“The Young and Evil creates this generation as This Side of Paradise by Fitzgerald created his generation.” — Gertrude Stein
‘Charles Henri Ford was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, in 1908. His middle name was originally spelt with a ‘y’ but he changed it in later life, having wearied of being constantly asked if he was related to the automobile tycoon. His father owned hotels, and Charles’ childhood was spent on the road. He never settled for long in any one school and was frequently expelled, but he managed to stay in one of them long enough to edit a journal called The Brass Monkey. At the age of twenty he borrowed a hundred dollars and founded a poetry magazine, Blues. In search of material for an expatriate edition of the magazine he wrote to Gertrude Stein in Paris; she responded favourably, and the two began a correspondence. Stein loved flattery, Ford was happy to oblige her, and by the time Ford arrived in Paris in 1931 all doors were open to him. He quickly established himself in the expatriate community: as well as meeting for the first time erstwhile contributors to Blues, Kay Boyle, Richard Thoma and Harry Crosby among them, he struck up friendships with Natalie Barney, Paul Bowles and René Crevel. He moved in with Djuna Barnes, and by way of rent typed up part of the manuscript of her novel Nightwood. In 1933, the same year that The Young and Evil was published by the Obelisk Press, Gertrude Stein’s An Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas appeared. Ford’s cultivation of her had not been in vain. She wrote:
‘Of all the little magazines which as Gertrude Stein loves to quote, have died to make verse free, perhaps the youngest and freshest was the Blues. Its editor Charles Henri Ford has come to Paris and he is young and fresh as his Blues and also honest which also is a pleasure. Gertrude Stein thinks that he and Robert Coates alone among the young men have an individual sense of words.’
‘Before arriving in Paris, Ford had spent most of 1930 in New York with Parker Tyler, a poet, a contributor to Blues who eventually became its co-editor. Parker introduced Ford to New York’s underground gay scene. The drag balls of Harlem and the speakeasies of Greenwich Village would provide the backdrop for their collaboration the following year on The Young and Evil.
‘Underground pornography aside, gay literature was a genre that barely existed in 1932; that which did was either cryptic to the point of invisibility or relentlessly self-loathing. But Ford was perfectly well adjusted to himself and saw no reason for either secrecy or shame. He saw no reason for proselytising, either, with the refreshing result that The Young and Evil is neither a plea for understanding, nor a cry for help, nor a call to arms. For all its modernist trappings the novel is a conventional one, building a picture of homosexual life in New York at the beginning of the 1930s through a series of loosely connected scenes: lovers’ fights and reconciliations, open assignations with poets and drag queens, secret assignations with married men, cruisings, beatings, arrests, and wild Harlem parties where gay men of all races come together to celebrate rather that hide their status as outsiders. The fuel of the book is Prohibition hooch, its drive the drive of youth well lived. That the youths concerned are almost exclusively male and wearing mascara had the result of depriving New York of this sight of itself until 1975, when The Young and Evil appeared in an American edition for the first time.
‘By January 1932 Ford and Tyler’s novel was finished, and at first was called Jump Back. Jump Back was knocked back by Liveright, Cape and Gollancz, but Gertrude Stein was evangelically enthusiastic, and she sent the manuscript to her agent William Bradley. Sharing her enthusiasm, on 5 August he sent the manuscript, by now entitled The Young and Evil, to Jack Kahane, proprietor of an obscure new English-language imprint called the Obelisk Press.
‘The manuscripts for The Young and Evil and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, which Bradley had sent Kahane in October 1932, put the fledgling publisher on the spot. Unlike the wealthy proprietors of the Paris expatriate imprints of the 1920s, Kahane had resolved to run the Obelisk Press as a proper business. Proper businesses must turn a profit, and in order for a publishing house to turn a profit it must sell books. Kahane the businessman knew that in this context a good book was one which sold, but Kahane the lover of literature was determined to use the finances generated by his business to give a home to books of great literary merit which would almost certainly sell slowly, but which were unpublishable anywhere else. Well, here were two. Reluctant to risk a prosecution that would destroy the company almost before it had begun, but also reluctant to pass up the chance of bringing literary respectablility to his imprint which until then had published pulp and little else, Kahane entered into protracted and complex contractual negotiations with Bradley, which were primarily designed to give him time to think.
‘The Young and Evil’s oblique style made it uncuttable, and both its cast and its milieu were unacceptable to the mainstream readership of the 1930s. The fact that the book’s characters occasionally use words like ‘fuck’ and ‘cocksucker’ — and the fact that, when they acknowledge their existence at all, they refer to women by the generic term ‘cunt’ — was the least of Kahane’s problems. The characters wear make-up and women’s clothes; they have sex with strangers; they sleep three to a bed — and they’re happy. Kahane could not even present The Young and Evil as a cautionary tale. The book’s tone is exuberantly unapologetic: no-one dies, no-one is punished, no-one repents. The complete absence of editorial moralising is The Young and Evil’s most revolutionary attribute, and gave Kahane his biggest headache.
‘His best hope of avoiding prosecution lay in the opacity of the book’s ostentatiously modernist style. Textual experimentation and stylistic tropes borrowed none too subtly from Stein and Djuna Barnes obscure the more visceral action of the book: maiden aunts and masturbators alike would be confounded. Kahane suggested to Bradley an expensive limited edition, signed by the authors, that would sell slowly to a small but rarefied elite and pass under the radar of the authorities. Ford, who conducted the negotiations on behalf of both himself and Tyler (pictured, right), agreed to this, but insisted Kahane also issue a trade edition ‘..of one or two thousand copies..’ as well, or give Ford the right to arrange for such an edition to be published elsewhere. This was a naive bluff — there was nowhere else for Ford to go — but somehow it resulted in Kahane publishing both a limited and a trade edition, even though the existence of the latter rendered the former pointless. Kahane also asked for translation rights and an option on future books, but Ford refused. Although he was to write two more novels during the 1930s they were never published, and slowly he began to feel his future lay in poetry, not prose. He anticipated no need of protection from censorship in the future, and since there was no other reason to commit himself to an obscure publishing house in Paris, he declined to do so. The relationship between Ford and Kahane would prove to be a one-book stand.
‘By November 1932 contracts were signed, and by the end of the following February Ford had corrected the proofs. But by March, Kahane was worrying again. Keen both to make a pre-emptive bid to establish the book’s artistic credentials as a defence against prosecution, and to push sales, Kahane wrote to Bradley: ‘I want to prepare a prospectus for Ford’s book which should consist of about 200 or 300 words [of] descriptive matter, as full of selling points as possible. Do you think you could get any intelligent friend of the author, such as Djuna Barnes, to do this? I don’t feel myself frightfully competent to write about it in as convincing a manner as should be done.’ Barnes provides a puff on the book’s front flap; the unsigned blurb is probably her work, too.
‘The Obelisk Press edition of The Young and Evil was published in August 1933. There were fifty copies of the limited edition, signed by the authors and priced at 200 francs. Estimates of the size of the trade edition range from one thousand, Obelisk’s usual print run, to two thousand five hundred. The book suffered the usual casualties in transit: five hundred copies were destroyed by British customs, and shipments to the United States were intercepted and turned back. (The book is one of the scarcer Obelisk titles today, suggesting that the print run was probably at the smaller end of the various estimates). By February 1934, six months after publication, The Young and Evil had sold seventy-nine copies of the trade edition, and two of the limited edition; the next six months saw sales drop to fifty-three. Kahane had succeeded in avoiding the attention of the French authorities; unfortunately, the reading public were equally oblivious.
‘In 1932, Djuna Barnes had introduced Ford to the Russian artist Pavel Tchelitchev. By 1934 they were a couple, and the relationship was to last until Tchelitchev’s death in 1957. (Tchelitchev’s illustrations for The Young and Evil were used in a 1988 edition of the novel). Ford’s first collection of poetry was published in 1936, and in 1940 he and Tyler founded another magazine, View. Reflecting Ford’s new and abiding passion, View was a forum for surrealist painters and writers, and ran until 1947. During the 1950s Ford largely dropped from view, but after the death of Tchelitchev he resurfaced as a painter and photographer, published two more collections of poetry in the late 1960s and, as a result of his association with Andy Warhol’s Factory, made two films. He met the nineteen-year-old Indra Tamang in Katmandu in 1972, and the two were to remain together for the next thirty years until Ford’s death in Manhattan in 2002, at the age of ninety-four.
‘Charles Henri Ford turned his hand to many art forms, but never established a reputation at the forefront of any of them. If he is remembered at all now it is as a facilitator for others rather than as a creator in his own right. But this is to shortchange him. In The Young and Evil he and Parker Tyler can lay strong claim to have created a new literary genre : a gay literature, stripped of moralising and miserabilism, which proved to be more than thirty years ahead of its time.’ — Neil Pearson
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Gallery: Charles Henri Ford
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Further
Charles Henri Ford (1910?-2002), and Parker Tyler (1904-1974)
The Young and Evil @ goodreads
An Excerpt from The Young and Evil
The 1933 novel which marked the birth of a genre.
the young and evil: QUEER MODERNISM IN NEW YORK, 1930–1955
Charles Henri Ford – Song of America
Making Modernism New: Queer Mythology in “The Young and Evil”
Keep on Waking : Charles Henri Ford, Camp, and Surrealism
Charles Henri Ford Was There.
The Young and Evil: challenging sexual convention
Shooting Charles Henri Ford: Cecil Beaton and the Erotics of the ‘Low’ in the New York Tabloids
Coming Clean
Charles Henri Ford & Pavel Tchelitchew
Circles: Charles Henri Ford
Why We Remember Charles Henri Ford
Buy ‘The Young and Evil’
Download ‘The Young and Evil’ (for free)
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Preview
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Extras
Poem Posters by Charles Henri Ford (excerpt)
FORD, Charles Henri View. 1940–7
Steven Watson at the Charles Henri Ford Memorial
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Gallery: Parker Tyler
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Interview: Charles Henri Ford
Bruce Wolmer Your distinguished career as a poet, novelist, filmmaker, editor, and publisher of little magazines has put you at the center of artistic life in New York and Europe for more than 50 years. You have consistently identified with and explored what until recently has been called the avant-garde. What do you think has been the motive force, the consistent thread, that has run through all of your activities?
Charles Henri Ford Surrealism.
BW How would you define the surrealist’s mission?
CHF Tapping the unconscious, the irrational, the incongruous and the nonsensical.
BW Is poetry at the core of your conception of surrealism?
CHF 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.
BW You went to Paris in 1931.
CHF Summer 1931. And I met Djuna Barnes. On the way to the boat I stopped by to say goodbye to Djuna and she said, “Well, I’m coming over in about a month.”
BW She was living in New York?
CHF Down on Washington Square.
BW Was that when she was doing journalism?
CHF No, no. Her book Night Among the Authors had been published and Rider. She was living with Thelma Wood then. Thelma was the main character in Nightwood. That’s Thelma that did beautiful silverpoint and drawings. Then Djuna came over to Paris and we immediately saw each other. Then she got appendicitis and had to go to the American Hospital, and I sort of moved into her apartment while she was recuperating and brought the breakfast tray to her bed, and when she got alright she said, “I’m thinking about taking a trip through middle Europe, would you come with me?” She wanted to do some research for Nightwood. So we went to Munich, Vienna, Budapest, and then back to Paris, and I continued living with her until I went to Italy in the spring, late spring, of 1932. And from there I went to Tangier, and that’s when Djuna came to Tangier to get Nightwood straightened out and in manuscript.
BW Who else were you friendly with in Paris? Was there a circle?
CHF Man Ray, Kay Boyle. Yes, it was very definitely a little circle. Mary Reynolds, who was the mistress of Duchamp. Allen Ross McDougal, who’s disappeared from sight now but he was a great companion of Isadora Duncan. He wrote a book called Isadora’s Russian Days. Janet Banner of the New Yorker. It was a very tight little group that used to meet at the Bore, the Dome, the Deux Magots, wherever. That about scoops it up. Then we used to go to Natalie Barney’s salon. Djuna took me there. Ten years later, during the war, I went back and Natalie was still introducing me as a protege of Djuna Barnes.
BW You wrote a collaborative novel with Parker Tyler in …
CHF It was published in 1933.
BW Right and …
CHF I took the manuscript with me in 1931 to Paris.
BW Why was it banned in the United States?
CHF Well, it had a lot of four-letter words. No one could possibly call it pornography, but it was … it was … well, I suppose the four-letter words.
BW What was the story?
CHF The story was about young homosexuals in New York City in Greenwich Village. The only review we got in America was Louis Kronenberger in the New Republic saying the book was “both authentic and alive.” That’s the only review that we got in America. Copies were destroyed and banned here, and even Brentano’s in Paris took it out of the window. But now it’s soon going into a fourth edition. The third edition was published by the Arno Press, a New York Times company! The fourth edition will have Tchetlichew’s illustrations, which he did for me in my own copy but which have never been seen. Gertrude Stein said it created a new generation as Scott Fitzgerald had created his generation in This Side of Paradise. It had an instant prestige and an instant banning.
BW What are your feelings about the well-known, almost doctrinal antipathy on the part of Breton and many of the other official surrealists to homosexuals?
CHF That has been exaggerated. The skeleton came out of the closet when Louis Aragon died.
BW You didn’t feel personally alienated or antagonistic to Breton?
CHF Not at all. Not at all, because he was certainly amiable and welcoming. The thing it started with is very simple: Jean Cocteau was Breton’s bête noire, and that symbolized the whole sexual ambiance. That’s it. Jean was famous, was arrogant, he was talented and he was there before the surrealists got there. They had to put down somebody.
BW So Breton was, in effect, competing with Cocteau for the leadership of the French avant-garde.
CHF At one point Man Ray took a beautiful photograph of Cocteau. It was all very friendly at the beginning. There were even groups with Cocteau and Tzara and Man Ray and so forth. But Cocteau was pushed out.
BW So there was no homophobia on the part of others besides Breton, like Eluard?
CHF No, totally, totally mythic. Eluard was very friendly with me too, and I took photographs of him. Nothing of that. And everybody knew about Dalí and Garcia Lorca.
BW I didn’t know that.
CHF Now you do.
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Book
Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler The Young and Evil
Masquerade Books
‘A stunning work, first published in 1933 by Obelisk Press (Jack Kahane’s legacy), The Young and the Evil is a non-judgemental depiction of gay life and men who earn their living there, told through characters like Julian (modeled on Ford) and Karel (based on Tyler). With the added interracial connotations (book was set in Harlem and Greenwich), err, anyone surprised that this title didn’t clear customs across the Channel or the Pond? Girodias later republished this work as part of the Traveller’s Companion series. Authors such as Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein praised it unflinchingly.’ — Masquerade Books
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Excerpt
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p.s. Hey. Kate Wolf has written a great review of I Wished in the Nation if anyone’s interested. Here. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, B. Yeah, warm and spooky. And … hooray! Everyone, Consider your lucky stars counted because the new episode of Ben ‘_Black_Acrylic’ Robinson’s key podcast is here and yours for not even a song. Ben: ‘The new episode of Play Therapy is online here via Tak Tent Radio! Ben ‘Jack Your Body’ Robinson serves up Sci-fi soundtracks, fairground thrills and some Italo curios too.’ ** David, Hi. Thank you, man. Very kind of you. Something happens when you die, definitely, but it might only happen to people other than you. Or that’s the question. I am following the La Palma eruption, but, strangely, I didn’t make the association with my novel. But you’re right. Hardcover books are hard to tear in half. Thankfully, ha ha. Have a ultra-swell weekend! ** Dominik, Hi!!!! It’s true, but it’s nice to have them as an option. I like big crowds when they’re all facing in one direction watching a band, say, and all feeling kind of the same thing. The ‘Jerk’ screening is on the 5th, so … in a week+, I guess? Should be cool. The film turned out really well, I think. The French mail service is super neurotic, at least when it comes to me. Sometimes things arrive magically fast, sometimes things take months, sometimes things never arrive. No, I didn’t find anyone to go to Vaginal Davis. Everyone was occupied or didn’t consider her to be their cup of tea. See, yes, I know you would’ve gone and had a blast. Geography is murder. Ha ha, thank you for that love! I spotted it. Love inflating his head like a balloon, rotating his skull 180 degrees, and then deflating his head, G. ** Tosh Berman, That does indeed sound treacherous and memorable. One time I was seeing The Melvins at the Palladium with some friends, and these giant bruiser type guys in front of us suddenly turned around and started beating the shit out of us, and literally the next thing I remember is standing outside the Palladium where some guards had apparently dragged my friends and me with half of our clothes torn off. I do think it’s a totally different thing re: adapting a non-fiction book versus a novel. The former seems totally ripe for that, for some reason. I’m not sure why that seems okay. But then I’ve never written a non-fiction book. That sounds very interesting and fun, the way you guys are banging out the script. Are you sticking to the book’s contents strictly or are you adding scenes/things that aren’t in the book? I’m so sorry to hear about your mom. The Golden years are so often not remotely golden. Lots of love. ** Bill, I’m going to attend your gig today. Yesterday I had to watch a film for my bi-weekly Zoom book club thing tonight. ‘Little Joe’ is back?! That is news. That was a fun journal. Huh. Cool, I’ll go pore over it. Thanks, buddy. The producer meeting got delayed until Tuesday, but for potentially good reasons, so it’s okay. ** T, Hi, T. Huh, it’s interesting to think of all those photos as being taken of the same crowd from different angles. Thanks for that thought. Me too, about Siouxie. I love her voice. It’s really hard for her to stay in tune and hit the proper notes when she’s singing, and I find that really exciting. Perfect example. I just saw your email now, and I’ll go open it and respond. Hope we can catch each other while you’re here. Try to enjoy the cold and rain. It is possible. xo. ** wolf, Wolfie! Gotcha, agree re: crowds. I still haven’t been to a standing room music gig since all of this, and I long to, but I am scared and being really picky. People here in the big P are still being almost 100% diligent about masks on the metro and elsewhere. French people: you gotta hand it to them. I don’t know Sergei Loznitsa’s films at all. Wow, I’ll go find some and see what’s going on. Thank you. Exciting! Good old MUBI. Oh, no, you guys aren’t coming? That’s very sad. But, okay, what can you do. Life is the big boss and all of that. Damn. Well, let’s Skype or Zoom or whatever we did last time. That would be something. That would be some kind of compensation. What did you say, pal? Hit me up. I return your virtual hugs with a big, big side of (vegan) nachos! Love, me. ** Steve Erickson, Eek! I feel like your computer is always fucking with you. No, I never hard about that compilation. Oh, pfffft, Black Metal guys can be such conservative ninnies sometimes. ** Jeff J, Hi. Thanks. Oh, right, Black Friday, I didn’t even think about that. I should say that post/occasion was all planned out though, shouldn’t I? Too late. My Zoom talk with Ryan was supposed to happen on Monday, but I think it’s being delayed a bit, so I’m not sure yet. I love ‘Girls on the Run’, and you’re right that it seems to be kind of overlooked, at least for the moment. But it’s fantastic, of course. I love his long poems so much. It’s so great to have gotten even the unfinished ones in that recent post-humous book. What do you think? Weirdly, I saw a Henry Darger show here just yesterday. The producer meeting is delayed until Tuesday because he’s working on some stuff and wants to wait a few days in case he has good news to tell us. So … I hope so. Good weekend planned or sneaking up on you? ** Misanthrope, I never saw Guns ‘n’ Roses live. Not sure why not. I did come across that Morrison photo and think of you and then go, ‘oh, what the heck’, and collect it. Sometimes I’m really surprised by the long lost d.l.s who still look at the blog but just don’t comment anymore whom I’ll bump into online or off, so even Shai could be lurking. It’s a good sign that David can still make you laugh. Enjoy the bonfire. It’s freezing here. I could use one. ** Okay. I thought I would spotlight the legendary cult novel ‘The Young and Evil’ for some reason. See you on Monday.
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