by Anne Conover
The Greek artists, most of them in dire need . . . have received the minimum for their work . . . but I did promise them an audience in this country, and it is in hope that you will help me keep this promise that I am sending you Portfolio VI for possible mention in your paper.
From the beginning, Portfolio was subsidized heavily from Caresse’s personal account. From Greece she wrote to Arthur Wagman, newly hired as business manager and public relations liaison in Washington: “I have great confidence in your ability to create a good market and to manage the business successfully, for,” she added realistically “we’ll either fold or flourish now.”
She explained her dilemma to Miller:
After trials and tribulations Portfolio VI is on the way to subscribers and one will reach you before long. I have had to reorganize the selling of Portfolio. It got very much out of hand while I was away, and unfortunately Mr. Wagman not only didn’t sell, but unsold, which was quite disastrous financially. I tried to find assistance from some of my well-heeled friends and from some gilded Greeks in this country, but not a soul has come across and I have had to falter along on my own resources. I hope the result will not be too inferior.
For three years, Caresse had accomplished the impossible with these handsome productions, and as she confessed to Wagman, “Never has so much been done on so little.”
“Let no one account this a small effort,” the critic Carley Dawson wrote.
Whoever has worked with his hands, and has slipped a thin wedge under a weight apparently impossible of moving, will know how effective a slender wedge can be, even when it may be only a small hammer that continues its persistent blows. Caresse Crosby, in her eager, knowledgeable mind, has that wedge. In her dynamic energy, her obstinate faith in and love of people, she has that hammer. Successive numbers of her Portfolio should be awaited with respect and interest, not only by intellectuals everywhere, but by all those who sense the world longing for a creative, universal, and lasting peace.
After Portfolio VI, Caresse was bringing out Charles Olson’s long poem Y & X, hoping to have it completed before Christmas. In answer to Olson’s request for payment, she wrote:
I’m in a jam myself until December 1st—if that is no good to you I’ll try to arrange the accounts so you can have it sooner. I saw Corrado but we are no further on Y&X because (1) I have too much at present to get out Portfolio (after this week, the checks will be cleared) and (2) I myself have no funds just now to work with. I always pay as I print—I hate bills piling up! So I am solvent but broke . . .
Y & X finally came out early in the new year, a handsome limited edition in palindrome format, handset in astrée italics, illustrated by the line drawings of Corrado Cagli. It was an appropriate swan song.
Caresse wrote:
Here are proofs of the text—but all you can check is the text—this actual printing was done on a proof press and I can’t get final proofs actually en page until the day it goes to press. If you were on hand we could watch the first sheets together and rectify any spacing, etc., but you will just have to trust me—I fuss and fume and work and space for hours, to my heart’s content, until I get things right . . . Well, let’s keep our fingers crossed . . .
Olson replied:
I return the proofs (which have just come) with the greatest pleasure in the type, congratulations. It seems to me perfect. Preface stands out like some revolutionary broadside, and it couldn’t be better. My own wish is that a little more breadth of space be put where I have indicated, even if it means crowding the margin a little in this case. For it is a difficult poem typographically and must be given all its chance, no?
Caresse was going ahead with plans to publish the work of black artists and writers in Portfolio VII until late 1948, when she abruptly announced to disappointed subscribers: “I regret to say Portfolio has been suspended due to lack of funds. You ask if publication will be resumed. We hope so, but we need financial support. Do you know of anyone who might contribute to this very worthwhile expression of cultural exchange?” When no angel appeared, there were no new issues of Portfolio.
Caresse was again a woman ahead of her time, in the vanguard of creative thought, apart from the crowd. In the post-war world of “pop” culture, she spoke out loud and clear against “the Philistines,” a voice crying in the wilderness in her time. Without an academic background or special creative talent of her own, she was blessed with an intuitive artistic sense to evaluate the work of others and was utterly fearless in printing anything of real merit, as long as it was sincere. She must have foreseen the importance of her role as muse, of a lifelong commitment to the arts, when she wrote: “The poet or artist is the longest life-giver in the universe. . . . Those whose deeds have been recorded by a poet may live till the world snuffs out.”
At the mid-century mark, a mushroom cloud appeared on the horizon that threatened the world “snuffing out.” Caresse cast aside creative concerns to take on a new role as political activist.
Chapter XI
A CITIZEN OF THE WORLD
“Idealists are all crackpots until they become heroes or saints.”
—Caresse
As Caresse reached another turning point in her life, she was still her father’s daughter, and William Jacob was a man who “dreamed of, believed in, and planned for a better world for rich and poor alike.” The cause she was seeking turned up on her doorstep in January 1948. “A young lawyer, Rufus King, and his wife Janice came to my editorial office in Washington, bringing a beautiful idea with them in manuscript,” she wrote. “They appealed to me as an independent publisher to print their work. Other publishers had turned it down as, at best, ‘ahead of its time,’ or at worst, ‘crackpot.’ These young people aimed to do something towards making this earth of ours a better habitat.”
We have just survived a cycle of three decades that carried us from total war to total war. This time, the cycle may be shorter; and this time it promises a holocaust. . . . We are young, with good years ahead of us in this life. . . . We believe that our lives could scarcely mean more to us than yours to you. . . .
This document of some hundred pages—The Manifesto for Individual Secession into a World Community—was couched in legal terms, but the thrust was obvious: A small number of national leaders had unleashed a weapon of total destruction. Only by pledging allegiance to a higher, international authority could mankind avoid the total disaster of a third World War.
“That night, in reading over their conception of World Citizenship, I realized that I had in my hands the cornerstone of a new World Order,” Caresse noted. “Their greatest appeal was to my heart and conscience. I knew it [The Manifesto] would have no immediate political or financial success. The best I could promise was to get it into print in Paris in the spring, and to distribute review copies.”
She began by placing announcements in Washington newspapers inviting anyone interested in world citizenship to gather at the new editorial office at 2008 Que Street. Some 50 people came, a cross-section: “the religious man, the artist, the soldier, the diplomat, the housewife, the businessman, the student.” The movement failed to gain momentum until April, when Caresse flew to Europe with Rufus King, taking the Manifesto in his briefcase. At their first stop, Hyde Park Corner in London, the tall, lanky young American impressed passers-by with his well-expressed ideas. In Paris, Roger Lescaret’s press put the Manifesto into production, with the publication date May 15, 1948.
Also in May, the Black Sun Press produced the first World Passport:
This passport has little meaning in itself. You will note that you have made no pledge or promise. You are simply identified as one who “will endeavor to recognize” his responsibilities as a member of the single, total World Community. . . . The number on your passport is the number of human beings who have accepted this trust already. Their numbers grow. We welcome you and honor the step you have taken.
; A young American in Paris, Garry Davis, was the first to act upon the idea of individual secession. A slight man with sandy hair and a self-effacing smile, Davis was deeply moved by his experiences as a bomber pilot in World War II. “No one really understood except those of us who had been out there with them and heard them laugh the night before it happened, heard them jeer obscenities . . . and then seen them die the next morning.” The son of Meyer Davis, a popular society orchestra leader, Garry planned to make a career as an actor before the War. When he returned, he was not the same carefree young man who left for flight training. After he read the Manifesto, “The only thing that was clear in my mind was that I, Garry Davis, was in some way responsible for the march of nations toward World War III.”
In a dramatic gesture, Davis walked into the Passport Division of the U.S. Embassy in Paris and renounced his American citizenship. To prove his point, he camped on the steps of the Trocadero, at that time the meeting place of the United Nations, designated an international territory. In a filibuster lasting for several days, Davis lectured the passers-by about U.S. history and the Founding Fathers—Madison, Monroe, Jefferson—self-declared “Americans” who relinquished citizenship in their native states to declare allegiance to a higher authority. Citizens of contemporary nation-states—particularly the Big Four—should renounce their own national interests on behalf of world government, according to Davis. (Lescaret, hero of the French Resistance, infiltrated the crowds to take meals to Garry.) The crowds thinned out as soon as the novelty wore off, but one young American stayed on.
“Are you Garry Davis? I’m Rufus King from Washington.”
“I’ve heard about you, Rufus. Good to know you.”
“I thought you could use some professional advice. Say, I’d like to help you to put this thing over . . . We could draw up a world Constitution, a Bill of Rights, a Pledge of Allegiance, etc., for world citizens.”
Despite Rufus’s offer of legal aid, Davis was a young man without a country, subject to extradition by the French. Caresse knew the day would come when gendarmes would move in to arrest him, and she did what she could to prevent such injustice. Reporting back to Olson in Washington, she wrote:
I am now official printer to the Citizens of the World! Youth movements, World crusaders, etc., etc., flock around my door. I am printing leaflets for “followers of Garry Davis”—it’s growing—60 countries heard from. Youth is against the Atlantic Pact—or any military pact; they’re scared, they want to rise up soon and assert their rights to live in peace. You’d better come help us—or prepare to help me have a big rally in Washington in September!
The international press at the time discredited and caricatured Davis and the World Citizens movement. As publisher of its “Bible,” the Manifesto, Caresse Crosby was tarred with the same brush.
The Sunday News in Washington noted on June 27:
World Citizen No. 3! Mrs. Caresse Crosby has a world citizenship movement of her own, in which she follows Mr. and Mrs. Rufus King on an informal citizenship roll. . . . Puzzled State Department officials have no answer. Millions outside want “in,” desiring the most useful citizenship in the world, and others clamor to renounce the privilege.
Several periodicals returned the published Manifesto to Caresse without reviewing it. A few enlightened individuals—such as Norman Cousins, editor of The Saturday Review and leader of the United World Federalists—praised the World Citizens movement as an idea whose time had come.
A major breakthrough occurred when Robert Sarrazac, leading French intellectual, risked his reputation by recruiting a distinguished group to meet at the Cité Club, a Conseil de Solidarité, with André Breton, the poet, and Albert Camus, the novelist, among them. With such substantial backing, the world press began to swing in Davis’s favor. The New Yorker acknowledged: “Mr. Davis, whether he acted wisely or foolishly, is in step with the universe. The rest of us march to a broken drum.” Life noted that Davis had aroused a deep longing for peace. An editorial in Harper’s magazine stated that “Six months ago, young Davis was a pathetic and somewhat absurd figure, staging a one-man sit-down strike on the doorstep of the U.N. Assembly. Now . . . he is supported by a group of intellectuals which astonishingly includes Albert Einstein, the novelist Richard Wright, and a number of French literary figures such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and André Gide.”
In the busy summer of 1949, Davis took the Manifesto to the first World Citizens’ rally in Belgium, and Caresse printed an agenda for the Peoples’ World Convention to be distributed by the British Parliamentary Committee for World Government. She was also invited to become sub-editor of Across Frontiers, a world newspaper edited by Jerry Kraus in London. Never one to play second fiddle, she decided to form her own organization.
A new idea began to take shape, of finding a home for World Citizens in an international territory. Pietro Lazzari, the Italian artist whose works Caresse had shown at the Crosby Gallery, thought of the town where his mother was born in Rieti province. “You must go there and see the ruined castle at Roccasinibalda,” Pietro suggested. “It’s just the place to start your ‘one world’ idea. Artists would love to live in that place.”
The next summer, Caresse took a lease from the Vatican with the option to buy, a million lire as down payment. “My idea was to provide an atmosphere where the poet and the philosopher, the artist, can really create ideas that will lead the world to peace and sanity. It’s a very big idea, but this is a very big place to start . . . In this ancient fortress, with a new idea, with ideas for a world where artists are important, I can carry on my own activities and help others . . . There’s a sense of beauty, of eternity . . .”
Once settled in, she determined to declare her own small fiefdom a Città del Mondo. She invited the women of the village to come up to the castle to sign the petition. At that time, there were three women for every man, so many men had lost their lives during World War II.
Their hostess offered vino and an attentive, sympathetic hearing of their problems. Before the signoras left, they voted to be recognized as citizens of the first World City. They marched back down the cobblestoned path to convince their men and the Mayor of the Commune that their town should be declared an international territory. Caresse wrote to a colleague in Washington:
During the past two months I have been living here in an ancient castle . . . in a pitifully poor, but humanly beautiful community (500 souls) in the foothills of the Abruzzi . . . This mondialization has drawn a great deal of public and journalistic attention to Roccasinibalda. But while its women have taken a courageous step forward in time, their present surroundings remain pitifully inadequate. They look to me and to America as their saviours.
To another Washington correspondent, Caresse urged help for “these men and women . . . I have visited the rubbled homes of the poorest citizens and know that with a small contribution of materials and of willing minds and hands we could mend and restore . . .”
We will need an engineer for advice, an architect for plans, some handy-men and white-washers for manual work . . . the use of a buzz-saw for cutting planks, the use of a cement mixer, a sewing machine, and one or two young women to sew curtains, etc.
At the end of another busy summer, the Vatican refused to grant Caresse the option to buy the Castello. Her dream of establishing a World Citizen center at Roccasinibalda would be postponed for another ten years.
Chapter XII
WOMEN AGAINST WAR
“The story of the phoenix holds good in the life of ideas more truly than in any other sphere . . . Whether or not we are successful in our generation, we shall have lit the lamp by which future generations will see.”
—Caresse
The mushroom cloud of the first atomic bomb that ended the second World War still hovered as a permanent shadow. Caresse’s son survived four perilous years in the Navy and returned home with a Brazilian bride, Josette. But Caresse c
onsidered she had “lost” two husbands as casualties of war. Both Dick Peabody and Harry Crosby returned with scarred psyches and died prematurely.
“We who have known war must never forget war,” Harry Crosby wrote. His widow never forgot. She listened intently to the last speech of the wartime President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom she strongly supported: “The work, my friends, is peace—more than an end of this war—an end to the beginning of all wars.”
When press reports first hinted that Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer had discovered the secret of the atom, Caresse sent a telegram to President and Mrs. Harry Truman (at Blair House while the White House was undergoing reconstruction):
—WE PRAY THAT THE NEW AND INFINITELY DESTRUCTIVE ATOM BOMB WILL NOT BE MADE—STOP—LET THIS GREAT NEW FORCE BE USED ONLY FOR PEACE AND PROGRESS—STOP—WE TRUST YOU—
Caresse considered that trust broken at Hiroshima. In earlier wars, women waited behind the lines for their men, but in the nuclear age, every man, woman, and child lives in a battle zone. With the threat of nuclear war looming in Korea, she joined the chorus of wives and mothers in protest. “Now it’s up to the women.”
In her view, women bear children, and children are the future. Men who control and direct the military and foreign policy hurtled America into two major wars in half a century. It could no longer be left to men to make life-and-death decisions. Women—53 percent of all Americans—must bear their share of responsibility too.
“Until I reached fifty, no matter how hard I tried to act independently, I never matured,” she admitted. “If ever there was a job which we women ought to tackle, it is this question of war and peace.” At a press conference, she made an emotional appeal to women everywhere: “Stop, stop, for God’s sake, stop!”
The collision is just around the bend, the train-loads gain momentum. . . . Perhaps the bodies of all the women of the world kneeling on the tracks from East to West could stop those trains. It may well be that from the rubble of World War III, here and there, one survivor of the East will at least climb forth to lift up one survivor of the West from the cinders of civilization, and naked together, will start anew. A man, a woman, a world; but before this can happen, all man’s power, his wealth, and his hopes may be sown into limbo.