Keep on Waking: Charles Henri Ford, Camp, and Surrealism

This paper focuses on the queer American modernist poet, novelist, and editor Charles Henri Ford (1908-2002). Beginning with his first modernist periodical Blues: a Magazine of New Rhythms (1929-30), I consider Ford’s engagement with and commitment to Surrealism. I argue that Blues left a profound and lasting impression on Ford’s (surreal) conception of cultural production and editorial praxis. Blues also signals the emergence of an important queer—or more specifically, camp—turn in Ford’s nascent praxis, which comes to exert a significant pressure on his understanding of and approach to Surrealism in the 1930s and 1940s. During this time, Ford took it upon himself to bring André Breton’s movement “out from [the] underground,” and more fully into the view of the American public. At the same time, Ford proposed a reworking of Surrealism. This is where Ford’s camp approach comes to the fore. Serious about Breton’s avant-garde movement, Ford sought to transform Surrealism by exaggerating its underlying absurdities and latently queer quirks. We get a clear sense of this when considering Ford’s main editorial project of the 1940s. Accordingly, I describe how, in the pages of his periodical View (1940-47), Ford oversaw the dissemination—and camp transformation—of Surrealism in the United States. When read in relation to the rest of Ford’s varied and vibrant creative output, it is clear that this unfairly overlooked figure can be said to have fostered the conditions for the subsequent emergence of decidedly surreal—and demonstrably camp—sensibility in postwar American culture.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC

A person counts once a day per paper. We keep no cookie and no address: a reader is a hash that changes every day. Any month under five reads shows no number.