Straight To Hell: 10 Art Suicides

STRAIGHT TO HELL

EDITED BY NAMIDA KING

AN EBOOK

ISBN 978-1-908694-38-6

PUBLISHED BY ELEKTRON EBOOKS

COPYRIGHT 2012 ELEKTRON EBOOKS

www.elektron-ebooks.com

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HARRY CROSBY

I want a long straight road into the Sun and a car with the cut out wide open speeding a mile a minute into the Sun with a princess by my side –Harry Crosby

I want to make a poem of my life –Yukio Mishima

Harry Crosby's life burned with an incandescent white-heat, and his suicide was an affirmation of his quasi-Nietzschean mystical beliefs. In Crosby the destructive spirit was not an annihilator but, through a uniquely dialectical perversion, a liberator. A death well chosen was, for Crosby, not a negative gesture, but rather a resounding affirmation, a yes carried into the abyss. For Crosby, death was the final and greatest of many adventures.

Born into a conservative Boston family on June 4th, 1898, it was expected that Harry Crosby would work in banking, marry correctly, sire an appropriate heir, and retire to a suitable New England – or at least East Coast – town.

When the teenage Crosby volunteered for service in the blood and shit soaked, cadaver strewn trenches of Northern Europe during the First World War, he was still primarily doing what was expected. The experience as an ambulance driver would be character building in the eyes of his family.

In the churned rotting mud of the Second Battle of Verdum, Crosby had the task of hauling the wretched casualties, and often corpses, from the frontline to the American Field Army section. On some days Crosby would drag more than two-hundred-and-fifty blasted, shot, stabbed, and destroyed bodies to the field hospitals. This was a truly charnel landscape, more grotesque than those realized in previous conflicts, as men on horseback would battle heavy artillery, where bayonets and hand to hand combat would be used alongside tanks, in these battlefields the atavism of previous conflicts met the mechanized terror of modern warfare. The world was turned upside down, and nothing was left unscathed.

On November 22nd, 1917, Crosby was driving an ambulance, loaded with brutally wounded soldiers, when a shell exploded only feet away. By some insane miracle Crosby escaped all injury, but his ambulance and its grisly flesh cargo were annihilated. Death's steed had ridden past Crosby.

Harry Crosby should have died.

In surviving the slaughter he became obsessed with his own death. It is unsurprising that he would come to know this date as his death-day and would mark it annually in his diaries and with rituals of his own design.

Following his military service – during which Crosby also carried the wounded at the Battle of Orme for which he was awarded the Croix de Guerre – he returned to Boston, and Harvard. He was expected to settle down, but his experiences of conflict, and growing passion for literature, meant the young man had other plans.

On July 4th, 1920, Crosby met the woman who would become his soul-mate and the major inspiration for the rest of his life: Polly Peabody. Seven years his senior, Polly was married to Richard Roger Peabody and was the mother of two children. The marriage was unsatisfactory, however, and the young Crosby began a campaign for Polly's heart, declaring his love for her only hours after their first meeting.

In a grim warning of what was to come Harry threatened suicide if the relationship was not formalized – as he wrote I'll... kill you and then myself so that we can go right to Heaven together. Polly was Harry's religion and he declared that whenever you want we shall die together.

The Crosby / Peabody relationship was scandalous, but Polly began divorce proceedings, and the couple were married eight months after her divorce. The two lovers – stifled by the conservatism of their Boston families – moved to Paris during their courtship. In Paris the couple lived exceptionally well, surviving on their familial incomes and the benefits of the exchange rate.

In France the couple were able to pursue their passions fully; literature, poetry, and decadence. Harry began to wear a black flower in his lapel, effecting the appearance of a noir-dandy, a black mirror to the classic / clichéd image of the 'colourful character'. In Paris, Harry was also able to fully consolidate his own cosmology based on sun worship.

Such was his religious conviction in the power of the Sun, Crosby had the image of the black-sun tattooed onto his back, and a cross and a pagan sun sign tattooed onto the soles of his feet; here was a man possessed by his own unique synchretic religion. Crosby's beliefs emerged from a combination of sources; they acknowledged the influence of the magical interpretations of the Sun that emerged from Ancient cultures and indigenous peoples, but combined these interpretations with a loosely Nietzschean understanding of the universe as will and as affirmation. The Sun represents dynamic, vital existence, the essence of life, energy, as well as the solar eruption of limitless energy and primordial expenditure. When Harry read Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra he was particularly inspired by the command that one must die at the right time, and the Crosbys set a date for their joint suicide: Halloween, 1942 – although whether this was a realistic proposal, or merely a lover's discourse remains open to interpretation.

The Crosbys’ passion for literature informed their days, both wrote poetry and kept journals. Harry in particular produced numerous volumes of poetry. In 1924, while preparing a book of her poetry entitled Crosses Of Gold for publication Polly was debating the use of a penname, and after much debate, Harry suggested she becomèCaresse Crosby’. It was the name by which he would know her for the rest of his life.

In 1927 their passion for literature drove Harry and Caresse to found their own publishing company, and the couple established Black Sun Press – the title of the company representing their fascination with the Sun and Harry's mystical beliefs. The company would publish works not just by Caresse and Harry but also key literary figures such as James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, and Kay Boyle, amongst others. Each edition would be designed by the Crosbys and represented their belief in the importance of their literary and publishing project. Thus literature too retained a mystical importance to Harry.

In 1928 Harry Crosby inherited a massive library of an estimated eight-thousand books, from Walter Berry. These books included an illuminated Koran, a Gutenberg Bible, first editions by Baudelaire and Voltaire, and The Book of