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Treasures for the Black Sun Press 50 50 5 TreasuresfortheBlackSunPress E ugene Jolas introduced Kay Boyle to the Crosbys on May , , at the Bal Nègre,a smokey Montparnasse nightclub famous for black jazz.Frans and Mai de Geetere were part of the Crosby party that evening, as was Armand, Comte de la Rochefoucauld,one of the most eligible bachelors the Crosbys knew, another naughty boy. Howard Hare (nicknamed“Pete”) and Gretchen Powel were also in attendance. Like Harry and Caresse, the Powels had fled their monied, respectable lives back in the States. A fighter pilot during World War I, Pete had met Caresse at a party in tony Newport,Rhode Island, his home town. Gretchen was Texas aristocracy, a pretty woman who like Caresse had bobbed her hair and studied sculpting at Antoine Bourdelle’s studio.“We luckily never appealed to the same men and so got along beautifully,”was how Caresse described the basis for their friendship.1 The Powels seemed to have no other agenda but self-amusement. Camera in hand, they cruised on sailboats, crashed parties, attended the opera. The couple was known as “the Crouchers” because Pete would squat as he got his pictures into focus while Gretchen inevitably hunched over his shoulder to register her approval. The Powels and the Crosbys enjoyed many escapades together, including a country trip through Normandy with stops permitted only in towns with names no longer than one syllable, an outing of several days that Caresse describes in much detail, especially meals topped off by rum and Calvados. The Crosbys and the Powels made a nice fit.Actually they were six: the Powels Treasures for the Black Sun Press 51 had Zulu, a white Great Pyrenees, who got along well with her counterpart, Narcisse Noir. In the town of Bu, there were no accommodations for the night except for a downstairs room usually occupied by the owners’ father and daughter. The four adults and two dogs tumbled into the huge featherbed together. The next day they tore into a hearty breakfast. Kay Boyle’s first image of Caresse and Harry that evening—an ultramodern , raffish couple with an entourage,sipping champagne,poised against the railing of a balcony that appeared ready to collapse momentarily—remained with Boyle forever in a“white blaze of the nightclub’s lights that have never dimmed.”2 Jolas led her up the stairs, and their meeting at the Bal Nègre marked the beginning of a mutually devoted friendship. Kay Boyle was twenty-six when she befriended Caresse and Harry. Before her arrival in France five years earlier, she had made small but significant contributions to the avant-garde literary scene in the United States: she had published book reviews in the Dial and a poem in Poetry and worked as editorial assistant to Lola Ridge for Broom.3 By ,she had made a reputation for herself in This Quarter and transition. Despite her emerging literary success, she was in dire financial circumstances. Her great love, Ernest Walsh,poet and cofounder with Ethel Moorhead in  of This Quarter, had died of tuberculosis, leaving her as a single mother of a daughter, Sharon. (Boyle was still technically married to Richard Brault, a French engineer.) For a while, Boyle lived comfortably as the secretary to Gladys Palmer, heir to the Palmer biscuit company fortune and currently the Princess or Dayang Muda of Sarawak. Boyle, however, was drawn to a commune outside Paris in Neuilly organized by Raymond Duncan, brother of Isadora Duncan. Sharon would be cared for at the commune (she was not permitted to live with her mother in Palmer’s home) in exchange for Boyle’s managing the shop on the boulevard St.-Germain where the togas, sandals, and scarves presumably produced by Duncan’s colony were sold.Harry often visited Kay at the shop, episodes that provided Boyle with material for a number of scenes in her fourth novel, My Next Bride (). Caresse apparently suspected that Harry’s frequent visits to the boulevard St.-Germain were not merely shopping expeditions.And there was gossip that a ménage à trois or a lesbian relationship between Caresse and Kay existed.None of these speculations was ever confirmed,4 although Boyle dedicated My Next Bride to Caresse partly to dispel suspicion. While not strictly autobiographical, the book sheds light on the early relationship between the Crosbys and Boyle. The plot revolves around Victoria, the Kay Boyle figure, who is living in a colony like Duncan’s...

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