by Anne Conover
I’m so pleased to be in NY, for which I have the true hick’s true admiration . . . Our magazine office is down in the Battery region, which has the harbor-smell I knew as a child on the edges of San Francisco bay. I’m in a small hotel, am very broke, but quite happy. I imagine you’re having a wonderful time: keep it up! And do let me know plans for the next issue, for I am deeply committed . . .
Caresse dashed off a quick reply:
Delighted to hear from you after so long . . . From now on, please address Hotel California, 16, rue de Berri . . . This number will stick mostly to the well-known names because the time has been too short to make discoveries and judge the work of newcomers. So in this issue we have ELUARD, CAMUS, SARTRE, PICASSO, CARTIER-BRESSON . . . and a Siamese doctor whose name I cannot spell . . . We have three political articles “Oui-Oui, Oui-non, et Non-non,” and a wonderful declaration in prose by Picasso on an artistic-political trend.
No. IV will contain some new names that even the French don’t know about and I hope I guess right. We will save the American contributions for the January number, but your review is important because French people are avid for news of American books and tendencies of thought in literature. I am having spiritual indigestion so much is happening!
Moore replied that he hoped [Crosby’s] “spiritual indigestion is cured, though I envy the causes of it.”
You indicate that a trend-review would be of special interest . . . there isn’t too much can be done in that way at the moment. We had no exciting groups over here the way the French have had, with their stimulating café meetings, etc.
How wonderful Paris, even though it is doubtless still a little stunned from the war, must be! I can just see that magnificent flame-hair of yours against the chestnut trees in the boulevards; do you ride the Bois in a cabriolet, or is it already too cold for open-air travel? The new issue sounds magnificent . . . I have, by the way, secured a promise from Tennessee Williams for an experimental short story; he is the boy over here now . . . The possibilities are enormous . . . As I’ve said, everyone likes the mag . . .
Portfolio II came out in December 1945. Lescaret set the type for a limited edition of 1,000 copies. Published “in the face of material difficulties at a moment when France is with great hardship being restored to its cultural activity,” Caresse wrote: “. . . The Editors wish to thank our French friends.”
It was a tour de force. Jean-Paul Sartre, leader of the new movement of so-called Existentialists—“the most provocative editorial writer in Paris” (for Les Temps Moderns)—commented on the challenge to “young France Today” : “This little bomb which can destroy 10,000 men at a time . . . confronts us with terrible responsibilities.” Albert Camus, then editor of the Resistance newspaper, Combat, appeared for the first time in any English-language publication. Henry Cartier-Bresson captured the “decisive moment” the refugees were freed by the Allied armies, a year before his first exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Henry Moore suggested that the literature emerging from World War II was in the grand tradition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace and that “Henry James’s Americans in Europe in 1875 tell us a great deal about Americans in Europe in 1945.”
Pablo Picasso, a frequent guest at Caresse’s Mill before the war, sent portraits of Mallarmé and Verlaine and added his personal political statement:
What do you believe an artist to be? An imbecile who has only eyes if he is a painter, ears if he is a musician, or a lyre on every rung of his heart if he is a poet: or even if he is a boxer, only muscles? He is at the same time a political being . . . No, [a] painting is not made to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of offensive and defensive warfare against the enemy.
In January, Caresse was back in Washington, writing to Henry Miller in California:
Portfolio was received in Paris like rain in drought. I’ve never realized what aridity for information and ideas and new objects loss of physical contact with the outside world could cause. They hung on to every word, they passed the few copies of Portfolio I from hand to hand, group to group; they are as hungry, from lack of contact, mentally as physically. . . . that is why to go there, to eat with them, makes one feel that you are repaying them for the bread and the wine. They long for us to come back . . . the little restaurants—45 francs—taste better than ever before. No-one in Paris looks ragged or starved (although of course “au fond” they must be).
Everyone tells me Portfolio II is better than I, but I don’t think so. I believe that I is fresher, more hopeful, and vigorous.
Miller agreed: “I liked Portfolio I better too.” But he protested the minimal payment to European contributors.
I understand your difficulties. However, I doubt if our poor European friends will see it that way . . . I would like to say this—a suggestion merely—that you pay such people treble or quintuple the amount, at least, and not pay the American contributors . . . I think most American writers would take it in good part. I just hate to offer, or have you offer, pitiable sums like ten dollars . . . But try to remember, to see, how they would look at it. Portfolio looks like a million dollars. If you can pay the printers and paper mfrs. for such elegance, why not the poor artists who really make the magazine? ENOUGH! . . . This is no reflection on you, please understand. Just a bit of bewilderment. No doubt it will all work out in the last blow of the horn.
Caresse’s idealistic view of the world often failed to consider such grim realities as money, but she did follow up Miller’s suggestion to seek more funds. She reminded Russell Davenport: “Please don’t forget you promised to write me a ‘fan’ letter for Portfolio that I could show to Paul Mellon,” but no help came from that source.
Portfolio III was produced on a shoestring in the basement of 1606 20th Street. The masthead listed Rodman, Rosenberg, and Miller as associate editors, along with Moore. Striking yellow posterboard binders lettered with bright orange script held together the kaleidoscope of orange, blue, pink, and cream-colored pages. (To print David Daiches’ article about Frank Schoonmaker’s selection of wines, Caresse used a burgundy ink.) A deluxe edition of 300 copies offered a frameable cover design by Romare Bearden “at a special price.” A quotation from Charles Peguy embellished the flyleaf: “He who does not shout the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and counterfeiters.”
Henry Miller sent Part II of “The Staff of Life,” another rebuke to the Philistines, and Kay Boyle contributed a story about a peasant who stubbornly refuses to give up his land in “A Military Zone.” Jean-Paul Sartre focused on the dilemma of adolescence, “Boy into Man.” The then-unknown Spanish poet Federico García-Lorca contributed “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez-Mejías,” a dead bullfighter, handsomely illustrated by Pierre Tal-Coat. Harry Moore praised Anaïs Nin—whose first commercial fiction, “This Hunger,” appeared in Portfolio as “someone to watch.” Rodman defied the New Yorker review of the highly-touted Brideshead Revisited by calling it an example of Evelyn Waugh’s “newfound pietism.”
Caresse reprinted several significant pages from the 1929 edition of Shadows of the Sun. Harry’s paraphrase of Walt Whitman provides a revealing glimpse into Harry’s own phyche: “it expresses exactly how I feel towards those who love me.”
Who is he who would become my follower?
The way is suspicious—the result uncertain,
perhaps destructive.
You would have to give up all else—I alone would
expect to be your Sun-God, sole and exclusively.
Your novitiate would then be long and exhausting.
The whole past theory of your life and all conformity
to the lives of those around you would have to be
abandoned. Therefore release me now—let go your hand . . .
(Caresse must have caught the nuances of his message, it so perfectly mirrored her relationship with Harry.)
She again recognized promise in another erratic young poet, Kenneth Rexroth, author of an innovative verse play, Iphigenia at Aulis. When she took a chance on him, she had no idea she would be rewarded with this angry outcry from San Francisco. (Rexroth’s letter gives a glimpse of the casual manner in which the “editorial board” of Portfolio functioned.)
Last fall, Selden Rodman asked me to send him some things for a magazine he was editing. This turned out to be Portfolio. . . . He suggested that I “might get fifty dollars” for them, if I “asked you nicely.” I answered that I considered such a proposition degrading, that it was not my custom to beg from the rich, and please return the mss. as I had other places to place them on less insulting terms. I heard nothing from him, and forgot about the matter . . .
Today, in a bookstore, I came upon Portfolio III, with my play. Since I received no final notice of acceptance by you, no proofs, no author’s copies, no pay—I certainly consider this a most extraordinary piece of behavior on your part. I am not a syncophant—the last thing in the world I wish is to be beholden to you in anyway—I am well aware that the literary bon ton is made up of English assistants, Stalinist gunmen, fairies, professional cunnilinguists [sic] and other swine, who simply love to be kicked around by millionairesses. I am emphatically not such a person. I publish only on invitation, in periodicals, etc. run by my friends. I loathe and despise the world of cocktail literature and art and want nothing whatever to do with it.
Doubtless you are asked simply everywhere as . . . a fascinating woman, and one of the world’s leading art patrons. I hear you have your picture in Harper’s Bazaar, or is it view, as a “Career Woman of the Year.” This is at my expense, and others like me who would not possibly afford $3.50 for your simply fascinating magazine.
Of course, I know, when one has so much, one is careless about other people’s property, isn’t one? Poor dear.
He added a postscript: “I am very poor, and not careless about such matters.
Caresse’s answer was lost, but she wrote to Moore about the contretemps:
The Rexroth business was the limit. Selden did all the correspondence with him, and he went off to Haiti without leaving me Rexroth’s address. When I learned that his check had not been sent due to lack of address, I mailed one c/o Selden from Europe. According to J[ames] Laughlin, the $50 I paid Rexroth was more than he received from New Directions and when he [Rexroth] wrote me the absurd tantrum letter, Portfolio had only been out two weeks, so the delay was not very enormous. I imagine he suffers from a great big inferiority complex. In spite of all this, the Iphigenia was one of the very finest things we have ever printed and really worth the row . . .
Caresse was always willing to take another chance on new talent.
Virginia Paccassi, a 24-year-old with a distinctive, colorful approach to painting scenes of contemporary life in the streets and docks of the cities, wrote to her benefactor from Bleecker Street:
. . . Everything seems to have happened today. I got a divorce at noon, lost my train ticket this afternoon, and almost had to walk home from Boston. . . . I found your Portfolio at the door when I reached home. I have a three-year-old daughter who Henry Miller was crazy about when he visited us in California two years ago. The painting you reproduced I painted when I was 19, therefore I was a bit in the fog on perspective—still am!
The Rome edition of Portfolio was prompted by a call from the cultural attaché of the Italian Embassy in Washington. He noticed Portfolio II, edited in Paris, and asked Caresse to make a similar report on the modern renaissance of Italian literature and art. During the Fascist regime, exhibitions were closed the day they opened if paintings did not conform, and liberal books were banned. After 21 years of repression, artists and writers, long underground, “emerged into the light of a modern era.” Their interest and curiosity about America were great.
In April 1946, Caresse set sail once again for Europe. It was still difficult for a civilian to enter Italy, so she stopped off in Paris to arrange a flight with the Air Transport Command. “I was not told what day or hour I would depart, only that I should be ready to take off whenever I was notified by telephone,” she wrote. She was having dinner with friends and had just started back to her hotel on rue de Bac when “I was met by the little chasseur on a bicycle . . . the ATC had telephoned that I was to be at Orly Field in two hours!”
She packed quickly, and as it was almost impossible to find a taxi in those days, the concierge telephoned every place he knew before he finally “ran to earth a copain with a car.” Even then, the driver arrived only some ten minutes before she was due at the Place Vendôme, the central meeting place for transportation to Orly.
At the airport, she waited another hour for a sudden rain to let up, then piled aboard a converted bomber with bucket seats filled with American G.I.s and officers.
“We swooped down to a little shed with ‘Roma’ on its red rile roof. The day was beginning to dawn and the darkness and desolation . . . were very apparent. I had heard that Rome was not destroyed, but I saw that the edges were badly singed,” she wrote. She was billeted along with military personnel at the Excelsior, once Rome’s “swankiest” hotel. Several members of the staff remembered Caresse from former visits, and the concierge welcomed her as a long-lost friend. She had lunch alone in the Officers’ Mess, “decidedly PX, but the two martinis at 50 lire [then the equivalent of 20 cents] were decidedly pre-war.”
Caresse spent the afternoon obtaining “privilege” cards for use in the occupied city and calling at the U.S. Embassy, where Professor Morey, the cultural attaché, won high marks as a man of keen intellect, excellent taste, and good sense. (She discovered belatedly on the day she left that Morey was also a poet.)
“From the moment that I finished my coffee and strawberries next morning in the sunshine on the Via Veneto, I was obsessed by a world of new and exciting work,” she wrote. She set about her task of interpreting the Italian scene of arts and letters “for circulation in America.” The work of Alberto Moravia (“Malinverno”) and Carlo Levi (“Italian Panorama”) were published in Portfolio well ahead of Levi’s best-selling novel, Christ Stopped at Eboli. Morandi, an unknown youth—in her view—usurped the high place of Giorgio de Chirico. (De Chirico’s “Self-Portrait in 17th Century Dress” was “an abundance of realistic fruit and feathers that seems to spell the word pompier.”)
Caresse noted other important post-war trends in Italy. New names like Manzu and Savelli added to the rich heritage of sacred art. Architects and sculptors were making impressive strides, and there was a renewal of cultural life in the great castles and estates far from the cities. The great halls of the Castello di Torre Sommi-Peccinardi were converted into a modern theater, where ambitious villagers were offering French and Italian chamber music and attempting a Saroyan play in translation. Before she left for the States, Caresse was photographed by Romolo Marcellini at one of the historic fountains of Rome for the flyleaf of Portfolio (a photo later reproduced in a Madamoiselle feature, captioning her as editor of one of the “newer avant-garde magazines”).
Back in Washington, she announced a special edition of 100 numbered copies with an original lithograph by Roberto Fasola, L’Autel des Jesuits. She wrote to Moore, now at Craig Air Force Base, Alabama:
Back again full of Italian news. Portfolio IV is going to be sensational. Half of it is on the way, shipped by the U.S. Embassy. The other half I am getting together now in Washington. Your Lawrence article is to appear in both Italian and English. The translation has already been made. I will send you proofs next week.
Few translators lived up to Caresse’s meticulous standards. She wrote to Dr. Felix Giovanelli at New York University:
I am enclosing my check for $13 to settle the balance of your translating bill. . . . The actual number of your words printed in Portfolio were 5,439. I had to discard the Moravia as the translation was not up to standard.
. . . The poems that I used (and you said I could do as I liked about them) were completely revised by me and Corrado Cagli, who . . . said your translation, as it was, could not stand. I am sorry that so much of your work had to be discarded.
Always hard-pressed for funds, Caresse wrote to Bearden:
Dear Romie:
We are sending you a check for $50 for the magnificent contribution you made. I hope that next year, now that circulation is increasing, expenses . . . will be reduced and adequate means available to increase payment for materials used.
. . . In March I plan to go to Greece. The following number I would like to have made up entirely of Negro contributors . . . I am wondering if you would be willing to act as one of my associate editors, your name to appear on the masthead? There is no salary connected with this, but I am hoping that you may find it of sufficient interest to devote some time to helping me gather an impressive list . . .
Portfolio V was issued in Washington from new editorial offices at 918 F Street. Bearden came aboard as art editor, but Rodman, newly released from the Army, was no longer listed as poetry editor. Belazel Schatz’s illustration for Henry Miller’s Black Spring, a serigraph (silkscreen) of the author’s handwriting, was the frontispiece of the deluxe edition of 200 copies. “Handwriting possesses direct contact, carrying a flavor . . . all of its own which is completely lost in type print,” the editor commented.
On the flyleaf was Harry Crosby’s 1929 photograph of D.H. Lawrence at the Moulin du Soleil, illustrating the feature article by Moore, “Why Not Read Lawrence, Too?” (At the time, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned from publication in the U.S.).
Max Ernst supplied another of his surrealistic paintings from Arizona. Man Ray, whom Caresse discovered in Paris—as yet unrecognized in his own country—contributed one of his photosensitive “rayographs,” which he described as “painting with light.” René Batigné, director of the French Art collection at the National Gallery of Art, contributed an essay on the life and work of Modigliani.