Years of work, a burst of glory, and it’s all over.
Up at six and found a feather in my bed, as though, while I was sleeping I’d been a bird.
Pavlik told me — in 1933—that I had been sent to him because his mother died.
What is called history comes to us as a transcription of the evanescent. A radio announcer’s excited play by play of the Tony Zale — Marcel Cerdan fight becomes a monologue written by a Surrealist. The now-famous 1948 Life photograph of poets at the Gotham Book Mart — Ford, the Sitwells, Marianne Moore, Tennessee Williams, Delmore Schwartz, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Stephen Spender, Randall Jarrell — was first, in the diary, an occasion for a gathering. The photograph documents the group, contributing to the historical record — these poets were there, those not, some are forgotten now.
Ford’s commentary about the group offers another record, a personal view that instantly affects the august photograph. He complains that Gore Vidal is in it, that Vidal is not a poet, and the reader can see the tension the photograph does not image. And then there are Ford’s musings about Christine Jorgensen, the G.I. who in 1953 underwent the first highly publicized man-to-woman sex change operation.
Why is everyone always foolish enough to think that a sexual partner will make life happy?
I took a terrace walk and saw the most brilliant falling star. I always make the same wish: Love.
A diary tells us what its author was thinking about then and how it was thought. It is different from a history, because it is an itinerary of lived attitudes, a catalogue of attitudes. Attitude is in the air we breathe, and we don’t always think about what we take in and give out. Ford’s ideas are his and not his, and, as a matter of history, the expression of attitudes allows a return to the past that so-called objective accounts can’t. Ford lets us conspire with him, breathe with him.
A record of himself is all any man records.
Being jerked off — if done by the right person — leaves no regrets.
Characteristic of our age (Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw a forerunner) — more and more interest in the perversity of children…to shock now, the child must be involved — Example in painting: Balthus, more shocking than Dali…The child is all.
The contemporary reader may be surprised by Ford’s anxiety over the effects of masturbation—“I recover from self-abuse”—or disturbed or pleased by his ecstatic evocations and lust for teenaged boys, by his openness about his desires generally. Maybe the only thing in life that doesn’t change, apart from the certainty of death — though these days that seems to be changing — is desire. Only its articulations and the environment in which it is felt shift. Ford’s freedom or constraints, his prejudices or lacks, gauge his moment and ours.
***
But I look too good to ruin: I wish my twin would come along and I’d kiss him.
I don’t know how my character will come out in these notes and memories, but I think we usually are to others what we are to ourselves.
The literary diary is a strange form. Was it written to be read? Maybe. Probably. Is it self-conscious? Necessarily. Ford’s diary was written to examine himself and others, and in a way, its self-consciousness is its raison d’étre. Preciousness is stripped from its self-consciousness by Ford’s sardonic, unflinching self-criticism — he’s regularly concerned with his character as well as Pavlik’s. (The diary pulses, too, with the impact of psychoanalytic theory on contemporary thinking.) But Ford is unself-conscious about his devotion to the cause of aesthetics and the examined life. And is, in his fashion, devoted to love, writing a love story with its own deliberate ideas about heart.
No one will ever mean more to me — inspire me more — than Pavlik…
The fatal image: Vito’s profile as he looked over the terrace yesterday. There it was and there’s nothing one can do about it. I wasn’t born to live alone.
Pavlik’s great heart stopped beating at ten to eight (July 1957).
Ford’s diary ends with questions. Does he love Vito? Does Vito love him? Anyway, what is love. Pavlik has died. Ford’s days will change. His life has come to the reader in bits and pieces, a collage, or, like his poems, a cut up. It ends the same way.
“This ravaging sense of the shortness of life. ” (V.W). I don’t have that. I sense, rather, that life will be long — too long.
Charles said something, on that brilliant fall day, about being fortunate or having had good fortune. I teased him about becoming soft. He said, I think a little sheepishly, “Well, it’s the right time, isn’t it?”
I shall continue this document until the end of next year, then I vow to continue it no longer. It’s a secret vice. Vices should be public.
Object Lesson
Houses and people remind me of each other. Both have facades behind whose stone and brick, smiles and frowns, lie other, often hidden aspects. The Hughes house on Lexington Avenue is covered in wisteria. I’m told the massive vine blossoms purple for one week in the spring, and now its gnarly brown branches are naked, obscuring the house, insinuating mystery — it is winter, when nature is under attack by its own elements, stripped to a raw, needy-looking state.
Fred Hughes has lived in the house on Lexington Avenue since 1974. Built in 1889, the four-story house was designed by Henry J. Hardenbergh, who also designed the Dakota, an uncanny actor in Roman Polanski’s modern gothic, Rosemary’s Baby. Hughes’s house once belonged to Andy Warhol who, for thirteen years, shared it with his mother. From 1967 until 1987, Hughes was Warhol’s business manager, friend, confidante and fellow avid collector. He helped Warhol build upon his fame and realize financial gain from his paintings, for one thing by introducing him to socialites and collectors who commissioned portraits at Hughes’s instigation. After Warhol’s death in 1987, Hughes played a fundamental role in developing the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. He was executor of Warhol’s estate, chosen by Warhol to be king, steward of all that Andy had achieved in his lifetime. But fate often treats kings poorly; many suffer and fall. Hughes fell to multiple sclerosis, which was diagnosed in 1984 but did not become active until after Warhol’s unexpected, unnecessary death. Hughes has been bedridden since 1998.
The language associated with royalty and lineage fits Fred Hughes like the English custom-made suits he once wore. He venerates the royals, and stories circulate about his English accent — he was born in Texas in 1943—scathing wit, dandyism, elegance, savvy, temper, eloquence and pretensions to being a royal. Like other people who collected around Warhol, or whom Warhol collected like art, Hughes made himself a legend and a superstar. He invented himself much like a novelist might a fictional character. But instead of writing his character, he lived it. Taken up by art collectors Dominique and Jean de Menil, who recognized his astute eye when he was twenty and sponsored his entry into the art world, Hughes gave birth to himself, left Texas and family, and maybe, as in fables, never looked back.