Water from a Bucket : A Diary 1948-1957

In an unpublished preface to "Les Fleurs du Mal," Baudelaire wrote "Does one show the audience all the rags and cosmetics, the pulleys and chains, the corrections and scribbled proofs - in a word, all the horrors that make up the sanctuary of art?" Charles Henri Ford does just that in this newly uncovered nine year diary. His notes and descriptions of hilarious and sometimes poignant social encounters, his sexual antics, his dithering and bitchiness, his relationships with Pavel Tchelitchew, Gertude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Marianne Moore, Edith Sitwell and so many others have a unique literary virtue of their own. Covering the period from 1948 through 1957, Charles Henri Ford's Water from a Bucket shows us a writer and bon vivant at his prime, reflecting on the world around him, his already amazing past, and the future to come. By turns witty, revealing, and moving, this book is a picture of three decades of twentieth-century bohemia, as well as a portrait of the often contradictory domestic and hedonistic aspects of pre-Stonewall gay life.