Chapter X

SUN AND SHADOW

“The surreal for me is the greatest reality of all.”

—Caresse

The Greek edition was the last—and in many ways the most difficult and rewarding—of the Portfolios.

In going to Greece at this time of crisis, I hope to gather into Portfolio VI an expression of what new Greece, young Greece, is feeling and hoping . . . at a moment when her future is in the balance and the eyes of the world are on her political problems, even her problems of survival, I intend to present every intellectual viewpoint that I find there, whatever its political background, and also to publish an expression of the direction of Greek thought in terms of art, literature, poetry and music.

The Boston Herald review of March 28, 1948 was amazed that Portfolio VI could come out despite the chaotic political situation under the military government. Caresse’s introduction, “Sun and Shadow;” described the appalling poverty, the shortages, the gigantic inflation, and wondered “at the beauty of the moon-drenched Parthenon [while] Greeks were fighting in the hills and children were starving just around the corner.”

When Caresse first arrived at Hassani Airport in May 1947, “the hills were the color of the sidewalks of New York, stripped bare of all living foliage.” During the bleak years of the Nazis, the Greeks survived without gas or electricity, and wood was the only source of fuel for cooking, even to propel the buses that carried the people to work. She noticed that the buses were still “crippled little derelicts with great caverns in their sides . . . they were back on gas now; but each bore a gaping smoke-blackened wound in its side.”

Caresse was startled to discover from currency control at the airport that two one-dollar bills brought a huge mound of 10,000 drachmas at the current exchange rate. On the drive into Athens in an ancient taxi, she saw the impoverished Greeks sitting on patched and unpainted chairs at little tables in the cafés that lined the way, nursing a small cup of coffee (Turkish), but more often, only a glass of water.

“I learned later,” Caresse wrote, “that one ordered water, then scooped a spoonful of a sweet resinous paste, masticha, from a center jar; this is dipped in the water to give it flavor, or licked slowly from the spoon . . .” (With 5,000 drachmas for the taxi, plus a tip here and there, the two dollars in exchange were quickly spent.)

The venerable Grande-Bretagne Hotel, Caresse’s favorite hospice, had no vacancies so she continued on to the other luxury hotel, the Acropole Palace. A threadbare room with an army cot and a dilapidated bath that provided water for only one hour per day was luxury in 1947 Athens (and a bargain at 50,000 drachmas—at the current exchange rate, U.S. $10—per day).

Caresse’s first stop was Aetos, the bookshop under the Colonnade that she remembered from her last visit in the ‘30s. There she met Nicholas Calamaris, a young Greek poet with a rebellious look in his eyes, who became her “constant cavalier” and followed her back to Paris. He was a frequent visitor at the Mill, where she introduced him to André Breton and other Surrealists before he acquired an international reputation as Nicholas Calas. (She planned to publish an excerpt from his book, “The Gathering Together of the Waters,” in the Greek Portfolio.)

Later that night, she went to dinner with friends. Walking through the narrow streets, skirting the tiny burial ground where Byron lies next to the house where he once lived, they arrived at the little taverna under the Acropolis, deserted then except for three tortoiseshell kittens and a small boy doing his homework. In the back, behind a hanging carpet, a cook labored over the wood-burning stove with glowing brazier and three huge, simmering kettles to prepare the Spartan menu—pigeons wrapped in vine leaves and tiny artichokes the size of walnuts, with special Attica wine and a sweet made of pastry and honey.

Not until the place began to fill up at ten o’clock did Caresse discover that this humble tavern was “the” best place to eat in the post-war city. She noticed that the women of Athens, who had not been able to buy new clothes for many years (or nylon stockings, at a prohibitive $12.00 a pair if one could find them), still managed to dress with flair. The Parthenon shone silver-white under a full moon when she left, and she could hardly believe the poverty-stricken sights of the morning, or that “the starving partisans in the hills were dying in defiance of that corrupt minority of ‘quislings’ who then held Greece in their grip.”

In the face of these difficulties, Caresse set about collecting the finest examples of the work of young Greek artists. Diamantopoulos was working alone in a bare room with only his paints and paper (canvas at the time was too costly, even if he could find it). He fought through bloody campaigns of the war and suffered starvation and imprisonment before devoting his life to creative work with no promise of selling. Krapalos worked in the hill country with homemade tools and clay before returning to Athens with his sculptures packed in straw on an ox cart. A bombed-out building in the outskirts was his temporary workshop. Ghika spent many years of exile in Paris and London before returning to his native island of Hydra to capture the Greek landscape on canvas. The youngest professor at the University of Athens and a leader of the modern Greek School, Ghika was well known in his own country but had no reputation abroad until Caresse published “The Invisible Mirror.”

Through Ghika Caresse happened upon the work of Vassilakis Takis—a shy, proud, and hungry young man, “not only belly hungry but spirit hungry,” who was sleeping in his only pair of ragged pants and shirt in Melethon Park “like a fallen Icarus.”

Hydra was the first of the Greek islands she visited. The daily mail boat from Piraeus deposited her on the pier, where she and her companions ate crayfish, cheese, and bread washed down with ouzo at a quayside tavern before a peasant with a donkey led them up the steep cliff to Ghika’s summer palace. The huge beds, with freshly washed, heavily embroidered linen piled high with eiderdown, in rooms with casement windows, were a welcome sight. “It was an adventure, as all journeys are, through these island landscapes,” she wrote.

The next morning, Rosa, the peasant’s daughter, came with fresh eggs, bread, and butter, with lemons for tea. Afterwards, Caresse went down to the sea—skirting ledges and ravines and little gardens—sunbathing “like one of the lazy little lizards that decorate the stones.” She could see young men below, bathing “naked as the gods.” One of them was Takis. Later, at the Ghikas’, Takis showed Caresse his delicate carved medallions and sacred pendants. She took with her an oval with blue and silver mermaids enameled on its surface, a treasured keepsake. Some 15 years later, Takis was artist-in-residence at the Center of Advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T., attempting to achieve “spiritual collaboration” with scientists through the medium of his magnetic sculpture.

Tetsis, also from Hydra, Kanellis, and Moralis produced new and vigorous conceptions of art in fresh forms for Portfolio. Caresse soon resurrected the works of Theophilos, a primitive with the naïve richness of a Rousseau, for a retrospective exhibit at the British Institute.

Critics and friends warned Caresse about Engonopoulos, a surrealist painter, poet, and philosopher: “He is difficult. He is shy. He is a little mad.” She went to see for herself. “A brigandish chauffeur drove me down long narrow streets and left me in front of a garage,” she wrote of the experience.

I skirted the dark building until at the back I saw a slit of light from a toolshed. I pulled at the door and stepped in. . . . A bare bulb hanging from the rafters lit up thirty or more huge canvases . . . of such vivid unreality that I gasped. . . . At a low table, the artist crouched, pen in hand, with pages strewn about, and from behind the largest, wildest painting issued the voice of Bing Crosby crooning softly, “Goodnight, Sweetheart.” I knew then that the surreal for me is the greatest reality of all.

She gathered up the verses scattered about, one of which was printed in Portfolio: “The women that we love are like pomegranates. . . .”

Soon after the bizarre experience with Engonopoulos, she was invited to tea in a spacious drawing room overlooking the Royal Gardens by George Theotokas, who was writing a Portfolio piece on the intellectual ferment of modern Greece. Five baronial chairs were placed around a center table of highly polished cypress, and in front of each chair was a beautiful string of precious beads—lapis and gold, silver and jade, onyx and crystal. Theotokas brought together Dimaris, a contemporary critic, Nicolareizis, a poet, and Elytis, a philosopher. “As each young man took his place . . . he lifted the beads pensively in his fingers, and as he talked, he fingered the string as if it were a rosary. I did likewise, and I must say that this elegant and spiritual custom seems to add much to the flow of ideas. The young men were quite as handsome as the beads,” she wrote, “and I took away with me a most embellished memory. . . .”

Caresse’s reputation was expanding into ever-widening circles. Eleni Vlachos, a reporter for Kathimerini, an Athens periodical, described their first meeting:

I happened a few days ago to meet an American lady at the house of friends of mine, Mrs. Caresse Crosby. She seemed particularly interested in our artistic movement, and to have already become perfectly acquainted with the way it expressed itself. She rolled off titles of Greek books, painters, authors, musicians, she criticized and compared; she had also met actors and discussed recent talent.

“How long has Mrs. Crosby been in Athens?” I inquired.

“One week,” was the reply.

“Well, how did she manage to learn all that stuff?”

[She was] possessed by a demon, and by a great talent. What kind of demon, and what kind of talent? The discovery of personalities . . . without artistic experience, she’d spy value in the unknown, in poor and despised painters and authors. She’d fish out talent in the way a cat smells a rat. . . . Nor did she need the support of reviews to understand the value of a work. She started traveling, looking, discovering, supporting, and succeeding . . .

Now this indefatigable woman is editing an art review, called Portfolio, which appears as a large copybook . . . [She] may well tell us about the present Greek art, and may add a fresh talent to the collection of those already discovered . . . that we in our blindness had not yet detected. [Translated from the Greek.]

Caresse discovered the Arts Theater, founded in 1942 by Charles Koun with the help of Dora Stratos, a dedicated musician who raised funds, borrowed costumes, and roused the public consciousness. During the German Occupation, the theater was a means of keeping Greeks informed about the Allied world despite strict censorship. The box office “take, divided among the dedicated young troupers, averaged 1,000 drachmas—then 20 cents—a day.” With raisins as our principal meal and butts of cigarettes going the rounds, we formed the craziest plans for a theater, hoping to build up a better civilization in a new world,” Koun wrote in Portfolio.

In the early days, German censors insisted that there should be nothing in a play that could suggest its British or American origin. Koun managed to produce Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, wholly unexpurgated, under the title, “For a Piece of Earth.” Some of the Anglo-­Saxon-sounding names were changed, as subtly as possible, so as not to misinterpret the meaning. “Lines that at other times would have had but a normal effect, under Nazi terrorism touched in each one of us more profoundly our sense of social justice.” After a hiatus of several years when conditions were intolerable, the Theater reopened in 1946 to produce Tennessee Williams’s Glass Menagerie. Mano Hadjidakis, a gifted 19-year-old, composed the score, and Taroukis, who later designed for Maria Callas’s appearances in Paris and London, did the sets.

The next-to-last day in Greece Caresse went to visit Angelo Sikelianos in his monastic retreat on the island of Salamis. She joined his wife, Anna, for the long and difficult trip by bus and by boat to the legendary island. Wearing big fisherman’s hats and carrying wicker baskets packed with cherries, cakes, and books for the poet, they set out on a sweltering June day through the vendor-crammed streets of Athens to Larissa Square, where a flotilla of rickety buses awaited. Soon,

. . . we riders-to-the-sea were tearing along the road Ulysses once followed. The signpost at the first corner read: Illis—Thebes—Delphi. . . . All along the roadside roses were bursting into bloom. The way to the sea was fringed with flowering trees, back of them, the olives shimmered silver-green, and the denuded hills rose blue and gray. Then of a sudden round a corner . . . the Aegean, indigo and pearl, lay between us and Salamis like a carpet. I shall never forget the first glimpse of that inland sea or the long, bright day that followed.

At the border of the province, military police stopped them for identity cards, and Caresse discovered she had left hers in Athens. After protesting in fluent “American,” she was allowed to pass. Two hours later Caresse and Anna arrived in Eleusina, a remote village of fishing shacks and deserted cottages. At the water’s edge, fishermen’s nets were hanging out to dry. The two women asked “a barefooted and sun-blackened” oarsman to take them to the opposite shore to the ancient convent of Phaneiomeni, where they found Sikelianos at work in an isolated sky-blue house.

“The blue door opened and I was in a scholar’s room, filled with shadows and poetry,” Caresse remembered. Her first impression was of a massive form and heroic head, with soft, penetrating eyes. “The poet told me he worked twenty hours a day, breakfasting at five, and that even then, there was not time enough.” He signed the flyleaf of his book “To Caresse Crosby, with emotion and friendship.” After a picnic lunch and a swim, the women poked about the island and departed at sunset. Sikelianos was standing at the end of the pier, waving his hat slowly back and forth until they could no longer see him.

Back in Washington, Caresse lost no time in writing to members of the Royal Academy in Stockholm, recommending Angelo Sikelianos for the Nobel Prize in 1947 for The Awakener, “not only by his acknowledged eminence as a literary figure, but by the example he has . . . set forth in his Delphic Idea.”

Caresse suffered many headaches in bringing out the Greek Portfolio. She wrote to Alexander Xydis in Athens:

Dear Aleko:

After trials and tribulations, Portfolio is actually to appear in a few days. The art work that I had printed in Florence has only just reached here due to strikes and customs. They have promised to deliver the shipment Monday morning. . . . I will send twenty in care of USIS Athens so that they may be distributed to contributors and fifty more to Aetos.

The spelling that you drew my attention to has been corrected, but I have been in a quandary as to several other spellings, since the Greek Embassy says one thing, the author himself signs another way and is often spoken of in the reviews written for Portfolio by another spelling. All this is most confusing . . .

I also had to have the Dimaras article done over and the Hadjimihali, since the first renderings done through the Greek Embassy were likewise a jumble of incomprehensible wording. . . . Your article was the only one that was sent to me in condition to be given to the printer, for which I was most grateful.

She also thanked the British poet Derek Patmore, whose rendering of “The Woman of Crete” by Andrea Cambas was exceptional:

I am using the Greek translation you gave me and will send off a CARE package the next time I go to New York. Portfolio is only just now about to appear because the ship which was bringing the printed matter from Italy was held up for months by dock strikes in Marseilles and has caused the greatest delay and difficulty on this end. However, the material in the Greek Portfolio seems to be even more timely than a few months back and as soon as it can be launched, I will send you, say 500, copies to try out in London.

Despite such obstacles, Portfolio VI came out almost on schedule in spring 1948. Caresse wrote to Bruce Blevin, editor of the New Republic:

Herewith is a copy of Portfolio VI . . . in brief, a review of the contemporary art and literature of that country whose problems are now so vividly in the news.

The Greek artists, most of them in dire need . . . have received the minimum for their work . . . but I did promise them an audience in this country, and it is in hope that you will help me keep this promise that I am sending you Portfolio VI for possible mention in your paper.

From the beginning, Portfolio was subsidized heavily from Caresse’s personal account. From Greece she wrote to Arthur Wagman, newly hired as business manager and public relations liaison in Washington: “I have great confidence in your ability to create a good market and to manage the business successfully, for,” she added realistically “we’ll either fold or flourish now.”

She explained her dilemma to Miller:

After trials and tribulations Portfolio VI is on the way to subscribers and one will reach you before long. I have had to reorganize the selling of Portfolio. It got very much out of hand while I was away, and unfortunately Mr. Wagman not only didn’t sell, but unsold, which was quite disastrous financially. I tried to find assistance from some of my well-heeled friends and from some gilded Greeks in this country, but not a soul has come across and I have had to falter along on my own resources. I hope the result will not be too inferior.

For three years, Caresse had accomplished the impossible with these handsome productions, and as she confessed to Wagman, “Never has so much been done on so little.”

“Let no one account this a small effort,” the critic Carley Dawson wrote.

Whoever has worked with his hands, and has slipped a thin wedge under a weight apparently impossible of moving, will know how effective a slender wedge can be, even when it may be only a small hammer that continues its persistent blows. Caresse Crosby, in her eager, knowledgeable mind, has that wedge. In her dynamic energy, her obstinate faith in and love of people, she has that hammer. Successive numbers of her Portfolio should be awaited with respect and interest, not only by intellectuals everywhere, but by all those who sense the world longing for a creative, universal, and lasting peace.

After Portfolio VI, Caresse was bringing out Charles Olson’s long poem Y & X, hoping to have it completed before Christmas. In answer to Olson’s request for payment, she wrote:

I’m in a jam myself until December 1st—if that is no good to you I’ll try to arrange the accounts so you can have it sooner. I saw Corrado but we are no further on Y&X because (1) I have too much at present to get out Portfolio (after this week, the checks will be cleared) and (2) I myself have no funds just now to work with. I always pay as I print—I hate bills piling up! So I am solvent but broke . . .

Y & X finally came out early in the new year, a handsome limited edition in palindrome format, handset in astrée italics, illustrated by the line drawings of Corrado Cagli. It was an appropriate swan song.

Caresse wrote:

Here are proofs of the text—but all you can check is the text—this actual printing was done on a proof press and I can’t get final proofs actually en page until the day it goes to press. If you were on hand we could watch the first sheets together and rectify any spacing, etc., but you will just have to trust me—I fuss and fume and work and space for hours, to my heart’s content, until I get things right . . . Well, let’s keep our fingers crossed . . .

Olson replied:

I return the proofs (which have just come) with the greatest pleasure in the type, congratulations. It seems to me perfect. Preface stands out like some revolutionary broadside, and it couldn’t be better. My own wish is that a little more breadth of space be put where I have indicated, even if it means crowding the margin a little in this case. For it is a difficult poem typographically and must be given all its chance, no?

Caresse was going ahead with plans to publish the work of black artists and writers in Portfolio VII until late 1948, when she abruptly announced to disappointed subscribers: “I regret to say Portfolio has been suspended due to lack of funds. You ask if publication will be resumed. We hope so, but we need financial support. Do you know of anyone who might contribute to this very worthwhile expression of cultural exchange?” When no angel appeared, there were no new issues of Portfolio.

Caresse was again a woman ahead of her time, in the vanguard of creative thought, apart from the crowd. In the post-war world of “pop” culture, she spoke out loud and clear against “the Philistines,” a voice crying in the wilderness in her time. Without an academic background or special creative talent of her own, she was blessed with an intuitive artistic sense to evaluate the work of others and was utterly fearless in printing anything of real merit, as long as it was sincere. She must have foreseen the importance of her role as muse, of a lifelong commitment to the arts, when she wrote: “The poet or artist is the longest life-giver in the universe. . . . Those whose deeds have been recorded by a poet may live till the world snuffs out.”

At the mid-century mark, a mushroom cloud appeared on the horizon that threatened the world “snuffing out.” Caresse cast aside creative concerns to take on a new role as political activist.