Rimbaud and Verlaine in Washington Square Park
Early on in Shakespeare’s comedy “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” the con man Pistol is scorned by his friend Sir John Falstaff, who refuses to lend him money. Enraged, Pistol issues a thinly veiled threat: “The world’s mine oyster,” he snarls at Falstaff, “which I with sword will open,” thereby inaugurating one of the best-known idioms of the English language. What is now thrown around as a starry-eyed declaration of free will began as a violent pledge—if you don’t give me what I want, I’ll take it anyway. A few moments later, Falstaff offers the money to a maid instead, and Pistol, rebuffed, makes another, not so famous announcement: “This puncke,” he proclaims, “is one of Cupid’s carriers.” At the time, London was a mecca of crime, illness, and tyranny. Amid that chaos, a legion of “punckes,” or sex workers, hawked their bodies in brothels south of the Thames. The maid, in Pistol’s chivalrous estimation, belonged to their lowly number.
Centuries later, these themes (sex, violence, punks, self-determination—even pistols, albeit the lowercase kind) reappeared in another work of serious literary merit: Richard Hell’s “Godlike,” which, twenty-one years after its initial publication, has just been reissued by New York Review Books Classics. Hell moved to New York City in the late sixties, a seventeen-year-old runaway from Kentucky, and began a career as a poet. In 1973, he and his childhood friend Tom Verlaine founded Television, a seminal rock band that, alongside the Ramones and the Patti Smith Group, spearheaded a new kind of musical attitude being heralded across lower Manhattan, one centered on a brash physicality and no-frills instrumentation that produced a visceral, cathartic effect. It didn’t take long for the rest of the country to notice. Nearly four hundred years after Shakespeare’s time, punckes had arrived in America.
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Though “Godlike” is inseparable from the downtown scene in which it is set, the word “punk” fails to make an appearance in the book. In fact, save for an isolated reference to Andy Warhol, most of the prominent cultural figures of that era go unmentioned. The novel concerns itself, instead, with the fictitious poets Paul Vaughn and R. T. Wode, the former a twenty-seven-year-old member of the East Village literati, the latter his teen-age male lover. For a hundred and forty pages—which, we are told at the outset, comprise the journals of the now fifty-three-year-old Vaughn, housed in a psychiatric unit on the Upper East Side—Hell charts their relationship in vaulting prose that jumps with audacious velocity from the sacred (“This I love, to be borne by love. The only person to tell it to is Jesus. My head is a church”) to the pornographic (“What does the tiny spurt from Cupid’s penis taste like? Like displaced space”).
Vaughn and Wode have sex in back alleys, decrepit apartments, motels, and hotels. They take LSD in gelatine form and write frenetic poetry and have even more sex. They drink to excess in storied haunts of seventies New York (at one point, Vaughn recalls how Wode “stood on a tabletop in the noisy little dark back room of Max’s Kansas City and pissed into a champagne glass”) and spend “the greatest amount of their time together reading and writing and sometimes talking” in Wode’s apartment. Eventually, they lose interest in the city and go south, first to Memphis, then to Florida. In a sweltering, roach-ridden house, the two begin to tire of each other, and their debauchery transforms into disillusion. As the aging Vaughn finishes recounting this tumultuous chapter of his life from the confines of a hospital bed, he’s faced with a startling revelation, and the whole enterprise concludes with a devastating dénouement.
“Godlike” is a poet’s novel, a dazzling Künstlerroman that touches on art, love, aging, and queerness, punctuated with verses by Hell (in both Vaughn’s and Wode’s voices) and his “translations,” or interpretations, of poems originally written by Frank O’Hara. The prose is dotted with allusions to the works of Joseph Conrad, Jorge Luis Borges, and Bob Dylan, to name a few. The Bible makes an appearance, as does the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, an ancient Buddhist text. Hell’s greatest feat, however, is a studied transposition of the infamous affair between the nineteenth-century French poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud onto the lives of Vaughn and Wode. Verlaine and Rimbaud’s eleven-year age gap, their elopement, even the final, turbulent act of violence between them, make an appearance here, in the waning years of Nixon’s America.
Hell’s previous novel, “Go Now,” from 1996, about a drugged-out musician-slash-writer on a cross-country road trip, drew criticism for closely mirroring his own life. With “Godlike,” Hell told an interviewer in 2005, he wanted to tell “a story about somebody as different as possible” from himself, and consequently “ended up writing a book about young, gay poets doing acid.” At certain points in the novel, that distance calcifies and restrains his writing. Moments of physical intimacy between his protagonists are often relayed in rigid and frustratingly inexpressive language, which occasionally veers into the tiringly smutty. If Hell hoped to capture, in first person, the volatile thrills of Verlaine and Rimbaud’s whirlwind affair—one so profoundly intense that some argue it led Rimbaud, by his early twenties, to quit writing forever—he falls short.
Still, “Godlike” is commendable for Hell’s fastidious re-creation of that relationship, remarkable for his faithful transmission not only of minute biographical details but also of Rimbaud’s and Verlaine’s artistic philosophies and religious beliefs, which he translates into the vernacular of seventies New York via meticulously written, wine-addled dialogue. Hell (né Meyers) has denied taking his adopted surname from Rimbaud’s iconic work of prose, “Une Saison en Enfer,” or “A Season in Hell,” but admits to keeping an entire shelf of the poet’s writing at home. His Television bandmate Tom Verlaine (né Miller), however, was outspoken about the commemorative nature of his own onomastic choices. The two weren’t the only artists of their era to have been inspired by Rimbaud and Verlaine—Patti Smith, throughout her collected works, writes with great admiration about those poets and others like them, including Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Jean Genet. How is it that these punk rockers, godparents of a musical movement fundamentally attuned to the present, owed some of their greatest artistic debts to a group of French poets, most of whom had been dead for nearly a century?
I first learned of Richard Hell shortly after moving to Brooklyn in the early months of the pandemic. I was jobless then, and my only goal was to form a rock band. By the time some friends and I found an apartment—a cheap five-bedroom place under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway—quarantine was still being enforced, but a crowd of restless New Yorkers had begun to flout its restrictions. The city felt like one big lawless secret, and music was its lifeblood, from illegal parties in downtown hotels to sweaty D.I.Y. raves in industrial warehouses. Within our apartment’s small, semi-subterranean living room, my roommates and I set up a drum kit and a couple of guitar amps, and opened our doors to friends, neighbors, and strangers alike. It was something more than social catharsis, though it was that, too. The music was an accessory to a way of being that celebrated and took solace in sound, movement, and life—not just our own lives, but in the fact of existence itself.
One morning, I found a battered copy of “Please Kill Me,” Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s oral history of punk, on our coffee table. There was Hell, in the middle of the cover, his right hand resting on his bleeding chest. New York in the seventies was a different city, shaped not by a pandemic but the material constraints of poverty, crime, and urban decay. Still, I felt a sense of kinship with Hell and his peers—the Blank Generation, as he called them, signifying, in his words, “the idea that you have the option of making yourself anything you want.” Like them, I was trying to live freely in a world defined by its limitations.
It is that way of living that drew Hell and his contemporaries to the works of Verlaine and Rimbaud. These poètes maudits, or “cursed poets,” as they came to be known, championed the duality of high and low. They were tragic figures, scantly recognized, often working on the fringes of respectable society, devoting themselves to a poetics that operated via transcendence—they stretched the limits of social norms, experimented with drugs to expand their conscious minds, and pushed the boundaries of the written word in bold new directions.
In her new memoir, “Bread of Angels,” Patti Smith waxes nostalgic about discovering Rimbaud’s “Illuminations” at a Philadelphia bookstall when she was just fifteen, “drawn to the face of the young poet on the cover.” Smith steals the paperback, feeling an urge to follow Rimbaud “down his shattering spiritual path.” Later, “A Season in Hell” becomes a “furious guidebook” within which she recognizes “a relatable duality, the demonic hand in hand with the charitable.” Upon first hearing Bob Dylan, Smith writes that she “could well imagine Rimbaud stretched out in a field listening to It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” because “both poets’ words seemed as if they were written for the tribe of black sheep.”
Smith extends that sense of kinship toward her contemporaries, too; she describes Hell and Tom Verlaine as “art rats embracing then breaking apart a vast cultural history, scurrying into the future with speedy and productive energy.” Within her acknowledgment of “embracing” and “breaking apart,” Smith demonstrates an implicit understanding that the movement she helped spearhead was not wholly original but a resurrection, in the Biblical sense of the word—a resuscitation of a stagnant poetic tradition that she and her peers fashioned into a soundtrack for their age.
That Smith and Hell turned to the poètes maudits as sources of inspiration should perhaps be no surprise. Like them, those poets were broke members of the demimonde whose careers began in a city as culturally vibrant as it was materially bleak. They were purveyors of grace; they sought to create their own kind of beauty. Many of them, like Smith and Hell, were outsiders to their adopted home towns, called to the metropolis by the intransigent demands of their own artistic odysseys. They viewed their medium as a mystical communion, a means of transmuting language into feeling. Theirs was a rebellious poetics of beauty, or a beautiful poetics of rebellion. And “Godlike,” through Hell’s incandescent, maximalist interpretation of Rimbaud’s voice, provides a visceral sense of the spirit of that era. Take the following passage, in which Vaughn and Wode drop acid in a flophouse by Washington Square:
The idyll of the cheap hotel room, pencil and paper pad, doughnuts, streaky window, sex. Fear of looking in eyes (and then they sadden). Cheap portable typewriter and the burnt, charred, purple-looking letters of the alphabet it smacked into the white, fibrous paper. You could almost smell them—the words—they smelled like burning teeth, the fumes from dentists’ drilling. Rich and hot and deathly innocent. There should be a law against something looking so pretty, because it was a crime the way they promised so much.
You can almost see the bruised typewritten letters, and feel the psychedelic maelstrom whence they originated. By inhabiting the same aesthetic ideals that the poètes maudits did, which were both inspirational for and infused within the punk movement, Hell manages to gesture at the sense of transcendence which fuelled his nineteenth-century forebears.
The authors of “Bread of Angels” and “Godlike” have in turn become the stuff of legend. Unlike many of their peers, Smith and Hell have lived to see themselves canonized. In 2004, the Fales Library of rare books and manuscripts at New York University acquired a collection of Hell’s archival materials; six years later, Smith’s memoir “Just Kids” won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. CBGB, the legendary punk venue where they got their start, closed its doors two decades ago, just a few months after “Godlike” was first published. Though the building’s façade still retains its iconic scalloped awning, the logo has been replaced with that of a high-end menswear store. Inside, three-packs of socks are sold for more than two hundred dollars apiece. Twenty blocks uptown, the Hotel Chelsea, once a ramshackle hangout for the city’s most promising artists, has been turned into a puffed-up luxury establishment run by a conglomerate of multi-millionaires. “Horses,” Smith’s groundbreaking début record, recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, and tickets for her memorial show at the Beacon Theatre started at more than three hundred bucks. The city, as Thomas Pynchon once put it—in the liner notes for an album by the relatively unknown rock band Lotion—is being “vacated and jackhammered into somebody’s idea of an update.”
And yet, the artists are still here, and their music survives, cropping up in dingy basements and bar back rooms. There, in the face of cultural homogenization, artificial intelligence, and corporate overhaul, the vestiges of the Blank Generation remain, and their stories, now immortalized as myth, continue to propel New York’s creative engine. There is no such thing as the past, Vaughn writes in his first journal entry—only that which is “actually forgotten, unrecorded, unknown to anyone.” Everything else, he tells us, “is really the present.” Somehow, a stubborn glimmer of the old scene persists. ♦