3

Building Up and Breaking Down: Surrealism, New York, New Criticism

1

In 1940, the American author, composer, and former Blues contributor, Paul Bowles gently chided Charles Henri Ford for what he perceived as yet another instance of his friend’s wilful contrariness. ‘You’re always building up just when everything’s breaking down,’¹ wrote Bowles. This assertion provides an initial means with which to consider, as I propose to do in this chapter, Ford’s output of the 1940s and his critical standing in the 1950s. Historical context is important in this regard. Bowles is referring here to Ford’s decision to publish what was in essence a pacifist avant-garde art journal – View – at a time when many in the United States supported the idea of a foreign policy intervention in war-torn Europe. His decision to found View not all that long after the start of the Second World War can be said to mirror the earlier decision to launch Blues in the same year as the Wall Street Crash. And much like Blues, Ford’s View was removed from the wider concerns and demands of the society into which it emerged.²

Still, View matters. For one thing, as we will see, it offered a port of textual refuge to the various displaced figures of the European avant-garde.³ In addition to this, we can read this seminal – and influential – magazine as another key moment in Ford’s development as an artist and editor. I want to discuss Ford’s developmental trajectory in the opening sections of the present chapter, before turning my attention to the issue of our Mississippian’s critical standing in the middle decades of the twentieth century. In particular, I suggest that Ford’s inquisitive aesthetic sensibility and his avant-garde disposition – both of which impacted his journal and the attendant View Editions imprint that he also founded in the 1940s – put him at odds with at least three of the dominant cultural and critical tendencies of the day. To begin, I move to consider Ford’s fraught relationship with dominant models of Surrealism. Here, I draw on unpublished archival materials newly unearthed from the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. This section reveals the depth of Ford’s engagement with the Surrealists, while suggesting that it is his inquisitive, questioning attitude that condemns him to the margins the movement founded, promoted, and guarded by André Breton. Having done so, I then propose to scrutinize Ford’s marginalization in the wider context of the historical narrative of mid-twentieth-century artistic practice and development. Referring here to Clement Greenberg’s heroic, masculinist narrative of painterly modernist progress, this portion of the chapter demonstrates that Ford’s overtly surreal stance is one of the primary reasons behind his enduring relegation to the footnotes of critical and cultural history. Finally, I consider Ford’s fractious encounter with purveyors of New Criticism. In this section, I propose that Ford’s unpublished theoretical output of this historical period should be read as a clear riposte to the contemporaneous brand of high modernist-inflected impersonality promoted by John Crowe Ransom and his formally conservative allies. Building on this line of critical inquiry, the chapter closes by gesturing to the ways in which Ford – in spite of the various critical obstacles he encountered along the way – directly influenced a host of crucial post-war, ostensibly postmodern American poets.

2

Ford’s interest in Surrealism is in a very specific sense bound up with the history of his Blues. Recall that in order better to achieve his aims when it came to his modernist little magazine, and so as to more nimbly sidestep the issue of his perceived adolescent isolation in the Deep South, Ford sought to establish contacts with writers, editors, and artists across the globe. Ford, as we know, was more than willing to take advice – and contributions – from a range of European sources. Significantly, one source of assistance came from the well-known American expatriate poet and editor Eugene Jolas, who was based in Paris. Ford admired Jolas, so much so that he eventually approached him to join the editorial board of Blues.⁴ Above all, Ford was much taken with Jolas’s influential second-generation modernist little magazine transition. It was in this little magazine that Ford first discovered surrealistically inflected instances of literary avant-gardism. Interviewed in 1987 by Bruce Wolmer, Ford detailed the way in which his initial encounter with transition, and his reading of Jolas’s work, shaped his own creative praxis. Ford’s response to the following question is revealing:

BW: Who were you influenced by in transition?

CHF: Eugene Jolas himself. Later on I discovered Paul Eluard and André-Breton and the poet Benjamin Péret. But my first surrealist thrill came from a nonmember of the official group who was, however, an advocate of surrealism – Jolas himself. I remember that distinctly.⁵

Ford’s reply resonates in relation to his decades-long engagement with all things officially Surrealist, as both a committed ‘advocate’ and, significantly, as an inquisitive non-member. Equally, if on a more immediate level, Ford’s retrospective account of his initial introduction to Jolas’s transition is also useful. It captures something of the sensual, almost palpable physical ‘thrill’ he experienced when first coming into contact with surrealistic materials. This experience, when combined with, and complemented by, his subsequent reading of prominent Surrealist poets such as Breton, Eluard, and Péret, were to electrify many, if not all, of his subsequent literary, aesthetic, and editorial ventures.⁶

Ford articulates his commitment to the precepts of Surrealism in his poetry of the early 1940s. Consider the following lines, which come from his 1941 collection, The Overturned Lake:

To tone down language is to tongue‐tie the pulse,

meter of mood, tape‐line of longing,

and so we are boosted by the measureless dream

and awake to an algebra whose symbols cry havoc.⁷

Ford’s ‘Comedy of Belief’ contains a number of allusions to the central tenets of Surrealism. The remark about a ‘tape‐line of longing’ refers to the crucial role that desire plays in Surrealist thought and literature. In Jennifer Mundy’s estimation, ‘The word desire runs like a silver thread through the poetry and writings of the surrealist group in all its phases.’⁸ For the Surrealists, ‘desire was the authentic voice of the inner self’.⁹ Notions of love and desire certainly play an important role in the work of the movement’s guiding light. For instance, in his poetic meditation L’Amour fou (1937), Breton asserts that love can function ‘as a fundamental principle for moral as well as cultural progress’.¹⁰ In Breton’s eyes, literary activity represents ‘a tried and tested means’ with which ‘to fix the sensitive and moving world on a single being as well as a permanent force of anticipation’.¹¹ In other words, concentrated poetic activity can provide a means with which we can better understand (the objects of) our desire and affection.

Ford’s declaration that ‘we are boosted by the measureless dream’ also relates to conceptions of Surrealism. As is well known, Breton and his followers looked to the Freudian unconscious and the attendant psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams for artistic inspiration. Dismissing formal divisions between conscious and unconscious states of existence in Les Vases Communicants (1932), Breton argues that the true ‘poet to come will surmount the depressing idea of the irreparable divorce between action and dream’.¹² Further to this, Breton argues that via a fusion of conscious and unconscious states of perception, the Surrealist poet might restore ‘man to the heart of the universe, extracting him for a second from his debilitating adventure and reminding him that he is, for every pain and every joy exterior to himself, an indefinitely perfectible place of resolution and resonance’.¹³ This assertion allows us better to understand Ford’s reference to the ‘measureless dream’ in the poem above. Following Breton, Ford is suggesting that a committed exploration of the ‘measureless’ reservoirs that underpin subjective perception might awaken a new kind of poetic ‘algebra’ whose seemingly irrational ‘symbols’ might ‘cry havoc’ and thereby tear apart previously held antimonies pertaining to objective and subjective experience.¹⁴

In equal measure, however, it is important to bear in mind that Ford was not content merely to praise or reaffirm conceptual notions set forth in Bretonian Surrealism. Rather, he sought also to differentiate his approach and outlook from that of the card-carrying members of the Surrealist group. There are reasons as to why he did so. First, Ford and Breton hardly saw eye to eye when it came to issues of sexuality. Breton’s homophobia was, as is commonly known, the stuff of legend.¹⁵ This was a man, lest we forget, who once accused ‘homosexuals of confronting human tolerance with a mental and moral deficiency which tends to turn itself into a system and to paralyze every enterprise I respect’.¹⁶ Yet, on the face of it, Ford seems not to have been all that bothered by Breton’s personal prejudices. This comes across in Ford’s aforementioned interview with Wolmer:

BW: What are your feelings about the well-known, almost doctrinal antipathy on the part of Breton and many of the other official surrealists to homosexuals?

CHF: That has been exaggerated. The skeleton came out of the closet when Louis Aragon died.

BW: You didn’t feel personally alienated or antagonistic to Breton?

CHF: Not at all. Not at all, because he was certainly amiable and welcoming. The thing it started with is very simple: Jean Cocteau was Breton’s bête noire, and that symbolized the whole sexual ambiance. That’s it. Jean was famous, was arrogant, he was talented and he was there before the surrealists got there. They had to put down somebody.

BW: So Breton was, in effect, competing with Cocteau for the leadership of the French avant-garde?

CHF: At one point Man Ray took a beautiful photograph of Cocteau. It was all very friendly at the beginning. There were even groups with Cocteau and Tzara and Man Ray and so forth. But Cocteau was pushed out.

BW: So there was no homophobia on the part of others besides Breton, like Eluard?

CHF: No, totally, totally mythic. Eluard was very friendly with me too, and I took photographs of him. Nothing of that. And everybody knew about Dalí and Garcia Lorca.

BW: I didn’t know that.

CHF: Now you do.¹⁷

Gossip, as we all know, makes the cultural world go round. Gavin Butt emphasizes as much his critical account of the vibrant queer art scene that developed in New York in the decades after the Second World War. According to Butt, ‘gossiping is a social activity which produces and maintains the filiations of artistic community.’¹⁸ Precisely, in Butt’s estimation, ‘gossip’s informal and trivializing mode of address [came] to be elevated to the status of an artistic expression, particularly within one cross-disciplinary community of practitioners centred on the so-called New York School of poetry’.¹⁹ I mention this here for two reasons. The first point concerns the general narrative arc of the present discussion. As will become clear in the final pages of this chapter, Ford’s career intersects with those of the core poets associated with the New York School. The second point speaks directly to the notion of gossip. Ford was, among other things, a certified quidnunc. This much is evident in the passage quoted above. To be perfectly clear though: in no way, shape, or form whatsoever is such a statement to be construed as negative. Quite the opposite. Ford always appreciated the radical – and radically subversive – potential of gossip.

We get a better sense of Ford’s fondness for a good chinwag in his interview with Wolmer. Ford’s gossipy recollections perform a number of distinct, yet simultaneously related critical functions. First, following Butt, we might say that Ford’s seemingly offhand remarks in fact serve, at least in one respect, to remind us of the role that a shared sense of filiation necessarily plays in the construction of a community, artistic or otherwise. As Ford says, ‘It was all very friendly at the beginning.’ At the same time, notice the manner in which Ford seeks quickly to foreground the fact that notions of community and exclusivity are linked inextricably. This becomes glaringly apparent when Ford broaches the topic of Jean Cocteau’s treatment at the hands of Breton and his acolytes. The issue of sexuality creeps into the picture at this point. Ford is suggesting that the significance of Cocteau’s homosexuality has been overplayed somewhat, at least when it comes to the issue of his vexed relationship with Breton and the Surrealists. Cocteau’s homosexuality, Ford argues, had less to do with his marginalization in the wider Surrealist community than might be expected. The Surrealists simply, in Ford’s estimation, ‘had to put down somebody’ in order to assert their aesthetic primacy.

Taking this a step further, one could even say that it appears as if Ford is trying, in what would surely be a decidedly strange turn of events, to downplay the issue of Breton’s homophobia altogether. After all, as he says, Breton was always both ‘amiable and welcoming’. But this would be to miss the point entirely. With the hint of a twinkle in his eye, Ford tells a clearly astonished Wolmer: ‘Everyone knew about Dalí and Garcia Lorca.’ How are we to read this statement? We can put it like this: having at first gone to great lengths to downplay the issue of Surrealism’s well-documented heteronormative predilections, Ford flips the script. As we can now see, he is in fact suggesting that if there was any homophobia, it came mainly from Breton. A weirdly staid, isolated, and sexually fusty Breton at that. In this sense, then, Ford’s use of gossip serves to put a queer spin on what has long been considered a primarily heterosexual cultural formation. As to whether Ford’s account is completely accurate? It is difficult to say with absolute conviction either way. In any case, portions of his remarks certainly do ring true. He is, for instance, surely right to emphasize the competitive nature of the Surrealist enterprise. Indeed, as will become apparent in the next section of this chapter, we need look no further than to Ford’s dealings with Breton during the 1940s in order to confirm this.

3

Generally considered the last historical European avant-garde, Surrealism experienced a surge of popularity in the United States during the early 1940s.²⁰ The increased visibility of Surrealism in North America can be attributed to the enforced mass emigration undertaken by the various members of the European intelligentsia in 1941. Glossing this point, the historian Serge Guilbaut reminds us that ‘by 1943 the surrealists had already been in New York for two years, and the public had become used to their extravagances which, if Salvador Dalí’s exhibitions in the windows of large New York department stores are any indication, were by now familiar to the man in the street’.²¹ Long established as an important aesthetic movement on the other side of the Atlantic, many prominent European Surrealists also benefited from increased exposure in the large gallery spaces of New York during the early 1940s. To quote Guilbaut again: ‘Max Ernst was the darling of museums and society matrons alike. Matta was the young eccentric whom other artists took seriously. Masson was doing automatic drawings. The unconscious was on everybody’s mind.’²² Guilbaut’s wry suggestion that the ‘unconscious was on everybody’s mind’ in New York during the early 1940s warrants further consideration here. ‘The influx of European refugees, who brought with them a cultural baggage that American artists had always admired without altogether assimilating’, Guilbaut notes, ‘suddenly brought home to New Yorkers especially that the United States was indeed at the center of the cultural upheaval provoked by the war.’²³ Guilbaut’s account of the upheaval provoked by the Second World War provides us with a more accurate means of contextualizing the impact of the displaced Surrealist émigrés. Crucially, young American artists and intellectuals no longer needed to travel to Europe to enrich their avant-garde education because the last vestiges of the very same avant-garde were now living alongside them. The immediate proximity of the displaced European émigrés thus afforded a whole generation of American artists the unique opportunity to reconsider their cultural relationship with national and international culture and thereby, to borrow from Guilbaut one last time, ‘adjust their actions accordingly’.²⁴

Accepting this, we might reasonably assume that Guilbaut would have thought to group Charles Henri Ford among those fortunate Americans who afforded the ‘unique’ and culturally ‘enriching’ opportunity of getting to know their European counterparts that little bit better. Ford did, after all, live in New York during the 1940s. But things aren’t quite as simple as they appear at first glance. On the one hand, Ford was very much interested in observing Breton and the other assorted Surrealists at intimately close quarters. As we will see later, Ford had a variety of reasons for doing so: many of which run contra to the decidedly Eurocentric version of events proffered by Guilbaut. For one thing, Ford had no interest in simply adjusting his actions accordingly, just because the Surrealists happened to be in town. And why would he? Ford had known the Surrealists for years. He first met them while living in Paris in the early 1930s. In a letter dated 3 December 1931, Ford reports to Parker Tyler that he has been introduced to the tragic Surrealist writer René Crevel at a cocktail party held at La Galerie de la Plume d’Or. In characteristic prose, Ford describes Crevel as ‘famous for his poetic books mostly on homosexual love, young, blond hair all about sort of fluffy and a little in front and such sweet blue eyes but too fat because he had tuberculosis’.²⁵

From here on, Ford sought to keep up to date with all things Surrealist. We get a sense of this in a piece of prose – ‘Gossip from Abroad’ – that Ford wrote sometime in the latter half of 1936.²⁶ By this time Ford was living in Italy with the Russian Neo-Romantic painter, Pavel Tchelitchew. We know this because Ford makes mention of it in his pseudo-letter. Written from the perspective of a certain ‘Hobo Peep’, Ford’s letter is full to the brim with detail – and gossip – pertaining to the comings and goings of Europe’s best and brightest. The aforementioned Cocteau is, for example, reported as having returned from a trip around the world, ‘with a new coiffure to match his new face (youthified by the painful burning process which has kept the Hon Mrs Reginald Fellowes more beautiful than her daughters, who have children of their own) consisting of a high clip, with curls in front a la Hepburn’.²⁷ Not all that long after this, Salvador Dalí makes an inimitably theatrical entrance. Hobo Peep recounts how, at a lecture in London,

Dali appeared in a deep-sea diver’s costume, leading from two large-wolf hounds. SALLLLLLVADOR DALI! came from the loud-speaker in the back of the room, the microphone on the platform receiving Dali’s opening words, his own name. He went on (in French, with a heavy Spanish accent) to tell of his pictures, speaking of one that represented the cadaver of a jackass, and a fly buzzing in a Bacchic dance around the rotting matter, but instead of flashing on the screen his picture, appeared the portrait of his wife and chief source of inspiration, Gala.²⁸

Meanwhile, on the other side of the English Channel, Hobo Peep recounts how ‘André Breton and Paul Eluard have quarrelled but Eluard continues to be Man Ray’s best friend’.²⁹ What, I want now to ask, are we to make of these seemingly inconsequential remarks, presented as they are without much in the way of critical comment, or, to adapt from Hobo Peep himself, any evaluative judgement?³⁰ There are, in my estimation, a number of things that need to be emphasized. First, consider the manner in which this unpublished text resonates when situated in relation to Ford’s long-standing interest in networks of social exchange. As we established in the previous chapter, Ford sought, throughout his career, to foreground the role that sociability plays in the circulation of cultural capital. Do we not get a flavour of something similar here, in Hobo Peep’s discursive missive, crisscrossing as it does from artist to artist, gallery opening to gallery opening, country to country? I think we do. Further to this, albeit on a less conceptual level, ‘Gossip from Abroad’ serves to remind us once more of the important fact that – and this is something that bears repeating – the Surrealists were very much at the forefront of Ford’s thoughts long before they disembarked en masse on the eastern shores of the United States.

Yet this is only part of the story. Dickran Tashjian argues, rather dismissively, that upon reaching Paris in May 1931, Ford ‘did not immediately infiltrate the Surrealist group. Although he met individual Surrealists like Man Ray and Jacques Baron, he was perhaps too distracted by the gay life that Paris offered. Then, too, he was understandably drawn to Jean Cocteau, who was anathema to the homophobic Breton’.³¹ Be that as it may, the fact remains that our young and ambitious Mississippian did indeed make quite the impression on the Surrealists in the 1930s. Archival research reveals that Ford figured in their thoughts a number of years before they arrived in New York. As a matter of fact, it turns out that Breton sought to involve Ford in some of the matters most crucial to Surrealism in the latter part of the 1930s. Consider the information contained in the letter Ford sent to Parker Tyler on 5 April 1939:

A telephone call from Breton summoned me to a ‘confidential’ meeting of the FIARI – the committee for CLE. There has been no large and general reunion as yet. I was asked to speak and reported the first call & plans for future organization (though I had to say I knew of no PLAN as yet) under auspices of [P]artisan [R]eview. Breton seemed impatient at not having heard from them.³²

Discussion concerning the possible formation of the Fédération Internationale de l’Art Révolutionnaire Indépendant having drawn to a close, the group then decamped to that most venerable of Parisian avant-garde institutions, the Deux Magots. Ford describes how, once ensconced at a table, the editor Albert Skira

wanted to know about agents and I suggested the Gotham BM; it costs him 100,000 francs $3000. for this issue and he breaks even on sales & others. Breton said he hoped I wasn’t disappointed in the FIARI meeting; it’s true it wasn’t very brilliant; MSS were read & there was some discussion – the atmosphere in the café was more informal. I made a report on my recent visit chez Eluard, at which I was shocked by his naive or ignorant adherence to the idea of the Soviet Union; also his willingness to engage in the next war, as officer: ‘and instruct his soldiers in the principles of Communism’!³³

Critical consensus suggests that Ford’s slightly disparaging remarks that the ‘confidential’ portion of the meeting was not particularly ‘brilliant’ weren’t all that wide of the mark.³⁴ However, the reason I cite this passage at length here has less to do with Ford’s dismissive account of official Surrealist business than it does with Breton’s candid, apologetic remark about the unsatisfactory nature of the FIARI meeting. Without belabouring the point, Breton seems to have had no trouble, in Ford’s retelling at least, confiding in a relative outsider. An openly queer American outsider.

In equal measure, it seems that Breton made quite the impression on Ford. This also comes to the fore in his letter to Tyler:

Breton I find very sympathetic, I gave him my Garden of Disorder with dedication to Andre Breton, Lenine de la Revolution Surrealiste and just finished reading his Les Vases Communicants, and have bought other of his books. I find I have been underestimating him all along, (though not the accomplishments of the surrealist painters), through not having read his works. I’m lunching Friday with him and will take photos.³⁵

What are we to make of Ford’s admission that he had been ‘underestimating’ Breton? As far as divulgences go, this is decidedly curious. All the more, given that Ford had been interested in Surrealism for the best part of a decade. On a related note, what is to be made of the frankly remarkable admission that he had yet to work his way through Breton’s oeuvre? It is difficult to know whether to take Ford’s comments at face value. Tashjian posits that ‘only by the late 1930s, during the course of working through left-wing politics, did Ford finally make his way to Breton and the Surrealist coterie’.³⁶ There is, I think, an element of truth in this statement. That being so, perhaps the most charitable way to put things would be to say that Ford’s meetings with Breton spurred the former figure into action. Indeed, from this point on, Ford sought, in both his poetic and editorial praxis, to rectify this unsatisfactory state of creative affairs. Moreover, it was at this point in his career that Ford began actively to consider what he could do with and make out of pre-existing forms and conceptions of Surrealism.

All of which is conceivably to say that the late 1930s and early 1940s found Ford at his most conceptually focused and driven, especially when it came to Surrealist aesthetics and ideas. We see this in another letter Ford sent to Tyler in 1939:

Les Vases Communicants is one B’s most brilliant works of prose; I’m reading it 2nd time as first time I read I didn’t have the eye on the translation. Other books of his I’ve read recently: Position Politique du Surrealisme; L’Amour Fou; Second Manifeste du Surrealisme. It’s easy, as I said, to underestimate the surrealist movement if one judges it only by the painting products… . However, Breton is an orthodox surrealist in his art-judgments, in spite of the ‘independent’ line taken in the manifesto. His group meets at 2 Magots on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays & Sundays. My lunch with him lasted from one until night during which time we had a lot to say: I told him I was shocked at his puritanism in the Sex Conference in Varietées wherein he protested against discussing pederasty, so I bluntly said it must have been because of an inhibition and he agreed.³⁷

Reading this, it soon becomes clear that Ford had been spending significant time with the primary texts of Surrealism. Notice also the manner in which Ford draws attention to Breton’s ‘orthodox’ stance in matters of Surrealist aesthetics. This notion of ‘orthodoxy’ is something that we will return to when discussing Ford’s critical intervention in the realms of Surrealism. Further to that, consider the way in which Ford appears to take Breton to task on issues of sexuality. This carries over into the next section of Ford’s communiqué:

I told him if I appreciated his lyricism inspired by ‘la femme’ it was only because I substituted the symbol of the Other Sex. He is revolted by obvious Lesbians as well as ‘fairies’ like we used to be… . Which doesn’t OBVIATE his looking like a woman in the first place without wearing his hair long in the 2nd… . Velvet knee pants and silk stockings would make him the REINCARNATION of O. Wilde, for whom, as is, he’s much more of a DEAD-RINGER than Robert Morley… . In fact Miss Morley has to be made up to the high g-ds in order to HOLD A CANDLE to Miss Breton… . Aside from the frivolity on my part, I take him seriously up to a POINT.³⁸

In one sense, of course, we find ourselves on familiar ground in these lines. What we have here is yet another instance of prime Fordian gossip. In addition, there is much that might also be said about the manner in which Charles Henri moves to foreground the inherently performative dimension of self-presentation in this passage. Having said that, on a slightly different note, consider the cutting tone that underlines Ford’s ostensibly ‘frivolous’ remarks. Specifically, consider his assertion that while he is willing to take Breton seriously, he does so only up until a certain ‘POINT’.³⁹

It was precisely at this juncture that Ford’s working association with Breton changed forever. Their relationship now becomes increasingly fraught and competitive. This appears clear when we turn our attention to the New York of the early 1940s. For instance, Breton’s decision to found an official magazine of orthodox Surrealism while exiled in New York in 1942 can be read, at least in part, as an implicit response – or even rebuke – to Ford’s decision to establish View in 1940. Realizing that Ford was better placed when it came to the promotion of Surrealism in America, Breton tried to bring Ford into the ‘orthodox’ Surrealist fold via the offer of an editorial position with his magazine, which was called VVV. Breton did this so as to nullify any potential threat that Ford might have posed to his aesthetic authority. Ford, however, quickly grasped the none‐too‐subtle implications of this ostensibly altruistic offer.⁴⁰ As Tashjian tells it, ‘Ford was apparently asked to be editor of VVV, but declined the position for the same reasons that he refused to hew strictly to the Surrealist line in View. “I knew [Breton] would be looking over my shoulder,” he later said, preferring a catholic stance for View.’⁴¹

This sort of statement needs to be borne in mind when we approach Ford’s retelling of what proved to be suitably awkward – and competitive – exchange with Breton in midtown Manhattan:

I invited [Breton] to the View office one day and I said, ‘Andre, I would like to publish a book of your poems’ So he looked at me and said, ‘vous etes malin.’ Now that’s hard to translate. ‘Malin’ means something like I was undercutting him. ‘You got me by the balls,’ so to speak. He knew it would be a feather in my cap, but he also knew that he couldn’t resist because nobody else had asked him.⁴²

There is, to be sure, much humour to be found here: all of it at Breton’s expense. Yet we would do well to remember that in spite of all their competitive jostling, Ford and Breton both wanted exactly the same thing. That is, they both wanted to promote and thereby ensure the survival of Surrealism in the United States. Having said that, as we will now see, it soon becomes strikingly clear that Ford was by no means content merely to praise or reaffirm conceptual notions set forth by Breton. Cupping André’s balls in one hand, Charles Henri sought with the other to differentiate his approach and outlook from the leader of the ‘orthodox’ Surrealist group.

4

In his ‘Open Letter to Surrealists Everywhere’ (1938), the American expatriate novelist and occasional View contributor Henry Miller declares that ‘scarcely anything has been as stimulating to me as the theories and the products of the Surrealists’.⁴³ As far as Miller is concerned, ‘There is no doubt about it. Surrealism is the secret language of our time, the only spiritual counterpart to the materialistic activities of the socialist forces which are now driving us to the wall.’⁴⁴ In Miller’s eyes, ‘The seeming discrepancies between the language of Breton and Lenin, or Marx, are only superficial. Surrealism will give a new, deeper, truer, more immediate spiritual doctrine to the economic, social, and political revolutionists.’⁴⁵ As these comments make clear, on the one hand, Miller has many positive things to say about Surrealism, but on the other it soon becomes painfully apparent that he’s a hopeless literary case who shouldn’t be left unattended anywhere near the avant-garde cutlery drawer. When it comes to the specific poets and artists who identify as surreal, the author of The Rosy Crucifixion is far from effusive. Indeed, he goes as far to propose that the Surrealists ‘await the miracle, but they do nothing to assist it, to bring about an accouchement. They talk of ushering in a general confusion, but they live like the bourgeoisie. They believe in the revolution but there is no real revolt in them’.⁴⁶ Having questioned the political credentials of Breton and his cohorts in this fashion, Miller turns his attention to aesthetic matters. He seeks now to remind us that the Surrealists ‘have demonstrated the possibilities of the marvellous which lie concealed in the commonplace’.⁴⁷ Significantly, Miller reads this ‘tremendous emphasis on the marvellous’ as an integral part of the Surrealist ‘reaction against the crippling, dwarfing harmony imposed’ by the ‘fake Hellenism of French culture’, a culture in which, according to Miller, ‘the sense of the marvellous, the sense of magic, of wonder, awe, mystery, was doomed to perish’.⁴⁸

It thereby comes as no surprise to discover that French culture comes in for a fair bit of criticism in the closing stages of Miller’s letter. ‘French life has become stylized,’ he argues: ‘It is not a life rhythm but a death rhythm. The culture is no longer vital … it is decayed. And the French, securely imprisoned within this cultural wall, are rotting away.’⁴⁹ This profound disdain for existing forms of French culture in part accounts for Miller’s interest in Surrealism. He is of the opinion that Surrealism will have performed ‘a valuable function’ if it serves to ‘destroy’ the ‘death grip’ of Francophile culture.⁵⁰ Yet lingering suspicions about the viability of this supposedly liberatory project remain. We get a clear sense of these reservations when Miller asserts that Surrealism might in fact be a mere manifestation ‘of a life becoming extinct, a virus which quickens the inevitable end’.⁵¹ Even so, in his reckoning, this might be a step ‘in the right direction. Europe must die, and France with it. Sooner or later a new life must begin, a life from the roots’.⁵² As to where such new life might spring? Miller doesn’t specify.

We might speculate as to exactly what Charles Henri Ford would have made of his American compatriot’s assertions and accusations, couched as they are in bombastic and iconoclastic rhetoric. Surely the seemingly unselfconscious, homoerotic quality of much of Miller’s diction would have caused him to chuckle. He may well have also had something to say about the question of precisely where new, presumably surrealistically inflected forms of cultural ‘life’ might spring. To put this in the simplest terms possible, Ford believed the ‘roots’ from which new cultural forms of ‘life’ were to ‘spring’ were to be found in his own creative, editorial, and theoretical praxis of the 1940s. Archival research confirms this. I am thinking specifically of Ford’s unpublished ‘Notes on Neo-Modernism’. These fragmentary notes shed a great deal of critical light on the scale of Ford’s dialogue with Surrealism.⁵³ ‘What will the New Modernism be?’⁵⁴ ‘Is Surrealism still modern?’⁵⁵ These are the sorts of questions Ford poses in this particular text. Reading through this significant document, which was most likely written in the first half of the 1940s, we get the sense that Ford had grown especially frustrated with Bretonian conceptions of Surrealism.⁵⁶ This much is evident in the section of Ford’s ‘Notes on Neo-Modernism’ that proffers a provisional ‘Critique of Pure Surrealism’. This unfinished commentary reads both as a critique and as a call to arms. Suggesting that as a ‘vice nouveau’ orthodox Surrealism ‘has lost its appeal, [and] its novelty’,⁵⁷ Ford here announces his divergence from the aesthetic programme as outlined by Breton.⁵⁸ Conscious of the fact that Surrealism had already begun to attract significant amounts of public and critical attention in the United States during the late 1930s and early 1940s, Ford proposes, in highly suggestive language, to bring Surrealism ‘out from [the] underground’.⁵⁹

In his critique, Ford envisions a transformative reworking of what he believed to be a conceptually stunted Surrealism. Imaginationism is the so-bad-it’s-almost good, quasi-Coleridgean name that Ford gives to his proposed modification of Surrealism.⁶⁰ Ford goes to great length to emphasize the avant‐garde heritage of Imaginationism. ‘Just as Surrealism came out of Dada’, he writes, ‘so Imaginationism was born of Surrealism.’⁶¹ Furthermore, in Ford’s estimation, ‘The Imaginationist is the son of the Surrealist – with an Oedipus complex.’⁶² Building on this, he reasons that ‘Imaginationism [is] more revolutionary than Surrealism because [it is] less passive, more active’.⁶³ The distinction being made here between the active and the passive helps us better understand the difference between Imaginationism and Surrealism. Elsewhere in his notes, Ford alludes to Breton’s description of Surrealist automatism as a fundamentally passive activity, which is dependent on placing oneself in a receptive state.⁶⁴ In Ford’s conception of Imaginationism, he wholly rejects the notion of unconscious passivity: instead the conscious mind also needs to be actively engaged. The following analogy succinctly demonstrates this distinction:

The surrealist is the somnambule who walks in the depths of the unconscious.

The imaginationist is also the somnambule – but he has awakened while in the unconscious, and keeps on waking.⁶⁵

Ford contrasts the figure of the passive, sleepwalking Surrealist with the more proactive, conscious Imaginationist. Ford is effectively suggesting that a sort of somnambulistic blindness has marred the conceptual and aesthetic merits of Bretonian Surrealism. While too harsh an assessment, the point that Ford is trying to make here is that ‘orthodox’ Surrealism often seems overly reliant on the insights afforded by constant and, in his estimation, passive recourse to the unconscious.⁶⁶ Where the orthodox approach sees the Surrealist practitioner firmly located in, and constrained by, the unconscious, for Ford, the lessons of the unconscious are there to be consciously and artfully applied.⁶⁷

Equally, it should be noted that Ford’s proposed critique is not quite as groundbreaking as it purports to be. For one thing, the language in which Ford couches his critique is indebted to the aforementioned Communicating Vessels. This much becomes evident when we read Ford’s remarks about somnambulism in relation to the vision of Surrealism articulated in a well-known passage featured in Breton’s treatise, where the self-styled Magus of Surrealism characterizes the ideal communicating vessel as

a capillary tissue, without which it would be useless to try to imagine mental circulation. The role of this tissue is, we have seen, to guarantee the constant exchange which must occur in thought between the exterior and the interior worlds, an exchange that requires the continuous interpenetration of the activity of waking and that of sleeping. My entire ambition has been to give here a glimpse of its structure.⁶⁸

Breton seeks in this passage to foreground the dialectical nature of the relationship that exists between notions of interiority and exteriority. Mary Ann Caws suggests that it is precisely this dialectical relationship between the interior arena of subjective experience and the exterior world of facts and figures – realms personified by the respective figures of sleep and wakefulness – that resides at the heart of Breton’s study. In her summation, ‘This passing back and forth between two modes is shown [in Breton’s reading] to be the basis of surrealist thought, of surreality itself.’⁶⁹

What, then, can we make of Ford’s critique of Surrealism, and his consequent theory of Imaginationism? Upon re-reading both his ‘Notes on Neo-Modernism’ and ‘Imaginationist Manifesto’, it now seems as if Ford was either unfamiliar with, or wilfully misinterpreted, Breton’s dynamic conception of Surrealism as outlined in Communicating Vessels. The former is, as we already know, impossible. Archival research demonstrates that Ford was well aware of Breton’s Communicating Vessels. Bearing this in mind, we need to turn our attention now to the possibility that Ford chose to misread, deliberately or otherwise, the Surrealist message contained in the pages of Breton’s text. Were this the case, such a glaring oversight would surely and severely dent Ford’s standing as a dedicated follower, let alone consistent critical thinker, of Surrealism. Still, in his defence, it is worth remembering that the document we are dealing with here is fragmentary, provisional, and unfinished. That being so, in the end, we can only speculate about the way in which Ford might have chosen to develop the critique of ‘Pure’ Surrealism that he had begun to fashion in his ‘Notes’ and the complementary ‘Imaginationist Manifesto’. Nevertheless, what does remain clear is Ford’s burning desire to use Surrealist techniques as he sees fit. Ford stresses this at the very end of his fragmentary notes on the future of modernism and Surrealism, when he declares: ‘Instead of automatism I would propose autonomy.’⁷⁰

Among other things, this desire for ‘autonomy’ speaks to Ford’s decision to turn down Breton’s offer of a place on the editorial board of VVV. Our man was, it seems, characteristically determined to go his own way, on his own terms. We see this when we turn our attention to View and the attendant View Editions. As I mentioned at the outset of this chapter, Ford’s magazine served as a vital conduit for the dissemination of Surrealism on the shores of the United States. Functioning both as a textual home away from home for the displaced Europe intelligentsia and as a showcase for local American talent, Ford’s View, in the words of Catrina Neiman, ‘set the stage for what was to come: it succeeded in popularizing the avant-garde’.⁷¹ Furthering Neiman’s claim, Stamatina Dimakopoulou argues that Ford’s periodical, which championed aesthetic movements of a predominantly figurative persuasion (most visibly Surrealism and Neo-Romanticism), ‘constitutes an important backdrop to the emergence of America’s first international avant-garde, not despite, but because of its resistance to the emergence of Abstract Expression’.⁷² Significantly, in Dimakopoulou’s estimation, ‘As the consonance between aesthetic and political radicalism could no longer be sustained, Surrealism in View encouraged an opening out to mainstream and popular cultures that were elided from the early experiments of the Abstract Expressionists.’⁷³

Dimakopoulou’s statement resonates with Ford’s aforementioned desire, expressed in his neo-modernist notes, to bring Surrealism ‘out from [the] underground’.⁷⁴ I want, in a moment, to consider some of the specific ways in which Ford sought to achieve exactly that. Before doing so though I want first briefly to draw the reader’s attention to Dimakopoulou’s mention of that most crucial of North American post-war cultural formations: Abstract Expressionism. Ford wasn’t – to put it mildly – much of a fan of this particular grouping. We know this because he admitted as much to Bruce Wolmer in 1987:

BW: You obviously felt friendlier to the Pop artists than to the Abstract Expressionists. You’ve said that you found Pollock worrying and Rothko empty. Do you still feel that way about them?

CHF: Even more.

BW: Why?

CHF: Because they don’t work any magic for me. I feel no rapport. I feel no poetry. I feel it’s … the technique is totally easy. Anybody can do it. All you have to do is look at their early work which is just hopelessly untalented. They couldn’t draw. They went into something very easy and something very easy to put over. And it was all put over on the American public for art. And they took it up in a big way.⁷⁵

Notice the emphasis that Ford places on the issue of ‘technique’ here. Without wishing to get too far ahead, I mention this now as the notion of ‘craft’ is one that we will return to when it comes time to discuss Ford’s dealings with New Critics such as John Crowe Ransom. In a similar fashion, pay especial attention to Ford’s assertion that the Abstract Expressionists ‘went into something very easy and something very easy to put over. And it was all put over on the American public for art. And they took it up in a big way’. In a manner not all that dissimilar to art historians like Serge Guilbaut, Ford is hinting at the massive expenditure of ideological and intellectual labour that went into the promotion of the Abstract Expressionist aesthetic. As to why I allude to this now? The answer, as we will see in the next section of this chapter, has much to do with another of Ford’s detractors, the vocal proselytizer now most commonly associated with the fortunes of those such as Pollock and Rothko: Clement Greenberg.

For the time being, however, I want to focus on some of the ways in which Ford moved to bring Surrealism up from the underground and out into the North American mainstream in the 1940s. Consider here how Ford chose to deal with the displaced leader of ‘pure’ Surrealism in the various issues of View. Having expressed his genuine admiration and enthusiasm for Breton’s work since the late 1930s, Ford took steps to publish the guardian of Surrealism in View soon after the elder writer arrived in New York. As well as granting Breton his first interview in the United States,⁷⁶ Ford afforded him significant room in View with which to promote his avant-garde movement and to celebrate the artistic successes of those closest to him. We see this in Breton’s essay on Marcel Duchamp, which appeared in the March 1945 issue of View. Effusive in his praise, Breton asserts here that the singular Duchamp is ‘the only one of all his contemporaries who is in no way inclined to grow older’.⁷⁷ Equating Duchamp’s aesthetic with the characteristically Surrealist desire to fuse together the rational and irrational, Breton cleaves to the orthodox party line in this article. He suggests that his colleague’s aesthetic output ‘determines a fundamental crisis of painting and sculpture which reactionary maneuvers and stock-exchange brokerages will not be able to conceal much longer’.⁷⁸

None of this really comes as much of a surprise. Given the opportunity, Breton was always going to sing the praises of an artist whose achievements reflected positively on the avant-garde organization that he had worked so tirelessly to establish. By the same token, Ford evidently had no problem ceding space to Breton in the pages of View, for he clearly had no intention of letting this notoriously controlling émigré have things all his own way. Reading through View, the impression one often gets is that Ford and a number of his contributors are taking humorous swipes at Surrealism’s draconian founder. Consider the events surrounding the publication of Breton’s Young Cherry Trees Secured against Hares. Translated into English by Edouard Roditi, this bilingual collection – which featured drawings by Arshile Gorky and appeared on Ford’s View Editions imprint in 1946 – was the first edition of Breton’s poetry to be published in the United States. Ford paid a great deal of attention and took significant care in bringing this volume to press. Among other things, Ford commissioned a review by his longtime supporter, William Carlos Williams. Published in the October 1946 edition of View, ‘The Genius of France’ opens on an approving note, with Williams singling out Breton’s poetic technique for praise. Williams argues that ‘there is no looseness in Breton’s work, it is all calculated, the tight plot precedes all composition, a coralization microscopic in the detail of its vastness’.⁷⁹ Yet this approval is far from unequivocal. Williams is also of the opinion that ‘everything’ Breton puts down on paper ‘is completely predictable and is thus reassuring to schoolmistresses and the young who need the support of the master’.⁸⁰

Williams then turns his attention to artwork that adorns the dust jacket of Breton’s collection, which was designed by Duchamp. Ford had a great deal of admiration for this seminal artist. Indeed, this is something that comes to the fore in his unpublished neo-modernism notes, in which Duchamp is described as the ‘modernist par excellence’.⁸¹ That being so, it must have felt like quite the coup when Ford found himself in a position to feature Duchamp’s work on the cover of a View Editions volume, especially one authored by Breton.⁸² This becomes strikingly apparent when we appreciate just what it is that we are actually seeing. The cover of Young Cherry Trees features Breton’s stern, paternalistic visage superimposed over a full-length image, flowing robes and all, of the Statue of Liberty. Essentially a depiction of Breton in drag, this palpably camp cover design would have both amused and delighted Ford. Moreover, it was a perfect fit for his general remit: it serves to remind us of the fact that Ford was unwavering when it came to the issue of the promotion of Surrealism in the United States. In equal measure, however, it also resonates with his desire to poke fun at and simultaneously foreground what he had come to perceive as the restrictedly gendered and sexually conservative aspects of Bretonian orthodoxy.

In the final reckoning, one can only speculate as to what Breton made of all this. Certainly, it is not all that difficult to imagine how he would have reacted if confronted with the aforementioned ‘Critique of Pure Surrealism’ contained in Ford’s Imaginationist Manifesto. Given that he had long since marked Ford out as a potential competitor, Breton would surely not have taken kindly to the existence of a document that sought to critique the version of Surrealism that he had worked so hard to establish. Having said that, it is just as likely that the possibility of incurring Breton’s wrath would not have perturbed Ford. He was, as we have seen, determined to make his own mark on Surrealism. Yet despite his steadfast commitment to the promotion and dissemination of Surrealism, Ford usually warrants no more than the briefest of mentions in many historical accounts of the movement.⁸³ Much the same is also true of those accounts that focus on the belated emergence of a staunchly ‘orthodox’ Surrealist Movement in the United States during the 1960s. Founded by Franklin and Penelope Rosemont in 1966, the Breton-approved Chicago Group purported to ‘disturb ceaselessly and without pity the complacency of the American people. We shall encourage and support, with every available means, every expression of wholehearted revolt’.⁸⁴ Denouncing what they considered to be the crass, commercialized version of Surrealism operating in the United States, the Rosemont-led Chicago Group pledged an unswerving allegiance to the aesthetic precepts established by Breton. In Franklin Rosemont’s words, they were not ‘interested in the Americanization of surrealism, but the surrealist transformation of America’.⁸⁵ This sits in clear contradistinction to Ford’s approach. Where the Chicago Group sought to adhere to Breton’s prescriptive Surrealist strictures, Ford moved to adapt them as he saw fit. He grasped intuitively that one need always – regardless of potentially negative ramifications stemming from such a decision – to ‘harness the new, or the horse will wagon you’.⁸⁶

5

That said, it is important to recognize that Ford’s steadfast, albeit idiosyncratic commitment to the Surrealists caused him no end of trouble during the 1940s. In order to appreciate this, we need first to take a small art-historical step back. Historical context is once again important here. In a manner not all that dissimilar to the previously mentioned Guilbaut, Martica Sawin notes that the presence of the displaced Surrealists in 1940s New York and the prominent displays of their work ‘in its small arena gave the American artists an opportunity to observe automatism at work and to examine at first hand the art that it generated, though they had little awareness of Surrealism’s original objectives’.⁸⁷ In this fashion, the shipwrecked remnants of the displaced European cultural intelligentsia were to play an important – if perhaps unwitting – role in the ‘rebirth’ of Western culture in the United States. A number of younger American artists took their aesthetic cues from the displaced Surrealists. I have in mind here painters such as Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. This loosely aligned group of New York-based painters – more commonly known as the Abstract Expressionists – came to dominate American aesthetics in the late 1940s and 1950s. However, while the output of these artists bore the imprint of European avant-gardism, there was, in the words of Guilbaut, ‘a clear difference in what the painters wrote about their work, [and] in the image they projected of themselves’.⁸⁸ The same critic also reminds us of the fact that ‘to be modern in New York in 1946, to wish to live or rather to survive in one’s own time, meant [that one had] to be pessimistic, somber and incapable of painting the visual reality of the atomic age’.⁸⁹ As a result, to be truly ‘modern’ was also, Guilbaut notes, ‘to be incapable of painting viscera, such a statement or description of reality having become frivolous, superfluous, hollow’.⁹⁰ Having thus come to the conclusion that figurative forms of painterly representation tended to deform the very reality that it claims to depict, these and other younger American artists turned their attention to other modes of representation that might more accurately express the conditions of the contemporary world. Alighting on the notion of total aesthetic abstraction, the New York School artists subsequently developed a communal style that increasingly eschewed volumetric depth and representation in favour of flatness.

This turn to abstraction also plays a vital role in the critical work of the pre-eminent theorist of the New York School, the art historian Clement Greenberg. As is commonly known, Greenberg’s narrative of modernism tells the story of the historical avant-garde’s heroic resistance to the forces of commercialization and ideological coercion. In his seminal essay ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ (1939), Greenberg argues that the function of the historical avant-garde is to keep genuine ‘culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence’.⁹¹ Greenberg here insists that the avant-garde has aggressively to assert its independence in order to detach itself from the prevailing attitudes and strictures of a hopelessly compromised contemporary society. Further to this, Greenberg reasons that the avant-garde’s desire for autonomy is registered on a purely aesthetic level. ‘In turning his attention away from subject matter of common experience’, he argues, ‘the poet or artist turns it in upon the medium of his own craft.’⁹² Casting his eye across the aesthetic field, this influential and always opinionated critic then posits that a number of diverse and prominent artists like ‘Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Miró, Kandinsky, Brancusi, even Klee, Matisse, and Cézanne derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in’.⁹³ Form trumps content in this account. ‘The excitement of their art seems to lie most of all in its pure preoccupation with the invention and arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, [and] colors’, Greenberg writes, ‘to the exclusion of whatever is not necessarily implicated in these factors.’⁹⁴

Such comments come to factor prominently in Greenberg’s overarching narrative of modernism, which is developed in the slighter later ‘Towards a Newer Laöcoon’ (1940):

The history of avant-garde painting is that of a progressive surrender to the resistance of its medium; which resistance consists chiefly in the flat picture plane’s denial of efforts to ‘hole through’ it for realistic perspectival space. In making this surrender, painting not only got rid of imitation – and with it, ‘literature’ – but also of realistic imitation’s corollary confusion between painting and sculpture.⁹⁵

Suggesting that the origins of this ‘denial’ can be traced back to the work of the French Impressionist Édouard Manet,⁹⁶ Greenberg speculates as to how, at each stage in the historical process of progressive surrender,

the picture plane itself grows shallower and shallower, flattening out and pressing together the fictive planes of depth until they meet as one upon the real and material plane which is the actual surface of the canvas; where they lie side by side or interlocked or transparently imposed upon each other.⁹⁷

Greenberg’s account of this ‘flattening out’ culminates in the radical collage experiments of the Cubists. The Cubist painter systematically eliminated traces of colour from his art because, in Greenberg’s estimation, ‘consciously or unconsciously, he was parodying, in order to destroy, the academic methods of achieving volume and depth, which are shading and perspective, and as such have little to do with color in the common sense of the word’.⁹⁸ As well as doing away with the illusion of depth, Greenberg notes that the Cubists employed similar ‘methods to break the canvas into a multiplicity of subtle recessive planes, which seem to shift and fade into infinite depths and yet insist on returning to the surface of the canvas’.⁹⁹ In this sense, then, Cubism represented, for Greenberg at least, a point-of-no-return in the narrative of avant-garde painting. Indeed, he goes as far as to assert that ‘as we gaze at a cubist painting of the last phase we witness the birth and death of three-dimensional pictorial space’.¹⁰⁰

While considerations of time and space do not allow for a thoroughgoing appraisal of Greenberg’s individualist, heroic definitions of Abstract Expressionism,¹⁰¹ it is clear that Surrealism simply could not fit into his valiant narrative of modernist aesthetics. He is absolutely clear on this point. In ‘Surrealist Painting’ (1944), Greenberg attacks what he perceives as the fundamentally compromised quality of Surrealism. Pay particular attention to the language he uses:

For the sake of hallucinatory vividness the Surrealists have copied the effects of the calendar reproduction, postal card chromeotype and magazine illustration. In general they prize the qualities of the popular reproduction because of its incongruously prosaic associations and the reproduction heightens illusionistic effect by erasing paint texture and brushstroke.¹⁰²

Greenberg’s account of the ‘illusionistic effect’ generated for the sake of ‘hallucinatory vividness’ enables us to better understand his rejection of Surrealism. Greenberg is of the opinion that Surrealist painting depends on the creation of ‘pictorial forms that will produce a strong illusion of its possible existence in the world of real appearances’.¹⁰³ ‘The Surrealist image provides painting with new anecdotes to illustrate, just as current events supply new topics to the political cartoonist’, he notes, ‘but of itself it does not charge painting with a new subject matter.’¹⁰⁴ In this regard, Surrealism’s reliance on representational figuration prevents the possibility of its inclusion in Greenberg’s narrative of the modernist drive towards aesthetic abstraction.

In short: the persistence of figurative forms in Surrealist art simply didn’t and couldn’t work for Greenberg. Yet the representational dimension of Surrealist painting was only part of the problem, for Greenberg that is. ‘It is Surrealist subjectivity that [was] the problem’, according to Caroline A. Jones, ‘its artists paradoxically looking “outside” the canvas to limn the processes of their consciousness.’¹⁰⁵ The subjective aspect of Surrealism thus runs counter to Greenberg’s privileged type of aesthetic formalism. Jones emphasizes exactly this, reminding us as she does of the fact that ‘the proper “subject” of art in Greenberg’s argument [was to] be the painting. Neither the painter nor his psychoanalyzed thought processes would suffice – the only “inside” Greenberg wanted was folded from the abstract surface of a detached and rational art’.¹⁰⁶ Greenberg thereby had to seal off what Jones describes as ‘Surrealism’s instabilities and intentional instabilities’ in order to prevent them from impacting on – and troubling – the stability of his unified narrative of the historical emergence of abstract painting in the work of younger post-war American artists.¹⁰⁷ He had, moreover, to expend a fair amount of critical energy doing this. In Jones’s words, ‘formalism had quite a job regulating Surrealism, given the style’s dominance in 1940s Manhattan.’¹⁰⁸ Jones then details the manner in which Greenberg realized that his modernist master-narrative ‘could be produced only by making abject that which resisted unification, even as that resistant other (Surrealism) [was] maintained as such to certify the ongoing need for formalism’s unifying regime’.¹⁰⁹

Jones speculates that the drive towards formalist unity can be used to explain Greenberg’s routine dismissals of Surrealist aesthetic praxis. She argues that even the ‘demise of Surrealism as an active style by the late 1940s would not diminish Greenberg’s need to produce its marginal energies in order to regulate them, again and again’.¹¹⁰ On first glance, this appears to be what we find in Greenberg’s later essays. Consider ‘Abstract and Representational’ (1954). He begins by conceding that a discernible, ‘recognizable image will add anecdotal, historical, psychological, or topographical meaning. But to fuse this into aesthetic meaning is something else; that a painting gives us things to recognize and identify in addition to complex of colors and shapes does not mean invariably that it gives us more art’.¹¹¹ Greenberg is, in characteristic fashion, harking on the limitations of figural representationality in this passage. Notice also how he makes no mention of Surrealism here. Something similar happens in Greenberg’s later account of ‘“American Type” Painting’ (1955). This important essay speaks directly to the emergence of the Abstract Expressionist aesthetic. All things considered, it seems reasonable to expect, given what we have already established, something approaching a discussion of the relationship between Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. Yet, a few isolated remarks about ‘Surrealist overtones’ having been ‘in the air’ in New York during the 1940s aside,¹¹² no such thing is forthcoming. Bearing omissions such as these in mind, we can indeed confirm Jones’s analysis: Greenberg did indeed have to expend a significant deal of time and effort in his attempt to keep Surrealism down.

As one might well expect, such a stance had clear implications for Ford and his journal. Reviewing the early issues of Ford’s recently established magazine in 1940, Greenberg proffered the following bristling critique:

View, of which three numbers have already appeared, is a tabloid-sized ‘poets’ paper’ put out by a group of American surrealists in New York. From it we gather that the surrealists are unwilling to say goodbye to anything. And that the American species identifies literature and art with its social life, and that this social life is complicated and satisfying. The gossip is good if you know the names; if you know the people I imagine it might get to be a little too much.¹¹³

We can clearly see that, from Greenberg’s perspective, the displaced European Surrealists – ‘unwilling’ as they were ‘to say goodbye to anything’ – were (already) operating in an outmoded aesthetic fashion. And as for the American ‘species’ of Surrealist? If anything, they come off even worse than their European counterparts, seemingly concerned as they are with the exchange of ‘names’ and the superficial pleasures afforded by idle chatter. Reading this withering account of View, one is left with the impression that the critic is trying to nip things in the bud here; that is, before someone lets things get too far out of hand. To put it another way, it seems as if Greenberg is doing his level best in this article to steer his readers away from the surrealistically inclined likes of Ford. By and large, moreover, given View’s omission in most histories of the period, Greenberg seems to have succeeded in relegating Ford and his work to the margins of post-war avant-gardism.

6

An equivalent situation arises when we strive to situate Ford in relation to the New Critics. Led by John Crowe Ransom, the staunchly formalist New Critics came to cultural prominence in the early 1940s and dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Reacting against what they perceived as the unsatisfactorily impressionistic nature of contemporary academic criticism, and influenced by T. S. Eliot’s first-generation modernist notion of the objective correlative, the New Critics developed a formally rigorous, depersonalized system of literary theory that eschewed historical, cultural, and biographically informed interpretations of any given poetic text. We see this in John Crowe Ransom’s seminal account of The New Criticism (1941). Ransom here contends that pre-existing formal demands impact on the act of poetic creation. He specifically maintains that there are two key components that determine the success of a poem, and as such, its status as a worthwhile object of critical study. This first component concerns the issue of metrics. Ransom comments that ‘The poets of our time have been insensitive to metrical niceties as the poets of no earlier period have been; and, for I think this follows, insensitive to the poetic function of the meters’.¹¹⁴ Ransom strives to rectify this state of affairs. In order to do so, however, he also needs to address the notion of argumentation. According to Ransom, ‘the composition of a poem is an operation in which the argument fights to displace the meter, and the meter fights to displace the argument.’¹¹⁵ Thus, in Ransom’s reckoning, it is the productive tension between metre and argument that ensures the success of a poem, and, in turn, the poet who wrote it.

I want now to demonstrate the ways in which Ford’s conceptualization of poetic composition can be said to differ significantly from the conflict-driven model championed by Ransom. Consider, by way of brief introduction, the contents of the following passage:

Poems that might be written anywhere: in a prison or on board a troopship: having not necessarily anything to do with where one is. And most importantly: musically organized – no regular metre – and no attempt at ‘intelligibility’ either, or didacticism or philosophy, or showing one’s own vain ‘intelligence’ – but letting the unconscious take over … to explore those Jungian depths with a more ‘free’ somnambulism: ‘Magnetiseur et somnambule’, Baudelaire’s definition of the poet: he was so right – that’s the combination of qualities he admired in Poe. The ‘somnambule’ aspect: the image; the magnetiseur controls the musical form: the combination produces the magic of the poem.¹¹⁶

This passage, which is taken from Ford’s unpublished ‘A Record of Myself’ (1950), revisits, as we can see, ideas and phrases contained in the earlier Imaginationist Manifesto. There is, however, one major point of difference between the two documents. Whereas in the earlier text emphasis fell squarely on the issue of Surrealist aesthetics, Ford’s ‘Record’ is concerned primarily with notions of poetic technique and craft. Two things stand out in particular here. The first concerns Ford’s understanding of poetic metrical patterning – an understanding which, in a manner that might come as a surprise to readers of the chainpoem venture discussed in the previous chapter, has now come to bear a striking resemblance to the high modernist model of poetic composition promoted by Ezra Pound all the way back in 1913. On a related, if slightly different note, the second point of interest contained in this passage pertains to the idea of poetic intelligibility. There is little doubt that the Charles Henri Ford of 1950 had absolutely no desire whatsoever to pander to the whims of a literary audience, real or imagined. This speaks to another remark contained elsewhere in the same unpublished document:

Some new poems: outrageous, ironic, incomprehensible, surrealist, comic, confusing, violent – go to extremes never reached before (in my work). Enough of compromise (with communicability – if I read again soon that the artist’s job is to ‘communicate’ I’ll vomit) and meeting people halfway – if they’re too lazy or stupid to come all the way, let them stay where they are. … Tap new sources of inspiration – both from the unconscious and in my conscious purpose of going to emotional and intellectual extremes.¹¹⁷

This passage only makes proper sense when read in relation to the New Critical models of textual analysis that rose to prominence in North American literary and academic circles in the decade preceding its composition. Such a comparison is not as fanciful as it might appear at first glance. Suffice to say, these two very different Southerners had wildly differing opinions as regards poetic quality and merit. Ransom told Ford so in a letter dated 25 March 1939:

I think you have a lot of stuff, and that your strategy is bad, your technique is not developed, if it is true you feel it is impossible to be consecutive and distinguished too. You are the logical end to which modern tendencies come. I am sure of that. I am for the modern tendencies and feel badly when they come to their dead end.¹¹⁸

Ransom is writing in an editorial capacity here. Ford had sent some poems to The Kenyon Review, in the hope that Ransom might publish them. We might well query Ford’s decision to send examples of his surrealistically inflected free verse to this particular figure. After all, we are talking here of a writer whose critique of Ford’s poetic ‘technique’ can be traced all the way back to Laura Riding and Robert Graves’s equally disparaging remarks about modernism’s purportedly debilitating fascination with notions of ‘sheer newness’.¹¹⁹ In a sense, this should come as no surprise. Riding and Graves single out their close friend John Crowe Ransom for especial praise in their 1927 Survey of Modernist Poetry. While they are at least willing – albeit begrudgingly – to defend the experiments of select modernists such as E. E. Cummings, they are clearly more comfortable with writers like Ransom, who, without being sensationalist has, in their estimation, ‘a colloquial dignity and grace which it is possible to call Southern and a quality in his poetry that is definitely aristocratic’.¹²⁰

Such an assessment needs to be kept in mind when we turn our attention to another of the letters that Ransom sent to Ford. This one was penned on 1 December 1939. Ransom is once again discussing matters of a poetic nature. When it comes to poetry, this aristocratic and gentlemanly Southern Fugitive covets a ‘certain mellowness like the homogenous taste of a wine; I am repelled by rawness, or what I have called violence; and I have the pious hope that the mellowness doesn’t make impossible the strength, the power’.¹²¹ Sadly, there is no record of what Ford made of this most characteristically ‘pious’ of statements. There is, however, a record of what Ford made of the literary magazine Ransom founded while working in the English faculty at Kenyon College. As conveyed to Parker Tyler, The Kenyon Review, in Ford’s fittingly pungent formulation, ‘stinks of Teacher’s Tone; if JCRansom hadnt sent back all my poems I’d cancel my subscription. I’ve never seen such a mess of obscene snobbish academic trepidation: all wrong, all antiquated, all boring. Even Williams’ article on Lorca seemed to fit irritatingly in. HAS FRANCE LIVED IN VAIN?’¹²²

It seems fair, reading this, to say that Ransom’s rejection stung Ford somewhat. It also appears to have stuck with him for a fair while. We know this because the portions of Ford’s ‘Record’ that concern poetics can to a large degree be read as thinly veiled ripostes to the author of The New Criticism. Ford’s conceptualization of poetic composition differs significantly from Ransom’s conflict-driven model. He spurns the notion of the finely wrought poetic balance – or ‘compromise’ – between metre and argumentation favoured by Ransom. Ford argues instead that ‘form invents new “rules” – or better, [that] the rules are not invented in advance but seem to be created as the poem forms itself. In this sense “rules” are not really rules but rather are self-created laws – created from – perhaps even identical with – the sense of form’.¹²³ Ford’s organic conception of self-created form in this sense proposes an alternative to New Criticism’s impersonal poetics of paradox. Such a conception of self-created form could not in fact be further from Ransom’s idea of how poems are made. Indeed, elsewhere Ford emphatically articulates his position: ‘Form will merely be the construction – very near to style but not identical. Style is the manner in which the poetry is put: much closer to the poet’s personality than the mere accidental and impersonal thing called form.’¹²⁴ As we can see, Ford is striving here to effectively invert the ‘impersonal’ formalist stance of Ransom’s New Criticism.

Further to this, it also becomes apparent that Ford’s rejection of Ransom’s brand of New Criticism is not merely confined to differing opinions concerning poetic balance and conceptual compromise. Ridiculing the idea of achieving impersonality in the construction – or consideration – of literary texts, Ford emphasizes his aspiration ‘to make an object that has complex but real effect when it comes in contact with a sensitive being – i.e., a being sensitive to poetry’.¹²⁵ In contrast to the detached formalism privileged by Ransom, Ford’s poetic aspiration depends upon provoking an emotional response in a suitably receptive reader. In this sense, Ford’s approach can be differentiated from that of the culturally dominant New Critics. In his interpretation, the poem is not an autonomous, self-contained and sealed text; instead it is a porous aesthetic object that actively encourages the engagement of its audience.

This is something that comes to the fore in Ford’s Ransom-baiting report, which was almost certainly written with a specific sort of literary audience in mind. Comprised of numerous segments – including a fragment entitled ‘Fortunately For You, Young Poet’ – Ford’s revealingly titled ‘A Course on Poetry’ was, as it happens, intended for young writers ‘living halfway between achievement and expectation’.¹²⁶ Beyond simply offering practical advice, Ford was – some three years later – to play host to a number of important younger American poets in a volume known as the Little Anthology of the Poem in Prose. Appearing in the 1953 edition of James Laughlin’s yearly New Directions annual, Ford’s Prose Poem anthology was initially conceived as a collection of, in his words, ‘texts sacred and secular, ancient and modern’.¹²⁷ Accordingly, in this historically diverse anthology, not only do the writings of Shakespeare and Franz Schubert sit side by side, they do so alongside the ‘Two Meditations’ of the first-generation New York School poet James Schuyler. In a similar fashion, Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Psalm’ sits in close proximity to the ‘Proverbs’ of Paul Goodman, with ‘The Folding Up’ of the prophet Mohammed sandwiched in-between.

In the context of the present discussion, this anthology is important for a variety of reasons. For one thing, it can be read as yet another explicit rebuke to the concerns of New Criticism. Ford’s anthology deliberately shifts the focus away from considerations of poetic form. As Parker Tyler notes in the anthology’s introductory preface, Ford paid scant regard to notions of form when selecting texts for inclusion. Tyler tells us that Ford considered the collection an ‘unswerving guide to the possibilities of revaluing the poetic act. Viewing timeliness so keenly, he felt it a radical act to wield editorial option over pages devoid of all but casual (and unintended) rhymes’.¹²⁸ Tyler’s words are useful as they more clearly bring into focus the fact that the editorial impulses underpinning Ford’s anthology of ‘casual’ and ‘unintended rhymes’ had absolutely nothing in common with the technical poetic concerns of critics such as Ransom. Ultimately, however, this seems to have worked against Ford in this specific instance; the Prose Poem anthology failed to make all that much of a mark at the time of its original publication. The lack of attention afforded to the Prose Poem venture must have irked Ford, desiring as he was of critical affirmation during the early 1950s. It seems that our subject had by now grown acutely weary of the neglected position he had long occupied on the cultural sidelines. This is the impression we get when reading through Ford’s journals of the 1950s. The following remark, which is taken from a journal entry of November 1951, reads as emblematic: ‘Fashions in poetry will change – my poetry will be recognized, my name will be exalted. And so at this point in my history I must not betray my heritage to be. The words, a flesh that lives on, as spirit, after we are gone.’¹²⁹

And yet, while he could not have known so at the time, the critical tide was indeed beginning slowly to turn Ford’s way. The Prose Poem anthology proved pertinent in this regard. Featuring emerging younger American writers such as Ginsberg, Schuyler, John Ashbery, and Philip Lamantia, Ford’s collection read as a roll call of those who would ultimately come to define The New American Poetry (as collated famously by Donald Allen in 1960). Indeed, a number of the poets featured in Allen’s seminal collection later came to acknowledge the important role that Ford played in their careers. For instance, the New York School poet Kenneth Koch went as far as to attribute his understanding of Surrealism to Ford’s View: ‘I think I started writing poems I liked more when I was seventeen or eighteen. I wrote a poem when I was just eighteen, maybe on my birthday, … and it was influenced by French surrealism in so far as I understood it. I understood it mainly from a surrealist magazine called View.’¹³⁰ Nor was this the only time Koch singled Ford out for praise. Now held at the Harry Ransom Center, Ford’s personal library contains a number of books by and about the New York School of poetry. Each volume contains a warm, handwritten dedication to Ford. The 1977 edition of Koch’s The Publications held is one such volume, featuring as it does an inscription to the man ‘who inspired my poetry at its start’. We find something similar when we turn our attention to Ford’s copy of The Poets of the New York School. Bringing together the work of major poets such as Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Joe Brainard (all of whom left kind words for Ford), this book, which appeared in 1969, was edited and introduced by one of View’s former managing editors, John Bernard Myers.¹³¹ In his prefatory remarks, Myers strives to

explain what had happened when the surrealists arrived in America and in what ways American painting and sculpture had been given an opportunity to free itself from provincialism and academicism. The official Surrealist movement did not take root in [the United States] but something of greater significance came out of it. I did not realize at the time the full extent to which the poets, in their turn, were imbibing the same strong draughts of inspiration from the American painters. ‘Unofficial’ poetry became possible. In this way the bridge from André Breton reached over to them.¹³²

Detailing as it does the emergence of ‘unofficial’ modes of surrealistically informed literary practice in post-1945 America, the story that Myers tells here will surely be familiar to readers of this chapter. It should also come as no surprise to find Myers reminiscing about the important ‘bridging’ role that View assumed when it came to the dissemination of Surrealist ideas on the shores of the United States. What does surprise, however, is the fact that nowhere at all in this extended introduction does Myer mention the editor of View by name. At first glance, history in this sense thus seems once more to be repeating itself. Ford seems to have slipped through the critical and cultural gaps yet again.

Or perhaps not. Koch, for one, was quick to acknowledge the vital role that Ford played in the development of post-war American poetry. His inscription to Myers’ edited collection is revealing in this respect, dedicated as it pointedly is ‘to one whom should have been in the preface’. Nor was this to prove an isolated incident. Other, slightly younger New York-based poets were similarly quick to recognize Ford’s achievements of the 1940s:

About reading at Le Metro, how about the first Wednesday in June? It’s free admission, and contributions, you wouldn’t make more than maybe twenty‐five dollars (or less), but there are a lot of us who sure would like to hear you read. Your poetry and your old magazine, VIEW, paved the way for so much of what many younger poets feel is really happening now, when so many other poets were being so boring and so ordinary.¹³³

These effusive lines are taken from a letter written by the second-generation New York School poet Ted Berrigan on 26 April 1965. I want now to bring this discussion to a close by suggesting that we keep Berrigan’s remarks about Ford having ‘paved the way for so much of what so many younger poets feel is really happening now’ at the forefront of our minds, as we turn our attention to the decade when pretty much everything and everyone artistically inclined in North America – including our primary subject, who inflated in a way that proved anathema to stolid cultural jeremiahs such as the aforementioned Greenberg and Ransom – went POP!

Notes

1 Quoted in Catrina Neiman, ‘Introduction: View Magazine: Transatlantic Pact’, in View: Parade of the Avant-Garde 1940–1947, ed. Charles Henri Ford (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991), xiii.

2 Consider afresh the criticism levelled at Blues by Ford’s one-time contributing editor, Joseph Vogel: ‘Blues for instance’, Vogel posits, ‘has persistently avoided life and human beings. The work in it has been metaphysical, treating with petty emotions, describing souls of lousy poets.’ Joseph Vogel, ‘Literary Graveyards’, New Masses (October 1929): 30. Historical context is again important when attempting to better understand Vogel’s polemical attack on Blues. Vogel’s piece was published in the same month as the Wall Street Crash. Appearing in Mike Gold’s prominent leftist periodical The New Masses, Vogel’s polemic is unsurprisingly flush with partisan rhetoric. What Vogel’s attack lacks in nuance, it makes up in sheer vociferousness. As well as decrying the apparent absence of socially conscious and politically committed writing in the pages of Blues, Vogel also suggests that Ford’s experimental little magazine is hopelessly out of touch with the various social, political, and economic concerns of the age.

3 In 1980 Ford told Clive Philpot and Lynne Tillman that View was initially formed in order to provide an outlet for the European intelligentsia: ‘Well, the impulse was because in 1940 many of the surrealists that I’d known in Paris were refugees in NY and had no organ, because Minotaur, their big thing, in Paris had stopped so I began.’ Quoted in Clive Philpot and Lynne Tillman, ‘An Interview with Charles Henri Ford: When Art and Literature Come Together’, Franklin Furnace Flue 1, no. 2 (1980): 1.

4 Jolas accepted Ford’s offer of a place on the editorial board of Blues.

5 Quoted in Bruce Wolmer, ‘Charles Henri Ford’, BOMB 18 (Winter 1987). Online Edition: http://bombsite.com/issues/18/articles/868 (accessed 2 October 2013).

6 Ford argued that his introductory encounter with the work of the Surrealists ‘electrified [his] output’. Quoted in Kitaori, ‘Charles Henri Ford’.

7 Charles Henri Ford, The Overturned Lake (Cincinnati: The Little Man Press, 1941), 51.

8 Jennifer Mundy, ‘Letters of Desire’, in Surrealism: Desire Unbound, ed. Jennifer Mundy (London: Tate Publishing, 2001), 4.

9 Mundy, ‘Letters of Desire’, 5.

10 André Breton, Mad Love (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, [1937] 1987), 77.

11 Breton, Mad Love, 77.

12 André Breton, Communicating Vessels (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, [1932] 1990), 146.

13 Breton, Communicating Vessels, 146.

14 Equally, we need to proceed with a certain degree of caution when comparing Ford’s ‘Comedy of Belief’ and Breton’s extended theoretical treatise. Communicating Vessels represents one of Breton’s most detailed, painstaking, and often contradictory attempts at reconciling Marxist notions of historical materialism and Freudian theories of the unconscious. Suffice to say, there is nothing in Ford’s playful poem that even comes close to matching, or approximating, the sheer intellectual scope and complexity of Breton’s exacting Communicating Vessels. In Margaret Cohen’s estimation, Communicating Vessels ‘constitutes a linchpin in [Breton’s] defense of surrealist praxis against the French Communist Party’. In it, ‘Breton turns the psychoanalytic notion of the dream against the version of the material/ideal opposition underwriting the French Communist Party’s refusal to admit that surrealist imaginative activity might have practical social consequence.’ As Cohen notes, Breton is, in this particular instance, reacting against ‘the separation that vulgar Marxism draws between material praxis, teleological activities focusing on the realm of facts and the politico-economic sphere, and surrealism’s “ideal” dwelling in the land of aesthetics, subjectivity, desire, [and] dream’. Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley: California University Press, 1993), 124.

15 At the same time, it is important to note that not all the Surrealists agreed with the prejudicial stance taken by their leader. Amy Lyford reminds us that ‘Louis Aragon, unlike Breton, assumed the existence of a plurality of masculinities that were neither normal nor abnormal. He was unable to support Breton’s idea of a “normal” man, and in so doing, raised a critical point about the methodology of the Recherches. The group’s investigation of male sexuality was not monolithic’. ‘Aragon’, Lyford continues, ‘refrained from passing judgment throughout the Recherches, apparently trying to be as clinical and analytic as possible to encourage frank, wide-ranging discussion.’ Amy Lyford, Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France (Berkeley: California University Press, 2007), 146.

16 Quoted in José Pierre (ed.), Investigating Sex: Surrealist Discussions, 1928-1932 (London: Verso, 1992), 5.

17 Wolmer, ‘Charles Henri Ford’. Original emphasis.

18 Gavin Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948-1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 1.

19 Butt, Between You and Me, 13.

20 This surge in popularity accounts in part for the sorts of post-war dialogues with Surrealism that we find in the work of many New York and San Francisco-based writers and artists. However, we would do well to remember that, in the words of Joanna Pawlik, ‘American writers’ dialogues with Surrealism were not usually with the “First Manifesto” of 1924, or solely about irrationality, fragmentation, spontaneity, or romanticism, all of which are common references on the “narrow compass” the American literary studies has used to orientate its approach to Surrealism. The dialogues were instead more frequently conducted between the many mediated versions of Surrealism in circulation, a consequence of the movement’s long history and permeation of transnational literary, artistic and intellectual cultures.’ Joanna Pawlik, ‘Surrealism, Beat Literature and San Francisco’, Literature Compass 10, no. 2 (2013): 106–7.

21 Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983), 73.

22 Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 73.

23 Ibid., 62.

24 Ibid., 63.

25 Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 3 December 1931, container 8, folder 2, Parker Tyler Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

26 On 8 August 1936, Ford told Tyler that he had just finished writing ‘a gossip-from-abroad letter to Lew Ney for his Hobo Number in case its not off the press signed anonymously HOBO-PEEP but what you don’t already know in it maybe wont hurt you’. Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 8 August 1936, container 8, folder 3, Parker Tyler Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

27 Charles Henri Ford, ‘Gossip from Abroad’ [1936], series 1, box, 2, folder 4, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, 1.

28 Ford, ‘Gossip from Abroad’, 1–2.

29 Ibid., 2–3.

30 Near the beginning of his pseudo-letter, Ford notes that as ‘this is a gossip foray, your Hobo Correspondent will not attempt to give any critical evaluation’. Ibid., 1.

31 Dickran Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant­Garde 1920-1950 (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 2001), 157.

32 Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 5 April 1939, container 8, folder 3, Parker Tyler Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

33 Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 5 April 1939, HRC.

34 Clifford Browder notes that ‘Breton’s own political views found expression in the activities of the newly formed national committee of the F.I.A.R.I., on which he served with other representatives of the non-Stalinist Left. Their monthly bulletin Clé preached both revolution and the independence of art, and continued to demand complete freedom of expression in the face of the worsening international situation. But internal dissensions troubled the group, so that Clé ceased publication after only two issues, and the whole project miscarried’. Clifford Browder, André Breton, Arbiter of Surrealism (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1967), 38.

35 Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 5 April 1939, HRC.

36 Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen, 158.

37 Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler [n.d.], container 8, folder 1, Parker Tyler Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

38 Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler [n.d.], HRC.

39 Despite his reservations about ‘Miss’ Breton, Ford was perfectly willing to take Surrealism seriously. He certainly had no problem when it came time to defend the Breton-led movement in print. We see this in a letter that he co-authored with Parker Tyler. Appearing in the January–February edition of Partisan Review, Ford and Tyler assert in their letter: ‘Surrealism is not defined by a parlor game, a set of rules, or a psychotic type. Surrealism exploits these things. Surrealism is a technique for sanctifying the unsanctified; a technique for everything of which [Paul] Eluard is capable, as he would be the first to admit.’ Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler, ‘Surrealist Protest’, Partisan Review 7, no. 1 (1940): 77–8.

40 Ford seems to have discussed Breton’s magazine with his younger sister, the Hollywood actress Ruth Ford: ‘VVV came. Its showy isn’t it? Your poem is wonderful. The best thing in it. I liked [Leonora] Carrington’s story, but I like all her stories. I think the photo on page 8 extraordinary. The boy on page 35 is a beauty. Looks something like Shelley [Scott]. You could tell Niko’s [Nicolas Calas’s] review of View hurt him. Of course all of your contributors are in it. Can’t they discover anyone by themselves? O I haven’t read it all yet, and I can’t read the French, but I felt the effort of the whole thing. Give me VIEW.’ Ruth Ford to Charles Henri Ford [n.d.], series 2, box 9, folder 3, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin,

41 Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen, 211.

42 Quoted in Asako Kitaori, ‘Charles Henri Ford: Catalyst Among Poets’, Rain Taxi Review of Books (Spring 2000).

43 Henry Miller, ‘Open Letter to Surrealists Everywhere’, The Cosmological Eye (London: PL Editions, 1945), 184.

44 Miller, ‘Open Letter’ 174.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid., 177.

47 Ibid., 189.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid., 190.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid.

53 In a small sense, the title that Ford affixes to these notes can be said to anticipate Frank Kermode’s later use of the ‘neo-modernist’ label. In 1968, Kermode argued that it might be possible to make a productive, if slightly ‘rough distinction between two phases of modernism, and call them paleo- and neo-modernism; they are equally devoted to the theme of crisis, equally apocalyptic; but although they have this and other things in common, they have differences which might, with some research, be defined, and found not to be of a degree that prevents our calling both “modernist”’. Frank Kermode, Continuities (New York: Random House, 1968), 8.

54 Charles Henri Ford, ‘Notes on Neo-Modernism’, [n.d.], series 4, box 4, folder 2, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, n.pag.

55 Ford, ‘Notes on Neo-Modernism’, n.pag.

56 There is no way to establish precisely when Ford sat down to compose his thoughts about modernism and Surrealism. However, I believe that Ford wrote his ‘Notes on Neo Modernism’ in the first half of the 1940s. My reasoning is twofold. First, Ford’s ‘Notes’ include a number of quotes from the primary texts of Surrealism. This, I posit, is further evidence of Ford having, as previously mentioned, brushed up on his Surrealism after discussing art, politics, and sexuality with Breton in Paris in late 1939. Further to this, Ford’s handwritten notes also contain a number of references to Charles Baudelaire. Ford’s enthusiasm for Baudelaire was at its strongest in the early 1940s. During this period, Ford also edited a collection of translations: The Mirror of Baudelaire (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1942). His own ‘Ballad for Baudelaire’ was included in this collection. Ford thought very highly of this particular poem, which he subsequently came to a view in terms of closure, as something of a personal milestone. Given that Ford’s interest in Surrealism was also at its peak during this period, I surmise that Ford’s ‘Notes’ would have been written somewhere between 1940 and 1943.

57 Ford, ‘Notes on Neo-Modernism’, n.pag.

58 On a related note, we might well argue that Ford also seeks to deviate away from the various political strictures associated with Bretonian Surrealism. It seems that art always came first for Charles Henri Ford. This is something that Tashjian discusses in his account of Surrealism in the United States. According to Tashjian, Breton’s insistence that Surrealism and Marxism could function productively in a dialectical relationship would have meant relatively little to Ford. Indeed, despite occasionally expressing a vague interest in revolutionary politics and historical materialism during the 1930s, it seems that ‘any avant-garde position on the left that did not elevate Marxism above art would have [had] some appeal to Ford’. Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen, 165. Ford rarely troubled himself with overtly political matters – revolutionary or otherwise – in his poetry. Sometimes, as in his early poem ‘A Curse on the War Machine’, Ford might obliquely express his displeasure at the prospect of (political) violence. Very occasionally, as in his early long poem ‘The Garden of Disorder’, Ford will refer fleetingly to famous political figures, such as the architect of the 1917 October Revolution: ‘Lenin has withdrawn to a dialectic paradise/and counts with sociological eyes/the biffs of the nightsticks, the devil’s police’. Charles Henri Ford, Out of the Labyrinth: Selected Poems (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1991), 5.

59 Ford, ‘Notes on Neo-Modernism’, n.pag.

60 Ford most likely had Breton’s first ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ (1924) in mind when he chose this name. Recall here the manner in which Breton spoke in his first manifesto of how ‘the imagination is perhaps on the point of reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights’. André Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, [1924], 1972), 10.

61 Ford, ‘Notes on Neo-Modernism’, n.pag.

62 Ibid., n.pag.

63 Ibid.

64 In his foundational instructional account of literary automatism, Breton implores the aspiring Surrealist artist to ‘put yourself in as passive or as receptive, a state of mind as you can. Forget about your genius, your talent, and the talents of everyone else. Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything’. Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, 28.

65 Ford, ‘Notes on Neo-Modernism’, n.pag.

66 Of course, Ford was by no means the only person to take issue with the perceived passivity of Surrealist automatism. The prominent Surrealist renegade Salvador Dalí was, like the dissenting Ford, unsatisfied with automatism. Indeed, as Mary Ann Caws has shown, his eventual theorization of a paranoiac critical method ‘was to undermine the concept of Surrealist automatism, which seemed to Dalí far too passive’. Mary Ann Caws, Salvador Dalí (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 74.

67 In this respect, Ford’s desire to rework Surrealism anticipates John Ashbery’s assertion that ‘real freedom would be to use this method [literary automatism] where it could be of service and to correct it with the conscious mind where indicated’. John Ashbery, Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957-1987 (New York: Knopf, 1989), 5–6. When it comes to the issue of artistic application, it should be kept in mind that Ford thought ‘shocking images are not enough – just as they haven’t been enough in surrealist painting – it’s the art that counts. Take a lesson from the history of surrealism’. Charles Henri Ford, ‘A Record of Myself’ (1950), series 1, box 5, folder 3, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, 80.

68 Breton, Communicating Vessels, 139.

69 Mary Ann Caws, ‘Linkings and Reflections: André Breton and his Communicating Vessels’, Dada/Surrealism 17, no. 1 (1988): 91.

70 Ford, ‘Notes on Neo-Modernism’, n.pag. Once again, Ford can be said to have anticipated John Ashbery’s later comments about the application of Surrealist literary methods and personal autonomy.

71 Neiman, ‘Introduction: View Magazine: Transatlantic Pact’, xvi. Ford’s desire to popularize Surrealism also led to an implicit alignment with the agenda of Breton’s aesthetic bête noire: Dalí. For better or worse, Dalí played a vital role when it came to increasing the visibility of Surrealism in the United States during the late 1930s. An indefatigable self‐promoter, Dalí’s many American commercial commissions resulted in him being variously described as a profiteer, a popularizer, and a dilutor of what I have been calling ‘orthodox’ Surrealism.

72 Stamatina Dimakopoulou, ‘Europe in America: Remapping Broken Cultural Lines: View (1940–7) and VVV (1942)’, 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), 739.

73 Dimakopoulou, ‘Europe in America’, 739.

74 Ford, ‘Notes on Neo-Modernism’, n.pag.

75 Quoted in Wolmer, ‘Charles Henri Ford’.

76 Nicolas Calas’s ‘Interview with André Breton’ appeared on the front cover of the October-November 1941 Surrealist issue of View (nos. 7–8).

77 André Breton, ‘The Point of View: Testimony 45’, View 5, no. 1 (1945): 5.

78 Breton, ‘The Point of View’, 5.

79 William Carlos Williams, ‘The Genius of France’, in View: Parade of the Avant-Garde 1940-1947, ed. Charles Henri Ford (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991), 239.

80 Williams, ‘The Genius of France’, 240.

81 Ford, ‘Notes on Neo-Modernism’, n.pag.

82 Ford was absolutely insistent that Duchamp’s design appear on the cover of Breton’s book. He told Tyler: ‘It doesn’t matter too much about the backbone on the Breton book, just so it’s on the backbone of the jacket. After all, the book isn’t complete without the jacket and its not supposed to be taken off.’ Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 9 August 1946, container 8, folder 4, Parker Tyler Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

83 No mention of Ford is made in, for example, Maurice Nadeau’s seminal The History of Surrealism (1968).

84 Franklin Rosemont and Penelope Rosemont, ‘Situation of Surrealism in the U.S.’ (1966), in The Forecast is Hot! Tracts & Other Collective Declarations of the Surrealist Movement in the United States: 1966-1976, ed. Franklin Rosemont, Penelope Rosemont and Paul Garon (Chicago: Black Swan Press, 1997), 7.

85 Franklin Rosemont, André Breton and the First Principles of Surrealism (London: Pluto Press, 1978), 120.

86 Ford, The Overturned Lake, 13.

87 Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 196.

88 Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 111.

89 Ibid., 112.

90 Ibid.

91 Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 1: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), 8. Original emphasis.

92 Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 1, 8–9.

93 Ibid., 9.

94 Ibid.

95 Ibid., 34.

96 Greenberg discusses the issue of avant-garde genealogy in his retrospective ‘Modernist Painting’ (1960): ‘Manet’s became the first Modernist pictures by virtue of the frankness with which they declared the flat surfaces on which they were painted. The Impressionists, in Manet’s wake abjured underpainting and glazes, to leave the eye under no doubt as to the fact that the colors they used were made of paint that came from tubes or pots. Cézanne sacrificed verisimilitude, or correctness, in order to fit his drawing and design more explicitly to the rectangular shape of the canvas. It was the stressing of the ineluctable flatness of the surface that remained, however, more fundamental than anything else to the processes by which pictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism.’ Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), 86–7.

97 Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 1, 35.

98 Ibid.

99 Ibid.

100 Ibid.

101 Nor is there sufficient space with which to discuss the differences between Greenberg’s account of Abstract Expressionism and that of a certain former Blues and View contributor: Harold Rosenberg. In ‘The American Action Painters’ (1952), Rosenberg asserted that after a certain historical point the ‘canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act – rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or “express” an object, actual of imagined. What was to go on to the canvas was not a picture but an event. The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in his mind; he went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him. The image would be the result of this encounter’. Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’, Art News (December 1952): 22. Suffice to say, Greenberg had no truck with this incredibly influential, existentially inclined reading of Abstract Expressionism.

102 Ibid., 229.

103 Ibid., 228.

104 Ibid., 230.

105 Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005), 178. Original emphasis.

106 Jones, Eyesight Alone, 179. Original emphasis.

107 Ibid., 67. Original emphasis.

108 Ibid., 67–8.

109 Ibid., 69. Original emphasis.

110 Ibid.

111 Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 3: Affirmations and Refusals, 1950-1956 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), 187.

112 Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 3, 229.

113 Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 1, 42–3.

114 John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1941), 254.

115 Ransom, The New Criticism, 295.

116 Ford, ‘A Record of Myself’, 94–5.

117 Ibid., 74.

118 John Crowe Ransom to Charles Henri Ford, 29 March 1939, series 2, box, 14, folder 5, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

119 Riding and Graves: ‘In the period just passing no new era was begun. A climax was merely reached in criticism by a combination of sophistication and a desire for a new enlightened primitiveness. Wherever attempts at sheer newness in poetry were made they merely ended in dead movements.’ Riding and Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 132.

120 Ibid., 49.

121 John Crowe Ransom to Charles Henri Ford, 1 December 1939, series 2, box, 14, folder 5, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

122 Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 5 April 1939, container 8, folder 3, Parker Tyler Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

123 Ford, ‘A Record of Myself’, 139.

124 Ibid., 140. Ford made much the same point in a letter to Parker Tyler on 24 September 1951. ‘You can be disunified as you like’, Ford argues, ‘insofar as “form” goes, and if you have an ear for the divine you’ll write divinely. Poetry is: content (what you have to say), rhythm, and sound. Nothing else. And if this content is symbolical, undescriptive, enigmatic, unprosaic, springing from the unconscious – then the poetry is the kind I want to write.’ Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 24 September 1951, container 8, folder 5, Parker Tyler Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. On a related note, elsewhere Ford also writes: ‘A question of composition. Musical form (for overall effect) to be organized as one goes along? A line at a time for real dredging of the unconscious. (No set plan of communication.) The fun of being a poet is that one is always a new and different poet from the one who wrote not so long ago.’ Ford, ‘A Record of Myself’, 117.

125 Ibid., 97.

126 Ibid., 139.

127 Charles Henri Ford, ‘The Poem in Prose’ [n.d.], series 1, box 4, folder 6, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

128 Parker Tyler, ‘Preface’ [‘A Little Anthology of the Poem in Prose’], in New Directions XIV, ed. James Laughlin (London: Peter Owen, 1953), 330.

129 Ford, Water From a Bucket, 126–7.

130 Quoted in David Kennedy, ‘An Interview with Kenneth Koch, 5 August 1993’: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/koch.html (accessed 4 October 2014).

131 Myers worked on the magazine between 1944 and 1947.

132 John Barnard Myers, ‘The Poets of the New York School’, in The Poets of the New York School, ed. John Barnard Myers (Philadelphia: The Graduate School of Fine Arts, Pennsylvania University Press, 1969), 9–10.

133 Ted Berrigan to Charles Henri Ford, 26 April 1965, series 2, box, 12, folder 2, Charles Henri Ford Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.