“Would you like to be in Rome…where all the pretty boys are?” Pavlik: “Don’t turn the dagger in the wound.”
Poetry, genius, love, fame, friendship, beauty, family, character, sex, psychology, youth, and Pavlik, always, are variously appetizers, entrees, or desserts on Ford’s menu du jour et de la nuit. His diary is riveting. As it moves from theme to theme, the reader senses a life formed consciously in the present, one lived spontaneously, interrupted and interfered with by memory and the pressure of unconscious thoughts. The reader feels the moment’s vitality and presence, and the sorrow at its loss, but not because Ford insistson it. Emotion—disappointment and sadness—is there in the way he writes the day, flying from an idea, sex act, or fantasy, to a line in a poem, a report on dinner talk, a death, an argument, to a question about aesthetics, a worry about Pavlik—then it’s all gone, except the memory of it, what he’s written down.
A passionate schoolboy who knew what he wanted—and got it. (In the pissoir.)
A shadow falls, a fragment of night; a day goes, a fragment of death. Life and the sun tomorrow .
Many beautiful machines—Tanguy painted. But the most beautiful machine is and always will be the human body .
His diary is beautiful and homely, an epic poem about the dailiness of art and life. It’s filled with insights about himself, love, sex, his illusions, delusions; there’s silliness, homages to his heroes—Isak Dinesen, for one—and acerbic or reverent considerations of his contemporaries. Tchelitchew comments that Jean Genet, whom Ford finds “solemn and humorless,” is “un moraliste—comme Sade”; Ford refers, less perceptively, to “messes signed by Jackson Pollock.” The diary is loaded with gossip about history’s celebrated, with whom Ford has had lunch or met at an opening. When he introduces Djuna Barnes to Tennessee Williams at a party, she asks Williams, “How does it feel to be rich and famous?”
Diaries confirm that life is in the details, and in its passions, all of which Ford includes, all of which are inevitably subservientto time. Ford’s diary is profound not because it marks time passing or spent, but because it is imaginatively and definitively of its time and in it.
I asked Parker (in a letter) if he thought posthumous fame is any fun and he replied it might be to posterity .
Go back to music, rhythm, as Yeats did, for a renewal of inspiration in poetry. “Go back” in the sense of renewal—
Pavlik’s summary of how I spend my time: “fornication and fabrication .”
Like histories, diaries are accounts of the past. Unlike histories, they are not written retrospectively, and subjectivity is their central claim to truth. Faithful to the subjective, the diarist’s words, Ford’s eyes and ears, conduct the reader through the world inhabits. The reader finds the way back as it was to Ford. His irresponsibility, his understanding of the power of transience—in sex, art, love—his appreciation of the ephemeral, and his desire to have it all, anyway, for as long as he can, carry us with him.
Years of work, a burst of glory, and it’s all over .
Up at six and found a feather in my bed, as though, while I was sleeping I’d been a bird .
Pavlik told me—in 1933—that I had been sent to him because his mother died .
What is called history comes to us as a transcription of the evanescent. A radio announcer’s excited play by play of the Tony Zale–Marcel Cerdan fight becomes a monologue written by a Surrealist. The now-famous 1948 Life photograph of poets at the Gotham Book Mart—Ford, the Sitwells, Marianne Moore, Tennessee Williams, Delmore Schwartz, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Stephen Spender, Randall Jarrell—was first, in the diary, an occasion for a gathering. The photograph documents the group, contributing to the historical record—these poets were there, those not, some are forgotten now.
Ford’s commentary about the
Poetry, genius, love, fame, friendship, beauty, family, character, sex, psychology, youth, and Pavlik, always, are variously appetizers, entrees, or desserts on Ford’s menu du jour et de la nuit. His diary is riveting. As it moves from theme to theme, the reader senses a life formed consciously in the present, one lived spontaneously, interrupted and interfered with by memory and the pressure of unconscious thoughts. The reader feels the moment’s vitality and presence, and the sorrow at its loss, but not because Ford insistson it. Emotion—disappointment and sadness—is there in the way he writes the day, flying from an idea, sex act, or fantasy, to a line in a poem, a report on dinner talk, a death, an argument, to a question about aesthetics, a worry about Pavlik—then it’s all gone, except the memory of it, what he’s written down.
A passionate schoolboy who knew what he wanted—and got it. (In the pissoir.)
A shadow falls, a fragment of night; a day goes, a fragment of death. Life and the sun tomorrow .
Many beautiful machines—Tanguy painted. But the most beautiful machine is and always will be the human body .
His diary is beautiful and homely, an epic poem about the dailiness of art and life. It’s filled with insights about himself, love, sex, his illusions, delusions; there’s silliness, homages to his heroes—Isak Dinesen, for one—and acerbic or reverent considerations of his contemporaries. Tchelitchew comments that Jean Genet, whom Ford finds “solemn and humorless,” is “un moraliste—comme Sade”; Ford refers, less perceptively, to “messes signed by Jackson Pollock.” The diary is loaded with gossip about history’s celebrated, with whom Ford has had lunch or met at an opening. When he introduces Djuna Barnes to Tennessee Williams at a party, she asks Williams, “How does it feel to be rich and famous?”
Diaries confirm that life is in the details, and in its passions, all of which Ford includes, all of which are inevitably subservientto time. Ford’s diary is profound not because it marks time passing or spent, but because it is imaginatively and definitively of its time and in it.
I asked Parker (in a letter) if he thought posthumous fame is any fun and he replied it might be to posterity .
Go back to music, rhythm, as Yeats did, for a renewal of inspiration in poetry. “Go back” in the sense of renewal—
Pavlik’s summary of how I spend my time: “fornication and fabrication .”
Like histories, diaries are accounts of the past. Unlike histories, they are not written retrospectively, and subjectivity is their central claim to truth. Faithful to the subjective, the diarist’s words, Ford’s eyes and ears, conduct the reader through the world inhabits. The reader finds the way back as it was to Ford. His irresponsibility, his understanding of the power of transience—in sex, art, love—his appreciation of the ephemeral, and his desire to have it all, anyway, for as long as he can, carry us with him.
Years of work, a burst of glory, and it’s all over .
Up at six and found a feather in my bed, as though, while I was sleeping I’d been a bird .
Pavlik told me—in 1933—that I had been sent to him because his mother died .
What is called history comes to us as a transcription of the evanescent. A radio announcer’s excited play by play of the Tony Zale–Marcel Cerdan fight becomes a monologue written by a Surrealist. The now-famous 1948 Life photograph of poets at the Gotham Book Mart—Ford, the Sitwells, Marianne Moore, Tennessee Williams, Delmore Schwartz, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Stephen Spender, Randall Jarrell—was first, in the diary, an occasion for a gathering. The photograph documents the group, contributing to the historical record—these poets were there, those not, some are forgotten now.
Ford’s commentary about the
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