Grieving Mothers in Solidarity – ‘Our Boys are at Rest’
CROSBY, Harry; Henrietta Grew CROSBY (editor). War Letters. Paris: The Black Sun Press. 1932.
4to. Original marbled calf-backed boards with patterned paper sides, spine gilt-ruled in compartments with two green morocco lettering pieces, patterned endpapers, tricolour silk place-marker, tail-edge uncut; pp. [8], vii, [1 (blank)], 312, [6], photographic portrait frontispiece of Crosby in uniform, with tissue guard, p. 305 with twelfth line from bottom blacked out as usual; extremities a little rubbed, light spotting to text block and to prelims, otherwise a very good copy; loosely inserted printed visiting card of ‘Mrs Stephen Van Rensselaer Crosby’, inscribed in ink ‘Dear Rita | It was lovely seeing you yesterday. I wish we met oftener. I hope you’ll enjoy these letters. I always feel a great bond with you but our boys are at rest and saved from the hard things of life. Much love | Rita’ (see below).
First edition, limited to 125 unnumbered copies printed on Navarre paper, of these letters from the front by Harry Crosby – founder of the Black Sun Press – edited by his mother, Henrietta Van Rensselaer Crosby (née Grew, 1872–1957) and published in the aftermath of Crosby’s death by suicide in 1931, our copy with a loosely inserted visiting card inscribed by Henrietta to another mother who had lost her son.
Born into New England’s influential and long-established Van Rensselaer family, Harry Crosby, a nephew of J. P. Morgan Junior and a direct descendant of Peggy Schuyler (sister-in-law of Alexander Hamilton), was educated at Nobles and St Mark’s. At the age of nineteen, he – like Ernest Hemingway – volunteered with the American Ambulance Corps during the First World War. War Letters gathers the letters he sent home to his mother, father, and sister from the front, edited by his mother Henrietta, who added a chronology and a brief preface; she was able to see her son multiple times during the war, travelling to Lunéville in January 1918 ‘under the auspices of the Y. M. C. A. to work in a Foyer du Soldat’, where mother and son were ‘able to pass several “permissions” together’.
Crosby returned from the war in March 1919 and studied at Harvard from 1919–21, and in 1922, sick of the ‘Boston virgins who are brought up among sexless surroundings’, as he would later recall in his diaries, moved to Paris with his wife Caresse (called by Time ‘the literary godmother to the Lost Generation of expatriate writers in Paris’). There, the two American expatriates founded the Black Sun Press, publishing the early works of writers including Hart Crane, D.H. Lawrence, Archibald MacLeish, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway, amongst others.
He returned to the United States for a party held in New York by his friend Hart Crane, whose poem The Bridge was to be published by the Black Sun Press the following week. On 10 December 1910, Crosby shot and killed himself and his lover, Josephine Noyes Rotch. After his death, Caresse and Henrietta collaborated to bring his War Letters to print. One line on p. 305 has been censored in ink, as usual: ‘How did that damn fool H.S. ever make the Porcellian?’. Harvard’s Porcellian Club, established in the 1790s, is one of the university’s oldest and most prestigious social clubs.
Provenance: Given by Henrietta Crosby to a close friend, Rita – a woman who, like her, had lost a son. She writes on her loosely inserted calling card ‘ I always feel a great bond with you but our boys are at rest and saved from the hard things of life’, expressing her hope of meeting more frequently and that her friend might enjoy Harry’s letters.
Minkoff A-43.
SKU: 2121126