The Young and Evil (1933)
A stunning work, first published in 1933 by Obelisk Press (Jack Kahane's legacy), The Young and the Evil is a non-judgmental depiction of gay life and men who earn their living there, told through characters like Julian (modeled on Ford) and Karel (based on Tyler). With the added interracial connotations (book was set in Harlem and Greenwich), err, anyone surprised that this title didn't clear customs across the Channel or the Pond? Girodias later republished this work as part of the Traveller's Companion series. Authors such as Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein praised it unflinchingly.
An infamous novel returns. Originally published in 1933, The Young and Evil was an immediate sensation due to its unprecedented portrayal of young gay artists living in New York's notorious Greenwich Village. From flamboyant drag balls to squalid bohemian flats, Ford & Tyler's characters followed love and art wherever it led them - with a frankness that had the novel banned for many years. A moving portrait of a very particular time and place, by two writers who lived its highs and lows. -- from back cover
In THE YOUNG AND EVIL, Julien (Charles Henri Ford) and Karel (Parker Tyler) are fleeing a homophobic attack by a gang of sailors when they run into the police and get arrested. I start with that because the novel seems so modern. Neither has a problem with their sexuality; each is looking for love or at least a good time; they all too briefly think they may have found it in each other but remain friends. It’s set in Greenwich Village bohemia of the early Thirties, during Prohibition. Julien and Karel drink too much, have parties, take a lot of drugs, go up to Harlem for drag balls, get involved with married men, sometimes trade sex for rent money….or a fur coat, and sometimes even with a woman. Mostly, they fall in love with the wrong people. They don’t suffer psychologically because they’re different. They like being different: they want to be poets. But mamma mia! The world they live in! They’re constantly being robbed, thrown out, beaten up, arrested. Their sexuality is a problem for the world, and that is what creates problems for them, which they mainly shrug off because, l’important c’est d’aimer and to create art. It’s a very uneven book, with some chapters written in a surrealist, stream of consciousness style, others in a more linear narrative. Part of the pleasure of reading is that it is a roman-à-cléf and it’s fun to try and figure out who is who. The book was published in 1933 by the Obelisk Press in Paris and considered so scandalous it wasn’t allowed to become a scandal. 500 copies were seized and burnt at port in the UK; shipments to the US were intercepted and turned back. It’s not a great novel, but it’s a great document of a particular structure of feeling. It was compared to Fitzgerald’s THE FAR SIDE OF PARADISE; and I suspect young queers might recognise more aspects of their conditions and experience in this almost hundred-years-old book than they’d like to .
