Preface
This book series is devoted to the analysis of late-nineteenth to twentieth-century literary modernism within its historical context. Historicizing Modernism thus stresses empirical accuracy and the value of primary sources (such as letters, diaries, notes, drafts, marginalia or other archival deposits) in developing monographs, scholarly editions, and edited collections on modernist authors and their texts. This may take a number of forms, such as manuscript study and annotated volumes; archival editions and genetic criticism; as well as mappings of interrelated historical milieus or ideas. To date, no book series has laid claim to this interdisciplinary, source-based territory for modern literature. Correspondingly, one burgeoning sub-discipline of modernism, Beckett Studies, features heavily here as a metonymy for the opportunities presented by manuscript research more widely. While an additional range of ‘canonical’ authors will be covered here, this series also highlights the centrality of supposedly ‘minor’ or occluded figures, not least in helping to establish broader intellectual genealogies of modernist writing. Furthermore, while the series will be weighted towards the English-speaking world, studies of non-Anglophone modernists whose writings are ripe for archivally based exploration shall also be included here.
A key aim of such historicizing is to reach beyond the familiar rhetoric of intellectual and artistic ‘autonomy’ employed by many modernists and their critical commentators. Such rhetorical moves can and should themselves be historically situated and reintegrated into the complex continuum of individual literary practices. This emphasis upon the contested self-definitions of modernist writers, thinkers, and critics may, in turn, prompt various reconsiderations of the boundaries delimiting the concept ‘modernism’ itself. Similarly, the very notion of ‘historicizing’ modernism remains debatable, and this series by no means discourages more theoretically informed approaches. On the contrary, the editors believe that the historical specificity encouraged by Historicizing Modernism may inspire a range of fundamental critiques along the way.
Matthew Feldman
Erik Tonning
Acknowledgements
To list all of my debts would take too long a time. But one needs to start somewhere. Since completing my doctoral research, which benefited from a generous Arts and Humanities Research Council grant, I have been the appreciative recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellowship in the Humanities. This fellowship facilitated the research trip I undertook in the summer of 2014 to the matchless Harry Ransom Centre in the Humanities at the University of Texas, Austin. This book draws on a wide range of archival materials contained at the HRC. I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to the HRC’s extraordinary staff, whose depth of expertise and warmth of spirit made my time in Texas so rich and enjoyable. On a related archival note, the present book also makes critical use of a number of materials held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale Library. I wish also to extend my thanks to the staff at this vital research institution. Thanks need also go to the staff at the New York Public Library’s Archives and Manuscripts division.
I have been fortunate to work with a number of exceptional scholars and outstanding human beings at a variety of universities over the years. While any mistakes or errors contained within the present book belong to me alone, all of the following people have played important parts in the shaping of the work now in front of you. I would like first to thank the faculty and staff of the incomparable Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia and the School of Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales. I would like above all to thank Helen Groth, George Kouvaros, Julian Murphet, Sean Pryor, and Mark Steven. These fine people have offered invaluable advice, encouragement, and support over the past few years. Exceptionally warm thanks need also go to the faculty and staff of the School of Literature, Art, and Media at the University of Sydney – especially Mark Byron and Sarah Gleeson-White. The vibrant and lively research culture at Sydney has ensured that the time I have spent as a visiting research fellow in School of Literature, Art, and Media has been both intellectually enlightening and invigorating. To this list, I want now to add the names of Peter Boxall, Marsha Bryant, Gregory Dobbins, Ben Etherington, Matthew Feldman, Fiona Green, James Harding, Doug Haynes, Daniel Kane, Angelos Koutsourakis, Douglas Mao, Peter Nicholls, Joanna Pawlik, Allan Pero, Erik Tonning, and Eric White. In addition, I would like to take the opportunity to thank the editors of Modernism/modernity, Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, and The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines for affording me the opportunity to publish early versions of some portions of the chapters that appear in the present book. I would also like to thank Michael Andre, Gerard Malanga, and Lynne Tillman for kindly sharing their recollections of Charles Henri Ford with me, and to Indra B. Tamang for his incredible hospitality and for granting me permission to quote from Ford’s published work. Finally, I would like to thank my family. None of this would have been possible without them. Claire Howard’s support has, in particular, been crucial. This book is dedicated to Audrey and Brian Howard and is for Meredith Okell, if she wants it.
1
Modernism, as is well known, is a notoriously difficult term to define. Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers acknowledge this in their recent contribution to the scholarly field. This particular issue, in their shared estimation, ‘has now beset, driven, and often befuddled generations of students and scholars alike’.1 And why might this be so? The answer they provide has to do with the rather paradoxical fact that ‘there is no such thing as modernism – no singular definition capable of bringing order to the diverse multitude of creators, manifestos, practices, and politics that have been variously constellated around this enigmatic term’.2 The concept as traditionally understood is also strangely detached, as Latham and Rogers point out, ‘from political history (unlike the crisply defined Victorian era) and even from the Western calendar itself, leaving it unmoored from something as vague as twentieth-century studies’.3 Given over as some culturally prominent early twentieth-century figures were to making portentous and unsubstantiated claims about the changeable nature of human character, the writers, theorists, and artists we tend to think of as modernists have hardly helped in this regard – that is, when they aren’t flat out denying having anything to do with this and other such related matters in the first place.4 Truth be told, the few writers on the ground who did deign to broach the topic of what modernism might in fact, for want of a better word, look like weren’t all necessarily that much help either.5 And yet we continue, in spite of everything, to try and get a critical handle on this most nebulous of notions, even as it continues to recede from our view. If we were to adapt the delightfully pithy axiom of an older and wiser writer, perhaps we might pen words to the effect that the pure and simple truth of modernism is rarely pure and never simple.
It is at precisely this point that we need to bring our attention to bear on the so-called area of New Modernist Studies. This branch of critical inquiry seeks, among other things, to productively complicate the ‘hegemonic’ version of heteronormative male Anglophone modernism identified by critics such as Peter Nicholls.6 ‘Were one seeking a single word to sum up transformations in modernist literary scholarship over the past decade or two,’ write Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, ‘one could do worse than light on expansion.’7 Of course, in this sense, as Mao and Walkowitz note, ‘the field is hardly unique: all period-centred areas of literary scholarship have broadened in scope, and this is in what we might think of as temporal, spatial, and vertical directions.’8 As if almost to pre-empt Latham and Gayle’s subsequent remarks about the weirdly ahistorical way in which many have tried to define modernism, Mao and Walkowitz remind us that once ‘scholars demonstrate the fertility of questioning rigid temporal delimitations, periods seem inevitably to get bigger (one might think of the “long eighteenth century” or “the age of empire”)’.9 Equally, ‘interrogations of the politics, historical validity, and aesthetic value of exclusive focus on the literatures of Europe and North America have spurred the study (in the North American academy) of texts produced in other quarters of the world or by hitherto little-recognized enclaves in the privileged areas.’10 Finally, there has been a vertical expansion, in which, as Mao and Walkowitz assert, ‘quite sharp boundaries between high art and popular forms of culture have been reconsidered; in which canons have been critiqued and reconfigured; in which works by members of marginalized social groups have been encountered with fresh eyes and ears; and in which scholarly inquiry has increasingly extended to matters of production, dissemination, and reception’.11 Bearing all this in mind, given that the present author came of scholarly age in the first decade of the twenty-first century, it is perhaps to be expected that the current book speaks, in certain respects, to each of the three expansions discussed by Mao and Walkowitz. To begin with, this study seeks to add a productive layer of historical and theoretical complexity to existing critical inquiry surrounding the historical trajectories and cultural logics of modernism and postmodernism. Further, as will become apparent over the course of subsequent chapters, this monograph takes as its critical focus a marginalized cultural producer whose work emerges from and engages with the concerns of hitherto little-recognized, non-normative social and creative enclaves situated in specific parts of the privileged Anglophone world. Finally, in terms of the sort of vertical expansion outlined above, this book scrutinizes various literary and artistic modes and forms, routes of dissemination, and notions of audience reception, while striving simultaneously to bring fresh critical pressure to bear on our understandings of avant-garde and popular forms of cultural praxis.
2
Yet the question lingers: What exactly does one mean when one speaks of modernism? It will surely come as absolutely no sort of shock to find that the answer has everything to do with that incomplete historical project – and narrative category – otherwise known as modernity. Fredric Jameson’s account of the contemporary connotations that accrued by this particular term is worth mentioning here. ‘What purpose can the revival of the slogan “modernity” still serve’, Jameson ponders,
after the thoroughgoing removal of the modern from all the shelves and shop windows, its retirement from the media, and the obedient demodernification of all but a few cantankerous and self-avowedly saurian intellectuals? It must somehow be a postmodern thing, one begins to suspect, the recrudescence of the language of an older modernity: for it is certainly not the result of any honest philological and historiographic interest in our recent past. What we have here is rather the reminting of the modern, its repackaging, its production in great quantities for renewed sales in the intellectual marketplace, from the biggest names in sociology to garden-variety discussions in the all the social sciences (and some in the arts as well).12
As Jameson tells it, ‘this means that there can be a modernity for everybody which is different from the standard or hegemonic Anglo-Saxon model. Whatever you dislike about the latter, including the subaltern position it leaves you in, can be effaced by the reassuring and “cultural” notion that there can be a Latin-American kind, or an Indian kind or an African kind, and so forth.’13 But this would be to miss the economic forest for the cultural trees. It would be, in Jameson’s reckoning, ‘to overlook the other fundamental meaning of modernity which is that of a worldwide capitalism itself. The standardization projected by capitalist globalization in this third or late stage of the system casts considerable doubt on all these pious hopes for cultural variety in a future world colonized by a universal market order.’14 Irrespective of whether one agrees with everything Jameson has to say about the state of cultural exceptionalism in the early twenty-first century, this account of what he describes as the other primary meaning of modernity furnishes us with a solid conceptual base from which to bear down on the interrelated notion of modernism. ‘Why not simply posit modernity as the new historical situation’, Jameson asks, ‘modernization as the process whereby we get there, and modernism as a reaction to that situation and the process alike, a reaction that can be aesthetic and philosophico-ideological, just as it can be negative as well as positive?’15 Jameson thinks this a fairly sensible proposal, as do I. In equal measure, however, I also think it possible to be even more specific than this.
Like Jameson, Perry Anderson suggests that artistic modernism is best understood as the logical outgrowth of capitalist modernity, ‘of a field of force triangulated by three coordinates: an economy and society still only semi-industrial, in which the ruling order remained to a significant extent agrarian or aristocratic; a technology of dramatic inventions, whose impact was still fresh or incipient; and an open political horizon, in which revolutionary upheavals of one kind or another against the prevailing order were widely expected or feared’.16 Against this historically tumultuous backdrop, according to Anderson, ‘a wide variety of artistic innovations could explode – symbolism, imagism, expressionism, cubism, futurism: some quarrying classical memory or patrician styles, others drawn to a poetics of the new machinery, yet others fired by visions of social upheaval; but none at peace with the market as the organizing principle of a modern culture – in that sense, virtually without exception anti-bourgeois’.17
As we can see, all of the modern artistic movements that Anderson mentions here emerged either in the latter part of the nineteenth century or in the first two decades of the twentieth. We will, to be sure, touch on some of the lasting creative advances won in this broad historical epoch during our subsequent discussions of literary and aesthetic modernism. Having said that, I am much more interested in the sort of modern art that was been produced in the Anglophone world in the historical period immediately subsequent to the one evoked so vividly by Anderson. That is to say, I am especially curious about the kinds of art that critics commonly describe in terms of ‘second-generation’ or ‘late’ modernism. Tyrus Miller is one such critic. ‘Late modernist writing was not particularly successful in either critical or commercial terms,’ Miller asserts, ‘and each work tended toward formal singularity, as if the author had hit a dead end and had to begin again. In content, too, these works reflected a closure of the horizon of the future: they are permeated with a foreboding of decline and fall, of radical contingency and absurd death.’18 Miller has in mind here the interwar novels of late modernist writers such as Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, and Samuel Beckett. He posits that the work these writers were producing in the latter half of the 1920s emerged alongside ‘a still developing corpus of high modernism. James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and Between the Acts, Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza, and other monuments of high modernism share the field with a new generation of late modernist works’.19 Yet it is important to remember that while high and late modernism existed concurrently, they are emphatically not one and the same. Timing is everything in this respect. Miller notes that examples of late modernist fiction began to emerge around 1926. How best to account for this? It depends entirely on whom you choose to ask. If you were to put the question to David Trotter, for instance, his initially surprising answer would have much to do with that most modest of household objects: the telephone. ‘By the mid-1920s, advances in shortwave radio had established wireless telegraphy and telephony as the most momentous of all new media’, Trotter reasons, ‘in economic, political, and military terms.’20 The ostensibly humble telephone, ‘the international standard-bearer for the principle of real-time interactive telecommunication’, Trotter continues, ‘had begun to alter fundamentally the exercise both of state power and of public memory, and the construction of the citizen’.21 This fact wasn’t lost on the writers we associate with modernism. They came soon to realize, in Trotter’s formulation, ‘that the technological mediation of experience had become both widespread and irreversible’.22
Human behaviour can thus in fact be said to have changed forever sometime in the mid-1920s. This change impacted on modernism in a variety of ways. For one thing, high modernism, as will come to the fore in the next chapter, was now regarded in certain artistic and critical circles as something of a spent cultural force. The late or second-generation modernists were acutely conscious of this fact. ‘In the empty spaces left by high modernism’s decline,’ Miller argues, ‘late modernists reassembled fragments into disfigured likenesses of modernist masterpieces: the unlovely allegories of a world’s end.’23 By the same token, however, ‘the works of late modernist literature should not be viewed simply as cultural curiosities salvaged from time, aesthetic souvenirs that exert their unsettling fascination by reviving an already moribund modernism’.24 Miller tells us that in the fictional and poetic works of late modernism ‘the vectors of despair and utopia, the compulsion to decline and the impulse to renewal, are not just related; they are practically indistinguishable’.25 In this sense, then, late modernism certainly did keep one eye fixed firmly on the recent past. But it also looked to the future. The works of the late moderns, in Miller’s reading, ‘mark the line of flight artists took where an obstacle, the oft-mentioned “impasse” of modernism, interrupted progress on established paths’.26 Such late modernist work, in this fashion, ‘also strongly anticipates future developments, so without forcing, it might easily fit into a narrative of emergent postmodernism’.27 Late modernism thus comes to signify more, for Miller, ‘than just patchwork in the otherwise unbroken façade of literary history. Untimely phenomena like late modernist fiction represent breaking points of nonsynchronism, in the broad narrative of twentieth-century cultural history.’28 If we were to put this another way, we might say that when writing of experimentally inclined work produced in the interwar years, we are also and always writing about a liminal sort of historical and cultural space in which the high modern, the late modern, and the proto-postmodern mingle conterminously.
Mingle conterminously, that is, until 1945, when, in the words of the aforementioned Perry Anderson, ‘the élan of modernism gave out. It had lived from the non-synchronous – what was past or future in the present – and died with the arrival of the purely contemporaneous: the monotone steady-state of the post-war Atlantic order. Henceforward, art that still would be radical was routinely destined for commercial integration or institutional cooption’.29 As it just so happens, we will have cause in subsequent chapters to discuss some of the historical, societal, and cultural changes that Anderson mentions here – specifically those pertaining to what is commonly regarded as the ‘post-war Atlantic order’ and the attendant ‘commercial integration’ of aesthetics that took shape in what we have come to think of as the historical postmodern moment. And yet, returning to Fredric Jameson once more, despite some sort of historical and aesthetic limit having been breached in the 1950s and 1960s, we would do well to remember that the types of art that were being produced during this period – the types of art that we commonly describe as postmodern – in some regards remain dependent on ‘essentially modernist categories of the new, which cannot be fully eradicated from the “new” dispensation whatever its rhetoric’.30
3
This leads me to one of the central questions I want to pose in this study: How best to understand the life and work of a hitherto forgotten avant-garde figure whose career not only began during late modern period, but who also – in a perhaps untimely manner – strove continually to ‘make it new’ long after the historical and cultural star of postmodernism had risen? The man I have in mind here is the Mississippi-born modernist writer, artist, and editor: Charles Henri Ford (1908 – 2002). Ford is one of the most interesting second-generation modernist writers that the majority of people probably haven’t read. Born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, on 10 February 1908 to a family of Southern hoteliers, Ford, who worked tirelessly from a very young age to establish himself within the international community of literary and aesthetic modernism, should be thought of as a torsional figure who has much to tell us about the historical transition from impersonal and predominantly heteronormative modernist models of cultural production to more sociable and queer modes of postmodern avant-garde representation in the United States. Leaving regional Mississippi behind him at the tender age of twenty, the openly queer Ford tasted the best that life had to offer in Greenwich Village; corresponded with ‘manly’ modernists such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky (all of whom were greatly impressed with what they read); had his early work published in many of the defining avant-garde periodicals of the day; befriended and worked alongside Gertrude Stein in 1930s Paris (where he also had a torrid affair with the famous journalist and modernist novelist Djuna Barnes); established himself as America’s very first fully fledged Surrealist poet and introduced Surrealism into the bloodstream of American popular culture; traversed Europe in the late 1940s and 1950s with the seminal, if now sorely overlooked, Russian Neo-Romanticist painter Pavel Tchelitchew; influenced a host of the major figures associated with the post-war New York School of Poetry; and played a small, yet significant role in Andy Warhol’s development as a fabulously ‘swish’ experimental filmmaker in New York City in the early 1960s. Despite Ford’s evidently rich and exceptionally productive life, scant critical attention has been directed his way. More often than not, the non-specialist writers who have chosen to write about Ford tend to focus exclusively on particular aspects of the poet’s personal life: with whom he was in touch, or more salaciously whom he was touching, for example. In a sense, then, the sheer richness of Ford’s fascinating personal life has tended to count against him, at least when it comes to the issue of critical inquiry.
This is something that came clearly to the fore after Ford passed away in New York City on 27 September 2002. Consider the following account of the posthumous showing of Ford’s work that was held at the New York-based Mitchell Algus Gallery in early 2003:
Ford was a dilettante, a character, peripatetic. The fashion for him now seems partly tied to his longevity – Ford as a relic of New York gay life in the 1930s – and to admiration for his being publicly out of the closet when few other men dared to be. Also to his multimedia, venturesome sensibility. His life was more interesting than his work, though. The art is ephemeral. Creatively installed, the show does the best it can to evoke Ford’s lively spirit. But absent the man himself, it may leave you wondering what the fuss is about.31
Michael Kimmelman is utterly damning in his faint praise: the current interest in Ford’s work should – in his eyes – be chalked up to a case of sheer longevity on the part of the poet. The choice of language that Kimmelman uses in his New York Times review is also curious. After all, ‘fashion’ is a decidedly strange term to use when talking about the work of a perennially marginalized, largely forgotten artist. In part, I would argue that it is Ford’s ‘venturesome sensibility’ that provokes such a strong reaction in Kimmelman. Stretched as it is across numerous decades and many different disciplines, Ford’s multiform aesthetic approach makes life extremely difficult for those critics who want to get to grips with – or might simply want to pigeonhole – his work. While I take issue with the offhand manner in which Kimmelman dismisses the subject of his review as a mere dilettante, there is certainly something to be said here about the importance of character, of personality, of spirit. I am thinking specifically of Kimmelman’s suggestion that without the presence of Ford’s ‘lively spirit’ to offer us a helping and guiding hand, we run the risk of being left ‘wondering what the fuss is about’. Based as it is upon extensive archival research undertaken in the United States, this study seeks figuratively to bring the man back to life.32 I want in particular to argue that when he was on top of his creative game, Ford was capable of producing work that not only stands the test of time and critical judgement, but forces us to reconsider some of our assumptions concerning the nature of modernist artistic praxis. I also want to suggest that Ford need at all times be thought of as a living and breathing iteration of the ‘mystical writing mad’ theorized so famously by Freud,33 as a distinctive and ever-ready cultural receiver uniquely capable of absorbing with impeccable attention and detail all that was going on around him. To put it simply: this study seeks both to situate Ford in relation to his modern and postmodern peers and to present the reader with a holistic – and historicized – portrait of an important writer that on occasion bears a passing resemblance to the one that was once proffered by Edward B. Germain. ‘When he began publishing in 1929,’ Germain writes,
Ford was unique: America’s surrealist poet. In retrospect, he is seminal. What he accomplished in 1930, most American poets hadn’t even imagined. In the pages of his magazines, Blues and View, he introduced and encouraged surrealism while it passed into the spirit of hundreds of American writers. In his own work he creates the wonder, the wit, and the erotic beauty that have made surrealism the most significant of all modern influences upon poetry.34
There is, as will become clear over the course of this study, a great deal of truth contained in Germain’s account of this critically neglected, yet seemingly ‘seminal’ figure. Ford did indeed play a crucial part in bringing Surrealism to the attention of the American literary and artistic public. At the same time, however, there is slightly more to the matter than Germain allows for in his generous account of Ford. This brings us back to the issue of modernism. As the title of the present book suggests, Charles Henri Ford stands somehow astride the historical realms of the modern and the postmodern. Given that, it should come as no surprise to find that Ford was once invited to read at an academic conference devoted exclusively to the topic of late modernist and postmodernist American poetry. The organizers of this National Poetry Foundation-sponsored conference – ‘The First Post Modernists: American Poets of the 30s Generation’ – put out a call in early 1993 for scholarly work focused
on poets or groups of poets of the 1930s generations, or on broad cultural and social movements which affected the work of these poets. Since a major theme of the conference will be what happens to the Modernist heritage during the 1930s, papers are especially encouraged on the ‘second generation Modernists’ who sought to carry forward the formal experimentations of Pound, Williams, etc.; on those poets of the period who attempted to combine Modernist aesthetic loyalties with assertive political stances; and on poets who, after an engagement with Modernism, finally rejected it.35
Ford was one of the late modernist – or, if you prefer, first postmodernist – poets listed as a possible topic of discussion at this conference, which was to be held at the University of Maine between 17 and 20 June 1993. Now this might have come as something as a shock to Ford. Think about the exchange between an elderly Ford and the equally aged postmodern architect Philip Johnson that the documentarians James Dowell and John Kolomvakis capture on camera in Sleep in a Nest of Flames (2000):
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?36
These pithy remarks regarding the issue of conceptual definition provide us with an initial means through which to understand the life and work of this marginalized poet. The point Ford is making in this conversation regards the inherently problematic nature of categorization, questioning how one might be labelled – let alone described as ‘post’ – while one continues to work and move through the world. Suffice it to say, this is the sort of thing that needs to be borne in mind when reading the present book.
4
Divided into five chapters, this study traces Ford’s various literary endeavours from the 1920s into the 2000s. Chapter 1 focuses on the pre-history and on the history of Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms, the Mississippi-based modernist little magazine that Ford edited between 1929 and 1930. Chapter 2 focuses on the various ways in which Ford sought to harness the energies of modernism after his magazine ceased publication in late 1931. This chapter describes how Ford’s interest in modernism continued apace throughout the 1930s, and how it culminated in the formulation of a uniquely sociable form of aesthetic practice in the 1970s. Our narrative then moves forward into the middle decades of the twentieth century. Chapter 3 focuses on the 1940s and 1950s, suggesting that Ford’s conspicuous absence in the mainstream annals of modernism is attributable to his poetic and aesthetic unorthodoxy, which precluded easy incorporation into generally accepted critical narratives of surrounding avant-gardism. As such, Ford’s marginalization has meant that his various artistic achievements have until now, gone unnoticed. In addition, I suggest that the custodians of literary culture have consistently overlooked Ford’s significant interventions in the field of avant-gardism. As I make clear in Chapter 4, this is a rather curious state of affairs – not least because Ford’s influence was openly acknowledged at the time: especially by the artists and poets associated with Pop art. Attention is paid here to the occasionally startling links that can be established between Ford’s modernist output and the ostensibly postmodern praxis of Andy Warhol. Having considered the productive crossovers between Ford and seminal artists such as Warhol, Chapter 5 turns to Ford’s poetic and editorial ventures in the late 1970s and 1980s. Tellingly, this period saw Ford return to Blues after a gap of exactly sixty years. This chapter repositions his late work in relation to a flexible, egalitarian, and inherently sociable version of modernism, which simultaneously gestures towards – and moves away – from the imprimatur-driven high modernist precepts of the man who helped launch his career: Ezra Pound. The study then closes with a coda that briefly gestures to some of the potential ways in which future researchers might seek to engage with the life, work, and legacy of Charles Henri Ford.
Notes
1 Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers, Modernism: Evolution of an Idea (Bloomsbury Academic: London, 2015), 1.
2 Latham and Rogers, Modernism, 1.
3 Ibid., 1.
4 Consider T. S. Eliot’s 1928 account of the so-called ‘free verse’ movement: ‘The term vers-libres, never a happy one, is happily dying out. We can now see that there was no movement, no revolution, and there is no formula.’ Notice how Eliot dismisses the notion of a modern ‘movement’ ever existing: ‘The only revolution was that Ezra Pound was born with a fine ear for verse. He has enabled a few other persons, including myself, to improve their verse sense; so that he has improved poetry through other men as well as by himself. I cannot think of any one writing verse, of our generation and the next, whose verse (if any good) has not been improved by the study of Pound’s. His poetry is an inexhaustible reference book of verse form. There is, in fact, no one else to study.’ T. S. Eliot, ‘Isolated Superiority’, The Dial, 84, no. 1 (January 1928): 5.
5 I have in mind here William Carlos Williams’s impressionistic 1925 account of his American compatriot and fellow modern traveller, Marianne Moore: ‘The best work is always neglected and there is no critic among the older men who has cared to champion the newer names from outside the battle. The established critic will not read. So it is that the present writers must turn interpreters of their own work. Even those who enjoy modern work are not always intelligent but often seem at a loss to know the white marks from the black. But modernism is distressing to many who would at least tolerate if it they knew how.’ William Carlos Williams, ‘Marianne Moore’, The Contact Collection of Modern Writers (Paris: Contact Editions, 1925), 326.
6 Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press, 1995), 167.
7 Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’, Modern Language Association of America 123, no. 3 (2008): 737.
8 Mao and Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’, 737.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., 738.
12 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso Books, 2002), 6–7.
13 Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 12.
14 Ibid., 12–13.
15 Ibid., 99.
16 Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso Books, 1998), 81.
17 Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 81.
18 Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley: California University Press, 1999), 13.
19 Miller, Late Modernism, 10.
20 David Trotter, Literature in the First Media Age: Britain Between the Wars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 14.
21 Trotter, Literature in the First Media Age, 14.
22 Ibid., 37.
23 Miller, Late Modernism, 14.
24 Ibid., 12–13.
25 Ibid., 14.
26 Ibid., 13.
27 Ibid., 7.
28 Ibid., 12.
29 Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 82.
30 Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 5.
31 Michael Kimmelman, ‘Art in Review; Charles Henri Ford’, New York Times, 24 January 2003. Online Edition: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/24/arts/art-in-review-charles-henri-ford.html (accessed 10 May 2016).
32 It does not, however, purport to be exhaustive or definitive. To be absolutely clear: I take as my primary critical focus Ford’s printed output. In my concluding remarks, I consider some of the possible directions that future inquiry into Ford’s vibrant and varied creative output might pursue.
33 Freud postulates that the mystic writing-pad – or Wunderblock – is an apparatus that combines an ‘ever-ready receptive surface’ which bears a permanent record of the ‘traces’ that have previously been inscribed upon it. Sigmund Freud, ‘A note upon the “mystic writing-pad”’ ([1924] 1925), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works: Volume XIX, James Strachey (ed.) (London: Vintage Books, [1961] 2001), 228.
34 Edward B. Germain, ‘Introduction’, in Flag of Ecstasy: Selected Poems, ed. Charles Henri Ford (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1972), 9.
35 A copy of this undated advertisement can be found in the New York Public Library’s holding of papers pertaining to Charles Boultenhouse and Parker Tyler. See series 1, box 4, folder 13, Charles Boultenhouse and Parker Tyler Papers, NYPL Archives & Manuscripts, New York Public Library.
36 Quoted in James Dowell and John Kolomvakis (dirs.), Sleep in a Nest of Flames (USA, Symbiosis Films, 2000).