Richard Hell on ’Godlike’ and Poetry as a Way of Life

In this episode of Private Life, Richard Hell joins Jarrett Earnest to discuss his novel Godlike (newly reissued by NYRB Classics), his creative process, the love of poetry, and the stories behind his work.  

Richard Hell is a writer and former musician best known as a pioneer of the punk rock scene in 1970s New York. Originally from Kentucky, he moved to New York at the age of seventeen and began publishing his poetry. In his early twenties, along with his friend Tom Verlaine, he started the Neon Boys, which later became the influential punk rock band Television. He went on to form the bands the Heartbreakers and Richard Hell and the Voidoids. In addition to Godlike, Hell has written several novels, poetry collections, and essay collections, as well as a memoir, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp (2013). His most recent book of poetry, What Just Happened, was published in 2023. Godlike, which was reissued last month by NYRB Classics with a new afterword by Raymond Foye, was originally published in 2005. Crossing Hell’s experiences in the demimonde of 1970s New York City with the doomed romance of the nineteenth-century poètes maudits of France, it traverses the profane and the profound in the story of a poet perambulating downtown Manhattan and pining for a young poet who probably won’t love him back.   

To find Richard Hell’s Godlike and other NYRB Classics, visit our book imprint at nyrb.com. Subscribe to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963. 

Creators and Guests

Host

Jarrett Earnest

Jarrett Earnest has contributed essays to the New York Review of Books on artists ranging from Tom of Finland to Jack Whitten. He is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (2018) and Valid Until Sunset (2023) and has edited several collections of criticism, including volumes of Dave Hickey and Peter Schjeldahl as well as artist's writings by Nayland Blake and Jesse Murry. His curatorial projects include the acclaimed 2019 exhibition "The Young and Evil" at David Zwirner gallery, New York.

What is Private Life: A New York Review Podcast?

Private Life is a podcast from The New York Review, hosted by contributor Jarrett Earnest. Each episode offers intimate, in-depth conversations with distinguished voices from across the literary landscape—about their lives, their work, and the ideas that shape both. Along the way, they revisit pieces from the The New York Review of Books's robust sixty-year archive (some episodes of the podcast will feature newly recorded readings of these classic essays) to situate arguments within contemporary culture. The show also includes discussions of titles from our book publishing arm, New York Review Books, featuring talks with translator Mark Polizzotti on Andre Breton's surrealist masterpiece Nadja and musician Richard Hell on the re-issue of his novel Godlike. Other early episodes find Joyce Carol Oates ruminating on true crime, while Darryl Pinckney opens up about the perils of memoir and his formative friendship with essayist Elizabeth Hardwick. 

Private Life is a personable, expansive invitation for longtime subscribers and a new generation of readers alike to connect with the past, present and future of The New York Review. 

Jarrett Earnest: This is Private Life, a New York Review podcast. I'm Jarrett Ernest, and today I'm talking with Richard Hell:. Hell is best known as a punk rock pioneer with the bands The Neon Boys, Television, The Heartbreakers, and especially for his 1977 album with the Voidoids, Blank Generation. He was also a writer of poems, essays, fiction, and a memoir. His 2005 novel, Godlike, was published in February as an NYRB classic. Godlike follows the relationship between two fictional poets, R.T. Wode and Paul Vaughan, through New York's downtown poetry scene of the 1970s. Their dynamic bears a striking resemblance to the tumultuous romance between Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine in Paris of the 1870s. And that poet Verlain is not to be confused with Hell's former bandmate, Tom Verlane. We start by discussing the book's cover, a photograph by artist Christopher Wohl and the art direction eye of Edwin Frank, the editor of NYRB. I mean the book came out 20 years ago, what's it like bringing it out so much later? How do you relate to it? What's this process been like?

Richard Hell: Well, it's funny. I've removed a few books from print over the last 20 or 30 years because I didn't like how they were being handled by the publishers and they weren't making me any money anyway. And yes, I learned eventually over the years how to be able to retain my copyright and be able control whether the book's in print or not. So I had like three books that I'd like to see back in print, and one of them was Godlike, though I hadn't really made any motions to do it? So I'm a long-time York Review books reader, and like everybody, I'm a big admirer of the classic series. And I know a couple of people that have done this or that with them. So I was able to get Edwin's email. And so I just took a shot. I said, what do I have to lose? But then he wrote back and told me he wanted it. It blew my mind because, you know, I thought it was a huge, long shot. But He'd been at a reading I'd given just before I sent it to him, completely by coincidence. So I was thrilled, because I couldn't think of a better...

Jarrett Earnest: Destination for it. One of the things that I love about that book series, aside from how great the books are, is that Edwin has this incredible art eye and he chooses a lot of the art for the covers. And so the image on the cover of your book, this is a photograph of Christopher Wolles, who is a long-time friend of yours and you've written about. I want to know more about that image on that cover.

Richard Hell: Yeah, well, the other thing about Edward knows that he's very receptive to what the artists want. I mean, there are not that many New York Review books classics authors alive. Right. It's pretty unusual.

Jarrett Earnest: I mean, I know that you've written an essay about Chris Will's photographs specifically, but this image that's on the cover from that book, what does it mean to you in relationship to this novel?

Richard Hell: Well, because the novel is so obnoxious and squalid and filthy and grimy.

Jarrett Earnest: You say that like it's a bad thing.

Richard Hell: Well, so I just, I liked the idea of using a cover that was consistent with that. And it's also in New York and it is from the nineties rather than the seventies where the book is set, but you wouldn't know.

Jarrett Earnest: But the thing that's also appropriate about it for the novel is that it's set in these two timelines. There's someone in the 90s, the late 90s reflecting on their experience in the 70s and all the things that happened in the seventies. So in a strange way, this like high contrast, black and white photograph of New York in the nineties that looks like the 70's is completely perfect. Right.

Richard Hell: Well, that's what I tell myself too.

Jarrett Earnest: Yeah.

Richard Hell: Yeah, all the pictures from that book were done in the early 90s. Christopher had a studio, he still does, on 9th Street between C and D. But his loft where he lived was in Chinatown. And every night he'd make that walk from 9th street down to Chinatow. And at that time, all that area was really derelict. And Christopher is into... Smudges and drips and darkness and glare. So I look at his work that way as he's focusing on the areas that are usually neglected or even not seen because they so pervade the environment but are beneath interest because they're so common and also often

Jarrett Earnest: have bad reputations. So did you ever think we would start by talking about your book with an in-depth discussion of the cover? No. No.

Richard Hell: But you're right, because it does have that whole atmosphere of neglect that everything did in the 70s as well. That part of New York didn't change until later, and some of it's still there, but this imagery could have easily been gotten in the seventies.

Jarrett Earnest: So just to explain a little bit how the book is structured, it's roughly or loosely based on the relationship between Rambeau and Verlaine, but transposed into being 70s poets in that downtown poetry scenes sort of around the Lower East Side and then...

Richard Hell: A whole bunch of poets that are associated with that. That was a really fertile moment in New York poetry, late 60s and early 70s. The second generation New York poets, while the first generation was still around and really active. But let me intercede. Please, please. When you bring up Rambo in Berlin, because I have a funny issue about that whole matter in that. When the book was originally published, I persuaded the publisher not to mention Rambeau and Verlaine. There's no reference to them on the book anywhere. And the first reviewers viewed it only as a book about these poets having the relationship they did. I think one recognized the Rambeaux-Verlaine connection. I'm not even sure of that, because when the book is presented that way, I didn't want... People looking for some kind of a stunt of a person presuming to be capable of presenting Rambo and Verlaine to great geniuses, you know, 100 years past, 200 years past. I used them just because it was a cool idea and convenient because I'm really bad at plots. My writing doesn't have to do with plots. My first novel. The way I got around plots was doing it as a road novel. So it's just like you go from town to town. And so it kind of take care of itself. Classic for a reason. Yeah. And for the second one, I knew I wanted to write about poets and specifically poets as I knew that life and world best which was the New York poets, even though I was not part of that scene. I learned a whole lot and really admire those writers. And so I know a lot about them. I wanted to just talk about poetry as a way of life, but I had no idea what kind of story there could be there. And then I had that idea, use the story of Rambo and Valaine. I knew a lot of about them too. And I learned more as I was doing research for the book. But the point of the book was not to present Rambo in Valaine, the point your book. Was to write about poetry as your highest value in your life. And Rambo and Verlaine were just the pretext, you know, like the means for talking about that. But it was really fun. I loved doing it because it opens up all kinds of possibilities for having fun. There are lives for dramatic and eventful and the book is full of poems and I had to make up all those poems. There are two or three that are actually by New York poets inserted in there. But... Yeah, so that's my just little caveat about Rambo and Verlaine, is that I wasn't writing a book about Rambeau and Verlane. I just used them so I had a story to tell.

Jarrett Earnest: Well, okay. I hear what you're saying, but also I think it's a little disingenuous because the information about them tracks very closely to events in their relationship in a way that's super subtle.

Richard Hell: Of course, yeah, well that's the whole point, I would need it applied.

Jarrett Earnest: No, but I felt that that was there's something about the way that a certain generation of not just avant-garde in general, one could think about Breton latching on to L'Autremont and to Baudelaire and to Rambeau, but then the group of 70s New York writers that we think of in that scene that you're talking about and picking up the mantle, not just Like, Patti Smith famously talking about Rambeau all the time, but... The way that these were important poets to you as a young poet, and you write about that in your memoir.

Richard Hell: Does it seem like an accident? Well, I differ. Okay. Uh, I do not write about that in my memoir. I did not really read Rambo until I was in my thirties. He represented something to me, but as a young poet, I was really intimidated by and baffled by translations. There aren't that many great translations of a lot of those writers, or it really takes attention. Later, I got completely immersed in the whole. Field of the values and approaches there are to doing translations of this was way fascinating. But when I was a kid, the poems that you could find by Rambeau felt so foreign. Wallace Fowley, the Inna Starkey, all the big treatments of Rambeaux. It was really hard, but I knew what he stood for. In fact, the way I came to Rambeaut was really through Dylan Thomas. Dylan Thomas is the first person to turn me on to poetry when I was like 15. I got really thrilled by Dylan Thomas and read everything he did and he was my model. And he called himself once or twice, in this or that context, the Rambo of Quimdunk and Drive or whatever. I don't know how you pronounce that Welsh word of the street where he lived. And that's how I heard about Rambo. And so I would look that up. And so, yeah, he was a... Guy who was writing great poetry at the age of 16, because that was the thing about Dylan Thomas. He was very young when he started publishing, and that's what he kind of meant. He was like this youthful rebel who was able to write really great poems when he was 16 and 17. And so I learned about Rambeau that way. But then when I looked for the poems, yeah, I didn't feel they were accessible to me. I had enough good reading. And for me, the big French poet of that period, the mid to late 19th century, was L'Autremont. That was the guy who I completely went head over heels for. And Rimbaud was just kind of a touchstone for a model of a certain glamorous kind of precocity and worldliness. But I didn't really know his work. It didn't come to a lot later.

Jarrett Earnest: We're gonna keep moving around in Godlike, but I wanna know more about Le Tremont and what he meant to you when you encountered him basically as a teenager. Yeah, well.

Richard Hell: I'd never read anything like that that was just so inspired and uninhibited and grand. His diction is like there's a lot of echo on his voice, it's like the voice from the clouds. It's his cantos where he just rolls on in this insane level of imagination and complete alienation. That was probably, it was the mixture of... Level of imagination, the famous image and concept that's always associated with him from his own work is as beautiful as the chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table. And it's like the whole 20th century art came from that one concept that he was so alienated and so confident and so eloquent that he could create this work of imagination And that was just... Magnificent and while being so unconventional. There had been nothing like it before. His work was really obscure back there at the time, right? Rambeau could not possibly have known of him. Rambeaud was super influenced by Baudelaire, but L'autre Monde was more or less turned up by the surrealists, right. People weren't conscious of it. He committed suicide very young and he had that book have a lead printed. So... Yeah, he's the original.

Jarrett Earnest: Well, the other thing that is so compelling about Le Tremont is, one, he creates a name, Like he, it's a made up name. Yeah. And also.

Richard Hell: Is it or do you cuss?

Jarrett Earnest: Also I generally am first of all when I am talking to young artists the advice I most want to give them is like you should change your name because your name is super boring and I won't ever remember it But you come up with something better But did you change your life? No, unfortunately, it's a great name. Oh, it sounds fake. It's one of the tragedies of my life I don't come out of perfect. You know, you don't mess with it, but I always think like I love the act. I think it's such a powerful thing to change your name, to choose your name of like self creation. And so L'Autrement already creates this character. And then furthermore, I love people who make themselves like a bad character. So it's like L'autrement is like evil and dark and it's sort of like Malaparte or something.

Richard Hell: Yeah, but then he turned around with the poesies, which is the absolute opposite. It's just about generosity and charity and love, and then he killed himself.

Jarrett Earnest: You know what I'm asking you is about becoming Richard Hell:, as a character, but as a artwork, almost. See, that's another-

Richard Hell: thing because people always relate that to Rambo and there's no connection whatsoever. It's funny. I was very clear about it in a number of places, including in my autobiography. This is a misconception. Had nothing to do with my haircut, had nothing to with my name. Rambo was not on my mind. He was as a symbol. And as a matter of fact, it was the one thing that made me hesitate about changing my name to Hell because when we're trying to think of a name for Tom, my collaborator at that time, Tom Verlaine, his original name was Miller. And I decided I was going to call myself Richard Hell:. And when we were going to start a band and he said, he wanted to come up with a new name too, cause he thought his name was boring. We both thought our names were boring. I was Richard Myers. He was Tom Miller. And so we started thinking of trying to think of a good name for him. And I said, why don't you take a 19th century French poet? And my, the first thing that came to my mind was Gaudier. I don't know why, I just like that name, and he's really fairly obscure, he was friends with Baudelaire and moved a lot in those circles, but I was a journalist and a poet, but that would be a good name for Tom, but then I thought, hmm, people won't know how to pronounce it because it's like T-I-E-R, you know, so Tom thought Verlaine, we both dug Verlain that time, like he's much more accessible in translation than Rambeau is because his poems are really simple. Gorgeous, but they're very plain spoken. And so we both agreed immediately. Yeah. But then I thought, wait, fuck, my name is hell. People are going to make that connection. But we thought, nobody knows who Rambo and Verlaine are. So we'll be okay. They're not, it's not going to look pretentious and ridiculous or whatever. But of course that played into it too. People think that I chose hell, but for some reason Rambeau was like, despite Rambeaux. It never occurred to me until Verlaine came up with Verlain for himself. But the thing is, like, I realized this about the legends of history. It's like that classic John Ford thing of print the legend, like in from the man who shot Liberty Valance, if there's somebody who has a reputation for having done this significant thing. There's no way you can fight it. So yeah, it was just go with what the legend is because you're not going to be able to talk people out of it. And I was reading this article about AI the other day, talking about how the brain works and how AI computers programming works, and it has to do with how the mind keeps related material. In a given location. It doesn't have to actually be related. For me, that's how dreaming works. That's how you jump from thing to thing in a dream because there's a relationship between moments that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with logic. It's like you're having a dream about a cat and the next thing that happens is a mouse or... Cat Stevens or a car, because it looks a lot like cat. They're not really related, except they have some quality in common. And that's what happens in people's minds when they're trying to explain things to themselves. So you have a Richard Hell: and a Tom Verlaine and you have a haircut and that's going to create the reality, whether or not it's actually true to the events or not, you can't find.

Jarrett Earnest: Don't you think it's so much more interesting and amusing to be having been haunted by your cross to bear as your association with Rambeau.

Richard Hell: I guess. I mean, there's worse faiths, I suppose, but I don't like it. You don't? Okay. Nevertheless, you wrote a book. Well, yeah. I'm not going to let it affect my behavior, except that I tell the truth about it. When I came to writing my second novel, it was a novel about poets. And it was also me wanting to depart from what I did in my first novel. I said, Okay, yeah, yeah. I'm thinking probably something to what you say. It's like What the fuck, lean in, you know what I mean?

Jarrett Earnest: Take it back. I hope you don't mind me reading something to you that you wrote, but there's a passage about translation in your first novel, Go Now, that feels related to what you were saying about. I don't even remember that. There's a lot about translation. Anyway, go ahead. Yeah. It's a recurrent theme, but I really liked where it appeared here. And in it, the protagonist of this book on a road trip picks up a copy of Baudelaire. Is talking about reading the translation and it was printed in the early 20th century. The prefaces and introductions and epigraphs are quaint in their self-important formality and their dated phraseology, but they're moving in their innocence and sincerity and in the very way they're helplessly pinned to their era by their styles and attitudes while they confidently rattle on as if they're going to live forever. Meanwhile, the translations themselves are wonderful. The prose, which comprises over half the book, is perfect. And while the poems are more problematic, with lots of extravagant language and compromises and meaning forced by the straining for rhymes and other difficulties in transferring from one language to another, the results are not all that far from giving the effect the writer must have had on his original readers. And he goes on to develop this as a theory. Or a statement that is echoed in Godlike about all poetry, like translated poetry being the heart of poetry itself.

Richard Hell: That's a little bit contrarian, but I think you make a good argument because, of course, just writing itself, picking up a pencil and starting on a piece of paper is a translation of whatever's going on inside me into words. So in a sense, translation is the essence of writing.

Jarrett Earnest: That recurs in different ways and godlike to be almost one of your great subjects, which is probably why you wanted to write about poetry, which is about how do you take this complicated experience of being alive and put it into language and in its own, that has a reality of its own. What did it mean to you to want to write about poetry as a way of living?

Richard Hell: I just wanted to really have a great time in writing this book. I wanted to be completely free of any feeling of obligation to meet some standard outside of what interested me. I just want to use everything I've learned about writing and whatever skills I've developed and what my preoccupations were in thinking about the world. Using Rambeau and Berlain as the cast, whereas Dona is much more conventional. I didn't really know what I was doing. I'd never written any fiction. I've written maybe two or three stories. Even if that, I don't know if I'd ever written any fiction. It is, for both of them, a matter of plumbing my preoccupations at the time and finding means for doing that in the characters and the narrative. And go now, it was that I was about the psychology of addiction.

Jarrett Earnest: Right. It's kind of a love story with heroin at a certain point.

Richard Hell: You say that kind of a tragic love story. So that was my aim there, was to try to plumb the psychology of addiction from my experience. Because I felt like I had not read a book that described what addiction had felt like to me. And so I wanted to try and do that. One thing that both books have in common is that I knew there was a risk of me getting really boring by staring at my navel for too long, it would always be going off into these spirals of free associative kind of thought and analysis and stuff, very interior. And so that's probably what they have in common. I really enjoyed it. Well, thanks, I'm glad. It's been a while since I've looked at it, but I do think of it as being more crude and clumsy. Than Godlike. Godlike, I sure was self-indulgent there too, but I did it on purpose there. I wanted just not to be inhibited about going wherever I wanted. Whereas in Go Now, I knew that I had to pull back from the edge. I was going to just boy the fuck out of people.

Jarrett Earnest: Well, in both books, they seem to me to be really about three things, which is God, sex, and poetry, and how they're basically the same thing. Okay. Yeah, very good. And I think that a lot has been made, most of all by you maybe, about the sex in the books, which I'm interested in, but I don't really know that anyone's talked a lot about the God stuff. Is there God in Gono? No. Let me, let me read you a passage near the end as the narrator has kind of blown up a situation in a extreme way. There's this kind of reflection which becomes about God and then becomes about language. So I was read a paragraph, any kind of mission, any kinds of drive to manipulate things to one's ideas of what they should be as a sickness. All it does is reflect yourself while wearying and wounding. It doesn't make any difference. But life is a sickness, some kind of infection of the inanimate. God is only the way things are, but God does have a will. It's called inertia. Things don't want to change. The larger thrust will not be altered. Rilke said the only battles worth living are the unwinnable ones, the ones with angels. It is oneself that changes, one finds, and that is how the world has changed. And then it kind of devolves there into the failure of the book. But I just, I love the narrator has long, aggressive Meditations on the nature of consciousness, which is also about the nature of language, which is ultimately also about God. So could you talk to me a little bit about how those things go together for you? Okay, well.

Richard Hell: They don't in a system in any way. I didn't even notice until you brought it to my attention. When people throw God at me from my own work, for me, that word is a convenience, but the only thing that, that makes sense in my mind as a definition for G O D is just the way things are. People made up that word to, to note. Why things are the way they are. And that's all it amounts to. We're all confused and mystified and trying to figure out how things are. What's going on? Why is this happening instead of that? And so they came up with this concept of God. And then they then had to make all these specifics and embellishments turn God into something anthropomorphic. But that's And that's all just crusty accumulations on the original. To understand, find, or have some knowledge of how things are. When I use the word God, it's just like shorthand for that. It has nothing to do with anything. I think scientists probably have a better idea of God than priests do, atheist scientists. Because they're trying to see. Yeah, like Einstein would use the world God, but he was a complete atheist. Like God doesn't play dice with the universe. He just used that as shorthand for the way things are. He didn't believe in God.

Jarrett Earnest: In the character of Paul Vaughan, which is the one that has a very rough approximation with Verlaine, of course, that character does take recourse to the church and to God. And of course the novel itself is called Godlike. And so what did it mean to you to give it that title of the association between the young poet? It's descriptive of the protagonist of the novel, Godlike.

Richard Hell: I mean, that eventually arises. Bon refers to him as him sometimes in the capital H. But you know, it's a little bit of a provocation. I mean it's trying to respect the way things are, which is just as ugly as it is beautiful.

Jarrett Earnest: And that was the character's sort of poetic mission to try and bring that sense of reality into the language? No, that's the author's mission, that is me. The other thing that I really like, perhaps unconsciously or accidentally in the association with Rambeau and Verlaine with these characters and like returning to them is that it actually functions in a sort of quite a complex way in the book, because Rambeau, both of them were young, although Rambeaux represents being young in a very intense way. And there's a passage in your memoir that I just thought was such a great description of like rock and roll as the art of being young. And you say rock and rolls the only art form at which teenagers are not only capable of excelling, but that actually requires one to be a teenager more or less to practice it. And it goes on quite beautifully for some length, and it ends in this wonderful way. You basically need nothing. And the rock and roll is about being cool, but you don't have to be cool to make real rock and rolls. Sometimes the most innocuous and pathetic fumblers only become graced by the way they shine in songs. And this is half of what makes the music the art of adolescence, that it doesn't require any verifiable skill. It's all essence, and it's available to those who, to all appearances, have nothing. And when I read that, I also thought, oh, well, that's also poetry. And then I was thinking about... I don't know if I would agree with you there, but...

Richard Hell: Go on.

Jarrett Earnest: No, but then please tell me the difference. I was thinking, oh, poetry is something you can do when you have nothing else. Well, that's true, for sure. When you have...

Richard Hell: Else but great rock and roll it's not a skill you cultivate you just you love the existing rock and roll and it's possible to analyze what makes really good rock and rolls say chuck berry is the exemplar for all time but that's not how you start playing rock and you're just imitating it and that's all it takes you you either have it or you don't it's It's not like a skill you develop. You know, I mean, obviously you have to learn to play and you have to find a musician to work with you that are on the same wavelength. But it's not something you learn in school. It's something that you love. It's what moves you. You get obsessed with it and then you start creating it. Whereas poetry is very unusual for a teenager to write good poetry. Very, very unusual. Right.

Jarrett Earnest: Right, is why Rimbaud is like the exception.

Richard Hell: Yeah. Started at the top and then out. Yeah, you have to unlearn a lot of things to write good poetry. And you don't unlearn things to make good rock and roll. When I did rock and role, I was really primitive. It wasn't good rock-and-roll. I may or may not have been able to ever get there if I wasn't a junkie and I kept working at it. But I don't really see much common ground between rock-n-roll and poetry as art forms. Probably the greatest line in rock and roll is wop-bop-a-loo-bam-a wam-bamm-boom.

Jarrett Earnest: So you're telling me that little Richard's not a poet in addition to everything else? Your memoir ends right before you make the transition from being a musician. It kind of ends with you saying, well, okay, what am I gonna do next? I'm gonna become a writer or I'm going to focus on being a writer. And your novel, Go Now, is sort of like the character is also trying to figure out how to be a writer, is being a rider, but is like piecing it together on this trip. And then of course, in Godlike you have these young people who are writers who are living out their life as poetry. And I feel that temperamentally there is something quite different between being a performer on stage or being in a band with collaborators. And being a writer mostly means being alone in a room for a long time. And I'm wondering how you made that shift and what the process was like of going between being. A musician and being a writer? Well, even...

Richard Hell: As a musician, I was alone in a room. Part of the reason I left was because I did not like touring and I had very mixed feelings about performing all together. What I really loved was writing songs and recording them in a studio. I did not like the life of a rock and roll. I would rather be in my room. And so it wasn't a big jump. It was basically saying, first of all, I'd quit drugs and I wasn't even sure that I was gonna be a writer when I quit music and managed to finally overcome my opioid addiction in the early mid 80s. I wasn't sure what I was going to do. I had to make a living and to start all over as a writer to make living, that seemed really like, It's like famously not a good way of making a living. Famously, yeah. So the first thing I said, I'd been in a few movies, even though I didn't really apply myself. Maybe I could figure that out. I actually took an acting class and I broke my hand. You see those knuckles are gone because in the acting class, because I hit the wall with my fist so hard in frustration. I'd always written, when I came to New York to be a writer, I had a little head start, I realized, because there was some does attached to my name, and so it would be easier for me to get a magazine editor to pay attention to my ideas than if I was just coming out of nowhere. So I had, I had little leg up, and so within three or four years. Leaving music and quitting drugs. I said, I got to just see if I can make a go of it, writing. But it was cool. It was like a dream. I got paid to think carefully about the things I wanted to think carefully about. The first big real job I had, and I knew people at Spin magazine because you know who Alex McNeil is? Yes, yes. From the Please Kill Me oral history thing. He was working at Spin and he'd been around CBG all the time. But we hung out and. It was 1986. Which happened to be the 100th anniversary of the publication of Huck Finn. So he hit on this idea that he and I proposed to spin that we take a raft down the Mississippi in honor of the 100 anniversary of Huk Finn. So that was my introduction to riding as a profession. We flew out to Hannibal, Missouri, got in a raft and pulled over every night. Set up camp. And it was just like a dream, joy. It was like pure pleasure. He would write one day and I would write the next day. He was right one day and I was right the next day for like a week or something. And so that's how I thought of writing. You just think of something that's fun to think about and get somebody to pay.

Jarrett Earnest: To do that. Well, that's basically how I interpret your discussion of poetry as a way of life, which is using the art as a means to enable yourself to do something really fabulous rather than the other way around. It's like, oh, I can do this, it's art. I can go down the Mississippi on a raft.

Richard Hell: That's so good. So how do you put that into poems? Well, that's up to the poet. No, but what do you mean? I'm just asking you what you mean. I just think that that concept of what writing is, how does it work?

Jarrett Earnest: For poetry? Because then you have to have something to go in the poems, experiences. I mean, this character that you've written is all about, he's like a, he is really a poet of experiences. He's like seeking out these crazy things that happen in life and pushing it artificially very far. And sometimes you can do that with drugs, but sometimes you You can do that with actions.

Richard Hell: Okay, I never really thought of it that way, but yeah, there's some of that.

Jarrett Earnest: I'm just projecting because my feeling was always like, well, if it's for my art, then of course I can do that. I wouldn't buy like an expensive pair of shoes, but I would spend anything if it were for art. So then you just have to expand your conception of art to be anything you might want to do. Yeah, but you know, I think Rambo.

Richard Hell: In reality he was just hungry for, he was excited by living and he loved poetry. I mean in those days in France the ordinary local schools for kids included Latin and Greek. He had an incredible education. His education at 16 is probably as good as we get in college now and he love poetry and he won prizes writing it when he was a school boy. But he was just excited by life. He was contemptuous of the literary world that he found in Paris, and his great joy was to offend them all. But he quit at age 21, and my feeling has always been he foresaw that he would have no life because he wasn't gonna fit into the literary worlds, so he'd be writing his poems, and the only books that appeared in his lifetime were self-published. Was no future in it. So he realized it he didn't have this like romantic concept of because I'm a poet and I'm writing poems I'm in some kind of exalted elite class and that's why I'm writing poetry. No, it came naturally to him. It was really exciting and really great but it was something he could very easily give up when he saw that there was no fucking future in And he said, I gotta make some money. I gotta find a way to have a life. Instead of this squalid, sordid struggle all the time. So that was his decision. He was going to figure out, and he did, he made a lot of money in Africa. I mean, that's one thing that Graham Robb pointed out, that people always thought he was just, you know, sad failure that he. Lived this really extreme hard life in Africa as it working for traders in the desert until he got this horrible tumor on his knee and had to be transported back to France. But yeah, he was transported back from France with like the equivalent of $100,000 or $200,000 in gold in his belt. He had done what he set out to do.

Jarrett Earnest: It also strikes me that you described the situation of the young Rambo as being related to the eternal problem of being the young punk, where it's like you've got to the point where it like, okay, like where does this go? Yeah. Then am I gonna keep doing this over and over? And actually most people don't even get there, so. One thing I wanted to ask you about Godlike is it is such a book, it's kind of a word drunk. With so much love for poetry. And throughout the book, there are places where language appears, different kinds of language, and sometimes it's attributed or in quotes, and sometimes, it isn't. It's kind of a slant illusion. If you can hear it, if you recognize it, and these kind of amazing little echoes. And like the most ostentatious part where it kind of alerts you is just like the quotation of the Rene Ricard poem. Because it's like, if you know that, you know it's Rene Ricard, nothing else sounds like that, and it's hilarious. But there is something else that sounds like. What is it? Which is John Weiner's. Right.

Richard Hell: Who is like basically Rene's idol.

Jarrett Earnest: Well, to that point, that whole group of poets in that scene, but first and second generation of New York school, they were all doing complicated, almost like mockingbird things, quoting each other, writing things in each other's styles, and like the language is associated with them. There's even a moment in Godlike where they're writing a poem together and then it says, this really sounds like bad John Ashbery, you know, it's like, but I poetry community, and I wanted to know how you felt about slipping these little bits of language throughout the book, these quotes, many of which are attributed in the back of the book in the supplement.

Richard Hell: Well, as I said, I just trusted my instincts. If something arose in my mind as in the course of telling a story, because it had some, some association, just. I would include it instead of just thinking, oh, that's funny. It makes me think of this. No, I put it in the book. It also really made me think, speaking of John Wieners, probably just as strong an influence for me and writing the book, trying to put myself in the shoes of Elaine as Paul Vaughan. I got a lot from what I knew about John Wieters and James Scotter, who both spent a lot of time in mental hospitals and had breakdowns and stuff like that. That was. In my mind, the back of my mind. That was much of a reference as anything else for a way to conceive of him. That's fascinating. Did you get to spend time with either of them? No. I mean, I did go to that first reading that Skyler gave at DIA, whatever year that was, in the 90s sometime. That was great. And I met John Winters a couple of times through Raymond, but yeah, I didn't know them at all. But I knew about both of their history and. Winners is so amazing as an interview subject. Just this kind of derelict, queen-y.

Jarrett Earnest: I love the voice. I love his voice with that accent and it's like shrill queen. Like that's good.

Richard Hell: So that, that really helped me coming up with Paul Vaughan in the hospital was. Oh, that is fascinating. But you know, it was often, I mean, I didn't really know what it was like for them. It's just what I could pick up vaguely from, you know. I heard stories about Skyler and stuff. I knew that story about him during one of his periods of however you would describe it, he was behaving strangely and So somebody who knew him called other friends of his to try to come help. And they come to the door in hopes of trying to help out because he's rigging out. And he opens the door completely naked but with rose petals, like sticking in clusters to his skin because he'd been out in the backyard, rolling naked in his rose garden.

Jarrett Earnest: I think one of the best ways to get to know someone is to like have them talk to you about the stuff that they love. And I think a lot of your writing is so guided by that. But when I reached out to you about having this conversation, I asked you about any essays in the New York Review that stood out to for any reason. And you said this thing, which was this Charles Baxter review of Don DeLillo's, The Angel Asmerelda. That you said is the only book review I've ever read with the pathos which moved me to tears. And so I want to hear about that. That was amazing.

Richard Hell: You know, I've been reading the New York Review for as long as I can remember. The magazine meant a hell of a lot to me because I didn't go to college. My high school dropout. But I'm interested in all these subjects and it was like going to college for me. It's like academic, without you having to be in class and it's like people who really know their subject who are good teachers conveying their knowledge to you in a really stimulating way. I just loved the magazine. It meant so much to me. So when you asked me about, was there an essay that I could recall? Now brain doesn't work like that very well. Nothing jumped out except that there was this one thing, which wasn't like it was because of favorite essay. It was because it had this effect that I'd never experienced before from a book review where it brought me to tears, like actually a drop fell. I think there was a lot of stuff in the essay that I took issue with. Was also really moving. He came up with this concept and he evoked it in a way that was just piercing. It was a review of the book of short stories by Don DeLillo and I'm not a Don De Lillo reader. I got that book afterwards and I found some stories I really liked but I haven't really been able to read his novels. I've tried a couple. So it wasn't about Don De I don't know, but just about, wait a minute, what is his name, Charles? Charles Baxter. Baxter, right. Because I didn't know, name meant nothing to me. Except I'd seen it before in the New York Review of Books, but I didn't know anything else about him. I discovered he was a novelist himself. And I'd actually known a couple of people who studied with him at Michigan and just adored him. And I found out why after, because I wrote to him. When the essay had such an effect, I was able to turn up an email address for him because he teaches. And I went to the side of the university. Anyway. Essay is a review of that book of short stories. Baxter comes up with this concept of the pre-apocalyptic. A lot of people write about post-apocalyptic novel set after some huge worldwide disaster, which is pretty potent these days. But he came up with his concept of the pre apocalyptic and he describes it, what he means by that. And it's about drinking and something. Transpiring before you with the knowledge that it's going to disappear completely. And I'm starting to mess up right now, just by thinking of that. But he made that happen in that essay. And he quotes Beckett, but it wasn't the quote from Beckett. It was just the whole message that he distilled in some number of lines that included his reference to that Beckett but. It was Baxter. Baxter put his finger on something. Yeah, it's a great read.

Jarrett Earnest: He says, that's beautiful. He has a quote from a Delillo story and then concludes that's beautiful. One thinks of the lines from Beckett's Malloy from things about to disappear. I turn away in time to watch them out of sight. No, I can't do it. However, Vollmer, the character has not yet turned away. Not quite. He's still watching, still looking, still occupying that passing moment of contemplation before the object of his gaze, the thing about to disappear is gone. So it was that concept.

Richard Hell: And how Baxter conceived of it and expressed it, described it. That was a unique experience I got from the New York Review books and Charles Baxter.

Jarrett Earnest: What's so impressive about this essay is that he takes an observation like that or like a conclusion and it's so connected to the text itself, to the moments of slowing down and he identifies the kind of trance-like state that permeates the book. And I had a moment thinking about the pre-apocalyptic and I also am thinking about you're responding to this as like the author of blank generation. As a kind of like, oh, yeah, you've been thinking about these esthetics a long time. And I think you even say at some, at one point in Godlike that, you know, the reader recognizes themselves in the book or there's a way that the book calls forth the recognition.

Richard Hell: He talks about how reading is discovering oneself. He's like, William Burrowes said something similar too about what good books do is show you something you knew but didn't know you knew. And Proust talked about that too, that the reader is reading himself in a great book. The author is presenting something with depths of perception that are. Revelatory they reveal to the reader things that they because you really cannot understand something you didn't already know. That's what's going on in great books. That's why when you read them every 10 years, you learn more because you've changed, you've grown. So if it's a really great book like Bruce, you get more than you did the last time you read because you had more experience and you're more developed and knowledgeable. But in fact, you can't understand something unless you actually know it.

Jarrett Earnest: That's also a kind of criteria for evaluating the greatness of a work of art is that it can sustain that return where it opens something different, you know? And so that way it's like this way of checking in or something, because it's always the same. One of the things I wanted to thank you for directing me to this essay because it is extremely beautiful. And as you said, one of the effects of great criticism, Like I think on one hand We can love a critic when they write something that we completely agree with, where we're like, yes, I love that. That's what I feel exactly the same way, but you've opened this to me in a new way. But in a certain sense, I think the most important criticism for one to read is about stuff you don't like or you don't know. And so when I read this piece on DeLillo on these short stories, which I had never read, I was like, I have to go read this book. It just seems vitally important, like in an emotional and intellectual sense. And that's when you know it's a good piece of criticism when you're like, I have to go listen to that album. I have to see that movie. Because otherwise it's like, well, I guess I saved some time by not having to do that if it was bad. So I thought that was your experience of it is so connected to how I without reading it too.

Richard Hell: Yeah, so I wrote him and he, you know, wrote back, kind of, it was just wonderful to hear back from him. Do you often write fan letters? No, and it wasn't a fan letter. It was, I just thought, man, if I'd had this effect on a reader, I would like to know about it. And I was grateful. So I said, I got to see if I can find this guy and just let him know the effect he has.

Jarrett Earnest: The last thing I want to ask you about in this conversation, but also in relationship to God, is in your memoirs are always interesting because the very early life, like kind of the period just after childhood, when somebody starts doing things on their own, has this outsized importance for the whole rest of their life. It's actually just a few years, but it is kind of the subject that takes up a disproportionate amount of space. And so your memoir is sort of on those years. How did you come here? How did your write and start making music? And God similarly feels like a meditation on that kind of early, extremely condensed period of these young writers, except that it has this character, Paul Vaughan, who is older and reflecting on it. So it then becomes a kind of a double vision about like the potency of these like few months of doing these things together, and then the implications that echo through the rest of his life. And I wonder in your own introspective work of writing your memoir, of returning to Godlike now, 20 years later, how you relate to this, I don't want to say being defined by these early years of being Richard Hell: punk rock slash Richard Hell: writer, but

Richard Hell: It's funny to say that because another factor or another element in how I gave myself the assignment that led to Godlike, what I was aiming to do in it, was deal with what it is to get old. The guy is looking back at his youth, but he's also, there's a lot of discussion of what it means to have outlived your youth. He's recalling this. Extremely intense time in his life but he's also meditating on and kind of semi-obsessed with what it means that he's as old as he is now. But yeah, I think it's really kind of natural and inevitable that those years from your late teenage years to your late 20s or something like that. That's when you're most open to experience, when you haven't like fallen into ruts of behavior and you've found some kind of false security in coming up with a concept of how things work and how you should behave. And that's part of the reasons I like switching between mediums too, because you get stale because You figure out how to do something, and it's so tempting to just keep doing that same thing you figured out how do. So you switch to another medium where you know nothing about it. That's like what I did when I went into rock and roll. You just try to stay fresh, you know what I mean? But that's the thing about those early years is you're fresh all the time with everything because everything is new. And you're just trying to understand what's going on and figure out how to manage. What works for you, but you're also at the peak of your faculties. You're strong and limber and your mind is sharp and you start losing capacities by your late 20s. It's shocking to sometimes hear this.

Jarrett Earnest: Also, you're also hungry, so you're thin and young. So even if you're not really an attractive person, you are still thin and young. You know, it's like, that's fine.

Richard Hell: And beautiful, because I mean, that's what the definition of beauty is. But at the same time, there's a lot of benefits from aging too. You keep learning, you learn how to navigate situations that were just completely excruciating when you were 20 and et cetera, et cetera. If you can keep your head on your, in the right place on your shoulders, you can just keep getting better at the thing that you're trying. To practice writing or, I don't know, trading stocks or whatever it is you're giving your life over to. You do learn more and more. That was a funny thing that took me a long time to learn because when I was a kid, I had the idea that ignorance was an advantage because if you did not know how to do something, you'll come to it in a very fresh way. And there's a certain truth to that. But I eventually learned what really pretty obvious which is that practice makes perfect. You do get better and better the more you do something. There's just no getting around it. If you're like trying to get better, you will get better. And so there's a lot of things that age has going for it as well.

Jarrett Earnest: Next week's episode will be a recording of Richard Hell: reading excerpts from his novel, Godlike. You can buy your own copy from NYRB.com or from your favorite bookseller. Private Life is hosted and produced by me, Jared Ernest, along with associate producer Luna Hayes-Dean. The audio is edited and produced Tyler Hill. The music is by Matthew O'Coyne, and it is a production of the New York Review.