by Anne Conover
When Caresse visited, she reported that the stage was set as if for a Kafka play. Two guards who appeared to be actors in The Trial stood on either side of Pound when they led him in. His appearance was deplorable, Caresse reported. Pound was unshaven, wearing a ragged shirt and trousers, his feet shod in dilapidated sandals. According to Caresse, she talked with Pound easily, reminiscing about the days of their friendship in Paris, and when she left, Pound kissed her on both cheeks, according to European custom. Caresse thought—but did not report to the doctors—that Pound was as arrogant and as sane as he had been when she last saw him ten years before.
Pound also received weekly visits from the tall young author of the Maximus Poems, Charles Olson. To Olson, Pound appeared confused and depressed, exhausted, living in his own past, “his eyes worried and muddy, his flesh puffy and old.” But Olson considered that Pound’s “jumps in conversation were no more than I or any active mind would make.”
Pound went to trial wearing the new blue suit Caresse had bought for him. He sat subdued, nervously clenching and unclenching his hands, with his head and eyes down. Thanks to the lobbying efforts of his friends and the literary community, the case had already been decided. The jury took only five minutes to declare Pound of “unsound mind.” His life was saved, but he was doomed to return to confinement in Howard Hall, a “hell-hole” without windows, behind a thick steel door with peepholes.
•
In the winter of 1945, one of the coldest on record to sweep the Continent, Caresse—who considered France her second home—thought of the heroes of the French Underground who led patriots across the nearly impassable Alps during the war. Her printer in Paris, Roger Lescaret, was one of them. She invited friends and clients to the Gallery to donate one dollar or more as admission to buy warm clothing and chocolates for the school children of Césaret, France. The exhibition notes for “The Private and Public Life of the Animals” were excerpted from the diary of a 12-year-old, Mireille Sidoine, a child of one of the Resistance leaders.
The photomurals were enlarged from the highly original engravings of J.J. Granville by Sam Rosenberg and Charies Gratz, with color effects by Pietro Lazzari. Granville, a contemporary of the 19th century artist Daumier and precursor of the Surrealist movement, inspired Tenniel’s illustrations for Alice in Wonderland, and, later, the animated cartoons of Walt Disney. Caresse—ever the idealist—hoped that the post-war era would provide
. . . an opening door to a more enlightened, saner world . . . grown full with hope, with the leaven of vision and courage. Let us have more poets and more painters . . . let us erect public buildings of magnitude and beauty worthy of the peace so dearly bought. [Let us] encourage writers to write for posterity and not for profit. . . . [Let us] aid and embellish with our talents the commerce and government of a new and better world. Let us put on “the full armor of light.”
Caresse sent out a letter to a number of distinguished leaders in government and the art world, asking for their support in institutionalizing a modern art gallery in the nation’s capital.
I am putting wheels in motion to obtain federal financing for a modern art project here in Washington and throughout the United States. This project is to be housed in a key building in the Capital city, with experimental art centers on the same lines in each state that warrants a development of this scope, and to be constructed with the help of the government. Plans for these buildings are under consideration by a group of prominent architects headed by Edward Durrell Stone (associate designer of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City).
The Capital of our nation has no Art Center in the sense that I describe. The Crosby Gallery of Modern Art, where for the last year I have presented small exhibitions of modern paintings, engravings and sculpture, has received acclaim as an “oasis in Washington,” and just as I see the immediate expansion and importance of our Capital as the center of post-war governmental ideas, I also see it as the matrix of post-war culture.
With her usual verve and enthusiasm, Caresse next turned her sights to a new publishing venture, a literary and artistic endeavor called Portfolio: An Intercontinental Quarterly.
Chapter IX
PORTFOLIO
“Those whose deeds have been recorded by an artist may live till the world snuffs out.”
—Caresse
“Phoenix-like, the world emerges from the ashes.” V-E Day—May 8, 1945—marked the end of the war in Europe, the beginning of a new era in Caresse Crosby’s life. The Black Sun Press remained silent for six years while Roger Lescaret fought with the French Resistance. Crosby’s daughter (then married to Count Albert de Mun) and friends (Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ernest Hemingway, and many others) were there to see the Allied troops liberate Paris, while Caresse herself was “cooped up in America.” She was eager to visit Polleen, now living in London, and to renew old ties in Europe. Yet only U.S. citizens on official government business were permitted to travel abroad. Caresse conspired with several imaginative friends to find a legitimate means of renewing her passport.
Selden Rodman wrote in his diary about the fortuitous meeting at the Crosby Gallery on the eve of Independence Day, 1945:
Caresse Crosby called me this morning about an editorial board meeting of her new magazine. She said, “Come to the gallery early if you can and meet Lèger.” When I arrived, she, Harry Moore and a middle-aged balding gentleman with piercing eyes and a sensitive mouth were going over some drawings. She introduced me. M. Lèger doesn’t speak English too well. He and I talked (in French) for half an hour about art and French literature. When Caresse came back, I asked her, have we nothing of M. Lèger for the first issue, not even a drawing? “My God,” she said in amused amazement. “You didn’t think this was Fernand Lèger, did you Selden? This is Alexis!” I had been talking to St. John Perse, the permanent secretary for the Quai d’Orsay.
Rodman would be listed on the masthead as poetry editor. Crosby asked Lt. Harry Thornton Moore (future D.H. Lawrence scholar and author of Priest of Love, then on military duty in Washington) to act as assistant editor. She persuaded Sam Rosenberg to be editorial adviser on photography. Henry Miller, now in Big Sur, California, missed the planning session, but promised to send a contribution:
It is wonderful to hear you’re going to start a quarterly. You ought to make a success of it more than of the gallery, because you won’t be limited to that Sargasso Sea of a Washington, D.C. It’s really a morgue, Washington! . . . You say send about four or five pages. How many words does that mean? I hardly ever write anything under twelve or fifteen pages . . .
Miller suggested several contributors, such as Lawrence Durrell and Alex Comfort, and added: “The time is ripe. There is scarcely any competition. There are no good literary magazines that I know of. Write me soon about what I can do for you, what ms. to send. Good luck! But why call it ‘Generation’? Why don’t you call it ‘Caresse Crosby’s Intercontinental Review?’
Transition, which ceased publication in 1938, was called “a work shop of the intercontinental spirit.” Black Sun published many of the same authors, the symbolic and avant-garde. Caresse hoped to continue the tradition of Eugene and Maria Jolas.
Paper during wartime was difficult to find in bulk, so Caresse bought odd lots of printer’s endpapers in any color available. With long-practiced skill, she designed each page with elegant typography and clean reproduction as “a moveable unit to carry away, or to have bound or to frame upon the wall.” The oversized 11" by 17" papers were gathered in a posterboard loose-leaf binder, a “portfolio” tied with red ribbon. W.P. Tompkins, a specialist in poster reproduction with an office at 931 D Street, printed Portfolio: An Intercontinental Quarterly, with large red and black script on the cover. Dedicated to world unity through the arts, the first issue of 1,300 copies appeared in fine bookstores on August 6, 1945. It sold for $3.00 a single copy ($10.00 a yearly subscription), a bargain considering that each of the origi
nal copies is now a collector’s item.
Caresse planned a party to celebrate, but when V-J Day broke, there was dancing in the sedate streets of Washington. Moore reported:
In a wild crowd at the Balalaika I saw an old friend, Thornton Wilder, in the uniform of a lieutenant colonel. I asked him whether I could bring the girl I was with over to meet him, but with his eager politeness, he said he would come over to our table. I took the liberty of inviting him to the Portfolio party at Caresse’s gallery the next night, where he would for the first time meet David Daiches, who had come to teach at the University of Chicago after Wilder left. Wilder appeared at Caresse’s, met David Daiches, and even suggested a book to him—which David then proceeded to write. Such episodes were typical of Caresse’s gatherings, at which the air was electric with potential creative activity.
In the introduction to the first issue, Caresse commented on the challenge of the post-war world: “Never before has so much depended on the courageous vision of the artist. In every age, there have been men to lead peoples into treacherous conflict, but human achievement lives on through the medium of the artist, be he historian, poet, or painter.”
The list of contributors (who received little or no compensation) was an eclectic group of lively experimentalists, outspoken on social issues. Henry Miller sent “The Staff of Life” (an excerpt from his book The Air-Conditioned Nightmare), a biting critique of contemporary American life.
What do I find wrong with America? Everything. I begin at the beginning with the staff of life, bread. If bread is bad, the whole life is bad. On the whole Americans eat without pleasure. They eat because the bell rings three times a day.
Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We’re the Only Colored People Here” pointed out that all faces are the same shade of gray when the lights go out in a crowded movie theatre. Alex Comfort, an English anarchist, called for civil disobedience to avoid the draft, anticipating the response of the young to the war in Vietnam some 20 years later. David Daiches commented on “The Future of Ignorance,” and Kay Boyle contributed a sensitive translation of a chapter from René Crevel’s posthumously published novel, Babylon. Rodman introduced three war poems, translated from the French, one by the controversial editor of Ce Soir, Louis Aragon. “Sleeper in the Valley” by Harry Crosby’s youthful idol, Arthur Rimbaud, lamented the death of a young warrior. Harry Moore’s review of best-sellers in “a particularly low-grade market place” concluded that there were no rivals for Proust, Mann, Kafka, or even Hemingway, and added the hope that “the publisher’s faith in Fitzgerald’s work will be justified by sufficient sales to keep it in print. Much of his talent was washed down the Saturday Evening Post’s glittering drain.”
Art included Romare Bearden’s “Nativity,” Pietro Lazzari’s “Horses,” and contributions by Jean Hélion, Lilian Swann Saarinen, and the British sculptor Henry Moore. Sam Rosenberg’s “Practical Joker” was a Rube Goldberg-type contraption designed to confound the sensibilities of the average reader. Loyal to the memory of her dead husband, Caresse included Harry’s 1927 photo, “Anatomy of Flight,” a surrealistic glimpse of the engine of a World War I fighter plane (which looked for all the world like the innards of a giant land crab). It was a tribute to Crosby’s genius as a muse that she recognized and promoted this impressive list of talents, long before their reputations were firmly established. Seventeen-year-old Naomi Lewis admitted that she “had never exhibited except on the bulletin board at school,” where her drawing for the first issue of Portfolio had recently been thumbtacked.
When Caresse announced alternative issues will be brought out in Paris, she presumed on her long-standing friendship with then–Undersecretary of State MacLeish, counting him as a valuable ally:
. . . I have talked with Mrs. Shipley in the Passport Division regarding a two-month trip to Europe this summer to gather material for the fall and winter issues of Portfolio, my new quarterly review . . . She felt my request “a reasonable one.” When I told her that you knew my publishing activities and had been published by the Black Sun Press in Paris days, she said it would be most helpful to me if you would write her a letter to the effect that certain of the younger European authors [should be] included in such a publication. I hope you do feel this to be so, as I am most ardent about creating a following. . . .”
Armed with additional letters from David Finley of the National Gallery of Art and Huntington Cairnes of the Censorship Bureau, Caresse again called upon Shipley, “expressing my belief that ideas could prove of more value than guns, and that peace must be sought through international understanding. Shipley—God bless her—realized that the plan had value, and the letters I brought with me assured her that I was capable of putting wheels in motion.”
As Caresse described the encounter:
Shipley said, “I’ll give you the passport, but you have to get yourself over there. You are not attached to the military, you know; nor to any branch of government. I doubt if you can manage transportation.”
“I’ll try,” I said, and the next day, I returned to pick up the precious document, duly signed and sealed.
My first idea was to ask Mr. Foster, travel agent in the Mayflower Hotel. “Absolutely no civilians are allowed on American planes or transports going to England,” Mr. Foster said. At the door he stopped me. “There’s just a chance that BOAC might take you on. They are hungry for dollars. Their office is up Connecticut Avenue.”
When I inquired of the charming lieutenant behind the desk at British Overseas Airways, he said, “If you have a passport and five hundred dollars, I can fix you up. When do you want to go?”
“As soon as possible,” I answered.
“Tonight?” he said. “Not tonight, but tomorrow?” I hesitated.
“Then will you settle for Friday?” the lieutenant asked.
“Of course,” I said, “Yes!”
Caresse was told that a BOAC limousine would pick her up and drive her to Baltimore, where the nearest flying boat was anchored in the harbor. She was a bit nervous about this odyssey, her first transatlantic flight, and asked her daughter-in-law Josette, who lived around the corner from the Gallery while Billy was on Navy duty, to accompany her to Baltimore.
Caresse was one of the two women en route to London. All other passengers were returning Army personnel in uniform. Wearing her usual travel clothes, she boarded with her Schiaparelli hatbox, her red silk umbrella and zebra jacket which, she recalled, “caused some consternation on that military transport.”
The flight was as luxurious as one could expect in the aftermath of war. The old “flying boats” had spacious accommodations for overnight passengers, seats that reclined so completely they could be made up into beds. Each compartment had a washstand, a long mirror, and a curtain that could be drawn for privacy. Despite postwar shortages, the dinner was ample. Caresse joined the gentlemen on the lower level for coffee and cognac in the lounge, but she had to face the troops alone. The other woman, a WAC officer, retreated behind her curtain, and none of the men had much to say to their exotic civilian companion.
The next day, Caresse arrived by taxi at the front door of her daughter and son-in-law’s cottage in a mews off Sloane Square. “All were as amazed at my appearance as if I had dropped from another planet, for it was quite unheard of that a civilian not on official business would be allowed on a BOAC flight.” The rejoicing carried on into the night. After the reunion with Polleen in London, she crossed the channel to begin the difficult task of starting up the presses again in a city hard hit by war.
The large Schiaparelli hatbox Caresse carried was not a frivolous affectation. In it were the works of two Washington artists for the first post-war vernissage at the John Devoluy Gallery. Lorna Lindsley covered the opening in a special to the Paris Post, an English-language newspaper:
Of special interest to Americans is the little show at the Devoluy Gallery in the rue de Furstenberg. The drawings and
paintings of two American painters were brought over by Caresse Crosby . . . As she came by plane, she could not bring much, but these are the first American pictures to come here in years. There are line drawings of horses by Pietro Lazzari, an Italian-born American who has worked for the WPA, and a series of watercolors of the Passion of Christ by Romare Bearden, a Negro, which show extraordinary feeling and talent. His rather archaic style and strong coloring suggest the ancient windows of stained glass in the French cathedrals. France needs more art from America. They know little about us over here. Let us hope that Mrs. Crosby, like the first swallows of spring, is a portent of others to come.
“The going is difficult in regard to paper, printing and getting about Paris . . . everything is full of red tape,” Caresse wrote to Moore, now stationed in New York with Air Force Magazine. In late October, his reply finally caught up with her:
I wrote you airmail on 4 September. . . . letter was returned yesterday (rétour à l’envoyeur—I’d so much rather be a voyeur than just an envoyeur!)—it had been addressed to the rue Cardinale. . . .
People are delighted with the magazine [Portfolio I]. I don’t know how it’s selling nationally, but I do know Pietro and Evelyn are selling it to bookstores in Chicago and Los Angeles, etc. And the Gotham’s first batch here sold out: Miss Steloff says the re-order shipment is going slower.