12 Questions for Richard Hell

The punk-rock icon on Proust, the nature of memory, hip hop, romantic love, why he writes, and more.

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Lower East Side, 03/05/2024

This isn’t meant as an insult, but I find being in the middle of Richard Hell’s paragraphs a bit like searching for the light-switch in a pitch dark room. It’s not that his prose isn’t lucid. More that Hell’s work bewilders me, the reader, to a preposterous degree. I lose my footing. I’m thrust into a new psyche, a new kind of attitude, description, and expression. You might be thinking: well all decent literature does that. And I’ll respond: No. Well, not exactly this way. It’s not only that the paragraphs themselves open up perspective and reframe assumption, biases, and pre-developed arguments. It’s that the vivid rhythm throws me off course. It’s disorienting, a bit startling. I’m in complete darkness, helplessly, altogether uselessly, searching for the dial. And then eventually I arrive at the end of a Hell paragraph and feel for a second that the switch has been found, and I begin the next section and realize that I’m back where I’ve started. I better learn to see in the dark, in a manner I thought previously impossible. Another way of putting it: I read Richard Hell and find myself in an unconscious zone of displacement, dysphoria, and elation. This is punk, I think. 

Richard Hell, punk, won’t admit to being punk. No real punk will ever tell you that they are a punk, part of punk. Answering a question on the topic, he writes: ‘I’m sorry, man—I don’t mean to undercut you—but I have no investment in “punk.” It’s like asking me about my position regarding a minority political party in Kuala Lumpur.’ (Question one) Or, see his answer to question six, when I ask him what it’s like to be a living embodiment of the 1970s punk generation, he claims disagreement, which I think is absurd, and perhaps a good example of false humility. This is part of the somewhat punk, deliberately antagonistic, but also lovingly endearing aesthetic Hell chose to adopt for our interview. 

From the start, I made the foolish error of sending off questions with several typos. One of the typos led to a misquote from one of his books. Another was the shameful substitute of prosperity, for posterity. Richard Hell: ‘That must be “posterity'' you mean, not “prosperity.”’ I think most writers I’d interview would recognize the clerical error as a normal part of the process, correct it in their own heads, then answer the intended question. Not Richard Hell, at least not in this posture, in his rhythm. I’m reminded of when I was 22 years old, writing film reviews for a dumb yet earnest leftist magazine in Brooklyn. At the Berlin Film Festival, I sat down for my allotted fifteen minutes with the actor Jim Broadbent. Jet-lagged, coming off several alcoholic, sleepless evenings, I mispronounced the word ‘chasm’, using the soft CH of chocolate, as opposed to the hard CH of chaos. ‘Chasm. It’s Chasm, young man. You do know this, right?’ Broadbent shook his head and checked his watch. I never submitted that interview for publication, not for the sake of embarrassment, more because I thought it was dull and filled with very actorly, vanity-struck clichés. And the PR agent stood over us the whole time, monitoring everything that was said in her Donna Karan blazer, double-fisting iPhones with a clipboard pressed against her bosom. It took me seven years to return to interviews. It’s also worth noting that Hell and Broadbent are the same age, 74. 

In the process of seducing Hell for the interview, he replied to me via email: ‘I’ll probably agree to do it. But I might scold you a little in advance.’ Later, via text message, following a humorous insult regarding my opportunistic panegyrics toward some of the subjects I’ve interviewed (Hell: ‘your starry-eyed blarney in pursuit of respect from the gatekeepers…’), he wrote again: ‘I told you I would scold you.’ Then several weeks later, another gem arrived.  

Hey Gordon hope you’re fine. The Jia (interview) was interesting. You’re maintaining! :-) So… I’ve taken up yr questions, but I need to ask u one or two as well before continuing. I warned u I’d scold u. I’m finding myself teasing u and challenging yr questions a lot in my responses. This means that you can’t edit or revise those questions without ruining the interview. In other words you can’t go through the pages and rewrite the things I’m scolding you about—because that would ruin the interview and mean I’ve wasted all this time. So can you here and now assure me that you won’t try to reword or cut out parts of your questions in reaction to my replies? I think it will be a great interview but only if you let it be freewheeling like this. I take the questions seriously enough to object to them and you can’t prune out those parts nor the questions that triggered them. Agreed? Thanks!!! (You’ll still have yr intro as a way to make a separate case.)

That doesn’t mean we can’t discuss it if something really bothers you. And I’d understand and tweak once or twice maybe. But I think it’s reasonable for me to require as a general rule that you stand by yr questions. Yes? You wrote them. I’m giving them the respect of answering them…

I’m reminded of what the great filmmaker Stefan Ruitenbeek, a figure who’s becoming somewhat of a mentor, a surrogate artistic father, says about his work: ‘I’m interested in people and how they want to show themselves. I don’t judge them in that. At least that’s my goal.’ Apart from not judging, or at least forming an opinion, this is something I think I’m achieving while conducting these interviews. I often meet my subjects in person, and I can see, albeit briefly, how my interlocutor shows themselves off the cuff, somewhat unplanned, the aspects of the IRL that are impossible to control. And then there’s always an interesting contrast with the written, edited interview; I can see their theatrical production of identity, the refined yet true manifestation of their unconscious. And even to use the word ‘subject’ feels strange. Due to my lack of critical distance, I’ve formed bizarrely intimate bonds with almost everyone I’ve thus far engaged. Some mysterious transference occurs. The whole experience is uncanny, abnormally satisfying if not sublime. 

Before sending Hell any questions, I went to meet him outside his East Village apartment, a humble walk-up where he’s lived for decades. Hell wanted to gift me a few signed copies of some of his books. This was delightful. He came downstairs and my large yellow Labrador began jumping all over him to say hello, trying to reach his face so he could give it a kiss. Hell didn’t love this. He handed over a tightly sealed envelope with the signed books. We exchanged a few pleasantries, shook hands, then went our separate ways. There was nothing notable or out of the ordinary about this brief meeting. But I was struck by one thing: his eyes. Astonishingly turquoise, depth-filled eyes. They belonged to a man who’d seen and encountered everything there was, and, vicariously, you could look into his organ of sight and see it all in return, a silhouette of the cosmos, those eyes. Or, better, ingenues of oblivion; the body part that gains wisdom but somehow doesn’t age. 

Hell sent the answers to his questions a couple days ago, document titled: The Gordon Glasgow Grill (Of Richard Hell). I read his responses immediately and proceeded to reassure him that I was fine with being chastised. ‘Oh good. Thanks, Gordon.’ And rereading once more, I found, as you’ll soon see, the gestalt. Hell had shown himself; I’d succeeded. And, Stefan, I promise you I didn’t judge. Never would, never will. At least I tried not to. 

Several years ago, I was having a few beers with a close friend, the British screenwriter Samuel Jefferson. I said to him: ‘My girlfriend, Nikki, you know, she’s been getting mad at me. Says I’m far too judgmental, like a bitchy-fashion-gay who never turns off. It makes me question myself, my perception, if perhaps too much judgment, subjection, which becomes abjection, clouds everything I perceive. I worry this disposition will negate everything I write. I become off-putting, someone no one wants to read.’ Sam looked at me plainly, and, without a pause for any contemplation, in his thick Yorkshire accent, said: ‘You’re a writer (write’a). It’s your job to judge. You must judge. Just, like, look around and perceive, and then write, don’t try. Don’t try to judge, because whether you like it or not you will judge. It’ll all come naturally in your description of events. It’s unavoidable. It lies in the said and unsaid. What’s your job is to put it out there. Nothing more. Everything, anyway, reveals itself, whether you like it or not. The whole is unavoidable. Your readers, which you will receive, no doubt, will be the ones to discern what’s been discerned. Not you. No, certainly not you.’ … That must be ‘posterity’ you mean, not ‘prosperity.’

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GG: I’m suspicious of scenes within all sectors of art. At first they’re cool, alive, and then, inevitably, given human nature, no matter how punk or fringe, they turn into a fiasco of politics and group-think. Did this happen with the early punk rock scene? If so, how? Moreover, how can an artist manage to stay in the periphery of a scene, to be in it but not of it, reaping the benefits of community and connections without falling into the traps of group-think within art? 

RH: