CONOVER, Anne 1937-

(Anne Conover Carson)

PERSONAL:

Born 1937; married Thomas B. Carson (a banker, futurist, and author; died 2002); children: Natalie. Education: Princeton University, graduated 1954.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—c/o Author Mail, Yale University Press, P.O. Box 209040, New Haven, CT 06520-9040.

CAREER:

Author and biographer.

WRITINGS:

AS ANNE CONOVER CARSON

Caresse Crosby: From Black Sun to Roccasinibalda, Capra Press (Santa Barbara, CA), 1989.

(With Julia Montgomery) Risk and Rewards, EPM Publications (McLean, VA), 1996.

Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound: "What Thou Lovest Well …," Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2001.

SIDELIGHTS:

Anne Conover, who writes under the name Ann Conover Carson, is a biographer whose first volume, Caresse Crosby: From Black Sun to Roccasinibalda, studies the life of the American expatriate who in the 1920s founded the Black Sun Press with her husband, Harry. The couple lived in Paris, and Conover goes beyond a 1976 biography, Geoffrey Wolfe's Black Sun, which ends with Harry's suicide in 1929, to cover the remaining forty-one years of Crosby's life as a publisher, poet, and activist.

The subject of Caresse Crosby is Mary Phelps Jacob (1892-1970). Born of a wealthy New York City family, she lived in a home that was on the real estate where the Plaza Hotel now stands. Her first husband, a Boston Brahmin named Richard Peabody, spent her inheritance and then became an alcoholic. His family assumed the care of Mary and their two children, but she soon began a relationship with Harry Crosby, the son of J. P. Morgan. She was twenty-seven, and he was twenty-one. She endured the scandal of divorce and then fled to Paris with Harry.

It was Harry Crosby who gave Jacob the name Caresse, though her friends called her Poll. New Leader contributor Carole Cleaver reported that the novelist and diarist Anaïs Nin described Caresse as a "pollen carrier, one who mixed, stirred, brewed, and concocted friendships together, who encouraged artistic and creative copulation in all its forms and expressions." At Black Sun, Caresse and Crosby published the work of Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other soon-to-be-famous writers. Harry wrote extensively, read, and studied the world's religions. He also smoked opium, drank, and caroused. In 1928 he convinced Caresse to enter a suicide pact with him, to be carried out fourteen years later. However, he did not wait for that deadline; within a year Harry and the woman he was seeing at the time killed themselves.

Caresse claimed to have had more than 200 lovers after Harry's death. She married Bert Young, and they moved to a farm in Virginia, where she entertained Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dali and his wife, Gala; novelist Henry Miller; and Nin. Young abused Caresse, however, and they divorced. She stayed in Washington during World War II, continued to edit her cultural magazine, Portfolio: An Intercontinental Quarterly, sponsored surrealist painters, held salons on both continents, and later bought Roccasinibalda, a drafty, seventy-two-room castle near Rome, where she entertained aspiring writers. She championed environmental issues, personal freedom, and world peace. She also published an autobiography, The Passionate Years, in 1968. N. R. Fitch wrote in Choice that Conover's biography of Caresse Crosby is "written in a readily accessible journalistic style."

Conover's Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound: "What Thou Lovest Well …" is the first complete biography of the woman who for fifty years devoted her life to the poet Pound (1885-1972). Rudge was born in 1895 in Youngstown, Ohio, and died at age 101. She was a violinist who once performed for Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who also played the violin. It was Mussolini who asked Rudge and Pound if they had ever heard of Vivaldi, at that time an obscure, forgotten composer who had died in 1741. They found Vivaldi's manuscripts and edited and microfilmed them, allowing the world to experience his genius. Harper's contributor Guy Davenport noted that "FBI agents were the first to hear [Vivaldi's music] … in America in our time: the shortwave broadcasts that Pound made from Rome in World War II were preceded by Vivaldi concerti."

Pound, aged thirty-six, was married to Dorothy Shakespear, daughter of the first lover of Irish poet William Butler Yeats, when he met the twenty-five-year-old Rudge, who was already an accomplished violinist. They had a daughter, Maria (later Mary), who was sent to live with an Austrian couple, and Rudge saw little of her before she was twelve. Rudge herself had similarly been sent off to a convent to spend most of her childhood away from her parents. Two months after Maria's birth, Pound and Dorothy had a son, Omar, who was raised by his English grandmother, and who did not meet Pound until he was twelve years old. During much of World War II Pound and the two women lived unhappily together in Rudge's cottage.

After the war Pound was tried for broadcasting anti-Semitic and pro-Axis radio programs from Italy. He was sent to St. Elizabeth's, a mental institution in Washington, D.C., and Dorothy moved there to be close by. He refused to allow Rudge to visit him, but when he left St. Elizabeth's in 1958, sick and weak, it was Rudge who cared for him until his death.

Conover drew on the papers of Rudge and Pound in Yale University's Beinecke Library and also had the full cooperation of their daughter and grandchildren. Davenport wrote that Conover "has made intelligent and cohesive sense of this treasure trove of letters, diaries, and the all-but-intractable mass of Poundian studies."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Choice, April, 1990, N. R. Fitch, review of Caresse Crosby: From Black Sun to Roccasinibalda, p. 1318.

Harper's, January, 2002, Guy Davenport, review of Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound: "What Thou Lovest Well …," p. 63.

Library Journal, November 1, 1989, Bill Schenck, review of Caresse Crosby, p. 88; November 1, 2001, Paolina Taglienti, review of Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound, p. 90.

New Leader, November 13, 1989, Carole Cleaver, review of Caresse Crosby, p. 22.

New York Times, February 15, 2002, Dinitia Smith, review of Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound, section E, p. 50.

Publishers Weekly, October 13, 1989, review of Caresse Crosby, p. 36.

Sunday Telegraph (London, England), February 3, 2002, Jonathan Bate, review of Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound, p. 16.

Times Literary Supplement, April 26, 2002, Clive Wilmer, review of Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound, p. 6.

Washington Post Book World, December 2, 2001, Michael Dirda, review of Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound, p. 15.*