1

Blues and the Belated Renovation of Modernism

1

There was not all that much for an artistically inclined teenager to do growing up in the Deep South. This is the overall impression produced by reading Charles Henri Ford’s extensive diaries of the 1920s. Comprising the first section of a large unpublished document entitled ‘I Will Be What I Am: A Documentary Portrait’, Ford’s journals span the period between 1922 and 1928. As such, they provide a richly detailed account of Ford’s youth and his development as an artist. Some of the entries, especially those concerning the scholastic trials and emotional tribulations of American preparatory schooling,¹ are of little or no concern to the literary critic. By far the most interesting entries are those that deal directly with Ford’s burgeoning interest in the worlds of art and literature.² The fiction of Charles Dickens makes an early appearance in Ford’s extracurricular reading list, as does the verse of Victor Hugo.³ By 7 May 1925, Ford had sourced and was making his way through Pope’s translation of the Iliad. Soon after this, specifically modernist literature began to register on Ford’s adolescent cultural radar. On 27 November 1925, Ford wrote that he had just ‘started a biography of Keats by Sidney Colvin. Also got from the library Ibsen’s “The Doll House” and “Ghosts”’.⁴ Ford seemed particularly taken with Ibsen’s plays;⁵ they certainly seemed to spark something in him. ‘God, what do I want out of this world,’ Ford asked himself on 26 March 1926: ‘What do I want of life? Do I want to be what, in the eyes of people, is a success and in so doing have my soul and inner-self trampled and smothered out?’⁶ A mere six days later, on 1 April 1926, Ford seemed one step closer to answering his own question: ‘What minds authors must have. Could I but write.’⁷ This reads as a statement of intent. Judging by journal entries made during this period, writers such as Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, as well as the preferred Ibsen, were now to be found at the forefront of Ford’s mind.⁸ It was also around this time that Ford, inspired as he was by the writings of the precocious Marie Bashkirtseff, decided on a decisive course of action:

As for me, gradually I am coming to see that I will be, something, yea famous, in this stupid world. The niche I will carve is becoming more distinct in outline tho the actual carving has not been commenced. I have something I know to tell people or something beautiful to give them that will live. I believe I am a genius, and from now on … ⁹

This rather grandiose and overwrought journal entry is admittedly a little short on detail. Before long, things became that bit clearer. In an entry dated 13 June 1926, Ford ponders whether he ‘ever could develop into a real artist. I know this much – I love art. I’ve been told I have talent in drawing. Well, – “quien sabes?” Paris, some day, maybe. Am I mad to think so.’¹⁰ Ford’s initial interest in a possible career in draughtsmanship proved short-lived. This becomes apparent when we turn our attention to the short entry of 23 July 1926, in which Ford states simply: ‘I long to write.’¹¹ From here, the pace picks up. Ford receives his first rejection slip – from the magazine ‘College Humor’ – on 20 August 1926; by 19 December he has resolved to learn French.¹² On 5 March 1927, he notes that he has started to read ‘the exotic Baudelaire’.¹³ On 31 May of the same year, Ford’s frustration boils over. ‘The Carnegie Library is so inadequate,’ he writes. ‘They do not have James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” Dostoevski’s “The Idiot” or “Women in Love” by D. H. Lawrence, three books which I was especially eager to obtain.’¹⁴

While I’ve yet to ascertain how long it took Ford to track down copies of these proto- and canonical modernist texts, it seems clear that by this point his interests were orientated firmly towards the experimental, avant-garde, and sexually charged end of the cultural spectrum.¹⁵ It is in precisely this context that Ford’s burgeoning interest in the variety of modernism promoted by Ezra Pound should be understood. Pound makes his first appearance in Ford’s journal on 2 July 1927: ‘Yesterday an autographed postal card came from Ezra Pound (with a picture of the Palazzo Ducale on the back – at Venezia, of course). Pound. So very business-like, telling me. “As per yours 30th May 1copy Exile 1st issue received to your order.” After my affusion. Ah, well. Even to see his signature is something.’¹⁶

So began Ford’s correspondence with perhaps the single most important modernist idol of his youth. To say the arrival of Pound’s postcard made an impression on Ford would be a serious understatement. Ford wasted little time in composing a speedy reply, which he reprints in his journal:

Dear Mr Pound:-

Your card reached me a few days ago and in accordance with same am enclosing a bill for No. 1 of the ‘Exile’ … ‘Pound!’ I said. ‘Could I ever dream of receiving a lettre [sic] from the most brilliant poet of the century?’…

Possibly you will be bored on seeing that I enclose these poems. … That they will be ignored I know only too well.¹⁷

Sadly, there is no record of Pound’s reply. In all likelihood, it probably failed to even register. Indeed, this sort of exchange would have been all too familiar for such an experienced modernist like Pound. But the point I want to make here is that it did matter – very much so – to Ford. From this point on references to and extracts from Pound’s poetry begin to appear at regular intervals in Ford’s journal. On 17 July 1927, two days before he was to receive a $12 cheque – his first – from The New Yorker magazine for the publication of his early poem ‘Interlude’,¹⁸ we find Ford inserting a couple of lines from Pound’s translation of ‘A Ballad of The Mulberry Road’ into his journal. Soon after, on 13 August 1927, he singles out ‘Don Ezra’s’ writing style in Canto XX for especial praise.¹⁹ Judging by subsequent entries in Ford’s journal, this early encounter with Pound seems to have proved decisive in certain respects and lasting in others. Poetry now came to exert a powerful pull on Ford’s imagination. We get a clear sense of this in Ford’s journal entry of 28 January 1928. ‘I hate contemporary novels and yet I persist in reading them,’ Ford declares in this particular entry. ‘They are all so shallow. With the exception of Hemingway, Gide and one or two others nothing worthwhile is being written in the way of novels. How far ahead is the poetry of today! And plays, too, for that matter.’²⁰ Ever the hopeless romantic, Ford sought now to commit himself fully, and sometimes hilariously, to the craft and vocation of poetry. Consider the journal entry of 16 April 1928: ‘Almost every afternoon I stay in my room and read, sometimes write verse which does not satisfy me any too frequently. I am probably smoking too many cigarettes. My chest hurts in the center, has been thus for some days. I shall probably contract tuberculosis.’²¹

Ford seems here to have mistaken himself momentarily for John Keats. Suffice to say: he did not contract tuberculosis. He did, however, need to find a way to escape from what he perceived as the crushing boredom of his existence in the South.²² The prevailing sense one gets when reading many of the diary entries in ‘I Will Be What I Am’ is that of isolation. Ford’s isolation was twofold. For one thing, he felt personally isolated and creatively frustrated in what he described as the conservative environment of the American South. Railing against the cultural conservatism of ‘provincial, bourgeois’ cities and towns, Ford demands ‘new sensations, new friends, [and a] new environment’.²³ Acknowledging that he needed to expand his personal and cultural horizons, Ford continually emphasizes the fact in his diary that ‘I must not live my life at home – sheltered and without pain. There isn’t the slightest doubt but that I would become a hopeless neurotic. For that reason I must go to New York.’²⁴ It is easy to see why New York might appeal. As well as providing him with an escape route from the apparently stifling confines of the ‘sheltered’ South, Ford recognized that his chances of forging stimulating personal and productive creative associations with like-minded individuals interested in art and literature would be increased dramatically in the culturally vibrant hub of New York. In 1928, however, Ford lacked the necessary financial and familial freedom to relocate permanently.²⁵ He was, for the time being at least, stuck in the South.

The second factor that we need to consider when discussing Ford’s sense of isolation has to do with sexuality. Ford was, lest we forget, a young gay man growing up in the often-hostile environment of the American South.²⁶ The issue of Ford’s sexuality also needs to be borne in mind while reading through his journals. By 1928, Ford was living in San Antonio, Texas.²⁷ While Ford is vague in his diary when it comes to specific details, it appears that he had discovered the existence of something approximating the form of an alternative, seemingly queer underground scene while living in what is now the Lone Star State’s seventh largest city. Entries concerning ‘female-impersonators’, ‘perverts’, and ‘bohemians’ begin to creep into Ford’s journal in the spring of 1928, as do references to time spent in illegal drinking-dens and at illicit rooftop parties with eligible young bachelors.²⁸ Yet it seems that Ford soon tired of the scene he had only recently discovered.²⁹ We get a clear indication of Ford’s state of mind in his journal entry of 13 June 1928: ‘I haven’t felt like this since those days and tear-stained nights I spent at Webb School [Bell Buckle, Tennessee] in the spring of 1923. There is nothing for me but N.Y.C. in the fall. And then. Oh, God, am I to be unhappy always?’³⁰ Ford’s sense of personal dissatisfaction comes evermore to the fore in the latter stages of his diary. This is certainly evident in the final entry, which he penned on 25 August 1928. In this concluding entry, Ford notes obliquely that he was ‘glad I went to the roof for I had a terrible time and that will make it easier for me to leave’.³¹

2

It was around this time that a deeply unhappy Ford made plans to relocate from San Antonio to Columbus, Mississippi.³² New York must have seemed a mere pipe dream.³³ Poetry was, now more than ever, at the forefront of his mind. Ford emphasizes as much in his journal entry of 30 July 1928:

What writers have influenced me most? Wilde, perhaps; and Shaw, Mencken and other iconoclasts in my ways of thinking. Perhaps I would have been happier had I never seen a book … never known the intensity of poetry … the thirst to create … the hunger for fame and life … hence the realization of the futility of it all … hunger again … fire and ice, fire and ice.³⁴

Note the manner in which this literary nobody has already begun to compare himself to some serious literary heavyweights. Then acknowledge that this entry, which was made in San Antonio, is important as it represents something of a turning point in Ford’s life and literary career. Of particular importance in this regard is a brief comment contained in the same entry. ‘The Dial is wonderful,’ Ford writes, ‘a refreshing escape from the stupidity met with at every turn.’³⁵ Ford is referring here, of course, to the long-running and remarkably influential American, first-generation, modernist little magazine edited by Scofield Thayer and Sibley Watson. Published between 1920 and 1929, The Dial, Christina Britzolakis notes, ‘aimed to provide a critical environment which would foster not only the production but also the circulation and reception of modernist literary texts’.³⁶ To put this slightly differently, we might say that the editorial team behind The Dial hoped to foster a constructive dialogue about modernism and modernist cultural production in their little magazine. Britzolakis also suggests that, in the pages of The Dial, ‘modernism was presented as a quintessentially cosmopolitan enterprise, providing an arena of cultural self-fashioning independent of nation or locality. The magazine’s contents were chosen to represent a cross-fertilization between US and European cultures, between literary and other artistic media, and between creative and critical activity.’³⁷ Why mention this? I choose to cite extensively from Britzolakis because, as we shall see in both this chapter and the next, conversation and cosmopolitanism are two of the things that Ford came to privilege in his capacity as a second-generation modernist little magazine editor and poet. In this sense, then, it does indeed seem significant that Ford singles out The Dial for praise in his diary. I propose that it was at precisely this point in his life that Ford realized that modernist print culture might just provide him with the requisite set of practical and conceptual tools with which to combat the encroaching sense of isolation that had recently begun to gnaw away at the very marrow of his adolescent being.

Before we go any further, we need to wind the clocks back a bit. We do so in order to more clearly see the beginnings of Ford’s literary career proper. On 22 February 1928, Ford received an unexpected letter from a total stranger named Kathleen Tankersley Young. Ford reprints Young’s unsolicited missive in his journal:

One of the scrapbooks from the First National Poetry Exhibition that is being held in New York is in my hands. Mr [Lew] Ney mentions your name as one who would be interested in seeing it. … I think that it will be at the Carnegie Library for a while. … I hope that you are an informal person. For it is an informal exhibit and I am the least formal of persons. I do not have any friends. I am interested in art, my poetry, people who write, think or can thrill equally over a bag of popcorn or a sunset.³⁸

Young is referring to the Carnegie Library of San Antonio, Texas. A poet associated retrospectively with the Harlem Renaissance, Young brought with her an appreciation of modernist aesthetics and sense of cosmopolitan glamour to Ford’s existence in San Antonio.³⁹ Disdainful of what they both perceived as petty bourgeois provincialism, the two quickly formed a close bond: ‘Saw K. again this afternoon at library and we talked for two hours or more … her nervous hands beating a tattoo on the table that tore my heart to shatters … . How I sympathize with her, living here with no people with her tastes, no nothing.’⁴⁰ It was presumably during one such emotionally fraught afternoon spent in the library that the pair first discussed the possibility of publishing a magazine together. Ford, who had previously written in passing of his desire to publish a magazine, makes mention of such a conversation in his journal entry of 28 March 1928. Young had also, Ford writes, ‘thought of starting a poetry magazine but don’t guess we will’.⁴¹

It was at this moment that the impetus for what would eventually become Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms began to take definite shape. Ford often had cause to reflect on this critical juncture in his career later in life. This is how he described events to the contemporary Mississippi-born photographer, Allen Frame: ‘I was in San Antonio, and somehow I got hold of Stanley Braithwaite’s anthology of magazine verse. I started writing some of my own. So, I thought, all these little magazines – If somebody else can do it, I can do it, too. I borrowed $100, never paid it back, got out Blues.’⁴² While Ford’s retelling is broadly correct, I think there’s a little more to the matter than he lets on here. To begin with, Blues tells us a lot about Ford. Eager to announce his arrival on an already overcrowded avant-garde literary scene at an early age, the adolescent Ford realized that founding a little magazine might enable him to accrue some valuable cultural capital.⁴³ At the same time, he intuitively grasped the fact that, in the words of Susanne W. Churchill, ‘Little magazines are intimate and social: they bring together an ensemble of writers into a small space, staging a performance for a familiar audience of like-minded people, who read each issue during the same limited time period.’⁴⁴ Finally, establishing a little magazine appealed to the precocious and ambitious Ford as it provided a means with which to combat the problems posed by his perceived geographical isolation.

Transnational modernist little magazine culture thus furnished Ford with a viable alternative with which to forge meaningful literary and artistic connections that spanned significant geographical distances. On a more immediate, pragmatic level it also provided him with a convenient outlet for his own work. Ford had, up until this point, struggled to get his work into print. He had by now come to accept that ‘launching a poetry magazine would help immensely. … I am sure I have not been timid about sending my poems to editors. And I don’t intend to be although hundreds have come back I am sometimes glad it’s not so easy.’⁴⁵ Harriet Monroe was one of the editors Ford had in mind when he wrote this. Ford’s initial dealings with Monroe were far from successful. Ford approached the first-generation modernist magazine editor in early 1927. He records this moment in a journal entry dated 14 February 1927: ‘Yesterday I sent three poems to “Poetry” – a magazine of verse. My hopes are small.’⁴⁶ Monroe’s reply arrived at the beginning of April 1927. In an entry dated 10 April 1927, Ford notes, ‘Last Monday I received a lovely note from Harriet Monroe the editor of Poetry. Though she encouraged me she did not accept my poems!’⁴⁷ Buoyed by Monroe’s initial words of encouragement, Ford continued to send his poetry to Chicago. However, it soon became clear that Monroe had no intention of publishing these early poetic endeavours. On 10 May 1927, we find Ford lamenting the fact that he had ‘received [his] poems (as usual) back from Poetry with a stabbing phrase from Harriet Monroe. She said (twist!) that my poems did not seem to her poetry – the worst criticism anyone could make of them.’⁴⁸ There is a degree of implicit intergenerational conflict and tension contained in this sort of exchange.⁴⁹ Building on this, I suggest that Ford and Monroe’s exchange should be read as symptomatic of a more general shift in the developmental trajectory of experimental literature and aesthetics in the twentieth century. Recall Monroe’s specific criticism of Ford’s early writing, that she didn’t think it possible to describe his verse as poetry. Why might Monroe say such a thing? Was she simply incapable of understanding Ford’s writing? This, to my mind, seems highly doubtful. After all Monroe was, among other things, an experienced reader and publisher of experimental poetry.

An example sheds further light on this particular matter. Troubadour: A Magazine of Verse first appeared in June 1928 and ceased publication in June 1932. Founded by Whitely Gray in San Diego, California, Troubadour was a periodical beset by paradox from the outset.⁵⁰ To take an example, while the writers featured in the magazine often espoused the merits of the so-called ‘free verse’ moment, the majority of the poems actually included in the magazine cleaved to what we might describe as a more formally conventional – or traditionalist – stance when it came to creative expression. This is one of the reasons why Troubadour strikes the twenty-first century reader as hopelessly confused. The contemporary reader is also left confused when reading the contribution of Grace Arlington Owen. In this untitled editorial piece published in February 1930, Owen laments the demise of modernist little magazines such as The Dial. ‘Gone too’, she adds, ‘is “The Little Review,” that child of Margaret Anderson and Jane [Heap]. Miss Anderson, who once printed what James Joyce wrote and gave the unusual a hearing, flings out her ultimatum, that she will not publish what she cannot understand. With this commentary on present day tendencies she makes a good exit.’⁵¹ Owen thus seeks to align herself with Anderson, supporting the latter’s refusal to publish what she had come to regard as sheer unintelligibility. But this, surely, is a wilfully perverse reading, and one that necessarily has to ignore the fact that The Little Review had a long and venerated tradition of publishing experimental literature. Literature that, we would do well to remember, struck many upon first publication as odd, and some as simply incomprehensible.

Owen’s reference to unintelligibility is important, as is her comment concerning Anderson’s refusal to publish that which she could no longer appreciate, let alone understand. Equally important is the specific example Owen uses to ‘justify’ her Anderson-inspired position:⁵²

Gather up the eyelashes that have fallen

into a square of cloth or with the wind’s pollen:

thus gauge the somber sun of your disquiet.⁵³

These lines – taken from a poem entitled ‘Commission’ – belong to none other than Charles Henri Ford. Why does Owen choose to quote Ford? To be sure, her decision to cite Ford’s early poem is a little puzzling. Excepting for a little sprinkling of juxtaposition and the smallest dash of incongruous imagery, there is little in these lines suggestive of problematic formal innovation or anything remotely approaching outright nonsensicality. How then to account for Owen’s ire? The explanation, I think, has less to do with the poem than it has to do with Ford. Or, precisely, it has more to do with what Ford represented – or signified – for Owen. This brings me back to my earlier point about intergenerational tension. In the eyes of established little magazine editors such as Anderson and Monroe, as in the written estimation of more conservatively inclined writers like Owen, emergent poets of Ford’s age and calibre were simply not to be trusted. In fact, they were a cause for profound anxiety. This is because younger writers such as Ford carried with them the seeds – or, depending on who you asked at the time, the implicit threat – of change, of disruption, of upset. Fearful of such change, established figures such as Monroe thus chose instead to adopt a dismissive approach to the wave of younger experimental writers they rightly or wrongly perceived as encroaching on their poetic turf. Such an act was tantamount to simply burying one’s head in the sand; like it or not, a change was coming.

I am of course referring to the historical shift from first- to second-generation modes of modernism. Recall Hugh Kenner’s belief that the (American) writers working in the wake of the high modernist period inherited a homemade, fully formed tradition. According to Kenner, these younger modernists were, paradoxically, ‘born mature, not to say middle-aged’.⁵⁴ Taking Objectivism as his primary example, Kenner argues that the output of a typical second-generation – or late – modern is that of a belated (male, heterosexual) artist who ‘inherited a formed tradition: the tradition over the cradle of which, less than twenty years previously, Ezra Pound had hoped to have Henry James, O.M., speak a few sponsoring words’.⁵⁵ But are matters as simple as Kenner might have us believe? Charles Bernstein suggests not. Bernstein argues that in order for a writer or artist to claim status as a second-generation modernist they needed to have been born between 1889 and 1909. Further to this, Bernstein posits that those whom we have now come to recognize as second-generation modernists ‘cover the first wave of response to many of the radical and disruptive innovations of the modernist poets and artists of the previous generation’.⁵⁶ Moreover, in Bernstein’s estimation, second-generation – or second-wave – modernism ‘may be the most profound critique of modernist art – not in theory, but in practice’.⁵⁷ It thereby comes as no surprise to find established figures like Monroe, Anderson, and Owen casting anxious glances over their shoulders, living as they did in perpetual fear of what they would have in all likelihood perceived as the unwashed, ungrateful, and uncouth mob of youths amassed outside the establishment gate. It should also be obvious by now how this all pertains to Ford. Born as he was in 1908, Ford was a member of the generation that those such as Anderson and Monroe had come to view with no small degree of trepidation. In a sense such anxiety was in fact warranted, at least when it came to Ford. As will become apparent, Ford had little interest in simply toeing the faded line chalked on the ground by his literary forebears. Instead, the fresh-faced Ford sought actively as an editor and poet to call into question certain established modes and norms associated with first-generation literary modernism; this becomes clear when we turn our attention to the venture with which he hoped to launch his literary career, Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms.

3

Kathleen Tankersley Young sat down on 23 November 1928 and wrote to Charles Henri Ford. Judging by the contents of her letter, Ford’s dream of launching a modernist little magazine was by now at least one step closer to being realized:

You have no idea how happy I was to find from your letter that there is to be another poetry magazine launched on this world of know-nothings. and that I am to be connected with it. now for facts.

I think the name is pretty bad and so does everyone I’ve told about it. it leads one to think of a special Negro Rhythm. Why not call it BLUE. or something like MODERNS. or think of something. (these are only suggestions, you don’t have to take them).⁵⁸

It seems that Ford had already settled on a name for his little magazine. Why he chose to call it Blues, I am not entirely sure. Decades after the fact, in May 1954, Ford claimed that he ‘loved the Blues before I loved the Poem. Somehow the two loves were from the same source. So it was natural that I called my poetry review Blues.’⁵⁹ There is no obvious reason to dispute this statement. Ford’s early journals are full of loving references to blues records and musicians. Still, Ford’s choice of the magazine title is undoubtedly problematic.⁶⁰ We would do well to remember that we are dealing here with the work of a relatively well-to-do white American male hailing from the Deep South. That being so, might we say that he is guilty at this early stage in his career of appropriating specifically African-American cultural forms? A kind of modernist minstrelsy? Perhaps.⁶¹ To speak in relative terms, it seems that Ford was, despite Young’s explicit – and equally questionable – reference to a ‘special Negro rhythm’, atbest simply unaware of the implications presupposed by such an act of cultural appropriation. In any case, the title stuck.⁶² Rather, Ford stuck fast to the original title, despite Young trying repeatedly to change his mind:

Listen dear everyone I have told of the idea think it is a ripping [idea] but no one can figure out the BLUES. they all say that it is a specialized word, new perhaps but with a limited meaning. why not call it THE MODERN REVIEW. or THE MODERNIST. or MODERNS. of course it is up to you. but BLUES gives a limited strange sense.⁶³

Young’s letter is important for three reasons. First, it reveals that Young had managed to generate some interest in Ford’s as yet unpublished magazine. Secondly, it reminds us that the term ‘modernist’ came freighted with a recognizable categorical weight in late 1928, before Blues appeared. Finally, it implies that the two aspiring poets had recently been discussing possible ways of situating Blues in relation to the other magazines already available on the literary market. But which magazines did Young have in mind? She spells this out in another, undated letter. ‘What do you think about the DIAL going under?’ Young asks Ford. ‘I would like to hear what W[illiam] C[arlos] W[illiams] says. I thought that they were making money, at least their expenses. Anyway now BLUES can take the place of the DIAL.’⁶⁴ Young’s hope that Blues might fill the space in the literary firmament that The Dial once occupied is certainly revealing. But we need to be careful here. Is Young proposing that Blues simply pick up where The Dial left off? Young’s letter of 29 March 1929 suggests otherwise:

When people have learned to destroy everything then they can learn to build. I love to sling these things in the face of american editors. and would like to tell them my theories concerning them. It seems the Dial can’t use anything by anyone who doesn’t live in some other country. they are so highbrow and sterile. let BLUES be just the opposite. at least pregnant with lots of healthy bastard children who may be either godlike or deformed.⁶⁵

Young could not have been clearer. Privileging healthy bastardization over ‘highbrow’ sterility, Young evidently hoped that Ford’s Blues would steer clear of the well-trodden road already taken by the editors of established modernist little magazines such as The Dial.

Young’s forceful words, conveying as they do her mounting frustration with what we might describe oxymoronically as the American avant-garde establishment, would have resonated with Ford.⁶⁶ In equal measure, however, such comments – had they ever reached the attention of the wider literary community – would have surely horrified some of the more vocal critics operating in the late 1920s. I am thinking specifically of literary critics such Laura Riding and Robert Graves. Published in 1927, Riding and Graves’s co-authored A Survey of Modernist Poetry was one of the first critical documents to deploy the term ‘modernist’ in a explicitly descriptive, classificatory manner. Riding and Graves had profound reservations about the relative merits of avant-garde – that is, modernist – poetry. They were especially dismissive of those seemingly misguided contemporary writers who persisted in displaying a predilection for what they describe as outmoded, perhaps even defunct mode of creative expression. Although Blues did not appear until 1929 – two years after the Survey – it is not a stretch to imagine that Riding and Graves would have viewed Ford’s second-generation modernist little magazine in a highly unfavourable light.⁶⁷ Desiring a return to a less self-conscious, less eccentric brand of literature, Riding and Graves would have been alarmed – in a manner not altogether dissimilar to the aforementioned Anderson and Monroe – to discover that Blues belatedly sought, as we will see, to amplify the sort of self-conscious and eccentric qualities that they wanted to downplay.⁶⁸

Still, as someone once wrote, all generalizations are dangerous, even this one. It would certainly be wrong to suggest that each and every established literary figure working in the late 1920s felt the same way as those listed above. Consider Ezra Pound’s take on Ford’s magazine. On 22 January 1929, we find Pound mentioning Ford to his father, Homer. ‘C.H. Ford is starting a local show’, Pound wrote, ‘with [Herman] Spector, Bill W[illia]ms. and [Joseph] Vogel, and printing [Louis] Zuk[ofsky]. Let’s see what they can do.’ ⁶⁹ Pound seemed particularly enthused about the prospect of Blues. His enthusiasm is evident in a letter sent to Joseph Vogel on 23 January 1929. There was, in Pound’s estimation, ‘a chance [in Blues] for the best thing since The Little Review and certainly the best thing done in America without European help’.⁷⁰ Judging from remarks such as these, it seems fair to say that Ford had succeeded in attracting Pound’s attention.⁷¹ Pound offered plenty of editorial advice pertaining to the direction of Ford’s ‘local show’. On 1 February 1929 Pound told Ford: ‘Most “young” magazines play ostrich. They neither recognize the outer world nor do they keep an eye on contemporary affairs of strictly literary nature.’⁷² Ever the provocateur, Pound suggested that Ford ‘shd. look at all the other poetry reviews and attack idiocy when it appears in them. The simplest and briefest form of attack is a sottisier’⁷³ To put it another way, Pound proposed that Ford compile an aggressively worded list of written stupidities contained in the pages of other magazines. It was, Pound wrote,

no longer my place to point out the idiocies that appear in “Poetry” for example.

The older boy shd. not stick pins into the younger. It is courageous of the young to stick pins into the pompous.

Make your sottisier from Poetry and the main literary reviews, sunday supplements etc.

These sottisiers are often the first parts of a live mag that people read.⁷⁴

Pound’s cutting remarks about Poetry would have surely been music to Ford’s ears. Notice, too, the generational element of Pound’s advice to Ford. Unlike, say, Monroe, Pound seems, on the face of it at least, far more relaxed about the emergence of young upstarts such as Ford. This comes to the fore in the following portion of Pound’s letter:

Every generation or group must write its own literary program. The way to do this is by circular letter to your ten chief allies. Find out the two or three points you agree on (if any) and issue them as a program. If you merely want to endorse something in my original Imagist manifesto, or the accompanying ‘Don’t’s’ or in my ‘How to Read’ that has just appeared in the N.Y. Herald ‘Books’ simply say so. Or list the revered and unrevered authors you approve or disapprove of.⁷⁵

Battle-hardened editorial veteran and benevolent patriarch by turns, Pound stresses here the importance of producing a coherent literary programme, one that could also serve as a rallying point of unification between individual writers. Specifically, Pound suggests that Ford’s most viable means of constructing a literary manifesto was to issue a ‘circular letter’ signed by a select number of close confidantes:

As you don’t live in the same town with yr start contribs, you can not have fortnightly meeting and rag each other. Best substitute is to use circular letters. For example write something (or use this note of mine) add your comments; send it on to Vogel, have him show it to Spector; and then send it to Bill Wms. each adding his blasts and blesses or comment of whateverdamn natr. Etc. When it has gone the rounds, you can send it back here.⁷⁶

We will have cause to revisit this passage at the outset of the next chapter. For the time being, however, I want to emphasize two main points. It is important to recognize, as Pound did, that Ford’s geographical isolation in Mississippi made the exchange of opinions and circular letters an absolute necessity. In addition, we need to appreciate that Pound’s suggestions are not necessarily as altruistic as they first appear. Reading between the lines, we can see that Pound was trying, in a rather ham-fisted manner, to wrest a modicum of editorial control from Ford. Pound gives the game away in the final line, by suggesting that Ford deliver any sort of completed Blues circular to Rapallo. Characteristically, Pound was trying to stamp his authority upon Ford’s magazine and, given his history of similar attempts, such an invention comes as no surprise.⁷⁷ But Ford, who would surely have been able to read Pound’s less than wholly selfless intentions here, wasn’t having a bar of it. As far I as have been able to establish, no such circular was ever sent to Pound – nor, it should be added, did anything even remotely approximating a ‘sottisier’ ever appear in Blues.

There is, however, evidence to suggest that Ford did in fact start work on producing a literary circular of sorts. We know, for instance, that Pound’s long-suffering friend and ally William Carlos Williams was involved in the drafting of a Blues circular in some capacity. Consider the following:

1. Agreed: That ‘Blues’ is a perfectly hopeless attempt to put what is alive in writing before an american audience; it is a negative virtue but the only one that can be respected.

2. Resolved: There is nothing to do but to continue to do as now being done by ‘Blues’: it is the best present day tradition. The only one that can be counted on to bear anything but dry nuts.⁷⁸

These two bullet-points are to be found in an undated letter from Williams to Ford. While Williams’s remarks never saw the light of day, I cite this letter here in order to show that Ford did indeed listen to some of Pound’s very practical advice. Donald Davidson confirms as much in his scathing review of the first issue of Blues. Writing in The Tennessean on 23 March 1929, Davidson noted that a critically vague, but rhetorically bold ‘editorial proclamation sets forth the magazine as the organ of certain persons “disgusted with literature as it is at present perpetrated in the United States”’.⁷⁹ Citing an anonymous, half-hidden statement printed on the inside cover of the first Blues, Davidson witheringly describes how ‘the plan of the editors is to “revitalize and introduce new rhythms in creative writing”’. They announce themselves as opposed with equal determination to the ‘sentimental’ and the ‘forced, the far-fetched’.⁸⁰ The complete text of the statement that so irked Davidson reads:

Future issues of Blues will contain work by William Carlos Williams, Joseph Vogel, Jacques Le Clercq, Louis Zukofsky, Eli Seigel, Oliver Jenkins, Kathleen Tankersley Young, Charles Henri Ford, Herman Spector and others who are disgusted with literature as it is at present perpetuated in the United States. By subscribing to Blues you will show your interest and willingness to help in the plans of the editors to revitalize and introduce new rhythms in creative writing. There is only one class of literature more intellectually depressing than the sentimental, the trite, the expected. The reference is made to that most deadening of mental incubuses – the strained, the forced, the far-fetched. Blues, by the exclusion of both classes from its pages will wage a bitter war against them, and will provide an organ of experimentation for the generation sans illusions.

As far as opening salvos purporting to attack ‘that most deadening of mental incubuses’ go, this is hardly the most memorable. There are a number of things that need be asked of it. Couched in the language of militaristic advance, the passage certainly wears its avant-garde credentials on its sleeve. But how does this tally with the notion of aesthetic revitalization evoked in the first half of the passage? Come to think of it, what does Ford have in mind when he writes here of revitalization? And exactly, does Ford propose to wage ‘bitter war’ against ‘forced’ and ‘strained’ forms of American literature. Finally, then, what does the phrase ‘the generation sans illusions’ mean? Suffice to say, this opening statement raises more questions than it provides answers.

We are certainly still a long way from understanding what Ford hoped to achieve with Blues. Perhaps Pound was right. If nothing else, a well-directed literary ‘blast’ may have helped people to get a clearer fix on Ford’s magazine. Indeed, if Davidson’s aforementioned review of the magazine’s first number is anything to go by, at the very least, it couldn’t have hurt. Unable to interpret what he perceived as the ‘vaguely’ oppositional and confusing nature of the passage cited above, Davidson criticized Ford’s magazine for repeating ‘the vices and [having] none of the virtues of the forward and experimentalist cults that wax and sicken on the banks of the Seine and the Hudson’.⁸¹ All things ­considered, Davidson’s dismissal of the recently published Blues was closer to the mark than he perhaps realized. A curious hybrid mixture of local, cosmopolitan, and internationalist experimentalism did indeed begin to emerge in the subsequent editions of Ford’s little magazine. However, the simple fact is that Davidson lacked the adequate critical knowledge and vocabulary to appreciate the first issue of Blues – information that a coherent, detailed, and clearly presented editorial programme could have provided.⁸² Lacking recourse to such material, the first Blues struck Davidson instead as merely ‘mysterious and odd’.⁸³

But hindsight is a wonderful thing. Knowing what we now know about Ford, it is possible to understand what he hoped to achieve with Blues, which comprised nine issues published between February 1929 and late 1930. This will be our objective for the rest of this chapter. Modernist little magazine theory is helpful in this regard. Adam McKible argues that modernist little magazines matter; that in order more accurately to study the past we need to emphasize ‘its difference from our present moment. Collections and anthologies cannot do this; they de-contextualize past writing and make it familiar in ways that little magazines resist’.⁸⁴ Peter Marks similarly argues that little magazines ‘provide unrivalled contemporary documentation of such ongoing literary developments, of rivalries and collaborations, of short-lived enthusiasms and failed projects, and of rich and illuminating work of lasting value’.⁸⁵ That being so, we might say that little magazines provided writers with literal and figural spaces – or communal textual forums – in which they could converse and potentially collaborate with other like-minded, similarly enthused individuals, while simultaneously developing their own literary identities. This is true of Blues. Sometimes described as ‘the big blue blasphemous baby of Charles Henri Ford’,⁸⁶ and sometimes advertised as a ‘Bi-sexual Bi-Monthly’,⁸⁷ Blues assumed the form of a metaphorical crucible in which a variety of decidedly diverse voices were able to interact, clash, ferment, and develop into discernible poetic identities and sensibilities, certain of which continued to flourish after the magazine ceased publication in 1930.

To this, another significant factor that needs to be considered when it comes to little magazines is longevity. Ian Hamilton suggests that ten years is the ideal publication lifespan for a little magazine. ‘Within that span’, Hamilton argues, ‘one can discern a pattern. There are the opening years of jaunty, assertive indecision, then a middle period of genuine identity, and after that a kind of level stage in which that identity becomes more and more wan and mechanical.’⁸⁸ It seems possible to talk of Blues in relation to the tripartite schema proffered by Hamilton. Ford edited and published two volumes of Blues. The first volume consisted of six monthly issues (all of which Ford edited and printed in Columbus, Mississippi); the second was made up of three quarterly editions (the last two of which were published in New York). The first five issues of Blues (February–June 1929), I suggest, can be read precisely in terms of Hamilton’s ‘jaunty, assertive indecision’.⁸⁹ The sixth issue of Blues (July 1929) acts as a conceptual pivot of sorts. Specifically, it brings to a close the magazine’s first stage and simultaneously ushers in a ‘period of genuine identity’ – a phase which spans the three remaining issues of Ford’s periodical (Fall 1929–Fall 1930).⁹⁰ As we will see at the close of this chapter, this final phase anticipates some of the ways in which Ford’s career would develop both in and beyond the 1930s.

4

Bearing all this in mind, let us turn our attention to the first volume of Blues. The first six issues of Blues laid foundations for the critique of first-generation modernism that Ford sought – as both poet and editor – to order and bring about in his second-generation modernist little magazine. Ford certainly led the way in this regard. Appearing in the second issue of Blues, the second section of his ‘To Be Pickled in Alcohol’ can be interpreted as an oblique poetic call to arms:

i rumble on the narrow streets and find an expiation for this chaos

he said it’s red like that all over looking and i choked a cigarette butt

looking in my glass i am sure that i resemble a traffic squall or a sudden

snow

a promise has been too insistent and i mold stickily bread into a hanging

if a watch ticks shatter your unrest against abnormality (Blues 1:2, 39)⁹¹

These lines are the antithesis of all that Riding and Graves sought to promote in their 1927 Survey. Instead of moderating, Ford amplifies the self-conscious and lyrical elements in his poem; it is tempting to read a line like ‘if a watch ticks shatter your unrest against abnormality’ as a tacit refutation of the views expounded by critics such as Riding and Graves. Indeed, something similar might also be said of the overwrought and over-the-top couplet that brings the poem to a close, which could perhaps also be read in relation to Ford’s lifelong interest in and commitment to modernism: ‘i hold tightly to a wreath and a shudder/with torn nails i build grandly the last madhouse for a burned dream’ (Blues 1:2, 39). On a related note, we may well wonder what Riding and Graves would have made of the early contributions of poets such as Norman Macleod and Oliver Jenkins. With sentiments ranging from quiet curiosity to outright exuberance, poems such as Macleod’s ‘A Woman Swayed’ and Jenkins’s idiosyncratic ‘Portrait of a Crusader Giving a Heart-to-Heart Talk’ can be said to epitomize the self-conscious – and self-consciously experimental – offerings of a number of the younger writers featured in the first volume of Blues. Macleod’s ever so slightly Wallace Stevenseque ‘A Woman Swayed’ captures this element of youthful curiosity:

Juvescently curious,

i postulated furiously

the integrity

of my position,

but a woman swayed forth

on the banister

and i doubted

conviction (Blues 1: 3, 72)

Opening with an allusion to T. S. Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’, Macleod’s poem depicts the hopelessly furious postulations of an unspecified adolescent. In direct contrast to the passionless, aged figure described in Eliot’s earlier poem, the painfully overzealous youth of Macleod’s poem is clearly in thrall to his emotions. Macleod’s humorous, if conceptually slight, take on adolescent pretensions spills over into outright exuberance in poems like Jenkins’s ‘Portrait’. The poet’s campy and exuberant contribution to Blues may have lacked aesthetic merit, but it made up for this with sheer syntactical vibrancy:

beware bewhere my friends of the lure

of sleek slimsleek thighs of harlots

and boozebenders (myfriends) i am proud

proud i say osoproud to lead you out of

the valley little lilies of the valley

and believe me i cum from the rolyholy

reeeaches of heaven local #7 to you

i stand 4square with love love love i

LOVE allofyou myfriends peeuritee is

a bellybusting banner flipping in the pure

o zone getitandholdittoyourhearts (Blues 1: 3, 69)

Jenkins’s strategy of syntactical appropriation serves a specific – if familiar – purpose. In keeping with tried and tested modernist methods, Jenkins manipulates language here in an attempt to more accurately represent subjective experience. His penchant for compound words and composite phrases can be understood as a characteristically modern or even sub-Joycean attempt to describe a theatrically heightened emotional state through a conscious manipulation – and deliberate deformation – of language.

The self-conscious syntactic amplification underpinning this overly dramatic ‘Heart-to-Heart’ is echoed in other contributions in the first volume of Blues. In many ways, Jenkins’s syntactically compacted ‘Portrait’ can be read as the inverse of Parker Tyler’s typographically fragmented and diffuse ‘Sonnet’. As will become clear soon enough, the New Orleans-born Tyler (1904–74) was to play an important role in Ford’s life and literary career. For the time being, however, I want to emphasize the fact that Tyler’s ‘Sonnet’ reveals that a shift away from some of the precepts associated with first-generation modernism did indeed begin to emerge in the first volume of Blues. Published in the second issue of Blues, Tyler’s poetic experiments also represent a direct challenge to pre-existing modernist ideals about coherence and controlled aesthetic patterning. Here are the opening lines:

I smell an oriental luxury

from him

his suit is brown (Blues 1: 2, 50)

So far, so conventional. Yet the poem gradually becomes more difficult to parse as it progresses:

I smell an or-

riental lux

I love his nose

ury

from him (Blues 1: 2, 50)

Increasingly prone to typographical proliferation and syntactical disjunction, Tyler’s fractured and interruptive declaration of love ends ambiguously:

I smell an orien-

tal

he’s in busi

luxury from him

ness

I

a Jew and O his sex ap

smell

an

peal

rien

him

from

ury

lux

smell (Blues 1: 2, 50)

Tyler’s formally self-conscious ‘Sonnet’ recalls the typographically experimental work of earlier avant-garde writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire and – somewhat closer to home – E. E. Cummings. Like Ford, Tyler was an enthusiastic supporter of Cummings. This enthusiasm is evident in an unpublished and undated article written by Tyler. In his ‘Imaginary Conversation between Mr E. E. Cummings and the Editors of BLUES’, Tyler poses a number of questions. His first question to ‘Mr Cummings’ sets the tone. ‘Do you realize’, Tyler asks, ‘that much poetry is now being written which owes something to you in technique and in general esthetic, but that this poetry is showing a distinction of its own?’⁹² Clearly, Tyler’s poem owes something to Cummings ‘in technique and in general esthetic’. But the qualification Tyler attaches to his question is equally pertinent. Tyler is making a clear ‘distinction’ here between his work and that of older, more established modernists such as Cummings. This desire to differentiate is indicative of a particular mindset, of a desire to break away from extant patterns of aesthetic production. Suffice to say, while Tyler does draw upon Cummings’s earlier typographical experiments, the effect produced by the younger writer’s poetry is markedly different from that of his significantly older modernist idol.

Tyler’s fondness for and concurrent desire to move away from the work of writers such as Cummings also resonates when considered in relation to the criticism offered by the aforementioned Riding and Graves. In their Survey, Riding and Graves note that context is crucial when reading Cummings. They suggest that Cummings’s poems ‘seem to support any charge of irrational freakiness, but in their context are completely intelligible’.⁹³ In other words, while such poetry might look chaotic on the page, it is actually relatively coherent. Now consider Tyler’s contribution to Blues. David Arnold argues that Tyler’s ‘Sonnet’ ‘parodies the conventional sonnet in its disarrangement; there is a discernible formal design but one that works at the expense of sense’.⁹⁴ In Tyler’s hands, ‘compositional units clash like tectonic plates, resulting in not only the disruption of syntax but also the fragmentation of individual words.’⁹⁵ In this fashion, Tyler’s treatment of poetic syntax goes much further than that of Cummings. This is especially true of the syntactically ambiguous, cascading finale of Tyler’s poem. The disjunction at the end of this particular ‘Sonnet’ challenges expectations about coherence. And that is precisely the point: the deliberate omission of what Lynn Keller once described as the ‘controlling patterns’ underwriting first-generation modernist poetic production distinguishes Tyler’s altogether more disruptive approach from those of his forebears.⁹⁶

But why dwell on Tyler’s work at such great length in a volume devoted to the study of Charles Henri Ford? Tyler played a very important and even decisive role in Ford’s career. In a manner not dissimilar to Ford, Tyler had been born into a fairly peripatetic family in the American South. Arriving in New York at the age of twenty, Tyler quickly established himself in the historically queer enclave of Greenwich Village. Having struck up a correspondence with Ford (who was still in Mississippi), Tyler encouraged the younger poet to visit him in New York, which Ford did in January 1930. Sharing similar tastes in art, men, and books, the two soon became firm friends. Around this time, Tyler also assumed an associate position on the editorial board of Ford’s modernist little magazine. Tyler’s role in the development of the second volume of Blues denotes the beginning of what was to become an extremely fruitful period of collaborative exchange and dialogue with the like-minded Ford.

The other reason I discuss Tyler’s ‘Sonnet’ in significant detail here concerns the notion of editorial intent. Ford chose to position Tyler’s ‘Sonnet’ at the very end of the second issue of Blues. Alone, such a gesture seems at first glance fairly inconsequential. Having accepted the poem for publication Ford had to print it somewhere. Why not at the end of the issue? Surely it makes no difference in the grand scheme of things? Perhaps not. But having said that, maybe there is something to be made of how Ford chose to arrange the materials available to him at the time. Let us now compare the respective texts with which Ford chose to open and close the second issue of Blues. This is how the March 1929 edition of Ford’s magazine gets going:

1. Government for utility only.

2. Article 211 of the penal code to be amended by the 12 words;

THIS STATUTE DOES NOT APPLY TO

WORKS OF LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC MERIT.

3. Vestal’s bill or some other decent and civilized copyright act to be passed.

Foot-note: Instead of EVERYBODY’S going to New York ten or a dozen bright young lads ought to look in on the national capital. We need several novels in the vein of Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring dealing not with helpless rural morons but with ‘our rulers’ and the ‘representatives of the people’. (Blues 1: 2, 29)

It should come as no surprise to find that this piece, replete as it is with vaguely conspiratorial mutterings about penal codes and good governance, belongs to Ezra Pound. The question immediately arises: Why lead with this stereotypically didactic, worryingly magisculed piece? Ford’s decision to open with Pound’s ‘Program 1929’ certainly comes across as a little odd. Given what we have said already about Ford’s desire to differentiate himself from his literary elders, the decision to afford Pound’s programmatic, hectoring, and above all else rote article pride of place in the second Blues reads as more than a touch counter-intuitive. How then can we account for such a decision? There are two related factors in play here. The first is largely pragmatic. Ford was well aware of the fact that Pound’s name carried a significant amount of cultural weight. As such, it seems reasonable to assume that Ford’s decision to open with Pound’s piece was, in part at least, an attempt to shore up the modernist credentials of his recently established, relatively unknown little magazine – a magazine which, it should be added, carried in its first volume a host of works by other, similarly prominent modernists. However, there is more to matters in this instance than mere editorial expediency. This brings me back to the notion of editorial intent. It is not coincidental that Ford chose to lead with the prose of a famous first-generation modernist figurehead. Nor is it an accident that he chose to close the same issue with the work of an aspiring second-generation modernist writer. On the contrary, it is possible to read such an act of editorial intent as a symbolic gesture of sorts, a passing of the modernist torch from one generation to the next. Out with the old and in with the new, if you will.

Truth be told, Ford didn’t always get things entirely right when it came to matters such as this. The first volume of Blues is at times, to put it politely, a bit of a conceptual mess. This is especially true of the fourth and fifth issues. Ford’s magazine reaches a definite impasse as it moves into what we might term its middle period. Reading these two issues together, it becomes apparent that very few of the pieces in the fourth and fifth Blues provided much in the way of exciting, relevant, or fresh modernist rhythms.⁹⁷ At this point, having watched his little magazine drift into conceptual and aesthetic slightness, an increasingly frustrated Ford was forced as editor to take stock. Ford’s decision to publish the infamous American expatriate Harry Crosby in the fifth issue of Blues is especially important. Positioned at the very end of the fifth Blues, Crosby’s ‘Trumpet of Departure,’ denotes a subtle change in Ford’s editorial decision-making process and heralds a shift in the overall direction of his little magazine. ‘Trumpet of Departure’ begins:

Abominable dead harbor of the Past. You are the poison Satan urges me to drink. I smell the stench of your wharves even to this day. Your coils of ropes are serpents ready to strike. Your warehouses house enormous sacks of bric a brac (ha! the tyranny of things). Your tumbrel-wagons are piled high with the empty barrels of hypocrisy. (Blues 1: 5, 130)

Crosby’s opening remark resonates in the wider context of the first volume of Ford’s Blues, and Ford utilizes Crosby in order to confirm his little magazine’s symbolic departure from clichéd modes of modernist expression. Moreover, Ford’s positioning of the émigré Crosby at the close of the fifth issue anticipates the latter’s reappearance at the very close of the sixth Blues.

It is in the sixth issue of Blues from July 1929 that Ford’s critique of certain modernist modes begins to take off. In the second issue of Blues brief mention had been made of the fact that a special issue of Ford’s magazine was already in the works. Among other things, this announcement indicates that Ford had a clear idea from the outset regarding the direction in which he hoped to take his magazine. ‘An Expatriate Number of Blues is planned for the near future’, the uncredited statement reads, ‘containing poems and stories by those writers living abroad who, though writing in English, have decided that America and [the] American environment are not hospitable to creative work’ (Blues 1: 2, 52). Not all that long after, in the summer of 1929, another uncredited advertisement trumpeting the cause of Blues appeared in the famous and hugely influential ‘Revolution of the Word’ double-issue of Eugene Jolas’s transition. Structured around three central claims, this announcement – ‘Out of a Blue Sky’ – declares:

BLUES is a magazine of a more complete revolt against the cliché and commonplace welcoming poetry and prose radical in form subject or treatment.

BLUES is a haven for the unorthodox in america and for those writers living abroad who though writing in english have decided that america and american environment are not hospitable to creative work.

BLUES is a cooperative experiment and cannot at present pay for contributions but the magazine will be given wide distribution among critics writers and those interested in modern literature in europe and the states.⁹⁸

This announcement, which doubles as an unofficial literary manifesto of sorts, reminds us once again that Ford did indeed listen to Pound’s advice about the running of a little magazine (consider in particular the tripartite structure Ford uses here). In addition, this advertisement, as you will have already spotted, borrows from the statement printed in the second issue of Blues. There is, however, one key difference. Notice that Ford now seeks to describe his magazine as a ‘haven’ for ‘unorthodox’ writing. This point of distinction is one to which we will return in our discussion of the second volume of Blues. For the time being, this qualification is important as it gestures towards the role that Ford hoped Blues might eventually perform. Without wishing to jump too far ahead, I propose that Ford came to conceive of his magazine an inclusive textual environment, as a social ‘cooperative’ forged by a host of ‘unorthodox’ writers; as a materialist ‘haven’ that might provide shelter and refuge for emerging literary talent, if you prefer.⁹⁹

Before we get to that, a little more on the sixth issue of Blues. The origins of Ford’s ‘Expatriate Number’ can perhaps be traced back to an earlier comment made by William Carlos Williams in the second issue of Blues. In ‘For a New Magazine’, Williams posited that Ford’s Blues ‘might too open up a path for the appearance of Americans in Europe and elsewhere where their observations, their serious observations of other countries and peoples might be laid before us for decent study’ (Blues 1: 2, 30). The expatriate issue of Blues represented an editorial coup for the geographically isolated Ford, yet to meet any of his contributors in the flesh. Superficially, the expatriate Blues followed the pattern established in the previous issues. At first glance, it might be tempting to say that the work of prominent older modernists – such as Gertrude Stein and Hilda Doolittle – bolstered the profile of the expatriate issue of Blues significantly. However, while the July 1929 edition of Ford’s little magazine does feature a number of contributions from venerable American expatriate first-generation modernists, by no means does it rely on them.

The sixth issue of Blues opens with Stein’s portrait of the French avant-gardist Georges Hugnet and closes with Crosby’s rhetorically overblown, mystical ‘House of Ra’. Sandwiched between Stein and Crosby’s first- and second-generation modernist pieces were the contributions of younger expatriate writers like Walter Lowenfels, Eugene Jolas, Kay Boyle, Leigh Hoffman, Harold J. Samelson, George Linze (translated by Samelson), and Laurence Vail. We can appreciate the logic behind Ford’s decision to publish an expatriate issue of Blues. Ford evidently hoped to tap into a rich tradition of dynamic modernist expatriatism (embodied in periodical form by earlier modernist little magazines like Broom, Secession, and This Quarter). However, Ford’s gesture of expatriate solidarity ran the risk of appearing outmoded from the outset. Indeed, as Daniel Katz notes, ‘the association of modernism with expatriation and exile is venerable to the point of being a cliché’.¹⁰⁰ Yet the arrangement of materials in the sixth Blues – especially at the end of the issue – is designed precisely to combat such a cliché. As will become clear, the sixth Blues signals instead a shift away from particular modes of modernist expatriate living that had become completely clichéd by 1929.

Admittedly, things do get off to a rather slow start. The expatriate Blues seems initially to celebrate the condition of voluntary exile. Consider ‘Antipodes’ by Walter Lowenfels:

A taxi! A taxi!

To Nineveh! – Rome!

No two people walk alike.

I shall

Search the antipodes

to find

Spring where Helen lies

Constantly out of season. (Blues 1: 6, 146)

Lowenfels’s evocation of wanderlust is wholly conventional and rife with middle-class cliché. Dissatisfied with his or her surroundings, the poem’s unidentified speaker is hailing a taxi that they hope will transport them to the famous historical and cultural sites of the Old World, places where everyone walks with an individualistic gait. However, Lowenfels’s poem is also something of an exception. Direct references to the condition of expatriatism are few and far between in the sixth Blues. Not that it really matters. After all, nowhere does it say that expatriate writers must address issues arising from their expatriate existence. What does matter is that we better understand the process of editorial patterning at work in the final issue of the first volume of Ford’s Blues. Broadly speaking, the first half of the issue is alternately serious (Leigh Hoffman’s ‘A Great Day for a Little Man’) and sincere (Kay Boyle’s ‘Confession to Eugene Jolas’). In contrast, the second half is generally more playful and parodic (Crosby’s contribution being a notable exception). As in preceding issues of Blues, the contributions that carry the most critical weight in the expatriate issue come at the close: Laurence Vail’s ‘Meek Madness in Capri or Suicide for Effect’ and Crosby’s ‘House of Ra’. Vail and Crosby’s contributions to the expatriate edition of Ford’s little magazine should be read together. In what follows, I posit that Vail’s sardonic ‘Suicide for Effect’ acts as a pre-emptive corrective to Crosby’s overblown ‘House of Ra’.

Crosby’s idiosyncratic, yet evidently Lawrentian-inflected brand of sun worship epitomizes his contribution to the expatriate Blues. Here is a choice extract: ‘O Sun I in to you the arrow of my soul (under the sharp point that pierces the flesh); let the sun shine (and the Sun shone) on the Pyramids and Palms, on the Step Pyramid at Sakkara, on the Unknown Pyramid of Beyond, on the Unknown Pyramid that stands between the body and the soul’ (Blues 1: 6, 160). What are we to make of such writing? Dougald McMillian notes that one of the infamous by-products of Crosby’s inscrutable second-generation blend of lyrical mysticism and modernist aestheticism was ‘a strangely positive personal cult of suicide’.¹⁰¹ This comment helps us better appreciate Vail’s ‘Suicide for Effect’. From top to bottom, title to typography, Vail’s poem is absolutely parodic and satirical. I want to argue that Ford positioned Vail’s poem where he did in order to prefigure Crosby’s appearance, while simultaneously lampooning his fellow expatriate’s sexual extravagances, as well as his well-documented poetic and mystical pretensions. Expatriate decadence and acts of violence go hand-in-hand throughout Vail’s contribution to the sixth Blues:

I shall slide into the embassy like a knife

or shall it be a brothel

a chic church

and rip the passports

stopping the slits with birdies (Blues 1: 6, 155)

Vail’s evocation of clichéd expatriate living is as unappealing as it is unromantic. Much is made of ‘gums obscene’ and ‘grease spots of vice’ (Blues 1: 6, 155). Vail casts aspersions on the sexual proclivities that those ostensibly virile – and primarily heterosexual – modernists like Crosby deemed so important to their aesthetic:

old right arm cardboard

drowsy and numb with thumbs

drowsy and numb with thumbs

my sex a drooping lily (Blues 1: 6, 155)

Vail’s seemingly impotent poetic subject is obsessed with sex and death in equal measure:

I’ll peel me quick

naked but unexciting miseree

tiptoe a something high

a roof a lash a head note

and now

to death mayhap

amusement

leap I leap I (Blues 1: 6, 157)

The depiction of death as mere ‘amusement’ is significant. Vail is suggesting that the poet-narrator of ‘Suicide for Effect’ is prone to pretentious, empty posturing ‘in mystic mines/purses and easy journeys/in swift plush chairs’ (Blues 1: 6, 154). Vail then appears to chide expatriate figures like Crosby as the poem gradually draws to a close:

the end in the end is the end of ends

thy young man was a mess

a mess

a mess

a mess

a mess

a mess (Blues 1: 6, 158)

What are we to make of this strange poem? As I mentioned before, the answer has everything to do with editorial intent. Positioned as it is immediately before Crosby’s ‘House of Ra’, Vail’s ‘Suicide for Effect’ serves in a sense to undercut the former writer’s closing, remarkably po-faced contribution. It is also worth noting that Ford’s act of editorial ordering also lends the last stanza of Vail’s poem an air of uncanny prescience:

I am most dead

hence not without grandeur

of sorts it is not meet to scratch

beyond extremis dead? very.

the final journey should have an air

begad my coffin is no taxi (Blues 1: 6, 158)

As we know, Harry Crosby committed suicide some five months after ‘House of Ra’ appeared in the expatriate number of Blues. Tyrus Miller situates Crosby’s death in relation to the wider developmental trajectory of Anglo-American modernism. Here is what Miller has to say on the matter. He argues that by the end of the 1920s,

The prophetic role of the modernist artist had been severely challenged by the convergence of several major currents. Modernism itself had aged, and its claims to represent the future had often proved hollow. Its imperative to innovate threatened modernism’s adherents with personal and artistic exhaustion, exemplified most poignantly, perhaps, by the suicides of Harry Crosby and Hart Crane.¹⁰²

Developing this point, Miller argues that the sort of writing that flourished in and beyond the 1930s ‘appears a self-conscious manifestation of the ageing and decline of modernism, in both its institutional and ideological dimensions’.¹⁰³ Further to this, in Miller’s estimation, ‘it is as if the phosphorescence of decay had illuminated the passageway to a re-emergence of innovative writing after modernism.’¹⁰⁴ There is a sense, in Miller’s writing, that some sort of modernist threshold has been crossed: ‘Sinking themselves faithlessly into a present devoid of future, into a movement grinding to a halt and an aesthetic on the threshold of dissolution, the writers of late modernism prepared themselves, without hope, to pass over to the far side of the end.’¹⁰⁵

This is a rather bleak assessment. Bearing Miller’s assertion in mind, I suggest that the sixth issue of Ford’s little magazine presented a similar symbolic passage to viable modes of innovative writing that began to emerge in the subsequent issue of Blues. However, it is important to recognize that the writing that began to emerge in the second volume of Ford’s little magazine was not, as Miller might have it, completely devoid of hope. Indeed, as we will now see, one of the merits of the boisterous and assertive second volume of Blues is that it productively complicates Miller’s theorization of a general move into a period of late modern despondency.

5

William Carlos Williams’s ‘Introduction to a Collection of Modern Writing’ captures something of the character of the second volume of Ford’s Blues:

We now boldly assert that saving the retreat there is no other way for writing in the present state of the world than that which BLUES has fostered.

‘You MUST come over.’ (Blues 2, 7: 3)

Printed at the start of the seventh issue of Blues, Williams’s opening introduction provides us with a useful means to approach the second volume of Ford’s little magazine. The only first-generation modernist to be featured in what was the first quarterly edition of Blues, Williams’s introductory salvo echoes Tyrus Miller’s aforementioned account of the re-emergence of ‘innovative writing’ in the wake of first-generation modernism. A threshold does seem to have been crossed. At the same time, this introductory piece also chimes with something Williams said a few months earlier, in the second issue of Blues. In ‘Notes for a New Magazine’, Williams argued that younger second-generation modernist writers such as Ford needed to build on the literary advances made by their elders. In particular, ‘the young writers of today must not be allowed to lose what those of 1914 and thereabouts won – even to be held as weakly as it is – with difficulty’ (Blues 1: 2, 30). Filled as it is with talk of ‘difficulty’ and weakness, this is, it seems fair to say, hardly the most inspiring of railing cries. Williams’s contribution to the seventh issue of Blues continues in much the same vein. ‘We live, gentle reader, in a world very much gone to pot’, Williams writes, ‘the thought of it tortured, the acts of it blind, the flight from it impossible. What to do? Either retreat, swallowing whole, as complete as it is the SUMMA THEOLOGIAE, the philosophy dependent on therefrom and the poetry pinned thereto and go to rest with John Donne in the tight little island of dreams where all past wealth is garnered; or face the barren waves –’ (Blues 2: 7, 3).¹⁰⁶

What to do? The question would have been on Ford’s mind around the time he was editing and publishing the seventh issue of Blues. Consider the letter Kenneth Rexroth sent on 30 November 1929:

I have been thinking a great deal about Blues and the work it has been doing for U.S. letters. Certainly you would be making a great mistake to discontinue it, for it has been one of the most valuable, perhaps the most valuable, periodicals in a long, long time, and with the #7 it has really just begun. It seems to me that the first 6 numbers were primarily explorative, intent on discovering what exactly a new generation of writers wanted to say, both you and your contributors were in a sense feeling your way.¹⁰⁷

To this, Rexroth adds: ‘Not until #7 does your editing become completely conscious in its selectivity (of course you had more time) and the work of your contributors in the majority of cases achieves at least a preliminary finish.’¹⁰⁸ While I would seek to dispute the suggestion that Ford’s editorial selectivity only ‘became completely conscious’ for the first time in the seventh number of Blues, I think it possible to read Rexroth’s letter in relation to the tripartite account of little magazines proffered by Hamilton. That is, we might say that Rexroth is here suggesting that Ford’s Blues had now moved into a phase of genuine identity.

To be sure, something seems to have changed. Led by Ford, the second-generation modernists featured in the seventh Blues sought to demonstrate that the contemporary situation into which they entered was not altogether hopeless. Where Williams saw only ‘barren waves’, the energetic second-generation Blues writers saw the opportunity to make a positive intervention in the contemporary cultural field. Many of the second-generation contributors to the seventh issue of Ford’s little magazine follow the example set by Paul Bowles:

No, I’m tired of being the passive element

I’m tired of hearing your fingers snap

And of feeling my muscles respond without volition (Blues 2: 7, 25)

Tired of waiting, the speaking subject in ‘Promenade des Anglais’ wants evidently to affect a more active, conscious sort of literary intervention. In this sense ‘Promenade des Anglais’ might be read as a poetic statement of intent. Bowles’s speaking subject is evidently no longer content with mere passivity. His decidedly impatient speaker desires to bring about a more active and conscious sort of literary intervention. This desire corresponds directly with Ford, who, as Rexroth recognized, sought to make an active intervention in the contemporary literary sphere with the publication of the seventh issue of Blues. The animated seventh Blues is best understood as a conscious, confident – and by no means hopeless – response to some of the established modes of modernism set out in the earlier issues of Blues. In contrast to the previous issues, the seventh Blues is assertive and visually arresting. In purely visual terms, we can compare Andrée Rexroth’s abstract geometrical artwork with the unchanging, uniformly minimal – or depending how you choose to look at it, formally conservative – cover design adorning the previous six issues of Ford’s little magazine. Rexroth’s cover is in this sense a visual marker serving to differentiate the seventh Blues from the previous issues.

The first fictional contribution to the seventh issue of Blues functions in a similar fashion. Edgar Calmer’s ‘Any Given Segment’ revisits the expatriate scene evoked in the previous issue of Blues. By a certain time on any given day, Calmer’s narrator writes, ‘the lesbians will be up on the terrace of the deux magots, warming in the sun. myself rising and to the window, acutely hungover and with the threatened attack of falling of the face. before me in the courtyard all dank summer, sweating and rising in mist’ (Blues 2: 7, 4). Having name-checked the famous rendezvous of the Parisian literary elite, Calmer’s unnamed narrator proceeds to describe ‘the indescribable clatter the absurd people. with comedy like that in the streets the theatre has a right to be bad in this country’ (Blues 2: 7, 4). Reading on, it soon becomes clear that a number of American expatriates dominate this particular milieu:

voices: ‘listen dearie maybe you haven’t a yen for me and maybe that’s too bad. but you can’t fix me you’re just as queer as I am dearie’. there was once a frenchman seen in this cafe but that was during the second empire and besides the wench he came to meet is dead. so are we all dead. I am dead. I have been dead three days and am just beginning to stench. (Blues 2: 7, 4)

The sentiment expressed in ‘Any Given Segment’ corresponds directly with the outlook expressed in the preceding issue of Blues. Like Vail’s satirical ‘Suicide for Effect’, Calmer’s ‘Any Given Segment’ reads as critical of the expatriate condition. Specifically, Calmer’s narrator has clear reservations about the apparent expatriate oversaturation of Paris. Secondly, consider how the story ends. In a turn of phrase that anticipates Tyrus Miller’s aforementioned account of the emergence of late modernist literature, Calmer’s ‘Any Given Segment’ closes with yet another suggestion that a significant threshold of sorts has indeed been reached. Finally, consider the inherently queer and camp ‘voices’ that feature prominently in the above passage.

Jaime Hovey argues that queer modernist culture ‘takes great pleasure in talking for its own sake’.¹⁰⁹ Hovey suggests that the idle chatter produced by what she describes as a logorrheic form of modernism ‘takes great pleasure in its own performance, and suggests the perversity of this pleasure by insisting that it circulate as the spectacle of its own pleasure, already framed for an audience constructed as an in-crowd of participants’.¹¹⁰ According to Hovey, ‘The pleasure of the talker taking pleasure in herself, and the audience taking pleasure in this pleasure, is then circulated as the foremost pleasure of art.’¹¹¹ In addition, ‘hearing one’s self being heard, like seeing one’s self seeing one’s self, embraces self-consciousness as a strategy and pose’.¹¹² This deployment of self-consciousness as both a strategy and a pose is pretty much exactly what we get in Calmer’s contribution to the seventh Blues. The haughty pieces of unabashedly voluble chatter that punctuate the monologue of Calmer’s sardonic narrative form part of ‘a self-consciously theatrical stage patter that dramatizes abnormality, anxiety, effeminacy, and queerness’.¹¹³ However, at the same time it is important to recognize that the explicitly satirical aspect of Calmer’s writing complicates our understanding of his contribution to the seventh Blues. There is undeniable ambiguity permeating Calmer’s treatment of the logorrheic chatter that circulates in his expatriate scene. There is simply no way of knowing what Calmer’s irritable narrator makes of all the non-normative theatricality and self-conscious queerness surrounding him. Putting it another way, how can we be certain that the queer scene represented in ‘Any Given Segment’ is celebrated, and not, like the other aspects of expatriate existence described by Calmer, simply satirized or deflated?

In a sense, it doesn’t really matter what Calmer’s narrator thinks. What matters instead is the way in which the queer voices assume a primary position in this, the very first piece of fiction to feature in the seventh Blues. They are explicit, in your face, and, as it turns out, going absolutely nowhere. Indeed, Calmer’s queer, chattering ‘voices’ were in good – and voluble – company in the second volume of Blues. The seventh Blues in particular includes inherently queer contributions like Ford’s demotic and melodramatically logorrheic ‘Suite’, Tyler’s metaphorical account of non-normative sexual awakening, and Richard John’s ‘Robert in Berlin’. The seventh issue of Ford’s little magazine thus hints at the viable possibility of a second-generation mode of modernist expression far removed from the ironic detachment and masculine rhetoric familiar to readers and students of first-generation modernism. The self-consciously theatrical and effeminate pieces of positive ‘stage patter’ featured in texts like Tyler’s ‘3 Poems’ and Ford’s ‘Suite’ also differentiates Blues from first-generation modernist little magazines such as, say, Wyndham Lewis’s Blast.¹¹⁴ While the antagonistic and oppositional editor of Blast wanted, as is well known, to banish the ‘effeminate lout within’,¹¹⁵ Ford sought to open up a communal, inclusive textual space in which self-consciously ‘effeminate’ and queer modernist voices might flourish without fear of chastisement or censorship. In this regard, the seventh Blues is an important critical document because it denotes a moment when Ford came tantalizingly close to realizing this ambition.

It seems fair to say that this moment had been a long time coming. Looking back, it now becomes apparent that clues as to the direction that Blues was to take had in fact been scattered like poetic breadcrumbs throughout earlier issues. Recall, for instance, the ‘Sonnet’ that Parker Tyler published in the second number of Ford’s magazine. As well as challenging assumptions about coherence and meaning, Tyler’s tonally ambiguous ‘Sonnet’ also opens up a textual space for the poetic investigation of queer desire. The opening lines of the poem foreground the fact that the unnamed – and ungendered – speaking subject of Tyler’s poem is enamoured with an unidentified ‘suit’-wearing businessman. Exuding a fair amount of ‘sex appeal’, oblique descriptions of this anonymous and perfumed figure begin to dominate while the syntax of the poem continues to proliferate:

I dream of

smell an oriental lux-

ur

him at night that

y from him

he

I

makes love to me yes

smell an orien-

tal luxury from

strenuous love

him (Blues 1: 2, 50)

One particular phrase stands out in this syntactically disjunctive passage: ‘He makes love to me.’ Satirical or not, the assertion of queer desire that we find in Tyler’s ‘Sonnet’ is the first of numerous subsequent expressions scattered throughout the first volume of Blues. We get a better sense of this in another of Tyler’s contributions. The poetic sequence ‘Frustration: From a Slender Coffin’ appeared in the fourth issue of Blues. Entitled ‘He the More, I the Less’, the first poem to feature in Tyler’s sequence is a treatment of the vagaries of non-normative desire:

(But if all over

the round world

There were a coming all

To his center

I there should be first

Kneeling, having eclipsed the

Bright sun, reaching him

In his bed,

Better loved and more willing

To be fondled because of

Things which came before most

Sweetly in the shrinelight

Memory of the heart a talking) (Blues 1: 4, 96)

As Tyler’s sensual poem unfurls it becomes clear that all is not well:

The breeze that cheats while I love him,

All over the world will be in losing

Memory the part of him I hold here now

Sweetly in the bed a grim giving all of him (Blues 1: 4, 96)

Increasingly, it appears that the ‘willing’ devotee of Tyler’s poem is locked in an oppressive relationship with a self-centred lover (the clue being in the title). Despite recognizing the shortcomings of his supposed beloved, Tyler’s devotee seeks nevertheless to

Live and die an honest giver

So I make a breathing

Wind and what I lose

Is national and overcome

By what I gain in love

A paradise

Of breezeless monitude (Blues 1: 4, 96)

The ‘paradise’ evoked at the end of ‘He the More, I the Less’ is, as we can see, hardly perfect. Tyler’s neologism ‘monitude’ suggests as much. Tyler’s splicing together of ‘monad’ and ‘solitude’ implies that the arid and ‘breezeless’ idyll that the steadfastly ‘honest’ devotee claims to have gained through ‘love’ is destined to be a lonely one. Tyler’s devotee is well aware of the absurdity that lies at the heart of his illusory, solitary ‘paradisal estate’ (Blues 1: 4, 96). Yet he seems unable to make a positive intervention. The reader is left with the impression that the emotional life of Tyler’s devoted and ‘honest giver’ is characterized by compromise, self-deception, and meek passivity.

While the conclusion of ‘He the More, I the Less’ is decidedly subdued, it should not prevent us from appreciating the fact that Tyler’s queer poem serves a specific critical function: it acts as a counterweight to some of the more universalizing tendencies endemic in certain models of earlier modernist expression. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reasons that the ‘rhetoric of male modernism serves a purpose of universalizing, naturalizing, and thus substantially voiding – as depriving of content – elements of a specifically and historically male homosexual rhetoric’.¹¹⁶ In this sense, poems like ‘Sonnet’ and ‘He the More, I the Less’ are interesting and important as they effectively invert the naturalizing logic that heterosexual (high, first-generation) modernism often deploys in order to keep homosexual rhetoric firmly in the closet. Ford, I want now to suggest, was well aware of this; it in part explains why he was more than willing to cede a significant amount of space in the various issues of magazine to a poet such as Tyler. Following Juan A. Suárez, I want also to suggest that Ford (and Tyler) instinctively recognized that, ‘if modernism provided an outlet for queer expression, it did so in a way that was intermittent and conditioned. Modernism was, in sum, as much a liberation as a closet’.¹¹⁷ Desiring to engender a textual space in which individual poetic voices could exist according to their own specificity, Ford came thus to favour forms of demotic and queer writing that sought to break away from the closeted conditions established in some earlier, predominately masculine models of literary modernism.

6

Sadly, however, Blues was to fold just as things were starting to get really interesting; it would be almost sixty years before Ford published another issue of his modernist little magazine.¹¹⁸ The speed at which Blues emerged and faded from public view is a factor that caused Ford no end of strife. Judging by the reviews it received at the time, most of Ford’s peers simply didn’t really understand what he had hoped to achieve with Blues. Some of these people had at one time or another expressed great interest in Blues. A number of them had even been published in Blues. Joseph Vogel was one of these people. Around the time of the seventh issue of Blues, in the October 1929 issue of New Masses, Vogel suggested that Ford’s little magazine, on whose editorial board he had once sat, ‘has persistently avoided life and human beings. The work in it has been metaphysical, treating with petty emotions, describing souls of lousy poets’¹¹⁹ These are strong words, which would have in all likelihood surprised Ford.¹²⁰ I think it fair to say that Ford would have also been taken aback by Vogel’s assertion that ‘it is time that young writers dissociate themselves from all these abstractions, as many have long ago done from Pound, the dean of corpses that promenade in graveyards’.¹²¹ What are we to make of such a statement? Given what we have established as regards Ford’s desire to break away from certain modes of first-generation modernism, I’m not all that sure Vogel gets it right when he moves to associate Blues with that ‘dean’ of high modern ‘corpses’, Pound. Speaking of first-generation modernism, I wonder what Vogel would have made of the following piece of prose, which was printed in the eighth issue of Blues:

Experiment we must have, but it seems to me that a number of the younger writers have forgotten that writing doesn’t mean just inventing new ways to say ‘So’s your Old Man’. I swear I myself can’t make out for the life of me what many of them are talking about, and I have a will to understand them that they will not find in many another. (Blues 2: 8, 47)

These words belong to William Carlos Williams. Found in the cautionary essay, ‘Bread and Caviar Again: A Warning to the New Writer’, this passage reveals that Williams’s enthusiasm for Ford’s project had – by early 1930 – taken something of a nosedive. As to which of the writers Williams couldn’t comprehend? Somewhat frustratingly though absolutely typical of his criticism, he isn’t all that specific when it comes to details. Still, the question I think we need to ask here is this: Who gets it right? Williams or Vogel? In a word, neither. Vogel gets it wrong when he moves reductively to equate the first-generation modernist Pound and the second-generation Ford; Williams is wrong to assume – in a passage that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in Riding and Graves’s Survey – that much if not all of the second-generation modernist work featured in the later issues of Blues was intended as nothing more than a collective thumbing of the nose aimed in the general direction of first-generation literary modernism.

Yet things were more complicated than either Williams or Vogel were willing to concede, or even admit. That being said, this wouldn’t be the last time Ford was to find himself – or his work – caught between two seemingly antithetical positions. Perhaps this explains why he felt moved to draft something approaching a proper manifesto. Co-authored with Parker Tyler, Ford drafted a lengthy ‘Program’, which was to have been issued in the tenth issue of Blues. This is how it begins: ‘Since a program may begin in the middle of things, this, in a sense, is true of Blues’ program. We are going to commit ourselves about certain things which, to let alone any longer would be to present as permissible.’¹²² Whereas before ‘the time to speak had not yet come – there has been growing in all directions a curious plant of opinion and trend, criteria and predilection, of which Blues may be easily conceived to be a name. It is to contradict such a superstitious conception that this program has been formed’. Couched in unnecessarily oblique language, the above extract also hints at why Ford felt the need to append a ‘Program’ to what was meant to be a tenth Blues.¹²³ Despite being rather short on detail, the unpublished ‘Program’ was intended to counteract the ‘great deal of nonsense’ that had been ‘expressed about Blues in the pulpy mouths of various licensed literary bushrangers, identifying themselves, for the moment, as more or less literary commentators’.¹²⁴ Ford and Tyler’s ‘Program’ makes clear that, initially, ‘Blues had not deemed it necessary to offer a protest in [sic] behalf of its rightful constituents’.¹²⁵ But now, having listened to the criticism of those such as Williams and Vogel, it seems that Ford recognized that a different approach was needed.

Yet the fact remains that Ford and Tyler’s ‘Program’ went unpublished. Could it have made a difference? Maybe. In any case, Ford and Blues now began to slip through the cracks at a rather alarming rate. Dissatisfied with this newfound position on the avant-garde sidelines,¹²⁶ Ford (again with the aid of his trusted lieutenant Tyler) sought in the pages of The Sewanee Review to launch one final, spirited defence of the soon-to-be discontinued Blues. Drawing to a close, I propose that this article holds the key to understanding precisely what it was Ford had hoped to achieve with Blues. In ‘What Happens to a Radical Literary Magazine’, Ford and Tyler exclaim proudly: ‘Blues started with a jump – with a spurt from the brain. The world was not prepared for it, for the world is never prepared for the really good things that are also new.’¹²⁷ Ford and Tyler also do their best in this piece to deflect attention away from what they seem to have come to regard as shortcomings in the early issues of Blues. ‘Obviously’, they concede, ‘something attacked the nostrils in Denmark, and, speaking more plainly, each notice had been fraught with a determination to overlook what was worthwhile (however sometimes awkward or abortive) in Blues.’¹²⁸ ‘No doubt’, Ford and Tyler admit,

some perfectly worthless stuff got in: it was not, at first, our intention to publish blueribbon literature. The general tendency in taste was certainly toward the significant in legitimate new literary modes. But the important thing to be considered is the fate which must befall any attempt at cultural renovation (we prefer the word to revolution), for each attempt has the partially secret but wholly venomous antipathy of the lords of cultural destiny.¹²⁹

Notice in particular the distinction Ford and Tyler make here between cultural renovation and revolution. Ford is now suggesting that his little magazine was characterized by the former tendency: renovation. This distinction between revolutionary rupture and more tempered cultural renovation is of fundamental importance when attempting to understand Blues. It is only by considering the role renovation plays in Ford’s thinking that we are properly able to understand Blues. However, given that Ford places great emphasis on cultural renovation in The Sewanee Review piece about Blues, it does seem surprising that initial advertisements for his little magazine would choose, as we heard earlier, to describe a process of ‘more complete revolt’. I want finally to suggest here that Ford’s tempering of his rhetoric can be understood as an attempt to more properly differentiate his magazine from competitors such as transition. This is where Ford’s distinction between outright revolution and more modest cultural renovation comes into play. The Sewanee Review article in this sense hints at a conversation between transition and Blues, with Ford slyly hinting that literature needs to be renovated or refurbished in contrast with the revolutionary rhetoric that famously underpinned Jolas’s second-generation modernist project. As to why Ford might think this? The answer speaks ultimately, I think, to Ford’s sense of the queer, of his desire both in and after Blues to produce a textual space – or renovated second-generation modernist ‘haven’ – in which ‘unorthodox’, purportedly abnormal figures traditionally excluded from mainstream literary discourse, might gather together, collaborate, and generally do as they saw fit. This, as we will now see, is something that came to the fore in Ford’s first major post-Blues project of the 1930s.

Notes

1 Some of these entries can be unintentionally humorous. For instance, the journal entry of 17 January 1923, which the fifteen-year-old Ford jotted down while enrolled at The Webb School in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, states simply: ‘I’ve got those dyin’, cryin’, homesick blues.’ Charles Henri Ford, ‘I Will Be What I Am: A Documentary Portrait’, [n.d.], 134, series 1, box, 3, folder 1, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, 26.

3 Having said that, Ford gets off to what might be regarded a slightly inauspicious start when it came to the highbrow. Dated 18 January 1924, the first primarily ‘literary’ entry in Ford’s journal concerns the author of Tarzan of the Jungle, Edgar Rice Burroughs. Ford describes Burroughs’s work as ‘rather fantastic but good nevertheless’. Ibid., 41.

3 Brief mention is made of Dickens’s David Copperfield in a journal entry dated 25 September 1924; Ford describes how he borrowed a volume of Hugo’s poetry from another student on 18 March 1925. Ibid., 54, 61.

4 Ibid., 70.

5 When it comes to the question of Ibsen’s standing in relation to the historical development of modernism, I defer to the analysis proffered by Toril Moi. She acknowledges that ‘on the one hand, [Ibsen] represents the unquestioned beginning of modernism in the theatre; on the other, there is a widespread feeling that however important he was for the development of modernism, Ibsen himself was not a modernist. Ibsen thus comes to occupy a strangely liminal position as an artist at once essential and irrelevant to the theory and history of modernism’. Taking issue with this view, Moi proposes instead ‘that the works of Henrik Ibsen provide a near-perfect genealogy of the emergence from the demise of idealism; and that by reintroducing the concept of idealism, we can see that what we usually call modernism is the result of a historical development that only really gathers pace after 1914’. Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1–2, 3.

6 Ford, ‘I Will Be What I Am’, 73.

7 Ibid., 75.

8 Ibid., 76, 75.

9 Ibid., 76.

10 Ibid., 77.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid., 77, 79.

13 Ibid., 79.

14 Ibid., 83.

15 Ford was also by now familiar with the work of Sigmund Freud. On 8 June 1926 Ford writes: ‘Finished Freud’s “A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis.” It seems to me that Sigmund has a libido-complex. Very!’ Ibid., 84.

16 Ibid., 90.

17 Ibid., 87.

18 Ford’s ‘Interlude’ appeared in the 20 August 1927 edition of The New Yorker.

19 Ibid., 91.

20 Ibid., 97.

21 Ibid., 105.

22 The palpable sense of delight Ford conveys in his journal upon receiving Pound’s postcard is perhaps telling in this regard.

23 Ibid., 91.

24 Ibid., 94.

25 As we will see, Ford found other ways to circumnavigate his geographical and cultural isolation.

26 John Howard has much to say about the complex history of same-sex desire in the American South. Take, for example, his opening remarks about the Ford’s home state, Mississippi. Howard notes that ‘to be labelled queer meant to be cast as different in any more or less threatening ways – from peculiarities of speech, manner, and daily habits to gender and sexual nonconformity’. In equal measure, however, ‘This ambiguity frequently benefitted those willing to test convention because it often shielded them from accusations of a more explicitly sexual – and thus menacing – nature.’ While Howard’s remarks pertain here directly to mid-twentieth-century Mississippi, we would, I think, do well to keep them in mind when approaching the formative years of Ford’s life and career. John Howard, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001), xi.

27 It seems that Ford went first to San Antonio in January 1923 to spend time with his ailing mother, Gertrude Cato Ford. Judging by ‘I Will Be What I Am’, Ford was, for a time at least, enrolled at a prominent Catholic university in San Antonio. On 28 January 1928 Ford wrote: ‘The crisis is past. I have registered at St. Mary’s. I have enrolled for French, Latin, English, biology and mathematics. There seems to be a paucity of students, but the ones there are do not look so bad. Brothers for instructors, of course. Think I will like it.’ Ford, ‘I Will Be What I Am’, 97.

28 Ibid., 115, 111, 112, 109, 110. Ford refers repeatedly to a certain ‘Pibas’ in his journal entries of 1928. Ford also alludes to an incident concerning a young man known as ‘Edward L.’ in a diary entry dated 29 May 1928: ‘A letter from Daddy [Charles L. Ford] saying to expect another cheque by Monday and that it would be the last if I wrote anymore to “that boy”, meaning, of course, Edward L. whom I haven’t heard from in God knows when.’ Ibid., 112. Truth be told though, this is pretty tame when compared to Ford’s later diaries. Consider the content of the following passage, taken from Ford’s (published) diary entry of October 1948: ‘When I was ten a man gave me a dollar to suck him off.’ Charles Henri Ford, Water From a Bucket: A Diary 1948-1957 (New York: Turtle Point Press, 2001), 12.

29 Having said that, Ford’s experiences in San Antonio certainly seem in some way to have impacted on his subsequent behaviour in Mississippi. He suggested as much in later life to the Mississippi-born photographer, Allen Frame. Pressed on his behaviour in Columbus, Mississippi, Ford recounted that ‘during the Blues days, in the neighborhood there was a counter cafe – so, fresh from Texas, editing Blues, I would say to the counter boys, “I’ll give you a dollar if you let me kiss you”’. Ford adds that he was ‘totally, totally uninhibited. Well, that didn’t make me very popular in Columbus, because, you know, word got around and all that’. Quoted in Allen Frame, ‘Charles Henri Ford’, Journal of Contemporary Art [n.d.]: http://www.jca-online.com/ford.html (accessed 22 January 2016).

30 Ford, ‘I Will Be What I Am’, 114.

31 Ibid., 118.

32 It appears that Ford left for Mississippi at the behest of his father. Ford mentions this on 28 July 1928: ‘A letter from Daddy saying I could come to Columbus and work for him if my plans were not to return to school this fall. He perhaps does not wish me to come until September but I’ll leave any day he sends me my fare.’ Ibid., 116.

33 If we were to borrow from the critical work of Scott Herring, we might say that Ford had already begun to codify ‘the metropolitan as the terminus of queer world making as many have come to know it’. Scott Herring, Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 4.

34 Ford, ‘I Will Be What I Am’, 116.

35 Ibid., 116.

36 Christina Britzolakis, ‘Making Modernism Safe for Democracy: The Dial (1920-1929)’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II, North America 1894-1960, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 88.

37 Britzolakis, ‘Making Modernism Safe for Democracy’, 87.

38 Ford, ‘I Will Be What I Am’, 100.

39 Until recently, relatively little has been written about Kathleen Tankersley Young (1903–33). By far the most insightful account of Young’s brief and tragic life can be found in Chapter 6 of Eric B. White, Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).

40 Ford, ‘I Will Be What I Am’, 100.

41 Ibid.

2 Quoted in Frame, ‘Charles Henri Ford’.

43 Pierre Bourdieu reasons that access to – and status within – the ever-shifting field of cultural production and power relations is determined by the possession and accumulation of cultural capital. While cultural capital does not necessarily ensure financial reward, the cultural benefits it does offer – honour, recognition, prestige, status – are invaluable. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure in the Literary Field (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).

44 Suzanne W. Churchill, ‘The Lying Game: Others and the Great Spectra Hoax of 1917’, in Little Magazines & Modernism: New Approaches, ed. Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 179.

45 Ford, ‘I Will Be What I Am’, 99.

46 Ibid., 81.

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid.

49 See Alexander Howard, ‘Into the 1930s: Troubadour (1928–32); Blues (1929–30); Smoke (1931–7); and Furioso (1939–53)’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II, North America 1894-1960, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 352–4.

50 See Howard, ‘Into the 1930s’, 350–2.

51 Grace Arlington Owen, ‘Untitled’, Troubadour 2, no. 6 (1930): 2.

52 Owen, ‘Untitled’, 2.

53 Quoted in Owen, ‘Untitled’, 2.

54 Hugh Kenner, A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (London: Marion Boyars, 1977), 169.

55 Kenner, A Homemade World, 169.

56 Charles Bernstein, ‘Objectivist Blues: Scoring Speech in Second-Wave Modernist Poetry and Lyrics’, American Literary History 20, nos. 1–2 (2008): 348.

57 Bernstein, ‘Objectivist Blues’, 348.

58 Kathleen Tankersley Young to Charles Henri Ford, 23 November 1928, series 3, box, 15, folder 6, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

59 Ford, Water From a Bucket, 182.

60 There are, of course, many ways in which we might interpret the title Ford chose for his modernist little magazine. Consider the stance that Eric B. White takes when it comes to the title of Blues: ‘Perhaps he felt it captured the “rhythms” of malaise, barrenness and cultural exhaustion that were gripping American modernists during the build-up to the stock market crash of 1929.’ Eric B. White, Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 188.

61 This troubling act of cultural appropriation in some senses mirrors the problematic application of dialect in earlier modernist praxis. Michael North reminds us that the modernist application of dialect is ‘a constant reminder of the literal unfreedom of slavery and of the political and cultural repression that followed’. Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 11.

62 There is, of course, another factor that could have feasibly informed Ford’s decision to call his magazine Blues. Perhaps he was responding in some way to the non-normative aspect of the blues. This is a subject that Eric Garber touches on in his account of the relationship between music and queer subculture in the Harlem Renaissance period. ‘The blues reflected a culture that accepted sexuality, including homosexual behaviour and identities’, Garber writes, ‘as a natural part of life.’ Eric Garber, ‘A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem’, in Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey, Jr. (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 320.

63 Kathleen Tankersley Young to Charles Henri Ford [n.d.], series 1, box 2, folder 189, Charles Henri Ford Papers, YCAL MSS 32, Beinecke Library, Yale University.

64 Kathleen Tankersley Young to Charles Henri Ford [n.d.], series 3, box, 15, folder 6, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Young also encouraged Ford to ‘study the TRANSITION [edited by Eugene Jolas] closely. I think you could make a go of something like this’. Kathleen Tankersley Young to Charles Henri Ford, 28 December 1928, series 3, box, 15, folder 6, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

65 Kathleen Tankersley Young to Charles Henri Ford [n.d.], series 1, box 2, folder 194, Charles Henri Ford Papers, YCAL MSS 32, Beinecke Library, Yale University.

66 As to whether Ford did in fact agree wholeheartedly with Young’s damning estimation of The Dial, the matter is still open to dispute. It is worth bearing in mind here that Ford praised The Dial in his journal back in 30 July 1928, a mere seven months before he received Young’s letter. While I firmly suspect that Ford would indeed have agreed with Young by the time he received her letter, I cannot say with absolute certainty that he did, one way or the other.

67 But perhaps things aren’t quite as clear-cut as they seem initially. Riding’s work did in fact appear in Blues. However, there is documentary evidence that suggests that Ford published Riding’s work in the ninth issue of Blues without her permission. In an undated letter to Ford, Riding charges: ‘You have treated me not as a work that caused you satisfaction or botherance but as a woman with whom you were having sexuo-literary intercourse.’ Laura Riding Jackson to Charles Henri Ford [n.d], series 1, box 1, folder 87, Charles Henri Ford Papers, YCAL MSS 32, Beinecke Library, Yale University.

68 ‘There has been’, Riding and Graves posit, ‘a short and very concentrated period of carefully disciplined and self-conscious poetry. It has been followed by a pause in which no poetry of any certainty is appearing at all, an embarrassed pause after an arduous and erudite stock-taking. The next stage is not clear. But it is not impossible that there will be a resumption of less eccentric, less strained, more critically unconscious poetry, purified however by this experience of historical effort.’ Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, [1927, 1928] 2002), 132.

69 Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895-1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 618.

70 Ezra Pound, Selected Letters: 1907-1941 (New York: New Directions, 1971), 223.

71 Nor was Pound the only first-generation modernist whose attention Ford managed to capture. To take another example, the true author of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) once remarked: ‘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.’ Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (London: Penguin Books, [1933] 2006), 260.

72 Pound, Selected Letters, 224.

73 Ibid.

74 Ibid.

75 Ibid.

76 Ibid.

77 One thinks here of Pound’s role in the creation of The Egoist.

78 William Carlos Williams to Charles Henri Ford [n.d.], series 1, box 2, folder 189, Charles Henri Ford Papers, YCAL MSS 32, Beinecke Library, Yale University.

79 Quoted in Charles Henri Ford, ‘Scrapbook: 1928-1931’ [n.d.], oversize, box 6, folder 327, Charles Henri Ford Papers, YCAL MSS 32, Beinecke Library, Yale University, n.pag.

80 Quoted in Charles Henri Ford, ‘Scrapbook’, n.pag.

81 Ibid.

82 The announcement is printed in small black type on a uniformly deep blue cover page, making it quite difficult to read, as well as fairly hard to find. This fact was not lost on Kathleen Tankersley Young. In a letter of 20 April 1929, Young told Ford: ‘The April issue of BLUES is at hand. it is much much better than the other issues. the cover is better and one can read without difficulty the inside of the cover.’ Kathleen Tankersley Young to Charles Henri Ford, 20 April 1929, series 1, box 2, folder 189, Charles Henri Ford Papers, YCAL MSS 32, Beinecke Library, Yale University.

83 Ibid.

84 Adam McKible, The Space and Place of Modernism: The Russian Revolution, Little Magazines, and New York (London: Routledge, 2002), 10.

85 Peter Marks, ‘Making the New: Literary Periodicals and the Constructions of Modernism’, Precursors & Aftermaths: Literature in English, 1914­-1945 (2: I, 2004): 37.

86 Quoted in Ford, Scrapbook, n.pag.

87 Ibid.

88 Ian Hamilton, The Little Magazines: A Study of Six Editors (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976), 9.

89 The doyen of periodical studies Frederick J. Hoffman once praised the ‘self-conscious, enthusiastic, and daring’ literary experimentalism contained in the pages of Blues. To my mind, such phrasing in certain senses echoes Hamilton’s theoretical account of ‘jaunty’ assertiveness. Frederick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich, The Little Magazine: A History and Bibliography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 290.

90 By extension, the premature collapse of Ford’s little magazine need not be viewed negatively. Indeed, the relative brevity and premature collapse of Blues while still in the first flush of youth prevented it from falling into the typical trap of little magazines as charted by Hamilton.

91 Charles Henri Ford, ‘To Be Pickled in Alcohol’, Blues: A New Magazine of Rhythms 1, no. 2 (1929): 39. Hereafter all references to Blues appear parenthetically.

92 Parker Tyler, ‘Imaginary Conversation between Mr. E. E. Cummings and the Editors of BLUES’ [n.d.], series 3, box, 19, folder 2, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, n.pag.

93 Riding and Graves, Survey, 30.

94 David Arnold, Poetry and Language Writing: Objective and Surreal (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 58.

95 Arnold, Poetry and Language Writing, 59.

96 Lynn Keller, Re-making it New: Contemporary American Poetry and the Modernist Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 10.

97 Consider, for example, Jessica Nelson North‘s criticism of the first issues of Ford’s magazine: ‘Blues, a magazine of new rhythms, contains no surprisingly new rhythms, but some notable poems by Louis Zukofsky, Kathleen Tankersley Young, and Horace Gregory. It features the modish uncapitalizing and unpunctuating which have been the conventional symbol of the modernist, and which will in the course of time be a brand of conservatism.’ Jessica Nelson North, ‘Convention and Revolt’, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (July 1929): 216.

98 Uncredited, ‘Out of a Blue Sky’, Transition: An International Quarterly for Creative Experiment (16–17, 1929), n.pag.

99 We will have a little more to say about the similarities and differences between Jolas’s transition and Ford’s Blues at the close of this chapter.

100 Daniel Katz, American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 1.

101 Dougald McMillan, Transition: The History of a Literary Era, 1927-1938 (London: Calder and Boyars, 1975) 119.

102 Miller, Late Modernism, 209.

103 Ibid., 7.

104 Ibid., 10.

105 Ibid., 14.

106 Williams is of course talking about T. S. Eliot here. In a characteristic swipe at his poetic bête noire, Williams criticizes Eliot’s ‘retreat’ from life. This attack on Eliot relates to an earlier piece – ‘A Note on the Art of Poetry’ – that Williams wrote for the fourth issue of Blues. In that piece, Williams took umbrage at ‘the voluntary spectacle T. S. Eliot has made of himself during the past year: the academic thing’ (Blues 1: 4, 77). Williams evidently thought very little of academism: ‘Next to the rascality of our legislative and judicial bodies the university, the true home or learning, is the worst scandal of our day. Never has it heralded genius. Always must it be broken into by men of genius before its check can be removed and thought advanced’ (Blues 1: 4, 77). In Williams’s caustic reckoning, ‘Its sole excuse and Eliot’s likewise must be that in certain seasons the intelligence goes into the spore stage for hibernation, getting a shell of high resistance. Eliot is tired’ (Blues 1: 4, 77). This snipe at Eliot’s alleged ‘tiredness’ is worth considering – both in relation to his piece in the seventh Blues and to Tyrus Miller’s theorization of late modernism. According to Williams, Eliot’s condition has taken a definitive turn for the worse in the time between the fourth and seventh issues of Blues. Williams is now arguing that Eliot has been metaphorically laid to ‘rest’ in England. In this regard, when read alongside Williams’s instruction to ‘come over’, it once again seems as if a symbolic threshold of sorts has indeed been reached.

107 Kenneth Rexroth to Charles Henri Ford, 30 November 1929, series 1, box 2, folder 157, Charles Henri Ford Papers, YCAL MSS 32, Beinecke Library, Yale University.

108 Kenneth Rexroth to Charles Henri Ford, 30 November 1929.

109 Jaime Hovey, A Thousand Words: Portraiture, Style, and Queer Modernism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), 50–1.

110 Hovey, A Thousand Words, 51–2.

111 Ibid., 52.

112 Ibid.

113 Ibid., 69.

114 Albeit for different reasons, Sidney Hunt also takes aim at the former editor of BLAST in the seventh issue of Blues. In his ‘London, September 1929’, Hunt asks: ‘Who wants a rock of ages? There is a good variety – Eliot’s anglo-catholic royalist classicism, Wyndham Lewis’ less ladylike alignment with Aquinas in torrents of words, Middleton Murray’s hopeful it’ll-all-come-right-in the-end-somewhere-somewhen gropings in the infinite, expressed respectively in the CRITERION, THE ENEMY, NEW ADELPHI’ (Blues 2: 7, 40).

115 Quoted in Karin Orchard, ‘“A Laugh Like a Bomb”: The History and the Ideas of the Vorticists’, in BLAST: Vorticism, 1914-1918, ed. Paul Edwards (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 18.

116 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: California University Press, 2008), 165.

117 Juan A. Suárez, Pop Modernism: Noise and the Reinvention of the Everyday (Urbana and Chicago: Illinois University Press, 2007), 190.

118 We will discuss the tenth issue of Blues in Chapter 5.

119 Joseph Vogel, ‘Literary Graveyards’, New Masses (October 1929): 30.

120 As an associate editor of Blues, Vogel had resource to a privileged vantage point that would have allowed him to appreciate how Ford’s magazine could – at any given moment – be metaphysically, experimentally, or socially inclined. This flexible, inclusive aspect of Blues accounts for, say, the positioning of Kathleen Tankersley Young’s more properly metaphysical poetic reveries alongside the socially conscious prose of William Closson Emory (in the third issue of Blues).

121 Vogel, ‘Literary Graveyards’, 30.

122 Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler, ‘Program’ [ca.1931], series 3, box, 19, folder 3, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, 1.

123 The tenth issue of Blues was scheduled to appear in 1931. This issue, which never appeared, was slated for publication in Paris. It was set to feature the work of Djuna Barnes, Gorham Munson, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, and others.

124 Ford and Tyler, ‘Program’, 1.

125 Ibid.

126 Consider, for instance, Ford’s figurative and literary marginalization in the famous ‘Objectivist’ issue of Poetry (February 1931).

127 Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler, ‘What Happens to a Radical Literary Magazine’, The Sewanee Review (January 1931): 62. Notice also the sexual dimension of Ford and Tyler’s language here. In a way, the emphasis on sexualized imagery foreshadows their brazenly explicit collaborative novel, The Young and Evil (1933).

128 Ford and Tyler, ‘What Happens to a Radical Literary Magazine’, 63.

129 Ibid., 64. Original emphasis.