{"id":109379,"date":"2017-03-29T12:06:06","date_gmt":"2017-03-29T16:06:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=109379"},"modified":"2022-04-01T12:44:57","modified_gmt":"2022-04-01T16:44:57","slug":"howards-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/29\/howards-way\/","title":{"rendered":"An Oral History of Richard Howard"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

Richard Howard.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

This Tuesday, at our annual Spring Revel, <\/em>The Paris Review will honor Richard Howard with our lifetime-achievement award, the Hadada, for a strong and unique contribution to literature. Long esteemed among poets for his verve and intellect, Howard received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize in\u00a0poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award seven times. His translations from the French helped introduce contemporary masters, such as\u00a0Roland Barthes and Michel Leiris, to American readers and breathed new life into classics like <\/em>The Charterhouse of Parma; his translation of Charles Baudelaire\u2019s <\/em>Les fleurs du mal won the 1983 National Book Award. He\u2019s the author of sixteen collections and three books of essays; his translations number in the dozens.<\/em><\/p>\n

But Howard has also had a distinguished career as a nurturer of young poets. From 1989 to 2011, he was the poetry editor of the<\/em>\u00a0Western Humanities Review, during which time he also held the same station at <\/em>The Paris Review,<\/em> from 1992 to 2005. As a teacher, he\u2019s influenced several generations of poets. We invited friends of the <\/em>Review to share their stories of Howard\u2014of working with him, learning from him, and, in several cases, surveying his elaborately decorated bathroom, adorned with the photos of dozens of poets. A portrait began to emerge: of a curious, polymathic reader; a generous mentor; and a zealous, sure-footed practitioner of his form.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

EDWARD HIRSCH (poet, former colleague)<\/p>\n

Richard is very unusual for an American poet because, as he said, he\u2019s nailed his colors to the past. American poetry has almost always been forward-looking. But Richard is looking, thinking backward.\u00a0He made himself up under the European wing of American literature. His great model is Henry James, our great novelist of consciousness, a person on whom nothing is lost.\u00a0James is the quintessential American writer who thinks about the American experience through its relation to Europe. As a poet, Richard stands in the line of American romantics like Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane, rather the line of American homemade modernists like William Carlos Williams.<\/p>\n

MARY JO BANG (poet, former student)<\/p>\n

He really is that European idea of a man of letters. It\u2019s not just the expanse of his erudition, but the expanse of his work. The reviewing that he\u2019s done, the support of poets, the correspondences, the translations, even the selection of the translations\u2014all this has put him centrally in a European tradition. We have very few people like that left.<\/p>\n

VIJAY SESHADRI (poet, former student)<\/p>\n

The poetry tends to flow into the criticism, the translation, the pedagogy, and they all form this very large river. All these voices become a part of a hydraulic environment, which contains or reflects in some way the bathroom crowded with the photographs. The personalities in the poems, in the photographs, the things going on in his mind are flowing together. The work is a reflection of a larger idea of culture that he has that he\u2019s been working out his whole career.<\/p>\n

BINNIE KIRSHENBAUM (novelist, colleague)<\/p>\n

He often speaks of his childhood, but it seems he never did the things that children do. He talks about all the time he spent in his grandfather\u2019s library. He learned to speak French during a long car ride to Florida with a distant relative who taught it to him during the ride. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever mentioned a book that he hasn\u2019t read. He\u2019s always bringing me books. He introduced me to Jim Shepard. He even brought me a Carl Hiaasen\u00a0mystery.<\/p>\n

JEFF DOLVEN (poet)<\/p>\n

I browsed with him in a bookstore once, a week after he accepted my first published poems\u2014he introduced my to Cioran and to Anne Carson\u2019s Autobiography of Red<\/em>. The message was, you still have some work to do.<\/p>\n

BANG<\/p>\n

In my ongoing attempt to come up to the edge of his intelligence\u2014I could never possibly meet it\u2014I have read and studied so much. I certainly never would have translated The Inferno<\/em> without my relationship with Richard, and the expectations he sets for poets.<\/p>\n

SESHADRI<\/p>\n

I think in those first fifteen years of my knowing him, I always wrote for Richard\u2019s approval. When I wasn\u2019t productive, he was always the person who would make me feel guilty. Although, he wasn\u2019t doing it directly, of course. I had internalized his presence.<\/p>\n

HIRSCH<\/p>\n

I once heard him say that there were three poets who had read everything that had come before\u2014Dante, Milton, and Coleridge. They\u2019d read everything in all the fields. In poetry, Richard has come as close to that as anyone could. He taught me that Baudelaire was the inaugurator of our modernity. His translations prove that.\u00a0When I was young, I thought the poets of the New York School had invented the contemporary idiom.\u00a0After I read Richard\u2019s translations of Baudelaire, though, I and then turned to Apollinaire, I realized it had come from the French poets. Richard teaches us that literature is a rocky, sweeping, continuous river.\u00a0We are fortunate to be part of it.<\/p>\n

KIRSHENBAUM<\/p>\n

Richard was always getting his students\u2019 work published\u2014if he saw something that he believed to be great.<\/p>\n

BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY (poet, former student)<\/p>\n

When we had our first private meeting,\u00a0I was shaking, of course. I was terrified. But he just said, with so much generosity, I didn\u2019t know we had this kind of talent in the class. Then he took a few of my poems for the\u00a0Western Humanities Review <\/em>and for The Paris Review<\/em>. The first time I was in print, it was because of him.<\/p>\n

JEANNE MCCULLOCH (writer, former managing editor of The Paris Review<\/em>)<\/p>\n

In a way, for George [Plimpton] to hire Richard as poetry editor of The Paris Review<\/em> was a funny thing to do. Richard was the lord of all he surveyed in his particular corner of the sky, and George in his. They couldn\u2019t have been a more unlikely pair to put in a sentence, let alone on a masthead, on one level. But on this other level, they were both deeply devoted to nurturing young writers.<\/p>\n

HIRSCH<\/p>\n

I would say that Richard\u2019s on a first-name basis with everyone in the history of poetry. He really is intimate with these poets. They\u2019re people to him. His mentoring of younger poets is meant partly to bring them into the community of poets, to make them understand that they are writing poetry, not just writing. That they are makers, and by making you are joining a community. That\u2019s the mode\u2014we\u2019re a part of a project here, alone and together, all of us.<\/p>\n

BANG<\/p>\n

If you stick around once he welcomes you, and you continue to seek him out, you see an example of what it is to be a poet\u2014to have an expansive intelligence, to be generous with others, and to form a community.<\/p>\n

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER (poet, former student)<\/p>\n

He told me this story.\u00a0A bunch of poets, he and Lowell, among others\u2014and I don\u2019t know how one could corroborate this\u2014they went swimming somewhere in a lake. This must have been in the fifties or sixties. They were all in the shallow part of the lake, and they were swimming through each other\u2019s legs, which I guess is something that midcentury people did for fun. And Lowell\u2014who was famously sort of crazy\u2014apparently locked Richard\u2019s head in between his legs when Richard was swimming through, and wouldn\u2019t let him up for a while. When he finally did, Richard surfaced to find Lowell barking with laughter at this funny thing he\u2019d done. But it scared the crap out of Richard. It was a time warp for me, hearing that story\u2014this connection to a casual moment in the lives of two of my heroes.<\/p>\n

BANG<\/p>\n

The first day I met him, I went to see him just to ask if I could be in one of his classes. I explained who I was, and what I was doing, and he very sweetly said, But, my dear, you\u2019re already a poet. Because on his desk was a copy of Salmagundi Magazine<\/em>. Coincidentally, there was a long article in that issue about his work by James Longenbach. Richard picked it up, opened it, and I could see that on the page opposite the end of the Longenbach was my poem. He said, See? Very nice poem. You\u2019re already a poet.<\/p>\n

That kind of generosity, though, is the kind I\u2019ve experienced from Richard in all these years since. You\u2019re already a poet. <\/em>And to include you in that circle of poets when you\u2019re just starting out \u2026 He\u2019s never been otherwise.<\/p>\n

LORIN STEIN (editor, former student)<\/p>\n

In college I was lucky enough to take a seminar with Richard devoted entirely to the problems of translating the French alexandrin<\/em>, the twelve-syllable line of traditional French poetry. A whole semester. It was one of the best classes I ever took. Richard could instantly point to what was alive in even crummy, apprentice attempts, and could gently dismiss for all time a stumble, as a stumble.<\/p>\n

I remember him once pointing to a line in a translation of a sonnet by Jos\u00e9-Maria de Heredia. I don\u2019t remember what the line was, but I remember him muttering under his breath, Oh, that won\u2019t do. It stuck with me. The idea that there\u2019s no point in analyzing the problems of a translation if it won\u2019t do<\/em>.<\/p>\n

TEICHER<\/p>\n

There is no space in Richard\u2019s apartment not covered with books, except the ceiling, where gravity prevents him from shelving them. And hung upon the bookcases and the few little bits of wall that are free are just hundreds<\/em> of pictures of poets. I mean, there are pictures on every surface in the house where there\u2019s room for them, but it\u2019s really the bathroom where you notice it. Elizabeth Bishop \u2026 just all these people you don\u2019t want watching you doing your business.<\/p>\n

KIRSHENBAUM<\/p>\n

He told me someone went into his bathroom, came out, and wanted to know who I was, having seen my picture in there. I told him I wasn\u2019t sure if that was a compliment or not. Quite the privileged place to be immortalized, though.<\/p>\n

SESHADRI<\/p>\n

I understood that Richard was a high priest of art. I\u2019m sure the Pope has portraits of all the saints in the papal quarters of the Vatican.<\/p>\n

HIRSCH<\/p>\n

His apartment is the only place you can go to the bathroom and feel intimidated because you think the Goncourt brothers are observing you. But that\u2019s what I mean by being intimate. These are models and mentors, sure, but he really doesn\u2019t make that much of a distinction between the poets he knew and the poets he did not know, the poets he read and the poets he knew personally.<\/p>\n

TEICHER<\/p>\n

I took care of his dog for a long time\u2014this amazing creature of a thing named Gide, who was a French bulldog, more human than dog, though a very strange human. French bulldogs, you know, they\u2019re one of those inbred kind of breeds, and they can\u2019t really breathe. So when Gide would sneeze, he\u2019d cover his own face with snot. And you know that scene at the beginning of Scooby-Doo<\/em>, where Scooby just like licks all this food off his face? That was Gide\u2019s favorite thing, to sneeze on his face. It was like a free meal.<\/p>\n

MCCULLOCH<\/p>\n

One of my favorite days of the year when I was managing editor of the Review<\/em> was to bring our volunteer poetry readers over to Richard\u2019s apartment. He would sit with this crowd of aspiring poets and discuss their work. For volunteer readers, this was way beyond any kind of cash remuneration for their services they could have ever imagined. Unfailingly, behind Richard on his high-backed armchair, would sit Maude, in those days\u2014Maude, who was later eclipsed by Gide. The young poets would sit there and try to keep a straight face as Richard, in his wonderful, articulate way, critiqued their work while the dog licked the bald pate of his head.<\/p>\n

SHAUGHNESSY<\/p>\n

Gide also licked other things.<\/p>\n

HIRSCH<\/p>\n

When I was in my thirties, when I realized I was going to actually have a life in poetry\u2014before that, it was really questionable\u2014but after I published a book and had a job, I began looking around for literary models. I couldn\u2019t find many. Most poets, I discovered, were very bitter and somewhat unhappy. They felt underappreciated. When I met Richard, I met someone who was not bitter, who wasn\u2019t so concerned with his own reputation. He really felt fulfilled. And the way he felt fulfilled was the way he participated in literature. And the way he brought other people in\u2014of course with his own translations, but also with his talks about poetry, his reading of poetry, his reviews. I found a model of someone who was fully realized. He was joyful in his participation in poetry.<\/p>\n

KIRSHENBAUM<\/p>\n

When I close my eyes, I picture Richard in one of his spectacular outfits\u2014but mostly\u00a0I just see this huge smile. The way he looks at you with utter delight. He\u2019s somebody who is truly happy to be in the world.<\/p>\n

MCCULLOCH<\/p>\n

He has always had that impeccable sense of style. Early on in his tenure as\u00a0poetry editor at the Review, we invited him to a causal dinner at George\u2019s. I think we made a pot of spaghetti. I can still see Richard arriving, looking debonair\u2014the red frames of his glasses matching the stripes of his shirt, the elegant jacket, the whole look. And then there\u2019s George, bent over his manual typewriter with one shirttail out of his trousers, sleeves half rolled up, hair every which way because he\u2019s on deadline. His prep for dinner was to tuck in his shirttail and comb his hair. I felt like a nervous yenta, bringing these two together, but I needn\u2019t have worried. Their common sense of mission at the Review<\/em> was clear even that very first night, over spaghetti on Seventy-Second Street.<\/p>\n

BANG<\/p>\n

Richard loves to read his poems to his friends. He loves to share the excitement of creation. He\u2019s got a wonderful, performative voice. Reading a poem by Richard is only part of the experience. Hearing it is the complete experience.<\/p>\n

HIRSCH<\/p>\n

Richard is the heir to Browning, with his dramatic monologues. He disguises himself. \u201cHoward\u2019s Way\u201d is a way of thinking about himself through others. He does remarkable impersonations of other figures. But behind it is a kind of meditation about being a person, and how to be a person and become an artist.<\/p>\n

STEIN<\/p>\n

Richard doesn\u2019t insist that young poets sound like him, or like one another. He\u2019s open to all kinds of things. He has a nose that will let him say, This will do, that won\u2019t do. But it\u2019s a very mysterious thing. It\u2019s the same thing that made him able to hear and honor a daunting diversity of voices in Les\u00a0fleur du Mal<\/em>. It allows him a great variety of pleasure and experience in his reading. That\u2019s one thing to treasure when you look at his years at The Paris Review,\u00a0<\/em>the variety of expression.<\/p>\n

MCCULLOCH<\/p>\n

That image of our volunteer poetry readers gathering at Richard\u2019s apartment has never left me. It embodies, to me, some of the singular things about him as an editor and, I imagine, as a teacher\u2014his love of nurturing talent, and the time and care he energetically puts into that. Also, of course, his ability to draw a crowd around him that would hang on his every word.<\/p>\n

HIRSCH<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to remember Richard made himself up. All this knowledge didn\u2019t just come to him through his education. Yes, he went to progressive schools in Cleveland, and then Columbia. But he decided<\/em> to turn himself into a person of letters. It\u2019s a very American story. He decided<\/em> to do that. He figured out how to talk like that and how to think like that. You know the other people in Cleveland weren\u2019t talking and thinking that way. Richard\u2019s is a very American story of how to become, and how to live the life of, a cosmopolitan artist.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Daniel Johnson works at\u00a0<\/em>The Paris Review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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Way: An Oral History of Richard Howard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Friends of \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 share stories about the poet Richard Howard, who will be honored with this year\u2018s Hadada Award for Lifetime Achievement.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/29\/howards-way\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"An Oral History of Richard Howard by Daniel Johnson\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"March 29, 2017 \u2013 Friends of \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 share stories about the poet Richard Howard, who was honored with the 2017 Hadada Award for Lifetime Achievement.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" 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