“I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths where your life wells forth,” the poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote. That dictum flows like a river through “I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp” (Ecco), the new autobiography from punk legend Richard Hell, carving a path from the author’s problem-child backwoods upbringing through the poor and dirty days of the New York music scene in the 1970s. ARTINFO’s Craig Hubert spoke with Hell on the phone about the problems of writing an autobiography, the urge to leave everything behind, and not recognizing your earlier self.
Why choose to write an autobiography now?
Well, I was desperate for a subject [laughs]. A book was due and I needed something easy. And fortunately, it didn’t turn out to be as easy as I expected. I thought it was going to be a cakewalk because I knew the subject, but that turned out to be a disadvantage. I started the book the year after my last novel came out, 2006, and I finished it in 2011. The problem was it presented all these problems I didn’t anticipate. The one I did expect, which was how to handle the natural impulse to be self-serving, turned out to be not much of a problem. For me, my whole life, I haven’t served myself very well [laughs]. I don’t have a very generous view of myself – I have a huge ego, but at the same time I’m always second guessing myself and always wondering about my motives. I regard myself as a novelist – I really like writing nonfiction too, I’ve written a lot of essays, I like doing research, and there was actually a lot of research involved in writing this book. But I have the material, which was an advantage because I always kept journals and then once I started becoming a quasi-public figure I was doing interviews all the time and there would be stories written by other people about, you know, my behavior, whatever. I had the foundation, all the background material. The other thing was I’d been thinking for a long time about what it meant to outgrow my youth. I think this happens to most people when they hit middle age, they’re always surprised by it and baffled and it leads you to want to assess who you are and what you’ve done. It’s not even deliberate, you just get struck by: What happened? I wanted to investigate that. I wanted to figure out what the hell had happened.
Did you ever explore writing an autobiography in a different form? This is a pretty straight autobiography for you as a writer. Did you ever consider writing this as a prose poem, or fiction, or some hybrid form?
My original concept, and this was just sort of a foggy idea that occurred to me years ago and rolled around in my head, was that I’d try to write a self-portrait in a form of describing various instances of running away. That’s a thread in the book, but that’s because it is an inclination of mine, it has a lot of power for me – the urge to leave everything behind and have everything be new again, be a stranger. That was something I was toying with but I realized pretty quickly that it was way too thin. I could maybe do 50 or 75 pages, tops, and I wanted to do something with more substance than that. I’ve always really liked a simple, clear style. I like sentences that are plain, bricks put in place that are solid, without any frills. I also like to go out into the stratosphere, too – and there are a few instances of that in the book where I get all lyrical – but I really like plain spoken prose. I really like Raymond Chandler, Primo Levi, Isaac Denison.
What about Joe Brainard?
I have first editions of all three of the “I Remember” series. Those are astonishing books. They’re very different from what I’m doing, of course, because it’s this overriding, brilliant concept, evoking all this stuff by telling these tiny moments from what he recalls from his childhood. Maybe at the beginning of my book there’s a little bit of a flavor of that, when I’m talking about my childhood, but that’s nice to hear.
Maybe not as inspirations, but were there any other autobiographies by writers that you admire?
Well, you know, it came to me during the process of writing the book how unusual it is that a writer’s autobiography is any good. Tons and tons of writers have written memoirs and autobiographies and they’re usually not books that anybody treasures. People usually don’t take them seriously because usually they’re not worthy of being taken seriously. There are exceptions of course – the one everybody always points out is Nabokov. But I think usually, the books like that that are good are presented as fiction: Rilke’s “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” and a few poets books that are really obviously about capturing the environment and psychological state of themselves in some period, or even a life, that are good. Primo Levi’s books are astounding. I don’t really think of them as models; when you bring up the subject some good examples come to mind. I didn’t have anything in my head to strive to approach in its virtues or anything like that.
You said you kept journals during this period. Going back through these materials of your life, was there anything that shocked you, in a good or a bad way?
They were mostly useful just to remind myself how I was thinking and feeling, but more than that, really, to get exact dates. But, there was this one instance. I kept a lot of letters I got too, and some that I wrote – not many – and I found this one letter from my teenage years, shortly after I came to New York, and I literally couldn’t recognize myself, at all. That was a really strange experience. I did not know who this person was who wrote a letter that had the tone and said the things the letter said. It was bizarre. It shows you another one of the huge challenges – when you’re describing what you went through at some earlier stage in your life, or some extreme situation, you can’t be that person again. It always has to be the person writing doing their best to capture what happened. But that was definitely humbling. If somebody showed me this letter cold, I would never have guessed that I wrote it.
Cinema comes up often in the book – you talk about working at the film book store, and writing term papers for students in Andrew Sarris’s class at Columbia, as well as acting in a few films. What role do you think films played in your life?
They meant a huge amount to me, though it was a lot stronger in my 20s, 30s, even my 40s. These days, I’m sort of out of touch and I find it really hard to get thrilled by a movie anymore. Back in those days, it happened all the time. In fact, something I wrote about in one of my notebooks, I remember having this funny experience sometime in the mid-’70s, going up to Times Square when they had action double features in all the theaters and seeing “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.” I had this revelation sitting there watching this movie. I got more stimulation in every respect from this movie. I was such a sucker for movies. A year or two ago, I went to some screening at the Museum of Modern Art and it said in the program that movies were the medium of the 20th century, the highest and most profound achievement in art. I never thought of it that way, but it hit me that it’s true. There are still directors that slay me – Godard still has it; whenever I go to a Godard movie it just makes everything else fall away, it’s so brilliant, intelligent, and inspired.
At the conclusion of the book, you talk about why you focused on this specific period of your life and why you ended the book when you did. Was investigating this period of your life a way to put it to rest?
I don’t know. It was already to rest in the sense that it’s not something I dwell on. I think there’s a tendency to write about that period that has more to do with it being my youth than the particular environment in which it happened. It’s not that I want to write about the rock ’n’ roll days or something. It’s that when you’re in your late-teens and early-20s you’re in the most fertile, the most interesting, time in your life.