ONE OF OUR FINEST, however underappreciated, American poets was Richard Howard, who died on March 31, 2022, at the age of 92. You may not have heard of him, but you may well have read one of the books he translated from the French. There are literally hundreds of them—everyone from De Gaulle to Saint-Exupery, Cocteau to Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes to Jean-Paul Sartre. He translated with a grace that finally earned him the American Book Award in 1983 for Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. He was also a teacher. According to Edmund White, an erstwhile lover, he knew “no love that was not pedagogical.” He was a brilliant, if eccentric, critic, especially of his contemporaries. His study Alone with America: Essay on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950 (1969, enlarged 1980) is a monument to postwar poetry. His blurbs were an art form in themselves. And he was a dear friend of mine for forty years.
Richard was an adopted child. His adoptive mother came from a wealthy, highly cultured Jewish family from Cleveland, and, although he spent sixty years in New York City, his purring voice retained something of the Ohioan. Among his happiest moments as a child was being in the “magic chamber” of his grandfather’s library, “a grand room with a coffered ceiling, full of beautiful and untouchable matched sets” of books. At the age of five, he was taught French by an aunt, who thought it would be a way to amuse him on their long car trip from Ohio to Florida. He was sent to the Park School of Cleveland, which he celebrated in his final collection, Progressive Education (2014), in which he assumes the voice of a class of precocious sixth graders writing to their principal, Mrs. Masters, as well as to their teachers and fellow students. This book is an extraordinary accomplishment—he was in his eighties writing as though he were twelve. It is arguably his best and most approachable collection.
Richard attended Columbia University, where his friends included John Hollander, Anthony Hecht, and Allen Ginsberg. In fact, he dated Ginsberg, and Richard told me of an adventure he and Ginsberg embarked upon to the wilds of Flushing, Queens, in order to examine an illegally smuggled copy of Genet’s banned poetry. For many years he lived with novelist Sanford Friedman.
If Richard Howard is underappreciated now—though anyone who has won the Pulitzer Prize and the forerunner to the National Book Award cannot be called unappreciated—and if he receives less attention than contemporaries like James Merrill or John Ashbery, it may be because, as poetry critic James Longenbach has remarked, “Howard’s sensibility remains threatening to many readers.” How so? Much of his œuvre consists of dramatic monologues in the manner of Robert Browning, whose speakers reveal more than they wish to and test readers’ powers of discrimination. It’s a form that challenges the notion of “authenticity” that’s so valued by many poets.
His poems may also be threatening because they test readers’ knowledge of literature and history.
(Effie of course declares, each
Day, that we must leave [Venice]:
A woman cannot help having no heart, but
That is hardly a reason she should have
No manners)
Who is Effie? She is Ruskin’s wife, and she will ultimately divorce him because Ruskin has never consummated the marriage. Who is the one without a heart or manners?
The poem is a letter that Richard Howard imagines Ruskin wrote in answer to his father’s news that J. M. W. Turner has died. Turner was the great painter that Ruskin devoted the first of his five-volume series, Modern Painters, to defending. One would expect that Ruskin would have been devastated by this news, and he does express some grief. He tells his father that Turner had “taught [him]to see” in the “red vertical cliffs … a tremor/ Of light.” As important as this lesson was in the past, “How much more I feel/ This now.” But then Ruskin immediately adds: “(perhaps it is worth noting here/ The appearance of my first/ Gray hair, this morning).” It tells us something about the nature of Ruskin’s grief that he felt the appearance of his first gray hair to be something “worth noting.” It is through his subtle use of language and detail that Howard builds up his complex and vivid monologues. Ruskin is unaware of what he reveals about himself; it is the reader who must recognize the significance of small gestures.
So, even if you know nothing about Ruskin, the following lines should make you queasy. Here, Ruskin writes to his father about the beauty of Italians.
Even the people
Look to me ugly, except children from eight
To fourteen, who here as in Italy
Anywhere are glorious …
At fifteen
They degenerate
Into malignant vagabonds or sensual
Lumps of lounging fat.
Yes, it is creepy. Howard will not ignore Ruskin’s creepiness. But with the word “degenerate”—one of the many terms that preceded “homosexual”—Howard (or is it Ruskin?) suggests a queerness that is disruptive to Victorian society. Readers are made uncomfortable because they must confront the dark aspects of their dark desires as well as their nicer ones.
If Ruskin is so creepy, so narcissistic, and so insensitive, why write a six-page poem in his voice? Why read Ruskin or read about him? Howard answers that question with Ruskin quoting himself. Howard borrowed for his poem a line from the multi-volume study, Stones of Venice (1851–53), whose first volume appeared in the year the poem is set.
“The shore lies naked under
The night, pathless, comfortless and infirm
In dark languor, still except
Where salt runlets plash
Into tideless pools, or seabirds flit from their
Margins with a questioning cry.”
This is not just any sentence. It’s a sentence that has been cited as “the most gorgeous prose styles of the nineteenth century.” But not only has Howard quoted Ruskin, but he has placed Ruskin’s words in his own snaky syllabic pattern—the lines 5, 7, 9, 11 syllables in length. They are, therefore, no longer just Ruskin’s lines; they are Howard’s as well, the words now reshaped by a hand a century in the future. For Howard, the past is never gone or finished. It is living with us and in us, even if we are ignorant of its presence. We do harm to ourselves by ignoring the past or remaining ignorant of it. The discomfort we face in Howard’s work comes from his insistence on placing us under the moral obligation to be aware of ourselves, of our past, and of the future.
In forty years, Richard and I had only one squabble. It started in a rare telephone call. I was in Baltimore; he was teaching at the University of Houston. I gushed about my new discovery, the obscure American gay author Francis Grierson, who wrote The Valley of Shadows (1909), a memoir of his youth in Illinois when it was still a territory. A week later, I received an angry letter. How dare I recommend a book whose dialogue was in dialect!
Two points should be made. First, it is notable that Richard took the time and trouble to locate a copy of Valley of Shadows, for he was already a distinguished man of letters, and I was a novice, a naïf. Second, while his rejection of the book may appear to be snobbish, I think it was actually something very different. I had a boyfriend who was a professional French horn player, and he was very careful when and if he kissed me because he said he had to protect his embouchure. His lips were his life. Language was Richard’s life, and I think he felt that he needed to protect the delicate instrument of his sensibility.
But I don’t want you to think there was something effete about Richard. His erudition was complemented by what some might call a vulgar penchant for the gothic and the sensational. Poems like “Famed Dancer Dies of Phosphorous Poisoning” or “Man Who Beats Up Homosexuals Reported to Have AIDS Virus,” if not ripped from the headlines, are at the very least clipped from the back pages. In his series “Masters on the Movies,” in which he imagined Henry James, Joseph Conrad, George Meredith, Rudyard Kipling, and Willa Cather at the cineplex, the films they watch are not by Orson Welles, Truffaut, or even Hitchcock, but big Hollywood extravaganzas like Now Voyager, Lost Horizon, Woman of the Year, King Kong, and Queen Christina (starring Greta Garbo). In “Again for Hephaistos, the Last Time,” an elegy for W. H. Auden, he tells Auden that he can “no longer endure a difficult mutual friend. … Because he calls everyone else either a kike or a cocksucker,” when difficult friend and Richard are both. Auden’s reply is that he never knew Howard was Jewish. It takes a perfectly tuned sensibility to know when “kike” and “cocksucker” are les mots justes.
In Progressive Education, the Sixth Grade has asked the principal to expel Arthur Englehurst for having killed a peacock during a class trip. Later, the students, most of whom are ethnic Jews, discover that before being orphaned Englehurst lived among the Hasidim, and that one ceremony commonly performed by Hasidic Jews, the kapparot, involves swinging a chicken by the neck so that it absorbs one’s evil. The Sixth Grade now wants Arthur to rejoin their class, because they now believe he was acting out of a cultural context that they had not appreciated. They now see Arthur’s statements at the time—“I had to do it”—not as a declaration of cruelty but as an expression of religious obligation.
Why would Howard write about so strange and esoteric a situation? As a gay man and as a Jew, he knew how his actions could be misinterpreted. Judgment must come out of the cultural context in which it is performed, but our failure to understand these contexts has deadly consequences. Our very language takes its meaning only within a cultural context. The instruments of awareness are very delicate, and poor Arthur Englehurst, having first lost his parents (and remember Howard was an adopted child) and then the culture in which he’d been raised, must be given room “to find himself.”
And so we face the question of why Richard Howard was an important American poet whose loss is of particular significance. Because, as a gay man, as a Jew, as an American, as a person of great learning, he was constantly refining his understanding of culture and his instrument of expression.
The last time I saw Richard, I’m not sure whether he knew me, but he sat at lunch attentive to every word I spoke to his husband, painter David Alexander. He himself said nothing, but he seemed to be sifting through what we said, suddenly smiling at a turn phrase, at a telling allusion, a vivid metaphor. Later, David told me that when Richard couldn’t understand what was being said to him, he still took pleasure in being read to aloud. He responded to the music of language, to the very presence of language.
What makes Richard Howard so discomforting and so important (the two in my mind are always linked) was his insatiability, not just as an intellectual, not merely as a translator, critic, and poet, but as a sensibility that could never see enough, never feel enough, never know enough, who wished to feel each moment not just in itself but as part of a continuity of moments that we share together. Nothing could be queerer than this insatiability.
David Bergman’s 1991 book Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature has recently been released in a new edition by the University of Wisconsin Press.
