Water From A Bucket

Influential American surrealist artist, writer, and editor Charles Henri Ford (1908-2002) was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, and grew up in Memphis and elsewhere in Tennessee, along with his mother and sister, Ruth, who went on to become a renowned film actress. In 1933 he published The Young and the Evil, a novel he wrote with Parker Tyler that was banned in England and America for its subversive content. He is better known, however, for his surrealist magazines: Blues, which he published from 1929 through 1930 while he was a teenager, and View, which ran from 1940 through 1947 and featured seminal works by up-and-coming artists of the time like Joseph Cornell, Allen Ginsberg, and Randall Jarrell. Ford's later collections of verse include Spare Parts (1966), Om Krishna (1978), and Secret Haiku (1982). Charles Henri Ford wrote: "To start off being a poet today you have to be young and full of illusions. To end up being a poet you have to have Another Job."

“A wonderful piece of writing. This provoking, pleasurable, unexpected book is a true labour of love.” —Neil Bartlett, Gay Times (London)“Ford and his supremely savvy, continent-hopping crew defined the era’s style and culture while pushing its moral codes to the brink.” —V Magazine “Like Tosca, Charles Henri Ford has lived for art and for love. In this scintillating diary, Ford presents his extended visits to war-torn France and Italy and his friendships with Cocteau, Paul Bowles, Gertrude Stein, Jean Genet, Truman Capote, and Tennessee Williams. . . . These pages show a golden moment before art surrendered to commerce, before gay life became brainless and ghettoized and before America turned its back on Europe. No wonder Ford considers Water from a Bucket his masterpiece.” —Edmund White“By making this public, Ford has provided readers with further evidence of just how talented and underrated a writer he is.” —Foreword Reviews“An extraordinary career even without the fact of Ford's own poetry, which stretches from the surrealistic to the cut up.” —The Memphis Flyer