Charles Henri Ford

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Charles Henri Ford (February 10, 1908 – September 27, 2002) was an American poet, novelist, diarist, filmmaker, photographer, and collage artist.

He exhibited his poetry in Europe and the United States, edited the Surrealist journal View (1940–1947) in New York City, and produced an experimental film.

Pavel Tchelitchew's partner was he.

Early years

On February 10, 1908, Charles Henry Ford was born in Brookhaven, Mississippi. His family owned hotels in the Southern United States. Despite the fact that his family was Baptist, he was sent to Catholic boarding schools. Ruth Ford (1911-2009) was his sister and his only known sibling. In 1927, the New Yorker published one of his poems before he turned 20 under the name Charles Henri Ford, which he had adopted to defuse the belief that he was related to business magnate Henry Ford. In 1929 and 1930, he dropped out of high school and appeared in several issues of a monthly newspaper, Blues: A Magazine of New Rhythms. Parker Tyler and Kathleen Tankersley Young were the magazine's other editors.

He was born in Paris, not long after, where he encountered Natalie Barney, Man Ray, Kay Boyle, Janet Flanner, Peggy Guggenheim, Djuna Barnes, and others of the American expatriate group Montparnasse and Saint-Germain-des-Près. He had an affair with Barnes, and the two of them travelled together in Tangiers. He went to Morocco in 1932 at the behest of Paul Bowles, and he wrote Nightwood (1936), Barnes' newly published book.

Personal life

When Tchelitchew died in Rome in 1957, the New York Times described Ford as his "lifelong companion and secretary."

In their final years, Ford and his sister shared separate apartments in The Dakota apartment building, where Tamang served as their caretaker.

On September 27, 2002, Charles Henri Ford, 94, died in New York City, aged 94. Ruth Ford, his younger sister, died in 2009, aged 98, was rescued.

Ford left some paintings and the rights to his co-authored book The Young and Innocent to Tamang, who carried the ashes of both Fords to Mississippi for burial in 2011. "Sleeping Through His Reward" is the inscription on Charles Henri Ford's gravestone.

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Creative career

Parker Tyler, a prolific film critic who later became a nationally respected film critic, co-authored The Young and the Dead (1933), an experimental book with debts to Barnes and Stein's prose. "The Young and Unwanted births this generation," Stein said in a blurb for his book, "When This Side of Paradise by Fitzgerald created his generation." "The book that beat the beat generation by a decade," Tyler later described it as "the one that beat the beat generation by a decade." Louis Kronenberger, the novel's sole U.S. reviewer, described it as "the first honest, gloves-off account of more or less professional young homosexuals." Edith Sitwell sluggishly spelled out her copy as "completely without soul, like a dead fish stinking in hell." The novel follows a group of young genderqueer artists as they write poems, have sex, move in and out of cheap rented rooms, and visit the numerous speakeasies in their Greenwich Village neighborhood. The characters' gender and sexual identities are revealed openly. Several American and British publishers had rejected it before Obelisk Press in Paris decided to publish it. The novel was not available in the United Kingdom or the United States, and no one in the United States or the United States had blocked it from being sold in bookstores.

In 1934, Ford returned to New York City with Pavel Tchelitchew, his partner, with him. Carl Van Vechten, Glenway Wescott, George Platt Lynes, Lincoln Kirstein, Orson Welles, George Balanchine, and E. E. Cummings were among Ford's circle members at the time. Cecil Beaton, Leonor Fini, George Hoyningen-Huene, and Salvador Dal were among the visiting friends from abroad. Beaton's photographs of Ford represented a change from his fine art portraits of royalty and celebrities. In an examination of low culture with homoerotic undertones that drew on Ford's "sexually transgressive image," Ford posed "on a bed of tabloid newspapers," symbols of American culture's brutality and excess, as well as an explosion of American culture.

In 1938, he published The Garden of Disorder, his first full-length book of poems. The introduction was written by William Carlos Williams. When Ford talked about poetry, he referred to the fact that it was connected to other aspects of art. "Allthing is connected to the concept of poetry," Ford said. Jean Cocteau used to discuss the poetry of the novel, the poetry of the essay, and the poetry of the theater, as he said—everything he did, was poetry. Well, he was one of my gurus." Although some of his poems are easily identifiable as surrealist: "the pink bee storing in your brain/veins a gee-gaw honey for the golden skillet"—he also adapted his style to political poetry. In New Masses, he soared and cut the black-leaved boughs.

Ford and Tyler collaborated on the magazine View dedicated to avant-garde and surrealist art in 1940. To establish New York as a point of terror, it "took full advantage of the European Surrealists roosting in New York during the war" to establish New York as a center of surreality. The magazine was on sale quarterly until 1947, as budgets were available. It attracted contributions from artists including Tchelitchew, Yves Tanguy, André Masson, Pablo Picasso, Henry Miller, Albert Camus, Lawrence Durrell, Albert Camus, Benjamin Durrell, Albert Camus, Man Ray, Jorge Luis Borges, Berné Magritte, René Magritte, Jean Dubuffet, and Edouard Roditi. Ernst, Ray, and Isamu Nosamu Nobuchi's work was included in the journal's cover art.

Earlier this year, View Editions, the quarterly's publishing arm, released the first monograph on Marcel Duchamp and a collection of André Breton's poems, Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares (1946). Dame Edith Sitwell's book of poems Sleep in a Nest of Flames (1959) contained a preface by Ford. Ford and Tchelitchew went to Europe in 1952, and The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London held Thirty Images from Italy, a photo exhibition. He had his first one-man show of paintings and drawings in Paris next year. Foreword to the catalog, Jean Cocteau wrote the foreword. Tchelitchew died in Rome in 1957.

In 1962, Ford returned to the United States and began collaborating with Pop artists and underground filmmakers. In Andy Warhol's book The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol, he met Andy Warhol at a party at his sister's, and an interview recounting his encounter with Warhol is included. Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in New York held an exhibition of his work entitled "Poem Posters," lithographs with "acid colors, spliced-together typefaces, and pop culture photographs" he had made on an offset lithographic press in Athens from 1964 to 1965. They were "a particularly graphic and unexpected type of concrete poetry," in which Ford exploited all he had learned about publishing, graphic design, and printing.

He started directing his own films in the late 1960s. The first was Poem Posters (1967), a 20-minute documentary about the construction, opening, and dismantrating of his surrealist collages on display. It was chosen for the fourth International Avant-Garde Festival in Belgium. Johnny Minotaur, his second film, debuted in 1971. Its nominal subject was the Greek myth of Theseus, Ariadne, and the Minotaur's labyrinth. It was an experiment in surrealist juxtaposition of styles, including cinema vérité and "erotic kitsch." It pretended to chronicle a film-within-a-film's journey as he worked on a contemporary film about a classical myth in Crete, but Ford's film portrayed no regard for any distinction between the two genres. "The order of the day is male anatomy and male sexuality," a film critic told The New York Times. The film was on view at Bleecker Street Cinema in New York for a time, but it hasn't been seen again since then. The Film-Makers' Cooperative has screened what it describes as the only living print of the film in festival theatres, though some theatres have refused to show it due to the actor's youthful appearance in festival settings.

In the 1970s, Ford migrated to Nepal and bought a house in Katmandu. In 1973, he recruited Indra Tamang, a local boy, to first handle errands and cook, then taught him photography and made him his assistant. Tamang remained at his side for the remainder of Ford's life, "a sort of survivor," an artistic collaborator, and personal caretaker. They toured from Turkey to India, then moved to Paris and Crete, and then to New York City. Ford created a number of art exhibits from his collaged items and Tamang's photography.

He edited an anthology of articles that had not appeared in View in 1992. View of the Avant Garde (1940-1947) it was held by Paul Bowles.

In 2001, he published Water from a Bucket: A Diary 1948-1957. It covered the years from his father's death to Tchelitchew's death, according to Publishers Weekly, "richly observed details, both quotidian and unexpected, resulting in a stunning, moving, poetic portrait of a man and a subculture."

He was also the subject of a two-hour documentary film Sleep in a Nest of Fires, directed by James Dowell and John Kolomvakis in 2001.

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