12 Questions for Richard Hell
The punk-rock icon on Proust, the nature of memory, hip hop, romantic love, why he writes, and more.
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.’
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: I remember hitting a certain point probably in my early thirties when it dawned on me that all the battling cliques of young artists were more about banding together for mutual support in order to assert themselves than any durable set of principles. As much as everybody might hug their platform, what they really want is recognition and power. It’s normal, I’m not being cynical. It’s hormones. But the group will eventually disperse in their individual directions. I’ve talked about how disgusted and disappointed I was when the Rolling Stones released their single “It’s Only Rock ’n’Roll (But I Like It)” in the mid-seventies because I liked the Rolling Stones and thought that they were betraying the faith by speaking of rock and roll as anything but the most important thing in the world. I don’t hold it against them anymore, even though I still can hardly think of a more worthy achievement than the great performance of a great rock and roll song. Truth is, I kind of think they’d agree with that. They just got a little more conservative or adult and wanted to throw a bone to that part of their crowd. Nobody ever said they weren’t ambitious.
James Wolcott wrote that punk bands “didn’t play for prosperity; rather, they infested the present.” Nostalgia for punk rock is a supposed oxymoron, yet so much of the punk scene today is pure nostalgia in the form of self-aware pastiche (at its best), and cheesy simulacrum (at its worst). What, in 2024, has the capacity to be authentically punk? Has the self-awareness of social-media, of our tech-addicted culture, stripped the capacity for punk rock, punk literature, to exist? Where, and in what form, is there any hope to be found?
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 on a minority political party in Kuala Lumpur. It’s not something I’ve kept up with. The word has some connotations for me, some concepts of values attached to it that I would sure favor over some other particular frames of mind, but I shrink from ideologies.
Also, that must be “posterity” you mean, not “prosperity.” What gets my attention is the writer’s fussy, self-satisfied use of “infest,” trying to have it both ways as an appreciative connoisseur of “punk” who also deploys terms that indirectly suggest that punks are vermin. James Wolcott.
The narrator of Go Now writes that “memories are better than life… Everyone is the power of their memories. Usually it’s better to get things over with so you have the memory, but like the best poems, they’re also never really finished because they gain new meanings as time reveals them in different lights.” Can you share a memory of yours that’s gained meaning and significance over time? How has this memory changed? How has it defined your current perspective?
That threw me for a moment. It’s “poet” not “power” of their own memories. I did put those words in the mouth of that character, but I think it would take a whole further book—and you’re asking for non-fiction—to answer your question and it’s a more diffuse and personal book than I’d want to try.
What do you miss most about New York that no longer exists here? Is there any change you appreciate?
Hmmm, that’s a good question. Harder to answer than I would have thought. The first thing that comes to mind, though, is not limited to New York. I miss the used bookstores. But in truth, like many of the changes, for me the loss is more imaginary or conceptual, since half the books I now buy are electronic, as they’re easier to read with age-degraded vision. And it’s great the way it’s a lot easier to find specific old books online than in an afternoon on a block of multiple used bookstores. Everything is a trade-off. I suppose what I miss most is the strength of character of the neighborhoods. It wasn’t all college students and tourists and bars and boutiques and deluxe niche restaurants. On the Lower East Side there were at least four distinct ethnic neighborhoods: Chinese, Italian, East European, Puerto Rican. But then, now there are all the new and different immigrant neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens. Times are pretty bad now, as we all know, but the racial killings and the Vietnam War, etc., etc., etc., of those times were not pleasant either. It’s a permanent fucking struggle. Though I can’t deny that the sense that now everything is on the verge of total collapse and destruction is pretty hard to shake.
Are all good writers sexual/sensual people? How does the idea of the book being the child relate to writing as an act of sexuality? What does impotence have to do with the blocked writer?
Wha??? Are you taking off from that thing I wrote about the challenges of describing acts of sex in books? So the child thing is about where I made a point about the way writers talk about their books as their children (usually in context of not picking a favorite)? Then you’re volunteering an impotence angle??? (Does that come from the image Gucci licensed from C. Wool and me?) (Where the words “impotence” and “impatience” are superimposed on each other?) We’re falling off the edge here. The first question is a weird extrapolation too, but the answer is no. I don’t think that one’s level of sensuality or sex-drive has anything to do with one’s abilities as a writer. As long as you’re asking. Though having highly sensitive receptors is definitely an advantage.
It has occurred to me that maybe a lot of writers have bad memories. I sometimes feel like a lot of my writing is about trying to create a record of what things have been like, partly because my memory isn’t good enough. Beckett, in his outrageous essay on Proust said Proust had a bad memory: “The man with a good memory does not remember anything because he does not forget anything.” Hee hee.
Beckett, 25 at the time, explained that ordinary memory is a type of habit (which condition—habit—Proust decried as desensitizing), a way we have of easing suffering by substituting our own scattered semi-random, stale and bleached memories of memories for what has actually been, for reality. Which would seem at odds with what I described Billy, the protagonist of Go Now, as harboring, the concept of consciously living in such a way as to create the best memories. Though, that was part of the appeal of the memories to him (and me), their separation from reality: “all that multidimensional and liquid maze of experience minus the fear and uncertainty, or with the fear and uncertainty changed to something else. Because they are already finished. I've made them up and they comprise me. It's as if experience is only the dark, chaotic factory where these little infinity gems are pressed into being. Everyone is the poet of their memories.”
I am a big fan of Proust, so I have to reconcile these apparent discrepancies between our views ha ha. Proust’s proposed transcendent improvement on the ordinary summoned memory (in search of lost time), was, as we’ve all heard, the involuntary memory: the rare but pretty well universally known experience of living a moment that magically, impossibly takes place in the past, suddenly transporting oneself to a long previous occasion in one’s life that shares crucial attributes with the present moment. A kind of fully realized déjà vu, wherein one is not having a memory, but fully inhabiting the prior experience at the time that it originally occurred. Time is momentarily obliterated (or recovered). This bypasses the trap of the mundane present, where one is stuck in Time that is formed largely of habit and everyday memory. "Memory and Habit are attributes of the Time cancer," says Beckett. But, to me, the apparent discrepancy between the involuntary memory and the concept of acting in such a way as to produce desirable memories is alleviated when it’s realized that the choice to act to create a memory is about making the decision to escape the habitual, because the acts conceived are always about upending one’s life. They’re about leaving, they’re about making everything unfamiliar again. It’s about changing your life, over and over—destroying the habitual and rendering irrelevant the mundane shadowy memories of former periods. As William Blake once wrote in a guestbook, “William Blake, born Nov 1757 and has died many times since.”
Wow, that was a digression. Sorry. I painted myself into a corner and had to try to dance my way out of it. Also, I really think that Proust’s emphasis on the “involuntary memory” was just as much a device or symbol that served his purposes in the novel as it was an experience that had the significance to encapsulate his mission and trigger 3000 pages…
Is there a burden to being a living embodiment of a generation? If so, what is it? How have you coped with this burden?
This is what they call a leading question. Its assumption is incorrect.
Do you think the acknowledgement of one’s past, in the most harsh, severe, and descriptive manner, can serve as a spiritual panacea?
Hmmm. Whoa. OK. Are you referring to the talking cure? :-) I do think it probably has mental health benefits, though formal psychotherapy is not for me. On the other hand, I think that the way I’ve examined and mapped myself fucking constantly, including in writing, for so many years has had benefits. Panacea is usually used derogatorily, isn’t it? But I’m suspecting you are coming from somewhere else, namely my fairly candid autobiography. You’ve done a wild amount of research. I have in the past described how my main purpose in writing that book was to try to have my whole life at once instead of being trapped in the present, and that I needed to be frank to succeed. That aim could be seen as having a spiritual aspect, but I think the spiritual part was more in realizing I had to try to try to do it in a way that wasn’t intentionally self-serving, that I’d have to have that purity. I did try for that.
Where/how, in the USA, can someone find dignity?
There are a couple of neighborhoods in Kansas City.
What’s the difference between being visceral and being intellectual? How can the two, if possible, beautifully coalesce?
Well, the former’s sloppy and wet, while the latter is drier and more on the ethereal side. You have to use a modified grapefruit spoon to combine them; it’s tricky and not intuitive.
How have you coped with the death of Tom Verlaine? A lot of people you’ve worked with, spent considerable time with, came up with, have now passed. What, in a general sense, in a spiritual sense, does grief do to someone? What has it done to you?
Sorry, but, again, this is not the way I frame these things, and they’re also too personal and complicated to talk much about.
Tell me about Theresa Stern - where is she today? What’s she wearing, what’s she thinking, how’s she feeling?
We speak now and then. She hasn’t changed.
How did your father’s death shape your life? Do you reckon you still would have become a musician? A writer?
I used to wonder about this every once in a while—whether my father’s early death (he was 38, I was seven) had some strong effect on me psychologically—but I couldn’t take myself that seriously for very long. Like everything else, I think it had its upside and its downside for me, but I don’t think there’s much to discover there. I don’t mean the writer/musician part. No one knows that about people. I don’t think.
How would you define romantic love? Can someone exist without it? What are the consequences of living a life without romantic love?
These questions are so wacky. I think it’s wrong to assume that the words “romantic love” have any meaning for me. I would say their meaning depends on the context. But there’s an incidental effectiveness in these questions that, if the interviewee actually takes them seriously, turns them into like Rorschach tests or free association or something, in that you’re showing your subject nonsense and appraising them by what meaning they can find in themselves to attach to it.
OK, I’ll take the bait. For me, when the word “romantic” is applied to love, it probably would indicate the stage and variety of love when a person is preoccupied or obsessed with feelings of tenderness and need for the other, or, at the very least, the feeling of being deeply affected, continuously, by the appeal of them. I don’t know anything about living without it except that loneliness is terrible, while full-blast love is almost as bad, not though.
How can an artist free themselves from the dominant movements of their time?
I’d say you can’t free yourself from anything about your time, but, if you want, you may be able to neutralize it by analyzing it and rejecting it, offering an alternative. As a rule, it doesn’t matter much what are the dominant movements. Every generation has to relearn and restate everything that is, and that knowledge will take on its own shading accordingly. It’s all cycles and modulations; nothing really changes overall. Energy is conserved. E=mc2
What do you now enjoy that you never have before? What do you no longer enjoy? Is there anything you’d like to enjoy, take pleasure in, that you’re simply not able to?
You do have a knack. Well, let me see… I like doing the dishes now. But the main thing is that I now actually like waking up in the morning. I remember when that first happened in the early 1990s, once I’d been clean for a few years after ten years of addiction. But it’s renewed and gotten stronger and more consistent at this late date. I’m 74. My only serious problems are death and taxes. I spend my days and nights with a person named Katherine who makes me very happy. I’m healthy and can afford to do the things I want to do. Yeah, there are little physical and mental snags, and I have normal problems, but largely everything is gravy now. A surprising loss is that I don’t love many old movies the way I used to. Most of the old stuff gets stale, no matter how great it was. I used to love Jasper Johns—he seemed self-evidently maestro. Now those paintings, etc., look too forced to me. Almost all of them. Though I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to find myself, if I live long enough, coming back around to them. What do I wish I could like? Hip hop comes to mind. It’s been so much of and so important to popular music for 40 years and I listen to multiple hours of music a day and always want to find more that gives me what I need, but hip hop doesn’t (yet). I can appreciate brilliant productions, like say damaged Kanye’s, and totally get my mind blown by the brilliance of some people’s rhymes, the creativity, ingeniousness and humor of the words, including rhythmically, but it doesn’t move me, and the obsession with glorified violence and cash and luxury brands in all that subset of it is a problem for me, because it’s sad and fucked up no matter how well you can understand where it’s coming from. I can’t get on board. I like songs.
“Tell a dream, lose a reader” (Henry James) is an aphorism that’s usually true… although not with your work. I take great pleasure in reading about your dreams and your reflections on them, specifically in your poetry. How do you approach writing about dreams? What do you gain from writing about dreams? Is it something you’d recommend for writers to try, or would you say you’re the exception to the rule?
Hmm, I don’t feel as if I’ve recounted many dreams in writing. Now and then in notebooks, but not often. I’m interested in them, as per the essay “Falling Asleep” in my new book, but I feel like I do know better than to tell a dream as if it were intrinsically interesting, though I may have gone there once or twice…
When you write, who are you talking to? Moreover, why do you write? Do you think this is something a writer should know about themselves?
When I think about it, maybe there are two parts to my conception of who I’m writing for. First, would be people who are broadly similar to me just in that they’re capable of responding because they mostly share the values underlying what I’m doing; the other is to be appreciated. That second one’s not too noble, but what can I say? As far as what “should” be, I don’t have an opinion.
What, in your opinion, qualifies as art? What doesn’t? Can art, true art, genuine art, exist if there’s a political or moral intention behind it?
You know, I think most of these questions are too divisive, too moralistic. There are not a lot of rights and wrongs about art. Artists often don’t even know themselves what’s interesting or not about their works, or why they make them, or who they do it for. People do what they must and then they find explanations. That said, I’ve had a couple of ideas about what drives me… When I think about it, there are three ways that’ve occurred to me for explaining my impulse to write: 1) to justify myself, which is Borges’s answer to this question; 2) as a personal ad, like a sexual display, to attract people to me; and, 3) to cheat death, since, in a way, one’s books perpetuate one’s consciousness similarly to how sexual reproduction perpetuates one’s genes (this is a way in which the comparison of a writer’s books to his or her children has traction)…
I sense in the culture now a real desire for reverence. People want art and literature to be reverent to something, and they desire a liturgical reverence for it. Punk rock is, in its most ideal form, the antithesis of reverence. It comes from chaos and garners chaos, and it doesn’t give respect or demand respect. How can one quash the desire for purity in the arts? How could that change our culture for the better?
I don’t know what you’re referring to with this one.
How would you define adulthood in relation to childhood? What changes, what’s lost, what’s gained?
Probably the adult is the one who takes responsibility for him or herself, who considers the consequences and implications of their actions and doesn’t behave as if they were exceptionally privileged to do whatever the hell they want.
Photo Credit — Nick Waplington
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These are the most inane questions I could ever ask Hell. Perhaps asking him what brand of tuna fish he likes would be more precise.