Rimbaud and Verlaine in Washington Square Park

“Godlike” is a poet’s novel, a dazzling Künstlerroman that touches on art, love, aging, and queerness, punctuated with verses by Hell (in both Vaughn’s and Wode’s voices) and his “translations,” or interpretations, of poems originally written by Frank O’Hara. The prose is dotted with allusions to the works of Joseph Conrad, Jorge Luis Borges, and Bob Dylan, to name a few. The Bible makes an appearance, as does the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, an ancient Buddhist text. Hell’s greatest feat, however, is a studied transposition of the infamous affair between the nineteenth-century French poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud onto the lives of Vaughn and Wode. Verlaine and Rimbaud’s eleven-year age gap, their elopement, even the final, turbulent act of violence between them, make an appearance here, in the waning years of Nixon’s America.

Hell’s previous novel, “Go Now,” from 1996, about a drugged-out musician-slash-writer on a cross-country road trip, drew criticism for closely mirroring his own life. With “Godlike,” Hell told an interviewer in 2005, he wanted to tell “a story about somebody as different as possible” from himself, and consequently “ended up writing a book about young, gay poets doing acid.” At certain points in the novel, that distance calcifies and restrains his writing. Moments of physical intimacy between his protagonists are often relayed in rigid and frustratingly inexpressive language, which occasionally veers into the tiringly smutty. If Hell hoped to capture, in first person, the volatile thrills of Verlaine and Rimbaud’s whirlwind affair—one so profoundly intense that some argue it led Rimbaud, by his early twenties, to quit writing forever—he falls short.

Still, “Godlike” is commendable for Hell’s fastidious re-creation of that relationship, remarkable for his faithful transmission not only of minute biographical details but also of Rimbaud’s and Verlaine’s artistic philosophies and religious beliefs, which he translates into the vernacular of seventies New York via meticulously written, wine-addled dialogue. Hell (né Meyers) has denied taking his adopted surname from Rimbaud’s iconic work of prose, “Une Saison en Enfer,” or “A Season in Hell,” but admits to keeping an entire shelf of the poet’s writing at home. His Television bandmate Tom Verlaine (né Miller), however, was outspoken about the commemorative nature of his own onomastic choices. The two weren’t the only artists of their era to have been inspired by Rimbaud and Verlaine—Patti Smith, throughout her collected works, writes with great admiration about those poets and others like them, including Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Jean Genet. How is it that these punk rockers, godparents of a musical movement fundamentally attuned to the present, owed some of their greatest artistic debts to a group of French poets, most of whom had been dead for nearly a century?

I first learned of Richard Hell shortly after moving to Brooklyn in the early months of the pandemic. I was jobless then, and my only goal was to form a rock band. By the time some friends and I found an apartment—a cheap five-bedroom place under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway—quarantine was still being enforced, but a crowd of restless New Yorkers had begun to flout its restrictions. The city felt like one big lawless secret, and music was its lifeblood, from illegal parties in downtown hotels to sweaty D.I.Y. raves in industrial warehouses. Within our apartment’s small, semi-subterranean living room, my roommates and I set up a drum kit and a couple of guitar amps, and opened our doors to friends, neighbors, and strangers alike. It was something more than social catharsis, though it was that, too. The music was an accessory to a way of being that celebrated and took solace in sound, movement, and life—not just our own lives, but in the fact of existence itself.

One morning, I found a battered copy of “Please Kill Me,” Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s oral history of punk, on our coffee table. There was Hell, in the middle of the cover, his right hand resting on his bleeding chest. New York in the seventies was a different city, shaped not by a pandemic but the material constraints of poverty, crime, and urban decay. Still, I felt a sense of kinship with Hell and his peers—the Blank Generation, as he called them, signifying, in his words, “the idea that you have the option of making yourself anything you want.” Like them, I was trying to live freely in a world defined by its limitations.