Black Sun: The Enchanting But Doomed Life of Harry Crosby

By Michael Hooper

Black Sun by Geoffrey Wolff, first published in 1976, is about the life of Harry Crosby, a devoted poet, adventurer, book publisher and party organizer in the 1920s in Paris. The book invites you into Crosby‘s grand parties in Paris and his rural countryside home where fashionable people of the day entertained in a movement called aestheticism, which is pure devotion to the arts, these people are living and breathing literary and artistic and musical lives, constantly singing, dancing, partying, smoking opium, smoking hash, drinking and more drinking with wild adventures including midnight drives into Paris.

I loved reading this book for its invitation to join these gatherings with illustrious people like Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound and Hart Crane.

Harry Crosby has enough money to support his expensive lifestyle. His parents gave him enough stock that he was earning $12,000 a year in dividends from his account with JP Morgan. Imagine making $12,000 a year in the 1920s in Paris, that would be like making $250,000 today. 

The author’s uninhibited love affair with Paris, in the 1920s comes through the eyes of Harry Crosby, who constantly wrote and documented and published poems in the Black Sun press with his wife, Caresse; they are a big part of high society in Paris, wining and dining with dukes, ambassadors, and leading authors and artists of the day.

He was born into a wealthy Boston Brahim family and was educated at Harvard College. His parents expected him to follow the morals and customs of the culture. Yet Harry Crosby was an extremist in his passions and loves in his sexual life, yet he wrestles with religion and the worship of the sun and alcoholism, opium addiction, hash. And he seems to have a death wish.

Henry Crosby is not well known for his literary masterpieces, some of his critics said he wrote too much about the sun; I know it feels good to have the sun on your face, but that’s a pretty common line. We got high in the midday sun, wrote Paul McCartney. 

Harry Crosby was not a role model for getting along with people.

He could be terribly rude and mean spirited. One time he and his wife were at a hotel with friends. He got upset and rudely left abruptly with his wife. An hour later he felt guilty about it, so he called the hotel to see if he could come back and they said yes. So he went out and gathered six pistols, and loaded them with bullets and then when he arrived at the hotel, he apologized and said I’m sorry I mistreated you, here are each of you a revolver. You may shoot me now.”

Harry Crosby slept with many women even while married he had loyalties to his wife to a certain extent, but he pushed boundaries that left them very alone at times, and not happy with each other, but they somehow carried on.

While Harry was in Harvard College, World War I broke out. He and some friends signed up for the American field service ambulance crew. Harry kept detailed descriptions of the wounded in his letters home to his mother and father. Page 48

“I saw the most gruesome sight I’ve ever seen. Lying on a blood stained brancard was a man not older than 20 I afterwards ascertained suffering from the agony of hell. His whole right cheek was completely shot away so you could see all the insides of his face he had no jaw, teeth or lips left. His nose was plastered in, blood was streaming all over the place Under his eyes. The skin was just dead blue. It took us an hour driving between two or 3 miles an hour to get him to his destination. Of course he couldn’t yell as his mouth or what was left of it was a mere mass of pulp for a while I was afraid Our ambulance was to be turned into a hearse, but he was still alive when we got him there. Of course, in typical French fashion, the doctors held their usual debate of questioning whether it was the right hospital or where his papers were.”

According to Ted Weeks, Harry successfully frightened the doctors into accepting the wounded man for treatment. The man then died immediately and the episode provoked from Harry and outburst of jingoism. In America, the man would’ve been on the operating table within a minute after his arrival, but in this rotten country, they had to hold their toute de suite Conference. I suppose it’s too much to ask of them to come out of their dream and show some pep. Well, thank God I’m an American. I’m prouder of it every day so is everyone else here.”

The drivers in orderlys frequently slept at the front according to the author or tried to sleep on stretchers stacked, like burst on a Pullman deep down in a ditch. The stink beneath the mud was awful, and it was so cold that in Midsomer, a man could see his breath.

Harry idolize the pilots, he never would forget lying on his back on the hood of his feet out watching them duel. He developed a lifelong fascination for flight 

Sometimes Harry can be very sweet. On page 57 he writes to his parents “you and Paul all my life have done every conceivable thing for me and you may not know it, but I certainly appreciate it all right. It is absolutely impossible for me to have thank you or pa for everything you’ve done for me in such an unselfish way.”

But other times Harry acts entitled like he is owed everything from the world and his parents. So he will often overspend his accounts and ask his father for bail out who was sure to do it because he didn’t want his son to go with unpaid debts. Gotta keep up a certain image in Boston.

After World War I, Harry Crosby became one of the lost generation. He went back to Harvard College and finished his degree and even joined a special society that his dad wanted him to be a part of but all in all he hated it and couldn’t wait to get out of college and start a new life doing something else. 

A lot of of his friends at Harvard did not share his love for poetry. An old friend named Helen Adamski recalls that Harry used to take her to a friend's house on Cape Cod. One soft foggy weekend Harry sat by the hour outside, leaning against the cottage wall and philosophizing. He had a deep spirituality and interest in poetry, she said Page 69.

But his dad never tired of reminding Harry that the point of college enterprise was to get elected into the A.D. club,

He eventually did get elected into that club, mainly because his dad was in the club, not because of any exceptional academic performance on Harry’s part. In fact most of his schooling, he was lackluster in performance and never really did a deep dive into literature when he was in college. That came later.

The big love of Harry’s life was without a doubt, Polly, at the time, later she called herself Caresse, but at one time she was Mrs. Richard Rogers Peabody, married to a handsome young ex officer. The Peabody name in Boston in 1920 was a very important name. The author says Peabody was one of the three most important names in Boston, the other two names might be Lowell and Cabot.

Harry’s pursuit of Polly was relentless. Even though she was married, she adored his affections, but also sometimes she questioned why she was getting involved with him. But he continuously pursued her and eventually married her. It became a big scandal among the Boston, Brahman people and eventually Harry despised these people and had sort of a love-hate relationship with Boston because of their views of his marriage to this woman. He took away a Boston favorite.

Page 81 the author writes Harry’s serial sexual adventures during the last seven years of his life should be understood as acts committed not only in the service of pleasure but against self government. his seduction were acts of anarchy thus perceived by the Brahmins, whose social arrangements he labored to subvert.

Page 82 carries on about the Cabots’ and the Peabodys’ morals of the day and their social decorum and proper ways. Divorce was considered not a good thing it was frowned upon. And here was the social elite girl divorcing her husband so she could marry Harry Crosby, who by this time was well known for his alcoholic and philandering ways.

Even more complicating is the fact that Polly and her first husband had two children.

Yet they decided to live in Paris to get away from Boston, morality and convention, they wanted freedom in the city of light.

Harry, Polly and the two kids first lived on the left Bank but eventually they moved to a fashionable dowdy address on the right bank.

Polly later changed her name to Caresse, when she published her first book of poems, Crosses of Gold. 

Harry received kind of a wake up call to the idea of children when he came home from the racetrack with some friends from Boston and found Polly at play with her brats with a motherly fit upon her, a mess on the floor with the children, he stormed out in shame and pushed his friends before him and returned three days later, bearing toys for the children and cloth of gold mandarin négligée for Polly. Page 103.

Harry tried to connect with the children. Pauline, the daughter said that he took notice of her and asked her why she was taking her shoes off and she said she was supposed to take them off to keep from making noise in the flat. He put the shoes back on and rushed her off to the Ritz, and she was given a glass of champagne and taken back to the house. She was six years old, and that was the beginning of their friendship. She said that of her stepfather, she was generally ignored, kept out of the way and looked scruffy. She never got fed properly, and she was put through all kinds of traumatic experiences. 

Harry Crosby and his wife Caresse started Black Sun press in Paris around 1925. This was an extension of his Obsession with aesthetisism. Rather than seek publication in other publishers, Harry and Chris decided to create their own publishing house and print the books themselves. Initially they published some poetry books of their own, but then started publishing other people‘s books during the 20s the black Sun press published books by James Joyce, DH Lawrence, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, McLeish and K Boyle. 

The Crosby‘s found their own printer, Roger Kescaret. He had a little tiny shop at 2 ru Cardinale. The Black Sun Press had its office upstairs

What’s interesting about this location is that I literally lived about two blocks away in the Hotel la Louisiane on the rue de Seine in 2021 when I spent a month in Paris painting every day. This location in the 6th  arrondissement  is vibrant with art and many literary ghosts, including Charles Baudelaire, who grew up in Saint Germain De Pre, and Ernest Hemingway, who used to live in this area. He used to take his son up to the nearby Luxembourg Gardens.

Everything in the bookshop was done leisurely with infinite care. There was no thought of money involved in these transactions. Eventually many book sellars wanted these special books. 

Initially they published five books called Editions Narcisse, three by Harry, and one by Caress and one by Lord Lymington and the fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe.

Today they’re highly sought after and prized because of their art and beauty, some of the most cherished books are by Alastair, aka baron hans Henning von Voight, whose drawings were considered part of the decadent movement. 

Page 140

Baudelaire, a sonnet, was part of Red Skeletons by Harry Crosby, illustrated by Alastair. An original copy today could be worth $1,000.

The Black Sun Press edition of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher is highly valuable, with values often ranging from $1,000 to $5,000 or more, depending on the condition, signatures, and whether it's a first edition. The original 1928 edition is particularly sought after by collectors due to its rarity and association with Harry and Caresse Crosby. 

The writer, Charles Lieurance of Austin, Texas, is a collector of Hairy Crosby and the Black Sun press. Charles and I work together at the daily Nebraska newspaper at the University of Nebraska Lincoln in the 1980s. He recently wrote to me and said,

“I am a rather fanatical aficionado of everything having to do with Harry Crosby & I love this book. I own a few Black Sun first editions of his poetry & those I wasn't able to afford I own as reissues. Shadows of the Sun: The Diaries of Harry Crosby from Black Sparrow should be your next stop.”

The next major thing that Harry Crosby would do is take over a rundown mill and convert it and restore it (page 226). Fill it with furniture, install bathrooms, and electricity and repair these buildings for the biggest parties in all of Europe.

Partying in Europe is kind of a chic thing to do. Topeka‘s very own Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple CEO, and nephew of our friend Webb Garlinghouse, recently married dietitian Tara Milsti over the weekend of September 20, 2025, and announced the marriage on social media on September 22. The wedding was a star-studded affair on the French Riviera.  Chris Martin of Coldplay sang yellow. A multimillion dollar wedding for sure. Brad Garlinghouse, a Topeka High grad, is estimated to be worth $10 billion as the president of Ripple the creator of XRP crypto now worth about $2.80 per unit, up from about $.56 before Trump.

With his parents help, Harry agreed to rent the property and fix it up while living there at the mill located on the property that included enough land for a race track where he and his guest raced donkeys. He had his own Nawa a couple of race horses cockatoos a ferret, a cheetah and macaw a couple of whippets two carrier pigeons, four donkeys, nine ducks and a python. The stable was converted at ground level into a huge cobble floor banquet hall with a Fieldstone fireplace. The hayloft was broken into 10 bedrooms, small and simply furnished each a different color above the tower rooms was Harry’s place of worship where he went along to take the sun and reflect upon its meanings. Many rituals were observed each morning and evening.

Salvador Dali, a frequent visitor to the mill, described a representative weekend there “we ate in the horse stable, filled with tiger skins and stuffed parrots. There was a sensational library on the second floor, and also an enormous quantity of champagne cooling, with sprigs of mint in all the corners and many friends, a mixture of surrealist and society people who came there because they sensed from afar that it was in this Moulin du Soleil that things were happening.”

Harry started a scrapbook filled with clippings about flight, airplanes, air races, and air disasters. Harry said we are the first generation to get our feet off the ground, we leave the ground we fly we saw we catapult into the sun while the engines roar, yahoo yahoo yahoo yahoo and the win hurricanes, and we balance on the rest of the sky like a diamond on the breast of a woman”

In August 1929, Harry saw a stunt pilot fly upside down 100 feet above the tide line loop the loop as he climbed spin and wag his wings. As miraculous a poem as I have ever seen, he said tomorrow I shall go to the flying field and enter my name as a student pilot. Page 261. 

Within two months, Harry was flying as often as twice a day. He had become close friends with his instructor, and he shared all these stories of the war, girlfriends love and adventure detachment drinking misunderstandings in our families attitude towards money restlessness.

Harry fell under the modern machinery spell of race cars, airplanes and skyscrapers. He took up photography in 1928 and 1929 using his camera frequently and a good effect. His impulse was invariably to the abstract such as an airplane engine or automobile exhaust pipe.

Harry drives a Bugatti in July 1926. While living at his mill in the country, he sometimes got the urge to drive to Paris in the middle of the night. He and Caresse would get into his Bugatti and race through the night to Paris.

All of his endeavors, the book publishing, the writing, the photography, race cars, airplanes, art -- show his incredible daring and zest for life. He’s willing to learn from an instructor how to fly a plane and he does it.

His zest for life and his doom complex are constantly at war with each other.  It’s like he’s got these two different sides of life, one that hungers for something new and innovative and cutting edge, but at the same time a death wish knowing he may die very soon with all his consumption of opium, hashish, champagne, the finest foods and liquors in France, the indulgence of incredible adventures, including going out on a yacht with his friends partying it up, baby, on the Mediterranean. 

The Lost Generation, Coined by Gertrude Stein, the term symbolizes a generation profoundly affected by World War 1's trauma and disillusionment with traditional values, leading to a rejection of the American Dream in favor of a cynical, often hedonistic, lifestyle in Europe.

The intellectual ferment of the time is incredible. 

In November 1929, the Crosbys return to America. Harry and his lover Josephine Noyes Rotch go to Detroit together and then return to New York. In New York they attend a party by Hart Crane.

On the same day, Harry Crosby wrote his final entry in his journal: "One is not in love unless one desires to die with one's beloved. There is only one happiness it is to love and to be loved."^[10]

Harry did not show up for a dinner with Crane. They checked an apartment where he had been staying and found Harry and Josephine dead. He had shot her in the temple, then shot himself in the temple.

I think he did it because he had trapped himself into believing this was how he was going to end life.

Once he had shot her, he had to shoot himself.

 

Wild Thing: A Life Of Paul Gauguin

By Michael Hooper

Wild Thing, A Life of Paul Gauguin, by Sue Prideaux, is an authentic biography of Post-Impressionist painter, Paul Gauguin. 

It’s a scholarly work of the French artist, but also very readable. I read the 364-page book in a week. The book includes 59 images featuring the work of Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh. The book covers Gauguin's development as a child in Peru, his youth in France and his work as a merchant marine, stock broker, journalist and artist.

Gustav Arosa, a patron of the arts and collector of realist and impressionist paintings, helped Gauguin get a job as a stock broker at a firm called Bertin in Paris.

Gauguin was living on his own terms for the first time in life and working at the French stock exchange called the Bourse, the author wrote.

He was hired as a liquidateur, the 19th century equivalent of a futures broker gambling on the buying and selling of certain shares at a certain date in the future, Prideaux wrote. He received a commission on each successful trade and received an annual bonus on his successes.

Gauguin enjoyed the Arosa household, the many beautiful paintings on the walls, and drawing with his daughter Marguerite, who herself would become a fairly successful artist in Spain and France. She took lessons from Camille Pissaro. Gauguin ended up taking a deeper and deeper interest in art during this time. He studied the old masters at the Louvre. He attended serious discussions about the latest advances in art and photography at the Arosa salon.

The book says another influence came from fellow clerk Emile Schuffenecker. Gauguin called him Schuff. Schuff had a passion for art. He had joined Bertin with the sole purpose of making enough money quickly to support himself for the rest of his life as an artist. Schuff dragged the evermore willing Gauguin to see what they were showing in these little art galleries surrounding the Bourse.

For 11 years, Paul was a successful businessman and stock broker who had gained an edge in figuring out the direction of stocks. He was making 30,000 francs per year, the equivalent of $145,000 annually, but he didn’t really save his money. He bought a lot of art and lived well. He and his wife Mette lived in Paris where he painted in the evenings and in his free time. He and his wife have five children over the next 10 years. Meanwhile, his friend Schuck was saving his money and getting ready to leave the brokerage business and become a full-time painter. Gauguin should have followed his example. When the stock market crashed in 1882 Schuck was ready for it, but Gauguin wasn’t. Business and art markets contracted. And that’s about the time that Gauguin decided to became a full-time painter.

When money was in short supply in Paris, Mette looked for another way to raise their children and decided to move back to Denmark. In Copenhagen, she was able to teach French to students and make a small living. She also was a very independent woman who was highly regarded among the intellectuals and artists of the day. Indeed, she had maintained a salon in her apartment, which was full of all of these artworks that her husband had been collecting.

Gauguin tried Copenhagen, but left and returned to Paris to continue to learn and to paint.

In the book, the author does not condemn Gauguin for leaving his wife and children to pursue art, yet I can’t help but feel sympathy for Mette, trying to raise five children. They had a robust sex life in their marriage, but after five children, she refused to have sex with him because she didn’t want any more children.

Yet Mette and Gauguin kept up with letters over the years between each other.

Gauguin fell in with the impressionist painters, with Pissaro as a strong advocate for him.

Woman Sewing, Paul Gauguin

Gauguin’s breakthrough painting was Woman Sewing in 1880, the author wrote. As a painter, I know it is difficult to draw and paint hands and face. In his painting, he draws the hands, face and body as one beautiful person, the skin tones seem real, and I like the mandolin hanging on the wall. His draftsmanship, colors and shading come together in a form of beauty.

His landscape paintings were considered dull and unimpressive at this time, but he was willing to take risks to learn new tricks in the art trade. 

Gauguin met Theo and Vincent van Gogh in Paris. Vincent wrote him several letters asking him to join him in Arles, France.

One detail that came up pretty prominently to me was how messy Vincent was in his house, leaving paint tubes all over the place with their lids off, drying out. Gauguin, knowing paint is expensive, put the lids back on. They painted several subjects together,

Night Cafe, Vincent van Gogh

Night Cafe, Paul Gauguin

The author captures the madness of Vincent van Gogh, and Gauguin’s fear of this madness. Eventually, at the end of his stay there, Vincent goes crazy and cuts off an ear and hands it to a prostitute.

Gauguin is interviewed by authorities over the bloody ear from Vincent. I think Vincent scared him. If Vincent would have died, Gauguin might have been charged with murder, according to the author.

People will pay hundreds of millions of dollars for Vincent van Gogh‘s paintings, but I question whether there is a single buyer of his art that would’ve actually taken the time to talk to the man because he was known as a dirty smelly man with mental health issues. Today if you see a dirty smelly man on the streets, are you going to take the time to talk to him?

Gauguin saw real talent in Vincent. Gauguin was willing to remain friends with him. They wrote letters to each other until van Gogh died.

French Polynesia 

Gauguin’s fascination for French Polynesia increased as he read books by Pierre Loti, the pen name of Julian Viaud. His books told stories about meeting pretty girls at ports in places like Tahiti and Japan.

Gauguin's fascination for Tahiti really took off after he attended the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, featuring the new Eiffel Tower.

Tahiti had been a colony of France for about 10 years by the time Gauguin attended the expo in Paris. There were vast displays of many places that France had colonized around the world in Africa, the far east and Tahiti.

In Tahiti, the idea of raw and wild living appealed to Gauguin. Unfortunately, he found Tahiti to be already losing its traditions due to the importation of Catholic and Christian missionaries and French government appointed leadership.

The author does a good job discussing this paradoxical position in which Gauguin struggled because here he was an import from France and was trying to blend in with the local culture. He studied the language and he got along with the people, the locals were not really interested in his paintings.

He built himself a shack near the ocean and lived out his days, with a woman partner. He struggled with his health issues, sometimes bedridden, but he managed to paint many of the local people in his own strange and fascinating way. He wrote stories about life on the island and advocated for the natives' rights.

He sent his paintings back to Paris for sale. He always looked forward to the boats arriving, hoping he would get some mail with some money, but often there was nothing there for him.

He needed a great deal of medical care and was in a lot of pain. He had wounds on his legs that would not heal. He died in his home from heart failure. He was 54.

In conclusion, I liked spending time with Wild Thing. Gauguin learned from other artists and crafted his own unique style. He changed up colors to create more dynamic paintings. He painted trees purple, and the earth orange. He was a bold swashbuckling painter with a background as a seaman. He could fence, he could use a sword. He attracted a following. Multiple artists lived with him and worked with him. Gauguin was their teacher, their guide.

Paul Gauguin inspires us to take chances, be bold, adventurous and creative. As an artist, try to capture the raw wildness of life.