A fascinating topic from the pen of a superlative nonfiction stylist; highly recommended if you're interested in a representative figure of the expatriate community in 1920s Paris.

This book had about 100 interesting pages in it. Unfortunately, flipping through and finding them was a challenge. It took me an unbelievable amount of time to finish, because it literally put me to sleep more times than I can count. Also, Harry Crosby was a total dirtbag, privileged misogynist asshole. ( )

“If there was one thing Harry learned to love more than the sacred, it was the sacred in ruins.”

I’m not usually one for biographies. They’ve got to be about someone who did something on such a grand scale or led such a grand life or exemplified a life so perfectly lived for me to bother with slogging through the whos and hows and wherefores of that mortal arc. You know, like Thomas Becket or Yukio Mishima or Lawrence of Arabia or Muhammad butterfly-dazzling Beelzebub-stinging Ali. So why Harry Crosby? This same question was asked of the biographer and nearly thirty years later he answered this in an afterword to the 2003 edition: “He was a phenomenon, not exemplary. Cancer might be regarded as exemplary, while a lightning strike is phenomenal. Crosby was like a lightning strike, and he interested me.” Which echoes an earlier sentiment: “It’s interesting—things that are interesting interest me.” Well, then . . . it’s hard to argue with that.

Harry Crosby was interesting, but more in that push/pull kind of way that only a great villain in fiction can evoke. Or that villain in reality? And was Crosby a villain? He was a magnet for the Lost Generation, a WW1 ambulance driver, awarded the Croix de guerre, instrumental in creating the Black Sun Press which published works by Hemingway and Lawrence and Eliot and Pound and Joyce (!) . . . breathe . . . breathe . . . breathe. And this magnificent passage about J.J the purblind poetic pirate himself had me enamored:

“When the final revisions had been made, and Roger Lescaret was setting the book in type, he discovered to his horror that the last page contained only two lines, a printer’s botch. He came to Caresse and asked whether Joyce might be prevailed upon to add eight or so lines, and she laughed in outrage, explaining that the greatest literary master of his age did not add words to fill to space like some hack newspaper reporter, and there was nothing to be done. Lescaret sadly pedaled away on his bike, but next day Caresse found him buoyant; eight lines had been found. Caresse asked him indignantly 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 they had been found, and Lescaret confessed that he had himself gone to Joyce and begged for them, and that Joyce, without a second thought, had added them.”

Fucking Joyce. I knew I loved that dude.

Harry Crosby, to balance the scales, was also a rampant philanderer, a mediocre poet, a spendthrift, moralized pedophilia, worshipped the sun while masturbating, gambled thousands on whims and wrote home to his wealthy parents for more. So, kind of a dick; not the kind of guy I’d usually read a biography about. Not so much grand as grandly disastrous and looking grand while doing it. I don’t know, who am I to say? I don’t even think Geoffrey Wolff liked him that much. More of a long-distance admiration, surely—why else the bio? Yet, still, villains and their villainy and the brightly patterned linings to their butterfly wings. Float like a . . . sting like a . . . Sonny Liston listening to the sunny black side of the canvas.

Someone should write a biography of Mr. Wolff. 𝘚𝘵𝘦𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘓𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘳 𝘒𝘯𝘰𝘸𝘯 maybe? I’d read it. Maybe I’d be bored with his life because, quite frankly, most writers, like most creators, can be kind of dull—guess it comes from all that living-in-your-own-head kind of shit. Nonetheless, if that future, fictional would-be biographer wrote a biography about this great biographer and it was equal to this biographer’s biography of a man that history had felt better left to the dust and ashes of memory, I can only say . . . wait, where was I? Oh, yeah.

Joyce. Fucking Joyce.

“But as he ripened, so did he spoil, quickly and luxuriously.” ( )