Crosby, Caresse

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CROSBY, Caresse

Born Mary Phelps Jacob, 20 April 1892, New York, New York; died 24 January 1970, Rome, Italy

Daughter of William and Mary Phelps Jacob; married Richard R. Peabody, 1915 (divorced); Henry G. Crosby, 1922 (died 1929); Bert Young, 1937

Caresse Crosby grew up with a "crystal chandelier background." Her life was that of a young socialite: debutante parties at Sherry's, Yale proms, and London court presentations. Her first marriage was to a Back Bay Bostonian; the couple had two children and were divorced in 1921. Her second marriage—when she embarked on a life in Paris, escaping with her husband from proper Boston—was the starting point of her literary career. In 1925 she changed her first name to "Caresse" and began publishing her poetry.

Although a friend and promoter of many avant-garde artists and writers, Crosby's own poetry tends toward conventional forms and topics. Almost all of her poems are love poems, reflecting her relationship with her second husband. Her other major theme, an offshoot of her romantic passion, is the search for Beauty and Life (in capital letters). This theme is present in most of her short descriptive poems, her panegyrics to other artists, and several of her short prose poems, particularly "Wisdom of the East," where the wise Oriental artist directs the young sculptress: "You must live before you can work…you must understand what beauty really is before you can portray it."

Crosses of Gold (printed in Paris, 1925) is typical of Crosby's poetic works, consisting mainly of love poems. The majority of these are rhymed, resulting in occasional distortions and anachronisms. Her best poems, such as "With You I Have Known Beauty in the Night," result from the successful use of sonnet form rather than a break with conventional forms. Although Crosby is quick to note the physical element of love, she loses her reader in romanticized and abstract passion rather than in her use of imagistic realism.

Crosby's Painted Shores (1927) exemplifies her careful sequencing of poems to reflect the path of her love relationship. Particularly in the first third of this volume, Crosby links the poems thematically as well as technically. The final line of each poem is repeated (with minor variation) as either the title or first line of the succeeding poem. The poems progress from the departure of two lovers from New York, follow their crossing to Europe, trace their love's development to the recognition of a betrayal, and conclude with their decision to remain together.

In 1927 the Crosbys founded Black Sun Press, which published original works by Joyce, Lawrence, Proust, Pound, and Hart Crane throughout the 1930s. After Henry G. Crosby's death in 1929, Crosby maintained Black Sun Press and expanded her interests by founding Crosby Continental Editions, which published and reprinted the works of French and American writers. Crosby was also an active publisher of other modernist writers. However, her career as a poet ended with Poems for Harry Crosby (1930). Published after his suicide, the love poems seek to reassure and reassert her belief that their love was so strong, so passionate, the two are fated "Forever to be Harry and Caresse."

Much of Crosby's life, through World War II, is covered in her autobiography, The Passionate Years (1953). As she indicates in her foreword, she worked from memory, not notes, using only the information "lined upon the tablets of the mind." As a result, her first-person memoirs are extremely anecdotal, focusing on personalities and her response to them. Many remembrances are of short personal encounters, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald intentionally dropping his gloves in her stateroom, hoping to accompany her abroad, and Hemingway's irate response to being called "precious." Crosby's recall is idiosyncratic. She writes as a reporter of scenes and feelings rather than as an analyzer. Her autobiography is spritely, and provides the reader with interesting glimpses into both the woman and the milieu.

Crosby's final publishing venture was the editing and producing of Portfolio, a mixed-media magazine published in Washington and designed to "present to an imaginative public, lively and varied examples of work by modern authors." Although Portfolio had a shorter lifespan than Crosby's earlier enterprises, its contributors and its critical reception were exciting. The later years of Crosby's life were spent in active support of both the arts and humanitarian causes. She ran an art gallery in Washington, D.C., established an artists' colony near Rome, maintained and sought out new friendships with artists and writers, founded the Citizens of the World organization, and was an active member of Women Against War.

Although Crosby was not a major poet in her own right, her interest and support of modernist writing as a publisher make her a fascinating character. She lived her life by the motto she believed in: "The answer to the challenge is always 'Yes."'