1Caresse Crosby published her third volume of poetry, Painted Shores, in 1927. The collection articulates some private conversations Crosby was having about the various dramas of her life, and how she was reconciling herself to the conflicts they created. But Crosby acknowledged that her writing was still mired in “easeful cliché and well-worn rhyme” (Crosby, 165). Crosby preferred the avant-garde poetry and prose that was appearing in literary magazines such as transition published by Eugene Jolas between 1927 and 1938. Her husband, Harry Crosby, and Jolas had drafted a manifesto “The Revolution of the Word” that she was eager to sign. It feverishly announced that modernist writers had finally found the new language the world so desperately needed. The document addresses many issues that concerned twentieth-century poets, including the right to manipulate grammar and syntax, the importance of the irrational and hallucinatory in the creative process, and the rising conflict between art and politics. Among the cosigners was Kay Boyle who later expressed embarrassment for having lent her name to this particular revolutionary tract because of its bombastic style and pitch that undercut any possible impact. Still, it was one of the first occasions where Kay Boyle and Caresse Crosby would be associated with each other.

4For 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 Saint-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 (1934). There was gossip that Harry’s frequent visits to the boulevard Saint-Germain were not merely shopping expeditions, and that a ménage à trois or a lesbian relationship between Kay and Caresse existed. None of these speculations were ever confirmed, although Boyle dedicated My Next Bride to Caresse partly to dispel suspicion (Spanier 89; Mellen 126). While not strictly autobiographical, the book sheds light on the early relationship between the Crosbys and Boyle.

5The plot revolves around Victoria, the Kay Boyle figure, who is living in a colony like Duncan’s—Duncan is called Sorrel—and who sells batiks in a Paris shop. Like Kay Boyle, Victoria gets pregnant at the time and cannot be absolutely sure of the father’s identity because she has been bedding down with more than one man. Fontana and Anthony Lister—the Crosbys—give her the money so that she can have an abortion. While Boyle would claim that the book is about women’s friendships and “material inequality” (Mellen 188), critics preferred to see it as yet another book about the 1920s that glorified people of little consequence. If the book fails to mask Boyle’s romantic perspective on this period, it can be appreciated for its lively portrayal of Caresse as Fontana.

7Fontana appears in a sharper, less idealized light when she is alone with Victoria.  At first she pretends that she does not suspect that an affair is brewing between Anthony and Victoria. She is dressed in a chic black-and-white outfit, looking youthful and boyish. “Fontana was talking, as well-bred women talk, of everything else but of what was before them,” Victoria reports (290). She sounds buoyant and tolerates Anthony’s eccentricities to a point. She finally confides to Victoria that she is determined to maintain her sense of well-being no matter how outrageously Anthony behaves. She will remain impervious to anything that would cause her pain: “I wouldn’t let them get me, I mean none of the things that put their arms around you and get you down… I would be very cunning from absolutely the crack of dawn until going to bed at night. I made up my mind to outwit things as fast as they come up, one after another. But I would do it incredibly as Rimbaud did it. Not a niche left open in the armor” (322). Here is a vision of an embattled Caresse who understands the consequences of preserving her marriage: self-imposed inner isolation.

8Boyle’s perspective, however, as sympathetic as it may have been, was not easily shared by Caresse. In her memoir, The Passionate Years, she recalls occasionally in bald terms the nature of her predicament. She admitted, for example, that during the latter part of 1928, she was growing distraught over Harry’s infidelities, his “search for clandestine fires” as she puts it. “He made me believe,” she continues, “that our children balanced our account. Though beleaguered, I felt safe, still centered in the widening circle of his interests, and I knew it would be treason to even wish for a simpler love” (Crosby, 236). A suit of armor does not get any thicker. In time, Boyle would eventually revise her romanticized vision but not entirely.

10From the start then, a kindred feeling existed between the Crosbys and Boyle, and their emotional involvement intertwined with their interest in mutual literary, artistic endeavors. The Black Sun Press would publish Boyle’s first collection of short stories and publish her translation of René Crevel’s Mr. Knife, Miss Fork.  Later, in 1932, Caresse published Boyle’s translation of Raymond Radiguet’s The Devil in the Flesh and her novel Year Before Last under her own imprint, Crosby Continental Editions.

11When the Crosbys traveled to the States in the fall of 1928, Boyle provided them with letters of introduction to William Carlos Williams, Charles Sheeler, and Alfred Stieglitz. During subsequent visits with various relatives in New York and Boston, the Crosbys extended to Boyle the use of their chauffeured car, complete with sable seat blanket. Also, when Boyle discovered that she was pregnant and could not be certain about the identity of the father, she managed to pay for an illegal abortion with 5,000 francs from Caresse and Harry (Mellen 126) as alluded to in My Next Bride. The Crosbys also provided the first, albeit brief, stopping place for Boyle and her daughter after they fled the confines of the Duncan colony where life had become increasingly oppressive, void of the idealism that had attracted Boyle in the first place. The escape plot of several stages took place at the very end of 1928.

12First, Boyle smuggled their belongings out of her quarters in Neuilly, and into the apartment of the Princess of Sarawak. Then on December 30, 1928, nine of the children from the colony were invited there for lunch. They arrived in two taxis, but after eight of the children disembarked, one of the cabs drove away with Boyle and daughter Sharon. They stopped at the hotel room of Robert McAlmon, a great friend of Boyle who helped design the plot to flee Duncan’s colony. With William Carlos Williams, McAlmon had started Contact magazine and on his own published writers such as H.D., Mina Loy, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. McAlmon knew that the Crosbys had returned from the States and were about an hour’s drive away in Ermenonville, at a country home they had purchased in 1928. He suggested that they go there for New Year’s Eve.  Caresse’s children, Polleen and Bobby, would be home for the holidays (MacAlmon 326). Boyle could not think of a better destination. Although it turned out to be a safe place at the moment, the scene there was hardly tranquil.

13Le Moulin de Soleil was Caresse and Harry’s escape from the daily intensity of Paris life, where the routine was structured for work in the morning and play in the afternoon, evening, and night. The setting for The Mill was pastoral, even magical since it was rumored that the three buildings built around the courtyard were haunted. The Crosbys had leased the uninhabited property for twenty years. The walls of the main building were whitewashed, the ten little bedrooms painted in the colors of the rainbow, and a swimming pool was dug out so that it could be fed by a nearby waterfall (Conover, 27-28). The cobblestones on the ground floor were left bare, and a long trestle table turned the space into a dining room. A terrace off the attic, a haven for bats, served as Harry’s sunroof, and the cellar and washroom were converted to a large kitchen. A regular menagerie was installed: burros, whippets, schnauzers, Afghans, cockatoos, pigeons, a parrot, even a cheetah. Caresse furnished the rooms to resemble a summer camp in the Adirondacks. At the front gate, signs indicated the various trails that visitors could follow through the forest. Guests were asked to leave their signatures in colored paint on the whitewashed wall under the staircase near the entrance to the main building. There was also a cannon in the hayloft that was hauled down and fired in honor of distinguished guests (Crosby, 252-53).

14New Year’s Eve festivities were in full swing by the time Boyle, her daughter, and McAlmon arrived. Boyle was far less shocked by the situation than McAlmon. She understood that Harry and Caresse’s frivolous antics concealed a more serious agenda that forged a personal ethic into a quality small press. They added twelve books to their list in 1928, including a French and English edition of Oscar Wilde’s The Birthday of the Infanta. Nevertheless, their parties attracted a significant number of people more interested in rejecting propriety, respectability, and sobriety than in realizing any kind of artistic or moral integrity.

15Sophisticated as their tastes were—they gravitated toward classical art, literature, and history along with Dada and jazz and Eastern cultures—Caresse and Harry were remarkably naïve about the tantalizing image they presented to the Parisian world. Although they constantly urged friends and acquaintances to visit Le Moulin, they were surprised by the chaos that resulted. Undoubtedly, they sought pleasure, but occasionally they were so exhausted by their guests that Paris appeared to be a better retreat than Ermenonville. On New Year’s Day, McAlmon beat a hasty retreat from Ermenonville. Boyle remained and a few days later Hart Crane arrived in one of his more raucous states of drinking and carousing. Boyle and Crane got into an argument after she criticized his behavior in front of the other guests at the Mill. (She had recently written a mean spirited review of Crane’s White Buildings for transition which could have contributed to Crane’s rancor.) In any event, Boyle would continue to visit the Crosbys at Le Moulin, and their relationship became more secure than ever. The first title published in 1929 by the Black Sun Press was Boyle’s Short Stories.

16Harry Crosby’s life came to a spectacular and tragic end in New York, in December 1929. He was found dead in the Hotel des Artistes with a bullet through his head and beside his lover Josephine Rotch Bigelow, whom he shot to death. It was weeks before the press lost interest in the sensational details. As soon as she was able, Caresse returned to Paris where she hoped to recover some kind of normalcy. James Joyce, Sylvia Beach and Kay Boyle were among the writers who sent telegrams of condolence to Caresse. Kay Boyle wrote: “Here is my devotion and my love and my homage forever and ever” (Mellen 142-43).

17There was something manic about Caresse’s determination to conduct business as usual in the months that followed Harry’s death. She kept her despair at bay by carefully supervising the publication of Harry’s oeuvre, and her own poetry, testaments to her life with Harry and her enduring devotion to his memory. She wanted to prove once and for all that she was more than Harry’s helpmate. She would continue the Black Sun imprint, deluxe letterpress editions distributed through subscription, and she would launch another kind of operation altogether, a new line of inexpensive editions of contemporary and avant-garde literature in English, a good proportion translated from the French. Its nearest competitor was Tauchnitz, the series of paper editions of classic literary works established by Christian Bernhard Tauchnitz in 1841, in Leipzig. When it ceased operations in 1943, nearly six thousand titles by British and American authors had been published. Caresse called the press Crosby Continental Editions.

18Among the titles she published for the deluxe Black Sun Press relevant to this discussion of the friendship between Crosby and Boyle, was the publication of Raymond Radiguet’s The Devil in the Flesh, which was translated by Kay Boyle (with an introduction by Aldous Huxley). Crosby also published Louis Phillipe’s Bubu de Montparnasse, with an introduction by T.S. Eliot. The translation was by Laurence Vail, now Boyle’s second husband after he left his wife Peggy Guggenheim. Crosby Continental Editions soon took over the majority of Crosby’s publishing efforts.

19She succeeded in acquiring rights to Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time and Torrents of Spring, William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, a reprint of Dorothy Parker’s Laments for the Living, a collection of short stories that included well known “Big Blonde,” Night Flight by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, translated by Stuart Gilbert and with a preface by André Gide. In addition to publishing the already mentioned Year Before Last by Kay Boyle, Crosby published The Indefinite Huntress and Other Stories Stories by Robert McAlmon, edited with much tug and pull by Kay Boyle.

22Ironically, Boyle’s My Next Bride was the book Harcourt agreed to publish. As described earlier, Boyle had drawn on her early days with the Crosbys to write the book. Indeed, in a passionate letter to Crosby (September 30, 1933), Boyle insisted that she had written the novel for Caresse, that it was “in every way” Caresse’s book, and that she was “absolutely heartbroken” over the possibility that her decision to go with Harcourt might jeopardize their relationship. Caresse agreed that Boyle should go with the highest bidder—that is, cut her ties to Black Sun, Crosby Continental Editions, and Simon and Schuster—if she wanted to protect her career. And much later, in an August 2, 1967 letter, Boyle mentions that she would never have allowed Ann Watkins to take her proposal to Simon and Schuster, as Crosby suggested she did in her memoir The Passionate Years. Crosby knew that Boyle was as usual desperate for money, and the friendship was sustained. In the end, Harcourt defaulted on its contract with Carnevali (Mellen 213). Crosby maintained her enthusiasm for Crevel’s work, but Mr. Knife, Miss Fork, the first chapter of Crevel’s novel Babylon, translated by Boyle and illustrated by Max Ernst, remained the only Crevel that the Black Sun Press ever published.

23Crosby had another opportunity to publish Boyle, although not until the end of World War II when she established Portfolio, a fluid, cross-disciplinary journal. If the Black Sun Press had flourished in the decade following World War I by providing the first international outlet for writers such as James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Hart Crane,  Marcel Proust, and Kay Boyle, Portfolio would provide a forum for writers, artists, and cultural critics to share their work with an aim towards maintaining a lasting peace between nations. Portfolio would be one of several projects which Crosby would develop with the goal of fostering a permanent world peace. The third edition included Boyle’s short story “Military Zone.”

24Crosby’s interest in social justice had emerged long before in less obvious ways. During the mid-1930s, Caresse traveled to Germany and the south of France, scouting for Crosby Continental Editions and to visit friends such as Kay Boyle when she was on the Riviera or in Kitzbühel with Laurence Vail and her children. At Boyle’s prompting, Caresse became briefly involved with helping Alexander Berkman obtain the documents he needed to stay in France, and eventually to return to the United States. The Russian American anarchist had been deported with Emma Goldman from the United States for the attempted assassination of industrialist Henry Clay Frick in 1919. Taking advantage of her well-placed connections, Crosby spoke on Berkman’s behalf to the attaché at the Ministère des Affaires Etrangères and ascertained that Berkman would be able to stay in France for the next five years. In a letter dated only “Sunday,” from Villa Coustille, Col-de-Villefranche, Nice, Boyle expressed her gratitude. “How can you be such a great-hearted woman and such a beautiful one besides?” she asked her loyal friend.

27During this tumultuous period in Boyle’s life, a great tragedy occurred in Caresse’s: the death of her son Billy. Caresse herself did not write immediately to anyone about her son’s death. There are few letters of condolence among the files of correspondence she saved. Even Kay Boyle did not learn of Bill’s death for several months. Billy died on January 25, 1955. He was in charge of the Paris office of American Overseas Airlines. He and his wife, Josette, lived in a third-floor walk-up on rue du Bac. Heating was minimal, and the small stove they depended on leaked so badly one night that Billy died of asphyxiation in his sleep, two weeks short of his thirty-ninth birthday. Josette fell comatose but was revived in hospital. “Poor darling,” Boyle wrote on June 7, 1955, “you, for so much courage has been asked of you, and you have somehow summoned.” Boyle also knew how to maintain a brave front. Fifteen years later, when she underwent a radical mastectomy in 1968, she shared her grief and misery with only a few close friends. Crosby was one of them. As Joan Mellen states, to the rest of the world Boyle pronounced her chief concerns were “peace in Vietnam and race relations” (Mellen 405).

28Over the following two decades, Boyle’s reputation flourished as a talented and prolific writer and social activist, and Caresse continued her efforts to promote world peace and support the work of numerous artists and writers. The altruistic friendship that existed between them warrants emphasis. Boyle and Crosby wanted success in love and life and work for one another. Caresse was the older, wealthy sister but there was no sibling rivalry between the two. Boyle was as eager to protect Crosby’s honor and publishing interests as her own. In the late 1960s, Boyle alerted Caresse that editorial and permissions problems might arise when Two Windows Press proposed publishing a volume of poems by Harry Crosby along with introductions to Harry’s poems that had been written by T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Stuart Gilbert, and D.H. Lawrence, introductions that Caresse herself had solicited in the 1930s for Black Sun editions. Kay Boyle had also been asked to contribute to the Two Window Press project, but she refused unless Caresse granted permission for the volume to be published. Like a lioness protecting her cub, Caresse halted further progress on the work, and allowed only an edition of Harry’s poems alone to be published.

29Both women rejected convention’s dictates about romance, marriage and motherhood. They were not always certain of each other’s immediate whereabouts and activities, but their devotion to one another remained intact to the end of Caresse’s life. After Caresse died on January 24, 1970, Frances Steloff held a memorial at the Gotham Book Mart in New York City on February 18, 1970. In San Francisco and unable to attend, Boyle sent a recorded testament to Caresse. And Boyle made clear in a heated missive to the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle that the obituary they ran on Caresse sorely misrepresented Caresse’s place in modern literary history (Mellen 179).