Godlike

by Richard Hell, Dennis Cooper (Editor)

Fiction. Richard Hell's second novel, GODLIKE, is set largely in the early 70s, but structured as a middle-aged poet's 1997 notebooks and drafts for a memoir-novel. The book recounts the story of a young man's affair with a remarkable teenage poet. GODLIKE is a novel of compelling originality and transcendent beauty. "[Hell's] every move and word reveal a naked, impassioned intelligence in the throes of the only truly rock & roll artistic convulsion"--Lester Bangs.

Genres: Fiction, Music, Queer, Poetry, Gay, Literature, American

141 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2005

About the author

Born in 1949, Richard Meyers was shipped off to a private school for troublesome kids in Delaware, which is where he met Tom (Verlaine) Miller. Together they ran away, trying to hitchhike to Florida, but only made it as far as Alabama before being picked up by the authorities. Meyers persuaded his mother to allow him to go to New York, where he worked in a secondhand bookshop (the Strand; later he was employed at Cinemabilia along with Patti Smith) and tried to become a writer.
He arrived in the Big Apple at the tail end of the hippie scene. He took acid (and later heroin), but sought to develop a different sensibility in the manner of what he later referred to as 'twisted French aestheticism', i.e. more Arthur Rimbaud than Rolling Stones. He printed a poetry magazine (Genesis: Grasp) and when Miller dropped out of college and joined him in New York, they developed a joint alter ego whom they named Teresa Stern. Under this name they published a book of poems entitled Wanna Go Out?. This slim volume went almost unnoticed. It was at this point that Meyers and Miller decided to form a band. They changed their names to Hell and Verlaine, and called the band The Neon Boys.
During this hiatus, Hell wrote The Voidoid (1973), a rambling confessional. He wrote it in a 16 dollar-a-week room, fuelled by cheap wine and cough syrup that contained codeine. He then played in various successful bands: Television, Richard Hell and The Voidoids.
Hell recently returned to fiction with his 1996 novel Go Now.

Reviews

[Hux · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the 1870s, the poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud were lovers in a tempestuous relationship. In this book Richard Hell essentially recreates their relationship but in the 1970s with the New York poets Paul Vaughn and Randal Terence Wode (referred to as T throughout the book). Paul is young man in his late twenties and married to a woman (who gets almost no character or backstory). He meets a 16-year-old boy called T who is a fan of his poetry. They immediately have sex (page one) and fall in love.

What follows is a retelling of the same story, but set to the poetry scene of New York in the 1970s. Albeit this story is given to us (somewhat unreliably) by Paul from the perspective of 1997. Their relationship follows the same pattern as Rimbaud's and Verlaine's (including attempted murder and the loony bin) and allows Richard Hell to delve into real and fictionalised poetry along the way. One of my problems with the book (with any book that contains poetry) is that I have no means of measuring how good the poetry actually is. The simple fact is I honestly couldn't tell you the difference between good poetry and bad poetry. To me they all seem identical and I've never enjoyed reading either, good or bad. Plus, I've never been able to read it any way that helps me better understand it. Take this, for example:

They say, Welcome
Bugs swarm on it,
Girls are half made,
A heron overhead drops

Straight down to crash
At his feet. 'Is this the
World,' it asks. There
Is no such thing to the living

Is that good? is it bad? I really have no idea. Additionally, I don't even know how to read the thing; am I supposed to pause at the end of each line? Am I supposed to pause after a comma or a full stop? Not a clue. But regardless, there are endless examples of poetry throughout the book and I failed to appreciate any of it for various reasons. As for the love story itself, It never really appealed to me or felt authentic; there was always a sense of something manufactured about it (not least the fact that Richard Hell is not gay but nonetheless, quite graphically, describes homosexual experiences). And I found the prose, while occasionally vibrant and lively, was ultimately very beatnik and something I'd seen before in other similar books. I've never been a fan of New York Liberalism and it's performative artistry or worldview -- it always feels empty and vapid and soulless. And there's a lot of that here.

But I can't say the book is bad. It had elements that strongly reminded me of other books (especially set in New York) such as The End of Me by Alfred Hayes. There's certainly something very readable about it, something which allows for an urgency and pleasure in the experience. It's fairly easy to read and goes along at a pace. I'm just not sure I'll remember this one for very long. Definitely worth a look though.

[Dana Jerman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A slim novel the poetic premise of which almost outweighs the plot. It's like Hell has all these poems that didn't fit together, so he just incorporated them into the structure of a loose storyline revolving mostly around the young lives of 2 lover poets R.T. and Paul.
Surreal and bittersweet, they move thru friendship groups and drug experiments, New York to Florida (on a bus) and lastly age and death. "T" going first. Death next to mania and Paul's memoir in a mental hospital.
I should probably read more of this guy's work.
Very Beat-like, and accessible.

[Lee Foust · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first read this second novel of Hell's, at least six or seven years ago now, as I hadn't yet joined Goodreads as there's no previous review here, I really, really loved and admired it. I was blown away in fact that Hell had written such an amazing book. On a second reading, however, I found it a tad less astonishing. I think part of my admiration the first time came from lower expectations: Hell's first novel Go Now is great for what it is, but is pretty much what you'd expect from the witty, old punk rock icon--a glorified tour diary and clever tantalizingly autobiographical romp. But this novel is very different, both far more serious and literary in a way, but also just as playful and crazy--that is to say, it's smarter but in no way betrays the spirit of punk or Hell's previous musical, poetic, and autobiographical writings. It's certainly a stepping up of his game, but a tad less of an achievement, I guess than I first gave it credit for. Still, it's great and a favorite.

The novel's form is here in every review: it's a re-telling of sorts of Rimbaud and Verlaine's raucous love affair transported to 1970's New York, specifically the Lower East Side poetry scene around St. Mark's Poetry Project, as seen in retrospect from the Verlaine character's sickbed some 40 years later. Great conceit, super well handled here. Aces.

The novel's themes are poetry and sexual abandon, cleverly intertwined and explored both in the older man looking back as well as in the real time of the love affair's events--also aces. They are linked, I think, as forms of ecstatic, partially out of mind experiences, act in which we blend intellect and physicality in a search for transcendence of both, it would seem. I guess most people do that in the gym or jogging these days, but I feel there's a whole lot less intellect in sports than physicality, except perhaps in baseball. And winning is hardly the transcendence we seek in sex, drugs, or poetry.

Thus I'm at a bit of a loss to explain why the novel wasn't as astounding the second time through, except just that my expectations were raised by my first reading's surprise and the memory of loving it so much. It's hard to be surprised twice by the same thing. But I will read it again, I'm sure. The narrative is so tight and so full of beauty and wisdom, I feel myself missing it as I move on to read more "normal" novels. This one is extraordinary for sure.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first Richard Hell I've read and it won't be the last. This is a novel that's also a fictional memoir within a novel that tells the love story of Rimbaud and Verlaine but set in early 1970's Manhattan which is a story that mirrors somewhat Richard Hell's actual experiences at the time.

It might sound convoluted but it's told in such an off-hand, off-kilter, yet engaging and searching way, with a uniquely loopy use of words, that the pages just flow by.

Something I particularly liked was the fictional portrayals of the NY poetry scene of the time (early 70's) which is a favorite time of mine, with poets like Ron Padgett, Ted Berrigan, James Schuyler, Edwin Denby, and John Ashbery being invoked. It really was a great time for American poetry, and Hell was there so he's able to weave in actual anecdotes and street and apartment textures of living that enrich the story.

I thought the title Godlike might've been a bit over the top, for though Rimbaud might be worthy of that title, R. T. Wode the Rimbaud-like character did not possess the preternatural lyricism and brilliance of mind as the real Rimbaud, and to me just seemed like another very good poet of that era.

But in the end the book is actually a love story, and that part of the story offered real possible insights into the tormented yet fertile Rimbaud/Verlaine affair.

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Richard Hell is a remarkable writer. I never read anything bad from this iconic "punk" rocker. Incredibly talented. "Godlike" is about the poetry scene in NYC circ. 70's and it is really an amazing novel where you can feel the city via his writing. I am hoping for more Hell on the printed page!

[daphny drucilla delight david · Rating 3 out of 5]

i dont like poetry and i hate books about poets. that being said, the characters in this book had enough self loathing that i could jump on the hate boat and feel better about myself

[Dylan Brandsema · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Life has subtext. Isn't that a great idea?"

Sort of defies star ratings. I struggled to choose between 3 and 4 and maybe I'll change my mind in either direction in 2 weeks time. For all it's bewilderment, it's never boring and it does hit emotionally in the end.

Noting that this is my first experience with a Richard Hell, my broad interpretation is this: If art by its nature is the disenfranchised and the pawpers getting in the last word, and art has always and will always exist, then nothing in the world is ever really right. (Unless artists are wrong, which they sometimes are.)

It is almost certainly a coincidence, especially considering McCarthy claimed he never read any contemporary fiction after 1980, but it's an easy comparison narratively and thematically to Cormac McCarthy's The Passenger & Stella Maris, even down to the ephebophilia and the inclusion of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. What physics and philosophy were to Bobby Western is what poetry and....poetry are to T. and Paul. And like TP & SM when it discusses those subjects, Hell's novel works best on the page when it's made up of long passages discussing the purpose of poetry and writing, which largely makes up the book's second part (there are 3, with the third only last 1 chapter). I'm a sucker for long and dense passages such as these both in dialogue in the text. The book's atmosphere and mood are also very attractive. Hell does a great job bringing us into the Taxi Driver-esque seediness of New York in the early 70s.

Where I struggled with Godlike was firstly it's first section ("I"), which jumps around so frantically in narrator and sentence structure that it jumps all the way past random and lands somewhere around barely comprehensible, and secondly that I found all the in-book poetry to be complete dreck. This may be the point, with the idea being that T and Paul are pretentious, not very good poets, but the Afterword where it suggests Hell lifted most of it from other sources and "translated it" (whatever that means) hews towards suggesting otherwise, which is slightly troubling. I've never had much of a taste for poetry but almost the in-book verse here is very ugly and none of it conveys any particular feeling.

Hell claims that he is not Paul so I will take that as face value, but there seems to be general thesis to the narrative here that poetry is the absolute purest form of distilling human emotion into art, which is simply not true, unless you're being literal. There are many pieces of music that do not require lyrics or even any understanding of language that can make listeners cry. So what do you make of that, Paul?

Please do not mistake my numerous paragraphs of criticism for disliking the novel, which is enjoyable overall, full of interesting ideas and very short.

[Jim Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

NY’s original punks featured a number poets who idolized the French Symbolists. Richard Hell’s Godlike is a retelling of the relationship between Verlaine and Rimbaud set in early 70’s NY. It’s an antidote to Patti Smith’s myopic “Just Kids,” with plenty of drugs, grime, butt sex, and bad behavior by a narrator who recalls his relationship with a teenage (Hell-like) poet from Kentucky. It ends very much like Verlaine’s relationship with Rimbaud with a slight twist. The writing is densely poetic, at times breathtaking, and at times annoyingly disconnected (almost as though Hell put unrelated items from his notebooks in the text). Overall it’s a great slice of punk writing by one of its originators

[Sarah Foulc · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holy shit I want to read this 17 more times.

[Hanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was good. Really good, unfortunately. Short, poignant, and straightforward, a literary treat with its use of poetry and confusing narrative.

I enjoyed it, but I'm so glad I'm not a man.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

The complete review is at my blog.

As soon as we let ourselves love another person we are forever wounded, because we are dying and everyone we love is already dead. It’s that certain. Life is just so much unfolding of time and spatial relationships. The wound of our mortality is with us if we dare to look honestly and directly at our lives. Godlike by Richard Hell not only looks but picks at the scab.

There is much packed into the slim book. Many of the images are inexplicably unforgettable like one of Vaughn’s old friends visiting him in the hospital, the poets’ bus ride across the south, and a particular doorway in a Memphis hotel. The love affair between the two young poets is as palpable as the breakdown that inevitably follows.

[John Arnold · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would give this short novel 2 and one half stars if you could give halves. Hell's novel Go Now I thought was a little better (I would give it 3 stars, while his autobio I dreamed I was a Very Clean Tramp I think earns 5 stars). Nevertheless, Godlike is interesting although some of it is over my head. Some of the character's thoughts get complex and I was not able to figure them out. It's a very literary-type book as it deals w/ 2 writers who are unknown poets who are seriously into writing poetry. Plenty of sex and drugs in here (same as in Hell's other works).

[Monica Nazarouk · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite Hell book, and I'll keep reading it until I get so sick of it. The style of this novel is exactly how and what I want to read, and I'm not surprised because Hell just gets it - he knows how to write with wit and poetry.

Godlike easily immerses you into another decade when poets roamed the streets and fell in love with each other.

[Bhaskar Thakuria · Rating 3 out of 5]

First of all this is a book about poets and poetry in general, however, quite offbeat and superannuated in its setting in the bohemian culture of 1970's Lower East Side of NYC. The central plot in the novel revolves around the gay affair between two young poets drafted in the form of a middle aged poet's notebooks and the drafts for a memoir novel.

The basic premise of the novel can be summarised from the author's own admission (referred to in the detailed afterword to the novel):

“….This one would be about gay poets on acid! Half of my favorite poets are gay. And still of course people thought it was me! [laughs] But the initial impulse was simply to write about poets. I wanted to write about poetry as a criterion for living, poetry as your whole moving force, your value in life.”

In retrospect I can only note that the overtly poetic premise of the book certainly overrides the basic plot of the novel. As Raymond Foye notes in afterword: The first- and second-generation school of New York poets who appear in some literary form in the book include John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Edwin Denby, Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, and Ron Padgett, along with others such as Bob Dylan, John Wieners, and Rene Ricard. Their poems and aphorisms are interwoven throughout this novel.........Likewise, lurking in the shadows of these pages are Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Valéry, carrying experience to an ultimate point, which is often oblivion.

The depiction of the relationship between the two poets is subtle and colorful, but never overtly sexualized (unlike some of the other works of fiction I have been reading at this point!). It is quite evident that the influence of the French symbolists, particularly Rimbaud and Verlaine, is particularly strong in the 70's New York school of poets, and especially on Richard Hell, the author. So much so that a palpable analogy can be easily drawn from the gay affair depicted here to that of the relationship between Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud.

Commenting on the major themes presented here Raymond Foye writes in his afterword:

It is edifying to see this quiet masterpiece of a novel, Godlike, reissued by NYRB Classics, taking its rightful place with similar neglected offspring. It is particularly befitting given how this novel was conceived in homage to poetry as a way of life and to the bohemian culture of the Lower East Side. This is a novel built upon the raw nerves that spring from the streets, where art is still rooted in physical and emotional impulses. Like their author, these characters are living for those moments of disruption, when things fall apart and everything is seen for what it is: hopeless.

In conclusion from the afterword:

Godlike documents a time and place that no longer exists, which is all the more reason to read it. As Richard Hell once quoted Robert Creeley, “It is the pleasure and authority of writing that it invents a life to live in the first place.”

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

If time and space were a character -- and it most definitely is -- my ideal is 1970s NYC, the place that was supposed to drop dead but never did. In these pages, Richard Hell doesn’t dwell on the violence or drugs (at least not hard ones too much). It’s a New York for the starving artists shut out of the Factory, of poetry readings in tenement dumps, or overflowing dive bars and of sweaty movie houses. My kinda place.

But Godlike takes place in a vanished New York, its story running along two separate cracks in the city’s gumspotted sidewalks: Paul & T., young, broke poets self-destructing on the Lower East Side; and older Paul living in the margins post self-destruction, inpatient at a psych ward, writing this book, thinking back….

It’s 1971. Randall Terrence (T.) is 16 and has just bumbled into New York from Kentucky with no money and no prospects, except a letter from the older poet Paul, who takes him under his wing. Paul is 27, but let’s set that aside for now. He's relatively straight, married with a kid, but has wandering eyes and is entranced by the new boy. T. in turn loves the attention, and leans into Paul’s affections. They’re his best bet for now.

It’s 1997. Older Paul writes in his notebook about T., “Nearly everybody hated him.” going on, “but it’s important that you not like him either. If you like him, you don’t understand him.” By the end it is truly hard to like T. (or Paul, who has found Jesus), though in the beginning he is seductive, like a dickhead cat you love anyway. But back to his age: at 16, it’s easier to lusted after than it is to be likable, and drugs are not the only vice we succumb to. Whoever said you need to like characters to like a book was trying to sell you a bridge.

Richard Hell, t00, bumbled into New York as from Kentucky with no money and no prospects. He became a trailblazing protopunk. A founding member of Television with Paul Verlaine (a model for T., but more a slight one than Paul Rimbaud), then The Heartbreakers with Johnny Thunders, and was eventually a frontman of the Voidoids. Their biggest track, Blank Generation, showed his interest in lit with its gutter-grime riff on the dying or already-dead beat generation. Writing was his first love though and you always go crawling back to your first love.

I feel something like an overwhelming sense of anger that this New York was stolen away, long gone by the time I was of an age ready to hop a train into its beckoning arms. What we’re left with now is this somewhat clean, safe, corporate-friendly husk of a heavily overpoliced terror target, the grime scraped from the gutter, CBGB’s reduced to a John Varvatos store, The Zeigfeld a banquet Hall. It's really not my kind of place at all anymore.

[Christopher Louderback · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Paul just wanted to run his finger along the crack of Ts ass, and T. let Paul turn him to the wall and do that. He reached under and T's cock had gotten harder and he squeezed its base through T's pants. T. gave Paul charge of himself there for a moment, and Paul took advantage of it by pulling T's shoulder to turn him, kissing him once again, and it felt closer to a kiss. Paul started them walking back along the street. He wasn't going to hurry or let T. think he was at his mercy. It was better to stretch it out anyway.

"So how does it feel to be a faggot?" T. asked.

"What?.. Uh... So far, so good."

This novel is a dirty and beautiful shotgun read — think Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe hanging out with Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine in 1970s New York. Grimy and chic all at once. And you better believe I went on a deep dive auditory journey into Television, Richard Hell, and Tom Verlaine’s discography while reading this.

“I know that love is real.”

[Evan Allen]

Richard Hell is muddled, but that's what makes him great. He's never pretended to be clean in his thought or writing. He's intuitive, his poetry is unhinged, it's sensory and fat. Godlike is a long philosophical musing, as well as a really visceral and interesting depiction of the 70s east-side. It feels real, it's blunt, it's obviously a subsection of that life, the life around st marks, the ability to rent a room for 60 a week, the unpopularity of poetry, poetry as a meaningfully unpopular pursuit, life as poetic material: your reason for living being to scrape the bottom of the barrel for content. Hell has always been someone who writes and thinks in statements, mulls over philosophy in his writing, sometimes it's blanket, but the simplicity of "oh god, we're going to die" is at least genuine.

[Nick Thissell · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unbearable read. I was looking forward to the premise, but was not expecting the prose to rely almost solely on the shock value of over-the-top perverse imagery. I do not consider myself prudish, but this book made me reconsider that. When the author went more than a page without sexualizing vomit, it wasn’t too bad, sadly that didn’t happen enough to earn it a higher rating.

[Omar Abu Samra · Rating 5 out of 5]

“We must follow his example or kill ourselves or die forgotten, not even regretted but just forgotten by all time like mush, like food that nobody wants unless they’re starving and no one ever wants to remember again.”

[Marcia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably more like 3.5 but rounding up. I liked the thinking/theorizing parts of this (the notebooks!) more than the narrative parts. It's short, easy to read, worthwhile, especially if gritty 1970s New York is your thing.

[Vronka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pure gold.

[Megan Schaller · Rating 5 out of 5]

wasn’t expecting this to hit so hard. wow.

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

liked his other stuff better

[Drew Praskovich · Rating 4 out of 5]

What more does one need than chaotic gay poets!!

[B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars finished the book at the end of february but just read finally the afterword today. Will write more when thinking properly

[Alan Murray · Rating 4 out of 5]

verlaine and rimbaud in gay 70s new york written by a founding member of television is right up my alley actually

[Leah Mayes · Rating 2 out of 5]

An engaging idea — what if Rimbaud and Verlaine (well, characters meant to represent them) were in New York City in the early 1970s — is let down by a belabored story-within-a-story conceit that just becomes confusing and tiresome. The language alternates between overly precious and dreadfully clunky, and the egregious typos and homophone errors in the edition didn't help the prose. Furthermore, while the unpleasantness of the characters may have been plausibly representative of the real poets on whom they were based, most of the examples of the literary cleverness (I hesitate to refer to it as poetry) attributed to the two main characters and their peers were just wretchedly written.

[Tait · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another punk turned poet and author, Hell was most famous for his song "Blank Generation" with the Voidoids. His work offers a curious modern updating of several literary traditions that inspired his life. "Go Now" corrupts the Beat spirit of Kerouac and Clellon Holmes, while "Godlike" re-imagines the life of Rimbaud and Verlaine as gay New York poets on acid, all the while retaining a grasp on the frailness or pointlessness of humanity.

[Kit · Rating 3 out of 5]

About what you can expect from the whole punker-than-thou written tradition of transgressiveness, but it does have some lovely parts and playful language I can get behind. I just might be too old for this stuff at this point.

[Lanny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Saw Richard Hell read from this!