Fantastic figures fornicate and fuse

Into deciduous monsters that abuse

The girl-gold visions over whom I reign.

Or

October 12--Sherry and Schopenhauer. I like him best of the philosophers (and sherry best of the light wines)

October 14--More Sherry and more Schopenhauer. By seeing so far he (the genius) does not see what is near; he is imprudent and 'queer and while his vision is hitched to a star he falls into a well... the genius is forced into isolation, and sometimes into madness

In his biography of Crosby, Black Sun, Geoffrey Wolff stresses Crosby's notion of madness as a short-cut to genius. And there is undoubtedly a manic quality to many of the jottings that goes beyond mere eccentricity. His entry for January 1, 1929 begins:

"Sunfire"

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 this year be the Sunfire Year) and we all kissed each other....

In this hysteria, though, Crosby is only more extreme than the times he was living in. It has become proverbial to describe the 20s in terms of a final, desperate fling before the reckoning of 1929.

As for the subjects of Crosby's records, they are exotic and often as empty as the writer himself. He describes the great literary figures of his day and the watering-holes of the very rich with minute detail but little empathy. The characters he describes live only insofar as they affect Harry's life, consequently, his perspective is slanted.

It was this egoism (as well as a lack of talent) that prevented Crosby from developing into a genuine artist. His spiritually hollow diaries show little sympathy for the people they describe and even his reverence for decadence was second-hand, gleaned from other people's books. He longed for a niche in posterity. But in the end he earned little more than the short-lived notoriety of the suicide who murders his beautiful mistress as a prelude to suicide. And that is no more than any brute with a pistol can achieve.