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In 1974, when he was in his early twenties and living in downtown Manhattan, Richard Hell, born Richard Meyers, founded the band Television with his high-school friend Tom Verlaine. After an acrimonious split with Verlaine, Hell left the group and created the Heartbreakers, alongside a post-New York Dolls Johnny Thunders; later, he established Richard Hell and the Voidoids, whose 1977 album, “Blank Generation,” is considered one of the building blocks of punk rock, a movement that Hell himself helped originate. (The late punk impresario Malcolm McLaren has said that he used Hell’s no-fucks-given attitude and look as a template for creating the Sex Pistols.)
But Hell is not only a New York rock legend; he is also an accomplished writer of great sensitivity and taste. After his arrival in New York as a seventeen-year-old, in 1967, he wrote and published poetry both on his own and in collaboration with Verlaine. (A book of seventeen poems, “Wanna Go Out?,” was released in 1973, with Verlaine and Hell writing under the pseudonym Theresa Stern.) Since quitting music in 1984, partly in order to rid himself of a decade-long heroin habit, Hell has written two novels (1996’s “Go Now” and 2005’s “Godlike”), and an autobiography (2013’s “I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp”). He also published a collection of his early journals (1990’s “Artifact”), an anthology of critical essays (2015’s “Massive Pissed Love”), a compendium of early poetry, short essays, and drawings (2003’s “Hot and Cold”), and a collaboration with the painter Christopher Wool, a friend of Hell’s (2008’s “Psychopts”).
Now, after a long hiatus, he is publishing a book of new poetry, “What Just Happened,” written during the lockdown months of the COVID-19 pandemic, with original images by Wool. (A reading and signing event pegged to the book’s release will take place on July 6th at White Columns gallery, in Manhattan.) “I had basically accepted, and had for decades, that I hadn’t turned out to be a poet,” Hell told me, in May. “[But] it suddenly felt like it was my vocation. . . . I felt like a poet for the first time, and it was really gratifying.” Hell, who is now seventy-three, still lives in the same East Village walkup tenement he has been occupying since 1974, with his girlfriend, the novelist Katherine Faw. On two recent occasions, we spoke about poetry and prose, nineteen-seventies New York, mortality, and drugs. Our conversations have been edited and condensed.
Maybe we should start from the beginning.
What’s the beginning? [Laughs.]
I guess I meant your beginning. You were born and grew up in Lexington, Kentucky. Your father died when you were young, and as a teen you were sent away to boarding school in Delaware, where you met and befriended Tom Verlaine, and you both decided to run away.
I’ve always hated authority. I started getting suspended from school in ninth grade, and then, at the private school in Kentucky that I got a scholarship to, I almost got expelled, but I was able to squeak by. And, when I went to boarding school in Delaware, shortly before Verlaine and I ran away, I was suspended for a week for doing morning-glory seeds. [Laughs.] I just didn’t like school, period.
Verlaine and I got as far as Alabama before we got busted. Spent a night in jail, got sent home. My mom wanted to send me to public school in Norfolk, but I knew that I was done. I wanted to be on my own, and not because I had a horrible home life but because I wanted my freedom.
At seventeen, you decided to move to New York. Were you scared about it at all?
I was just excited. I was determined. I wasn’t scared. I was looking forward to running my own life. When me and Verlaine left school, we decided we were going to be poets in Florida. I had no idea what [being a poet] meant. I had gotten excited by Dylan Thomas, but it was as much for his spirit as for his poems. I did love those poems, I did, but it was all mixed up with the Dylan Thomas legend, too. I wanted to live by my wits, is what it came down to.
I wonder if it was just a sign of the times generally—in the mid- to late sixties, it was in the air—or if it had to do with something essential about you.
Apart from my own impulses, as ugly as it has become to admit, I was a baby boomer, and so I was a member of this generation that thought that we owned the world because we outnumbered everybody. And I didn’t want to be told what to do. I wanted to be a writer, even though I didn’t know what it meant. I’d always read a lot, and a few writers had a huge effect on me. Probably, for me, the most significant experience of discovering a writer and being opened up by that experience was [Comte de] Lautréamont. I was seventeen or eighteen, I guess. And “The Voidoid,” my first book, which I wrote when I was twenty-one, in 1971, was way influenced by him. On the first edition, the cover image was my thumbprint in blood. [Laughs.]
[Hell picks up an edition of “The Voidoid” to show me his author photo: a long-haired, scowling dreamboat.]
Oh, my God.
That’s how I presented.
Well, it’s certainly effective.
In my early years in New York, starting in the late sixties, I was doing a poetry magazine called Genesis : Grasp, and I had a small press. Me and Verlaine collaborated on the Theresa Stern book, and I had three other books planned that I had the manuscripts for: one by Verlaine, one by Patti Smith, and one by me. But I was getting frustrated with the whole life because the rewards were few. I wanted to have more of an impact. And then the New York Dolls happened, and that was really inspiring to see. Because they were just street kids going totally on nerve, regarding themselves as meaningful, and being aggressive and having a great time in this totally anarchic spirit with these fantastic getups.
How did it happen that you turned to music?
Verlaine had gone back to high school and finished up, and came to New York maybe eighteen months after I did, but, apart from that, from ages sixteen to twenty-three, we were basically inseparable. The only times we weren’t hanging out were when one of us had a girlfriend, but otherwise we were constant companions. And he was playing guitar the whole time. At that point, it was still acoustic; he didn’t have an electric guitar until later. And, between Verlaine and being blown away by the Dolls, I thought, Why don’t we make a band, and I could use the chops I developed as a writer to write lyrics? From the beginning, I loved the whole concept of a band as a subculture. How you dressed, what you said in interviews, what the themes of your songs were were all consistent with one another, and you made that up. So that really excited me.
It was about bringing real life back to rock and roll, because [the genre] had become this stadium thing and all these theatrics and lights and showtime, whereas for me the best music was about experiences people were having. It wasn’t just comforting pop music, and it was also not the self-indulgent, endless guitar solos and drum solos or musicians trying to do symphonies. But, instead, it was the driving, expressive, three-minute songs. I didn’t know anything about how these things were constructed when I started out. It was more about an attitude or values of what matters in a rock-and-roll song.
And at that point I kind of dropped poetry, because I knew for sure that I did not want to get tagged as, like, a rock poet—someone who was intellectual rather than visceral.
After picking up the bass, you and Verlaine started the Neon Boys, which then, once the second guitarist, Richard Lloyd, joined, morphed into Television. Were you still writing anything apart from lyrics?
There was a lot of gratification in having a rock-and-roll band, but, for three or four years, there was no money in it. When we played as Television at CBGB, a big month would be if we made fifty dollars, divided among the band. Then it picked up a lot, but I was always scrambling. There were journalists hanging out at CBGB, including people who were editors, so I had the chance, if I wanted to make a few bucks, to write for magazines, so I’d do a little bit of that now and then. Later on, when I was really strung out and fucked up and, like, crippled, I accepted an offer to have a column in The East Village Eye.
When you were at your worst in terms of addiction?
Oh, God, it’s so embarrassing to look back on. I was doing a lot of speed, too, at that time, and it was just—I didn’t have a clue how to write the kind of stuff I thought that I was writing. [Laughs.] It was horrible.
The story of those years of your life is recounted in your fantastic memoir, “I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp,” which you published in 2013. You seem to have somehow remembered and retained a lot from that time.
I have a terrible memory, but I’ve always kept journals. A lot of the incentive to do the autobiography was that I’ve always been stumped and frustrated by how you can’t have your whole life at once. You’re stuck at the moment of the present. It seems like you really get cheated because at any given moment you only have what it is at that moment, and I want all of it, not just whatever remnants there are that have whatever minuscule effect and vague presence now.
But, yeah, I don’t have a great memory, and that’s part of why I’m really glad that I’ve written the books that I have. Three or four days ago, I was trying to boost my morale about this interview [laughs], so I picked up my second novel, “Godlike,” and it did the trick. I felt like, O.K., I’m a good writer. I think it might be the best thing I’ve done, though at other times I’ve looked at it and been mortified. But what I’m getting at is that that book, too, has such a detailed description of New York in the early seventies, and that’s part of what brought me to write it. It’s about being a poet, in that time and place. It describes all the restaurants in the neighborhood, what the socializing was like, what apartments were like, how you’d go give your blood for five dollars because you didn’t have any money. So I think that my writing definitely tries to have all of those experiences and adventures and times and places preserved for me. Because otherwise, man, you’d just be stuck in the prison of this moment.
In the autobiography, and I know that this put some people off, I wanted to say things that people, because they have good manners, don’t usually say about what they’re actually experiencing. Some people called me misogynist, and said, How come you gotta talk about the breasts of every girl you ever met? But I was talking about the breasts because I noticed the breasts, and I think anyone would. And I wanted it to be frank, because part of my object was to see what had taken place, myself, by just describing it moment by moment.
Is it strange, having lived in New York since the late sixties, and in the same apartment since 1974, given that the city around you has changed so much?
I was just thinking about something along those lines today. Namely, I’ve lived long enough now that I feel like I’ve learned from my own history. Seeing how things have changed has basically been about seeing how everything is cyclical. So, it’s a nightmarish Disneyland for the super-wealthy right now, but it’ll go back. In fact, it’s in the process of going back.
So you welcome the coming apocalypse?
No, I don’t welcome the apocalypse. But I don’t feel like the ways New York has changed say anything about where it’s going to be in ten years. Eventually, it’ll be a giant slum again. People talk about it as if what New York has become is permanent, but the thing about New York is it’s always changing. The time when I was first getting any results from myself in the early seventies, when I’d just turned twenty, was a time that now represents so much to people, a period when everything was alive, and people were doing exciting new work, and it wasn’t about money, because New York was in such bad shape that it was a Wild West frontier town, and lawless, and no one was supervising anybody, but at the same time there was an endless fund of jobs and cheap apartments, and it still had all the cultural things—great movies, bookstores, bars, music. But the ironic thing is, in a way, that situation of New York as the Wild West in the seventies and early eighties is libertarianism, where it’s every man for himself. You look at John Lydon and he’s a Trumpist, so in a way being nostalgic for that is wishing for the strong to survive.
How does that make you feel?
[At the time] for me it was normal. It’s all I knew. And you did not go past Avenue A, and, if you lived in the East Village, you expected to be burglarized at least every eighteen months, and people were regularly mugged, and there were lots of rapes on this block. That’s what life was, really. So it’s not simple.
Since the eighties, you’ve been publishing a lot of cultural criticism, and, in the late nineties, you also began to write steadily about art. How did that come about?
Probably the first most significant [romantic] relationship I had was with the artist Patty Oldenburg, Claes’s ex-wife, when I was nineteen. And that was really stimulating and opened up worlds to me, but I didn’t really follow through with keeping up with what was going on with painting after my mid-twenties. I was doing music and drugs, and I wasn’t circulating in that culture. So, when, in the late nineties, Christopher Wool contacted me, I had never heard of him, and he asked me for permission to use the words that I’d written on my chest on the “Blank Generation” cover for his word paintings. It was “You Make Me ______.” I said, “Sure, you don’t have to ask my permission—it’s not like I own these words.” I had been out of the game of art for years, so he invited me to his studio, and I went over, and I just had to laugh. My literal reaction was, I can’t believe what they’re getting away with these days. I’m not entirely unsophisticated, but, yeah, I was clueless. I didn’t know how to read it at all. But he kept inviting me, basically. He asked me to write something for him, a catalogue text, and he was just very generous and encouraging. So I gradually got pulled into the world of what people are doing in visual art now. As a poet, I was totally aware of Baudelaire’s art writing, Apollinaire’s art writing, Ashbery and O’Hara’s art writing, and that’s what started me going—the artists bringing in the poets to have an audience to what they’re doing, and also helping the poets, because they know the poets have no chance of ever making a living.
I probably socialize as much with visual artists as I do with writers—probably more. And it’s really been an education and a serious revelation for me. I feel like the society of painters is more congenial than the society of writers. When I was a kid, I thought of the poetry life as having these noncompetitive values—which isn’t to say that I’m not competitive, because I’m as competitive as the next person. But I had this fantasy of a supportive bohemia with no judgment. It’s really ironic how, even though there are no rewards in poetry, the little that there are, everyone’s so competitive about, and everyone is backbiting and striving for some kind of recognition in a way that’s probably more sordid than among painters, because there is actually a possibility of having some sort of comfortable life when you’re a painter, while the poets have to fight for scraps.
You stopped publishing poetry in an organized way in the early seventies, but were you always continuing to write it?
I had basically accepted, and had for decades, that I hadn’t turned out to be a poet. Because for me a poet is a person whose main preoccupation is writing poetry, someone who looks at the world that way, and works at it out of love for it, and I had never got there. I wrote poetry very sporadically. I would write three or four poems a year, but I wouldn’t publish them. Anything I wrote I kept to myself. But then, when the pandemic hit, it just happened. I realized it was more or less a product of complete tedium. Poetry writing is so hard to do. I mean, all writing is hard, but that’s not something you tell anybody. [Laughs.]
Maybe they don’t want to hear it, but I tell them.
Nobody believes it. But, yeah, it is really hard. But, when I had no other obligations or responsibilities, I was suddenly finding myself doing this without it being some kind of discipline I forced on myself, and it suddenly felt like it was my vocation. The more surprising thing about that was that I had a form, and it was different than it had ever been before. Somehow, during the course of the time that I put in across all these years of writing in whatever genre but also reading poetry, something had evolved inside me, to put me in this place where I had a method. Just the way the poems came out—where the line breaks came, what the tone was, what the object was, what I regarded as being worth writing about—felt completely organic and natural. And all my life I’ve been circling that. I’d never got there as a kid, to the place where it felt natural. It was forced; I was forcing it. And I solved all that, somehow. I felt like a poet for the first time, and it was really gratifying.
One thing you seem to be circling around in the poems which I really liked is where you say that we’re dirt, we’re mud, we’re part of the world, we’re in the process of coming from matter and then ultimately returning to being a clod of dirt.
The in-between state of being and nonbeing. Consciousness or mineral.
Is that a generative place?
Everything is about the contradiction between our being capable of reason and being driven by forces over which we have no control whatsoever, that reason has no relation to. So it’s a struggle all the time between what we want and think is right and how we actually behave. Because we’re driven by all these biological evolutionary forces that we don’t even recognize, because we’re made of them. You can’t completely know yourself, by any means. It doesn’t work like Greek philosophy; you can’t dream up the ideal life and then live it and stick to it, no. You’d be constantly behaving in ways that would be self-destructive, destructive to other people, or that, in other ways, diverge from where you’d be if you actually were in control.
Is mortality something you’ve been thinking about?
In lockdown, I was going through what everybody was going through, which is a reassessment of everything, a kind of mortal shock: all the uncertainty, and all the consciousness of people dying, and your own mortality. And I’m already super conscious of being the age I am. It’s not like I dwell on it or try to figure something out about it, and I’m glad I’ve lived long enough to have a book of poems, finally. But I’m definitely conscious of mortality. I felt this way when I quit dope, too—that my life was over, because all the wild adventures were over. I was going to be a writer now. What had been my life was going to be material, but the actual living of the life was over.
And was that true?
No, because I had a lot of wonderful things happen. [Laughs.] But in a certain sense it’s true. In rock and roll and also just in youth, you’re always out looking for adventure, and then you hit a certain point, as an artist anyway, that you’re using all that experience as material. But then, when you start hitting your sixties and seventies like that, it becomes even more pronounced, because there’s not much time left. But it’s different for everybody.
Do you believe in therapy?
No. I had a funny experience in my first marriage. She insisted I get therapy before she would marry me. [Laughs.] It didn’t really work. I said O.K., but my experience of that was of being in this room with this guy and thinking, I don’t even know you, I’m not going to . . . why should I trust you? I just couldn’t do it. I have too much ego or something. I can’t open up to a stranger like that. Do you know the Melville movie with Belmondo as a priest? [“Léon Morin, Priest.”] What I took from it is the appeal of having a priest as your confessor. It’s a person whose whole concern is for your soul. And it’s free.
Isn’t that what writing is, though, in a way? Especially if you’re writing memoir or even poetry that’s close to the bone?
Definitely. I think you get some relief. So why do you have to go pay somebody to sit there and listen to you do it? Most of what people are is chemical. It’s biological. Did you ever see [Michael Apted’s] “Seven Up!” movies? The seven-year-olds are still the same, even at seventy. You don’t change. You’re who you were at three. I mean, of course, if you have a horrible or a fantastic childhood, it’s gonna have its effects. But, generally, you can see who a person is. There are those who have the kind of temperament that they don’t have neuroses. Lucky for them.
But you’ve had a life where you’ve made, seemingly at least, changes to certain tendencies that, for some people, you would think, This is the end. Like, if you’re a junkie, you’ll always be a junkie. And yet you’ve changed course in a way that’s actually fairly rare.
Being a junkie is a superficial thing.
Is it?
Yes. You can definitely be a type of personality that’s more inclined to become this way or not, and it does change the way you behave—it messes up your life in a lot of ways—but I was still myself when I was a junkie, and I was the same person before. If you read the Theresa Stern book, and this is something I noticed a long time ago, it’s consummate junkie mentality, and that was before I ever touched dope. It’s just, like, complete anger and despair and a feeling of helplessness. And also this kind of egotism. I feel a lot in common with other junkies because there are certain psychological mechanisms I think that we share. But the getting clean—it’s just lucky. It was largely because I knew that there were other things I could do. Usually, people who ended up really destroyed by junk in my experience are people who didn’t have other options, especially in music. And the music thing is so conducive to it. It’s such a tedious life. You can really see why all the jazz musicians became junkies. It’s even worse for them, because not only is the life horribly boring and monotonous, you’re just travelling in buses all the time and staying in cheap motels. But, for them, unlike for rock and roll, they actually had to be creative every night. And I don’t see how they could do it without junk, and most of them couldn’t. Though some of them, like Coltrane, were able to come out of it, and Miles Davis came out of it but then went back into coke and shit and fucked himself up later in life. But I had other options. There were things I wanted to do that I thought I could do, and there was no way I would have been able to do them with dope. But I wouldn’t go to rehab. I never went to rehab. It’s the same thing about shrinks and school: I don’t like people taking authority over me. So I had that incentive and that remaining little kernel of hope that things could be different. That I could pull something off. But so much of it is just chance. I could have died, I O.D.’d five times. So a lot of it is luck, too.
Is it strange to you, now that you’re older, to think how cheap life was? The ease with which you could have died when you were in your twenties? Or no?
When you’re that age, you don’t think you’re ever going to die. It never even crosses your mind. It’s funny, it occurred to me that your proximity to death is kind of steady your whole life: for the reason that, when you’re very young, you’re at high risk for death because you’re constantly taking insane risks because you can’t imagine that you could be somebody who could die, but then, as you age, you get closer to death, your physical infirmities and the way you’ve worn yourself down and everything, you take fewer risks. Because death is closer already.
Were you in touch with Verlaine before he died, recently?
No. I never recovered from what felt to me at the time like a total betrayal. Our relationship was really complex. We were so close, but it always makes me think of how I once got a postcard from Ted Berrigan advertising a reading he was doing with Ron Padgett, and on the postcard he said, “Ron and I hate each other as only best friends can.” And then, when that thing happened with that split, it just, it was final. When I would see him, I would invariably come away thinking, He just rubs me the wrong way. Even though he was my best friend, and in lots of ways we had more in common than anybody else in my life. Those are the most impressionable years; they’re when you’re forming, and, if you shared that experience with someone you’re with constantly, it’s eternal. It doesn’t go away. So I still have that feeling of brotherhood with him, even though I couldn’t stand being in his presence. But there was a funny thing that happened right after he died. There was this little book about graffiti at CBGB, and I wrote an introduction for it, and, within the first couple of days after Verlaine died, I’d be looking for references to what happened, and I came across this tweet, which the editor of the book who approached me to write the intro tweeted. When he was doing this book, he first approached Verlaine to write the intro, and Verlaine demurred, but said to him, “I can’t stand the guy, but you gotta get Richard Hell.” [Laughs.] And that gave me a really good feeling. Because it was the same for me, about him. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
