Alexander Howard’s pathbreaking study of the life and work of the sadly neglected Charles Henri Ford is much more than a simple recuperation of lost value. It dextrously navigates the categorial coral reefs growing up over the wrecks of modernism and postmodernism both, and establishes some eye-opening passages between and among them, where the reef-fish teem and school. Howard’s Ford ... Read moreis a multiform experimentalist, queer icon, regional surrealist, late-modernist mentor, and sociable internationalist, who tirelessly offered his ‘torsional’ character to those movements and causes that could use his energy. His longevity turns out to be a key to the broken clocks of modernity, with which he tinkered and played in an amazing series of works to which we now have the most reliable guide.
Julian Murphet, Ph.D. FAHA, Scientia Professor in English and Film Studies, Director, Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia, School of the Arts and Media, UNSW Australia
Alexander Howard hopes that Charles Henri Ford’s “uncredited role” in U.S. avant-garde traditions “will one day be properly acknowledged.” That day dawns already in Howard’s compelling book. Its portrait of the artist exhibits Ford’s traversal of seventy years of aesthetic movements. By turns exemplifying modernism, the modernist little magazine, queer immoralism, surrealism, Beat poetics, pop art, camp, postmodernism, and New York School poetry, and by turns revising them too, Ford’s career constitutes an object lesson in the metamorphic complexity of literary history. The lesson is made available to us thanks to Howard’s brilliant revelation of Ford’s interests and writings as a “hidden chain” that links together some of the last century’s most notable American cultural productions.
Robert L. Caserio, Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park
“‘In the end, everything is a question of personality.’” So states second-generation modernist Charles Henri Ford in 1958. Drawing on newly unearthed archives, Howard meticulously uncovers how Ford cultivated his own spectacular individuality. America’s first surrealist-cum-Imaginationist, Ford was poet, visual artist, and self-described genius; his aesthetic daring was matched by his prescient sexual politics. Ford’s epistolary élan alone sparks interest: he corresponded, collaborated, and frequently fought with the likes of Pound, Stein, Barnes, Breton, Warhol, and Brakhage. Howard’s work importantly recovers this wry, innovative, and influential figure for the annals of vanguardism.
Dr Sara Crangle, Reader, School of English University of Sussex Brighton, UK
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