Hostess to the Lost Generation
CLEAVER, CAROLE
Hostess to the Lost Generation Caresse Crosby: From Black Sun to Roccasinibalda By Anne Conover Capra. 239 pp. $19.95. Reviewed by Carole Cleaver Co-author, "Horace Pippin: The A rtist...
...Her life is explored for its triumphs, with little attention given to its trials and sadness (Billy Peabody, her son, also committed suicide...
...Harry played as hard as he worked—philandering, drinking, smoking opium, and cavorting at the Crosbys' renovated country mill, Moulin du Soleil...
...At the castle, Roccasinibalda, she was once more an eminent hostess, welcoming artists and writers with cheap wine, pasta and drafty rooms —all that her depleted funds now allowed...
...Adevotee of the color black, he always wore a black flower in his buttonhole...
...She died in 1970...
...she had to run her own show...
...He was no loafer...
...He took flying lessons, too...
...Neglected by her alcoholic husband, she was confined with her two children to the stolid Boston mansion of her strait-laced in-laws...
...In the capital Caresse did what she did best: She opened an art gallery, edited the literary magazine Portfolio, and had more affairs (with David Porter, an American artist...
...In the summer of 1928 he persuaded Caresse to make a suicide pact with him, to be fulfilled 14 years in the future: They were to die in each other's arms on October 31,1942...
...Everything he did was marked by the obsessive intensity he exhibited in pursuing Caresse, who introduced him to sex...
...Reviewed by Carole Cleaver Co-author, "Horace Pippin: The A rtist as a Black A merican " Once there was a penniless young woman named Mary Peabody...
...She published books by trend-setting writers, edited literary magazines, ran art galleries, and attempted to establish an international center for peace...
...Its books were a crystallization of the Crosbys' sparkling social life, a microcosm of the Lost Generation...
...To print their own poetry, the couple decided to found a publishing company, the Black Sun Press...
...It suited her...
...As the decade drew to a close, however, Harry grew jaded, tired of life...
...Over the course of five years he produced no less than eight volumes of undistinguished verse...
...Of course, she continued to give parties...
...Lawrence, Hart Crane, Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dali...
...and would have balked at death, the ultimate No...
...But the wait was to prove too long...
...The many typos and misspellings would have disturbed Caresse, who was a production perfectionist...
...Conover seems entirely unconcerned with the psychology and motivation of her spellbinding subject...
...she grew up in splendor in a home on the spot where the Plaza Hotel now stands...
...3, Bert Young...
...She was never a team player, though, and found herself incapable of working with the World Federalists...
...and Pietro Lazzari, an Italian artist who had swum the length of the Tiber...
...Having watched her first two husbands disintegrate, she believed, from their wartime experiences, Caresse became interested in the peace movement: The end of nationalism would mean the end of war...
...Divorced again (Young apparently was a wifebeater), she moved to wartime Washington...
...Yet despite its frustrating limitations, this account makes for fascinating reading...
...She had many lovers—among them a Tartar prince, an English earl, and a black American actor...
...The Peabody family assumed responsibility for the wife and two small children...
...But Mary's first husband, Richard Peabody, a Boston Brahmin unhinged by the trenches of World War I, quickly squandered her small inheritance and turned to drink...
...Morgan...
...Soon Black Sun Press transcended the minor talents of its founders by publishing the work of their intimates—Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Pound, Lawrence, and Joyce...
...Before long the family was scandalized when their 27-year-old daughter-in-law was extravagantly courted by a 21 -yearold veteran, Harry Crosby, a nephew of J.P...
...Both her parents came from pedigreed families...
...Mary—"Poll" to her friends—sought a proper literary name that would blend with Crosby...
...And Anne Conover's biography recounts it in a style as fastmoving and fluent as fiction...
...There she entertained Dali and his wife Gala, and Miller and Nïn...
...The adultery, divorce and remarriage that followed forced the young lovers into exile in Paris, a fate they never regretted...
...to noon and 2 to 5p.m., five days a week...
...Harry suggested Caresse, "a giver of love...
...When she was bom in New York City in 1892, Mary Phelps Jacob was by no means penniless...
...Canada Lee, theblack actor...
...When the march of the Nazis put an end to her love affairs on the Continent, she moved to a Virginia farm with husband No...
...She was, in the words of Nïn, a "pollen carrier, one who mixed, stirred, brewed, and concocted friendships together, who encouraged artistic and creative copulation in all its forms and expressions...
...The work, it should be added, is short on significant details—dates, prices, even brief portraits of the many celebrities and lovers whose names are dropped throughout its pages...
...Hoping to set up a center for "World Man," she bought land in Greece and Cyprus and a castle in Italy...
...She always wanted to be where the action was...
...Harry, as Malcolm Cowley has observed, epitomized the anguish of that tragic group...
...On an annual income of $ 12,000 he was able to live comfortably, even lavishly in the Paris of the '20s, and happily gave up a sinecure at his uncle's bank to give his life to literature...
...She prided herself on always saying "Yes...
...In her old age she entertained the Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso...
...Following her husband's demise, Caresse showed the resiliency that was her primary attribute...
...After a trip to the Middle East he conducted elaborate rituals to the Egyptian sun god, Ra...
...Unfortunately, Conover's slim book is, finally, less a biography than a celebration of its protagonist...
...He also read all the great books and studied the world's religions...
...The very year he made the pact with Caresse, he had an intense affair with a young woman who, Harry wrote, "was mad, and madness is appealing— especially to me who is mad...
...She ran away to Paris, changed her name to Caresse and, in a duke's country mill, held soirees for many great cultural figures of the '20s: James Joyce, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Anais Nïn, D.H...
...The moment the War ended Caresse pulled strings to get back to Europe so Portfolio could chronicle the reborn intellectual life of France, Italy and Greece...
...He went to his study religiously from 9 a.m...
...Indeed, a fuller picture of Caresse's early years is provided in her autobiography, The Passionate Years(1950), and in Geoffrey Wolffs examination of Harry, Black Sun (1985...
...No fairy tale, this was the life of Caresse Crosby...
...In December 1929 they shot themselves in a New York artist's studio and were found in each other's embrace, fully clothed except for their bare feet...
...She died the princess of an Italian castle...
...It is highly probable that Caresse would have reneged on her promise...
Vol. 72 • November 1989 • No. 17
