Godlike by Richard Hell
Review by Rob Stephenson

The Creator expressed his gratitude by a movement of the head. Oh! You will never know how difficult a thing it becomes to be holding the reins of the universe! Sometimes the blood rushes to the head as one strives to wrest from nothingness a last comet with a new race of spirits.

--the Comte de Lautréamont in the third Canto of Maldoror

Rudimentarily speaking, Godlike is an updated version of the relationship between the writers Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. As Hell’s reinvention, it is a story of the 1970’s East Village as told in 1997 by Paul Vaughn (Verlaine). Through a series of diary entries, letters, poems, and an essay about Mallarmé and translation, he speaks of his torrid, yet inspired, involvement with a young poet Randall Terrance Wode (Rimbaud) known throughout this novel as T.

Structurally, it pretends to be a pre-first draft of a memoir as novelette in the form of published notebooks. The second-hand tale of the two poets is used adroitly as an unraveling tapestry onto which Hell weaves his own poetic color and shape scheme. Poetry doubles as the landscape and the centerpiece throughout. The book has a divine experimental stink wafting from it: an exotic perfume that makes no attempt to cover up the reek of day-old piss and puke. It’s irresistible!

Music (what Hell was famous for in the punky late Seventies) has little apparent connection to this arrangement of notebooks. Much more obvious is Hell’s involvement with filmic ideas. Paul Vaughn says several times that this is actually a film. He refers to Jean-Luc Godard twice.

Godard said in one of his succinct moments: “I prefer simply putting things side by side.” This is the sense I get of Hell constructing this book: that it was built up over time, as if he polished stones, leaving some edges jagged, and assembled them into a lovely (and lonely) cinematic architecture of ruins. In the long run, putting things side by side becomes something much richer than mere comparison.

As Paul moves through his story, it becomes clear that his is an obsession-stricken mind, an over-medicated mind that is not just a bowl of glittering strawberry Jello. Paul’s mind is actually the reason to read this book. He has never finished processing the effect that his infatuation for T. has had on him, because he has never been able to stop feeding off of T. or his inspired image of him. That struggle has made him the writer he is now and an adventurous thinker. At sundry times Paul’s mind flickers through a montage of rapturous and inconsistent thoughts that are fastened end to end wildly, but with great care. Included are poems by T., Paul, and other fictitious poets that further extend Hell’s imaginative existential musings.

The title Godlike refers, of course, to the sixteen-year old T., whose divinity is based on an array of revelations he imparts to the ten year older Paul over the course of the book. Paul is intoxicated by weeks of psychedelic, drunken sex and the dirty boy’s fresh, unflinching take on the world around him. The casual cruelty through sex with T. in front of Paul’s pregnant wife and the icky blissful encounters that follow create in Paul an awareness of freedoms he has never known. He helplessly continues a relationship with the boy. Rude T.’s audacious commentary flows out towards any signs of inappropriate sentimentality. But instead of converting Paul from his weaknesses, T. uncovers more and more of them as their doomed relationship is played out in the most squalid circumstances. Paul’s forlorn sentimentality appears often as he writes and Paul is well aware that T. would despise its presence.

Being Godlike is also an attribute of celebrities, especially film stars. There is an early reference to Bette Davis that makes clear T. will be an unbearable, essential star in the poetic universe. He is an actor as well. He adores equally the unpopulated countryside and the actress Tuesday Weld. Paul depicts T. crying as he cores an apple. Paul does this a few times, he attributes the humanity he wishes T. would show in scenes where Paul sleeping and can’t really know what T. is doing.

The hole that T. has left in him has grown so cavernous after all these years that a return to Catholicism teeters towards fragility more than strong faith. As a somewhat used-up bohemian in his early fifties, Paul still drinks and takes medication in the hospital where he tries to recover a few weeks every year. He finally admits that nothing is left inside him except the love he was never able to shake or shape into anything except a few poems and these notebooks.

I am reminded of La Vent da la Nuit (Nightwind), a film by Phillippe Garrel, another poetic visionary of the French cinema (not as well known as Godard). In it, Garrel has created a marvelous character, Serge. He exudes an attractive pessimism set into motion by the passing and haunting of a great love. The adored image in the film is a simple photograph that fixes the beloved in a glorified past. This idealized love traps him in a perpetual cycle of remembering and distracting himself from remembering.

In Godlike, however, Paul is not quite stuck in the past because he is aware of the changes the intervening years made in him. He speaks constantly of time and death, what his own identity is in relationship to those around him, and how these things are determined by the imagined past and future. He finds that surviving this long is a good thing though the transition into old age will not be an easy one for him.

By outliving his youth and still remaining in the shadow of T., Paul is now capable of being GODLIKE himself. He has, after all, built and controlled the world of this book, including his portraits of T. and himself. For quite some time, he has been determined to set down what T. was (to him) and what he himself has become.

It is fortunate that Hell loves playing in language enough to turn his mud pie into a soufflé. He deftly invokes the spirit of a number of precocious French poets in their smuttiest romps as well as their loftiest visions (not only Rimbaud and Verlaine, but Baudelaire and Lautréamont, too). Occasionally, he echoes the systematic antics of that absurd gang of writers, Oilipo. And there are allusions to numerous poets of all sorts if you take the time to find them.

Hell can’t help making phrases that stick out like the uneven planks on a Boardwalk after dark. Sometimes they sting like a Canker sore that flares up on the underside of the tongue. Whether his words are depraved, delirious, or bound up in what makes a human “be,” Hell’s language is a dank field of heady poppies growing in asphalt. Take the time to trip through it.

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Rob Stephenson's writing appears online and in print in such publications as: Mascara, Skin and Ink, Between the Palms, Blithe House Quarterly, BUTT, Dangerous Families, Problem Child, Best Gay Erotica, and Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness. He has written introductions to two of Samuel Delany's books: HOGG published by Fiction Collective 2 and The Motion of Light in Water published as a Triangle Classic by Insight Out Books. He designs a continuing series of chapbooks that feature his poetry, essays, stories, and photography. He edited the erotic anthology Tough Guys with Bill Brent (Black Books) which was nominated for a Firecracker Award. A CD composed with Mikael Karlsson will be available later this year from Please Musicworks.

Website: www.RAWBE.com