The Cramoisy Queen: A Life of Caresse Crosby

14. Fame

Fame 170 170 14 Fame T he s for Caresse then were hardly a silent decade. Indeed, her rallying efforts on behalf of Women Against War and Citizens of the World did not consume all of her energy. Caresse had started writing a six-part memoir that began with her“crystal chandelier”childhood; following were sections devoted to her marriage to Richard Rogers Peabody and life as a Back Bay matron and mother of two; her seven years with Harry Crosby in Paris and the founding of the Black Sun Press; her merry widow years in Paris and New York as an independent publisher; her marriage to BertYoung and “farming by ear”in Virginia; and finally her years in Washington, D.C., and travels abroad as publisher of Portfolio and an art gallery owner.She intended to include reminiscences about her encounters with one hundred well-known writers, artists, musicians, and scions of society. Malcolm Cowley, then editor at Viking Press, worked with Caresse during the first stages of her manuscript. She and Cowley had maintained a distant but cordial relationship since their first meeting at Hart Crane’s Brooklyn apartment in December , three days before Harry Crosby’s death. However, when Cowley first published Exile’s Return in , Caresse heard, before she had had a chance to see the book herself, that Cowley had relied heavily on Harry’s diaries in order to write his chapter on how neatly Harry exemplified the American expatriate writers of the , an observation already noted to which Caresse objected. She had been more than willing to lend Cowley three volumes of the diaries but never expected him to Fame 171 quote extensively from them and possibly divulge aspects of her marriage that she preferred to keep private. Cowley assured her that he had tried not to pick out the personal passages, “just the ones that helped to interpret Harry’s character. . . . Harry was an extraordinary person and I don’t think the world ought to forget him.”1 Caresse had been mollified, especially after she learned that the French postal service had lost her advanced copy of Exile’s Return, that in fact Cowley had wanted her to have the book before anyone else could tell her what was in it. Actually Caresse had already begun work on The Passionate Years—an alternative title had been “I’ll Never Forget”—as early as December  at Craig Air Force Base, Alabama, where she was staying as the guest of Harry and Beatrice Moore. Still in the air force, Moore took Caresse to military parties, where she was“as successful as ever in conveying her magnetic personality .”2 During the day,however,Moore“virtually closed her in her room, telling her that she must write her autobiography.”Caresse wrote some early segments there in Alabama, and Moore suggested“The Passionate Years”as a title. Malcolm Cowley encouraged Caresse to step back from the story, if she could, and speculate about why she and Harry had behaved as they did. In a letter of November ,,Caresse admitted that she did not know how to interpret her relationship with Harry or with anyone else for that matter. She would try introspection, but she had never been inclined “to judge motives, only actions. I am % extrovert (or was); if I had been otherwise, I doubt I could have weathered the ’s.”3 And yet she took Cowley’s advice to heart. A little over two weeks later, she wrote to Cowley: “I seem to be turning myself inside out, a thing I had no intention of doing in public.”4 She had hoped Cowley—“you are the doctor”—would advise her through to the end, but he was about to go take a leave from Viking to teach a course at the University of Washington in Seattle. He did offer strong words of encouragement : “Do you know what old Dr. Cowley prescribes? Just more of the same medicine you’ve been taking this last month. I am very pleased with your revisions.”5 He gave her some good pointers on writing biography (for example, to take as much care presenting the people in her life as she would developing the characters in a piece of fiction) and pushed her to explain her dreams and ideals, and to elaborate on the details of the times,especially the s. Caresse turned over the completed manuscript to Pascal Covici and George W. Joel, both editors at Dial/Viking. First published in...