Charles Henri Ford (February 10, 1908 – September 27, 2002) was an American poet, novelist, diarist, filmmaker, photographer, and collage artist. He published more than a dozen collections of poetry, exhibited his artwork in Europe and the United States, edited the Surrealist magazine View (1940–1947) in New York City, and directed an experimental film. He was the partner of the artist Pavel Tchelitchew.
Early years
Charles Henry Ford was born in Brookhaven, Mississippi, on February 10, 1908. His family owned hotels in the Southern United States. Although the family was Baptist, he was sent to Catholic boarding schools. Actress Ruth Ford (1911–2009) was his sister and only known sibling. The New Yorker published one of his poems in 1927, before he turned 20, under the name Charles Henri Ford, which he had adopted to counter the assumption that he was related to the business magnate Henry Ford. He dropped out of high school and published several issues of a monthly magazine, Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms, in 1929 and 1930. The magazine's other editors were Parker Tyler and Kathleen Tankersley Young.
Not long after, he became part of Gertrude Stein's salon in Paris, where he met Natalie Barney, Man Ray, Kay Boyle, Janet Flanner, Peggy Guggenheim, Djuna Barnes, and others of the American expatriate community in Montparnasse and Saint-Germain-des-Près. He had an affair with Barnes and they visited Tangiers together. He went to Morocco in 1932 at the suggestion of Paul Bowles, and there he typed Barnes's just-completed novel, Nightwood (1936), for her.
Creative career
With Parker Tyler, who later became a highly respected film critic, he co-authored The Young and Evil, sometimes called The Young and the Evil, (1933), an experimental novel with debts to the prose of Barnes and Stein. Stein wrote a blurb for the novel that said "The Young and Evil creates this generation as This Side of Paradise by Fitzgerald created his generation." Tyler later described it as "the novel that beat the beat generation by a generation". Louis Kronenberger, in the novel's only U.S. review, described it as "the first candid, gloves-off account of more or less professional young homosexuals". Edith Sitwell burned her copy and described it as "entirely without soul, like a dead fish stinking in hell". The novel portrays a collection of young artists as they write poems, have sex, move in and out of cheap rented rooms, and explore the many speakeasies in their Greenwich Village neighborhood. The characters' gender and sexual identities are presented candidly. It was rejected by several American and British publishers before Obelisk Press in Paris agreed to publish it. Officials in the U.K. and U.S. prevented shipments of the novel from reaching bookstores.
Ford returned to New York City in 1934 and brought Pavel Tchelitchew, his partner, with him. Ford's circle at the time included Carl Van Vechten, Glenway Wescott, George Platt Lynes, Lincoln Kirstein, Orson Welles, George Balanchine, and E. E. Cummings. Visiting friends from abroad included Cecil Beaton, Leonor Fini, George Hoyningen-Huene, and Salvador Dalí. Beaton's photographs of Ford represented a departure from his fine art portraits of royalty and celebrities. In one Ford posed "on a bed of tabloid newspapers", symbols of the violence and excess of American culture, in an exploration of low culture with homoerotic undertones that drew on Ford's "sexually transgressive image".
He published his first full-length book of poems, The Garden of Disorder in 1938. William Carlos Williams wrote the introduction. When Ford discussed the concept of poetry, he highlighted its relationship with other forms of art. Ford said, "Everything is related to the concept of poetry. As you know, Jean Cocteau used to talk about the poetry of the novel, the poetry of the essay, the poetry of the theater—everything he did, he said, was poetry. Well, he was one of my gurus." While some of his poetry is easily recognizable as surrealist–"the pink bee storing in your brain's/veins a gee-gaw honey for the golden skillet"–he also adapted his style to political poetry. He published in New Masses and gave voice to a black man confronting a lynch mob: "Now I climb death's tree./The pruning hooks of many mouths/cut the black-leaved boughs./The robins of my eyes hover where/sixteen leaves fall that were a prayer."