(Above: Charles Henri Ford in Paris emerging from a vespasiennes - which one presumes is the term he preferred to pissoir. Photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson. 1935.)
In the previous column I focused more on Ruth Ford than her brother Charles Henri, a polymathic high school drop-out - photographer, editor, artist, filmmaker, publisher, collagist, novelist, pioneering LGBTQ historical presence, salonnier - who is considered America’s first Surrealist poet. Surrealism is a subconscious jukebox of juxtapositions - an instinctive scream of calculated calm to which, once noted, one can waltz sophisticatedly a jejune jitterbug, twist in a spin of visual language and written images, square dance in a circle, two step en pointe, rise in refusal, stay in a huff, whisper unheard earsplitting hosannas, whirl in stillness, rhythmically remain off kilter, pose steadily in an erratic perfection, take a deep surly plunge into the an-only surfeit of surface, or just (justifiably) preen, pretend, proclaim, shrug, dismiss, dare, dilute, enlarge, leer, and long. In fact, the jukebox, invented by Louis Glass in 1889, even surreally appeared within a first juxtaposition in San Francisco at a place called the Palais Royale Saloon. André Breton, the foremost theorist of Surrealism, was Ford’s mentor and champion once Ford arrived in Paris some 40 years later where he’d saunter about the Palais-Royal with his other friends and mentors which included Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes and Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dalí and Janet Flanner and Kay Boyle and Paul Éluard and Peggy Guggenheim and Max Ernst, et al., on their way to Natalie Clifford Barney’s salon. Or, perhaps on one of those rare occasions when he found himself alone, I’d like to imagine he decided to pay a call on Colette at her apartment there within the Palais-Royal since Ford knew everyone else one needed to know in Paris in the 1930s - he moved there in the summer of 1931 - in order to be socially deputized as dandy enough to dally about in its demimonde of literature and art, an avant-garde where pleasure was not policed but still had its place where it deepened the surfeit of selfs that served as such a circle’s own surface. Breton cooled on Ford, however, when the issue of homosexuality, a character trait he shared with Breton’s bête noire Jean Cocteau, complicated their connection because of Breton’s distaste for anything that he could associate with Cocteau - which was Ford’s theory in order to displace any notion of Breton’s homophobia. Breton, although he wrote Manifestoes of Surrealism, considered the real prophet of the Surrealist movement to be Isidore Lucien Ducasse, the poet who published under the name Comte de Lautréamont and who died at the age of 24 in 1870. The definition of Surrealism being an umbrella and a sewing machine having a chance encounter on an operating table is often attributed to Breton but he was instead quoting Ducasse who described a boy in his collection Les Chants de Maldoror as being as “beautiful as the accidental encounter, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella.” That this quote has become a kind of mission statement of Surrealism is fitting because of its irony - another juxtaposition surreal in itself - since Charles Henri Ford’s unabashed beauty as a young out gay man as much as his talent was the agency he would not deny that finally alas denied him the support of Breton.
(Above: From a Man Ray contact sheet for the composition Beautiful as the accidental encounter, on a dissection table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella. The Man Ray Trust. 1935.)
Both Ruth and Charles were born in the early 1900s in Brookhaven, Mississippi - the ur-surreal-juxtapostion for two such artistic iconoclasts who defied conventions. Though raised Baptist, Charles Henri (he changed his second name to the French spelling so he would not be confused with the archly conservative auto magnate) was sent off to Catholic boarding schools by his parents who owned small hotels throughout the south. No doubt the strictures of such schools were too much for such a boy born with bohemianism in his blood more than any strains of religion. After dropping out of school, he even published the now legendary literary journal Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms - which was subtitled “A Bisexual Bimonthly” - while living back home with his parents in Mississippi. Its nine issues over two years included the works of, among others, Paul Bowles, Kenneth Rexroth, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Kay Boyle, Erskine Caldwell, William Carlos Williams, and the critic and essayist Lionel Abel who went on to translate Jean-Paul Sartre and to whom Sartre referred as “the most intelligent man in America.” Ford told Bomb magazine in an interview in 1987 that he got many letters to them requesting their work by writing to them in care of a magazine that first inspired him, Eugene Jolas’s journal for experimental writing, transition. “People were very responsive in those days, and you could write somebody famous and they would answer and send you something,” he said. “William Carlos Williams continued that all his life. He was contributing to little mimeographed magazines until the end. He believed in that diffusion and contact with the young.”
In 1931, Ford took a manuscript of his novel, The Young and Evil, which was co-authored by Parker Tyler, who published in Blues and later became a film critic, to Paris with him after living in Greenwich Village with Tyler. The book owed its narrative enigmatic thrusts and parries to Gertrude Stein who gave them this blurb: “The Young and Evil creates this generation as This Side of Paradise by Fitzgerald created his generation.” It was, it is claimed, the only blurb she ever gave to any other writers to use on a book’s cover flap. But the novel’s narrative about queer life in Greenwich Village and Harlem replete with sex and a lack of shame wasn’t enigmatic enough for the censorious time and it was banned in America. (A first edition can now cost a book collector $2800.) Stein was instrumental in getting it published with the Paris-based imprint Obelisk Press, an English language publishing house that specialized in subjects that no one else would touch. In 1933, Obelisk printed around 2500 copies, of which at least 500 were seized and burned by British customs. “The only review we got in America was Louis Kronenberger in the New Republic saying the book was ‘both authentic and alive,’” Ford told Bomb. “That’s the only review that we got in America. Copies were destroyed and banned here, and even Brentano’s in Paris took it out of the window.” Edith Sitwell, who later became a friend and a champion of Ford’s poetry, detested the book and said it was “entirely without soul, like a dead fish stinking in hell.” She actually burned her copy.
(Above: Ford photographed by his dear friend Cecil Beaton. 1940s.)
(Above: Ford’s first poem of many published in Poetry magazine. The above one - full of Surreal juxtapositions - appeared in the July 1939 issue.)
(Above: Charles Henri Ford, Parker Tyler, Pavlev Tchelitchew peering at Ruth Ford. West Dean College. Photo by Cecil Beaton. 1935.)
While in Paris that first summer, Ford met the Surrealist artist and set and costume designer, Russian emigre Pavel Tchelitchew; the two became lovers for the next 26 years until Tchlitchew’s death from heart failure in Rome with Ford by his bedside. Ford took his body back to Paris where Tchelitchew is interred in Père Lachaise cemetery. Charles Henri and Ruth are buried themselves in Rose Hill Cemetery in their family plot back in Brookhaven, Mississippi, their ashes having been taken there by Indra Tamang whom Charles Henri had met in Nepal where he lived for a time in his peripatetic life. He brought the then 21-year-old Tamang back with him to care for him in the apartment in which he lived next to Ruth at The Dakota in Manhattan for the last decades of their lives until they each died in their 90s. Ruth, who never remarried after the death of her husband, actor Zachary Scott, and had grown estranged from her daughter, left the two apartments and her art collection to Tamang who had ended up caring for her as well. He was the closest thing they had to family other than each other by the end of their remarkably lived lives.
Before Tchelitchew died, he had been the art director - and Ford along with Parker Tyler the editors - of one of the greatest literary and art magazines ever published in America they created together which they titled View. Indeed, it introduced Surrealism to the country which didn’t quite know what to make of making its acquaintance - much like those who met Charles Henri felt upon first meeting him. View lasted from 1940 until 1947 and its contributors included Wallace Stevens, Joseph Cornell, Henry Miller, Laurence Durrell, Paul Bowles, Marshall McLuhan, Albert Camus, Jean Genet, Jorge Luis Borges, Georgia O’Keefe, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, Isamu Noguchi, Max Ernst, Jean Dubuffet, Pablo Picasso, René Magritte, Aaron Copland, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Breton.
(Above: A Léger cover for View.)
There is so much more I could write about the Ford siblings - especially Charles Henri. I plan to read Water from a Bucket, his published diaries which cover the years 1948 - 1957. (You can order the book here.) Later in life, post-diaries, he became a part of the Warhol crowd and a dear friend of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe forming an arc with his younger self and its earlier artistic circles in Paris and New York. As a fellow gay Mississippi writer with bohemianism running through my own veins even more now than ever and who has spent time over the last 40 years in Brookhaven where my brother lives and where he with his wife raised their four children, I am fascinated by Ford whose understanding of Surrealism began by his being so strangely rooted in the soil of such a lovely but little Mississippi town. I understand the need to live one’s life as a kind of artistic and spiritual pilgrimage, as he did in Morocco and Katmandu and Rome and Paris and London and India and New York. Mississippi made Charles Henri Ford in such a way that it embedded within him, as he set forth, the artistry and courage to remake himself anew and anew, and ever anew. I also understand that: the need not to allow the clay that made us to remain in place as the already-sculpted, the safe, the satisfied, but to understand it as the material we, never safe, never satisfied, needed, still need, in order never to finish the sculpture. We left to become the negative space in our own escaped inescapable continuously sculpted selves. That is the juxtaposition. That is the Surreality. Leaving our families behind, we became the negative space ourselves where familial connection needed too to sculpt itself anew. Where nothing exists next to what does exist is where art exists, where love does.