Nothing But a Star

by Jeremy Reed

  Harry was obsessed with death, not morbidly, but optimistically, frequently quoting Nietzsche’s injunction in Zarathustra, ‘die at the right time’, as the pre-requisite to living. He owned racehorses, and gambled compulsively, rather like Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones, the speed in his veins having him live to overtake himself, like he was on teleport into a quantum future. Money helped pull him out of normal living, and he burnt it all over town, coke up his nose, and gin and champagne trafficking his bloodstream. He impulsively bought what he saw, the purchase pleasure giving him mega-hits of dopamine, each grab temporarily fetishised as part of his personal myth-making, before quickly being superseded by another. Harry cross-dressed and made up, again as the expression of needing to bypass accepted gender frontiers and achieve an altered look that put him in touch with his own feminine aspects, in a way that most men repress or simply don’t dare. Part of the full-on, impacting sensory dynamic of his life can be assessed in his January 1, 1929 diary entry, written in the same year as his death, and at a time when Hart Crane was his guest in Paris:

  Oneness for Eternity Red-Gold of Sun and I looked into the red-gold of the fire and drank a first toast to 1929 (let the year be the Sunfire Year) and we all kissed each other CC and HC HC and CCC (one minute past twelve) H and JH and J Etcetera and I smoked my opium pipe and we all drank and there was much laughter and toward one o’clock a wandering off to bed after gin and champagne silver and gold and a pipe of opium and so the New Year has begun auspiciously—I have never enjoyed the crossing over the bridge more—I hope the crossing over the sun-death bridge into the Sun will be as sincere and strong… Morning and I look out the window straight into the gold of the Sun and a huge stork coming from the West flies over the courtyard (is this an omen) and I walk to the Poteau de Perth and when I got back I climbed to the top of the Sun-Tower and exploded into the Sun.

  Crosby’s imagined (and very real) destination was always the Sun, as he internalised it through his dopaminergic system. For him it was almost a mind-altering drug, a sort of chemicalised gold dust molecularised into consciousness through its source, our Sun, the star at the centre of the solar system, approximately 149.6 million kilometres from Earth, its light arriving here from there at the travelling speed of 8 minutes 19 seconds to promote photosynthesis and climatic weather. Not only was the speed of life too slow for Harry, he would like to have been faster than light-travel, but things experienced quickly lost their fascination when re-experienced, meaning that Harry’s index of highs reached an exhaustive burn-out early, leaving him used-up, neurally damaged, and maniacally psyched up for the ultimate pathological hit—murder and suicide—because there wasn’t anywhere else to go.

  Like many other people walking the London streets (and I’m writing this at Starbucks on St Martin’s Lane), I’m a failed or parasuicide, from an overdose, left permanently with the feeling that I might really be dead but living parallel with others through a weird time slip. Have I brought something back from the experience that makes me different, that has me write so many off-message books? Would I have been better off dead, rather than wondering constantly what I’m doing here? As I write this, looking out on the 3pm street, two Korean girls, black bobbed hair, in skinny jeans, are disappearing backs to me in real time, and the acute realisation I’ll never see them again in big city life, as an instance of what I call recognition-death, has me focus on death and departures, and on all the people biologically checking out of life this moment, brains shutdown terminally, into death.

  Like Harry Crosby, Hart Crane was always on a catastrophic collision course with suicide, metabolically hiked up on booze and sex—Crane was openly gay—and on the furiously self-destructive impulse defiantly to burn up everything including himself. It was inevitable that the two men should meet, and Crosby’s suicide may have been instrumental to encouraging Crane to do the same three years later.

  Rejected by his father, a wealthy Cleveland candy manufacturer, and emotionally hexed by a viciously possessive mother, fucked by a system he despised, ripped up by financial anxiety, and arguably fifty years ahead of his contemporaries in poetry, Crane wasn’t prepared to compromise or hang around too long in the hope things would get better. He knew they wouldn’t, and that being queer in a heteronormative society put him unquestionably at the bottom, together with blacks, and all the other band of social outlaws kicked out by big city life. Crane was as understandably allergic to normal as Crosby, with both men using poetry as the energy to bounce signals at the alien frequency with which off-world poetry connects. Hart’s intensely compressed poems coded with homoeroticism and sourced from the core of modern New York and its complex of piers—he lived for a time in an apartment overlooking Brooklyn Bridge and its harbour—mashes the sensory with the urban in a mix that feels like Jimi Hendrix forcing feedback through a ship’s siren.

  If you look at a photo of Hart Crane you can spot the chronic alcoholism; he’s eye-puffed, splodgy and needs foundation. But his good looks resiliently defy booze; and his femininity, always masculine, is simply butch. How many men are ever called Hart, the absence of the ‘e’ the defining point? If you stare at Hart long enough you know he’s going to do it—go over the edge. Suicide occurs when the impulse for departure is stronger than that for return, when the inner momentum to do so is irreversible, like the critical point reached by a Boeing accelerating to climb-out on the runway. That’s what gets you there, a surge of adrenalin like plane fuel. Once Hart had got out on the lip of the Orizaba’s stern, his flight path was inexorably decided.

  I’m writing this now, same gold-dusted afternoon, 9/9/10, outside in Soho’s Newport Place, in Chinatown, watching two old Chinese guys getting volubly excited over a game of mah-jong. I often write here, as I like the East/West fusion of energies, and the fact that writing directly on the street puts edgy edges on what I’m doing. I’m never paid for my time, so words have to be really special to me that I constantly put such sparkle on their poetic potential. They’re my oxygen under the bilingual street names: Newport Court WC2 and Lisle Street WC2, and the other signposting I need, that’s in the brain’s microcircuitry, to link all this up into disrupted writing. I like to come at things from an angle, in the same way I prefer dyed hair to natural, as it puts poetry into the look. Hart Crane had blond highlights in his hair and did it rather like Morrissey.

  I’d say it’s debatable whether Hart would have dipped off the ship if his companion had been a man rather than a woman, and that’s not in any way being sexist. Peggy Cowley, the ex-wife of the literary critic Malcolm Cowley, who thought Hart an aberrant talent stunted by lack of academic education, and like Hart Crane was in Mexico on a Guggenheim grant, wasn’t the right person to arrest his suicidal impulse, and while she may have sympathised with his homosexuality, she was on the rebound, desperate and emotional, hoping for a lot more than Hart could offer. Crane’s relationship was with the bottle and not Peggy. If there’s a drink-gene, then Hart got his from his mother, who slugged spirits to help compensate for her own catastrophic emotional mess.

  Peggy Cowley was a largely style-less, ordinary looking woman, who Carol Dexter informed Hart’s mother, in advance of their one meeting to discuss Hart’s literary estate, was ‘probably in her late forties, always dowdy in appearance’ and little likely to turn Hart on. It was common knowledge among Crane’s friends that he kept a little book noting the arrival times of most naval and merchant ships in the New York harbours, and that he cruised the docks, always searching at least for one special friend, who might in time become a partner, and help heal in part his insupportable loneliness. Hart and Peggy had separate cabins on the Orizaba, something that in itself suggested their physical alienation. Psychically, too, Hart must have been feeling totally out of character in the role he was playing, making it easier for him to go on an obliterative binge to fuel his unstoppable suicide leap.

  Peggy was herself a heavy drinker, and married twice more after Hart’s death. Whatever their connection
was, their time together was brief. During their relationship she wrote to her ex of Hart: ‘I don’t mean he wants my body, but he does want to marry me, all of course because he is more than a bit lonely and desires a closer companionship than he has ever found in sex.’

  In Mexico, for the year preceding his death, and funded by a Guggenheim grant for 2,000 dollars to begin work on an epically conceived poem about Cortes (that he never started), and with a gallon jar of whisky kept habitually at the foot of his bed, Crane appears from his letters to friends to have entered into an illicit orgy of same-sex encounters that must have shocked even Peggy, when revealed to her in his drunken confessional rantings. According to Katherine Anne Porter, who was witness to his drunken recriminations, ‘His voice at these times was intolerable; a steady harsh inhuman bellow which stunned the ears and shocked the nerves and caused the heart to contract. In this voice and with words so foul there is no question of repeating them, he cursed separately and by name the moon, and its light; the heliotrope, the heaven-tree, the sweet-by night, the star jessamine, and their perfumes. He cursed the air we breathed together, the pool of water with its two small ducks huddled at the edge, and the vines on the wall to the house. But those were not the things he hated. He did not even hate us, for we were nothing to him. He hated and feared himself.’

  Hart Crane couldn’t write in Mexico, and so he drank ferociously to forget, temporarily, he had lost it, went to jail for disorderly conduct after a night spent drinking tequila, got repeatedly robbed by his pick-ups, attempted to evoke the cupidity of the conquistadors by sporadic surges of travel, but Hart’s proposed subject as an Americanist, intended as a sequel to The Bridge (1930), was one devised more to secure a Guggenheim fellowship than as a workable imaginative reality suited to his particular creative sensibility. There had already been debate about his alcoholism, and strong reservations expressed by members of the Guggenheim Foundation’s Advisory Committee, as to the question of Crane’s suitability for a grant, given his notorious drinking, and the danger he might bring the Foundation into disgrace by bingeing riotously in Mexico. Crane had a bad name in literary circles as a punk bandit, an inspired, unrepentant social deviant, who turned up at parties disreputably drunk and who knocked about with lowlife on the New York docks. Even his closest friend, supporter and patron Waldo Frank, warned him away from Mexico on the grounds it would threaten his stability. Hart Crane was a mod, his poetry wired to big city tensions, and his proposal to do a time-reversal and revive that first moment of fusion when Hernando Cortes met and then overthrew Montezuma II and his Aztec empire didn’t really mesh with his poetic sensibility. The projected epic was already partly submerged in Crane’s enthusiasms even before he first arrived in Vera Cruz, on the same ship, the SS Orizaba, from which he would shatteringly plummet on his return journey to New York, almost exactly one year later.

  Hart’s full on in my thoughts as I take a break from writing this, and walk over from Chinatown to Trimmings in Winslet Street, back of Oxford Street, where I regularly buy 120 gram bags of sequins for use in my poetry performances, solo or with the Ginger Light, and I choose black on this occasion, black, scintillating micro-UFO-shaped saucers, rather than acting on my usual attraction to ruby, purple or emerald. When I cut back across Soho to Newport Place, a zingy shower puts me in a doorway, where I use my phone before getting into a Mac lipstick conversation with a girl I’ve identified as wearing their trademark Russian Red; all the while keeping a tangential hold of the subject about which I’m writing. I buy a Kit Kat and get back to my spot in WC2, next to the animated mah-jong players and their quizzical spectators.

  Both Harry Crosby and Hart Crane approached death like crash test dummies, the violence of their self-motivated ends creating a shattering rather than an autonomous shutdown of physical processes. Ideally, they should have committed suicide together, and must have sensed in their meetings, almost as contagious sensibility-types, that they were both going to do it, and that one would go first. We could conjecture that both Crosby and Crane had rewired their brains through the pursuit of drugs and booze, so that normal pleasurable activities that stimulate neural pathways were inhibited by addiction. Researchers using positron emission tomography (PET) have validated a long-held theory that individual personality traits—particularly reward dependency—are connected to brain chemistry, and particularly to the ventral striatum as the key area of the human reward system. By constantly looking to trigger dopamine rushes, each signal harder to repeat without an increase in abuse, both men were in their own way making the idea, and ultimately the reality of suicide, the final sensation to compensate for the fact that chemical coshes no longer worked to create sufficient highs. When the main pleasure pathways shut down due to habituation, death is often the preferable option to detox, which requires the sort of restart that neither Crosby nor Crane desired, or had any time for in their brief, compressed, radically shook-up lives. The need to get higher and higher was written into their poetry, its unalterable valency.

  I can make a confident guess, in the moment of writing this, that nobody passing by now, or hanging out like me in Soho’s Newport Place, and nobody working opposite in China Buffet, Guanghwa, or Canton Restaurant, has ever heard of Harry Crosby or Hart Crane, or ever needs to, and that my writing about these two men would appear as redundant an act as pissing in the wind, only, my urinalysis would contain chemicalised poetry. But for me the weirdly alienated fix in doing so constitutes the reward. The hours I spend filling time with words creates a relationship with imaginative reality superimposed on Newport Place, like I’ve gone temporarily missing in the process, and zoned into a time-slip.

  It’s a fact that writing makes you want to drink because your nerves get shot-down by its exactingly quirky air-pocketing demands on serotonin. What do I think of Pak Choi, Mini Pak Choi, Choi Sam, Kaio Choi, Tong Ho Dik, as the names arrest me mid-sentence; what have these, if anything, got to do with my subject, other than that they are fundamentally integrated locally into what I’m writing about: the constituents of suicide?

  Harry Crosby lived like a loaded gun and died by one; and Hart Crane like a smashed dervish wanting to break windows on reality. A typical optimally charged Harry moment in a detonative chase across town, reads, in his diary: ‘Darker and darker. (I drink sherry). And at five o’clock on foot through the rain to the Place Vendome, the sky an inverted bowl of purple-gold, the wet bronze column like a gold-black phallus yearning for the night. Down Pretty Alley past Boue dresses and Mercator ships and Tristresse to the Maurstania. (The Ritz bar and a Bacardi-cocktail). And a bookshop just off the Rue-Royal in a sort of corner between the Trois Quartiers and Cooks. There I found the first edition of Bilitis on hand-made paper in the most luxurious of bindings, the copy that Pierre Louys gave to Heredia, with a dedication and the poet’s signature. Price seven thousand five hundred.’ It’s the accelerated immediacy of things as Crosby experiences them that so impresses me. It’s like conducting a heist on the moment: a Harry raid.

  Anything we know about death is imagined, because there aren’t any substantiated facts of post-death survival; we simply follow our story to where it ends or continues in some sort of many-worlds channel-surfing. All we are certain of is that none of us can ever be the same again, after we’re physically dead, and that the 100 trillion cells in the human body can’t ever be reassembled into cellular respiration. We can realistically upload our mind into a digitised twin to create a lifelike digital representation of the biological body (an avatar), and so construct a genuinely conscious robo-clone, with sensors both to perceive the world and to monitor its own movement, but we can’t, it seems, reconstitute individual consciousness. You can’t recreate an Elvis Presley or Michael Jackson.

  The charcoal sky’s breaking up over Soho: a blackcurrant slab of dense rain clouds, shaped like a slice of sexed-up off-world architecture, trails south over the river towards Waterloo. At seventeen, I used to stare fixated at Hart Crane’s photo on the dust jack
et of his Collected Poems, had decided already that I wanted to go there too, into an off-world dimension, because I felt, and still do, that life falls short of my imaginative expectations. I wanted to get beyond the body’s constrained frontiers and connect. Only listening to very loud rock music made me feel in any way right, as though its maxxed-up noise made the necessary neural adjustments for my needs. I wanted to go anywhere that seemed like altered physics, or sounded beyond noise-limitations, and I still do. Turning up the volume on Keith Richards’ gunningly voodoo riff on the Stones’ epic ‘Gimme Shelter’ helped speed me to wherever I intended to reach beyond normal sensory perception.

  When I’m dead will I know that I sat out in Newport Place one gold hazy September afternoon, writing this piece into real time, on a characteristically busy Soho day, not wanting anything from the work but to get it done, so I can get on with something else, the next poem, the next chapter in the novel I’m writing, the next Ginger Light performance, whatever happens in my index of immediate creative possibilities? Anyhow, it’s time for a drink, and like the intention of suicide to substitute one state for another, ideally to move on, like Hart Crane and Harry Crosby bulleting into the fourth dimension, but for today to take myself to the Phoenix on Charing Cross Road, drink wine and re-read what I’ve written.