Young and the Evil

260 Pages·1996·29.053 MB·English

by  Charles Henri Ford, Parker Tyler

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Acknowledgments
I want to thank several people for their help with this introduction. Catrina
Neiman generously provided me with her gleanings from the Parker Tyler
Archive, and I benefited further from her remarks about the manuscript. Charles
Boultenhouse provided vital information about Tyler and allowed me to read his
evocative memoir, Parker Tyler’s Own Scandal, which will be published in a future
edition of Film Culture. Ruth Ford shared her memories and her photographs of
her brother. Sandra Phillips of the San Francisco Museum of Art furnished a copy
print of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photograph of Charles Ford (purchased through a
gift by Byron Meyer). Robert Atkins provided perceptive editorial comments and
loving support throughout.
The Young and Evil
Copyright © 1988 Charles Henri Ford
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including
mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without prior written permission of the publishers.
Reprint Edition by G.P.N.Y from a copy in The New York Public Library
First Richard Kasak Book Edition 1996
First Printing July 1996
ISBN 1-56333-431-3
Manufactured in the United States of America
Published by Masquerade Books, Inc.
801 Second Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10017
A RICHARD KASAK BOOK
ntroduction by Steven Watson
CHARLES HENRI FORD & PARKER TYLER
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2017 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/youngevilOOchar
When we read The Young and Evil in the 1980s, we bring to its
pages the sensibility of a post-Beat, post-hippie, post-punk, post-gay
liberation era. To see the novel more distinctly, we must divest
ourselves of such excess consciousness, for this book belongs to an
early period before the battles of the modern age had been waged.
Not simply another recycling of freedom and nihilism, or the name of
the latest punk band, The Young and Evilby Charles Henri Ford and
Parker Tyler was the first novel to describe its particular brand of
bohemian life. Gertrude Stein declared on the novel’s dust-jacket:
“77ze Young and Evil creates this generation as This Side of Paradise
by Fitzgerald created his generation.”
What did it mean to be young and evil in Greenwich Village at the
beginning of the Depression?
“Young” fits the novel easily enough. Its protagonists are on the
brink of adulthood and their narrative contains a heady mixture of
freedom and self-involvement, melodrama and speed that belongs to
the world of adolescence. The book’s extravagant style, too, could
only have been created by young men anxious to rebel in every arena
from sex to punctuation.
The contours of “evil,” however, are less distinct. Values are hard
to discern within the shifting world of the novel—as they were in the
Greenwich Village of that era. This milieu lacks a formal code of
values—nothing like the Victorian morals that still cast their shadow
on the rest of America, nor the principles of commerce espoused on
Wall Street, nor even the liberal establishment of progressive aca-
deme. The circumscribed universe of The Young and Evil, in fact,
seems morally blank. Even Djuna Barnes, whose comment also
appeared on the original dust jacket, expressed concerns: “Their
utter lack of emotional values—so entire that is is frightening; their
loss of all Victorian victories, manners, custom, remorse, taste,
dignity; their unresolved acceptance of any happening is both evil
and ‘pure’ in the sense that it is unconscious.”
Twenty-seven years later, when the book was re-published by
Olympia Press, Parker Tyler conducted a mock interview with him-
self and addressed the question of evil.
“The Young and Evil is also still ‘evil’ because, in its
rightness (not righteousness!) it is quite unconscious of
piety or purity. Nobody in it—and everybody in it is
young—postures as an artist or an anti-artist, or as any-
thing in particular. The world calls ‘evil,’and has always
called so, whoever rejects labels and methods and sys-
tems, even nominal rights and privileges, in order to
uncompromisingly create its own individual good. This
province of action belongs eternally to the individual
soul. Once the soul declares—and it always does, or it
isn’t a soul—that it can judge itself and all else as an
absolute, the soul is called ‘evil’.. .You see, The Young
and Evil was written soon enough, and roughly uncons-
ciously enough to escape being officialized modernis-
m.. .It strikes me that certain novels written today are
unaware ‘translations’ of The Young and Evil into the
masochistic tongue of the Beat Generation. Most of the
‘daring’ of our young literature is actually academic; the
side of the ‘fallen angels’.. .where art always is... is
much too crowded to be extraordinary
.”1
It is precisely the novel’s unjudging tone that assures its place in
literary history. While not the first American novel to present homo-
sexual characters on its pages—Strange Brother by Blair Niles and
Twilight Men by Andre Tellier, for example, preceded it by a few
years—it is the first American novel to take its characters’sexuality
for granted. In the earlier novels, the homosexual protagonist could
be either a clean-cut sort whose inversion was restricted to guilt-
ridden fantasies of life with a heterosexual buddy, or he could be an
exotic who relied on morphine to ease the pain of his decadent life.
Both protagonists, naturally, ended in suicide. There was simply no
other option.
Imagine then, being confronted with a book whose characters
take a lover as casually as they take a smoke. They seem incapable of
guilt (let alone over something as matter of fact as ‘inversion*) and
express themselves in a vernacular previously unknown to the pages
of American literature.
“Well said the wolf to Little Red Riding Hood no sooner was
Karel seated in the Round Table than the impossible happened.
There before him stood a fairy prince and one of those mythological
creatures knows as Lesbians.” So reads the opening of The Young
and Evil. Ford and Tyler lost no time in announcing that theirs
would be a tale of the homosexual underground, arch, flamboyant,
and enacted in real places with unreal names.
The novel’s two protagonists, Julian and Karel, live in the margi-
nal world of Greenwich Village at the dawn of the Depression. Three
others—Louis, Gabriel and Theodisia—share the novel’s bohemian
milieu and sometimes the beds of its principals. This quintet carries
on the common struggle of impecunious poets—equally concerned
with raising the rent money and creating the perfect modern stanza.
After shedding traditional values, they have neither aspirations for
the future, nor guilt about the past. The Young and Evil eavesdrops
on their conversations, follows them as they take on lovers and
roommates, records their meals and perambulations.
The relationships in this world comprise a revolving door of
lovers and roommates. Julian and Karel live together; Louis and
Gabriel live together, Karel sleeps with Louis, Julian lives with
Theodosia, Karel returns to Julian, Louis brings Gabriel to live with
Julian and Karel. (One thing these people do is move a lot.) Their
roundelay reflects not simply a bygone era of New York real estate,
but a universe of shifting relationships and labile sexuality. The
Young and Evil doesn’t present a strictly homosexual world, but one
of polymorphous sexuality. The characters collide with one another
for money, power and narcissistic validation.
The most romantic relationship is embodied in Karel’s feelings
for Louis. However brutish Louis is capable of being, Karel trans-
forms him into an idealized object of desire, a fetish. In return for his
devotion, Karel is stripped and robbed and receives from Louis a bite
on the neck instead of a kiss on the lips. Such are the possibilities for
romantic love in the world of the young and evil.
* * *
“Nothing is invented,” said Charles Henri Ford, describing the
narrative of The Young and Evil. Scratch a first novel, as the truism
goes, and you’ll find an autobiography—but few draw as literally
from lived experience as does this double first novel. The Young and
Evil is both bildungsroman and roman a clef. In excavating the facts
below the surface of the narrative, we not only gain a better under-
standing of the novel, but the parallel story of the real lives lived.
Our archeology begins with Charles Henri Ford.2 His birthdate is
in question; although Ford claims he was born on February 10,1913,
other sources add three years. Youth has always been central to
Charles Ford’s personal myth. He grew up in small towns through-
out the South, where his family operated hotels in such towns as
Fulton, Kentucky, Columbus, Mississippi, and Nacogdoches, Tex-
as. Charles’s aesthetic precocity seemed to spring from nowhere. The
closest thing in the Ford family life to cultural activity were the local
dances. From an early age, Charles and his younger sister Ruth3
accompanied their parents to rural dancehalls and danced all even-
ing. “Man is delivered from the womb complete as a seed; everything
else is accident,” Ford later wrote. Whatever the statement’s univer-
sal truth, it described young Charles very well. By the age of 13, he
was the editor of his first publication, a dormitory paper called The
Brass Monkey.
He very soon determined one thing he wanted—fame. On the eve
of his 17th birthday he wrote in his diary: “In two years I will be
famous. In two years I will be famous. In two years I will be famous.
In two years I will be famous. In two years I will be famous. In two
years I will be famous. This is my oath.”
Soon his diary turned to Ezra Pound, the man Ford considered
the greatest poet of the twentieth century. “Pound! please write me!”
Ford pleaded. “To be recognized, to be discovered! So much could I
accomplish if, by having a patron, I could have leisure. I do not
expect to come into the literary world like a meteor, but early, while I
am young, at any rate.” Two days later he declared, “I will be what I
am.
; ' '

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Charles Henri Ford (1933) photographer unknown
Courtesy Ruth Ford