Reviews for The Cramoisy Queen: A Life of Caresse Crosby

The average rating for The Cramoisy Queen: A Life of Caresse Crosby based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-07-28 00:00:00 Heidi L Tucker Trips over itself, in bad ways. This is the biography of Caresse Crosby. She's hardly known now, but was once a major player in literary modernism--a bank-roller, like the also-forgotten James Laughlin. She was modern in the most ostentatious ways, living in France, openly having affairs (her husband did, too), ignoring her children who were shipped away, doing drugs, drinking too much, sleeping with several people at the same time. And putting out important editions of modernist literature. There's a lot to tell here, and Hamalian is well-positioned to do so, having already done yeoman work to recover the reputation of another forgotten modernist, Kenneth Rexroth, who provided institutional structure to West Coast literary types as well as a clearly defined ideology. Her biography on him is too long but still good, and she edited his autobiography-as-novel. The beginning of this book promises to be excellent. Hamalian sets up Crosby's life well--she was born to wealth, privilege, and influence--indeed, she had the ear of J.P. Morgan--and always had an aristocratic bearing and sense of self. Hamalian covers Crosby's childhood concisely, even novelistically in the scene setting, then moves on to her first marriage. It was to an alcoholic man who could not bear domesticity, especially as they had two children. The text then moves to the heart of the story, the decade or so that Crosby spent with her second husband, Harry. They met while she was still married. Harry was quite a bit younger, but morbidly fascinated with death and breaking social taboos--he seems to have come to this position as a result of his work during World War I, when he was tasked with moving buckets of amputated body parts. Like so many of the men in Crosby's life, Harry was a drunk. He cheated on her excessively. And he planned for the two of them to commit suicide together. It is at this stage in the book that Hamalian starts to veer off course. The book promised to be a look at the life of a patron of the arts, then turned to something even more interesting: how Crosby managed the difficult process of being a woman casting off social convention when the weight of those conventions still bore heavily on her--and the weight of casting them off did, too. In Hamalian's view, Crosby was never completely comfortable with the cheating and neglecting her children, though she could indulge in both extravagantly. She was torn. Here Hamalian needed to burrow down and get inside Crosby, to dwell on the subject, but she really couldn't figure out how. The narrative starts jumping back and forth in time confusingly. It becomes endlessly repetitive. Hamalian makes only references to what should be centrally focused in such a narrative: Crosby was badly sexually harassed at least once, maybe assaulted a second time, and raped on another occasion. Important for understanding Crosby's position as a woman in the debauched 1920s, these events are noted and forgotten. But wouldn't they play a role in how Crosby understood her marriage? Her place in society? The time she was raped was on VJ Day. One thinks of the famous picture of the sailor kissing the nurse--and her later report that the advance was unwanted. Crosby was raped by a service member, too--proof that men still took what they thought they deserved. How did this effect Crosby's later pacifism and quest for world citizenship? Who knows. And how did any of this relate to the literature that she was editing and publishing? Again, who knows. Indeed, Hamalian balks at explaining Crosby's literary philosophy at all. She liked some things, wrote not-very-good poetry, and worked hard at designing the books she published is about all the information that we get. It's very unsatisfying. Worse, though, the editing goes out the window. There are too many typographical errors for such a slim volume, and way too many times Hamalian merely says again what she said before. Crucial facts are butchered. Page 39 reports that Caresse and Harry agreed to kill themselves on 31 October 1942--the date chosen for specific astronomical reasons. Page 72 says the date was 4 October 1944. Which is right? Who knows? It became a moot point in Crosby's life because Harry killed himself and a lover in 1929. Hamalian tells that episode in great detail. But after it, the narrative becomes completely unmoored. She spends long stretches figuring out trivial details--what was the exact date when Caresse met Henry Miller?--that might have worked in a much longer biography, but not here. She tacks from subject to subject, without ever spelling out why they were important, except that Caresse was in contact with someone famous, and so the events had to be important. Any sense of the double-bind in which Crosby found herself during the 1920s is lost. Toward the end, Hamalian finds a bit of momentum and structure in Crosby's attempts to push for world citizenship, but there is no spelling out of the detailed relationship between this quixotic campaign and Crosby's earlier life. Only at the end of the book do we realize that Hamalian never really cared about this part of Crosby's life. She concludes by arguing that Crosby may have structured her life after 1929 to somehow be responsive to perceived criticisms from her dead husband--to prove herself worthy. It would have been nice to no this was a point Hamalian wanted us to see before the conclusion. It would have been nice to know that this was always story about the two of them. Maybe this explains the fascination with the Henry Miller timeline--does Hamalian think of this as some kind of Henry and June? Or is she trying to make some kind of argument about the connection between personal desire, the erotic in literature, and politics? Maybe. The material seems suggestive, but, ultimately, given the poor editing and confusing structure it's hard to trust anything she is saying, and certainly too hard to read out subtle implications. A missed opportunity.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-10-04 00:00:00 Nicholas Lavers What an amazing woman! She knew absolutely everyone, although Scott Fitzgerald doesn't appear in this book. I really didn't like her at first - rich, pretentious and besotted with a weak man. I had little patience with her tolerance of Harry Crosby's philandering, although she had plenty of her own in retaliation, and the way she abandoned her children to nannies and boarding schools. But Caresse redeemed herself in later life. She devoted her time and money to supporting the arts and, in the 1950s, founded Women Against War and became a member of the Citizens of the World. I'm impressed! The book is well-written without being either too informal or dry, and thoroughly researched as one would expect from an academic. However I do think it could have benefited from a closer edit eg Cafe de Flore has the "de" missing, and there are the odd grammatical errors. The omission of prepositions and use of "gotten" in American writing always annoys me. I loved looking up addresses on my Paris map and, even better, on Google Earth! I've bought The Passionate Years on ebay and can't wait to delve further into the life of Caress Crosby.