CONVERSATION: Richard Hell is Godlike

Juliet Escoria interviews Richard Hell about the new reissue of his 2005 novel, GODLIKE, from New York Review of Books Classics. Discussed: dropping out of school, time, & the pointlessness of writing

Originally published by Akashic Books twenty-one years ago, Richard Hell’s novel Godlike was recently reissued by the New York Review of Books Classics. The book is an unusual one, structurally, consisting of a novelette that is interspersed with the fictional notebook writings and poems of the novelette’s “author,” a poet named Paul Vaughn, recollecting his romance and friendship with a younger poet, R.T. Wode, as he writes from a hospital bed twenty years in the future. Paul and “T” are based on Verlaine and Rimbaud, respectively, and T’s poems are based on Frank O’Hara and other poets’ work—“translations,” as Hell refers to them.

It’s a lot of ideas to fit into a slim, 130-page book. Rather than feeling dense, the experience of reading it feels thrilling and fast, like riding passenger as the driver goes a little too fast on a curvy road on the side of a cliff, but the driver is skilled, so you don’t worry about hurtling to your death. I read it in a rush, propelled by its tenderness and beauty, and also the sheer wonder of “How on earth is Richard going to pull this off?” As Raymond Foye writes in the book’s new afterword, “the book nearly spirals out of control on every page.” That “nearly” is key. The tires screech, but Hell maintains control the whole time.

We talked about the book over Zoom a few days before the book release party for Godlike, which featured no readings. Instead, it was a party, one that featured merch like matches, signed poems, and also fake blotter acid—a nod to T and Paul’s acid-based experiences in the book. Hell told me that some of the blotter acid sheets were soaked in his own piss. People could choose if they wanted pee-soaked blotter acid or plain. He views the event as “the climatic moment of [his] life as a poet in public.” Our conversation reflects this: a writer viewing their work in retrospect, now that his writing is no longer seen as that of a dirty punk rock “junky,” but that of a “classic.”

Juliet Escoria: A lot of this book is about time, and now it’s been twenty-one years since it was published. So how do you feel about the Richard that wrote this book, and the book now?

Richard Hell: That’s one thing about getting older. Time goes by so much quicker—twenty years feels like nothing to me. The book is still completely fresh to me, though I don’t think I could write something like it now. It’s gratifying that the New York Review of Books took it up. I have two or three books—used to be three, now two—that I’ve kept out of print for the last twenty or thirty years because they were too precious to me to entrust to a publisher except in a way that felt safe and correct.

But I’ve been thinking for the past five or six years, “Okay, that’s got to become a priority,” to find where these books will get the treatment that I’d like for them. When I was thinking of who would be the ideal publisher for Godlike, one that came to mind was NYRB Classics. But that was a long shot. Not only might it seem like dubious material, degenerate poets in seventies New York, written by a guy who’s generally regarded more as a junky musician than a writer, but it was only published twenty years ago. Most of their authors are dead, because they’re, you know, classics. But I thought I might as well take a swing.

And so I sent it to them, and amazingly they accepted it. I’m a big admirer of The New York Review of Books. I felt as if I wasn’t taken as seriously as I would have liked in music because of the literary connection—but then, in literature I wasn’t taken as seriously as I would have liked because of the rock and roll connection. I was a high school dropout, but I respect learning above all things. I just can’t stand school, and reading NYRB was a way to go to school without having to sit in class and be told what to do. It was like my college education. The magazine was important to me.

Sorry—I seem to have lost the thread of your question. To me, who I was when I wrote the book at the beginning of the 21^st century and now, is simply a dot on a graph. I recognize what I was doing writing the book, but it’s a stage in the development of my condition, my state. It’s the book after Hot and Cold and before my autobiography, in my attempt to keep things interesting for myself.

JE: It feels like everyone I know who writes and has dropped out of high school, myself included, has this chip on their shoulder, which I typically think is a good thing—but not always. Do you feel like you have a chip on your shoulder from dropping out?

RH: I don’t feel like I have a chip on my shoulder, because I don’t want to be like them. The New York Review of Books editors and contributors are really clever. They tend to feel superior to other people who aren’t as well educated and bright, in certain self-serving areas, as them. Like in my generation, if you couldn’t say something interesting—or that they considered interesting—about structuralism, say, you weren’t worth talking too. But the NYRB writers make very good teachers in print for someone like me who doesn’t like the classroom environment.

It’s a funny situation, because they’re academics, and I am not comfortable with academics, but both my parents were academics. So that’s a whole other aspect to it— trying to figure out the psychology of the situation. I can respect their achievements without needing their approval, except that I welcome their approval if it’s there, and it’s about my books.

I went to a party that the New York Review of Books had after this thing got accepted, and I made a bunch of gaffes and like, humiliated myself, and I was crushed for about a week, and then it became funny, and then it became beyond funny, and a learning experience of me realizing that I didn’t really want to be accepted by them, socially, but if they like my books, great.

JE: What was one of the gaffes you did at the party?

RH: Well, there were a couple of them. Three, really. I struck out. It was like I was Woody Allen at the party in California [in Annie Hall] where he sneezed into the cocaine.

I come in, I’m feeling on top of the world. Wow. I’m looking around at these literary stars, and I’m among them now. I spot Geoff Dyer. Some of his books I don’t like at all, but the ones that I do like are spectacular to me.

And so I spot him over there, and I see he’s about to leave. I had hoped to meet him. I follow him out into the hallway where he’s getting his coat. I say, “I have to introduce myself, because I’m a big admirer of yours.” I told him my name and he said, “Voidoids.” So there was a kind of starting point, a legitimization of sorts. I’ve had a drink or two, and it’s also a high-tension situation, and I’m kind of floundering, trying to tell him what he means to me, who he is to me, without sounding like a fool. I’m reaching to tell him about the connection I have to him, and I can’t remember the name of this book that so impressed me [it was But Beautiful], so there’s silence and I’m stuttering. After a moment of this, he just looks at me and, presumably to put me out of my misery as well as brush me off, he goes, “What’s your skincare regimen?”

And so in one sense, I’m humiliated. Another sense, I’m just laughing at this funny situation. But he’s serious! I say, “Well, I don’t really have a skin care routine. I do wash my face with something that my girlfriend recommended to me but it’s just something you can get at any CVS. She’s in there,” and he wants to follow me back in there and get the name of what I’ve used on my skin.

So that was the first thing. The next thing is, Katherine and I are standing there and sipping drinks, chatting with a couple people, and in a moment a woman comes up to me and she compliments me on my shirt. I ask her, “What brings you here? What’s your connection to the magazine?” And she was, and is, the editor of The New York Review of Books. I didn’t even know. So next I’m wondering how much mingling there is between the two sides, of the magazine and the book publishing wing, so I’m looking around, half-drunk, stressed out, 76 years old, and there’s a long pause, and I can’t think of how to ask, I’m stuck searching for the word, but have to say something, so I look at her and go, “I’m curious, how much…uh…—for lack of a better word—intercourse do you have with the NYRB Classics people?”

I get a really skeptical look—I’m asking her about the intercourse she’s having with the book publishers.

I change the subject. I had had in my mind a piece I wanted to propose I might write for the magazine. I’m talking to its editor. I thought it would be fun to write a defense of Todd Phillips’s and Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker II for the paper, trying to counter all the liberal intellectual critics who abhorred the movie because they read it as being Trumpian, all about asserting white grievance or whatever, MAGA style. I knew of course that it wasn’t a likely idea for the NYRB—it’s their class who condemned the movie. But maybe they’d think it was fun too. I start explaining my plan to her and she interrupts me and says the person you need to talk to about that is over there, and she points me at this kid. So I thank her and go over to him. I start to give him my pitch and he seems interested but tells me to email him the concept. I thank him.

So I spend half the next day working up this elaborate summary of what I want to say about Joker II for The New York Review of Books and I email it to this guy at the magazine. He ghosts me. He never replies.

Of course I ended up writing a version of that essay on Joker for you, when you invited me to contribute to Zona.

So that’s the relationship I have with the New York Review of Books. That party made me feel out of place. But it’s not unusual for me to feel out of place.

I’m fucking old. I’m 76, and four or five years ago, I thought I would be okay if I never publish anything again. I could accept that happily, that it was over, and I would try to make the rest of my life as pleasant a vacation as I could. Then the pandemic hit and I was overtaken by this drive to write poems. And so I wrote this book of poems [What Just Happened] that came out, and then Godlike got taken up by the New York Review of Books. Now I don’t know where I’m going except I’ve been finding myself writing convoluted little essays that may well not be of interest to anyone except me.

JE: But what if you get taken over with the urge to write poems again?

RH: I’m not making it a principle that I’m not doing anything else, but I’m trying to reconcile myself to the possibility, because my attitude towards everything changes over the years. I feel like you’re almost a different person every decade. I’ve always felt that there’s not much point in doing anything, but something—probably that need to make a living, and to be attractive to people— drove me, but I’ve always felt like it was kind of meaningless. Except that you have to do something with your time.

JE: But it seems very existentialist, of “It means nothing,” so you have to give something meaning, or at least choose to do something.

RH: I’ve never understood what existentialism is. Once it occurred to me that it would be a funny, interesting project to write an essay on existentialism, but just derive it from the vague impressions I’ve received.

There’s really not much motivation left. I don’t have to make things anymore. It does seem pointless.

JE: What’s pointless about it? That it just doesn’t change anything?

RH: I think you do it to stamp yourself on the world. And it’s partly out of outrage. You have to register your dissent. Or it’s just like making graffiti or something. You want to be recognized and seen. It’s a strange drive and like a psychological reflex. What is it actually? What are the actual rewards? Sometimes I’ve thought of it as sexual display.

JE: Yeah, in the book, it says something about [how writing is] to save things, or also to make them meaningful. So I think those are three ways that it means something. Maybe asserting yourself is the more selfish reason, but I guess they’re all kind of selfish. Why is your life worth saving and somebody else’s isn’t?

RH: Yeah, that’s been a strange thing. I’ve noticed all my life— this is humiliating and shameful, I feel like—but I don’t know how to talk to people who aren’t interested in art. I don’t understand what moves them. It’s not an elitist thing, like I feel superior to them whatsoever. It’s just that my whole basis of communication is about responding to things in an effort to try to understand what’s going on. Art is the most apposite mode in which to work in that realm and almost everybody I’ve ever been close to has been a writer, a musician, a painter.

JE: I don’t really understand how one would get through life without the need to make stuff. I feel like I can’t see the point of life without it, which maybe means that I’m broken.

This book has an unusual structure, with the journal excerpts alongside the novelistic part, and then you also have the poetry that you’re repurposing. It feels like a book that was written because you love poetry. I was wondering if the idea of writing a sort of ode to poetry came first, or if it was this idea of structure.

RH: Yeah, you’re totally right that the motivation was wanting to celebrate poetry as a way of life. But I can’t remember the exact sequence of the book’s intentions.

I wanted to write a book about poetry as a way of life, but at the same time, my first novel, which was called Go Now, was dismissed here and there. They would treat it like it was autofiction, which it wasn’t, because the character was a burnt-out, junky, punk womanizer—all of which could have described me at that time. So I guess it was inevitable that people would say, “Okay, this isn’t really a novel. It’s like a diary or something.”

But I thought that with my next novel, I’m going to make it so that they can’t wave it off as me writing about my own life. So that mixes with this idea of writing a book about living as a poet, and choosing Rimbaud and Verlaine as the vehicle for it, but as if they lived in seventies New York. This is not going to be a book about a womanizing punk junky, but gay poets on acid.

I can’t remember the exact sequence of having that all come together—there was a third or fourth conceptual component to it, and this was when I had just turned fifty, and I was preoccupied with what it meant to outlive your youth and become middle-aged. So that was something else I wanted to incorporate into the book—later life hospital notebooks of this poet, who’s in the hospital because he had a nervous breakdown, and he’s spending his time doing a lot of scribbling, and the sort of writing he usually does, which is diaristic, but also essays, poems, and then he goes down this avenue of trying to write a piece of fiction that portrays this intense relationship he had when he was twenty-seven with a poet who was sixteen.

So yeah, just a big mash-up of these various aims. But I ended up being really happy with the structure because it also allowed me to do this really fun thing: writing other people’s poems, and the various ways I could do that in the context of New York in the very early seventies, among the poets who had a huge influence on me, even though I didn’t really hang out with them. I just admired them. And I would buy their mimeograph magazines all the time, all the stuff coming from St Mark’s Church, The World magazine, the mimeos, C—which I regard as the best literary magazine in the 20th century, edited by Ted Berrigan—Ron Padgett’s various publishing ventures, Joe Brainard. All that bunch were important to me, so I was going to riff on that milieu, even though I didn’t really know it firsthand.

I had this idea of having the couple poems that I was going to insert in the book as ostensibly written by the Ted character be versions of Frank O’Hara. I was thinking of Ted Berrigan, whom I barely knew, as the model for the Ted character. He was such a huge admirer of Frank O’Hara, and you can see it in his writing. It’s not derivative by any means, but you can see it. His poems would be me taking a poem of Frank O’Hara’s and—I call it “translating Frank O’Hara,” for lack of a better way of putting it. I work up versions that I mean to correspond to poems of O’Hara’s, but without using his language…

JE: That was one thing I wanted to ask you—what do you mean by “translating” the poems? It seems like it would be a fun thing to do.

RH: I don’t paraphrase. It’s just trying to get the tone and the import, emotionally and intellectually—just the feel of it. It’s as if it were a different language.

JE: So you’re translating the feeling of the poem, and not the words of the poem.

RH: Well, if I used the words of the original, they wouldn’t be translations. I get to have a lot of latitude. I want it to be a good poem. It’s not me paraphrasing him. It’s trying to write a poem that works on its own, but the entire source of which is the Frank O’Hara original.

JE: That’s one thing I really liked about this book—it just felt like somebody having fun and seeing if you could get this stuff to work. And it does. It didn’t seem like it was, “Okay, I’m going to make a book like this,” but just like, “I want to do this thing and see if I can get this to work,” which is sometimes my favorite type of book, the ones where you can tell that the writer is having fun.

RH: It was purely that. I’m just going to kick out the jams. I’m going to have no inhibitions. I’m going to present writing that has no internal logic, except that it gives me joy. That’s the only qualification. If it doesn’t work for you, so be it. And if it has boring passages, so be it as well. I had no model for the book. It was just coming from my own pleasure and interests.

JE: You told me in an email that you like to argue. Why do you like to argue?

RH: Did I tell you that? Well, I just like to hash things out. I’m a kind of a skeptic, too. To me, what’s stimulating is to take issue with assumptions people have, and points of view they have, and see what happens if you counter them with another point of view, and see what develops. It’s how you hone your thinking. To me, it’s like a Socratic dialogue or whatever—that’s the way you can find out the most, by hashing it out with somebody, where you have two different viewpoints.

JE: It seems like the same sort of instinct to make stuff, which is trying to find the true meaning of something.

The ending of the book, where you resolve the issue of R.T.’s death…. Did that take a bit to find that ending, or was that something that showed up right away?

RH: Yeah, I did not know where I was going to go. I can’t remember at what point that hit me. There’s the situation between Rimbaud and Verlaine, once Rimbaud split off from literature and up and went off searching for a livelihood, finally ending up a trader in Africa. Some of that had to be included in the book, but I did not know how to do it. Verlaine didn’t have any idea what Rimbaud was doing—he just disappeared and had hardly any contact with the people he’d known as a teenager, as a poet.

But I needed to include that because it’s so significant and dramatic. The guy just stopped writing poetry by the time he was 21, after having completely changed poetry as a teenager. I had to touch on it. I did not know how to do it, because the whole book was from Verlaine’s point of view, and Verlaine didn’t know what was going on with Rimbaud once he quit poetry and disappeared.

It’s self-centered for me to say this, but I feel like a lot of what happened with Rimbaud is like what I was talking to you about before, of writing being childish, deluded, and I found a kind of rapport with Rimbaud in that area. The whole act of writing as somehow a pretense that doesn’t hold up, because you’re wanting to immortalize yourself. I think that’s probably the biggest drive to write, just simple self-assertion, but also that if you say, “I am here, and this is who I am” [the person intending to make these works], it’s only in writing that it becomes possible to outwit your mortality. So to some extent, you do become immortal, because something will exist after you’ve died that contains who you are.

But it’s an illusion. Nothing lasts more than two or three hundred years. And that’s nothing. The very earliest writings we even talk about are only 3000 years old. Can you name thirty writers from more than 500 years ago off the top of your head? No, hardly anybody can, unless their profession is to know those things.

And anyway, what difference does it make? In fact one is writing because one has to have something to do besides suicide or sex.

JE: Is that how the title fits in of Godlike— it’s not actually God, but it’s just god-like?

RH: The way you put it is an element, but it’s kind of a provocation, because if you use the word “God,” it’s about you.

People use God to try to explain or understand how we came to be, and the way that our world came to be, and that world is not pretty—where people use “God,” as if it’s some kind of perfection. But it’s excruciating. The world we live in, it’s really hard to navigate, and there’s a lot of cruelty and injustice and squalor and pain, as much as there is anything on the other side of the scale.

So it’s kind of a provocation, but if you’re going to refer to God, you’ve got to refer to horrible torture and pain and fear and ugliness—a lot of which is in that little book.

But what I was getting at before, about quitting poetry, I think a lot of it must have come from that recognition in Rimbaud. It’s just futile and meaningless. He wanted to have a decent life on earth. All the poets end up like Verlaine in that book: broken down, drunk, and in mental hospitals. My guess is that Rimbaud thought, “That’s not what I want to give my life to.” It’s the same reason I went into rock and roll. To make a fucking living. Of course, there’s a lot of premature deaths in rock and roll too, but at least they have nice shoes.