Between the Covers

Although only a minor poet in her own right, Caresse Crosby had a significant impact on modern literature. With her husband, Harry Crosby, and later on her own, she published and promoted many of the early modernists. The Crosbys' Black Sun Press produced works by D.H. Lawrence, Kay Boyle, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Hart Crane, and in the 1930s, Caresse Crosby established Crosby Continental Editions to print inexpensive paperback editions of American and French novels. As editor and publisher of Portfolio: An Intercontinental Review (1945-1948), Crosby fostered the continued exchange of ideas between writers and artists in France and America. In addition to her publishing ventures, Crosby also supported avant-garde art through her sponsorship of individuals, through exhibits at her Crosby Gallery of Modern Art in Washington, D.C., during the 1940s, and through her establishment of an artists' colony in Rocca Sinibalda, Italy, in the early 1950s. Her final energies were devoted to the world-peace movement. She helped found Citizens of the World and Women Against War, and in the 1960s she purchased a mountaintop in Cyprus, where she intended to build a world-peace center. All her undertakings were notable for the tireless vitality she brought to them. Caresse Crosby was an activist who made ideas concrete, for both herself and others.

The daughter of William and Mary Phelps Jacob, she was born into a socially prominent New York family, what she called"a crystal chandelier background." While in school she began a neighborhood newspaper, for which she wrote both poetry and local news. However, at this period of her life, her inventiveness took less a literary turn than a fashion one. In 1913 she invented and patented a"backless brassiere," to be worn instead of a corset. Light and risque, its unconventionality was the harbinger of her future life-style. She produced about a hundred before selling the patent for $1500.

In January 1915 Polly Jacob married Richard Rogers Peabody, a young Boston banker. On Peabody's return from WWI service, his increasingly serious alcoholism and her newfound interest in a young Harvard war hero, Harry Crosby, led to their divorce. She had met Henry Grew Crosby, six years her junior, while chaperoning a social outing. Within a few weeks the two were lovers. The difference in their ages, her marital status, and their flagrant and impassioned courtship scandalized proper Boston society. Although the Peabodys' divorce was final in December 1921, familial and social pressures on the couple forestalled an immediate marriage. Only after a separation and transcontinental romance (he was in Paris, she in New York City), were they married. Two days after the ceremony on 9 September 1922, the Crosbys and her two children sailed for Paris.

For the next seven years, Caresse and Harry Crosby lived out the advice given in one of Caresse's poems,"Wisdom of the East":"You must live before you can write...." These seven years were frenetic, hedonistic, exuberant, and a total break with the"polite society" in which both had grown up. Living first in Paris, then in the suburb of Ermenonville, in a restored mill they called Le Moulin du Soleil, the Crosbys partied with artists and socialites, met with writers, studied literature, and began to both write and publish. In 1924 Caresse officially changed her name from Polly to Caresse and began in earnest her career as a writer. Her first five books (the bulk of her poetic career) appeared in rapid succession and varied only minimally in form, theme, and quality.

As both Caresse and Harry Crosby began to write, they needed a means to get into print. Their solution was their own press. The couple first started publishing under the imprint Editions Narcisse (named for their black whippet) but soon changed the name to Black Sun Press. Once underway, Black Sun Press published original works by other writers, including Joyce, Lawrence, Hart Crane, Proust, and Pound. Caresse Crosby was in charge of the day-to-day business of the press. Although they had a master printer, Roger Lescault, it was she who designed the colophon, chose the paper, set margins, and planned the layout of pages. She also illustrated several of the works, including her Painted Shores and Harry Crosby's The Sun (1929). Her detailed attention to material and the printing process made the volumes from Black Sun Press exceptionally well crafted.

In November 1929 the Crosbys returned to the United States on a semiannual visit. In the seven years of their marriage, Harry's obsession with an egocentric sun mythology and worship was progressively leading him to suicide. On this visit, he had a tryst with Josephine Rotch Bigelow, one of his lovers, who had agreed to join him in a suicide pact, which Harry saw as the ultimate act of love and art. On 10 December 1929 Harry Crosby failed to meet Caresse Crosby and his mother at an appointment with his uncle, J.P. Morgan, Jr. When he later failed to meet them for dinner, Caresse Crosby asked their escort, Hart Crane, to look for him. Crane discovered the bodies of Harry Crosby and Bigelow, both dead of gunshot wounds. Shaken by the murder-suicide, Caresse Crosby stayed in the United States only long enough to have Harry Crosby's body cremated, and then returned to Paris.

In Paris, Crosby continued the work of Black Sun Press. However, her publication of Poems for Harry Crosby (1931) marked the end of her career as a poet. She spent the next two years in another, equal labor of love: the reprinting of Harry Crosby's poetry in a series of four volumes - each with a preface or afterword (by T.S. Eliot, Stuart Gilbert, D.H. Lawrence, and Ezra Pound) - and publishing his War Letters (1932). She also edited and published Hart Crane's The Bridge (1930), Ezra Pound's Imaginary Letters (1930), and Archibald MacLeish's New Found Land (1930).

In 1931 Caresse expanded her publishing venture by founding, with Jacques Porel, Crosby Continental Editions. The function of Crosby Continental Editions was to provide inexpensive paperback reprints of works by important modern writers. The publication list compiled by Crosby and Porel featured both French and American authors. Among those whose books were reprinted were William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Kay Boyle, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and Alain-Fournier. Although paperback editions had become popular in Europe, they were not in America; the press, not economically successful, soon ceased publication.

In the mid-1930s Caresse returned to the United States to live. In 1936 she purchased Hampton Manor, an estate near Fredericksburg, Virginia. She turned her attention to promoting the visual arts and in the early 1940s she opened the Crosby Gallery of Modern Art in Washington, D.C.

In 1953, urged by friends such as Henry Moore and Malcolm Cowley, Crosby published her last book, The Passionate Years, an anecdotal memoir of her life. -- from Melody M. Zajdel's entry in American Poets, 1880-1945: Second Seriesmore