by Anne Conover
Moore postponed his visit to the castle, but at the end of another busy summer, Caresse wrote that “Sy Kahn has been here, and now he and Nancy are off to Poland. Bucky [Fuller] has been here, Gregory Corso has been here, and of course Robert Mann a lot. I saw Ezra [Pound] last week in Venice when I visited Peggy Guggenheim—Summer [has] flown.”
Recently released from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, Pound had returned to Italy with Olga Rudge. Caresse invited him to visit her at Roccasinibalda. Unlike the rambunctious, combative youth she had danced with in Paris, Pound at 72 was a tired old man with listless eyes and a shock of white hair. Having spent the last quarter of his life in confinement, he regarded his years at St. Elizabeth’s as martyrdom.
The castle was cold and damp that summer, and Pound never could find a room warm enough to suit him, though he spent long sunny hours in the courtyard. Caresse wrote to Sam Rosenberg, another friend from the Washington years, that there were some days when “he [Pound] doesn’t say a word, and hardly whispers ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in answer to direct questions. . . . His mind is alert, and I am sure he has a lot to say, but it would be better if he could write instead of speak. His mood swings were dramatic. By turns he was alert and energetic, despondent and apathetic.”
Frances Steloff also was dismayed to see Pound’s deteriorating condition when they met at Roccasinibalda that summer. She had known both Pound and Caresse for many years, as owner of the venerable Gotham Book Mart, home of the James Joyce Society and gathering place of the New York literati for two-thirds of a century.
Steloff often told an anecdote that epitomizes Caresse’s generosity and genuine affection for female friends. This late in life, Caresse could not afford Paris designer dresses, but she was always well turned out in self-designed “costumes.” When Steloff admired the gown she was wearing, Caresse exclaimed, “But you must have it! I’m sure we wear the same size.”
“Oh, no,” Steloff protested. “It is so becoming to you, dear Caresse.”
Later that evening, without saying a word to Steloff, Caresse took “the dress off her back” and tucked it into the suitcase, where Steloff discovered it after she returned to New York.
Caresse was aware that her days at the Castello were “dwindling down to a precious few.” She began to search for a philanthropist or institution to buy the castle and continue with her One World concept after she was gone. She again turned to Harry Moore to ask if Southern Illinois University might be interested.
“I am waiting with some impatience for the advent of [President] Delyte Morris,” she wrote, “for it is very necessary that I make some arrangement about the castle before next season, and now castles in Italy seem to be at a premium. I see that Mr. J. Paul Getty has just bought a lovely ruin not far from Rome. Anyway, I am in the market for an exciting university to share my beautiful Castello di Roccasinibalda.”
Morris, who was planning to be in Europe that summer, promised to stop at the castle to report on the condition of the property. Caresse met him in Rome in her chauffeur-driven car. As they arrived at the gate, members of the household staff came down to meet them with the special sedan chair Bucky Fuller designed to carry the Principessa up the steep hill to the entrance. Doctors warned her not to climb even a short distance up the hill with the weakened condition of her heart.
By the time of Morris’s visit, Caresse had doubled the asking price for the castle, so negotiations with SIU ended permanently. She reported to Moore:
I was terribly put off by SIU’s decision not to take the castle . . . I had expected to be “in the chips” in 1967, and instead I find myself quite deep in bedrock and must start all over again to try to find a buyer for this year. . . .
During the time I waited for the answer from SIU, one of the art colleges who wanted to look it over last summer has landed elsewhere—but I know that I can make it work, once I get going again.
Despite her disappointment at the failure of the negotiations with SIU, she led an active and peripatetic life with many friends in New York that winter. Throughout the ’60s, Caresse stayed with Helen Simpson in a gracious old townhouse on the Upper East Side at 109 East 91st Street. She was never a paying guest, but there was an informal arrangement with Helen that whenever Caresse cabled she was coming, there was a room ready for her. Caresse would appear for extended stays with a case of wine or some other hostess treat. Simpson was, in those years, almost totally deaf, but her many friends communicated on a large notepad, and she enjoyed any number of guests at her bountiful table.
In October, Simpson wrote to ask Caresse “When will you and Robert appear? I suggest any day after Sunday, November 7, because Kerensky will have flown back to California where he is giving seminars at Stanford University, and the fifth floor ‘Kerensky rooms’ will suit Robert. . . .”
Among those who came to dinner at Simpson’s and stayed on for months or even years was Alexander Kerensky, who succeeded Prince Lvov in 1917 as premier of Russia’s provisional government before the Bolshevik Revolution exiled him. In February 1927—the tenth anniversary of the Revolution—Kerensky and his first wife Olga had arrived in New York Harbor on the S.S. Olympic, to be welcomed by Helen and her husband, Kenneth E. Simpson, then Republican candidate for New York’s 17th Congressional District and Assistant U.S. Attorney. The Simpsons installed the Kerenskys in their home until they could find one of their own.
The friendship persisted throughout Kerensky’s exile, with Helen long after Simpson’s untimely death in 1941. For a number of years, Kerensky lived in a dacha on the New York-Connecticut border, then visited Australia with his second wife, Nell. When he returned to New York after Nell’s death, he was only too happy to accept the everlastingly kind Helen’s offer of accommodation in her fifth-floor apartment, where he would remain for the next two decades. An éminence grise of amorphous features topped by a crew-cut, Kerensky could be seen leaving a side entrance of the townhouse with “the quick, nervous step of a caged lion,” disappearing inconspicuously among the passers-by on Madison Avenue. Caresse always enjoyed his “debonaire, monocled wit” when they met at table.
She wrote to Moore about other activities that winter. “I am lunching tomorrow with John Gordon, head of the Berg Collection of the NY Public Library—do you know him or it?” Bucky Fuller and Mike Lekakis were coming to dinner, “knitting up the loose ends of the Cyprus project.” Kay Boyle would be in town on the 12th, but Caresse would miss her because she expected to fly back to Rome via London and Paris, with a stopover in Madrid to visit Polleen and Lorraine before returning to Roloff Beny’s flat on the Tiber. In May she would be in Roccasinibalda again.
Caresse continued to search for a prospective buyer for the Castello. “I have spent several legacies on living well and with excitement—now I still live well and with exciting ideas but there are no more legacies in view and I do not have money to carry on any plans for ‘One World’ here or elsewhere,” she observed. Perhaps she was grasping at straws when she wrote to Dr. Boris Pregel, whom she met casually at Simpson’s:
You told me on our first meeting . . . that you could sell the castle for me and that you know more about me than I know myself. Therefore, among other things you must know that I have vast ideas and no wealth. I intend to live another 20 years and during that time I must find means to live as I plan to. One way would be to find a foundation that would back me with the intention to set up a school of restoring here in the castle . . . To set up and conduct such a school . . . I need 100,000 dollars a year. The castle I own, . . . and on my death the place could become the property of the donor or the school. . . . Lacking the school idea I would like to sell to some institution for 40,000 dollars a year for fifteen years. At the end of that time or on my death it would become the property of the institution (you must know my age too). The World Academy of Art and Science, which at present has no headquarters, might be such an institution. . . .
My own five-room apartment in one of the wings with private entrance I would keep for myself during my lifetime. . . . On my death, this too would revert to the institution or foundation that buys. It is well worth the 600,000 dollar investment. Can you sell it for me? . . . “The days dwindle down.”
The World Academy of Art and Science was her next target. She wrote to its Secretary General, Dr. Hugo Boyko, asking if a date was set for a meeting to decide on the trusteeship of Roccasinibalda and ways to maintain it as a One World Center. If the Italian government granted the Castello extraterritoriality, the WAAS could proclaim its World Constitution from a pilot plot of earth in the center courtyard.
Until the Castle becomes the seat of the World Academy of Art and Science with the necessary steps taken vis-à-vis the Italian Government I will continue to use and run it and pay the taxes, but once WAAS takes over I will expect taxes and maintenance to be the obligation of the Academy, leaving me one wing for tenure during my lifetime . . . The property is ideally situated and its value is increasing yearly. It can be used for rather large conferences as well as giving ample living space to a resident body of from 20 to 30 fellows of the Academy . . . For ten years the castle has flown the World Flag and the mondial ideas for which it stands have gained wide respect and acceptance. Please let me hear soon what you have decided . . .
(Caresse closed all official letters at this time with: “Hopefully, faithfully.”)
The next spring, Caresse’s travel plans changed dramatically. She advised Harry Moore that she would not fly off to Europe on May 23 as intended “I have been getting steadily worse in the heart department since last summer,” she wrote. She had been to see the experts at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, and after a three-day check-up, they advised that they were willing to operate with a new, experimental technique “if I care to take a chance.” Again, she said “Yes!” to life. “I am very excited,” she told Moore, “this could give me a new and active lease on life which I truly want . . . now I am given this chance to feel fit to climb Mt. Parnassus again.”
As a postscript she added, “Maybe I’ll stop off for a few days’ breather in your garden guest room on my way East from Minnesota.” Her courageous spirit never considered—or refused to admit—that she might not return after the difficult, and at that time experimental, “open heart” surgery.
En route to Europe on the S.S. Italia after the operation, the irrepressible Caresse wrote to Moore from Gibraltar: “I am fine but have grown enormous—at least two inches ’round the waist, four ’round the chest! It’s being able to breathe that’s done it—I’m furious!!!” Surgical intervention increased Caresse’s awareness of the passing of time—that her Thirty-Year-Plan was no nearer to completion. “I don’t know enough, not anything really. ‘Tis maddening to feel so ill-equipped to meet whatever time is left, and there is so little time for me.” She drafted an agenda for a meeting of Humanists to discuss “the evolution of the individual in relation to the infinitude of the Cosmos, which summons him, and the earth, from which he has come. . . .” She posed other difficult metaphysical questions:
Where is man going and why? Will he find within his own nature a center of gravity to withstand the forces of an expanding universe? How can a finite mind deal with the infinite? What is the power within man that evolves his own consciousness? Where should man place himself . . . as a catalyst between a continuous eternity and never-ending force? as a force to withstand an expanding universe and to mobilize humanity as the perfect anchorage within time and space?
There was no doubt about Caresse’s seriousness of purpose when she invited an ecletic group of Humanists, including Julian Huxley, Lewis Mumford, Bertrand Russell, Arthur Toynbee, Robert Oppenheimer, Roger Baldwin, Norman Thomas, and Jean-Paul Sartre. (She did not forget her friends of long standing, Henry Miller, Kay Boyle, Anaïs Nin, and Charles Olson.)
Her recuperative powers were remarkable. Early the next year, she wrote to Foster Parmalee of the World Constitutional Convention:
Your interesting and really flattering communication of February 28 reached me in Rome only a few days ago. I have been traveling around the Middle East, touching bases in Lebanon, Cyprus, Turkey and Greece, always with the One World idea in view.
I am putting my mind and heart into your suggestion that I draw up a list of 100 persons of the world who might serve suitably in a top group for the World Government movement. I feel the young people are the ones that should back this development, and since there are so many who believe in it, it is through them, backed by “elder statesmen,” that it can come about. I hope that by the 2nd session of the world convention in 1970 we can have an important list to present.
Sorry I have been so out of touch but in the countries where I have been traveling the mail just did not go as fast as I did!
“Blessings on you and my affection for you is real,” Parmalee replied in a handwritten message.
“The young people” are the goal of a new project in NYC, the National Teach-In for World Community, developed by the WCC, a local group stimulated by the Interlachen-Wolfach meeting last summer. Columbia University in October is the first program. Clark has sponsored it, and another 50 professors have promised their sponsorship.
About Norman Cousins . . . he was president of UWF [United World Federalists] and is also President of the World Association of World Federalists. WAWF now has the able services of Andrew Clark, executive director. He was head of Canadian WF and works out of Canada with European office moved from The Hague to Copenhagen, where the Parliament is almost solid for W.G. Be sure you become a member and receive “The World Federalist” monthly or bimonthly . . . Norman is for the top group.
Among other “top” people, Caresse wrote to Pope Paul VI in appreciation of his journey around the world in the cause of peace, expressing her own unconventional beliefs:
Your Holiness,
. . . I call myself a Christian Atheist believing in love as Christ did when He said, “Love Thy Neighbour as Thyself”, and in St. Paul’s appeal, “I come to you from all the world”; and I believe that the journeys Your Holiness has taken to Jerusalem and India have truly expressed a love for all mankind and a willingness to consider the value of other doctrines as well as the Roman Catholic faith.
I have never been able to accept the divinity of a personal God, which I believe man through vain desire and self-righteousness has framed in his own likeness. . . .
I do completely and objectively believe that Jesus Christ lived, and died the most perfect life ever known and I believe it is right to raise Mary, the Mother of Christ, to beatify and sanctify the Church. Mary was human and Jesus her Son was human, but by whose knowledge has God the Father ever existed? That is why I am a Christian Atheist and a Humanist as well . . .
I . . . believe that the Humanities, and Humanism . . . may one day save the world through understanding and love, understanding of the mysteries and complex laws of the Cosmos and love of one’s fellow men.
Helen Simpson reported to Caresse after the Pope’s visit to New York that “even the weather rejoiced . . . a beautiful clear early autumn day, although rather windy. It was a great event. He should receive letters of thanks (such as you wrote) from all Catholics, Protestants, and Atheists. I only hope he gets back safely . . . there are so many crackpots who might take a shot at him.”
During that winter, Caresse began to plan for a Threshold for Peace ceremony to be held in the courtyard of the Castello. First on her guest list were poets—inspired by the memory of Harry Crosby—Robert Lowell, Pablo Neruda, and the Italian poets Ungheretti, Montale, and Murillo. She originally planned to time the event to coincide with the opening of the Gian-Carlo Menotti Festival of Two Worlds at Spoleto July 1, which would draw world press attention and outstanding artists and writers. In the end, she decided on a later date when the eyes of the world might focus solely on Roccasinibalda.
A galaxy of
stars of the literary world gathered at Spoleto that summer—Pablo Neruda, Stephen Spender, Allen Tate, Ted Hughes, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John Ashberry, Rafael Alberti, and the Russian exile, Yevtushenko. Fuller, who designed the Spoletosphere for theater and dance, appeared with Isamu Noguchi. Desmond O’Grady was there to organize the poetry reading for Menotti. Ezra Pound, who emerged from his self-imposed silence to give the first public reading since his return to Italy, inscribed a volume of poetry to Bucky: “Friend of the universe, bringer of happiness, liberator.” Charles Olson came with Caresse, folding his huge frame into the only transportation available, a Volkswagen “bug.” (Together, Caresse and Olson were an odd couple; it appeared that bear-like Olson could hold the petite Caresse in the palm of one hand.) She lunched or dined almost daily with the Spoleto artists—at her happy, vibrant best in the company of creative minds.
Plans for the Threshold for Peace continued throughout the summer. The date was finally set, and invitations were dispatched to friends and colleagues around the world to rally at the castle.
CARESSE CROSBY
Citizen of the World
invites
to the inauguration of a “Threshold for Peace” at the Castle of Roccasinibalda, Province of Rieti, Italy. This mondial step will be symbolized by the placing of a marble plaque in the earth of the courtyard of the castle, inscribed with the words, LOVE, TRUTH, BEAUTY, JUSTICE, CHOICE. This round of earth, a man’s span, will be ceded out of present ownership to the youth of the world, in the belief that man’s future lies in the acceptance of a cosmos without frontiers and a globe freed from waste and from want, without barriers to individual expression or opportunity. This round of earth is to be safeguarded by the mondial rights of man, and bequeathed in perpetuity to humanity by humanity as a symbol of ONE WORLD.
Sunday, October 6, 1968.