He knew it would be a feather in my cap, but he also knew that he couldn’t resist because nobody else had asked him” (ibid., p. 4). This edition was taken from the same plates as the earlier UK edition, published by the Europa Press, and has the New Directions cancel page. Octavo. Original green cloth boards, spine lettered in yellow, edges untrimmed. With dust jacket. With a frontispiece by Pavel Tchelitchew. Lower tips a little bumped. A near-fine copy in the fresh jacket, small chips to spine ends and tips, spine panel a little toned and rubbed, a few marks to rear panel and damp stain to rear fold, crease to head of front panel, occasional short closed tear to extremities, still fresh. ¶ Alexander Howard, Charles Henri Ford , 2017. £750 [154945] 49 FORSTER, E. M. Howard’s End. London: Edward Arnold, 1910 The copy of a suitor of Virginia Woolf First edition, first impression, with the ownership inscription of Forster’s friend Sydney Waterlow pencilled on the first blank. Waterlow was a career diplomat, Ambassador to Greece from 1933 to 1939, and an early suitor of Virginia Woolf, to whom he proposed after his first marriage was annulled. Waterlow (1878–1944) was close friends with Toby Stephen and Forster, and introduced the latter to Henry James. In a diary entry of 1910, Waterlow recalls dining with the Bells: “I realised for the first time the difference between her [Vanessa] and Virginia: Vanessa icy, cynical, artistic; Virginia much more emotional, & interested in life rather than beauty” (quoted in Stape). His praise of Virginia is at odds with her opinion of him: “What a bore that man is! I don’t know why exactly, but no one I’ve ever met seems to me more palpably second rate and now the poor creature resigns himself to it” (Letter to Lytton Strachey, 22 October 1915). Despite Woolf’s ridicule (“What a sight he looked bathing! like Neptune, if Neptune was a eunuch”), he numbered among Strachey, Forster, and T. S. Eliot as a regular guest at Monk’s House, and in gentler moods, Virginia’s mockery could pass for affection: “his absurdity is
48
48 FORD, Charles Henri. The Garden of Disorder and other poems. With an introduction by William Carlos Williams. Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, [1938] Inscribed to the Lenin of the Surrealist revolution First US edition, first printing, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “à André Breton, Lenine de la revolution surréaliste, avec tout ma sympathie, Charles Henri Ford, 2 avril 1939”. This, Ford’s first full-length book of poetry, was a gift to Breton early in their friendship. Ford recounted the occasion of this presentation in a letter to author Parker Tyler on 5 April 1939: “Breton I find very sympathetic, I gave him my Garden of Disorder with dedication to Andre Breton, Lenine de la Revolutuion Surrealiste and just finished reading his Les Vases Communicants , and have bought other of his books. I find I have been underestimating him all along, (though not the accomplishments of the surrealist painters), through not having read his works. I’m lunching Friday with him and will take photos” (quoted in Howard, p. 110). Though both surrealists respected one another, Breton’s well-documented homophobia was a point of contention for the openly gay Ford. The dust jacket and frontispiece of this title are by Tchelitchew, Ford’s partner, who disparagingly referred to Breton as “Pope Joan”. Later their association wbecame became increasingly fraught and competitive. Breton’s establishment of an official surrealist magazine in 1942, VVV , can be read as a response to View , the influential magazine founded by Ford in 1940. Breton offered Ford an editorial position “so as to nullify any potential threat that Ford might have posed to his aesthetic authority” (ibid, p. 113). Naturally, Ford declined the position. Ford offered to publish a book of Breton’s poems, Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares (1946): “I invited [Breton] to the View office one day and I said, ‘Andre, I would like to publish a book of your poems’. So he looked at me and said, ‘vous etes malin’. Now that’s hard to translate. ‘Malin’ means something like I was undercutting him. ‘You got me by the balls’, so to speak.
49
ONLY CONNECT
40
Made with FlippingBook Online newsletter maker