Pantechnicon; Bubbling Brown Sugar; Profile of Harry Crosby (Wolfe/ Weekes)

A. Hello I'm Eleanor stuff and this is from technical tonight a magazine on entertainment the arts and ideas and this for an expanded venue the latest happenings in science education government and medicine. When the rich resources in the New England area. The Golden Age of Harlem from 1910 through the 40s as witnessed in many sparkling personalities of the swing era the sort of wonderful tunes coming out of that period like some of these days Honeysuckle Rose in Sweet Georgia Brown zesty bouncy bubbling brown sugar captures these tunes in the rhythm of swing and the national company of

bubbling brown sugar. Presently touring the United States and now at Boston's Colonial Theater. It's a musical odyssey back into Harlem highlights held together by a very weak storyline. But as a compensation a cast that constantly propels its energy and vitality across the footlights there are the glamour stars the rising hopefuls the burlesque comics and the spirituals and from the audience. A lot of foot tap and the director Robert Cooper can't seem to decide on whether he wants to spoof the musical numbers like Sophisticated Lady and in my solitude or simply play it straight. But if it's lots of rhythm you want bubbling brown sugar is an evening worth of entertainment. There are several musical highlights in the show. Two of them God bless the child and Sweet Georgia Brown sung by wrestling Kerrison. Now. You. Know we're. We're.

Left. With. Some. Sweet. Sweet was. Not. When I do bring the house down but I am amazed at the amount of energy that really comes out across those footlights. And so if the shell has a tremendous amount of energy mothering I was wondering about is how do performers how can they possibly keep

up such a high level. How do you get yourself so psyched out that once you get out there really is easy just to finally get rid of it. What's the trick. Well we take a lot of vitamins. Yeah what kind of vitamins. Well lots of B vitamins B complex and of course and I take lots of iron and this really helps. I think so you know in a multiple vitamin I really do. But I tell you it really does impose a kind of discipline on you. I mean you have to warm up you know otherwise you can hurt yourself by pulling a muscle. You have to warm up vocally you can hurt yourself that way. It's it's just a matter of discipline. Did you train as a as a singer dancer both or. I sure ain't as a singer mostly. That's what most of the time that I have put in training has been. I've taken acting classes of course and dancing classes along the way.

Above and beyond sugar Chronicles. BLOCK And attainment. But is it the turn of the century. You know I see 14 primarily in Harlem but I wondered why is it when you think about black music why it is that so that jazz that New Orleans jazz wasn't included around the 20s 1020 there was a time. Well we call it the Harlem Renaissance you know. And it was a very significant time for black artists. And that's probably why I mean a lot of great music great writing a lot of great artists as you know came from that time. I mean jazz is one thing and it's a kind of style and you have. Well there's a kind of you know people like sort of on that kind you know you have that but the kind of music that we do has an appeal to everybody. And that's probably why you know it's just the greatest. And.

You like doing Sweet Georgia Brown. Yeah I like doing it very much. Gives you a chance to give me a chance to be something other than I really am. Yeah it's a lot of fun. Do you get dressed up and be very sassy. And I suppose every woman has at some time or the fantasize about walking you know just bowling men over and you get a chance to do that. It's all choreographed. But you can be dangerous really doing it as opposed to the song that so completely different God bless the child. That also I think is very much a showstopper. Yes very much so but there was something you asked me before that I want to talk about you were talking about the music that was

identified by black performers. One important thing the song Love will find a way which opens a second that I think the important thing about that number is that black people didn't buy that kind of music. Music like that is not usually associated with black singers. And that's why that song is important. And you know it was probably difficult to get a song like that accepted by you know clever by a wide public and yeah maybe even by blacks you know or care some one of the leads in the musical bubbling brown sugar. Currently appearing at Boston's Colonial Theater. He will both. Order and glory. I don't think you made it without thinking of it.

So much of what you're doing to be involved in the arts was a very popular thing to do in the twenties especially in the world of expatriates living in Paris including F. Scott Fitzgerald Ernest Hemingway and Archibald MacLeish. Much of the gracious poetry was published at that time by the Black Sun press under the aegis of Harry Crosby a personal Boston friend of Archibald MacLeish and a great lover of literature. Harry Crosby had great aspirations of being a writer himself but unfortunately never reached his goal. He was a young man in a great hurry about everything including trying to become a literary genius overnight. His method was to reach madness as quickly as possible because Harry felt that through madness genius would develop. Well although Harry's madness was simulated at first alternately he achieved a true state of madness ending in a suicide pact with his girlfriend. Both of them found in a New York City apartment in one thousand twenty nine. Harry Crosby it seems has become somewhat of a cult figure now through a biography by Geoffrey Wolfe called Black Sun. Jeffrey Wolff is with us tonight along with Ed good weeks of

Boston's Atlantic Monthly friend of Eric Cross Bay. If there was such a thing as a lost generation He was certainly the kind of character that Fitzgerald wished he had been. Having said that though if the last generation is conceived of as a literary generation in any way he was by no means he was. He was by no means a writer of the stature of Hemingway or Fitzgerald when he went to Europe. He went as a banker. He had no notion at that time of becoming a writer. The life that he lived was was a life. In the beginning lived on the right bank of Paris rather than the Left his from his friends were taken not from the American Bohemian community but from the French artist a crowded community. He really. He in no way was it was emblematic of what people like Malcolm Paoli have chosen to call and I guess. Eggs I was Generation his. His interest in literature his obsession

I should say and then of it with literature came after all when he was he was 25 years old. And he lived only another six years and he realized especially for a poet which he chose he chose to be poets like mathematicians and composers I think that peaked very early. And it's it was terribly late to come to an apprenticeship. And I and I believe he had to it it had he had an intuition it was also I think told by people that the only hope for him was if he was just struck by genius I said I love you. OK I'll do that I'll become a jihadi become genius. And I think you realize that. In common with a lot of the Oh I think French decadence fairy he believes that genius and madness were inextricably tied up together. And. So he began to hit on ways of

inspiring madness of all of absurd devices. So he found his way to sun worship he found his way to drugs he found his way to excessive alcohol. He tried to and every literary he tried to enact every literary theory that fell his way that attracted him trying to actually hacked it out and I think that there's an enormous innocence and this. And enormous courage and and enormous futility. Mr. Wolf I think emphasizes it was his narrow escape from death and the autumn of 1917 that if you like wound him up that put him into a very tense. He was he was a hired strongman anyway. He had the closest scape from death of any person I've ever known certainly of any soldier that I've known. The shell that he was at that

he brought his car in his ambulance emptied fortunately to a sunken road as close to the post as a core which was the big aberrated down which the wounded were taken until they were and I'm going to take them out. And he was in the act of backing the ambulance up close to the entrance of the aberrated when he heard the shell come in and it would cause it was coming at a terrific speed. Standing in the doorway of the average was his friend Spud Spalding a driver who was mocking Howard because he'd stalled in the mud. Perhaps it was just as well he had stalled because the shell hit on the parapet right there and it he was under the spray of the club. It absolutely demolished the car. He threw himself on the floor and where he had sat and it just kind of cut an outline of the wooden backboard.

To show whether Barry would have been wounded had he been sitting even before the war. He believed in a life after death. He chose to ignore. He chose to ignore the church's injunction against suicide. He was preoccupied with death always. He offered and he offered to do a great many women to kill them and then himself so that they could be joined together in the hereafter. After a while this theology began to take on kind pagan tones as he became a sun worshipper but he certainly did believe that he would be he would survive his own death in some sense that he would be a witness to the aftermath of that suicide. Who is not of the people Jeffrey that you think really affected his life and the directions of his life.

In the very beginning his mother was probably the principal influence on him in there and they're very very very close relationship continued all through his life extremely close an extremely healthy relationship. Then I think JP Morgan for a time. When he was never very close to him but he admired him enormously. And then a man who was his cousin a man in Waterbury who was the was the confidant and I suppose lover of Edith Wharton was a great personage in Paris and at the time of his death there was a state funeral a huge funeral. Everybody attended and Harry was. It was his executor of his estate and arrange the funeral after after Barry's death and progression of literary figures influenced him. I fundamentally James Joyce Elliot McLeish had a great Archibald MacLeish a great influence on him. Hard crime to a lesser degree. His

lack of talent is in a way what makes his life so extraordinary. He said he had no he had no hope of transforming the materials of his life into art and he half realized that I think he wasn't under any great and under any great illusions about his his abilities. It makes the attempt even more brave. It means too that he had no substantial inner life. That means that that whatever was beneath whatever was beneath the surface of him was very close to the surface. So there was a very small gap between his motives and his subconscious and his acts and that is wonderful material for biography because it means that that what is acts. It means that the record that is actually our revelation of the man himself that the man himself of them means what. What did he do that we've been talking about the people who affected his life and I wondered.

How he must've affected so many people's lives that were that were there that many people really in his life. Yes there were a great many people in his life and people from all kinds and conditions of life one of one of the men who admired him most as it was a great friend of his was and was a New York gunman that he met during the war who offered to kill Crosby's not out of friendship over because of that cross because in his mind Crosby had determined did he mean that. Oh he meant it oh yes I know he faced our house in Baltimore and he was all set to he was also to do it when Crosbie found out that it was on the edge of an argument but he seemed to charm everybody who came within his orbit of the hundreds of people that I talked to who had touched him in some way or other talked to or communicated with by mail. There wasn't one of them who hadn't been drawn to him to his to a kind of a boyishness but also an intensity he had Hugh

he had he had enormous energy. They all remarked his courage. He was extremely handsome man. He was witty. His self-absorption. His incredible self-consciousness was a thing only confided to his journals and two letters. He didn't seem so preoccupied at all on the contrary he seemed enormously curious what people forget about him was that he was a voracious reader. He read enormously and his attendance of the office became less and less until it stopped altogether and he was very greatly assisted in his assimilation of poetry by what a better writer a relative of his one of the most sophisticated Americans in Paris a friend of Marcel Proust a man of means of the beautiful library a very intimate friend of his walking and whirled about right took took a shine to how right he he saw in the aspiration and how his aspiration and his

wish of James Joyce and his love of words that this was something to be encouraged in his very had an enormous library. He gave an even greater impetus to move into the realm of writing and of poetry. Then he might have had just left to his own now. Of course the difficulty was that Harry had never had any real discipline in writing and especially in portraits. So that. He had to employ three of us. His rhyming was hit or miss and what he really wanted to do was to somehow bring to the surface some of the unconventional ideas and thoughts Arris affectionate

shocking. And this is where he was delighted in being daring and he hoped that these would be published so he kept sending them back to me and I had my task to try to explain to him a different set of woods about every fortnight. Why. These weren't quite up to the Atlantic Standard. His courage was not of Hemingway's kind and is a very interesting I think distinction to be made between between him and once I think between Hemingway's Hemingway's life and suicide and Crosby's they were both For example in the same kind of war together. And they were both of us also traumatized during during during the campaigns and the war. Hemingway's entire life was lived according to a code which called for the overcoming of fear. He acknowledged fear and said that it just had to be overcome. There was a code that could be designed that would that would do this. Crosby's was less complicated but more awesome in a sense that he actually knew no fear. He

was he was utterly fearless and it was a thing that Hemingway remarked about in his carelessness and recklessness. He had no fear to overcome. And this is is because it's odd it's various. It's strange and it exerts an attraction I think you know the thing is if he were destined to have a short life of a fast paced one filled with all sorts of mixtures of things. But nevertheless I shotgunned What do you think about that. Oh certainly it had to be a short life because it was his his principal his principal belief he kept saying you should always leave the table before you're 4 or choose the moment you should die at the right time. And so the idea of surviving into middle age was unthinkable for him. He died at 31. He had experience by that time so much that I am writing about him.

I began the book when I was 35 and I'm now 38 I began when I was 33 and I threw it. There was never a time that I didn't think of him as older than I am because of his his range of experience I suppose. I cared about him for only only one reason and the answer I suppose seems simplistic but it's honest to say that he fascinates me. He interests me. I of course hope that that in the retelling of this story that that it will interest other people but that I can't control in terms of him being exemplary. I don't believe that there is such a thing as an exemplary figure from the 20s. I don't believe that people's lives can be shoehorned into the feces of any kind. Ironically he fled Boston to us. He wanted to escape all the ties that bound him. And there was a time when he cried out one of his diary entries he said it was it was very late it was after he and his wife caress had been involved in an orgy with the weather 13 year old Moroccan girl and much.

Much dope and smoked it and he talked about this extraordinary all of them writhing together in benzo and afterwards he had a trace of something he recognized both as a guilty conscience and his homesickness of all things and he cried out in his diary when oh when will the chains of New England be broken. And in fact he was much. I mean here he was. He was writing tirades against the Atlantic Monthly terrible tirades against the Atlantic Monthly and he was submitting as many as 50 poems a year there at the same time at the same time trying to get him and perhaps they were the same poems too. But I like very much about like a naughty child who really isn't very serious about what he's doing goes on tirades but nevertheless is very serious. He was terribly serious about it. He was too well. He was so sorry he killed himself because of what he believed. He was serious That's not to say that he was mature. He wasn't that. But

he was far more of what he did had far more consequence God knows them than the pranks of a naughty child. How do you think that Harry's death affected Boston. First of all. Well it's possible to answer that specific in some cases and in the graue family for example. The family in the graue family his mother his mother was a grow. There are still many grows around Boston and it was ordered ordered to do not speak of him. His name was not to be spoken at all. His mother was was devastated by that because she was so fond of her. John tried for a long time to. To blame it on the war entirely as a kind of an aftermath he was and in her imagination a victim of war casualty of war. His father was both was both wounded and in right aged part of his rage down from

from his his humiliation when he fancied to be his humiliation. That is his father had excuse me his son and scandalised had scandalised. That's gondolas past and that's reflected on him. The injury that Crosby did and the family of the woman that he killed is incalculable I have no way of judging but it must have been immense. How do you like to cross me all the years you spent with him. Yes I have been it's an affection which is not rational. I know we have no way of justifying it. It's very much of the nature of I think she's pretty I don't know but I couldn't have spent five years in this in this company with conditions of such intimacy if I hadn't. However having said that in my fiction forum I prefer to have that kind of distance. I'm not I think what he did is both evil and absurd

but fascinating. He did have this feeling this strange feeling that grew deeper in him about death and he never wanted to live to a time when his physical resources were any less than they were in the 1920s when he and caress rented very romantic converted dawn that belong to the Rothschilds. He planted the tombstone in the courtyard. They were going to they were going to leave the earth in 1942 which by that calculation was about as far as they could stand. Author Jeffrey will find a good week's of the Atlantic Monthly discussing carry Crosby his biography recently appears in book form titled The Black Sun. The time Technica. This is Eleanor stout.

Thing to think on is produced in the studios of WGBH Boston by Greg Fitzgerald. We invite your comments on the program. Our address is 125 Western Avenue Boston. I am. I am.