The gods Inspiration and Creativity, Originality and Talent, were off playing the day Richard Hell wrote Godlike, leaving only sad little Imitation and Juvenilia to inspire the aging rocker. And the god of bad-inside-jokes was there too, when the lead character laments that he is being treated “like I’m the last surviving member of a big-time rock group.” But the Voidoids (Hell’s band in the seventies) were never big- time (disclosure: I do like their music).
Having just finished a few days ago the wonderful biography Rimbaud by Edmund White I was especially attuned to Hell’s complete and total rip-off of the Verlaine-Rimbaud history in Godlike. The book tells telling the story of Paul Vaughan, older poet, and Randall T., teenage poet, and every detail is taken from the true history of Verlaine and Rimbaud, from Paul (Verlaine) having a pregnant wife and living in the house his father-in-law bought to the invitation he offers young Randall T. (Rimbaud) to leave the Kentucky (the provinces) and come to New York (Paris), and so on and so on. Randall T. is despised by the New York poet crowd for his rudeness and audacity (Rimbaud ditto ), and Randall T. writes of being inspired while pooping (ditto Rimbaud, but much better done, the poem not the poop) and the two poets travel out of New York (Paris) to Memphis and Florida (Belgium). On and on the story is repeated, including Paul coming home with a fish for dinner and T. laughing at him, right on through the accidental shooting of T. by Paul and the resulting jail time of 18 months for Paul.
The true history of Rimbaud and Verlaine is tragic and raises the very troubling question of whether their beautiful poems would have been possible without the destructive way they conducted themselves together and with others. Rimbaud was trying to get to the essence of poetry by searing away everything else: is this necessary to write great poetry? Godlike’s story (twisted and pasted into Hell’s fiction) is only pathetic and raises no questions other than “when is this over?” Hell’s characters are never anything but flat and boring, and the poems they write are the same.
It is one thing to take an event from history and bring it into a different time in history and see what can be learned from that new juxtaposition of event and time and place. But what Richard Hell does with the facts of Rimbaud and Verlaine is just wrong. Was he hoping we wouldn’t notice? Hell has his Paul character muse on and on about Mallarme and Baudelaire, admired contemporaries of Verlaine and Rimbaud, and yet he never mentions either Verlaine or Rimbaud. It is a very stupid plot device, if intended as a hidden joke; it is even more stupid if Hell thought readers wouldn’t get it.
There was one good line in the novel (when he compares aging to “reverse adolescence”: “You’re all disconcerted at the changes taking place in you, only now its negative and slow motion, losses of capacities…”). But I have to ask: who actually came up with that idea? Was the line and the thought taken from another place, another person, and I don’t get the reference? Or could it possibly be original?
Voidoids, rock on through vinyl. Mr. Meyers, move away from the word processor and stick to reading books, not writing them.
