Charles Henri Ford | Biography

Charles Henri Ford was born in Brookhaven, Mississippi, to native Mississippians Charles Lloyd and Gertrude Cato Ford. He began his literary career in Columbus, Mississippi, as the founder of Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms, which he edited with the assistance of Parker Tyler and Kathleen Tankersley Young. Although they published only nine issues, the magazine's contributors included William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, E. E. Cummings, and Kay Boyle as well as Bravig Imbs, Edgar Calmer, Harold Salemson, John Herrmann, and Alfred Kreymborg. Although the magazine was not well-received in the United States, it was viewed favorably on the Continent, and the contacts Ford made through this publication assured his welcome in the literary communities of Montparnasse and Saint-Germain-des-Pres when he arrived in Paris in 1931. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Gertrude Stein praised both Ford and his magazine: "Of all the little magazines which as Gertrude Stein loves to quote, have died to make verse free, the youngest and freshest was the Blues. Its editor Charles Henri Ford ... is as young and fresh as his Blues and also honest which also is a pleasure."

Ford was in Paris intermittently from 1931 until 1934, during which time he contributed to such avant-garde magazines as Eugene Jolas's transition, Samuel Putnam's New Review, Harold Salemson's Tambour --all published in Paris--and Front, printed in The Hague. From 1934 to 1936 he contributed to and helped to edit Caravel, which was published in Majorca, Spain. Two of the three poems and the short prose piece that appeared in transition both before and after his arrival in Paris suggest Ford's interest in experimentation, and the prose contribution, "Piece" (June 1930) foreshadows his first novel, The Young and Evil (1933) in both subject matter and style.

During his early days in Paris, Ford also contributed to two anthologies. A poetic prose piece "Letter from the Provinces," appeared in Readies for Bob Brown's Machine (1931). Its editor, Bob Brown, had asked for contributions suited for use with his Reading Machine, which allowed the reader to move words, printed on reels of paper, past his eyes by turning a crank. Brown asked for streamlined sentences as different from conventional books as sound motion pictures are from the stage, and Ford responded by eliminating punctuation and capital letters. Ford also contributed four previously unpublished poems to Americans Abroad An Anthology (1932), edited by Peter Neagoe, the associate editor of the New Review.

After about a year in Paris, the young poet spent a short time in Morocco, after becoming intrigued by Paul Bowles's description of that country. While there he lived with Djuna Barnes, for whom he typed the manuscript of her best-known novel, Nightwood (1936). Upon his return to Paris later in 1932, Ford met the Russian neoromantic painter Pavel Tchelitchew at Gertrude Stein's. Through him Ford met Jean Cocteau, Max Ernst, and Cecil Beaton. Tchelitchew returned with Ford to the United States in 1934, where they lived together, with occasional trips abroad, for the next eighteen years before moving to Italy for the last five years of the painter's life.

Much of Ford's work during his Paris years testifies to his fascination with words and his eagerness to put words together in new ways. This tendency is especially evident in The Young and Evil, his first full-length novel, written in collaboration with his close friend Parker Tyler, who had remained in New York. This work, a narrative about a group of artists living in Greenwich Village, was published in Paris by Obelisk Press in 1933 and was banned in the United States and England. It was not published in the United States until 1975 when Arno Press included the book in its series Homosexuality: Lesbians and Gay Men in Society, History, and Literature. At the time of its first publication it was praised by Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Kay Boyle, and others, but it was condemned by Waverly Root of the Paris Tribune as "patching together incoherently all the well-known [homosexual] tags" and being "very dull dirt." Nevertheless, in its use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, in its intentional repetitive dullness of homosexual slang, and in its games with letters and words, it confirms Ford's interest in experimentation. Of interest also is his defense of Gertrude Stein :

Theodosia was reading. Julian was lying on his back and heard her voice: Wyndham Lewis says that a page of a servant-girl novel smashed up equals a page of Gertrude Stein . What Julian said Mr. Lewis means is that he thinks Miss Stein is purely negative, but he has no better word for the behavior of the organism than negative; Miss Stein is writing or walking. In one way these are the same. In neither case is she smashing the pages of a servant-girl novel.

The years between 1935 and 1947 were probably the most productive of Ford's literary career. Possibly stimulated by his correspondence and association with such well-known writers and artists as Gertrude Stein, Edith Sitwell, Jean Cocteau, Cecil Beaton, and E. E. Cummings, he published several volumes of poetry. Some of the poems he wrote during his Paris years, including several sonnets dedicated to Djuna Barnes, reappeared in A Pamphlet of Sonnets (1936), illustrated by Tchelitchew. Also in 1936 three short prose pieces appeared in 365 Days, edited by Kay Boyle, Laurence Vail, and Nina Conarain.

Ford's next volume of poetry, The Garden of Disorder (1938), contains an introduction by William Carlos Williams, who comments that the verses "from a single, continuous accompaniment, well put together as to their words, to a life altogether unreal." Herbert Read's review echoes these sentiments: "There are few poets writing today whose work is at once so personal and so prophetic." This book was followed two years later by ABC's (1940), a series of quatrains arranged alphabetically in the manner of an old-fashioned primer. In the first issue of Ford's new magazine, View, Henry Treece called the poems metaphysical, despite some Surrealistic methods, because they "move me in the same strange way that Donne and Herbert do."

During the late thirties and early forties, Ford contributed poems to a variety of little magazines, including Life and Letters Today, Poetry, Tiger's Eye, Seven, VVV, and Furioso. He also edited The Mirror of Baudelaire (1942), a collection of Baudelaire's work that also contains one of Ford's best-known poems, "Ballad for Baudelaire." In 1945 he edited a volume of Surrealistic short stories, A Night With Jupiter .

In the early forties he founded and edited the little magazine View (1940-1947), which evaluated Surrealist poetry and painting. Single issues were devoted to Max Ernst, Pavel Tchelitchew, and Yves Tanguy. Besides poems and editorials by Ford, View published poems by Parker Tyler, William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, and Randall Jarrell; and essays were contributed by Wallace Stevens, Kenneth Burke, and Lionel Abel. Four books of Ford's poems were published during the forties: The Overturned Lake (1941); Poems for Painters (1945), which combines poems dedicated to Marcel Duchamp, Leonor Fini, Yves Tanguy, Esteban Frances, and Pavel Tchelitchew with sixteen halftone reproductions of the five painters' work; The Half-Thoughts, the Distances of Pain (1947), illustrated by Dimitri Petrov; and Sleep in a Nest of Flames (1949), which contains an introduction by Edith Sitwell, whom Ford considered one of his mentors from his Paris days.

For the past quarter of a century Ford has published poetry only occasionally in magazines and anthologies. During the sixties he published two books of college poems, Spare Parts (1966) and Silver Flower Coo (1968), and in 1972 he produced and directed an underground art film, Johnny Minotaur. He has also had several exhibitions of paintings, lithographs, and photographs, among them "Thirty Images from Italy," which was shown in London (1955) and New York (1975). The exhibition "Having Wonderful Time--Wish You Were Here" (New York, 1976) was a collection of 109 postcards he had received over three decades from such friends as Gertrude Stein, H. D., Joseph Cornell, and Georgia O'Keeffe. Most recently, "The Kathmandu Experience" (New York, 1976) featured artifacts designed by Ford and executed by Nepalese craftsmen.

At the present time Ford is involved in a variety of projects. Most significantly, he is assembling and editing "Blues 10," the fiftieth anniversary issue of Blues, which will contain work by some of the original contributors, as well as work by new writers, and an introduction by Kay Boyle. He is also working on a tetralogy of poetry, Om Krishna, and has completed the first draft of a novel, "Mississippi."

There is no doubt that Ford was and continues to be an innovator. As editor, first of Blues and later of View, Ford has promoted and drawn public attention to many American and European avant-garde artists; and he deserves recognition as a versatile, talented artist. During the past fifteen years, Ford has lived in Nepal, Crete, and New York City, where he stays with his sister, the actress Ruth Ford. Though he still owns a studio in Paris, he rarely occupies it.