Torchbearer. With Notes by Ezra Pound. First limited edition.
Paris: Black Sun Press, MCMXXXI. 4to. 18 x 23cm. Original wraps. One of 50 numbered copies on Holland paper. Volume IV of "The Collected Poems of Harry Crosby."....
Caresse published this work 2 years after Harry killed his lover Josephine Rotch and himself... Crosby revered Rimbaud, and with Rimbaud’s self-deregulation in mind, believed in his own idealizations of suicide. To his wife, Caresse Crosby, he had proposed suicide pacts on several occasions since early in their relationship....
He wrote about such pacts in his poems and in his diaries, and he talked about them, most consequentially, with the most significant of his many mistresses, Josephine Rotch Bigelow, with whom he was found dead in bed—a bullet hole to her left temple, a bullet hole to his right temple, his right hand holding a .25 caliber pistol, his free hand joined in Josephine’s—in a New York hotel room on December 11th, 1929.....
The couple was fully clothed, and there was no suicide note. They had consumed immense quantities of gin and opium pills, not unusual for Harry, or his “fire-princess,” as he called Josephine, who, like himself, was thoroughly a product of Back Bay Boston. Had Josephine been the first to call Harry’s bluff, and insist that he carry through in action the belief he expressed to her, that the greatest expression and fulfillment of love was for two lovers to die together in suicide?"
Minkoff, A-42.
OCLC Number / Unique Identifier:
471859
Provenance… Collection of Dr. Gregory R. Bonomo. Item #51-6516
Price: $1,250.00