The Brooklyn Rail

When Bob Dylan invokes Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud’s relationship in “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” it’s as the ultimate intensifier of a relationship gone bad. Paul Vaughn, assuming the role of Verlaine in Richard Hell’s novel Godlike, acts as the steward to sixteen-year old poetic ‘seer’ T., this novel’s Rimbaud, as he spelunks the underground poetry scene of New York in the 1970s. (For a full analysis of Godlike’s katabasis, please see Charles Schultz’s review in the February 2026 Rail.) The difficulties of attempting to make sense of a catastrophic relationship are revealed in one line of T.’s letter to Paul: “I want to see and be seen through.” That “through” is doing a lot of work. More than merely moving this beyond cliché, it can be read as the transparency of someone who would much sooner offend than obscure or as the desire to be seen in such a way as to be thoroughly eaten up, consumed by the adoration, wonder and disgust of the world. This is a text and these are characters to be devoured. 

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I want to make what I know of R. T. and that time into a book so that it won’t be gone. I don’t have the best memory in the world but there is no reason I can’t produce a story as close to true as it would be if these things happened yesterday. It will just have mixed into it what I have become across twenty-five years, but that includes what I’ve learned, and at least I can say with certainty that it’s written with love and without any hidden purposes or self-censorship.

Those are more or less the first words in the first of the notebooks I filled during the month I was in the hospital in 1997. I planned to write about T. in the form of a novel. I wrote other things in the notebooks besides my story of T., too: letters, diaries, poems, even an essay. Now I’ve accepted my editor’s encouragement and made this book out of all of it.

As an account of T., it will have to do, because T. is gone and only he could offer a memory to compare. I’ve known for a long time the meaning of the deaths of friends. It’s losing oneself! T. took me with him, but I’ve been what I can, and I want to present my him before it’s too late for me too.

Look, he was a scumbag. Nearly everybody hated him. He didn’t care! He insisted on it. That’s the beauty of it. But it’s important that you not like him either. If you like him, you don’t understand him. To give offense was his mission, his meaning. That was part of his failure, the impossibility of him; I don’t advocate it—it’s just what he was. I do maintain that it’s interesting. But then, a good writer can make anything interesting.

It makes me think of movie stars. People say James Dean was the same way, mean and arrogant and competitive. And I remember having this revelation watching Bette Davis on-screen one time. That everything that was magnificent about her in the movie would be impossibly obnoxious in the same room with you . . .

—Paul Vaughn
NYC, 2004

 

 

It was March and the weather was like a pornographic high-fashion magazine. But Raw’s Drink was a gutter derelict in it. The room was see-through brown broken by a debris of battered tables and cluttered walls. There was a little clearing in the far corner where a stalk of microphone stood leaning thinly.

Paul felt affection for the poor poets, his family. He probably liked them more than anyone else did. He was popular for that.

Tonight’s reader was Tom Bennett. Tom was a filthy drug addict who was too smart for his own good. His face was like a monkey’s carved from a blond wood doorstop wedge, he was going bald, and he wore reddish whiskers that looked like pond scum. He never stopped talking and he considered himself a Buddhist. Whatever else, he was in his element at Raw’s this night, and it was heartening. He was a messenger and Paul was mentally gorging on it. “God made everything from nothing, but the nothing shows through.”

Paul played a favorite mental trick for enjoying poetry readings and imagined the reader had died long ago.

The reading ended, and everyone drank on, and the room got noisier. People went out into the air and smoked grass together and came back. Paul saw the kid. He planned to find him but hadn’t gotten around to it when he sensed the attention shifting in the crowd. The kid’d gone up to three different poets in the room and told each what he thought of him. He told Bill Miller, “I read your latest book and all I can say is that your only virtue is its own punishment.” He told Barret Combs that he’d “ruined frivolity for a generation.” Then he gave each of the poets hand-copied examples of a new poem and told them that they could suck his cock for $20. He arrived at Paul, and just as Paul realized who he was the kid introduced himself. He was the boy who’d sent him a letter a few weeks before. The letter had read:

Mr. Vaughn! Sir!

I write to you most humbly, most presumptuously. I am no one except that I am a poet. And it is because I am a poet that I eat up your books. And that is why I write and enclose the pages you find here. I hope that you will respond to them.

I’m going nuts in this nowhere. Used to be I could twist in my misery and big time lusts, sweating, and the breezes of these suburban streets would cool me a little, the fruity sunsets would bring me something, as would old literature, but now I know too much! One must always move on. (It is not important to live.) I’m rotting here! I will come to New York. Especially since I know of you.

Do you know what I mean that I am no one except that I am a poet? I will explain so that you cannot misunderstand. I do not want to be anyone. I have nothing to protect! I want to see and be seen through. I am given to see and I see aloud. It is necessary that “I,” that cowardly imposition, be discarded, in order that nothing interfere, that nothing interrupt, that nothing pollute what speaks. It isn’t pretty! But it is poetry and all we know of—of—. I know you know what I mean.

Have mercy on me. Your admiring little bro,

Randall Terence Wode

 

 

Paul had written back and told the kid he should come to New York and to call him when he got there.

“I am drunk,” the boy said.

“You are?”

He lowered his voice.

“Come outside and walk with me.” They left the party behind and the air outside was a nice surprise. The presents kept coming, piling up around them as they walked. Paul got breathless and aroused.

R.T. told him his big ideas. He said honestly there were only two or three poets and that he himself was first among the living, with the possible exception of Paul, though he was in danger of going slack. He talked of how the literary was sacred but the literary was shit. That the poets’ poor knowledge must be advanced in life for poetry to be real. That the poem is everything, but incidental—it’s shit and come, it’s tracks and mirrors, hair, snot, ricocheting beams. It’s nothing, but it’s all we get and if we will be receptive it’s the thing itself, the nothing itself, and what else is there to desire, want, have, be, and it only follows from delirium, which is just ordinary life. “No big deal,” he said, and it was true—Paul’d heard it before (though he hadn’t seen it)—“You want to kiss me, don’t you.” He took Paul’s hand and pulled it to him and pressed the palm on his crotch.