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The Life and Times of Charles Henri Ford, Blues, and the Belated Renovation of Modernism

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The Life and Times of Charles Henri Ford, Blues, and the Belated Renovation of Modernism A University of Sussex DPhil thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details The Life and Times of Charles Henri Ford, Blues, and the Belated Renovation of Modernism D.Phil Thesis: University of Sussex September 2011 Alexander Howard What a lot of fun we’d miss if we were born wise. We wouldn’t run the risks. Well, there are dreams we do not remember: but they exist, nevertheless. —Charles Henri Ford, Water From a Bucket 2 Declaration: I hereby declare that this thesis has not been and will not be submitted in whole or in part to this or any other University for the award of any other degree. …………………………………………………………………………………………………… 3 Abstract: This thesis focuses on Charles Henri Ford (1908‐2002). Spanning much of the 20th century, Ford’s multiform and multimedia aesthetic sensibility incorporated poetry, visual art, filmmaking, photography, and magazine editing. Despite the breadth and depth of his numerous interests and achievements, scant critical attention has been paid to Ford. The little criticism that deals with Ford focuses on his experimental novel The Young and Evil (1933) and his magazine: View (1940‐47). This thesis addresses this imbalance. It seeks to recover a marginalized poet whose work unsettles contemporary and critical assumptions concerning modernist literary and aesthetic production. In order to do so, focus is shifted from View to Ford’s first modernist little magazine: Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms (1929‐30). Blues made an indelible mark on Ford and informed many of his subsequent poetic and aesthetic projects. This thesis considers the significance of Blues and a selected assortment of Ford’s subsequent projects and literary career moves. Divided into six chapters, and utilizing a reverse chronology, I trace Ford’s various literary endeavors back through the decades. The first chapter focuses on Ford’s poetic and editorial ventures in the 1980s. This chapter re‐positions Ford’s late work in relation to a flexible and sociable version of modernism. The second chapter focuses on Ford’s sociable poetics in particular as it culminated in the 1970s. The third chapter draws on the implications of the second and considers the ways in which the modernist Ford is an aesthetic precursor to the postmodern Warhol. The thesis then moves into the 1940s and 1950s to give an account of Ford’s perpetual aesthetic awkwardness. Ford’s conspicuous absence in the annals of literary history is attributable to his poetic and aesthetic unorthodoxy, which precluded easy incorporation into generally accepted critical narratives of modernism and avant‐gardism. Ford’s marginalization has meant that his attempt to renovate modernism has gone unnoticed. Conducted in Blues, Ford’s (belated) renovation of modernism is the focus of the final chapters of this thesis. The fifth chapter contextualizes Blues. The sixth and final chapter offers a series of readings focused on Ford’s original literary apprenticeship: Blues. 4 Acknowledgments: I would like to thank the AHRC for the funding I received from 2007‐2010. This funding afforded me the opportunity to visit archives in the United States, and to complete the research for this project. This thesis would not have been possible without the support, guidance, and continual encouragement of my supervisor, Dr. Daniel Kane. I would also like to express my gratitude to my former supervisor, Professor Peter Nicholls. Especial thanks must also go to my secondary supervisor, Dr. Douglas Haynes. In addition, I want to thank Maria Lauret and the other faculty members of the American Studies department at the University of Sussex. Others have also been more than generous with their time during my project, particularly James Harding who was kind enough to read and comment upon the various chapters of this thesis. Eric White, Joanna Pawlik, Alexandra Manglis, Peter Blake, Alex Pestell, Richard Parker, Sian Mitchell, and Stephen Ross have also offered useful advice throughout the duration of my project. I would also like to thank Michael Andre, Gerard Malanga, and Lynne Tillman for furnishing me with detailed and invaluable insights about the life and work of Charles Henri Ford. I cannot end without thanking my family for their love and support. In particular, I would like to thank Claire Howard for her incredible generosity and continued interest in my work. I dedicate this dissertation with gratitude to Meredith Okell. 5 Contents: Introduction: Exotic Realities / of Half­buried HISTORY: a Preliminary Guide to the Life and Times of Charles Henri Ford…………………………………………………………………………..6 Chapter One: Multiform Modernism, the Ghost of Ezra Pound, and the Late Poetic and Editorial Practice of Charles Henri Ford……………………………………………………………………11 Chapter Two: Themes of Circularity in the Poetry and Postal Practice of Charles Henri Ford………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………........44 Chapter Three: Be Careful What You Wish For: Caught Between Pop and a Historical Hard Place………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….85 Chapter Four: Building Up and Breaking Down: the Perpetual Aesthetic Awkwardness of Charles Henri Ford……………………………………………………………………………………………….132 Chapter Five: What Happens to a Radical Little Magazine: Understanding Charles Henri Ford’s Blues and the Belated Renovation of Modernism……………………………….158 Chapter Six: Charles Henri Ford and the Original Blues Implosion, 1929­30…………..183 Conclusion: A Record of Himself is All Any Man Records……………………………………231 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………………………………..233 6 Introduction: Exotic Realities / of Half­buried HISTORY: a Preliminary Guide to the Life and Times of Charles Henri Ford: Ah beautiful obscurity, with the K.O. kiss! When the operation’s over you’ll be oh so hulled; gape now at the algebra whose symbols cry havoc; the flower’s afire though the spine of it chills.1 This thesis concerns the life and work of the American poet Charles Henri Ford (10 February 1908 – 27 September 2002). The Mississippi‐born Ford’s career spanned much of the 20th century and he actively engaged with a number of important cultural and aesthetic movements.2 However, relatively little critical attention has been paid to the modernist, Charles Henri. Those critical works that have discussed Ford (figure 1) have usually taken two specific works as their focus, often with two equally specific agendas in mind. The first of these is his 1933 experimental novel The Young & Evil (co‐authored with Parker Tyler). Often described as one of the foundational texts of (Figure 1) queer modernism, this novel is primarily cited in terms of literary gender theory.3 The second is Ford’s editorial project View (1940‐47). The art journal View most often appears in critical histories of European Surrealism and American aesthetics during the Second World War.4 Whilst The Young & Evil and View are interesting works in their own right, the focus upon these two specific projects has tended to obscure Ford’s wider contributions to the interrelated fields of literature and aesthetics. 1 Charles Henri Ford, The Overturned Lake (Cincinnati: The Little Man Press, 1941), p.13. 2 William S. Burroughs once remarked that ‘Charles always had a small piece of a big thing’. Quoted in James Dowell and John Kolomvakis, Sleep in a Nest of Flames: a Portrait of a Poet; a Portrait of a Century – the Documentary Film (New York: Symbiosis Films, 2000). 3 See Joseph Allen Boone, Libidinal Currents: Sexualities and the Shaping of Modernism (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998); Juan A. Suárez, Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday (Urbana and Chicago: Illinois UP, 2007); Sam See, ‘Making Modernism New: Queer Mythology in The Young and Evil’, English Literary History 76 (2009), 4 See Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1995); Dickran Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant­Garde 1920­1950 (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd, 2001). 7 This thesis seeks to address this imbalance by shifting attention away from these works in order to shed light on his career as a whole. In so doing this study offers the first sustained critical treatment of the life and work of this largely overlooked poet, artist and editor. Surveying Ford’s career it is possible to gain a deeper understanding of the instability of those conceptions through which we seek to categorize cultural developments of the 20th century, in specific relation to the artist as he lives (and works) through them. How can you be ‘post’ when you’re living it? In the documentary film Sleep in a Nest of Flames (2000), James Dowell and John Kolomvakis include the following exchange between the elderly postmodern architect, Philip Johnson, and the equally aged modernist poet Charles Henri Ford: CHF: What does the word ‘postmodern’ mean? PJ: Well, in architecture, it’s a very straightforward meaning. It means when architecture went from doing Mies van der Rohe and Corbusier, to doing historical reference. CHF: How can you be ‘post’ when you’re living it?5 Given his involvement with a number of aesthetic movements that may be described as postmodern, here Ford is being more than a little disingenuous. However, these pithy remarks regarding conceptual categorization provide us with an initial means through which to understand the life and work of this unfairly marginalized poet. The point that Ford is making here regards the inherently problematic nature of issues of categorization, questioning how one might be categorized, or pigeonholed – let alone described as ‘post’ – whilst one continues to live and work.
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