Chapter IX

PORTFOLIO

“Those whose deeds have been recorded by an artist may live till the world snuffs out.”

—Caresse

“Phoenix-like, the world emerges from the ashes.” V-E Day—May 8, 1945—marked the end of the war in Europe, the beginning of a new era in Caresse Crosby’s life. The Black Sun Press remained silent for six years while Roger Lescaret fought with the French Resistance. Crosby’s daughter (then married to Count Albert de Mun) and friends (Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ernest Hemingway, and many others) were there to see the Allied troops liberate Paris, while Caresse herself was “cooped up in America.” She was eager to visit Polleen, now living in London, and to renew old ties in Europe. Yet only U.S. citizens on official government business were permitted to travel abroad. Caresse conspired with several imaginative friends to find a legitimate means of renewing her passport.

Selden Rodman wrote in his diary about the fortuitous meeting at the Crosby Gallery on the eve of Independence Day, 1945:

Caresse Crosby called me this morning about an editorial board meeting of her new magazine. She said, “Come to the gallery early if you can and meet Lèger.” When I arrived, she, Harry Moore and a middle-aged balding gentleman with piercing eyes and a sensitive mouth were going over some drawings. She introduced me. M. Lèger doesn’t speak English too well. He and I talked (in French) for half an hour about art and French literature. When Caresse came back, I asked her, have we nothing of M. Lèger for the first issue, not even a drawing? “My God,” she said in amused amazement. “You didn’t think this was Fernand Lèger, did you Selden? This is Alexis!” I had been talking to St. John Perse, the permanent secretary for the Quai d’Orsay.

Rodman would be listed on the masthead as poetry editor. Crosby asked Lt. Harry Thornton Moore (future D.H. Lawrence scholar and author of Priest of Love, then on military duty in Washington) to act as assistant editor. She persuaded Sam Rosenberg to be editorial adviser on photography. Henry Miller, now in Big Sur, California, missed the planning session, but promised to send a contribution:

It is wonderful to hear you’re going to start a quarterly. You ought to make a success of it more than of the gallery, because you won’t be limited to that Sargasso Sea of a Washington, D.C. It’s really a morgue, Washington! . . . You say send about four or five pages. How many words does that mean? I hardly ever write anything under twelve or fifteen pages . . .

Miller suggested several contributors, such as Lawrence Durrell and Alex Comfort, and added: “The time is ripe. There is scarcely any competition. There are no good literary magazines that I know of. Write me soon about what I can do for you, what ms. to send. Good luck! But why call it ‘Generation’? Why don’t you call it ‘Caresse Crosby’s Intercontinental Review?’

Transition, which ceased publication in 1938, was called “a work shop of the intercontinental spirit.” Black Sun published many of the same authors, the symbolic and avant-garde. Caresse hoped to continue the tradition of Eugene and Maria Jolas.

Paper during wartime was difficult to find in bulk, so Caresse bought odd lots of printer’s endpapers in any color available. With long-practiced skill, she designed each page with elegant typography and clean reproduction as “a moveable unit to carry away, or to have bound or to frame upon the wall.” The oversized 11" by 17" papers were gathered in a posterboard loose-leaf binder, a “portfolio” tied with red ribbon. W.P. Tompkins, a specialist in poster reproduction with an office at 931 D Street, printed Portfolio: An Intercontinental Quarterly, with large red and black script on the cover. Dedicated to world unity through the arts, the first issue of 1,300 copies appeared in fine bookstores on August 6, 1945. It sold for $3.00 a single copy ($10.00 a yearly subscription), a bargain considering that each of the original copies is now a collector’s item.

Caresse planned a party to celebrate, but when V-J Day broke, there was dancing in the sedate streets of Washington. Moore reported:

In a wild crowd at the Balalaika I saw an old friend, Thornton Wilder, in the uniform of a lieutenant colonel. I asked him whether I could bring the girl I was with over to meet him, but with his eager politeness, he said he would come over to our table. I took the liberty of inviting him to the Portfolio party at Caresse’s gallery the next night, where he would for the first time meet David Daiches, who had come to teach at the University of Chicago after Wilder left. Wilder appeared at Caresse’s, met David Daiches, and even suggested a book to him—which David then proceeded to write. Such episodes were typical of Caresse’s gatherings, at which the air was electric with potential creative activity.

In the introduction to the first issue, Caresse commented on the challenge of the post-war world: “Never before has so much depended on the courageous vision of the artist. In every age, there have been men to lead peoples into treacherous conflict, but human achievement lives on through the medium of the artist, be he historian, poet, or painter.”

The list of contributors (who received little or no compensation) was an eclectic group of lively experimentalists, outspoken on social issues. Henry Miller sent “The Staff of Life” (an excerpt from his book The Air-Conditioned Nightmare), a biting critique of contemporary American life.

What do I find wrong with America? Everything. I begin at the beginning with the staff of life, bread. If bread is bad, the whole life is bad. On the whole Americans eat without pleasure. They eat because the bell rings three times a day.

Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We’re the Only Colored People Here” pointed out that all faces are the same shade of gray when the lights go out in a crowded movie theatre. Alex Comfort, an English anarchist, called for civil disobedience to avoid the draft, anticipating the response of the young to the war in Vietnam some 20 years later. David Daiches commented on “The Future of Ignorance,” and Kay Boyle contributed a sensitive translation of a chapter from René Crevel’s posthumously published novel, Babylon. Rodman introduced three war poems, translated from the French, one by the controversial editor of Ce Soir, Louis Aragon. “Sleeper in the Valley” by Harry Crosby’s youthful idol, Arthur Rimbaud, lamented the death of a young warrior. Harry Moore’s review of best-sellers in “a particularly low-grade market place” concluded that there were no rivals for Proust, Mann, Kafka, or even Hemingway, and added the hope that “the publisher’s faith in Fitzgerald’s work will be justified by sufficient sales to keep it in print. Much of his talent was washed down the Saturday Evening Post’s glittering drain.”

Art included Romare Bearden’s “Nativity,” Pietro Lazzari’s “Horses,” and contributions by Jean Hélion, Lilian Swann Saarinen, and the British sculptor Henry Moore. Sam Rosenberg’s “Practical Joker” was a Rube Goldberg-type contraption designed to confound the sensibilities of the average reader. Loyal to the memory of her dead husband, Caresse included Harry’s 1927 photo, “Anatomy of Flight,” a surrealistic glimpse of the engine of a World War I fighter plane (which looked for all the world like the innards of a giant land crab). It was a tribute to Crosby’s genius as a muse that she recognized and promoted this impressive list of talents, long before their reputations were firmly established. Seventeen-year-old Naomi Lewis admitted that she “had never exhibited except on the bulletin board at school,” where her drawing for the first issue of Portfolio had recently been thumbtacked.

When Caresse announced alternative issues will be brought out in Paris, she presumed on her long-standing friendship with then–­Undersecretary of State MacLeish, counting him as a valuable ally:

. . . I have talked with Mrs. Shipley in the Passport Division regarding a two-month trip to Europe this summer to gather material for the fall and winter issues of Portfolio, my new quarterly review . . . She felt my request “a reasonable one.” When I told her that you knew my publishing activities and had been published by the Black Sun Press in Paris days, she said it would be most helpful to me if you would write her a letter to the effect that certain of the younger European authors [should be] included in such a publication. I hope you do feel this to be so, as I am most ardent about creating a following. . . .”

Armed with additional letters from David Finley of the National Gallery of Art and Huntington Cairnes of the Censorship Bureau, Caresse again called upon Shipley, “expressing my belief that ideas could prove of more value than guns, and that peace must be sought through international understanding. Shipley—God bless her—realized that the plan had value, and the letters I brought with me assured her that I was capable of putting wheels in motion.”

As Caresse described the encounter:

Shipley said, “I’ll give you the passport, but you have to get yourself over there. You are not attached to the military, you know; nor to any branch of government. I doubt if you can manage transportation.”

“I’ll try,” I said, and the next day, I returned to pick up the precious document, duly signed and sealed.

My first idea was to ask Mr. Foster, travel agent in the Mayflower Hotel. “Absolutely no civilians are allowed on American planes or transports going to England,” Mr. Foster said. At the door he stopped me. “There’s just a chance that BOAC might take you on. They are hungry for dollars. Their office is up Connecticut Avenue.”

When I inquired of the charming lieutenant behind the desk at British Overseas Airways, he said, “If you have a passport and five hundred dollars, I can fix you up. When do you want to go?”

“As soon as possible,” I answered.

“Tonight?” he said. “Not tonight, but tomorrow?” I hesitated.

“Then will you settle for Friday?” the lieutenant asked.

“Of course,” I said, “Yes!”

Caresse was told that a BOAC limousine would pick her up and drive her to Baltimore, where the nearest flying boat was anchored in the harbor. She was a bit nervous about this odyssey, her first transatlantic flight, and asked her daughter-in-law Josette, who lived around the corner from the Gallery while Billy was on Navy duty, to accompany her to Baltimore.

Caresse was one of the two women en route to London. All other passengers were returning Army personnel in uniform. Wearing her usual travel clothes, she boarded with her Schiaparelli hatbox, her red silk umbrella and zebra jacket which, she recalled, “caused some consternation on that military transport.”

The flight was as luxurious as one could expect in the aftermath of war. The old “flying boats” had spacious accommodations for overnight passengers, seats that reclined so completely they could be made up into beds. Each compartment had a washstand, a long mirror, and a curtain that could be drawn for privacy. Despite postwar shortages, the dinner was ample. Caresse joined the gentlemen on the lower level for coffee and cognac in the lounge, but she had to face the troops alone. The other woman, a WAC officer, retreated behind her curtain, and none of the men had much to say to their exotic civilian companion.

The next day, Caresse arrived by taxi at the front door of her daughter and son-in-law’s cottage in a mews off Sloane Square. “All were as amazed at my appearance as if I had dropped from another planet, for it was quite unheard of that a civilian not on official business would be allowed on a BOAC flight.” The rejoicing carried on into the night. After the reunion with Polleen in London, she crossed the channel to begin the difficult task of starting up the presses again in a city hard hit by war.

The large Schiaparelli hatbox Caresse carried was not a frivolous affectation. In it were the works of two Washington artists for the first post-war vernissage at the John Devoluy Gallery. Lorna Lindsley covered the opening in a special to the Paris Post, an English-language newspaper:

Of special interest to Americans is the little show at the Devoluy Gallery in the rue de Furstenberg. The drawings and paintings of two American painters were brought over by Caresse Crosby . . . As she came by plane, she could not bring much, but these are the first American pictures to come here in years. There are line drawings of horses by Pietro Lazzari, an Italian-born American who has worked for the WPA, and a series of watercolors of the Passion of Christ by Romare Bearden, a Negro, which show extraordinary feeling and talent. His rather archaic style and strong coloring suggest the ancient windows of stained glass in the French cathedrals. France needs more art from America. They know little about us over here. Let us hope that Mrs. Crosby, like the first swallows of spring, is a portent of others to come.

“The going is difficult in regard to paper, printing and getting about Paris . . . everything is full of red tape,” Caresse wrote to Moore, now stationed in New York with Air Force Magazine. In late October, his reply finally caught up with her:

I wrote you airmail on 4 September. . . . letter was returned yesterday (rétour à l’envoyeur—I’d so much rather be a voyeur than just an envoyeur!)—it had been addressed to the rue Cardinale. . . .

People are delighted with the magazine [Portfolio I]. I don’t know how it’s selling nationally, but I do know Pietro and Evelyn are selling it to bookstores in Chicago and Los Angeles, etc. And the Gotham’s first batch here sold out: Miss Steloff says the re-order shipment is going slower.

I’m so pleased to be in NY, for which I have the true hick’s true admiration . . . Our magazine office is down in the Battery region, which has the harbor-smell I knew as a child on the edges of San Francisco bay. I’m in a small hotel, am very broke, but quite happy. I imagine you’re having a wonderful time: keep it up! And do let me know plans for the next issue, for I am deeply committed . . .

Caresse dashed off a quick reply:

Delighted to hear from you after so long . . . From now on, please address Hotel California, 16, rue de Berri . . . This number will stick mostly to the well-known names because the time has been too short to make discoveries and judge the work of newcomers. So in this issue we have ELUARD, CAMUS, SARTRE, PICASSO, CARTIER-BRESSON . . . and a Siamese doctor whose name I cannot spell . . . We have three political articles “Oui-Oui, Oui-non, et Non-non,” and a wonderful declaration in prose by Picasso on an artistic-political trend.

No. IV will contain some new names that even the French don’t know about and I hope I guess right. We will save the American contributions for the January number, but your review is important because French people are avid for news of American books and tendencies of thought in literature. I am having spiritual indigestion so much is happening!

Moore replied that he hoped [Crosby’s] “spiritual indigestion is cured, though I envy the causes of it.”

You indicate that a trend-review would be of special interest . . . there isn’t too much can be done in that way at the moment. We had no exciting groups over here the way the French have had, with their stimulating café meetings, etc.

How wonderful Paris, even though it is doubtless still a little stunned from the war, must be! I can just see that magnificent flame-hair of yours against the chestnut trees in the boulevards; do you ride the Bois in a cabriolet, or is it already too cold for open-air travel? The new issue sounds magnificent . . . I have, by the way, secured a promise from Tennessee Williams for an experimental short story; he is the boy over here now . . . The possibilities are enormous . . . As I’ve said, everyone likes the mag . . .

Portfolio II came out in December 1945. Lescaret set the type for a limited edition of 1,000 copies. Published “in the face of material difficulties at a moment when France is with great hardship being restored to its cultural activity,” Caresse wrote: “. . . The Editors wish to thank our French friends.”

It was a tour de force. Jean-Paul Sartre, leader of the new movement of so-called Existentialists—“the most provocative editorial writer in Paris” (for Les Temps Moderns)—commented on the challenge to “young France Today” : “This little bomb which can destroy 10,000 men at a time . . . confronts us with terrible responsibilities.” Albert Camus, then editor of the Resistance newspaper, Combat, appeared for the first time in any English-language publication. Henry Cartier-Bresson captured the “decisive moment” the refugees were freed by the Allied armies, a year before his first exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Henry Moore suggested that the literature emerging from World War II was in the grand tradition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace and that “Henry James’s Americans in Europe in 1875 tell us a great deal about Americans in Europe in 1945.”

Pablo Picasso, a frequent guest at Caresse’s Mill before the war, sent portraits of Mallarmé and Verlaine and added his personal political statement:

What do you believe an artist to be? An imbecile who has only eyes if he is a painter, ears if he is a musician, or a lyre on every rung of his heart if he is a poet: or even if he is a boxer, only muscles? He is at the same time a political being . . . No, [a] painting is not made to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of offensive and defensive warfare against the enemy.

In January, Caresse was back in Washington, writing to Henry Miller in California:

Portfolio was received in Paris like rain in drought. I’ve never realized what aridity for information and ideas and new objects loss of physical contact with the outside world could cause. They hung on to every word, they passed the few copies of Portfolio I from hand to hand, group to group; they are as hungry, from lack of contact, mentally as physically. . . . that is why to go there, to eat with them, makes one feel that you are repaying them for the bread and the wine. They long for us to come back . . . the little restaurants—45 francs—taste better than ever before. No-one in Paris looks ragged or starved (although of course “au fond” they must be).

Everyone tells me Portfolio II is better than I, but I don’t think so. I believe that I is fresher, more hopeful, and vigorous.

Miller agreed: “I liked Portfolio I better too.” But he protested the minimal payment to European contributors.

I understand your difficulties. However, I doubt if our poor European friends will see it that way . . . I would like to say this—a suggestion merely—that you pay such people treble or quintuple the amount, at least, and not pay the American contributors . . . I think most American writers would take it in good part. I just hate to offer, or have you offer, pitiable sums like ten dollars . . . But try to remember, to see, how they would look at it. Portfolio looks like a million dollars. If you can pay the printers and paper mfrs. for such elegance, why not the poor artists who really make the magazine? ENOUGH! . . . This is no reflection on you, please understand. Just a bit of bewilderment. No doubt it will all work out in the last blow of the horn.

Caresse’s idealistic view of the world often failed to consider such grim realities as money, but she did follow up Miller’s suggestion to seek more funds. She reminded Russell Davenport: “Please don’t forget you promised to write me a ‘fan’ letter for Portfolio that I could show to Paul Mellon,” but no help came from that source.

Portfolio III was produced on a shoestring in the basement of 1606 20th Street. The masthead listed Rodman, Rosenberg, and Miller as associate editors, along with Moore. Striking yellow posterboard binders lettered with bright orange script held together the kaleidoscope of orange, blue, pink, and cream-colored pages. (To print David Daiches’ article about Frank Schoonmaker’s selection of wines, Caresse used a burgundy ink.) A deluxe edition of 300 copies offered a frameable cover design by Romare Bearden “at a special price.” A quotation from Charles Peguy embellished the flyleaf: “He who does not shout the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and counterfeiters.”

Henry Miller sent Part II of “The Staff of Life,” another rebuke to the Philistines, and Kay Boyle contributed a story about a peasant who stubbornly refuses to give up his land in “A Military Zone.” Jean-Paul Sartre focused on the dilemma of adolescence, “Boy into Man.” The then-unknown Spanish poet Federico García-Lorca contributed “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez-Mejías,” a dead bullfighter, handsomely illustrated by Pierre Tal-Coat. Harry Moore praised Anaïs Nin—whose first commercial fiction, “This Hunger,” appeared in Portfolio as “someone to watch.” Rodman defied the New Yorker review of the highly-touted Brideshead Revisited by calling it an example of Evelyn Waugh’s “newfound pietism.”

Caresse reprinted several significant pages from the 1929 edition of Shadows of the Sun. Harry’s paraphrase of Walt Whitman provides a revealing glimpse into Harry’s own phyche: “it expresses exactly how I feel towards those who love me.”

Who is he who would become my follower?

The way is suspicious—the result uncertain,

perhaps destructive.

You would have to give up all else—I alone would

expect to be your Sun-God, sole and exclusively.

Your novitiate would then be long and exhausting.

The whole past theory of your life and all conformity

to the lives of those around you would have to be

abandoned. Therefore release me now—let go your hand . . .

(Caresse must have caught the nuances of his message, it so perfectly mirrored her relationship with Harry.)

She again recognized promise in another erratic young poet, Kenneth Rexroth, author of an innovative verse play, Iphigenia at Aulis. When she took a chance on him, she had no idea she would be rewarded with this angry outcry from San Francisco. (Rexroth’s letter gives a glimpse of the casual manner in which the “editorial board” of Portfolio functioned.)

Last fall, Selden Rodman asked me to send him some things for a magazine he was editing. This turned out to be Portfolio. . . . He suggested that I “might get fifty dollars” for them, if I “asked you nicely.” I answered that I considered such a proposition degrading, that it was not my custom to beg from the rich, and please return the mss. as I had other places to place them on less insulting terms. I heard nothing from him, and forgot about the matter . . .

Today, in a bookstore, I came upon Portfolio III, with my play. Since I received no final notice of acceptance by you, no proofs, no author’s copies, no pay—I certainly consider this a most extraordinary piece of behavior on your part. I am not a syncophant—the last thing in the world I wish is to be beholden to you in anyway—I am well aware that the literary bon ton is made up of English assistants, Stalinist gunmen, fairies, professional cunnilinguists [sic] and other swine, who simply love to be kicked around by millionairesses. I am emphatically not such a person. I publish only on invitation, in periodicals, etc. run by my friends. I loathe and despise the world of cocktail literature and art and want nothing whatever to do with it.

Doubtless you are asked simply everywhere as . . . a fascinating woman, and one of the world’s leading art patrons. I hear you have your picture in Harper’s Bazaar, or is it view, as a “Career Woman of the Year.” This is at my expense, and others like me who would not possibly afford $3.50 for your simply fascinating magazine.

Of course, I know, when one has so much, one is careless about other people’s property, isn’t one? Poor dear.

He added a postscript: “I am very poor, and not careless about such matters.

Caresse’s answer was lost, but she wrote to Moore about the contretemps:

The Rexroth business was the limit. Selden did all the correspondence with him, and he went off to Haiti without leaving me Rexroth’s address. When I learned that his check had not been sent due to lack of address, I mailed one c/o Selden from Europe. According to J[ames] Laughlin, the $50 I paid Rexroth was more than he received from New Directions and when he [Rexroth] wrote me the absurd tantrum letter, Portfolio had only been out two weeks, so the delay was not very enormous. I imagine he suffers from a great big inferiority complex. In spite of all this, the Iphigenia was one of the very finest things we have ever printed and really worth the row . . .

Caresse was always willing to take another chance on new talent.

Virginia Paccassi, a 24-year-old with a distinctive, colorful approach to painting scenes of contemporary life in the streets and docks of the cities, wrote to her benefactor from Bleecker Street:

. . . Everything seems to have happened today. I got a divorce at noon, lost my train ticket this afternoon, and almost had to walk home from Boston. . . . I found your Portfolio at the door when I reached home. I have a three-year-old daughter who Henry Miller was crazy about when he visited us in California two years ago. The painting you reproduced I painted when I was 19, therefore I was a bit in the fog on perspective—still am!

The Rome edition of Portfolio was prompted by a call from the cultural attaché of the Italian Embassy in Washington. He noticed Portfolio II, edited in Paris, and asked Caresse to make a similar report on the modern renaissance of Italian literature and art. During the Fascist regime, exhibitions were closed the day they opened if paintings did not conform, and liberal books were banned. After 21 years of repression, artists and writers, long underground, “emerged into the light of a modern era.” Their interest and curiosity about America were great.

In April 1946, Caresse set sail once again for Europe. It was still difficult for a civilian to enter Italy, so she stopped off in Paris to arrange a flight with the Air Transport Command. “I was not told what day or hour I would depart, only that I should be ready to take off whenever I was notified by telephone,” she wrote. She was having dinner with friends and had just started back to her hotel on rue de Bac when “I was met by the little chasseur on a bicycle . . . the ATC had telephoned that I was to be at Orly Field in two hours!”

She packed quickly, and as it was almost impossible to find a taxi in those days, the concierge telephoned every place he knew before he finally “ran to earth a copain with a car.” Even then, the driver arrived only some ten minutes before she was due at the Place Vendôme, the central meeting place for transportation to Orly.

At the airport, she waited another hour for a sudden rain to let up, then piled aboard a converted bomber with bucket seats filled with American G.I.s and officers.

“We swooped down to a little shed with ‘Roma’ on its red rile roof. The day was beginning to dawn and the darkness and desolation . . . were very apparent. I had heard that Rome was not destroyed, but I saw that the edges were badly singed,” she wrote. She was billeted along with military personnel at the Excelsior, once Rome’s “swankiest” hotel. Several members of the staff remembered Caresse from former visits, and the concierge welcomed her as a long-lost friend. She had lunch alone in the Officers’ Mess, “decidedly PX, but the two martinis at 50 lire [then the equivalent of 20 cents] were decidedly pre-war.”

Caresse spent the afternoon obtaining “privilege” cards for use in the occupied city and calling at the U.S. Embassy, where Professor Morey, the cultural attaché, won high marks as a man of keen intellect, excellent taste, and good sense. (She discovered belatedly on the day she left that Morey was also a poet.)

“From the moment that I finished my coffee and strawberries next morning in the sunshine on the Via Veneto, I was obsessed by a world of new and exciting work,” she wrote. She set about her task of interpreting the Italian scene of arts and letters “for circulation in America.” The work of Alberto Moravia (“Malinverno”) and Carlo Levi (“Italian Panorama”) were published in Portfolio well ahead of Levi’s best-selling­ novel, Christ Stopped at Eboli. Morandi, an unknown youth—in her view—usurped the high place of Giorgio de Chirico. (De Chirico’s “Self-Portrait in 17th Century Dress” was “an abundance of realistic fruit and feathers that seems to spell the word pompier.”)

Caresse noted other important post-war trends in Italy. New names like Manzu and Savelli added to the rich heritage of sacred art. Architects and sculptors were making impressive strides, and there was a renewal of cultural life in the great castles and estates far from the cities. The great halls of the Castello di Torre Sommi-Peccinardi­ were converted into a modern theater, where ambitious villagers were offering French and Italian chamber music and attempting a Saroyan play in translation. Before she left for the States, Caresse was photographed by Romolo Marcellini at one of the historic fountains of Rome for the flyleaf of Portfolio (a photo later reproduced in a Madamoiselle feature, captioning her as editor of one of the “newer avant-garde magazines”).

Back in Washington, she announced a special edition of 100 numbered copies with an original lithograph by Roberto Fasola, L’Autel des Jesuits. She wrote to Moore, now at Craig Air Force Base, Alabama:

Back again full of Italian news. Portfolio IV is going to be sensational. Half of it is on the way, shipped by the U.S. Embassy. The other half I am getting together now in Washington. Your Lawrence article is to appear in both Italian and English. The translation has already been made. I will send you proofs next week.

Few translators lived up to Caresse’s meticulous standards. She wrote to Dr. Felix Giovanelli at New York University:

I am enclosing my check for $13 to settle the balance of your translating bill. . . . The actual number of your words printed in Portfolio were 5,439. I had to discard the Moravia as the translation was not up to standard.

. . . The poems that I used (and you said I could do as I liked about them) were completely revised by me and Corrado Cagli, who . . . said your translation, as it was, could not stand. I am sorry that so much of your work had to be discarded.

Always hard-pressed for funds, Caresse wrote to Bearden:

Dear Romie:

We are sending you a check for $50 for the magnificent contribution you made. I hope that next year, now that circulation is increasing, expenses . . . will be reduced and adequate means available to increase payment for materials used.

. . . In March I plan to go to Greece. The following number I would like to have made up entirely of Negro contributors . . . I am wondering if you would be willing to act as one of my associate editors, your name to appear on the masthead? There is no salary connected with this, but I am hoping that you may find it of sufficient interest to devote some time to helping me gather an impressive list . . .

Portfolio V was issued in Washington from new editorial offices at 918 F Street. Bearden came aboard as art editor, but Rodman, newly released from the Army, was no longer listed as poetry editor. Belazel Schatz’s illustration for Henry Miller’s Black Spring, a serigraph (silkscreen) of the author’s handwriting, was the frontispiece of the deluxe edition of 200 copies. “Handwriting possesses direct contact, carrying a flavor . . . all of its own which is completely lost in type print,” the editor commented.

On the flyleaf was Harry Crosby’s 1929 photograph of D.H. Lawrence at the Moulin du Soleil, illustrating the feature article by Moore, “Why Not Read Lawrence, Too?” (At the time, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned from publication in the U.S.).

Max Ernst supplied another of his surrealistic paintings from Arizona. Man Ray, whom Caresse discovered in Paris—as yet unrecognized in his own country—contributed one of his photosensitive “rayographs,” which he described as “painting with light.” René Batigné, director of the French Art collection at the National Gallery of Art, contributed an essay on the life and work of Modigliani.

Caresse continued to be a risk-taker in publishing unknown talent, however unlikely the source. Edwin Becker’s “Who Cried Against the Wall”—a short story submitted on Miller’s recommendation—was written while the author was serving time in New Jersey State Prison for creatively forging his name to checks. “A young man of sensitive and courageous mind, he has made of his life in prison an opportunity for study and intellectual development,” the editor noted. “In one of his letters to me, Henry Miller said, ‘Prison is not the worst place in the world in which to write. . . . many eminent men have written great works in prison: Marco Polo, Cervantes, et al., Walls? Bars? Restrictions? . . . against freedom of the mind, NO!” Becker’s byline later appeared in mass circulation magazines, such as Collier’s, Esquire, and Readers’ Digest.

Of special interest was an excerpt from Leo Tolstoy’s last work, “The Law of Love and the Law of Violence,” never before published in English. Caresse must have chosen to print it as a personal expression of her philosophy. Protegé Charles Olson sent “Upon a Moebus Strip” from the new experimental school in North Carolina, Black Mountain College, where he was in residence.

Portfolios were getting popular press coverage, not only in Washington and New York, but as far afield as the Toledo Blade:

Remember Caresse? In the post-war heyday of American expatriates in Paris, she sponsored surrealist painters and writers; maintained Le Moulin, popular salon for artists; flashed rhinestone eyebrows at the opening of Gertrude Stein’s “Three Saints in Four Acts,” wore a white horse costume at the fancy dress ball she gave to introduce Dali to New York.

Now she and her staff are editing “around the world.” The next Portfolio will be edited in Athens, she says, and will report the artistic and intellectual reaction of the Greeks to their current dilemma.