Caresse Crosby Read online

  Characteristically, whatever Mary did, Harry was sure to follow. He began to write for the first time in the disciplined sonnet form. Mary recorded: “The next week we spent composing sonnets to each other in traditional iambic pentameter.”

  Back on the rue de Lille, Harry struck out in new directions for himself. “While I wrote in my own room,” Mary remembered, “I could hear his light footsteps passing overhead in the tour grise as though he were training for the ‘big race.’ His steps had a good thoroughbred sound. I was sure he was going to win. My bets were already down.”

  After several attempts at publication by the “little” magazines and commercial publishing houses, the Crosbys decided that the simplest way to get a poem into hardcover was to print the book themselves. The Black Sun Press was born, “the foal of necessity out of desire.” What began as simple literary dabbling evolved into a serious commitment to practice and support literature and the arts. If, to the proper Bostonians, the Crosbys’ lifestyle appeared to be selfish and hedonistic, the press they established was to become a serious vehicle for creative literary and artistic expression, in itself a work of art.

  Chapter II

  BLACK SUN PRESS

  “Writing is not a game played according to the rules.”

  —Harry

  Roger Lescaret, printer of birth announcements and wedding invitations, must have wondered what benevolent fate guided two elegant young Americans to look through his fly-specked window at the shop on the bend of the rue Cardinale, 200 yards from the Deux Magots, the outdoor café-cum-club frequented by Hemingway and other improvident expatriates. The day they arrived on the doorstep simultaneously with Lescaret, he had been delivering printing orders on his bicycle:

  . . . a bird-like little fellow in a black printer’s smock came to a very sudden stop . . . a fringe of unruly hair hung over his clouded glasses . . . he seemed quite unaware of the smudges on his face, as he took a huge iron key from the folds of his black alpaca, and opened wide . . . his domain. There was a desk bang up in front of the door and three straight uncompromising chairs . . . already occupied by toppling piles of printed matter . . .

  Harry stooped to avoid the beams overhead as he entered.

  “You do your own work?” he asked.

  “Oui, monsieur. All except for the young girl en haut.” He pointed to the ladder at his back, leading to a loft which later would become the Crosby editorial office.

  “And you print by hand?” Harry continued.

  “Entirely,” Lescaret answered, pointing to the old-fashioned hand press protected by a large cloth cover. “I cannot afford another.”

  Harry suggested that their job would be a large one; he soon might be able to afford a new press.

  Lescaret protested, “A whole book is a lot of work!”

  The Crosbys asked him to copy the layout and typography of the handsome deluxe edition from their own library they spread out before him.

  Lescaret’s confidence returned.

  “Mais oui, mais oui! But it will be très cher, the paper alone; and astrée italic, we must buy special type.”

  Harry assured Lescaret that the cost was no object, the quality of workmanship was more important.

  Roger Lescaret was a man with the skills of a master printer and deep pride in his craft. Two days later, he responded by producing proofs that exceeded all expectations, to the obvious surprise and delight of the Crosbys. Thus began a long-standing and successful literary collaboration that was to continue for more than 20 years.

  To begin, Mary toyed with designs for the colophon of her first slim volume of lyrics, to be called “Crosses of Gold.” One of her first considerations was the name to imprint on the title page. The nickname “Polly” she considered unpoetic, too reminiscent of Boston and the Peabodys. The bluestocking Mary Peabody nobody used but the bank. Harry always referred to Mary as “Bunny” or “The Cramoisy Queen” in his diary. He suggested a new pen name to go with her artistic persona. They consulted the dictionary for names beginning with the alliterative “C” to go with Crosby and “to form a cross with mine,” Harry added. “Cara” was close, but they dismissed it as sounding too harsh. “Caresse” with a final “e” to conform to French usage was Harry’s final creation: it sounded right. Thus, at 32, Mary Peabody was born again as Caresse Crosby.

  The change was registered at the mairie, and announcements were dispatched to the family in Massachusetts. Outraged comments arrived by return mail from the Boston matriarchs: “It’s like undressing in public,” one cousin replied. Undaunted, Caresse linked her new name with Harry’s in a golden cross for the colophon.

  Of the evocative poems from the collection of Caresse Crosby’s early verse, “One Way Like the Path of a Star” emerged as an interesting example. Eulogizing the great lovers of the past—Tristan and Iseult, Thisbe and Pyramus—she draws the comparison with Harry and Caresse, contemporary lovers, who “choose the immortal path of love’s bright star,” going “hand in hand against the unknown . . . Forever to be, Harry and Caresse.”

  The critics were kind. Poetry of London caught Caresse’s irresistible joie de vivre:

  . . . a book that shows none of the pretentious gravity of the minor poet. Rather, it is a devout and joyous wantonness. It shows that there is one, at least, upon whom the shadow of our smoke-palled civilization has not fallen . . . if we do well to sorrow for those who weep, we must do well to rejoice that there are others whose laughter is naked and unashamed. . . . We may thank God for a poet who is intoxicated by the beauty of the world around her, wherever she may be.

  Cousin Walter encouraged Caresse to submit her work to a commercial publisher. “I shouldn’t change a word, but if I were you, I’d send it off, exactly as it is, to Houghton-Mifflin in Boston. . . . They have just lost Amy Lowell,” he suggested.

  “But I’m not in her class,” Caresse protested.

  “You’re a lady poet from Boston . . . that’s a beginning,” Berry replied.

  Such acclaim was heady wine for the young poet. She began to plan the next publication, Harry’s “Sonnets for Caresse.” Caresse, the designer, chose the paper, the typeface, the layout of the second handsomely-bound volume of Editions Narcisse. With a typical blend of serious intent and fey whimsical humor, they named their first imprint after their black whippet, Narcisse Noir. Caresse designed a pool-gazing Narcissus for the title page.

  For the young publishers, dropping into Lescaret’s small shop to see the pages emerge from the hand-worked press became an irresistible new diversion. The next two volumes of poetry, Painted Shores by Caresse and Red Skeletons by Harry, were more professional than the first private love messages and illustrated with attractive designs. In Painted Shores, Caresse’s verse is still personal and provocative:

  All of the day’s delight

  And half of the moon’s mad rise

  I fling at the feet of “I saw you once

  With deception in your eyes.”

  This title poem was inspired by Harry’s current liaison—only one of many through their chaotic years together—this time, with Polia Chentoff, the Polish artist, who had just completed portraits of both Crosbys. Polia’s portrait of Harry, Caresse thought “strange and portentous.” Later, when the poet St. John Perse saw Caresse’s portrait by Chentoff, he remarked, “I’ve never seen the distaste of one woman for another so skillfully and subtly portrayed.”

  Another poem revealed a disquieting personal life, an outwardly giddy façade superimposed on a suffering psyche:

  For you remember that the voyage was made

  To be a holiday of flight and thought

  Since we have loved and learnt, and wept and played,

  Have we not realized everything we sought?

  Though you and I, my heart, are sealed with pain,

  Would we not turn and seek it all again?

 
Caresse also dedicated a poem to her maestro, Antoine Bourdelle, who responded with this tribute: “I am very touched by your kind thought . . . Your poetry is very beautiful and emanates from your luminous and spiritual personality . . . The artist and the poet, the two are one . . .”

  The frontispiece portrait by Manolo Ortíz showed the author reclining on a divan in a toga-like gown. Her friend Kay Boyle captured and interpreted Caresse’s persona:

  Everything you write has that almost distressingly feminine and alluring you. Your letters are like bits of powder puff and a lovely smell—that graciousness of offering one’s young, strong lovely arm to help old gentlemen crossing streets—and you, like a very arrogant little figurehead carved in wood on the prow of a ship, going straight through the waves, because you are at the head of an adventure. Well, the poems have all of this, all of that enchantment in life.

  The Crosbys first met Boyle through Eugene and Maria Jolases’ circle of writers. (In time, Harry was listed on the masthead of transition, the avant garde magazine the Jolases published.) Boyle was then living in the artists’ colony in Neuilly founded by eccentric, toga-wearing Raymond Duncan. According to Caresse, Kay was “built like a blade,” her black hair “arranged with panache to one side, her silver-green eyes the color of moss accented an oval face with high cheekbones like a Seminole maiden.”

  Eugene Jolas had described the Crosbys to Kay as “madder than hatters and freer than the wind.” Boyle provided this vignette of her first meeting with her future publishers and lifelong friends:

  That very early morning (two or three o’clock, it must have been) Eugene Jolas took me to the Bal Nêgre to meet Caresse and Harry Crosby . . . we eventually found them on the perilously high and crowded balcony of the nightclub that had become the current rage (it being the thing to have two or three negro friends, provided they were in the jazz scene) . . . Caresse and Harry were drinking champagne, talking, laughing . . . looking down on the chaos of the dance arena below. . . . The Bal Nêgre, near dawn, the wildly stepping dancers with no more than an inch between the coupled men and women . . . are as vividly alive to me today as a Lautrec canvas; the saxophone wails louder and louder, the beat of the drums is almost deafening. In the white blaze of the lights . . . I see the features of Caresse’s face, her bronze hair cut in a bang across her forehead, and Harry’s face, already then committed to the look of the skull he paid daily and nightly homage to in the rue de Lille. . . .

  Harry’s poetry, in time, was more significant, more driven. Red Skeletons was inspired by his reading of Poe, Mallarmé, and his idol, Rimbaud. One sonnet was dedicated to Baudelaire: “Within my soul, you’ve set your blackest flag.” Bearing such titles as “Necrophile,” “Lit de Mort,” and “Uncoffined,” with grotesque illustrations created by the Hungarian artist Alastair, his verse was far more than an exercise in the macabre. Rather, Harry wanted to exorcise the war experience. One critic perceptively commented, “It was a litmus paper of his life, past and present.”

  Edgar Allen Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher (also illustrated by Alastair) was next, the production by which the Crosbys’ press broke into the English and American markets. For the first time, the credit page read Maître Imprimeur Lescaret. In limited edition, Poe’s oeuvre was an artistic success. In recognition of their determination to expand the publishing venture, the Crosbys changed the name of Editions Narcisse to the Black Sun Press. The new name was indebted to Harry’s favorite color, black, and his idolatrous worship of the Sun God, Ra. At this time also Harry began to adopt the eccentric habits that followed throughout his brief life—black suits, a black cloth flower in his buttonhole, wire-thin black whippets and black race horses.

  Kay Boyle recognized that Harry was one of the early social dissidents. His black was

  . . . more of a means of blacking out obstacles, imposing

  the black of oblivion on conventional standards . . . so

  that he might be free to function unencumbered in his

  almost frenzied response to other writers, other poets, and to their work. Yet he believed that the black of this

  undeviatingly practiced sacrament did not for a moment

  signify the absence of light.

  According to Harry, “Writing is not a game played according to the rules. Writing is a compulsive and delectable thing . . . writing is its own reward.”

  Caresse was the driving force behind the Press, with an uncanny knack of picking winners among the vast smorgasbord of unknown writers in Paris. She had a rare gift for nurturing the poets, painters, and novelists who came, seeking recognition, tea, and sympathy. To those who drank from her cup, Caresse was the Life Force. Kay Boyle gratefully dedicated two of her books to “that small woman with the fierce courage of a hummingbird, whose belief and fervor never failed.”

  During this era, the Crosbys subscribed to Shakespeare & Company, which in the 1920s functioned as informal club and mailing address for the American literary circle in Paris. Sylvia Beach, the legendary proprietress, was supportive of their efforts. She wrote that “Harry used to dart in and out of my bookshop, dive into the bookshelves like a hummingbird extracting honey from a blossom. The Crosbys were connoisseurs of fine books, but better still, of fine writing.”

  On Beach’s recommendation, they first encountered James Joyce, whose Ulysses was brought out by Shakespeare & Company after U.S. publishers unanimously rejected it as pornography. The Joyces lived near the Boulevard des Invalides, back of the Gare Montparnasse, in a “tidy but unimaginative” apartment, Caresse noted after their first visit, “its only ornaments, an upright piano and a goldfish bowl.” Joyce was uncommunicative, “and seemed bored with us . . . retreating behind those thick, mysterious eyeglasses” (possibly because of the pain caused by glaucoma attacks, and the remedy, usually a large dose of Irish whiskey). Nora Joyce was heard to comment in an acrid Irish brogue: “You’re dumb as an oyster, now, so God help me, Jim. What is it ye all find to jabber about the nights you’re brought home drunk for me to look after?” Then something was said about John Sullivan, the great Irish tenor, and Joyce suddenly came to life “and asked if we’d like to join them after the concert next week.”

  At the post-concert party, “there was much song and ribaldry—I think we drank beer!—and Nora had cooked a special Dublin dish. Archie and Ada MacLeish were there, and Maria and Eugene Jolas. Maria took turns with Stuart Gilbert at the piano.”

  Several weeks later, Caresse plucked up her courage to return and ask if the Black Sun Press might publish a section of Joyce’s Work in Progress.

  “How many pages would you be wanting?” Joyce asked.

  “It’s the meat not the water that makes the broth,” Caresse answered, which seemed to please him. She left with his promise to deliver a manuscript for a single limited edition, paid in advance.

  The manuscript of two colorful Irish tales, “The Mookse and the Gripes” and “The Ont and the Graicehopper” soon was delivered by Joyce’s emissary, Stuart Gilbert. It was Black Sun’s most important acquisition to date, and Caresse determined to enhance it with an important illustration. She thought of her friend from the Grand Chaumière, Constantin Brancusi.

  Brancusi loved Americans, and as one critic observed, “pranced about as the spirit of the jazz age, although at times wearing wooden sabots.” He was a great bear of a man, who seemed like a peasant saint to Caresse. She went to his whitewashed atelier on the rue Vaugirard, where he lived alone with his white spitz dog, Polaris. A plump pullet and potatoes were roasting on red-hot coals on the hearth, and he invited Caresse to join him for lunch à deux. He set the work-table with crisp white sheets of drawing paper as placemats and carved the pullet with a sculpting knife.

  Of the two sketches of Joyce he submitted to the Press, the Crosbys selected an abstraction to illustrate the new title, Tales Told of Shem and Shaun. The realistic line drawing is also a classic of its kind, bu
t the two perpendicular lines and the spiral curve represented Joyce’s inward-winding thought, they believed. As always, the Crosbys’ vision of contemporary art was well ahead of their time.

  “The Black Sun Press writers and artists on the Paris scene in the 1920s were workers first and party-goers second,” Caresse later wrote. “Unlike the popular image, we were not forever drinking at the Dôme or getting into scrapes in Montmartre. Most of the BSP writers guarded their desks like fortresses, and only relaxed in the evenings when the one electric light bulb or gas jet in the studio up six flights cast a very meager light, then they gathered at their favorite eating places.” From the time he left the Morgan Bank until he died, Harry brought out 15 volumes of poetry and his diaries, Shadows of the Sun—a considerable output for any dedicated young poet. “Harry Crosby and I rigidly divided the work day in the rue de Lille: 9 to 12, closed in the library; 12 to 2, lunch (Harry went out alone, unless we had friends to luncheon); 2 to 5, more work.”

  When the Crosbys entertained in the Sicilian dining room, it was a baroque affair at midday, with the black whippet Narcisse Noir seated next to Harry at the head of the baronial table. On his crimson cushion, Narcisse looked “like a Delta dog on a royal sarcophagus . . . very effective, black against red,” Harry wrote Henrietta Crosby. At first, Parisian guests were delighted at the novelty of dining with the trend-setting Crosbys on American cuisine spiced with a soupçon of French imagination: clam consommé with whipped cream, canard à l’orange, mashed sweet potatoes, tomato-cheese salad, and marshmallows with hot chocolate sauce. On one occasion, the madcap Douglas Burdens, just back from Africa, brought an uninvited guest—a honey bear!—to lunch. Led in on a leash, the lumbering brown beast was cuddled by the women, ignored by the men, and engaged in pitched battle by Narcisse Noir before they were pulled apart. “Worst of all, the dessert was gone before we others had a chance,” Caresse complained.

  Nights en famille were rare. On such occasions, the Crosbys retired early to the ornate four-poster, (It was a practical necessity in winter, when Paris apartment furnaces seldom functioned until mid-­November, thereafter at a meager 60 degrees.)