Nothing But a Star
Nothing But a Star
by Jeremy Reed
Chômu Press
Nothing But a Star
by Jeremy Reed
Published by Chômu Press, MMXIII
Nothing But a Star copyright © Jeremy Reed 2013
The right of Jeremy Reed to be identified as Author of this
Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Published in December 2013 by Chômu Press.
by arrangement with the author.
All rights reserved by the author.
First Kindle Edition
Design and layout by: Bigeyebrow and Chômu Press
Cover photo copyright to: Gregory Hesse-Wagner
E-mail: info@chomupress.com
Internet: chomupress.com
to John Robinson and Mark Jackson with love
“Jeremy Reed is a legend. What more can you fucking ask?”
Pete Doherty
“Jeremy Reed’s talent is almost extra-terrestrial in its brilliance. He is Rimbaud reconfigured as the Man who fell to Earth, a visitor from deep space whose time machine was designed by Lautréamont and de Sade, and powered by the most exotic fuels the imagination has ever devised.”
J.G. Ballard
“The man is light worlds apart from his contemporaries in poetry.”
Andrew Loog Oldham
“One of the most original virtuoso voices to be heard in the poetry of our time.”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
“The most beautiful, outrageously brilliant poetry in the world.”
Björk
Contents
BLACK TATTOOS
Black Tattoos (The Suicides of Hart Crane and Harry Crosby)
COME ALIVE AND BURN
Around the World
Superglue
Diadem Court
Reported Sightings
A Day in the Life
Soho Kids in Retro—(pop song)
ET Conference
Harold Robbins
Peppering Strawberries
Bonus Tracks
Jumping the Queue
Pink Roses
Bank Holiday
Just a Shot Away
Geranium and Orange Chocolate
100 Years On or So
Workshop
Holly’s Moves
Chasing the Dragon
Come Alive and Burn
Maddox Street
Elegy for Paul Lightborn
Books
Wounded Kink
WHITE BOY BLUES
White Boy Blues
THREE SONGS FOR JAKE ARNOTT’S THE LONG FIRM
Suck Grease Off Fingers
Vada the Mystery
The Casbah Lounge
LOVE SONG
Love Song by Jean Genet—(Goldfinger remix)
NASTY HABITS: MICK TAYLOR’S ROLLING STONES
Nasty Habits: Mick Taylor’s Rolling Stones
VOODOO
Johnny Spitfire
Marta
Voodoo
The Velvet Underground Bootleg Series
China Tea, Roses and Your Sort of Hat
Eleonara Come Back
Ruth Ellis Blues
Listening to the Television Personalities
Collecting Asa (Benveniste)
Selling Truman Capote
‘Sorrow’—original and cover
Charles Baudelaire, Voyage to Cythera—(sex tourist remix)
DORIAN
Dorian
LYRICS
Limehouse Blues—(Dorian)
Sling City—(Henry Wotton)
Black Honey
Excess and Ruin—(Dorian)
Sibyl Vane’s Blues
A THOUSAND STARS IN MY EYES
HQ
Hanging On
Ham Yard
White Poppy Blues
Roses and Guns
Pills
Retro Shirts
Shares
Addicted
Never Too Busy To Be Beautiful
Pulling the Cork
J&B
Sweet Thing
Broken Hearted
Global Spin
Donald Fagen’s Top Ten
What John Ashbery Eats for Lunch
Mister Handsome
Just a Shot Away
Broadwick Street
Vauxhall Bridge
Russian Caravan
Sequins
Jean Cocteau Lines made into a Pop Song
Lissiana
Allium
Maroon Dahlia
Sandra
Urban Cannibals
Autumn Blues
Depression Greys
September Writing in the Rain
Honey
What I’m Doing
Street Reading
Elephants
Yauatcha
R.E.M.
Yellow Chrysanthemums
What I’m Giving
Non-Mainstream
Frank
AGAINST NATURE
Ennui
Indigo and Orange
Flowers and Cannibals
Uranian Blues
A Delinquent Treat
Frangipani
Foggy Harbour Days
Black Halo
Disease and the Devil
Saint in Black Velvet
Me and My Coffin
BLACK TATTOOS
Black Tattoos
The Suicides of Hart Crane and Harry Crosby
Late afternoon, Tuesday, December 10, 1929, New York, was a grainy foggy one that smoked in off the cold harbours like old Kodak film stock. Harry Crosby, the sex-addicted, opium-hallucinating, suicide-obsessed poet and playboy, and his desperately susceptible on-and-off sex-partner, Josephine Rotch Bigelow, were due to join Hart Crane at the Lyceum (having already adopted Hart’s family name, when checking into the expensive Book-Cadillac Hotel in Detroit, earlier in the week, as Mr and Mrs Harry Crane), to see Leslie Howard playing the part of a ghost in a comedy called Berkeley Square.
When Harry Crosby’s equally promiscuous wife, Caresse, grew anxious over his failure to turn up at the Lyceum, she called their mutual friend, Stanley Mortimer, in whose borrowed New York apartment at the Hotel des Artistes Harry and Josephine were staying, to have Mortimer go over there in person, while Caresse continued to worry at her husband’s no show.
Alarmed by his failure to elicit any response from his repeated hammering on the bedroom door, and sensing an emergency, Mortimer got help to break open the lock, and found the fully clothed couple dead on blood-soaked pillows stained a dense A&E red. Harry was still holding the .25 calibre Belgian automatic pistol with which he had blown off Josephine’s head by shooting her through the left temple, two hours later, repeating the process by shattering his cranium with a bullet fired through his right temple, in what appeared to be a sensational suicide pact.
The coroner’s report added that Harry’s nails and toes were painted bright red (he also had a penchant for pre-punk black), and that the soles of his feet were signatured with two black tattoos—one depicting a cross, and the other an Egyptian solar sign, representative of Harry’s own personalised sun worship. Curiously, Harry’s wedding ring was found scrunched on the floor, not on his finger, where he had always promised Caresse it would remain. Meanwhile, in his wallet, and typically for Harry, was a photo of Zora, the 13-year-old Berber girl he’d had sex with in Egypt, during a visit there six years earlier in 1923.
Why the ruthlessly flattened gold wedding ring, stamped underfoot? Another bit of blood-hot solar imagery in Harry
’s inventive myth-making? Was it evidence suggesting a disruptive Josephine may have insisted he left Caresse for her (Josephine herself having married a Harvard man, Albert Smith Bigelow, six months earlier on June 21, 1929)? Did Harry, smashed on opium pills, murder Josephine as an act of delusional mania, and spend the next two excruciating hours evaluating what he’d done, and what subconsciously he’d always wanted to do, before coldly pulverising his brain with a single bullet’s impacted rip?
What interests me in part is that in order to visualise what happened in that locked bedroom, and to recreate whatever we imagine led to a possible murder/suicide flashpoint, we have to stream our own internalised videos of re-made footage. We’re all imagining different concepts of how it was—the physical atrocity, the facial mutilation, the violently accelerated momentum precipitating the first shot: we’re all for a moment seeing red. But what if Harry died happy, after blowing Josephine apart, believing in his private mythology that a suicide pact was the ultimate union in establishing an extra-terrestrial gateway to the Sun?
Gretchen Powell, who had lunch with Harry on that same day, December 10, 1929, related that he had told her, ‘The Rotch girl {Josephine} was pestering him; he was exasperated; she had threatened to kill herself in the lobby of the Savoy-Plaza if he didn’t meet her at once.’ Who wanted who in this accelerated car-chase of hysterically exhausted personalities across the next four to five hours in freezing downtown New York?
Four days earlier on December 6, Harry had noted in his obsessively confessional diary, ‘New York. J sick as a cat from the opium. 1west 67 I see C. I fight with Josephine. I go to bed 2702 with C.’
The day after his fight with Josephine, he recorded, ‘Modern Art Gallery, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, Seurat. 1 Van Gogh still life 2 Gauguin decorative panels 3 Van Gogh room at Arles. J appears all young and sparkling her eyes goodbye in that grey city. Hart Crane party for H and C EE Cummings. Pack of cards I said I like Hearts the best I drew and I drew the Ace of Hearts the card I wanted.’
I want to time-cut here to April 27, 1932, with the SS Orizaba, carrying amongst its 90 New York-bound passengers, the poet Hart Crane, and Peggy Cowley, his one failed attempt at a heterosexual relationship. It’s approximately ten minutes before noon, the ship’s four turbines churning a boiling wake 275 miles out of Havana: real-time, sea-time, no-time.
The previous day a drunken Hart Crane disembarking at Havana was robbed, beaten and bruised after an assignation with a sailor, and had made a will, leaving his anticipated inheritance from his father’s estate to a sailor called Bob Stewart, explaining to the latter that he had ‘very wilfully killed’ himself, and concluding: ‘Dear Bob, I remember so many things, and I have loved you always, and this is my only end.’
When Peggy Cowley, after going ashore at Havana to buy Hart a number of blues records he loved, returned to the ship alone, to find Hart, who had remained on board, seriously drunk at the bar, she had suffered the accident, while lighting a cigarette, of having a box of Cuban matches explode, scorching her wrist and leaving a painful burn demanding immediate medical attention. Peggy was sedated by the ship’s doctor, given a sleeping pill, and awoke late on the 27th to another block of Hart’s brutally self-destructive recriminations, on what was to be his last morning. Hart was already drinking Cutty Sark from the bottle, and complained out of booze-induced amnesia that he could remember nothing of the incidents on shore leading to his wallet and rings going missing. In the attempt to sober him and calm his erratic, unpredictable behaviour, Peggy insisted he order breakfast from the steward, and remembered Hart having grapefruit, cereal, eggs and bacon, and toast, and eating with the relish of someone who probably hadn’t done so for several days.
Hart apparently had a saucer-shaped black eye, from his encounter with the marines, and, usually fastidious about his appearance, refused either to shave or dress, keeping a light topcoat on over his blue pyjamas. ‘I’m not going to make it, dear, I’m utterly disgraced,’ is what Peggy Cowley remembers him saying, before he left her cabin a few minutes short of noon.
My friend Alan Detweiler often reminds me of his intention to die in optimal health, as a means of projective release from the body, and Hart Crane’s ingestion of pleasurable protein and carbohydrates, coffee and fruit juice was the nutritional incentive he needed to fire him up to jump over the ship’s rail, clear-eyed and not dodgily drunk.
According to witnesses on deck, Crane walked rapidly to the Orizaba’s stern, without looking back, surrounded on all sides by an intense, aching blue window of seamless Caribbean sea and sky, took off his topcoat, and, neat to the last, tied it to the ship’s barrier-railing rather than drop it on deck. It’s interesting that care for his coat, in a very pronounced way, should be almost his last human act: putting the coat before himself. Hart apparently stood at the ship’s oxidised railings for an agonisingly extended 90 seconds, before vaulting them on an accelerated trajectory that pushed him out in an arc over the white-lettered stern, his kamikaze nosedive impacting with the sea as 150 lbs of mass shattering in a white explosive plume. A witness saw him surface once briefly, before disappearing forever from sight, the ship travelling at a relentless 17 knots as it crossed the Tropic of Cancer en route for New York.
What was Hart’s last taste—salt water?—and his last emotion—optimally panicked shock?—before the turbines sucked him under in a concussed, spiralling vortex?
Unlike Harry Crosby’s ripped open body, Hart’s was never reclaimed; the Orizaba jolting to a thunderous halt, and the captain immediately launching lifeboats to lucklessly patrol the unknown zone in search of Crane’s remains, before Captain James Blackladder put the ship back on course for New York.
What happens immediately after we die? What is the signposting, if any, with which we become neurally acquainted? Is death like smashing a space-time window to access altered physics in another radically altered state? Is the shift in consciousness quantum, in allowing us to exist like a particle simultaneously in two places at once, or does the brain physically shutdown? And what’s out there to which consciousness can attach in a subatomic world of dark matter, vibrating strings, point particles, two-dimensional membranes, three-dimensional blobs and other p-brane objects?
Harry Crosby died at 29, and Hart Crane at 32, both suicides sustained by an unstoppably accelerated momentum, a speed of life that felt inhibited by partial restraint, and aimed through a sort of volume-up euphoric overreach to crash into another dimension with the force of a Boeing’s nose cone rammed into a tower. Suicide seems to me to be motivated in some instances by the impulse to overtake the body’s physical resources in the attempt to connect with an imaginative reality projected into possible futures. It’s a frustration comparable to writing poetry or fiction, in that no matter how much you alter reality on the page, nothing happens off it. Sometimes out and about in Soho as my psychogeographic precinct, I get confused by quarters I’ve changed in recent novels of mine like The Grid, Here Comes The Nice and Space Oddity Gene, and start to believe that what I’ve imagined has become a physical reality. It’s this split between imagined and real time, and the acute realisation that the two are at variance, that so often leads to the sense of disappointment or disillusionment damping the creative sensibility. When you can’t physically realise what you’re mentally doing, you’re in sort of trouble. It’s like trying to fire a bullet into the fourth dimension.
Harry Crosby was so death-obsessed that he carried cremation instructions on him all the time, throughout his recklessly hedonistic lifestyle in Paris in the 1920s as a writer, publisher, and decadent partyer, fuelled by substances like hashish, cocaine and opium, and sex-addicted on a random bisexual basis, his optimal need for kicks fully endorsed by his wife, Caresse, with whom he shared his ramped-up sensory experiences. As an avant-garde small press publisher, beginning with Editions Narcisse in 1927, Crosby, apart from publishing the likes of D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound and James Joyce, also initialised publication of a limited editi
on of Hart Crane’s epic poem The Bridge, through his Black Sun Press (finally released in 1930, after Crosby’s death) with tipped-in photos by Walker Evans, in a deluxe limited edition preceding the Boni & Liveright trade edition published later in the same year.
Harry Crosby, like Hart Crane, was addicted to optimal sensation, which for him largely meant substance abuse, opportunistic sex, gambling recklessly, alcohol and compulsive shopping, particularly for rare books and jewellery. His trust fund, endlessly manipulated by selling stock from his future inheritance, was 12,000 dollars a year, a sum that he was capable of liquidating in a month. Harry lived like a hedonistic rock star with a groupie entourage he bought, wasted and mostly discarded. Born into Boston and banking, and the concern that is now J.P. Morgan Bank, Harry, rejecting his solid money past, moved to Paris, with his wife Caresse, and, most of the time stoned on hashish, began writing the explosively visionary poetry, flavoured by decadent aspects picked up from his readings of Baudelaire, Gerard de Nerval and Rimbaud. This he self-published in six volumes during his lifetime: Sonnets for Caresse (1925), Red Skeletons (1927), Transit of Venus (1928), Chariot of the Sun (1929), Mad Queen Tirades (1929) and, just weeks before his handgun suicide, Sleeping Together; A Book of Dreams (1929). But, in many ways, the wired, hyperactive, psychoactively altered state known as Harry Crosby is best read through his extraordinary, accelerated, counterintuitive diaries, obsessively maintained day by day, and published selectively as Shadows Of The Sun by Black Sparrow Press (1977).