Caresse Crosby Read online

  Caresse Crosby

  From Black Sun to Roccasinibalda

  Anne Conover

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not have been possible without the enthusiastic support of the Bennington Writing Workshops (Brian Swann, director), and especially of my mentor in the writing of Creative Non-Fiction, Scott R. Sanders, who found merit in the project and suggested a publisher. In Scott’s words: “Writing is a lonely business, the most isolating of all art forms. We need to gather once in a while to share our work . . . to hear other human voices.”

  I am also deeply indebted to the staff of the Morris Library, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, who were unfailingly helpful: Dr. David V. Koch, curator of Special Collections; Sheila Ryan, curator of manuscripts (for the photo research); and Shelley Cox. Beatrice Moore of Carterville, widow of Harry T. Moore, also gave freely of her time and intelligence in assisting my research.

  Of the many others who gave abundantly of their efforts, I wish to thank:

  Polleen Peabody Drysdale of London, Caresse’s only daughter, who graciously received me and gave generously of her memories and permission to quote from her unpublished memoir;

  Richard Peabody, editor of Gargoyle and D.C. Magazines: A Literary Retrospective, who put me in touch with many valuable resources (when I first contacted Rick, I assumed he was a descendant of Caresse’s first husband, which he is not);

  Evelyn Lazzari, widow of Pietro, who offered memories and tea and sympathy and started me off on my path of discovery;

  Allegra Fuller Snyder, Buckminster Fuller’s daughter, and her husband, Robert Snyder, who contributed the narration of the film, Always Yes! Caresse; Selden Rodman, for permission to quote from his unpublished diaries; Kay Boyle, Caresse’s closest and only remaining friend of “the passionate years,” who reviewed that portion of the manuscript;

  In Paris: Henri Cartier-Bresson and Josef Erhardy;

  In New York: Helen-Louise Simpson Seggerman, who contributed memories of the brownstone on East 91st Street and of her parents, the Kenneth Simpsons; Andreas Brown of the Gotham Book Mart, and the late Frances Steloff, whose memory remained extraordinarily clear and faithful into her 90s; Buffie Johnson, Bertha Klausner, Priscilla Morgan, David Porter, Sam Rosenberg, George Stillwaggon, and Dorothea Tanning Ernst;

  Of the Washington years: Ellen Barry, Garry Davis, the late Major Howard “Pete” Powel, Mrs. Raymond Piland of Bowling Green, Va. (owner of Hampton Manor); and Lucy Keith Tittman (of Concord, Mass.), who lived at 2008 Q Street in the ‘50s and shared her letters and memories.

  In Italy: the late Roloff Beny and Robert Mann; Giuseppi Picchi, mayor of the Commune of Roccasinibalda; Giuseppi de Stefani, owner of the Castello; and Dr. Luigi Ceccarelli, the accommodating friend who put me in touch;

  Also special thanks to Desmond O’Grady of Kinsale, County Cork, Ireland, and Professor Sy M. Kahn of the University of the Pacific, who filled in the gaps on Caresse’s life at the Italian Center for Creative Arts and Humanist Living;

  Walter Phelps Jacob of Cape Elizabeth, Maine, Caresse’s only surviving brother, who despite “the considerable age differential” and the “very different worlds lived in by Sister Poll and myself,” received me and reminisced about the Jacob family; and Josette Spiero, Caresse’s daughter-in-law for memories of “Billy” Peabody.

  Others who were contacted for briefer interviews, in person, by mail, or by telephone, were: Malcolm Cowley, Larry Allen (childhood friend of Romare Bearden), Catherine Hios (sister of Michael Lekakis), the late Sarah Hunter Kelly, Robert Payne, Ted Peckham, Florence Tamburro, Arthur Wagmann, Volkmar Kurt Wentzel, Billie Wills, and Mrs. Theodore Watson (Leonard Jacob’s widow). Of those who died almost on the eve of an interview—most recently Isamu Noguchi and Edward Weeks—Romare Bearden, Salvador Dali, Archibald MacLeish, Harry T. Moore, and Helen Simpson: their loss is felt on these pages.

  With grateful appreciation to George Robert Minkoff for providing a rare copy of the Bibliography of the Black Sun Press; the late George Butterick of the University of Connecticut, Storrs, who provided access to the Charles Olson letters (and to Charles Boer, who catalogued them); to Edith Wynner, who introduced me to the Schwimmer-Lloyd Collection on World Peace at the New York Public Library; to Marc Pachter, assistant director of the National Portrait Gallery (author of Telling Lives) for his helpful suggestions and for the support of the members of the Washington Biographers’ group.

  To Derek W. Marlow, who visited Roccasinibalda in the ’60s and suggested Caresse as a subject;

  To Dr. Karen Shanor, who helped to explore Caresse’s psyche, and who encouraged me through the birthing process;

  To Veronica Wilding-White, who began the word processing of the manuscript; and to Mary W. Matthews, who finished it, without whose intelligence, skill, good humor, and long hours at the computer we could not have gone to press on schedule;

  To Noel and Judith Young and Lynn Maginnis of Capra Press, who shared my enthusiasm and were the “wind at my back” in seeing the manuscript through to hard cover;

  To Hugh M. Pinkerton, William Paul Pinkerton, and “Polly” Parsons Pinkerton, who taught me the beauty of the English language; and to my mother, Louise Pinkerton Conover, who inspired me to write it;

  To my daughter, Natalie Ambrose, and to my husband, Thomas B. Carson, neglected during the many months from prologue to finish, but without whose cooperation and love I could not have stayed the course.

  Foreword

  The name Caresse Crosby is almost unknown today. Yet Crosby was a significant figure in the fertile world of Paris publishing in the 1920s, instrumental in bringing to fruition many important works under the imprint of the Black Sun Press, and a coruscating personality in the colorful pantheon of those who came to international prominence as the so-called “Lost Generation.”

  In the literature, she is often overshadowed by her then-husband, Harry Crosby. The life of Harry Crosby has been well documented, most recently by Geoffrey Wolff, in his Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby, published by Random House in 1976. Indeed Harry Crosby’s life was violent, brief and, apparently, insane. But it was the question, “What happened to Caresse after Harry?” that intrigued Anne Conover. She began dedicated research into Caresse Crosby’s life and times, and uncovered a fascinating woman who has received insufficient acclaim for her many contributions. Even Geoffrey Wolff, in his study of Crosby, dismissing the fascinating period of Caresse Crosby’s later years in two paragraphs of his Postscript to Black Sun, described her as an “odd mixture of shrewdness and goofiness.”

  George Bernard Shaw once said, “The greatest sin is not to love or hate someone, but to be indifferent to them.” And it is this indifference to Caresse Crosby that author Anne Conover has attempted to address and redress, through a study of Crosby’s papers at the Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, and through in-depth interviews with leading figures all over the world who have had some association with Caresse Crosby. Her discoveries, I believe, right a serious wrong. She has rediscovered a woman ahead of her times, influential to writers and artists beyond the dreams of those who would like to influence writers and artists, and a woman who endured — often spectacularly so. Her life was filled with accomplishments of some magnitude, all carried out with a remarkable joie de vivre.

  —William F. Claire, Poet and Publisher, Voyages

  Foreword to the 2018 Edition

  I welcome a new edition of Anne Conover’s biography of Caresse Crosby, née Mary Phelps Jacob (“Polly”). Caresse—a name which seems to drift in and out of the vast net of literary consciousness and memory like an errant comet or effe
rvescent butterfly—bedazzled me in much the same way she bedazzled the author.

  Who was this enigmatic descendent of Puritans with the seductive name, one half of “literature’s most scandalous couple”? She walked away from her first marriage to a scion of one of New England’s prominent families, invented the modern bra, championed paperback books via Crosby Continental Editions. She became a muse and literary icon by establishing an international literary magazine, Portfolio, and the first modern art gallery in Washington, DC, by providing a refuge for artists at Hampton Manor near Fredericksburg, Virginia. At the time of her death, she was the principessa of a 200-room castle and doyen of a “One World” arts colony in Italy.

  I first heard of Caresse, like many, via Hugh Ford’s Published in Paris and Geoffrey Wolff’s Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby. The diverting photos of Caresse, the quintessential flapper with the decadent Harry Crosby, etched themselves in my post-adolescent brain. What had become of her after Crosby’s suicide pact with his mistress? What, indeed?

  Anne Conover celebrates this seemingly forgotten history, and portrays a woman far ahead of her time—the spark, the kickstarter, the arts enabler, the benefactor—one whom Anaïs Nin described as a “pollen carrier, who mixed, stirred, brewed, and concocted friendships.” Time magazine declared Caresse the “literary godmother to the Lost Generation of expatriate writers in Paris.”

  Caresse cast a wide net. She surrounded herself with creative talent from the 1920s until her death in 1970. With Harry and the Black Sun Press she brought recognition to the works of Kay Boyle, T.S. Eliot, Max Ernst, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene Jolas, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Dorothy Parker, Ezra Pound, among others. In Portfolio she published Louis Aragon, Romare Beardon, Kay Boyle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Charles Bukowski, Albert Camus, René Char, Paul Eluard, Jean Genet, Natalia Ginzburg, Wilfredo Lam, Robert Lowell, Henri Matisse, Thomas Merton, Henry Miller, Eugenio Montale, Anaïs Nin, Charles Olson, Pablo Picasso, Kenneth Rexroth, Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Shapiro, Stephen Spender, Dorothea Tanning, Giuseppe Ungaretti, and still more.

  Caresse numbered among her friends artists, writers, actors, bohemians, and politicians: to mention a few—Kay Boyle, Henri Cartier-­Bresson, Hart Crane, Salvador Dali, R. Buckminster Fuller, and Archibald MacLeish. At one point she had residences in Washington, D.C., New York City, Virginia, and Italy. She seemed capable of accomplishing almost anything she set out to do.

  Her memoir, The Passionate Years (published in 1953) was reprinted in the “Neglected Books of the 20th Century” series by Ecco Press in 1979. But as the woman who “never had regrets” and said “Yes, Always Yes!” to life, she comes across on those pages as a self-promoter in the Hemingway sense, and her memory is not altogether trustworthy.

  Anne Conover’s meticulously researched and more nuanced biography parts the veil on the second half of Caresse’s life after Harry’s suicide when she was only thirty-six. It’s here we finally meet the passionate free spirit and world traveler who evolved from debutante and dilettante into bohemian, feminist, peace activist, and patron of the arts.

  Let’s pledge not to forget her again. Caresse Crosby deserves her place in history alongside celebrated promoters of the arts like Alice Pike Barney, Sylvia Beach, Nancy Cunard, Isabelle Stewart Gardner, Peggy Guggenheim, Wihelmina Cole Holladay, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Adrienne Monnier, Elizabeth A. Sackler, Alma Spreckels, Gertrude Stein and Frances Steloff.

  Anne Conover has rescued Caresse from the ashes and brought her back alive. And for that we owe Conover a tremendous debt of gratitude.

  Richard Peabody

  Editor and Publisher

  Prologue

  Her name was Mary, but they called her Caresse. In the Romance languages, Cara, Caresse, Caressissima all mean “a giver of love.” Her friend Anaïs Nin described her as “a pollen carrier,” one who “mixed, stirred, brewed and concocted friendships together, who encouraged artistic and creative copulation in all its forms and expressions, who trailed behind her, like the plume of peacocks, a colorful and fabulous legend.”

  And the way she walked! Aging Don Juans, savoring the conquests of some 50 years before, still remember the feline grace of those racy legs, the well-rounded derrière. She was petite, but she carried herself well, with a touch of class, of character, of Back Bay Boston. From whatever perspective one viewed her, Caresse sailed into a room, and if there wasn’t excitement in it, she created it.

  She had classic cheekbones and beautiful, translucent skin. A mass of dark waves, cropped short, framed a pert face with a fringe of bangs. Her eyes—which bewitched lovers described as “wayward”—were a fathomless seablue-green. She focused them directly on her victims with curiosity and delight and a hint of mockery, the frequent façade of a “flapper” peering over a coupe champagne glass saying, “Here’s looking at you!” Whatever “It” was, Caresse had it.

  She dressed—sometimes outrageously—in bright-colored “costumes,” always with flair. In the frontispiece of one of her slim volumes of poetry, Caresse is reclining on a chaise-longue like the Empress Eugénie, swathed in a Roman toga. She appears strikingly contemporary in fading photographs wearing a chic cloth-of-gold evening suit by Vionnet, a man-tailored dinner jacket accented by a large lace jabot, an above-the-knee skirt. She walked, cat-like, into a Faubourg St. Germain drawing room leading Narcisse Noir, the black whippet, whose gold-lacquered toenails matched his gold necklace. As an American expatriate in Paris, Caresse provided titillation, excitement, and innovation to moribund Proustian characters in their ancestral homes.

  In the ’20s, Caresse led the procession of atelier students to the Quatre Arts balls, stripped to the waist as an Inca princess. Even her then-husband Harry did not recognize the exquisite nichons in the passing throng on the Boul’ St. Germain. She picked a fight with Picasso. She dreamed up a Surrealist Ball for Dali. A Paris press report announced, “Caresse Crosby à l’inventé le soutien-gorge—et Hemingway.” And if she did not quite invent Hemingway, she founded an avant-garde Left Bank publishing house that printed Ernest and Scott, and many other titans of her time—Lawrence, Pound, and Joyce.

  She consorted with counts and lords and the Maharanee of Cooch Behar and Mahatma Gandhi. And when Harry shot himself in a suicide pact with the Other Woman—a “Fire Princess”—Caresse retaliated by saying “Yes!” to life and to some 200 lovers, and all of them special. She never looked back. She never turned to stone.

  In the spring of Holy Year, 1950, Caresse was traveling some 40 miles northeast of Rome on the Via Salaria, the ancient route since the time of Caesar, by which salt gathered along the seacoast was carried to the capital. (A good worker was “worth his salt” in Rome’s heyday.) Her destination was a massive eagle-shaped fortress spreading its wings above the Turano River that winds like a ribbon through the Sabine Hills. Every peak is topped by a legend—Farro Sabina (where the Sabine women were raped), Farro Nerola (where Nero was born), Farro Ornaro (where Beatrice Cenci was held prisoner by her lord and master). The villagers say the Castello is haunted by a genuine ghost, “La Donna Bianca,” whose eerie cries can be heard as she paces the battlements lamenting her lost lover. And across the valley that first night, Caresse swore that she saw a white, luminous form on the highest turret, vague and indistinct, but surely there.

  Caresse still qualifies as an interesting woman. Her short, softly waved hair is sprinkled with white, but her eyes still bewitch. She walks with a quick step, impulsively. Even after the long journey, she appears fresher than anyone else. It was not lost on Caresse that this was “the summit” of her life, that the Castello—and the title of Principessa that goes with the territory—was a spectacular finis to a fascinating life story. The feudal estate of Roccasinibalda and its titles passed through the hands of Popes Clement VII and Paul IV and a number of noble families, but despite wars, plagues, neglect, and time, the Castello endures.

  By what circui
tous route did this “chargée d’ affaires of the heart of the world” (to quote Anaïs) arrive in the Sabine Hills? For the moment we shall leave her there.

  Chapter I

  THE PASSIONATE YEARS

  “Those who restrain desire do so because it is weak enough to be restrained.”

  —William Blake

  Mary Peabody first noticed Harry Crosby emerging from the subway station in Copley Square. At first glance, he was a slight man, of middle height, almost ungainly in an American Field Service uniform. But she “caught a look so completely right that from that moment, I sensed my destiny . . .” (“He didn’t look like anybody else on the street . . . or anywhere. He was just different.”)

  Mary wasn’t sure he had noticed her. Yet the next morning, Harry’s mother, Henrietta, telephoned to ask if Mary might chaperone her 21-year-old son, a Harvard undergraduate, and a dozen or so of his friends on an Independence Day outing at Nantasket Beach. Everyone in Boston knew about Mary’s sad plight. They considered her husband, Richard Peabody, yet another casualty of the Great War. He had returned with body intact, but mind out of focus. He tried to replace the close calls and life-threatening thrills of war by chasing fire trucks; to erase the nightmare of mangled bodies by drinking himself to oblivion.

  With Dick away at a sanitarium, Mary’s social life suffered. Henrietta Crosby felt sorry for the attractive young woman kept tightly at home with her parents-in-law and two small children. That night, she seated Mary on Harry’s right at dinner. He never spoke once to the girl on the left. Afterwards, at Nantasket’s amusement park, they cuddled in a small boat through the Tunnel of Love, and Harry first said, “I love you.”

  In Harry’s observations on the dynamics of love, he wrote that “a love affair should be as delicate and as swift as a modern pursuit plane.” For almost three years he pursued Mary. The fact that she was seven years older and married, to a member of their same social set, with two small babies, never deterred him. He first tried persuasion and vowed a life of good deeds. When that failed, he threatened to kill himself.