His younger sister, Ruth Ford — the diary’s “Sister”—was a well-known actor. She debuted in Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater production of The Shoemaker’s Holiday in 1938; performed in plays by Tennessee Williams; had a lead in Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit (translated by Paul Bowles); and received a nomination from the London Drama Critics, in 1957, for her performance as Temple Drake in Requiem for a Nun, which she had adapted into a play with William Faulkner. Ruth Ford was married to Hollywood actor Zachary Scott, who died in 1965, and lives in the Dakota, four floors below her older brother.
I loved the Blues before I loved the Poem. Somehow the two loves were from the same source, so it was natural I called my poetry review Blues.
Precocious and ambitious, the young poet launched Blues, The Magazine of New Rhythms, in 1929. William Carlos Williams and Eugene Jolas were two of its contributing editors and Kathleen Tankersley Young its associate editor. For nine issues, Ford solicited and published writing from Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Kay Boyle, Harry Crosby, James Farrell, H.D., Kenneth Rexroth, Mark van Doren, Louis Zukofsky, Edouard Roditi, Erskine Caldwell. He was the first to publish Paul Bowles.
From Mississippi, Ford moved to New York, to write poetry and lead la vie bohème in Greenwich Village. Ford had published Parker Tyler, the poet and future film critic and writer, in Blues and was corresponding with him. They met in person in New York—“I could hardly see his face, he had so much makeup on,” Ford says — and soon collaborated on writing The Young and Evil. Called by some the first gay novel, published in 1933, banned in the United States and England, it is — like Ford himself — unapologetic, unashamed, poetic, candid and determinedly free of conventions.
It’s not doing the things one wants to do — even if considered a vice, like opium-taking — that makes one age, but doing things one doesn’t want to do.
A kind of Surrealist free verse, the uninhibited novel was influenced, in part, by Ford’s mentor Gertrude Stein, who took him up when he was first in Paris. When Ford fell in love with Tchelitchew, Stein found less reason to see him; she and Tchelitchew had had one of those famous, furious partings of the way. But in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein wrote of Ford: “He is also honest which is also a pleasure.”
Along with The Young and Evil, Ford is perhaps best known for View, the international art magazine he edited in New York, from 1940 to 1947. Europeans Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Max Ernst — forced into exile during World War II — Americans Maya Deren, Meyer Schapiro, Joseph Cornell, Florine Stettheimer, Man Ray, Paul Bowles and many more found a home in View’s pages and on its covers. Not coincidentally, Ford begins his diary a year after he stops View and ends it shortly after the death of Tchelitchew in 1957.
Since finishing the diary, Ford has produced or invented the “poem poster” (shown at the Ubu Gallery in New York in 2000); published many books of poetry, including a limited edition, unique collage book, Spare Parts, and Out of the Labyrinth: Selected Poems (City Lights, 1991); directed the feature-length movie Johnny Minotaur (shot in Crete, starring Allen Ginsberg among others) and exhibited his photographs, most recently with fellow Mississippian Allen Frame (at the Leslie Tonkomow Gallery in New York).
You have to enjoy what you’re doing and do it every day.
Ford has made a habit of doing what he wants to do, and his life is dedicated, as much as anyone’s can be, to poetry, art, and the pursuit of pleasure. He usually adheres to a self-imposed, rigorous routine, and now, just short of 93, he writes haiku poems and makes collages daily. When I visit him on a brilliant fall day, October 1, 2000, one of the day’s haikus is on his disk:
Men too have a
change
of life
didn’t Marcel
Duchamp
have it twice
***
I first read Charles Henri Ford’s diary in the late 1970s, and again in the late 1980s when I urged him to have it published. He didn’t want to bother. He was writing poems, making collages and photographs; not one, as the reader will see, to look back with longing or regret.
Those were not the days. These are the days. My days are always these.
I find it pointless to have a nostalgia about the past.
I: “Would you like to be in Rome…where all the pretty boys are?” Pavlik: “Don’t turn the dagger in the wound.”
Poetry, genius, love, fame, friendship, beauty, family, character, sex, psychology, youth, and Pavlik, always, are variously appetizers, entrees, or desserts on Ford’s menu du jour et de la nuit. His diary is riveting. As it moves from theme to theme, the reader senses a life formed consciously in the present, one lived spontaneously, interrupted and interfered with by memory and the pressure of unconscious thoughts. The reader feels the moment’s vitality and presence, and the sorrow at its loss, but not because Ford insists on it. Emotion — disappointment and sadness — is there in the way he writes the day, flying from an idea, sex act, or fantasy, to a line in a poem, a report on dinner talk, a death, an argument, to a question about aesthetics, a worry about Pavlik — then it’s all gone, except the memory of it, what he’s written down.
A passionate schoolboy who knew what he wanted — and got it. (In the pissoir.)
A shadow falls, a fragment of night; a day goes, a fragment of death. Life and the sun tomorrow.
Many beautiful machines — Tanguy painted. But the most beautiful machine is and always will be the human body.
His diary is beautiful and homely, an epic poem about the dailiness of art and life. It’s filled with insights about himself, love, sex, his illusions, delusions; there’s silliness, homages to his heroes — Isak Dinesen, for one — and acerbic or reverent considerations of his contemporaries. Tchelitchew comments that Jean Genet, whom Ford finds “solemn and humorless,” is “un moraliste — comme Sade”; Ford refers, less perceptively, to “messes signed by Jackson Pollock.” The diary is loaded with gossip about history’s celebrated, with whom Ford has had lunch or met at an opening. When he introduces Djuna Barnes to Tennessee Williams at a party, she asks Williams, “How does it feel to be rich and famous?”
Diaries confirm that life is in the details, and in its passions, all of which Ford includes, all of which are inevitably subservient to time. Ford’s diary is profound not because it marks time passing or spent, but because it is imaginatively and definitively of its time and in it.
I asked Parker (in a letter) if he thought posthumous fame is any fun and he replied it might be to posterity.
Go back to music, rhythm, as Yeats did, for a renewal of inspiration in poetry. “Go back” in the sense of renewal—
Pavlik’s summary of how I spend my time: “fornication and fabrication.”
Like histories, diaries are accounts of the past. Unlike histories, they are not written retrospectively, and subjectivity is their central claim to truth. Faithful to the subjective, the diarist’s words, Ford’s eyes and ears, conduct the reader through the world inhabits. The reader finds the way back as it was to Ford. His irresponsibility, his understanding of the power of transience — in sex, art, love — his appreciation of the ephemeral, and his desire to have it all, anyway, for as long as he can, carry us with him.