Death, and suicide, were a central focus of Crosby’s life, easily seen by even the most basic review of his biography (he died at age 31, in December 1929, in a murder/ suicide (or double-suicide), of/with his mistress) and writings (see, for example, his prose-poem “Sun-Death”(in 1929’s Mad Queen), originally titled “Hail : Death !” when first published in a variant version).
Crosby’s obsession with death/suicide is, for me, deeply unsettling and uncomfortable, even awful. The obsession contrasts sharply with much that was invigorating and inspiring in his life, including to him, such as his devotion to and championing of poetry, writing, and books (reading, collecting, and publishing), or his deep passion for many people and things of this world, as shown in many passage of his diary (see Shadows of the Sun, Black Sparrow Press, 1977). He loved many women and men, and his diary recounts many moments of awe and wonder, both grand and intimate, in his years in Paris and associated travel.
Crosby’s attraction to / need for death probably arose from, or was super-charged by, from the crucible / psychological scrambling of his World War I service, including at Verdun, particularly the November 22,1917 incident in which a shell obliterated the ambulance he was driving (and seriously wounded his passenger) but somehow left him physically unharmed. The War clearly impacted him profoundly, and never left him. As he wrote in February 1925, after having finished Les Croix de Bois [Wooden Crosses], Roland Dorgelès’ moving novel, “ . . . above all else we who have known war must never forget war. And that is why I have the picture of a soldier’s corpse nailed to the door of my library.”
Morris Ekstein, in his Rites of Spring (1989), suggests the war was for Crosby an escape from what he saw as the dreadful dull life of Boston’s elites, and that the war’s “pervasive horror” became “ a stimulus . . . to personal imagination and inwardness an avenue to a new and vital realm of activity.”
Gregory Wolff, in his seminal biography, suggests that Crosby’s focus on death in part pre-dated the war, and, in the Afterword when the book was republished, describes “the mystery of his suicide” and says Crosby was the “willing prisoner of his announcement that he would control his end, die when and how he chose.” See Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby, 1976 / 2003). Of course, Crosby, again to judge by his diary, was in the last years of his life also a heavy drinker and regular user of opium, perhaps resulting from, and/or reflecting, deep psychological depression.
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Given his obsession with death, it comes as no surprise that Crosby, in his seven or so years in Paris, occasionally visited the city’s famous cemeteries, as documented in his diary. Once he visited, on the same day (April 4, 1925) both Charles Baudelaire’s grave in Montparnasse and Oscar Wilde’s tomb in Père Lachaise. He also visited the Catacombs.
(Side note: for a deep-dive into the continuing vitality of Paris’cemeteries, click-thru for Peter Ross’s well-done article in Smithsonian Magazine, November 2025).
To me, the most interesting aspect of Crosby and Paris cemeteries involves a little known graveyard he happened upon in late 1923, while walking with his wife Caresse in the Bois de Boulogne (the Boulogne Woods), a large public park on the city’s western edge that also had a well-known horse racetrack that they frequented (both to race their horses and to bet on others). Known as the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp, it became a favorite place for him, and the “story” here, traced from nearly twenty diary entries spread over the following five years set in or which reference the cemetery, is fascinating. It shows well Crosby’s sensibilities, particularly (and obviously) his intense obsession / identification with death and place, but also his love of the authentic both in locales and people (here, the Roux, an elderly couple who served as the graveyard’s caretakers). Best of all, the story, such as it is, can be told in Crosby’s words, and should be – and as such also serves as an exemplar of his observational skills, attention to details, and poetic diary writing.
Here then are the relevant excerpts from his diary (with bracketed explanatory text added for context, plus a few historic photos of the cemetery, such that I could find):
1923
December 18. A long walk in the Bois [de Boulogne] and we came upon a stone house half-hidden by the trees, a house with a garden enclosed by a stone wall and guarded by a great iron gate. A handful of silver to the old crone and the gate was swung open. The Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp (had never heard of its existence) and we wandered among the graves, and the grass was tall and unkept and weeds everywhere and moss growing upon the wall and tombstones all leaning awry and by our side the aged crone mumbling and muttering. With her lean forefinger she indicated the grave of a danseuse du roi [King’s dancer]. Cypress trees grouped in a corner and the place overrun by cyclamen. A real burying place. We must be buried there.
Christmas and for me a purple handkerchief (“and all that there is of beauty in me to give”) and the day is very clear and cold and after prayers at the Madeleine [La Madeleine, presumably] and after luncheon at the H’s where everyone drank hot punch from a great wassail bowl, we walked out to the Bois [de Boulogne] to the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp where the old woman greeted us. The Cimetière and the Soul. Dead leaves and the frost on the ground and the sentinel fir tree watching over the dead. Over the top of the stonewall a red-gold winter sun had almost set. The air was cold and damp and in the underbrush we saw a leaning tombstone with an archaic urn carved upon it. Nearby a simple stone cross enclosed by four low stone pillars these linked together by a rust-corroded chain. Among the trees a white goat browsed and under the dark wall. Soul in Eternity dreaming and praying prayers into the departing Sun. It was dark when we reached Paris . . . .
1924
October 16. Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp; entangled foliage, gravestones leaning awry, moss-covered stone walls, [¶] Perhaps it is here I shall kill myself. [¶] Must live in colors. A red-gold sun flames westward with my inmost color-prayers (“et leurs cendres reposent dans la même urne” [“and their ashes rest in the same urn” – an unattributed quotation from Ovid, Metamorphoses]
Christmas and the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp and orchids and gardenias on the grave of the danseuse du roi. The Gate to the Sun.
1925
March 16. [At the Escorial, in Segovia, Spain] . . . the gloomiest part was the descent into the crypt . . . where lie the buried Kings of Spain, down a long granite staircase, into the small octagonal burial-vault built directly under the high altar of the church . . . . Black sarcophagus and the empty tomb of Alphonse XIII . . . and how many times must he be haunted by this chamber of horrors. How different this chamber which oppresses, which smothers, from the sunshine and moonlight and chaste disorder of the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp.
October 31. Gold and red and brown are the leaves on the ground and it is a gray day and our black Dom Luco gallops out to the post (Casaque Grixe, Croix de Malte Rose, Toque Noire) and twenty-two horses ran and we were twenty-second and afterwards to the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp.
Christmas. And C is still away and it is a sombre grey day and out to the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp—one strong flame into the red-gold Sun. And a gift to the Roux (they were there before I was born) and a glass of wine with them and there was the dog and the parrot and the white goat.
1926
May 24. The Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp. Chequered sunlight and prayers and I read the Rubaiyat sitting against a tree trunk and there were twin trees upgrowing in oneness from a humble grave and their branches were interlaced and there were the lichened walls and the dense foliage and the moss-covered tombstones lean awry (like love-thoughts leaning in the brain) and there were prayers into the Sun (my soul a fountain playing into the Sun, gushing sunthoughts into the Sun).
June 29. [. . .] . . . and to the Cimetière after supper and we ran Narcisse [the Crosby’s whippet]—a black arrow through the long grass . . . .
July 4. [In Massachusetts] More of Symons [The Symbolist Movement in Literature (expanded/revised 1919 edition)] – Léon Cladel who (like E.E. Cummings) employs ‘oddities of printing, of punctuation, of the very shape of his accents!’ and ‘l’âme de Léon Cladel était dans un constant et flamboyant automne’ ["Something of the colour and fever of autumn is in all he wrote.”] This is me and my Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp and my red-gold sun.
July 11. [In Massachusetts] The Beach again at noon and I was bored and C. was terribly bored and I thought of the Cimetière . . . .
July 31. [In Siasconsent, Massachusetts] . . . of all places the most dreary. [ . . . ] After supper C and I and the mother-in-law to the Cinema and it was disgusting, especially the audience, and there was rowdyism among the children . . . for whom this damn country seems to be run and how the place smelt, stank rather, of bananas and cococola and ice-cream. Resolved to become a Persian. Thank Christ (if the Sun-God is willing) a month from to-night we should be back in Nineteen Rue de Lille. [ ¶ ] Before supper to-night holding an orange-blossom cocktail towards the red sun, the red-gold knowledge of the color of my burning shoe into the remoteness of my soul. Thank you O Sun and Prayers and Aeolus and Green and Gold and the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp.
November 13. To the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp and the Roux present us with a “canard” (nourished on corpses?) and it was wonderful to see the pleasure they got from giving us this gift and there were Prayers . . . .
1927
May 11. To the Montparnasse Cemetery to get our gravestone and in a taxi I took it out to the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp . . . .
December 25. Christmas for the Christians but for Sun-Worshippers the Birthday of the Sun and I walked out to the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp and there were skulls lying in a heap (they are rearranging things) and I moved our gravestone from the chicken yard to a place of security under a fir tree and I gave the Roux a hundred francs and we drank together Benedictine from my flask and I fed an apple to the goat . . . .
1928
First Day of the Year. [. . .] . . . and out to the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp where we found the frightening queer old Madame Roux wandering among the graves like someone walking in her sleep (c’est-il vrai Monsieur [is it true Sir]) and Narcisse went sniffing into the Invisible Sun and there were strange goings on—graves being rearranged and six tombstones have disappeared and we went away . . . .
May 31. [returning from Versailles] . . . and it began to rain a rain of stars and on the way home we stopped at the Cimetière de l’Abbaye de Longchamp to get our gravestone and to say goodbye to the Roux (too disgusting of the park commissioners to destroy the walls and to put all the skulls and skeletons in one common grave—I am furious with them especially as I had offered to pay for the preservation of the walls) . . . .
And so the story ends -- the cherished almost forgotten cemetery taken down by the park commissioners, with Crosby -- understandably and even, it seems, justifiably -- furious at the action, with his dreamed-of final resting place vanished.
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