‘The younger generation is asking about you all the time so you are beginning to penetrate.’1 This line is taken from a letter that the New York-based experimental filmmaker Charles Boultenhouse sent to Charles Henri Ford on 4 January 1965. Ford was living in Athens, Greece at the time. He replied to Boultenhouse on 8 January. ‘Boy,’ Ford exclaims, ‘there’s no idea I like more than “penetrating” the younger generation.’2 Leaving the issue of this perennially hopeful penetrator’s vulgarity aside, what are we meant to make of such an exchange? While he doesn’t specify which particular members of the ‘younger generation’ have been asking after the absent Ford, Boultenhouse presumably has writers and artists associated with the 1960s New York art-scene in mind. However, he might just as well have been referring to the generation of poets that came of literary age in Manhattan during the 1950s. I am thinking here of the first-generation figures associated with the so-called New York School of Poetry. In a sense, of course, we have been here before. We have, for one thing, already established that the core members of the tittle-tattling New York School had high praise for the equally gossipy Ford.3 Yet I want now to draw to a close by suggesting that there is still more to be said about Ford and the New York School. Mark Silverberg has pointed out that notable post-war poets such as Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch ‘were among the few of Donald Allen’s “New Americans” to make humor an important part of their aesthetic. Humor for these poets was both a value in itself and a means toward an already-described end: a way of achieving the detachment or indifference necessary to the creation of neo-avant-garde art in the 1960s’.4 Specifically, ‘the New York School used comedy and camp as means of incorporating, celebrating and, most importantly, exaggerating (rather than rejecting) the culture in which they lived’.5 ‘Unlike the Beats’, Silverberg adds, ‘the New York School poets were not interested in offering a new (more progressive, liberated, hip) culture but rather in working with American culture as they found it – exposing, playing up, and camping up its quirks, absurdities, and odd (queer) mannerisms.’6
Much the same can be said of Ford. He was extremely interested in and recognized the significance of Camp. We get a fleeting sense of this in a message Ford posted to Parker Tyler on 10 December 1964. He demands in this letter that his old comrade ‘lock on [to the] Pop CAMP EXPRESS (see Susan Sontag’s article in Partisan, which Time took up & summarized)’.7 Ford is referring here to the career-making essay – ‘Notes on “Camp”’ – that Sontag published in the Partisan Review in 1964. But what exactly is Camp? As with modernism, it depends on whom you ask. This is how Sontag chooses to define the term:8 ‘It is not a natural mode of sensibility’, Sontag argues, ‘if there be any such. Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric – something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.’9 Further to this, in Sontag’s estimation, ‘Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization.’10 Fabio Cleto’s account of ‘Notes on “Camp”’ helps us to understand what Sontag is getting at in passages such as these. ‘Sontag’s essay disseminated camp as the cipher for contemporary culture’, Cleto notes, ‘as a refined – and, most infamously, apolitical – aesthetic taste for the vulgar and the appreciation of kitschy middle-class pretensions.’11 Because of this, various critics have tended to accuse Sontag of, as Cleto puts it, ‘turning a basically homosexual mode of self-performance into a degayifed taste, a simple matter of ironically relishing an indulgence in what is “so-bad-it’s good.”’12 For a staunch critic like Moe Meyer, such a ‘degayifed’ account of Camp is unforgivable: all the more so given that historical analysis confirms the specifically homosexual origins and politicized connotations pertaining to the term. ‘By removing, or at the least minimizing, the connotations of homosexuality’, Meyer argues, ‘Sontag killed off the binding referent of Camp – the Homosexual – and the discourse began to unravel as Camp became confused and conflated with rhetorical and performative strategies such as irony, satire, burlesque, and travesty; and with cultural movements such as Pop.’13 This, in Meyer’s eyes, simply will not do. For him, there was, is, and will always be only one kind of Camp: ‘And it is queer. It can be engaged directly by the queer to produce social visibility in the praxis of everyday life, or it can be manifested as the camp trace by the un-queer in order … to provide queer access to the apparatus of representation.’14
I wonder what Meyer might make of the creative output of an openly gay modernist writer and artist who, lest we forget, started working in a decidedly closeted period of history. A second-generation modernist novel like The Young and Evil would probably be of great interest to Meyer, given over as it is to innumerable depictions of queer characters dolled-up in drag and ‘camp[ing] like mad’.15 But might the same be said of Ford’s deep-seated interest in some the very same ‘cultural movements’ that Meyer decries while discussing Sontag and Camp? Ultimately it is difficult to say. However, we can say that, long before Meyer, Sontag, and, for that matter, the New York School, Ford intuitively grasped the aesthetic advantages of Camp. Turning our attention to Ford’s literary output of the late 1930s and the early 1940s, it appears that, at least when it came to his own work, he proposed to camp Surrealism via processes of self-conscious exaggeration and theatrical poetic stylization. This becomes clear when considering the closing lines of the following poem, which was included in The Overturned Lake:
this is a jingle for your jaw,
pearl-planted, a rant for the blest hee-haw
of the pink bee storing in your brain’s
veins a gee-gaw honey for the golden skillet
set to heat on my heart’s rubies
BABY WITH REVOLVER HOLDS HURRICANE AT BAY16
How best to read this exuberant and self-consciously surreal poem, which concludes with a playful nod in the direction of André Breton’s collection The White-Haired Revolver (1932), and which also flirts with notions of metaphorical incongruity and outright nonsensicality? Edward B. Germain makes the important point that Ford’s Surrealism is wholly ‘American in its hilarity and ingenuousness and its fascination with sex and slang and the lyrics of popular songs’.17 Of particular interest here is the reference that Germain makes to the strain of seemingly irreverent humour, or hilarity, coursing through Ford’s poetry. Reading poems such as this we are left with the impression that Ford just wants to have a bit of fun. However, there is slightly more to it than that, and this pertains to yet another definition of Camp. In The World in the Evening (1954), Christopher Isherwood makes the following claim: ‘High Camp always has an underlying seriousness. You can’t camp about something you don’t take seriously. You’re not making fun of it; you’re making fun out of it. You’re expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance.’18 Isherwood’s comments should be kept in mind when considering Ford’s output of the 1940s. When Isherwood’s comments on Camp are read in relation to unpublished texts such as the previously discussed ‘Imaginationist Manifesto’ we begin more fully to appreciate that Ford has no interest in rejecting – or simply making fun of – Surrealism; rather, he is interested in shaping or making fun out of it. Realizing this, one comes to suspect that the same thing might also be said of this man-sized mystic-writing pad’s approach to modernism more generally. Of all Ford’s achievements – above and beyond even his proposed renovation of modernism, his career-spanning commitment to communal and collaborative creative praxis, his long-standing investment in and promotion of Surrealism, and his receptiveness to the work of queer postmodern kindred spirits – his camp aesthetic sensibility may well prove to be this historically torsional figure’s lasting modernist legacy. Only time will tell.
Notes
1 Charles Boultenhouse to Charles Henri Ford, 4 January 1965, series 1, box 4, folder 9, Charles Boultenhouse and Parker Tyler Papers, NYPL Archives & Manuscripts, New York Public Library.
2 Charles Henri Ford to Charles Boultenhouse, 8 January 1965, series 1, box 4, folder 9, Charles Boultenhouse and Parker Tyler Papers, NYPL Archives & Manuscripts, New York Public Library.
3 They also shared Ford’s passion for literary collaboration. I have in mind collaborative ventures such as the experimental literary journal Locus Solus (1961–2). Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, and James Schulyer edited this magazine. Another example would be Ashbery and Schulyer’s co-authored novel A Nest of Ninnies (1969).
4 Mark Silverberg, The New York School Poets and the Neo-Avant-Garde: Between Radical Art and Radical Chic (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 135.
5 Silverberg, The New York School Poets and the Neo-Avant-Garde, 135.
6 Ibid., 135.
7 Charles Henri Ford to Parker Tyler, 10 December 1964, container 9, folder 2, Parker Tyler Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
8 Parker Tyler had profound reservations about Sontag’s reading of Camp. This comes to the fore in a letter he sent to the cineaste Amos Vogel. He writes: ‘This is a country where a Susan Sontag puts up a defense of the mere act of compulsive self-expression in a Jack Smith by conceptualizing the kind of response to life that made Smith take his fetish footage; however arbitrarily, she causes him to look intellectually chic. Only an utmost minimum of the film-fancying audience in Europe could swallow such clumsiness and inconsequence as Flaming Creatures, which is on a subject very close to French hearts in particular: sexual variations.’ Parker Tyler to Amos Vogel, 20 April 1966, container 5, folder 5, Parker Tyler Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
9 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Penguin Books, [1966] 2009), 275.
10 Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays, 277.
11 Fabio Cleto, ‘Introduction: Queering the Camp’, Camp: Queer Aesthetics and Their Performing Subject: A Reader, ed. Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2002), 10.
12 Cleto, ‘Queering the Camp’, 10.
13 Moe Meyer, ‘Reclaiming the Discourse of Camp’, The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (London: Routledge, [1994] 2005), 6.
14 Meyer, ‘Reclaiming the Discourse of Camp’, 4.
15 Ford and Tyler, The Young and Evil, 167.
16 Ford, The Overturned Lake, 38.
17 Germain, ‘Introduction’, 9. William Carlos Williams comes to a similar conclusion in the introduction – ‘The Tortuous Straightness of Charles Henri Ford’ – he penned for the younger poet’s The Garden of Disorder (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1939). ‘In reading these poems through, from beginning to end, at one long stroke’, Williams starts, ‘a special condition of the mind is generated which to me seems the gist of the poems and the only way to understand them particularly or generally. They form an accompaniment to the radio jazz and other various, half-preaching, half-sacrilegious sounds of a Saturday night in June with the windows open and the mind stretched out attempting to regain some sort of quiet and be cool on a stuffed couch.’ William Carlos Williams, Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1969), 235.
18 Christopher Isherwood The World in the Evening, (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, [1954] 1999), 110.