctively knew that Harry was sleeping together—with someone else.