Making Modernism New: Queer Mythology in The Young and Evil

Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method.It is, I seriously believe, a step towardmaking the modern world possible for art.

—T. S. Eliot, "Ulysses, Order, and Myth"¹

Literature is and was and is and was.

—Parker Tyler to Ezra Pound, letter dated 18 September 1933

I. Queer Mythology?

Although it has largely eluded critical attention, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler's 1933 novel The Young and Evil has come to be known among some scholars as one of the first proto-queer texts in American letters. Joseph Allen Boone, most notably, argues in his Libidinal Currents (1998) that the novel "deliberately carves out an alternative niche for itself within the modernist tradition" by using "modernist style [to] encod[e] explicit gay content."² Boone's reading helpfully highlights that The Young and Evil depicts a group of young men and women in the late 1920s Greenwich Village community who engage in an array of non-normative sexual experiences and that the text relates these experiences through a prototypically high modernist aesthetic of formal experimentation. Featuring poetic lineation, spatializing parataxis, stream-of-consciousness narration, and surrealist imagery and thematics, The Young and Evil reads at various moments like Gertrude Stein's Three Lives (1909), Djuna Barnes's Nightwood (1936), and Ezra Pound's The Cantos (1970). Such likenesses are unsurprising since Ford and Tyler were friends with Stein, Barnes, and Pound, and since they edited and managed the little magazine Blues, which Ford and Tyler described as "a magazine of modernism" that "afforded modernism to everyone."³ More surprising is that, given the authors' professional and personal intersections with so many canonical modernists, Ford and Tyler's literary achievements have been widely overlooked.

One reason for The Young and Evil's obscurity may owe, ironically, to the very attributions that Boone uses to champion the novel: despite its experimental style, The Young and Evil has seemed all too "niche," too focused on an "outcast queer fringe" to be considered as a representative modernist text.⁴ Such a reading is counterintuitive, however, because the novel's queerness undergirds its most consummately modernist ambitions: to renovate myth for modern purposes and to create folklore for a burgeoning ethnic community.⁵ Grounding hallmark modernist texts like T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) and James Joyce's Ulysses (1922)—the novel that incited Eliot to promote a "mythical method" for modernist literature in his 1923 essay "Ulysses, Order, and Myth"—myth traditionally aims to convey cultural universals and ideals. Folklore, in contrast, records the beliefs, customs, and idioms of particular, or ethnic, groups, as epitomized in novels like Younghill Kang's The Grass Roof (1931) and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Together, myth and folklore comprise the aesthetic goals and content of much canonical modernist literature and offer two formal instances of literary modernists' more widespread anxiety to reconcile cultural unity and pluralism. When Eliot propounds his "mythical method," for example, he requests that modernist writers "manipulat[e] a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity," or particularity and universality, which is, he maintains, "a goal toward which all good literature strives."⁶

By the standard of Eliot's mythical method, The Young and Evil would seem to qualify as a paradigmatic modernist text, perhaps even as "good literature." Consider the novel's opening paragraph: "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 known as Lesbians. Won't you join our table? they said in sweet chorus."⁷ In less than fifty words, the paragraph invokes at least five mythological references: the fairy tale "Little Red Riding Hood," Arthurian legend via "the Round Table," "a fairy prince," "mythological creatures" ethnographically identified as "Lesbians," and a kind of Greek "chorus." Such allusions associate the novel with a seemingly unrelated group of transcultural mythologies, a mixture that queers the text's relation to "impossible" myth, or Eliot's "antiquity," from the...