Charles Henri Ford Books

This book is a gem of Mid-Century Avant Garde, Surrealist, Fabulist & more writing. Pieces by Man Ray, Henry Miller, Paul Bowles, Camus, Borges. Stuff about Ernst, Breton, Durrell, Leger. 60 or more similar items. A fascinating short article that gives the `40s perspective on "Les chants de Maldoror;" really an underground book then. A time capsule or doorway through to a long gone, fertile period in the arts from a participant's perspective.

I read this book during a binge of early 20th century gay fiction and I wouldn't say it was 'dreadful.' If you're talking esoterics, Ronald Firbanks is the bloke you want! Wyndham Lewis was equally unrewarding. There was at least some humor in The Young and Evil, when the protag pukes on the straight woman! I laughed. The copy they interlibrary loaned me was printed in Paris on handmade paper--you probably won't find anything so opulent on Amazon . . . I digress, I caught more of a Joycean feeling than Stein but I can't stand that woman!

A dreadful novel, pretentious, arty and clearly indebted to Gertrude Stein in its alliterative passages of nonsensical phrases. The characters are cardboard, the plot non-existent and good chunks are completely unintelligible. Saying all that, I found the book fascinating as a historical document of gay life in New York of the early 30's. Village Bohemia, gay bars, the drag balls, cruising on Riverside Drive, gay bashing, rent parties are all here, and written by those who lived it. Those looking for sex scenes will be deeply disappointed because none exist...just the fact that the male characters went to bed or paired off with each other was risqué enough to put terror in the hearts of potential publishers. But as an illustration of George Chauncey's Gay New York none better could be found, an authentic document of the times. Worth every affected paragraph.

By this time, there's a fairly sizeable American sub-genre of "Bohemian" novels that deal with young artists and their sex-drug-and-alcohol-crazed friends. This is the fourth of this sub-genre that I have read. The others are Kerouac's THE SUBTERRANEANS (1950s San Francisco), Viva's SUPERSTAR (the Warhol crowd in the late 60s) and of course, Henry Miller's Parisian classic TROPIC OF CANCER. Several years ago I was showing some visiting German friends around New York and they asked me, "When did Greenwich Village become a gay neighborhood?" After a little thought, I said that I didn't know, but would guess after World War II when the young men came home from the war. Well, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler's THE YOUNG AND EVIL shows that I was wrong. This book was published in 1933 and depicts a Greenwich Village with a well-established gay scene, so the Village must have gone gay decades before then. Like the other books I mentioned, this one is virtually plotless and an obvious roman-a-clef, with false names attached to real people. Like THE SUBTERRANEANS, it is written in the present tense. Unlike any of the others, this one has been influenced by Gertrude Stein, much to the book's detriment. One pretentious sentence treads upon another's heels. Most of the time this oblique way of storytelling just gets in the way. However, there's in an interesting sequence of non-sequiturs jumbled together from about a dozen simultaneous conversations at a drag ball that struck me as rather exhilarating. But most of the time the book is a gay soap opera about the tangled emotional lives of mascara-wearing poet boys and the masculine ethnic youth of the neighborhood. Some of it is quite funny. But toward the end, there's a shocking scene in which the boys are attacked and beaten by sailors. Fortunately they are all arrested and taken to jail before they can be too badly beaten, but the episode does bring home vividly the terrors that could be in store for those whose only crime was being effeminate. Fortunately, the book is brief. As literature, I'd say this book's value is minimal. But as an historical artifact I found it quite worthwhile. I'll give it two and a half stars rounded up to three.

A dreadful novel, pretentious, arty and clearly indebted to Gertrude Stein in its alliterative passages of nonsensical phrases. The characters are cardboard, the plot non-existent and good chunks are completely unintelligible. Saying all that, I found the book fascinating as a historical document of gay life in New York of the early 30's. Village Bohemia, gay bars, the drag balls, cruising on Riverside Drive, gay bashing, rent parties are all here, and written by those who lived it. Those looking for sex scenes will be deeply disappointed because none exist...just the fact that the male characters went to bed or paired off with each other was risqué enough to put terror in the hearts of potential publishers. But as an illustration of George Chauncey's Gay New York none better could be found, an authentic document of the times. Worth every affected paragraph.