2

Community, Circularity, Sociability, Postcards

1

Charles Henri Ford travelled to New York City for the first time in January 1929. It seems that he had been planning this trip for quite a while. Ford makes mention of his desire to visit the metropolis in a letter to his father dated 5 February 1928:

Mother has no doubt written you of my decision to remain and enter the University here. There will not be, after all, much to be regretted by the postponement of my debut in New York. Just before the second semester began, though, I received an inviting from a well-known writer and publisher of Greenwich Village urging me to come, ‘by all means’.¹

Ford wrote this while still based in Texas. The institute he refers to in this letter is the San Antonio-based St Mary’s Catholic University. But who is the unnamed Greenwich Village publisher and writer that Ford mentions to his father, Charles? Recall at this juncture Kathleen Tankersley Young’s very first letter to our Mississippi-born subject – the one in which she wrote longingly of sunsets and shared bags of popcorn. Eric B. White reminds us that ‘Ford and Young began corresponding following their joint appearance in the First National Poetry Exhibition, convened in Greenwich Village by the Texas writer, editor and Village impresario Luther Widen, better known as Lew Ney’.² In all probability, Ney is the ‘well-known writer and editor’ to whom Ford refers in the letter above. Fast forward to 17 March 1930. Ford had by now made his way from regional Mississippi to Greenwich Village. He had been living there since January – in an apartment just off Washington Square Park.³ We know this because he told his father as much in a rather entertaining dispatch:

this letter begun is with a baby screaming at the TOP of its voice on Macdougal street and & if its not a baby its an Italian hollering GEORGE together with (1) how many taxis with engines running (2) the 3^rd avenue elevated ½ block away (3) wheels of milkwagons at 4 a.m. & cetera ad infinitum… . INcluding the mechanical piano grinding out last year’s tunes, just as if there were NO law!⁴

Ford, as the tremendous soundscape evoked in this letter attests, clearly wasn’t in Mississippi anymore. His letter-writing style had also changed dramatically. But some things hadn’t changed. Blues was still at the forefront of Ford’s mind. He had obviously been keeping himself busy since debuting in the Village. ‘I have been getting along very well financially’, Ford writes, ‘Brentano’s sends a check for $24.50 for sold copies of the last BLUES. H. D. (Hilda Aldington) sends check for two pounds (ten dollars) on her London bank, saying credit her account and send some back numbers of BLUES.’⁵ Luther Widen then makes his entrance:

Now isn’t it marvelous that No. 8 will be at his own risk? The contents are better than any other number. There will be 48 pages and the cover will be folded like the French books. It’s going to be a knock-out sure enough. If I had to pay for the printing it would have cost me well over $200.00 anywhere in New York.⁶

‘Of course’, Ford continues, ‘the reason Lew is printing it is that his name will be on it as PUBLISHER and the reputation of BLUES is sufficient to add his prestige if his name IS on it, see? Then too, he will run some ads of his: for his type-shop and whatnot.’⁷ In addition to this, Ford planned ‘to get a page ad from a place in the Village with the stipulation that I take out the cost of the ad to them, $25.00, in FOOD, which will be a big help. Lew, however, insists (and it is only fair) that his only expense be the actual printing’.⁸

Ney certainly sought to emphasize his role in the funding and creation of the eighth issue of Blues. We get a clear sense of this in the prefatory note – ‘Friends of Blues’ – printed on the first page of the magazine. Ney’s version of events is slightly different to the rendition extended by Ford. ‘This number of Blues is not essentially different from the seven numbers that have preceded it,’ Ney begins: ‘When Charles Henri Ford came to New York last January I entered into an arrangement with him, which means as far as any poetry magazine is concerned, patronage. Eventually we have, with the help of Parker Tyler, been able to bring out the following examples of new rhythms by our contemporary moderns’ (Blues 2: 8, 2). Whether or not we class it as an act of patronage, Ney’s efforts on behalf of Ford’s Blues certainly produced some positive results. Ney’s Greenwich Village connections afforded financial relief and increased publicity for Blues; as the previously discussed letter to his father attests, Ford’s ability to secure this patronage also acted as a seal – or stamp – of approval from the wider literary community. At the same time, increased association with Ney had far-reaching consequences for both Ford and his little magazine, as they became linked to Greenwich Village. Unsurprisingly, this association saw an increase in the number of contributions printed in Blues from writers based in the Village.⁹ In earlier days perhaps this would not have been a problem, but by the time of production, some of the connotations attached to the area were negative. In the minds of many older writers and critics, the Village had long since lost some of its cultural sheen. For instance, prominent first-generation modernists such as Malcolm Cowley could, not long after Ford moved to the bright lights of the big city, be heard opining that Greenwich Village ‘was really dying, it was dying of success. It was dying because it became so popular that too many people insisted on living there’.¹⁰ To take another example, Ford’s relocation to Greenwich Village must have, for some people at least, confirmed Ezra Pound’s fears – expressed in the second issue of Blues – about impressionable young men being seduced and corrupted by the city’s glitz and glamour.¹¹

However, it is clear that Ford did not share Pound’s fears. As Lynne Tillman suggests, Ford was eager to ‘lead la vie bohème in Greenwich Village’.¹² It is easy to see why. For a relatively affluent gay man raised in some of the less glamorous parts of the Deep South, life in Greenwich Village would have been a highly attractive alternative, with its well-established reputation for unconventional and permissive sexuality. Or as Ford put it late in life: ‘What made Greenwich Village was the unconventionality and the acceptance of any eccentricity, so naturally every kind of deviation would surface and be accepted. I mean, that was what Greenwich Village was all about.’¹³ Ford’s retrospective account of his time in the Village dovetails neatly with the important historical research of George Chauncey. In Chauncey’s estimation, ‘Greenwich Village hosted the best-known gay enclave in both the city and the nation – and the first to take shape in a predominantly middle-class (albeit bohemian) milieu.’¹⁴ As a result of this, in Chauncey’s words, ‘the Village took on special significance for lesbians and gay men around the country, and disaffected New Yorkers were joined in the Village by waves of refugees from the nation’s less tolerant small towns.’¹⁵ Seeking sanctuary, these queer refugees ‘fled to the Village, and in the 1920s they built an extensive gay world there’.¹⁶ This, then, was the social world that Ford entered into upon his arrival in 1930. As Chauncey demonstrates in his extensive cultural history of New York’s bohemian epicentres, the highly visible queer men and women that Ford would have counted as his neighbours played a crucial role in ‘shaping both the image and reality of the Village, for they became part of the spectacle that defined the neighborhood’s colorful character, even as they used the cultural space made available by that character to turn it into a haven’.¹⁷ Chauncey’s account of Greenwich Village as both a vibrant ‘cultural space’ and a welcoming ‘haven’ is of especial interest when considered in relation to what we have already said about Ford and Blues. Surrounded now by an intimate and social network of like-minded individuals in the unorthodox ‘haven’ of Greenwich Village, Ford found a habitat conducive to the aesthetic and literary expression of polymorphous queer desire.

Given what we already know, it makes conceptual sense that Ford would continue to work on Blues while living in Greenwich Village. Having said that, we already know that the Village incarnation of Ford’s modernist little magazine – which ceased publication in late 1930 – was too short-lived to truly flourish.¹⁸ Despite this, the work that Ford undertook during this period undoubtedly laid the foundations for his subsequent literary ventures. This brings me back to the letter Ford sent to his father on 17 March 1930:

Plans for our bookshop are still simmering. Mrs Tyler said we should look around for a good location so that’s what I shall be doing for a while instead of looking for a job. When I actually do have to relinquish one of the Privileges of a Poet the Doubleday, Doran people may put me in one of their bookshops until I have one of my own.¹⁹

I have as of yet been unable to determine how close Ford came to realizing his ambition of opening a bookstore somewhere in Greenwich Village. Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize the sheer scope of the youthful ambition and determination on display here. If nothing else, it serves to remind us that Ford was absolutely resolved to make his mark on the literary scene at a young age. The second point of interest in this portion of Ford’s letter concerns the mention of a certain Mrs Tyler. Ford is likely referring in this instance to Parker Tyler’s mother, Eva. Ford had become quite close to the Tyler family by March 1930. Tyler was one of the first people Ford met in New York. In fact, Tyler was there to greet Ford when he arrived in 1929. In Ford’s words, Tyler was, when they first met, ‘full of suntan-powder. I could hardly see his face. Everyone was powdering their faces in suntan-powder then. He had it collar-to-collar. He was also a Southerner, from Louisiana’.²⁰ But as we already know, Ford and Tyler’s friendship went back further than this.²¹ They had, lest we forget, been correspondents for the best part of a year prior to their first face-to-face meeting in New York, suntan-powder and all.

This, in turn, returns us to the issue of Ford’s modernist little magazine; it was Blues that first brought Ford and Tyler together, in spirit if not in flesh. This was, we recall, part of Ford’s broader plan from the very outset. As we established in the previous chapter, Blues provided him with a means to sidestep the issue of his geographical isolation. Lacking the financial resources that would enable him to make the trip to New York, Ford realized that the best option available to him at the time was to try to foster a sense of collegiality and community in the pages of his little magazine. In this sense, Ford recognized early on that establishing Blues might make ‘meeting’ like-minded people just that little bit easier. Nor was he the only person to realize this. Consider afresh Ezra Pound’s advice about literary programmes. ‘As you don’t live in the same town with yr start[ing] contribs’, Pound told Ford on 1 February 1929, ‘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.’²² As noted previously, it is clear that Pound wanted some sort of say when it came to determining the direction of Blues. But Ford, as we saw in the last chapter, had no interest whatsoever in ceding any sort of control over his fledgling second-generation modernist little magazine to Pound.

I propose that we consider Pound’s advice from a slightly different vantage point than we did in the previous chapter. The specifically ‘circular’ shape of Pound’s attempted intervention is of particular interest. Pound is advocating that Ford foster a collective sense of modernist camaraderie in a relatively controlled, secure, and stable textual environment. Notice also that he wanted any process of circular exchange – and the exchange of circulars – to take place within a clearly delineated, almost hermetically sealed sphere. Further to this, Pound wanted the results of such a process of circular consensus to be kept private: at least until someone (preferably him) could bestow their authoritative signature – or stamp of approval – upon any sort of hypothetical Blues manifesto. In other words, when it came to Ford’s Blues, the approach that Pound privileged demanded private consensus and codification prior to potential public distribution. But our young Mississippian was seemingly having none of it. To be sure, Ford’s decision not to heed Pound’s advice is an early instance of his desire to differentiate his approach from that of his literary elder. It is, however, by no means an outright rejection of Pound’s advice. As I will demonstrate, Ford clearly recognized the important role that circular letters and literary circulars might assume when it came to establishing networks of communication. At the same time, Ford also grasped the role the letters and circulars could play in the construction of one’s poetic identity. So much so in fact that it became an ingrained aspect of his approach to poetry. Accordingly, the present chapter considers Ford’s commitment to what we can describe productively as a distinctively circular brand of poetic practice – one that revolves around notions of sociability and epistolary exchange, and which strives to fashion ever-widening networks and relay systems of alternative literary circulation, participation, and collaboration. As we will see, Ford’s poetic practice is one that strives to establish increasingly expansive, transnational networks of alternative literary circulation, participation, and collaboration. In the process of so doing, as this chapter will demonstrate, Ford’s ‘circular poetics’ is one that breaks away from certain strictures of modernist authorship and anticipates simultaneously the emergence of specific trends in postmodern artistic production. Specifically, Ford’s circular approach is indicative of a shift from the sort of intimate private exchange associated with models of canonical modernism to a more ostentatiously public – and potentially postmodern – sort of cultural display.

2

Ford himself thought and wrote of his approach to poetics in terms of circularity. We see this in a portion of verse published in 1974:

The faded magnificence of emerald ponds

Pre-figures the death-trap of a counterclockwise game

The Legend of Myself, theme of circularity,

Like a strangler without a victim, whose rhythmic signature

Discarded and discovered on ladders and scaffoldings

Denies that immortality is ever interrupted²³

Written while Ford was living in Kathmandu, and printed on Ira Cohen’s Nepal-based Bardo Matrix Press, these lines, featuring mentions of circularity, scaffoldings, signatures, counterclockwise motion, and gaming speak to many of the concerns of this chapter. Yet these lines tell only part of the story. Ford’s interest in the ‘theme of circularity’ went back much further than 1974. Ford first began to explore the possibilities of what I describe in this chapter as his ‘circular poetics’ while working on the first volume of Blues. Think back to the fourth issue of Blues from May 1929, and specifically to Parker Tyler’s contribution of the extended poetic sequence ‘Frustration: From a Slender Coffin’; a sequence which includes the previously discussed ‘He the More, I the Less’ (Blues 1: 4, 96–8). If we are to properly appreciate this poem (and the longer sequence of which it is a part) we also need to consider it in relation to some of the other surrounding poems. In the spirit of circularity we return now to the previous chapter, in which I sought to highlight the overtly queer nature of Tyler’s early contribution to the equally non-normative Blues. While that analysis still holds, we can now see clearly an implicit aspect of collaboration in Tyler’s contribution to Blues. At first glance, this might strike the reader as slightly odd. After all, ‘He the More, I the Less’ is the work of an individual poet; that is, it belongs solely and indisputably to Tyler. In equal measure, however, Tyler’s sequence needs to be read in relation to Ford’s contribution to the fourth issue of his Blues. Situated next to each other, Tyler’s ‘From a Slender Coffin’ and Ford’s ‘Four From Tension’ are grouped together under the umbrella term: ‘Frustrations’. Tyler’s contribution comprises three poems: ‘He the More, I the Less’, ‘Instruction of the Sensibility’, and ‘For Some Pins’; Ford chose to include four: ‘why ears’, ‘n. b.’, ‘denudation of tributes’, and ‘poem’.

Tyler’s ‘He the More, I the Less’ needs to be read alongside Ford’s ‘why ears’ (Blues 1: 4, 99). Ford’s oblique and formally discrete piece is, I want now to argue, best understood as a direct response to the relatively more conventional contribution proffered by Tyler. As we noted in the last chapter, the emotional life of the devoted and ‘honest giver’ in Tyler’s ‘He the More, I the Less’, is characterized by undue compromise, self-deception, and meek passivity. In a similar fashion, Ford’s formally oblique ‘why ears’ can be read as a personal address to an unnamed object of desire:

why should you lie dead

at ten o’clock then carelessly

talk and rise into a gold awakening

then (tell me) why

should you as fondling

draw in the scent through

two

chiseled

nostrils (Blues 1: 4, 99)

It soon becomes clear that the anonymous owner of this particularly well-defined nose is – like the persona of Tyler’s poem – the cause of some undisclosed irritation:

why are you never specific

the morning is definite the wind is

you

are a ghost on horseback

or the image of a hotness caught in ice

you are the loophole in a hangrope

and i forever harmonious

discords sagging about your head and ears (Blues 1: 4, 99)

Superficially, the references to ‘morning’ awakenings and ‘wind’ in Ford’s poem recall the evocations of breezes and potentially steamy bedroom scenes in Tyler’s. However, we can also discern noticeable differences between the two poems when it comes to the division of content and form. In terms of content, Ford’s account is much more tonally ambivalent than Tyler’s; Ford’s contribution to the fourth issue of Blues contains nothing approaching the sort of devotional awe expressed in ‘He the More, I the Less’. Nor is there anything approximating Tyler’s admittedly arid, Milton-alluding ‘paradisal estate’ in Ford’s poem, characterized as it is by ‘discord’ and dissonance. Poetic form is another point of difference. Much of Tyler’s ‘He the More, I the Less’ tends towards interlocking internal rhyme and occasional enjambment. By way of direct contrast, Ford’s poem is an example of fragmentary free verse. Whereas Tyler cloaks devotion in symbolistic ‘breezes’ that summon suggestions of emotional turmoil and which trigger memories of his often-absent loved one, Ford prefers to present the object of his poetic affection in a number of vivid, relatively direct images of juxtaposition that would later become one of his most recognizable literary trademarks.²⁴

In spite of these tonal and formal differences, however, we need to emphasize the fact that Ford and Tyler’s contributions to the fourth issue of Blues represent a sort of a collaborative poetic dialogue. Significantly, this formative collaborative exchange was of a necessarily and specifically epistolary nature, conducted as it was through a very particular relay system: the postal network of the United States. As we know, Ford and Tyler had to yet meet in person when this ‘frustrated’ exchange appeared in Blues. I mention this here as it reminds of the vitally important role that postal networks and letters played in Ford’s early poetic and editorial endeavours.²⁵ At this point in his life and career, letters were, for the geographically and culturally isolated Ford, a figurative and at the same time quite literal lifeline to the outside world. Knowing this, it should come as no surprise whatsoever to find that the exchange of letters and other epistolary forms factor in many of Ford’s myriad literary and aesthetic ventures.

This is just as true as it was with, say, Blues,²⁶ as it was with the collaborative project that Ford was working on around the same time that his little magazine folded. We know this because Ford told Gertrude Stein so on 22 January 1931. ‘Dear Gertrude Stein’, Ford writes,

your letter as well as the end of your long series of meditations on writing reached me in new york and it is now that I should answer if at all;

so we want to use this ms in no. 10 blues which will be published doubtless in paris or italy or paris;

if at all;

LOVE AND JUMP BACK will decide it being a novel and love and back (jumps) ward by parker tyler and me and sooner than later it will decide it;²⁷

Ford is referring here to the book-length manuscript that later became The Young and Evil (1933).²⁸ Co-authored with Tyler and published on Jack Kahane’s English-language, Paris-based Obelisk Press, the sexually explicit and formally experimental The Young and Evil is important for a host of reasons, all of them related. In a fashion similar to the earlier Blues, epistolary exchanges carried along postal relay networks played an important role in the construction of The Young and Evil, which Ford and Tyler worked on between 1930 and 1932 in three very different locations: Mississippi, New York, and Paris.²⁹ Retrospectively, Tyler acknowledged the important role played by epistolary exchange in the creation of the novel in a letter to Alice B. Toklas, dated 10 September 1959:

About The Young and Evil, I appreciate your recollection. I never really knew how much Ch. Henri Ford told Gertrude Stein or anyone else about the method of the book’s composition. In wordage, I must have written about half, considering that perhaps a fourth or fifth of the whole thing was ‘collaged’ by CHF from my letters. If I had a ‘corrective hand’ it was probably spiritual, at the outset of the book when CHF proposed to make a ‘story’ of our and others’ melodramas and rushed ahead. As to the final text, CHF, being at the publisher’s end, was in a position to determine that. It might amuse you, if the book is still around, to verify our respective contributions by noting that the very first section is wholly mine and ‘Julian’s’ idyll with his girl wholly Charles’.³⁰

There are a number of things that need to be said about Tyler’s revealing letter. For one thing, Tyler makes it clear that the original idea for the novel came from Ford. For another, Tyler confirms that Ford was far more involved than he when it came to getting the finished book into print. It should be added that getting the book published proved much easier said than done. The manuscript was rejected out of hand by a number of publishers, including the up-and-coming Horace Liveright. As to why publishers might have chosen to pass on the novel? A note from Liveright to Ford contains something of a clue: ‘I read with infinite pleasure your brilliant novel, but I could not think of publishing it as a book – life is too short and the jails are unsatisfactory.’³¹ Notice also Tyler’s assertion ‘that perhaps a fourth or fifth of the whole thing was “collaged” by CHF from my letters’. Observe, finally, that Tyler seems totally at ease with Ford’s very public deployment of epistolary materials that may well have been intended for strictly private consumption. As we well see, this desire to transform the private into something public is part and parcel of Ford’s circular poetics.

But what of the content of the letters that Tyler mentions? Judging from even the most cursory of glances at the text of The Young and Evil, Tyler’s letters must have been full of details of his and Ford’s shared experiences in New York at the dawn of the 1930s. Throughout the novel, explorations of avant-gardism are interspersed with regular forays into the popular sites of so-called low culture: Manhattan dive bars, Village dance clubs, and Harlem drag balls ‘too large to be rushed at without being swallowed’.³² Standing in for the authors, the characters of Karel and Julian offer a running commentary on the various scenes they witness:

The negro orchestra on the stage at one end was heard at the other end with the aid of a reproducer. On both sides of the wall a balcony spread laden with people in boxes at tables. Underneath were more tables and more people. The dance-floor was a scene whose celestial flavor and cerulean coloring no angelic painter or nectarish poet has ever conceived.³³

Of course, there is a self-consciously poetic dimension to this co-authored depiction of the heavenly dance-floor. However, Karel and Julian’s attention soon wanders elsewhere:

They found Tony and Vincent at a table with K-Y and Woodward. Vincent spoke with the most wonderful whisky voice Frederick! Julian! Tony was South American. He had on a black satin that Vincent had made him, fitted to the knee and then flaring, long pearls and pearl drops.³⁴

Our narrators are clearly less interested in aesthetic representations of the ‘angelic painter’ or the gauchely ‘nectarish poet’ in moments such as these than they are in meeting interesting people. Specifically, they are interested in meeting figures like the ‘black satin’-clad Tony and Vincent:

Vincent had on a white satin blouse and black breeches. Dear I’m master of ceremonies tonight and you should have come in drag and you’d have gotten a prize. He had large eyes with a sex-life all their own and claimed to be the hardest boiled queen on Broadway. Frederick he said you look like something Lindbergh dropped on the way across.³⁵

Much like their fictional counterparts, the co-creators of The Young and Evil were evidently enchanted with the figure of this wide-eyed drag queen. In this respect, we might say that Ford and Tyler seek to capture something of that which Justus Nieland describes as ‘the joyous hum of public being, physically undone by collective scenes of sympathy, and ever-attentive to intimate potential of public spaces, finding new homes for feeling in uncanny places’.³⁶

When read in such a fashion, it soon becomes clear that the authors of The Young and Evil seek to depict to suitable public ‘spaces’ (in this instance an underground drag ball) that are capable of producing new, intimately charged, non-normative regimes of feeling. To be precise, the non-normative regimes of feeling which Ford and Tyler privilege are of a distinctly queer persuasion. In this manner, The Young and Evil can also, in certain respects at least, be spoken of as a companion piece to Ford’s modernist little magazine. Juan A. Suárez situates Ford and Tyler’s novel in an urban social space ‘where normality was suspended, where alliances between social, racial, and sexual others created something akin to what we would call a queer polity based on a common fringe identity’.³⁷ Building on this assessment, I suggest that The Young and Evil can – much like the earlier Blues – be conceptualized as a kind of non-normative textual fringe space, or haven, where, in the words of Joseph Allan Boone, ‘homosexuality is the norm rather than the exception’.³⁸ In this sense, then, The Young and Evil picks up where Blues left off. Ford and Tyler certainly revel in all things queer in their novel. We get a sense of this in the following passage:

baggage grand cocksucker

fascinated by fairies of the Better

Class chronic

liar fairy

herself sexual

estimate crooning I’M A CAMPfire girl

gratuitous sexually meaning

both my thighs are so much

stouter tongue’s hanging

out sprawled in

bed lower than my

naval tie beginning between his

breasts nest of

Lesbian eyebrows so perfect what it is to

blossom before his style started going uphill on one-ballbear-

ing rollerskates and the curious pain³⁹

Approximating the form of free associative verse, the above extract reads as a litany of all things non-normative; it is one of many to be found in The Young and Evil. Thinking back to the previous chapter, one can’t help but wonder what critics such as Riding and Graves would have made of a passage such as this. Given their predilection for ‘colloquial dignity and grace’ in poetry,⁴⁰ it is difficult to imagine them having anything positive to say about the content and indeed the form of The Young and Evil. Still, perhaps the co-authors of A Survey of Modernist Poetry might have had something interesting to say about Ford’s decision to write and then push to publish a novel with a literary collaborator of equal standing.

At the risk of stating the obvious, it is important to bear in mind at all times the ostensibly simple fact that The Young and Evil is the work of two equally ambitious young gay men, both of whom wanted desperately to make their respective marks on the modernist scene. Yet in spite of these personal ambitions Ford and Tyler were perfectly happy to share equal billing as co-signed collaborators. In certain respects, this seems not to matter all that much. After all, as Wayne Koestenbaum has demonstrated, the history of male literature – and male literary modernism more specifically – is replete with numerous instances of works written under the sign of a ‘double signature’,⁴¹ of texts determined by what we can describe as a complex process of metaphorical intercourse between passive and active collaborators.⁴² One need only think here of the shared (male) labour that went into the creation of that most famous of first-generation Anglophone modernist poems, The Waste Land. But perhaps things aren’t quite as straightforward as they appear at first. As is commonly known, Ezra Pound played a crucial role in the shaping of T. S. Eliot’s long modernist poem. But the simple fact remains: it is Eliot’s name – and Eliot’s name alone – that is to be found on the frontispiece of the finished poem. We need now, I propose, to step a little further back in time to find bona fide examples of co-signed modernist literary collaborations. I am thinking here of the three now largely forgotten novels produced by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford in the first decade of the twentieth century: The Inheritors (1901), Romance (1903), and The Nature of the Crime (1909).⁴³ To the best of my knowledge, Conrad and Ford were the only modernist novelists willing to share the plaudits (or lack thereof) when it came to the act of co-signed literary collaboration.⁴⁴ The only modernists, that is, until Ford and Tyler.⁴⁵ I find this fact, which has until now gone entirely unnoticed, particularly striking.⁴⁶ How are we to account for this rather peculiar state of literary affairs, which lasted, as we can see, for some twenty-four years?⁴⁷ The answer has much to do with the notion of authorial control and anxieties concerning the issue of modernist mastery.

‘The great Modernisms were’, Fredric Jameson argues,

predicated on the invention of personal, private style, as unmistakable as your fingerprint, as incomparable as your own body. But this means that the modernist aesthetic is in some way organically linked to the concept of the unique self and private identity, a unique personality and individuality, which can be expected to generate its own unique vision of the world and to forge its own unique, unmistakable style.⁴⁸

Drawing on this famous theorization, Aaron Jaffe sets out to demonstrate the manner in which major first-generation modernists – especially the male ones – tended to publicly downplay the often profoundly collaborative nature of their various literary and aesthetic projects.⁴⁹ This they did in order to ensure their own critical reputations. And it by and large worked. While many modernist voices have now faded into relative or total obscurity, a few key, unmistakable signatures remain instantly recognizable to both eye and ear: Joyce, Pound, Lewis, Eliot, Woolf, Faulkner, and so on. Let me be clear. I am not saying that the high modernists were against artistic collaboration. Far from it. What I’m trying to say is simply this: first-generation modernist literary praxis was, almost exclusively, marked by a profound anxiety when it came to the notion of co-authorship and co-writing.⁵⁰ This leads me to Jaffe’s account of modernism and the culture of celebrity. Jaffe reminds us that when it comes to the related issue of modernism and the question of critical posterity ‘the name of the author won’t go away. As so many entrance and exit visas, authorial names warrant the exchanges, the translations, the bearing of bodies and discourses’.⁵¹ ‘At best’, Jaffe suggests, ‘authors are forever elusive, off-stage paring fingernails, feigning disinterest. In their “diminished” capacities, however, they’re arranging a host of contacts, ordinary labors, and promotional exchanges.’⁵² The underlying reason as to why the modernists chose to perform such tasks is not difficult to grasp. ‘As producers of culture’, Jaffe notes, ‘modernists were keenly involved with the exigencies of making a place for themselves in the world and for their products in the cultural marketplace.’⁵³ We are, in other words, dealing here with the production and management of meaning, value, and cultural capital.

We can put it like this: all of the major modernist figures listed in the previous paragraph realized that they needed to fashion an unmistakably recognizable – and recognizably unique – brand name in order to get ahead in the crowded, value-driven cultural sphere. This is where the notion of the ‘modernist imprimatur’ becomes important. Imprimaturs, Jaffe tells us, ‘sanction elite, high cultural consumption in times when economies of mass cultural value predominate’.⁵⁴ Building on this suggestion, the notion of the specifically modern imprimatur is, in Jaffe’s estimation, ‘one familiar from countless accounts of modernism, that the modernist literary object bears the stylistic stamp of its producer prominently’.⁵⁵ Jaffe is suggesting that the major modernists grasped the fact that if one had a recognizable, clearly visible name (or imprimatur), one could generate personal cultural capital. In order to do so, however, one also needed to position one’s work carefully. ‘The key ingredient of modernist reputation is not merely the demonstration of high literary labor through extant literary texts’, Jaffe explains, ‘but the capacity to frame this work in reference to the contrastingly lesser work of certain contemporaries.’⁵⁶ Hence the modernist distrust of any act that might compromise or dilute the strength of one’s (brand) name. Collaboration, Jaffe posits, proved ‘particularly vexing for authors keenly invested in promoting unrivalled, detached originality. The subordination of collaborative work thus served as a controlling mechanism for ordering networks of literary relationships vis-à-vis hierarchy and self-promotion’.⁵⁷ This, then, is the reason as to why so few modernists chose openly to admit to collaboration. And this is one of the reasons as to why The Young and Evil matters so much. Breaking away as it does from certain ‘controlling mechanisms’ associated with first-generation modernism, Ford and Tyler’s co-signed and proudly collaborative novel in this sense signals a subtle shift in the wider developmental trajectory of Anglophone modernism.

Ford and Tyler certainty sought to situate their novel in relation to the groundbreaking work of the first-generation moderns. In Tyler’s words, he and Ford ‘were both dreadfully impressed by modern poetry, and we were trying to create our own brand of it. What we didn’t realize too consciously was that we were (I hope this isn’t too much of a boast!) modern poetry!’⁵⁸ Interestingly, Ford turned not to poetry but to prose when asked about the modernist roots of The Young and Evil. Pressed on the topic, Ford recalled that ‘many of us had been introduced to The Sun Also Rises and everyone wanted to write a novel about their life like that novel’.⁵⁹ Yet it is important to recognize that Ford and Tyler – who do in fact name-check and debate the worth of modernists such as Eliot, Pound, Lewis, Stein, and Hemingway in their novel – had absolutely no intention of merely imitating what had come before.⁶⁰ Taking The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway as his primary point of contrast, Boone emphasizes this in his reading of The Young and Evil. He notes that, at the level of content, ‘the experimental text that [Ford] and Tyler produced is not stylistically but thematically worlds removed from Hemingway, for its “lost generation” is composed of the queer fringe that Hemingway’s novel continually attempts to excise’.⁶¹ This is not all though. We need at all times to remember that we are dealing here with a text that self-consciously meshes together the energies of, to cite Suárez, ‘experimental modernism with the camp idiom of gay street culture’.⁶² Punctuation-free passages of what at first glance appear to be a curious admixture of camp verbiage and almost unintelligible modernist prose are in fact, Boone argues, ‘designed to hide their gay content from outsiders while revealing themselves to those readers who share what is in fact a highly developed use of gay argot’.⁶³ Bearing such an assessment in mind, Boone is surely right to suggest that Ford and Tyler’s novel is one that, among other things, bends ‘modernist technique to queer purposes with a vengeance’.⁶⁴

3

It would, however, be decades before writers, artists, and literary critics came to appreciate this fact.⁶⁵ In the meanwhile, Ford continued to refine his ‘circular’ approach to collaborative literary praxis. The circular and collaborative aspect of Ford’s epistolary poetic approach comes to the fore at the beginning of the 1940s. Ford’s so-called ‘chainpoem experiments’ continue in the circular vein of postal poetic exchange previously established in his earlier literary ventures. Ford’s chainpoem project was a collective experiment, featuring a variety of poets from a number of different countries. Before work on a chainpoem began, a preliminary list with the names and postal addresses of the selected ‘chainpoets’ would be circulated among Ford’s chosen contributors.⁶⁶ In receipt of this list, one of the selected poets would, in Ford’s words, then write an opening line, before sending the manuscript to the ‘next [poet] on the list (which has been drawn up in advance by whoever starts the chainpoem), together with the list itself, and so the chainpoem revolves to completion. Anyone may decide he has written the concluding line, in which case he makes copies of the chainpoem and sends one to each chainpoet on the list’.⁶⁷ The first thing we notice is the way in which Ford’s instructional account of the chainpoem project echoes Pound’s aforementioned advice about the distribution of circular letters. Keeping that in mind, consider now how Ford chose to theorize his collaborative, multi-author undertaking, the fruits of which appeared in the 1940 edition of James Laughlin’s New Directions in Prose & Poetry. Ford’s introduction to the chainpoem section of the New Directions annual is self-explanatory. According to Ford, ‘after the first line is written, the problem of each poet, in turn, is to provide a line which may both “contradict” and carry forward the preceding line.’⁶⁸ Significantly, ‘the chain poet may attempt to include his unique style and make it intelligible to the poem; in which case the chainpoem will have a logical and spontaneous growth. Alternatively, using the surrealist approach, he may automatically add a line that springs from whatever is suggested by the preceding line.’⁶⁹ Ford then suggests that

the chainpoem is not only an intellectual sport but a collective invention. However, it is not a product of social collaboration in the sense that architecture is. Each poet is architect, supervisor, bricklayer, etc., of the construction. The blueprint of the chainpoem is the anonymous shape lying in a hypothetical joint imagination, which builds as though the poem were a series of either mathematical or dream progressions.⁷⁰

While the chainpoem is thus determined by the input of individual poets (or ‘supervisors’), it is a resolutely ‘collective’ literary construct: one that immediately complicates notions of poetic individuality, autonomy, uniqueness, and, to borrow from Jaffe once more, ‘unrivalled, detached originality’.⁷¹ In addition, Ford makes it absolutely clear that anyone can decide that the chainpoem is finished. The collaboration can be brought to a close at any given moment: there is no need for prior codification or consensus. The implication here is that all the chainpoem contributors are afforded the same status. Ford’s approach thereby ensures that there is no single dominant, supervisory – or quasi-Poundian – voice overseeing the collaborative ‘blueprint’ of any given chainpoem.⁷²

Let us now look at some examples of chainpoems in action. Consider the opening of Ford and Tyler’s relatively small-scale ‘Duo No. 2’:

The melted harp you inhaled with your ear

Grew in your wrist like a lady-limbed spear.

The broken blue eye your bed’s foot wept

Returned to the phantom that parades in your coat.⁷³

As with the rest of the poem these lines function as an oscillating kind of poetic call-and-response, with both Ford and Tyler building on – or contradicting – the other’s suggestion. As should be obvious, there is a line of collaborative continuity here: Ford and Tyler’s chainpoem has its conceptual roots in the ‘frustrated’ dialogue that appeared in the earlier Blues. But what we have here is a far more intimate type of dialogue, taking place across smaller units of poetic space. Ford and Tyler’s dialogue rumbles along under the empty space separating the couplets, as well as in the lines of the poem. Occurring more or less in the middle of the poem, one such moment of intimate movement stands out:

How you drink the drowned dream of Not

That makes your heart run backwards like a clock.

When your arms are open, a big toe in each hand,

The past slaps you when you dare to stand.⁷⁴

These two couplets are revealing. We get the sense here that Ford and Tyler are being deliberately provocative, or, if you prefer, wilfully perverse. This, I think, has much to do with an incident that occurred around the time that Blues folded. Ford and Tyler were by this time incredibly frustrated with the fact that certain avatars of first-generation modernism still dominated in contemporary literary circles. Pound, in particular, had come to represent something of a perceived obstacle standing in their way. Tyler acknowledged as much in a letter he sent to Pound: ‘Therefore we are stopping for a few moments to speak to you; we agree with little you have ever said in theoretic and practical direction; i think we have passed up everybody you have noticed recently except zukofsky but he IS good.’⁷⁵ ‘The longer we move desperately around the clock’, Tyler continues, ‘permitting its mobility, concerned with the familiar gestures of writing and editing a magazine, the more perverse, the more dilatory, the blinder you seem from the peculiar and oracular vantage point you have established for yourself in this century, first and now second quarter.’⁷⁶ Bear in mind that Tyler is also speaking on behalf of Ford here. Taking his cue from his friend, editor, and collaborator, Tyler seems to be turning his back on Pound’s ‘theoretic and practical’ advice. Tyler is in effect making it clear that he and Ford were no longer prepared simply to rely on the scraps thrown to them by Pound. In a roundabout fashion, this accounts for Ford and Tyler’s otherwise baffling decision to cling to a deliberately awkward semblance of rhythmic poetic form in their chainpoem. It is as if Ford and Tyler’s co-signed chainpoem strives to run in a counterclockwise – and counter-intuitive – manner to the final of Pound’s famous modernist imperatives of 1913:

1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective.

2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.⁷⁷

Much as he sought to break away from Pound’s advice for poets and his commands about the rules of circulation, Ford is now (with the aid of Tyler) responding parodically to perceived paternalistic ‘slaps’ by distancing himself from his modernist elder’s poetic dictates.

To take another example, we see that while the line-by-line dialogues that comprise the chainpoems are fairly compressed, the networks of epistolary exchange are in fact increasingly expansive. This comes to the fore when we consider the unfinished (and unpublished) ‘International Sonnet No.1’. Serving as American representative to the London Bulletin in the 1930s, Ford had forged links with the British poets of the New Apocalypse. Led by Henry Treece and J. F. Hendry, the now largely forgotten New Apocalypse movement is usually described as a poetic manifestation of Neo-Romanticism.⁷⁸ Two of the writers associated with the movement contributed to Ford’s chainpoem venture.⁷⁹ ‘International Sonnet No. 1’ reads like this:

There are these hungers the corse beak brings

amputating the public ghosts of public poets

as they pound the gavel and say: Watch how I sing;

in the milky night I swing you in a cradle of bone!

With fumbled lava and ransacked moon

on your unskinned baby-skin the lullabye wind tattoos.⁸⁰

Having reached the end of the first line of the sonnet, logically one anticipates the second will open with an alliterative repetition – ‘back’ seems likely – to carry over the rhythmic movement generated just as the bringing ‘beak’ paradoxically signifies the line’s abrupt termination. Not so, however. If not an outright contradiction, the act of amputation that greets the reader in the opening of the sonnet’s second line does denote a turn of sorts. Shifting from the bleak depiction of natural desolation and starvation, the poem’s second line shifts register into something altogether more literary. Changing direction again, the third line of the poem carries forward – rather than refutes – the ghostly spectres mentioned in the second. The semi-colon that punctuates the close of the third line does not act as a thematic connective, although a lingering sense of that line is carried forward into the fourth. The fourth and fifth lines of ‘International Sonnet No. 1’ belong to writers of the New Apocalypse (Norman McCaig and Dorian Cooke, respectively), and it is perhaps unsurprising that at this point, given their shared thematic sensibilities, the poem shifts yet again into more recognizable Neo-Romantic tropes, evocative both of death (‘cradle of bone’) and destruction (‘lava’). Correspondingly, the reader encounters the somewhat trite – but nevertheless momentum-sustaining – conversion of ‘milky night’ into ‘fumbled lava’. The sixth line of the poem is Ford’s, and it falls to him to bring order – or potentially, contradictory disorder – to the chainpoem. Ford plumps in this instance for order over chaos. The ‘unskinned’ depiction of the anonymous infant corresponds with the ‘amputation’ that inaugurated the second line of the sonnet. Furthermore, not only does Ford’s wind-beaten tattoo of a ‘lullabye’ relate back to the nocturnal song spread over lines three and four, it also suggests the sort of emotional nourishment meted out to dependent children laid in ‘cradles’. In turn, Ford’s ‘lullabye’ relates back to the poem’s opening line, where – if not for the unavoidable sense of truncation presupposed by the switch from poet to poet – the ‘beak’ might well be in the process of bringing ‘back’ something to stave off physical hunger. In this manner one can indeed say that this particular chainpoem – despite failing to meet the formal requirements traditionally associated with the sonnet – does somehow manage to ‘revolve’ to completion.

However, while ‘International Sonnet No.1’ reads, in spite of its brevity, as more or less finished, it is by no means representative of the complete chainpoem relay system. The ‘International Chainpoem’ serves, on the other hand, to convey a clear sense of the depth and breadth of the collaborative poetic relay system envisioned by Ford:⁸¹

When a parasol is cooled in the crystal garden,

one spire radiates and the other turns round;

a toad, the Unwanted, counts the ribs’ teardrops

while I mark each idol in its dregs.

There is a shredded voice, there are three fingers

that follow to the end a dancing gesture

and pose a legend under the turning shade

where the girl’s waterfall drops its piece.

Then balls of ennui burst one by one,

by and by metallic metres escape from ceramic pipes.

Oh sun, glass of cloud, adrift in the vast sky,

spell me out a sonnet of a steel necklace.⁸²

Themes of circularity are foregrounded in this chainpoem, as ‘one spire radiates and the other turns round’ under the similarly ‘turning shade’. Notions of transmutation also abound. For instance, ‘teardrops’ seemingly cascade from a ‘girl’s waterfall’ before turning into ‘balls of ennui’ which then ‘burst one by one’. Similarly, a process of alchemical transformation can be discerned in the poem, as ‘the crystal garden’ gives way to an image of ‘metallic metres’ leaking from ‘ceramic pipes’. Be that as it may, underlying issues of composition are arguably more important than those concerning content when it comes to this poem. What we are witnessing here is a prime example of Ford’s desire to branch out and establish increasingly expansive networks of circular poetic communication. Two of the lines belong to the aforementioned Dorian Cooke and Norman McCaig; four belong to Americans: Ford, Tyler, Gordon Sylander, and George Marion O’Donnell. The remaining six lines belong to the Japanese ‘VOU’ poets: Takesi Fuji, Katue Kitasono, Saburoh Kuroda, Nagao Hirao, Syuiti Nagayasu, and Tuneo Osada. Recall here, for one final time, Pound’s advice about circulars. In Pound’s reckoning, one needed, at all times, to maintain complete control over the circular letters (or chainpoems) that one chose to distribute. When it came to the question of circulars (and circular poetics), Ford evidently thought otherwise. In choosing to hand his invention over to a group of relative strangers scattered across the globe, Ford is, contra Pound, signalling his willingness to become one poetic voice among many others.

The sheer bravado of this conceptual gesture accounts for the reception meted out to Ford’s collaborative project. The chainpoems were met with a mixture of bewilderment and outright hostility.⁸³ John Peale Bishop’s comments prove representative. ‘I cannot but wonder why it occurred to him and his companions in the craft to do them at all’, Bishop writes, ‘and why, having undertaken them, the world being what it is, their compositions should have turned out as they have.’⁸⁴ While collaborative poetic experimentation during times of global crisis might not be to everybody’s taste, is Bishop right to call the very existence of the chainpoems into question? Given the need for gestures of solidarity and comradeship at times of global crisis, Bishop’s argument against poetic collaboration is at best curious:

For more than a year we have seen in continuous advance of devastation an army long prepared and disciplined to the death. And I cannot but ask why, in this year of 1940, in the midst of a war in which the conquerors have left nothing conceivable to chance, in which the exact methods have been adopted to promote a brutal triumph, why so many poets have collaborated on a work from which discipline has been deliberately discarded and which, if it is to succeed, can only do so by the happiest of hazards.⁸⁵

Bishop then moves to attack the apparently ‘ill-disciplined’ element of chance inherent in the production of the chainpoem. Having done so, he concludes by suggesting that Ford’s project ‘is a necessary protest, but like so many protests, costly to those who make it. For it is the responsibility of the poet to be aware of every aspect of the speech he uses and to use less than the whole word is to aim at less than the whole man’.⁸⁶ Bishop’s criticism of the chainpoem project is in this sense twofold. To begin, Bishop’s criticism of Ford’s collaborative venture is underwritten by an anxiety pertaining to the potentially unwelcome ‘cost’ of poetic collaboration. Bishop is in effect arguing that the inevitable ‘cost’ attached to the ‘protest’ of collaborative writing is the attendant loss of authorial ‘discipline’ and control. We might think about it like this: implicit in Bishop’s criticism of the chainpoem concept is a presupposition about poetic individuality and autonomy. In poetic collaborations such as these it is impossible for any given writer to be in total control of ‘every aspect of speech’ because there are a number of other architects, supervisors, and bricklayers who have an equal share in the poetic process. This accounts for Bishop’s disapproving comments. Much like the first-generation modernists before him, Bishop is in this sense fearfully opposed to anything that might challenge the primacy of the hard-earned imprimatur. Yet such a possibility seems not to have perturbed Ford in the slightest. And with each subsequent delivery of a chainpoem, the value placed on the idea of hard-won modernist autonomy receded one step further, at least in Ford’s work. In its place, as we will now see, came something more akin to a proto-postmodernism.

Ford’s chainpoems arose out of the historically regulated relay system of international postal exchange. I want now to suggest that Ford wanted to use – or rather, subvert – pre-existing, regulated routes of standardized postal exchange as a means to create something approaching a subjective, transnational, and collective poetic sensibility. It is the subversive aspect of Ford’s attempt at postal appropriation that gives the collaborative chainpoems an anticipatory postmodern quality. In his discussion of networks of artistic production after 1945, Craig J. Saper argues for the emergence of what he terms intimate bureaucracies. ‘An intimate bureaucracy makes poetic use of the trappings of large bureaucratic systems and procedures (e.g., logos, stamps) to create intimate aesthetic situations’, Saper suggests, ‘including the pleasures of sharing a special knowledge or a new language among a small network of participants.’⁸⁷ Ford’s chainpoems – those created ‘among a small network of participants’ and which also make ‘poetic use of the trappings of large bureaucratic systems and procedures’ associated with international postal relay systems – prefigure Saper’s theorization of intimate bureaucracies. Such bureaucracies hinge upon both individual and communal activity.

Further, in Saper’s estimation, ‘These almost opposed values of collective action and self-promotion combine to form an alternative to more hierarchical systems of appraising artworks.’⁸⁸ The emphasis that Saper places in this passage on personal and collective activity resonates with what has already been said about Ford’s chainpoem project – a project which, as well as being predicated on individual and communal activity, unsettles hierarchical assumptions pertaining to preconceived notions of poetic autonomy. It also tallies with the conceptual processes of collaborative exchange privileged in the work in one of Ford’s associates of the 1960s, the American Pop Artist Ray Johnson.⁸⁹ José Esteban Muñoz reminds us that Johnson’s artistic world was also ‘a queer world of potentiality’.⁹⁰ According to Saper, Johnson ‘initiated a practice called “on-sending” which involved sending an incomplete or unfinished artwork to another artist, critic, or even a stranger, who, in turn, helped to complete the work by making some additions and then sending it on to another participant in the network’.⁹¹ Saper describes how Johnson’s ‘gift exchanges, begun in 1955, evolved into more elaborate networks of hundreds of participants, but at first they included a relatively small circle of participants’.⁹² Reading this, it becomes impossible to ignore the points of comparisons that emerge when we compare Ford’s postal practice of the 1940s with the one developed by Johnson in the 1950s.⁹³ At the very least, we can say with confidence that Ford’s chainpoems anticipate aspects of Johnson’s mail art. Ford’s chainpoems and Johnson’s mail art share a sense of (queer) cultural heritage.⁹⁴ In addition, both attempt to draw old and new friends together through the otherwise regimented routes of postal exchange in order to create alternative and intimate networks of inter-subjective communication. Indeed, as William S. Wilson notes, Johnson’s collagist practice ‘was most useful to him as a means of thinking about friends. He made art so that his collages were, as works of art, one of the variables in friendship’.⁹⁵ Johnson’s demotic aesthetic was in this respect a fundamentality sociable endeavour. The most satisfying art Johnson, in Wilson’s reckoning, ‘was the art of friendship. Loving movement, he used art to set a set of friends in motion’.⁹⁶ This description of Johnson’s love of ‘motion’ and his desire to use art ‘to set a set of friends in motion’ chimes, I think, with Ford’s desire to be thought of as, in his own words, a poetic ‘catalyst’.⁹⁷

However, in spite of these personal and aesthetic similarities, there is one major difference between the respective postal practices of Ford and Johnson. While Ford’s chainpoems work to preliminary, yet predetermined list of potential contributors, Johnson’s collagist mail art is utterly contingent. ‘An item in one of Ray’s envelopes could refer to something within the same mailing’, Wilson argues, ‘or might also refer away from the piece of mail to a prior mailing. The chain of references was not closed, but was open to combining with other images linked in reciprocating references.’⁹⁸ What we have here is the beginning of what might be described as postmodern proliferation. Of course, Ford’s chainpoems, based as they are upon a predetermined list of participants, can only hint at the direction of Johnson’s radically performative – and potentially unending – postal practice, casting away as it does the need for anything approaching what a critic such as Jameson would describe as a private personal style. But the point to be made is that they certainly do anticipate some of postal routes that Johnson’s subsequent intimate bureaucracies take.

4

Permit me here a brief coda with which to close out our discussion of literary circulars and circular exchange. In 1976 Charles Henri Ford curated an exhibition of his work at the New York-based Iolas Gallery. Nothing unusual there, one might say. Nothing unusual that is, until we consider the materials Ford selected for inclusion. Ford’s exhibition comprised 108 postcards, all of which were addressed to him. The names of those senders selected by Ford to feature in his exhibition – which he wryly titled ‘Having a Wonderful Time: Wish You Were Here’ – reads as a hit-parade of twentieth-century avant-gardism. Among others, the exhibition included postcards from Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Hilda Doolittle, and Henri-Cartier Bresson. On the one hand, Ford’s postcard exhibition represented the culmination of a process of epistolary sociability that stretched back almost fifty years. On the other, it can be read as a final refutation of modernist strategies of circular exchange. While modernists such as Pound wanted to keep the processes of their circular exchange private and controlled, Ford sought decisively, as his exhibition at the Iolas demonstrates, to make them ever more public; he most surely delighted in tearing open the envelope of intimacy and exposing the mechanisms and value-hoarding machinations of hitherto private expressions of modernist discourse. Ford’s use of the postcard is in this sense absolutely scandalous: he is parodically highlighting the role that sociability has always played in the circulation of modernist capital. As this provocatively hung exhibition of postcards suggests, Ford is more interested in revealing the taste-making and reputation-making mechanisms of circular exchange as a kind of art in and of itself. It is, was, and always will be first and foremost a performance. Ford is thus brazenly suggesting that it is who you’re in correspondence with (i.e. who’s sending you postcards and who’s performing in your chainpoem experiments) that determines your allotted fifteen minutes of poetic fame. In other words, Ford is suggesting that poetic expression can be a fortuitous by-product of sociality, of collaboration, of circular exchange. Much as he said of his friend Andy Warhol: ‘You are what you eat.’⁹⁹

Notes

1 Charles Henri Ford to Charles L. Ford, 5 February 1928, series 2, box 7, folder 7, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

2 White continues: ‘Ford was unable to attend that event, but he and Young eventually met in San Antonio, beginning their intense relationship and collaboration, and their broader engagement with the modernist transatlantic.’ White, Transatlantic Avant-Gardes, 187.

3 Ford could be found at 11 Macdougal Street.

4 Charles Henri Ford to Charles L. Ford, 17 March 1930, series 2, box 7, folder 7, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

5 Charles Henri Ford to Charles L. Ford, 17 March 1930, HRC.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 Ford’s letter to his father continues: ‘The cost of mailing (stamps), envelopes for mailing, express packages to bookstores, cost of copyright, the plates for a new cover and an art reproduction that we are considering: these things he is leaving up to me: expenses that will probably not run over $35.00. Of course, the only one I can turn to for this amount is you. That this is a small sum, proportionately, you realize. I hope that you will also consider it a worthwhile artistic investment. Incidentally, there will be one thousand copies of this number of BLUES printed: twice the number of previous issues.’ Ibid.

9 The eighth and ninth issues of Blues feature contributions from Greenwich Village affiliates such as John Rose Gildea, Lionel Abel, Joseph Rocco, and Ben Maddow.

10 Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return: a Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (London: Penguin Books, [1934] 1994), 65. Incidentally, in late 1929, Parker Tyler wrote that Greenwich Village had ‘ceased to be more than a romantic memory. There has been an influx of bank clerks, gangsters and sharp real estate dealers. The proper people are becoming elegiac’ (Tyler, ‘New York Notes’, Blues 2: 7, 41).

11 A more measured assessment of Greenwich Village during the 1920s can be found in the literary criticism of Cristanne Miller. She notes that ‘by the mid-1920s … the Village was less of a radial cultural than a media-celebrated enclave, where the “new” appeared as much in “lifestyle” as in art or politics’. Cristanne Miller, Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, and Else Lasker-Schüler (Michigan: Michigan University Press, 2007), 38.

12 Lynne Tillman, ‘Cut Up Life’, in Water From a Bucket: A Diary 1948-1957, ed. Charles Henri Ford (New York: Turtle Point Press, 2011), viii.

13 Quoted in James Dowell and John Kolomvakis (dirs.), Sleep in a Nest of Flames.

14 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 227.

15 Chauncey, Gay New York, 234.

16 Ibid., 237.

17 Ibid., 242.

18 In the context of the current discussion, I think it worth mentioning that the ninth and final issue of Blues carried the sexualized and indeterminately gendered line drawings of the queer Mexican ‘Los Contemporáneos’ artist and playwright Augustín Lazo. Created by the man usually credited with introducing Surrealism into Mexico, these line drawings were very much in keeping with the queer remit of Ford’s magazine.

19 Charles Henri Ford to Charles L. Ford, 17 March 1930, HRC.

20 Quoted in James Dowell and John Kolomvakis (dirs.), Sleep in a Nest of Flames.

21 Not all of Ford’s friends were impressed with his decision to move to Greenwich Village. Nor were they all that taken with the company Ford kept while in the Village. Consider Kathleen Tankersley Young’s letter of 29 February 1929: ‘I wish I was there because I would certainly like to steer you clear of that Village bunch so you could someday be something beside a Village Poet. But we all pass through that stage a little. And by your address I see that you are in the very midst of the Village. Watch Gildea. HE’s not as much genius as personality. Watch Tyler. HE’s not very deep.’ Kathleen Tankersley Young to Charles Henri Ford, 29 February 1929, series 3, box, 15, folder 6, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

22 Pound, Selected Letters, 224.

23 Charles Henri Ford, 7 Poems (Kathmandu, Nepal: Bardo Matrix, 1974), n.pag.

24 On a related note, it is tempting to read a line like Ford’s ‘why are you never specific’ as a playful rebuttal of what we might describe as Tyler’s career-long penchant for indirect symbolist allusion.

25 It also proves Pound correct.

26 The use of letters and dispatches from Paris, London, and New York in the later issues of Blues is another example of Ford’s early eagerness to construct routes of communication through the postal network. In addition to this, Blues also carried advertisements for a variety of other sympathetic little magazines: Bozart: The Bi-Monthly Poetry Review, Palo Verde: A Radical Southwestern Poetry Review, Japm: The Poetry Weekly, Contemporary Verse, Morada, The Hound and Horn, Tambour, Janus: A Quarterly Review of Letters, Thought and the New Mythology, Alhambra: A Monthly Magazine Devoted to Spain and the Americas, and Revista de Advance: A Cuban Monthly of the Newer Arts and Letters. Ford’s decision to give over advertising space to magazines like Alhambra and Revista de Advance can be thought of as an early instance of his desire to establish networks of ever-widening geographical and international scope.

27 Quoted in Charles Henri Ford, ‘I Will Be What I Am’, 138–9. Ford was living in Columbus, Mississippi at the time.

28 Ford sailed to France in May 1931. According to Steven Watson, ‘Ford arrived in a Paris that had been thoroughly colonized by expatriates and he immediately negotiated his way through its social circuits.’ Steven Watson, ‘Introduction’, The Young and Evil, ed. Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler (London: Gay Men Press, [1933] 1989), n.pag.

29 Tyler lived in New York during this period. Ford finished working on the manuscript while living in Paris. On 18 April 1932, Ford told his mother that ‘the novel is all typed and last night I took it around to their hotel and Frederick read it aloud to us until three o’ clock in the morning. Carmita [Mariňo, a friend of Tyler’s] loved it, said it was the only modern novel she could think of that didn’t bore her, parts of it exquisite, tender, extraordinary piece of organization, etc.’ Quoted in Charles Henri Ford, ‘I Will Be What I Am’, 217–18.

30 Parker Tyler to Alice B. Toklas, 10 September 1959, container 5, folder 4, Parker Tyler Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

31 Quoted in Watson, ‘Introduction’, n.pag.

32 Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler, The Young and Evil (London: Gay Men Press, [1933] 1989), 152.

33 Ford and Tyler, The Young and Evil, 152.

34 Ibid. 153.

35 Ibid.

36 Justus Nieland, Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life (Urbana and Chicago: Illinois University Press, 2008), 2.

37 Suárez, Pop Modernism, 181–2.

38 Joseph Allen Boone, Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), 252.

39 Ford and Tyler, The Young and Evil, 164. Ford and Tyler refer in this extract to Beatrice Lillie’s rendition of the song ‘I’m a Campfire Girl’, which was popular in the gay urban world of the 1920s and 1930s.

40 Riding and Graves are referring here to another Southern writer: John Crowe Ransom. They describe Ransom as having ‘a colloquial dignity and grace which it is possible to call Southern and a quality in his poetry that is definitely aristocratic’. Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 48. We will have cause to revisit this assessment in Chapter 3.

41 Wayne Koestenbaum, Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 2. It should be added Koestenbaum’s argument is both gendered and selective. This is something Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson address in their co-signed account of literary collaboration. In their estimation, ‘Although he describes his queer theoretical approach to male collaborators writing between 1885 and 1922 as feminist (in some respects it is), Koestenbaum is disturbing dismissive of the female partners in mixed-sex couples of various kinds.’ Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson, ‘Contexts and Heterotexts: A Theoretical and Historical Introduction’, in Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship, ed. Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2006), 18.

42 Melissa Jane Hardie makes a similar claim about The Young and Evil. ‘The creation of the text is fantasized as a fathering by two men’, Hardie writes, ‘a collaborative effort that mimes the status of “Ford and Tyler” as a double signature.’ Melissa Jane Hardie, ‘ “That Man in My Mouth”: Editing, Masculinity and Modernism’, in Modernism and Masculinity, ed. Natalya Lusty and Julian Murphet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 47.

43 Koestenbaum has much to say in particular about the critically neglected Romance, combining as he does textual analysis with biographical information concerning the working relationship of Ford and Conrad. In his provocative account, Koestenbaum argues that we read Ford’s collaboration with Conrad as an instance of textually sublimated male homosexual contact.

44 These co-signed works tend to fare poorly in the critical estimation of Ford and Conrad scholars.

45 To clarify: I am talking only of novel-length works of modernist fiction. I do not seek in any way to dispute the rich tradition of collaboration in the history of proto-, first-, and second-generation Anglophone modernism. One need only think here of the turn-of-the-century collaborative undertakings of W. B. Yeats and George Moore (Diarmuid and Grania), as well as the literary undertakings of William Dean Howells (The Whole Family). To take another example, we might also consider the interdisciplinary collaborative projects of canonical first-generation figures such as Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Kew Gardens). In a similar fashion, one might also think of the collaborative partnership of Wyndham Lewis and Naomi Mitchison (Beyond This Limit), the historic sketches of Ford Madox Ford and Violent Hunt (Zeppelin Nights: A London Entertainment), and even the output of D. H. Lawrence and Mollie Skinner (The Boy in the Bush). In addition to literary examples such as these, there is, of course, always Riding and Graves’s aforementioned Survey. Expanding our historical and categorical remit somewhat, one might also speak here of a text such as Wallace Thurman and Abraham Furman’s Harlem-based The Interne (1932). Moving forward chronologically, we soon also encounter the collaborative output of writers such as W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood (The Dog Beneath the Skin). To this list, we might also add the co-signed poetic travelogue produced by Auden and Louis MacNeice (Letters from Iceland).

46 I also find it striking that the collaborative novel Romance has been discussed by some critics in terms of queerness. Sadly, however, further discussion of this issue remains beyond the scope of this study. Interested parties are encouraged to seek out Sarah Cole, Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Richard J. Ruppel, Homosexuality in the Life and Work of Joseph Conrad (New York: Routledge, 2008).

47 One final piece of information: The Nature of Crime appeared in the April and May 1909 editions of The English Review. It was not published as a novel until 1924.

48 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Washington: Bay Press, 1983), 114.

49 By way of direct contrast, openness about collaboration and co-authorship was not as much of an issue for the historical avant-garde. One thinks, for instance, of the work of Verlaine and Rimbaud, of Breton and Soupault.

50 Critics such as Koestenbaum would likely – and rightly – frame a discussion of such anxiety in terms of homosociality.

51 Aaron Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 9.

52 Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity, 9.

53 Ibid., 7.

54 Ibid., 20.

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid., 101.

57 Ibid.

58 Quoted in Watson, ‘Introduction’, n.pag.

59 Ibid.

60 It is also worth noting that Gertrude Stein conceived of The Young and Evil as a sort of companion piece to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut novel This Side of Paradise (1920). Stein said as much to Charles Henri Ford. He passed on the message to Parker Tyler in a letter dated 26 January 1932: ‘Sunday I had gone to Gertrude’s at 2 o’ clock and we talked about Jump Back until teatime when the others came in (Grisham comes on Sunday to wash Basket, Gertrude’s dog!). Well she gave me some good advice, showed me places where I had lost my “point of view” – she had found where the words themselves didn’t sound right there was an error in the meaning, always. She didn’t like the woman chapter and I told her I didn’t either (and D____ doesn’t) but you had said when I said it wasn’t needed to put it in as a LUXURY and she said your advice was wittier than the chapter and that it wasn’t good enough to be a luxury so I think it had better come out. She said Hemingway hadn’t given the world a generation that it was Scott Fitzgerald who did it in This Side of Paradise and that we had done the same thing and that was the importance of it.’ Charles Henri Ford, ‘I Will Be What I Am’, 202.

61 Boone, Libidinal Currents, 255.

62 Suárez, Pop Modernism, 261.

63 Boone, Libidinal Currents, 255.

64 Ibid., 255. This is a point that Sam See also emphasizes in his critical account of modernism, myth, and queerness in Ford and Tyler’s co-signed novel. See suggests that ‘Ford and Tyler’s text shuttles between two collective, and to them, similar, experiences – those of the queer community and literary modernist culture at large – to blur the line between the strange and common, the queer and the mainstream, in American modernism’. Sam See, ‘Making Modernism New: Queer Mythology in The Young and Evil’, English Literary History 76 (2009): 1076.

65 For one thing, it was difficult to get hold of a copy of the Obelisk Press edition of The Young and Evil. Steven Watson notes that British customs found the content of the novel so scandalous that they move to ‘seize and burn 500. American customs officials did not set such conflagration, but turned back the shipments that made it to American shores’. Watson, ‘Introduction’, n.pag. The Olympia Press reissued The Young and Evil as part of its ‘Traveller’s Companion Series’ in 1960.

66 The complete list of chainpoem contributors reads as follows: Forrest Anderson, Hilary Arm, John Bayliss, Harvey Breit, Nicolas Calas, Dorian Cooke, Matta Echaurren, Charles Henri Ford, Robert Friend, Takesi Fuji, Troy Garrison, John Hastings, H. R. Hays, J. F. Hendry, Jyun Higasi, Nagao Hirao, Robert Horen, Elgar Hougton, Kohiti Kihara, Katue Kitasono, Takesi Koike, Saburah Kuroda, Conroy Maddox, Norman McCaig, Robert Melville, Townsend Miller, Nicholas Moore, Syuti Nagayasu, Tio Nakamure, Helen Neville, George Marion O’Donnell, Tuneo Osada, Paul Eaton Reeve, Harry Roskolenko, Giko Sirota, Gordon Sylander, Henry Treece, Ryoozen Torii, Napier Towne, Parker Tyler, Mary Woodman, and Minoru Yasosima.

67 Charles Henri Ford, ‘How to Write a Chainpoem’, in New Directions in Prose & Poetry, ed. James Laughlin (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1940), 369.

68 Ford, ‘How to Write a Chainpoem’, 369.

69 Ibid., 369. Emphasis added. The chainpoem project, as this passage makes clear, was in part inspired by specific artistic practices of a decidedly surreal tenor, such as ‘cadavre exquis’ and literary automatism. We will have much more to say about Ford’s interest in Surrealism in Chapter 3. For the time being, however, I want simply to draw attention to the way in which, as Mary Ann Caws notes, the exquisite corpse ‘experiments combined communality, performance, and personality. They took the measure of the collective mind’. Describing the conceptual procedures underpinning the Surrealist exquisite corpse, Caws reminds us that the purpose of such ‘play is both collective and automatic: the unleashing of the marvellous or the irrational in a group, with each individual effort working toward the final result greater than the sum of its parts’. Mary Ann Caws, The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 223, 228.

70 Ford, ‘How to Write a Chainpoem’, 369.

71 Based as they are in a ‘hypothetical joint imagination’, Ford’s chainpoem experiments attempt poetically to approximate psychoanalytical concepts – such as the idea of the ‘collective unconscious’ – associated with Carl Jung. Ford’s choice of language certainly has a Jungian ring to it. For instance, his account of the ‘anonymous shape’ lurking at the bottom of the ‘joint imagination’ is clearly indebted to Jung’s famous definition of the psychoanalytical archetype. As described in ‘On the Psychology of the Unconscious’ (1917), the typical primordial archetype is, according to Jung, an ‘idea that has been stamped on the human brain for aeons. That is why it lies ready to hand in the unconscious of every man. Only, certain conditions are needed to cause it to appear’. Encountering this, we get the distinct sense that Ford’s chainpoems represented an ambitious attempt to tap into the hidden reservoir of what Jung might describe as the ‘greatest and best thoughts of man [which] shape themselves upon these primordial images as upon a blueprint’. Carl Gustav Jung, ‘On the Psychology of the Unconscious’, in Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume Seven: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, ed. Herbert Read (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953), 69.

72 The chainpoems also hint at Ford’s later interest in Japanese poetic forms like haiku. Traditionally, the Japanese renga – a poetic form determined by communally written, interlinked sequences of haiku – was characterized by a largely democratic impulse. The democratic aspect of renga finds an unexpectedly correlative in Ford’s chainpoems. However, there is one significant difference between Japanese renga and Fordian chainpoems. In traditional renga there is always a so-called ‘master of renga’: one who directs the process of this otherwise non-hierarchical poetic procedure. In Ford’s chainpoems, however, there are only provisional supervisors. We will return to the topic of Ford’s interest in Japanese poetic form in Chapter 5.

73 Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler, ‘Duo No. 2’, in New Directions in Prose & Poetry, ed. James Laughlin (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1940), 370.

74 Ford and Tyler, ‘Duo No. 2’, 372.

75 Parker Tyler to Ezra Pound [n.d.], series 1, box 2, folder 176, Charles Henri Ford Papers, YCAL MSS 32, Beinecke Library, Yale University.

76 Parker Tyler to Ezra Pound [n.d.], series 1, box 2, folder 176, Charles Henri Ford Papers, YCAL MSS 32, Beinecke Library, Yale University.

77 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays (New York: New Directions, 1968), 3.

78 In Treece’s words, the New Apocalypse aimed ‘to collect and display [various] international examples of a new Romantic tendency, whose most obvious elements are love, death, an adherence to myth and an awareness of war’. Henry Treece, The Crown and Sickle: An Anthology (London: P.S. King & Staples Limited, 1943), 5.

79 The involvement of such sympathetic British writers in the chainpoem projects would have obviously appealed to Ford, whose partner was the Neo-Romantic painter Pavel Tchelitchew.

80 Charles Henri Ford et al., ‘International Sonnet No. 1’, [n.d.], series 1, box 1, folder 5, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. ‘International Sonnet No. 1’ in order of appearance (and location): 1. Harvey Breit (New York), 2. Harry Roskolenko (New York), 3. Robert Friend (New York), 4. Norman McCaig (Edinburgh), 5. Dorian Cooke (Lincolnshire), 6. Charles Henri Ford (Norwalk, Connecticut).

81 ‘International Chainpoem’ in order of appearance (and location): Takesi Fuji (Tokyo), Katue Kitasono (Tokyo), Charles Henri Ford (Paris), Dorian Cooke (London), Norman McCaig (Edinburgh), Gordon Sylander (Madison), George Marion O’ Donnell (Belzoni), Parker Tyler (New York), Saburoh Kuroda, Nagao Hirao, Syuiti Nagayasu, and Tuneo Osada (all Tokyo).

82 Charles Henri Ford et al., ‘International Chainpoem’, in New Directions in Prose & Poetry, ed. James Laughlin (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1940), 370.

83 Dylan Thomas was particularly dismissive of Ford’s project: ‘And thank you for the collaborated poem. I liked bits of the language, but it didn’t seem to make anything. It was very nice of you to ask me to collaborate, but I don’t want to. I think a poet today or any other day is most pleasurably employed writing his own poems as well as he can. With all due lack of respect, I believe this chainpoem to be a pretentious, and lazy, game.’ Dylan Thomas to Charles Henri Ford, 14 December 1939, series 2, box, 15, folder 3, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

84 John Peale Bishop, ‘Chainpoems and Surrealism, 1940’, in New Directions in Prose & Poetry, ed. James Laughlin (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1940), 363.

85 Bishop, ‘Chainpoems and Surrealism, 1940’, 363.

86 Ibid., 363.

87 Craig J. Saper, Networked Art (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2001), xii.

88 Saper, Networked Art, xii.

89 Reproductions of Ray Johnson’s art featured in the tenth issue of Blues (1989). We will discuss the tenth issue of Ford’s modernist little magazine in Chapter 5.

90 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 119.

91 Saper, Networked Art, 31.

92 Ibid., 31.

93 Given the role that issues of modernist ‘circulars’ have played in the current discussion, it seems fitting to discover that Johnson once sent Ford a collection of mail art sealed in an envelope bearing the slogan ‘Ezra Pound for President!’ Ray Johnson to Charles Henri Ford [n.d.], series 2, box, 14, folder 2, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

94 Whereas Ford’s chainpoems develop avant-garde strategies like the exquisite corpse, Johnson’s mail art collages arguably represent a culmination of such avant-garde praxis. Johnson’s mail art, in the words of Ina Blom, ‘not only attempts to sanction the free reception of gifts of art without obligation (in a sense to restore the symbolical division between gift and exchange in an increasingly commodity-orientated society). More importantly, it accords to each and every one without exception the power of a giver who gives the most and thus obligates the others – a social impossibility if there ever was one and perhaps the purest expression of the many avant-garde dreams of an existence beyond social division (from Dadaist to Surrealist notions of collective creation and the politics of the subconscious, to Joseph Beuys’s dictum Jedermann ist Künstler)’. Ina Blom, ‘How to (Not) Answer a Letter: Ray Johnson’s Postal Performance’, Ray Johnson: Please Add To & Return (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2009), 103. Original emphasis.

95 William S. Wilson, With Ray: The Art of Friendship (Black Mountain, NC: Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, 1997), 12.

96 Wilson, With Ray, 12.

97 Quoted in Asako Kitaori, ‘Charles Henri Ford: Catalyst Among Poets’, Rain Taxi Review of Books (Spring 2000), http://www.raintaxi.com/charles-henri-ford/ (accessed 4 December 2015).

98 Wilson, With Ray, 20.

99 ‘He feeds off other people, and he is a product of what he eats. You are what you eat.’ Quoted in John Wilcock, The Autography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol (New York: Trela Media LLC, 2010), 61. We will discuss Ford’s relationship with Warhol at greater length in Chapter 4.