The Passionate Years

by Caresse Crosby

A mad, amusing, and revealing look at Paris in the twenties and at the people Caresse Crosby knew—Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, James Joyce, Picasso, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Lawrence of Arabia, and a host of others. In a single day, a visitor to the Crosby home outside of Paris might have found Salvador Dali at work in one room, Douglas Fairbanks Senior playfully swinging from the rafters, and D. H. Lawrence sunning himself by the pool.“In her autobiography Mrs. Crosby has added a valuable footnote to the literary history of our time....She tells some amazingly good stories. Her account of Lindbergh’s arrival in Paris is a superb piece of straight reporting and her description of a Quatre Arts ball at which she won first prize for reasons that cannot be mentioned in a family newspaper is funny and sad at the same time. Her fostering of unknown or otherwise unpublishable writers (Crane, Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, among others) through the Black Sun Press can now be seen clearly for the important project it was.—The New York Times“The Passionate Years becomes immediately an essential document of its era. Also it is an entertaining book.”—New York Herald Tribune

Genres: Biography, Memoir, Nonfiction

448 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 1, 1968

Reviews

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Caresse Crosby led a fascinating life, interacting with numerous famous authors and artists. I loved reading about how she and her husband got their start in publishing and all their experiences in their extensive travels.

I bought this book because I read BLACK SUN which was mainly about Harry Crosby. I wanted to get Caresse’s take on things and this book did not disappoint

[Nick Guzan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Passionate Years is a remarkably fun retelling of a life lived among many of the most important artists and socialites of the early 20th century. Caresse's unapologetic looseness with facts and self-indulgence can be excused by her wit and first-hand perspectives of the artists in her circle.

It's probably best read after a more encyclopedic piece (Cowley's Exile's Return or Wolff's Black Sun) as her portrayals of each personality are anecdotal and not biographical. A reader should pick up the book with some base knowledge of who Harry Crosby, Hart Crane - and even figures like Hemingway, Stein, and Dali - are before expecting to be as fulfilled as I was by its content.

[Gini · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before this year I had never heard of Caresse Crosby. Now I am fascinated by her and moving on to a biography.

This book is less a coherent autobiography than it is the anecdotes of a woman living in the very center of the Jazz Age. And that is what makes it so delightful—it feels like being there in the midst of a remarkable age that resulted from one war and all but disappeared into the maw of the next. You will never manage to create a timeline of Crosby's life from this book—she darts from story to story like a minnow in a glittering pond. But the overall atmosphere that she creates will captivate the reader who is not so worried about the order of events than about the feel of the time.

As I embark on the book of the scholar who sleuthed her way through Crosby's life, I am exceedingly glad I read this work first. Yes, I will gain a better understanding of the whens and wheres of what took place, but I will retain the sense of immediacy that will help me comprehend the whys of it all. And that is joy.

[Bill Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

The obvious bookend at the other end of the shelf from Shadows of the Sun both complements and embellishes Harry's diary and paints a candid picture of remarkable times, betters it. Caresse is a better narrator, less given to flights of mildly silly rapture. Alas, her sense of class never leaves her, an odd thing in one so deliberately outside the strictures of her time, and it's a good thing that most of the names she drops are those of people you probably want to read about. Altogether a splendid picture of the gilded edge of 'tween-war culture by a woman who made a lightning streak through 20th Century literature, at least as published in fine, limited editions. Someone really needs to make the movie of the Crosbys' lives.

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 2 out of 5]

Written in the early 1950s, this is the autobiography of Caresse Crosby from her childhood up to the beginning of World War II. A third or more of the book is about her life with her second husband, Harry Crosby, in the 1920s. Good to read this after Geoffrey Wolff's excellent biography of Harry Crosby as Caresse is a little shy of the truth on occasion, though she captures the feeling of her life and times very well. After Harry's suicide in 1929, the book feels like just a few small anecdotes about famous people she met or knew though it doesn't quite devolve into the litany of names that happens in Charlie Chaplin's autobiography.

[in8 · Rating 3 out of 5]

http://www.5cense.com/15/437.htm
better off reading The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book puts new meaning to live life to the fullness!