Poetlike: On Richard Hell’s Godlike

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The original copy for Richard Hell’s 2005 novel Godlike, a shaggy transposition of Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine’s tawdry, painful fin de siècle dalliance to 1970s New York City, made no mention of either of the French poets, almost as if it were embarrassed by its high-art aspirations. The author has also been quick to correct the rumor that his adoption of the “Hell” pseudonym––which paired serendipitously with his Television cofounder Tom Miller opting for “Verlaine”––had nothing to do with Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. But after Television, The Heartbreakers, The Voidoids, and Dim Stars, Hell’s perpetual interest in poetry and literature finally supplanted his attention to music. The Richard Hell of the 21st century is a writer, no longer relegated to the scrappy underground operations of CodeX and the first iteration of Hanuman, but the subject of New York Times profiles and HarperCollins distribution deals.  

NYRB Classics’s reissue of Godlike formalizes the Rimbaud/Verlaine inspiration in its blurb. The twenty-seven-year-old married poet Paul Vaughan becomes besotted with the younger, flighty, destructive enfant terrible R.T. Wode. Paul, with a pregnant wife and modest career, is Verlaine, a benefactor-cum-enabler of Rimbaud analogue T.’s poetry and libertinage. 

The tempestuous Rimbaud-Verlaine relationship—remember, this hothouse romance, nourished on absinthe and abuse, culminated in Verlaine shooting at and wounding Rimbaud—provides the bones for something robust, though Godlike is emaciated at best. If Hell was truly trying to come out from under the shadow of Rimbaud, Godlike substantiates that––but then why evoke him and Verlaine in the first place? It’s as if Hell has created this feedback loop, apropos of his career at large, where he must acknowledge the significance of the poet while also offsetting the proximity they have to one another. Hell drops the façade for little more than a shrug.

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So what actually happens in Godlike if Rimbaud and Verlaine are more a structure than nebulous influence? Metafictional gambits abound, telescoping across time: the novel begins with an open letter to the reader from Paul Vaughan, dated 2004, wherein he describes the genesis of the next 140 pages; these pages are from a 1997 mental hospital stay (briefly putting us if not in the exact idiom, then the mindset of the European sanatorium novel), and toggle fitfully between contemporaneous institutionalized living and the Lower East Side of 1977, where Paul and T. first meet. 

Paul’s first-person narration is often supplanted by a third-person omniscience that builds brick by brick the New York shared by him and T. Startling metaphors and taxonomies erect the dilapidated buildings of the Bowery and Alphabet City, and furnish the sturdier bastions of old New York with an amber glow: “It was March and the weather was like a high-fashion pornographic magazine.”; “New York seemed dignified and demure and teeming with treasure in the hour just after noon when they started uptown.”; “The idyll of the cheap hotel room, pencil and paper pad, doughnuts, streaky window, sex.” In one chapter, Paul rents an L.E.S. apartment for T., and Hell’s narrator takes the reader on a guided tour of the immediate neighborhood, listing off cheap restaurants and delis, playhouses and theaters, back-alley blood banks, and the various corners and doorways where specific drugs are sold. It’s a remarkable exercise in nostalgia-dodging reconstruction of a city in a novel otherwise predicated on a poetry-addled fixation with the past. 

Those metaphors tend to slip out of Hell’s grip, however (“…a stalk of microphone stood leaning thinly” tries for too much and trips over itself), and the omniscience when applied to Paul and T. lapses into disinterest that at its worst is condescending. The few zeniths of Godlike are pocked by dead weight, obligatory scene fillers, chapters doing the bare minimum to mount the next truly great idea. The decadence of Paul’s and T.’s sexual appetites is mismatched with Hell’s impersonal patter, like how Paul’s wife flits in and out, her two prominent characteristics being her tears and her pregnancy. Godlike’s 2005 publication was under the auspices of Dennis Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery imprint for Akashic Books, and the Cooper association––and endorsement––does little more than call to mind how that author could render the corporeality of sex both exploratory and dissociative, especially in his Frisk. One could argue then that the dead-eyed William S. Burroughs of Junky and Queer is Hell’s working template, though he can’t manage to sustain an interactive environment of melancholic disaffection for very long before interrupting himself, which happened less in Godlike’s predecessor, Go Now (1997). 

Inspired by a travel magazine commission that imploded because of Hell’s heroin use, Go Now emerged as a peripatetic road novel, the potential drug haze enlivened by a telegraphic prose. Some of that modest, chipped, and soiled crosscountry majesty recurs in Godlike on a trip to Memphis. “The poets got giddy. There was snow on the ground once they got outside of New York City,” Hell writes, a sudden expansion into the wider world beyond the downtown NYC continuum conveyed with childlike excitement about the snow. Hell’s urban topography is amenable to the poets’ destination: “Memphis was spooky with its wagon-era brick-paved streets, abandoned buildings, and ignored giant river that was both the center and the edge of town.” The L.E.S. environs are more stultifying to read of again and again after this excursion.

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The milieu of Godlike, in both its fictional and true-to-life elements, is unfortunately a means to an end for Hell. An appendix denotes all the interpolations and direct quotes, even at their most mangled; if only this collage-like process of writing Godlike weren’t turned back on its progenitors! Paul and T. are inserted into this poetic landscape, rubbing shoulders with Ted Berrigan, quoting Bob Dylan and Frank O’Hara, but the incessant referentiality––in already so slim a book––ensnares the two. Their creative world is so lazily defined, abandoned in a canyon of smuggled ancillary detail. 

In a recent interview in Protean Magazine, Hell, when referencing poet John Wieners as an influence for Godlike, needlessly adds, “You probably don’t know any of these names.” Earlier in the conversation he’d also name-dropped the New York School individually: O’Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest. 

His comment has rankled me throughout my rereading of Godlike. I have tried to not hinge my estimation of the novel on an offhand comment made by the author in an interview, but Hell, if not verging on ahistorical implications here, is at the very least lamentably oblivious. He mentions Nathan Kernan’s Schuyler biography released only last summer through Macmillan, A Day Like Any Other, but it’s as if to exert yet another degree of possessiveness over them (Godlike now shares a backlist with two Schuyler novels). Does Hell know Song Cave published a lovely fiftieth anniversary edition of Wieners’ Behind the State Capitol: Or Cincinnati Pike in November? I too abide by the argument that beyond Frank O’Hara, his peers are still underappreciated and underread, but there are plenty of poets and publishers doing the corrective work. Hell, always combative and prickly, so as to appear an eloquent and unabashed capital-R Reader, still fancies himself a man apart in his tastes. 

In Godlike, those tastes run rampant, high on their own usage. The burden of influence doesn’t figure much, as it does for the literature-drunk novels of, say, Roberto Bolaño or Enrique Vila-Matas—or the poetry of O’Hara, Schuyler, and Wieners, for that matter! That is, except for chapter 12, a rousing dispatch on Mallarmé, poetry at large, translation, and cartoons, prefaced with a Deleuze epigraph and presumably enacted from Paul’s hospital bed. Narrative becomes secondary as Hell the poet and essayist (or poetic essayist) actualizes. “Paragraphs on pages do seem like clouds,” he writes, “like the interesting dirt behind the detergent container in the cupboard. And the men go somersaulting through them, physically fighting, suggesting sexual stories on the scale of cracked teacups.”

I found it hard to plummet back into the vicissitudes of Paul and T. after that chapter 12, although T.’s uptown walk with a woman named Catherine in chapter 14 is a particularly lovely, self-enclosed piece of writing. The vagaries of T. and how they tentacled themselves to Paul have more affecting and immediate counterparts in Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance (1978) and Gary Indiana’s Horse Crazy (1989), aerodynamic pairings of the sort of cruel and oneiric downtown reality Hell is courting––but never achieving––in Godlike. I value Hell’s perspective, one that survived the volatile circumstances of the Blank Generation while so many didn’t, but he too eagerly drags his heroes along with him into his novel, and strands them with little to no recourse, as if trapping them behind glass for all spectators of the quasi-literati.