A doll does not believe in itself he thought it believes in its dollness I have the will to doll which is a special way of willing to live my poetry may merely be a way of dolling up and then it may be the beginning of ego I think I would be practically nothing without my poetry unless a DOLL my homosexuality is just a habit to which I’m somehow bound which is little more than a habit in that it’s not love or romance but a dim hard fetish I worship in my waking dreams it’s more a symbol of power not a symbol inducing pleasure but exemplifying it not a specific symbol no I am not a fairy doll.

So speaks Julian in The Young and Evil, the second of our books from the still satisfying Metronome Press. First published by Paris’ Obelisk Press in 1933, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler’s surrealist text deals in love and queenery in the bars of thirties New York, as a coterie of beautiful, mascara’d boys fall painfully in and out with one another, and, to an actually far lesser extent, society.

A year later, from the same city and the same press, issued Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, whose cunts and pricks, which shocked the world, were well in evidence by page four. Ford and Tyler, a year ahead, are onto the Lesbians by the fourth line. What worlds these were, with such things in them.

Ford and Tyler’s achievement, much like Miller’s, is to give a mythical, heroic aspect to the gutter lives of their characters, and, more lovingly than Miller, fairytale titles to their games. They inhabit a world where, at the best of times, too much tea is drunk, damsels are asked to private parties and magistrates, at the point of crisis, bid them go, and hand back the eyebrow pencil. The grinding poverty of everyday life is utterly forgotten.

The sun didn’t shine white but the sun shone. Karel slept, loving neither flowers, animals nor music. There was no clock in the place. Louis found cigarettes and gave Julian one. Louis sat at the table and wrote with pencil on a piece of yellow paper. Julian looked at the floor strewn with cigarette butts, a broken victrola record and some glasses. An empty gin bottle stood at Louis’ elbow and another lay at his ankle.
Don’t you know that poems shouldn’t be written after sexual excesses said Julian.
Louis said that is when I always write.