Rick Whitaker: Where, when, and to whom were you born?

 

Richard Howard: I know about it in a kind of sketchy way, the way an adoptive mother would tell her child eventually what she knew. I was born, so I was told, in the institution from which I was adopted, on October 13, 1929. My adoptive mother, who I always thought of as my mother, had tried and had had several operations and really couldn't bear, and so she went to several places to inquire about adoption. She was discouraged, because she'd gone to a rather fancy place first, the Steven Weil Institution or something like that, and they tried to pass off on her a baby that was not entirely right. She had worked as a social worker and she knew enough to know. She was very angry about it, because it was a very attractive child. But there was something wrong. The same thing happened to Ed Hirsch and his wife. They decided to adopt and for family reasons they insisted that it be a Jewish child. Finally when they were in Rome at the Academy they had news from some institution in New Orleans, that they had a child for them. They went and picked the baby up and brought him back to Rome, and we were there, David and I, at the time, about 25 years ago. We were quite aware that he wasn't a normal child. We thought he was, well, there were other names for it then. I think adoption is sometimes not exactly what the ... Parents are so eager to have a child, and it's just not clear at the start that it's going to be as difficult as it turns out to be.

 

RW: It's hard to predict. What do you know about your birth mother?

 

RH: We didn't know who the father was but my mother always said that she was a woman of some distinction. She was Jewish, and there was some connection to people we

knew.

 

RW: Did your parents specifically want a Jewish baby?

 

RH: No, they didn't care about that. And two years later, in 1931, the institute that had done my adoption called my mother and said "Why not adopt another child?" The perception in those days was that it wasn't good to be an only child, it's better to have siblings. Pure nonsense. In any case, rich Jews--and we were that, alright—but 1931 was two years after the Crash and they were not about to adopt a second child. It was just ridiculous to think of it. It wasn't that they were impoverished, it was just not the time to do such a thing.

 

RW: Did the Crash directly affect your family?

 

RH: No. I don't think so. The only thing that affected my family was that when I was six years old it became clear that my mother's first husband had been casually stealing money from her and managed to get off with about $700,000. And she divorced him.

 

RW; Do you remember him well?

 

RH: Oh, yeah, I was six years old. And I continued seeing him on weekends, on Sunday afternoons. I called him "Dad." I didn't think of him as my father because the first word I

ever knew was "adopted." No one was my father. My mother was a loving person, but I don't think Harry—his name was Orwitz–he came from a rather distinguished family. I remember his father, an old blind man, arrived for a couple of visits when I was 2 or 3 years old with a chauffeur, and a wonderful suit with a watch chain and beard, from Kentucky.

 

RW: Like Elizabeth Hardwick.

 

RH: By the way, we saw that movie, "The Powder and the Glory." It's a kind of documentary about Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein. It's wonderful. David is related to Helena Rubinstein, so we rented it and had a wonderful time watching it.

 

RW: You're talking about Elizabeth Arden, I had said Elizabeth Hardwick! She's the one from Kentucky.

 

RH: So were the horses! Because of the Derby. Elizabeth Arden had horses and stables there. She was from somewhere in New England, from a very undistinguished family. Anyway, Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden were heads of the two leading cosmetics businesses, you know, which was very unusual in the 1920s. They never spoke though their establishments were five blocks away from each other. When Elizabeth Arden was feeding a horse a carrot in Kentucky, the horse bit her finger off. They rushed her to the hospital to sew it back on again and when Helena Rubinstein was asked what she thought about that, she said, "Well, what happened to the horse?"

 

RW: You once told me a story about Elizabeth Hardwick, about a phone call she made to you, the theme of which was "curtains" vs "drapes." You remember?

 

RH: It was just at that period when writers were first getting jobs—not permanent jobs, but good jobs--in universities, teaching, and she was able to do that at Columbia. It wasn't that they needed money, but she needed something to do. When Cal–Robert–Lowell's first wife, Jean Stafford, got a job at Columbia, Lizzy called me and said, "Dick"--she always called me Dick–"this is terrible, I can't bear this! They don't even read me!" When Elizabeth started teaching at Columbia, or Barnard, she called me and said. "“Oh Dick, I’m not enjoying teaching. The girls are so ignorant. You know, they say ‘drapes’ when they mean ‘curtains’. Now our Susan [Sontag] wasn’t like that. She wouldn’t have used those words incorrectly. Of course she did have cancer. Well, it was only cancer of the breasts. Silly floppy things. It’s not like having cancer of an internal organ. Now Lionel had cancer of an internal organ. That was serious. If you have cancer of an internal organ it’s curtains, or as my girls would say, ‘drapes’.” Part of her gift was always to have this surreal thing going on in her head. She was just wonderful.

 

RW: Tell me about the time when you were very young and met Carl Van Vechten.

 

RH: It was my freshman year at Columbia. I was 17. There was this gay teacher named Sanford Crider who was kind of a silly southern man. We went around together a little bit. We didn't go to bed together, I wasn't interested in sleeping with him, but it was pleasant, and I think he felt the same way, more or less. One day he said he was going to see Carl Van Vechten, and would I like to come along. Sure, I said, I knew who Carl Van Vechten was. I had read one of his books, Parties, which wasn't very good, but it was funny. So we went there, and he was living on Central Park West in a great big apartment, very shabby but big, with cats everywhere. He was married to Fania Marinoff, the dancer who by then did nothing but knitting. They were talking about their life as literary people. It was quite interesting. Then they were talking about gaining weight–he was quite fat by then. And he said, "You know, the other day I went to the toilet and looked at myself in the mirror and saw my penis for the first time in six months." And Fania, with an adorable little laugh, looked up from her knitting and said, "Well, it's been a lot longer than that since I've seen it." And nobody talked that way then, I had never heard such things, I was 17 years old. I really was shocked, which was exactly what they wanted.

 

RW: Did you ever meet Gertrude Stein?

 

RH: No, but my friends did, of course. My mother's best friend was named Margaret Bates, she was a minister's daughter but very intellectual. She and her husband had a son who was sent overseas and met Alice, who liked him and took him home to meet Gertrude. What he was, of course, was queer as a three-dollar bill. My mother had very powerful friendships, usually with non-Jewish women. By the time I was in college she went rather further than that with a Catholic woman, Ethel, fifteen years older than herself. They came to visit me from time to time in New York and I was aware the beds were moving closer and closer together. By the time I graduated from Columbia they were a pair.

 

RW: What happened to your mother 's second husband?

 

RH: My mother's second husband was a mistake. I was nine. He was a very attractive guy. I always thought he was the Torso Killer, a famous murderer, but I don't suppose he was. They were only married for about three months. He was a doctor. Then her third husband Ralph was her first cousin, and in Ohio you're not allowed to marry your first cousin even if you're sixty years old, so they had to go to North Carolina to get married. I was eleven then. I called him "Pop" or something since I didn't want to call anyone Dad again. I'd already been through that. He had three grown children from his first wife who had died. They divorced when I was in college. My mother didn't know she was homosexual, she thought she just liked women. But with my help she figured it out and she and Ethel had a wonderful twenty years together. My mother was an alcoholic. But she became much less virulent an alcoholic than she had been. Ethel was a really nice person. Not interesting, but very attractive. They traveled all over, they went to visit the pope. Ethel's purse was picked in the Vatican. And they moved in together. Ethel moved in. And when my mother died, Ethel and I took care of it together. And when Ethel died, she left me $10,000 of her own. She never had much money, but she was retired and she did have that much. She loved me because I was Emma's boy, but we got along real well. I wasn't interested in her, she had a terrible laugh, but Mother was interested in her and she was really good with her. She was from southern Ohio, and they were rather distinguished people– distinguished morally. Good people, without being too fussy about it. Fine people. Ethel was a really good social worker, she was made a supervisor when she was much younger than her colleagues there. She was very accomplished. I didn't know her family very well, I only saw them at various funerals. I think for both of them there was this exoticism, this very rich Jewish woman who went to Vassar, on the one hand....

 

RW: What did she study?

 

RH: I don't know. She did get quite close to her teachers. There was something about Ida

Tree, who was a woman writer of some interest who had been in Cleveland and she

was married to the director of the Cleveland Playhouse, and they divorced and my mother kept up with Ida. She came to visit us during the war. She was living in France. She wrote a book about living off the coast of Normandy during the Second World War. As an American woman, it was awful because the Germans were there. Anyway she came to visit us and my mother said something to her about studying French, that she was trying to memorize French words in the bathtub, and I wondered whether Ida went in with her, because there was something about my mother 's attraction to distinguished women, always. Not necessarily good-looking the way Ethel was, but women of accomplishments that have interesting work to do. She had that sort of taste in women.

 

RW: Your mother's relationship with Ethel reminds me a little of Sylvia Townsend

Warner. She had a hetero relationship first, and then moved on to Valentine.

 

RH: That's right, she never did men again. She could have. A lot of people liked her.

 

RW: Why did you decide to teach an entire course on Warner at Columbia last semester?

 

RH: She was doing exactly what the other writers that I was interested in could do, which was to make literature in all shapes and sizes: poems, short stories, essays, and I want the kids to know about that. We read D. H. Lawrence and Kipling [in previous semesters]. I hadn't done a woman yet, and I didn't want to do it with Stein because I felt that was too--it would have been distracting because of the nature of her writing, which got to be so complicated and bitter, the kids wouldn't enjoy that at all, even now, reading those... great works. I would teach Gertrude Stein for other reasons. Sylvia wrote everything, she translated, she wrote a biography of T.H. White, the author of The Once and Future King, all that stuff. As well as really wonderful diaries and letters, so I thought that would be the right thing. And then I realized there was even something else. I'd never had the opportunity of having students read a writer they had never heard of. And they weren't resentful at Columbia but they were mystified. But I thought it was a great opportunity. It's one of the wonderful things about literature, that you can do that, you've never heard of a person and then there it is. And the students got it. It was that experience of not having read anything by that person and discovering not only that it was valuable but that she was a really terrific writer.

 

RW: Could you try to say why you think she's a terrific writer? How would you sell her to someone who's never read her before?

 

RH: Her gifts as poet and as a prose writer were extraordinarily detailed and exceptional in that she really noticed things in a very original way, whether it was a human being or a relationship between human beings or things growing in a field or the shape of a house or the taste of something she was cooking she could really distinguish one thing from another, and it was exceptional, her gift for that. It made her novels–we read five of them, and there were two more–and even the connected stories, like Kingdoms of Elfin at the end, when she said she "got tired of the human heart" and invented these weird, unreal creatures but she gave them all a reality that was just extraordinary. It never stopped, her originality with things like cooking or flowers or things growing, she was marvelous about anything alive. So I guess it was her capacity for accuracy and an almost visionary exactitude about life itself. She wasn't very interested in philosophy as such and she was really anti-religious.

 

RW: Like you.

 

RH: Pretty much. I'm anti-church. Like Sylvia, I'm sort of interested in the spiritual but not as long as it's going to be associated with any kind of church. And Sylvia was very troubled about it, especially when at the end of her life Valentine became a member of the Catholic Church, she reverted to her old Irish Catholic upbringing. Sylvia was decent about it, she didn't make fun of it, but....

 

RW: What did you think of Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre [at the NY Phil last week]?

 

RH: I hated it. I thought it was crude, and he's such a good composer. I like a lot of his music, his chamber music and piano music—I love the piece called San Francisco Polyphony. I think Ligeti is very interesting, but I just didn't think he was very interested in the libretto, and I like that writer, the playwright. I read the text in English and it just seemed like nonsense. I didn't like it. But it was a real event at the concert hall, what they did, and the conductor was wonderful. But it made it impossible to really hear the music, they were doing so much stuff on the stage.

 

RW: You were hearing the opera for the first time? I have a strong feeling that we're really not able to appreciate music the first time we hear it.

 

RH: For most music, that's absolutely true. And especially with such a big production.

You're right. I was very impressed by the way they did it, it was astonishing, and the orchestra played it with such desire to put it across.

 

RW: Yet you "hated it"?

 

RH: I just didn't care for it at all.

 

RW: You wouldn't want to go back and see it again?

 

RH: Probably not, not that production. I'd like to see other productions of it.

 

RW: Where did you first go to school?

 

RH: It was the Park School, the school I'm writing about in my poems now, in Cleveland Heights. It was a private school that got money from the Rockefellers because it was progressive, and everybody paid a large tuition. It was a tiny school. They only graduated one class up to college from the beginning. I went there up through 7th grade. It was the wonder of my life, that school. It was so satisfying and thrilling. We were vying with each other to get there early each day. All our chauffeurs brought us and dropped us off before 9 in the morning. We had so many things to do, playing with animals, there was a pet turkey, and a goat. We were all crazy about it. We loved school. It was progressive: we had to make up things and invent things.

 

RW: What exactly do you mean by "progressive”?

 

KH: Well, it was a big movement, there were many versions of it in the 30s in America. This one was a pretty advanced school. When I was in seventh grade the teacher I had then had come from England and she was appalled that we'd never studied grammar, so she got us to diagram sentences for a year, which I loved. But before that we were studying Egypt and the Nile and so forth, and we studied the Vikings and this and that. It was very exciting and fun, and there were these woods that were part of the school grounds, and we were always out there. There was an enormous skating rink, and we all skated. It was a wonderful place.

 

RW: Were there particular teachers who were important to you?

 

RH: Oh, many, year after year. Even in Kindergarten, Mrs. Kem was somebody, and Miss Husband in 3rd grade, and then in 4th grade Ms. Peterson, who was a nut for the Vikings, and she was a Northern woman herself. And then the next year was Mrs. Kohl for two years, 5th grade and 6th. She was an elderly woman and really had the progressive slant on everything.

 

RW: She taught all the subjects herself?

 

RH: No, by the time we were in sixth grade we moved around quite a lot. Mr. Lee was the science teacher, and he would introduce us to live alligators and things like that. A lot of animals that we played with all the time.

 

RW: And you liked animals all along? Did you have pets?

 

RH: Oh, yes, dogs. English bulldogs initially. And my grandmother had a French bulldog.

When my mother married Ralph, her first cousin, and seemed to settle down, we had three Scotties. There was a long dining room table, and Ralph and my mother and I would sit at one end and the three dogs would sit on chairs at the other end of the table! They didn't eat there, but they could drink water from a glass on the table. I remember when I brought a friend home from college. He was so stunned by that! My mother was always drunk, and so was Ralph. That was the thing about the beginning of their marriage, neither of them knew that the other was an alcoholic. It was a bad business.

 

RW: Tell me about Miss Husband, one of the main characters in your new poems.

 

RH: She was very attractive and funny, from Califomia.

 

RW: Where did you go for high school?

 

RH: I went to the Shaker Heights High School.

 

RW: A public school?

 

RH: Well, it was Shaker Heights, so it really wasn't very public. It was very nice. I had a good time, but I was so far ahead of my colleagues.

 

RW: Did you do well in all the subjects?

 

RH: Not really, I only wanted to shine in the things I was interested in, which was part of what progressive education was, allowing students to find out for themselves what they

wanted to do. I did like the math and science courses, but I wasn't particularly good at them. But we had a good time with history, we "made up" the pioneers and the Greeks and Egyptians and all that stuff. It was marvelous.

 

RW: You met Anne Hollander in 1937 or ‘38?

 

RH: Yeah, she was one year younger than me. She was Anne Loesser then. Arthur 

Loesser's daughter–the evil of two Loessers. They were very distinguished, lovely

people. Anne's grandmother knew my mother's mother when they were schoolgirls, so

our families went back a long way even though they weren't Jewish. But then Arthur was

very Jewish. When he married Jean, he really didn't want to be a part of the Jewish congregation in any way. He did not want to be a Jew. Very irritating. When the war came, he was one of the few people in the West who knew Japanese, so he got sent all over the place. Anyway, Anne went to a very handsome girl's school for a while, and we really didn't get to know one another well until almost time to go to college. I thought of going to one of the prep schools in Cleveland, but when I went to take their entrance exam I thought it was so childish and uninteresting. So I told my mother that I didn't want to do that. I was a terror because I was so smart. I remember in algebra class the teacher would always ask for volunteers to give the answer, and I always had my hand up. He would look down his nose at the room and then say to me, "Alright, tell 'em, Brains." Which became my nickname in school for three years: Brains.

 

RW: Did you have close friends in high school?

 

RH: Oh, yeah. Especially cute young men.

 

RW: Did you... play with them?

 

RH: No, but I would have liked to. I didn't get to do that until college. Although I knew I was gay from the time I was nine. I remember figuring that out and thinking. This is not going to be easy. I told my mother and she was not horrified, but she just wondered what would happen. And then when she turned out to be a lesbian, , it was amusing that we shared that, though it wasn't easy for my mother to talk about it even then.

 

RW: Did you not play sexually with other children at all? Weren't you eager to be intimate with other boys?

 

RH: I was much more interested in people older than I was, and I didn't seem able to reach them. It just didn't seem at all like something I could manage as a child. But then as soon as I got to Columbia. Right away. There was a boy named John Itta.

 

RW: Was he a beauty?

 

RH: I don't think so, but he was available. There was someone else he was interested in who was much more attractive than me, but who I think wasn't gay, though John always

suspected he was.

 

RW: How did you feel about John's being interested in this other person?

 

RH: I thought it was terrific. He was obviously more attractive than anyone else in our class.

 

RW: You didn't feel jealous?

 

RH: Oh, no.

 

RW: Have you ever felt jealous?

 

RH: I don't think so. It hasn't come up very much.

 

RW: That's unusual, isn't it?

 

RH: I don't know, it doesn't seem unusual to me. I was used to being a sort of "star" figure in my circle.

 

RW: Do you think monogamy is the right goal? Is it the right thing?

 

RH: I don't think anything's the right thing for everybody. For some people it is and for some it isn't. When I met David I was 49 and he was still in his late 20s, so it was a very different kind of relationship than if we'd been the same age. I guess in relation to David Osborne, the doctor, who was very beautiful and so forth, I can imagine having been jealous. It was so difficult to obtain access to him in the first place. But then we went to the South Pacific for a year and I was always with him and there was no one to be jealous of.

 

RW: You spent a year in the South Pacific? Tahiti?

 

RH: Yes. Almost a year. The French islands were much more interesting than Tahiti, and I liked them much better.

 

RW: What did you do all that time in the South Pacific? Read? Write?

 

RH: I never wrote anything. I had just graduated from Columbia, had done a little work with translation, but my mother had died and I inherited quite a lot of money.

 

RW: When did you first learn to read?

 

RH: I remember that perfectly. I insisted that someone teach me. I was two years and nine months old. My grandmother was living in this "chateau," really an establishment with a private drive opposite a Jewish country club. There were two: this was the old one. There was a summer camp there for the kids, and I liked the swimming pool. I could swim. My grandfather built a big house with gardens and flowers, chauffeur, gardener, cook, upstairs girl.

 

RW: There's a similarity between you and Hart Crane, isn't there?

 

RH: Some similarity. I can remember going to Crane's Canary Cottage for dinner and

hearing about the family and that mother, Grace. We probably even met her. And of course I heard about the Life Savers, the candy with the hole in the middle. Anyway. there was a very grand library in my grandmother's house, and my grandfather, who died before I was born, was a gent who liked to move among fine bindings. There were these enormous sets of books, and I liked to look at them. I learned to read very quickly because my grandmother said, "Well, I'll teach you." I remember the day I really began to leam, I was reading "Little Black Sambo" and there was a difficulty I had over the letter "T" and then an apostrophe and "11." It was so difficult for me to figure out that that was a contraction, that I would have to supply the real words there. It was a kind of symbol, and I didn't get that. And my grandmother was very impatient with me about that because I was so good at reading anything that was standard English. So she explained it to me gradually. She wasn't a very good teacher. But I finally got it and was off and running from then on. I was not yet three. When I got to the Park School, nobody was reading yet. I read everything I could find. I didn't like poetry very much, but I knew what it was. I didn't really take poetry up until after the third grade. I liked Browning very early on. I liked the idea of other people talking. But when I was young I read mostly books with pictures. I loved The Swiss Family Robinson when I was five.

 

RH: [Hands me a copy of the new Raritan, which contains one of his new poems.] That's for you.

 

RW: But I don't see your name on the cover.

 

RH: It's there. It's on the back.

 

RW: Oh, I see. You're in the same issue with Fred Seidel.

 

RH: Oh, terrible poem.

 

RW: Terrible poem or poet?

 

RH: Poem. Well, both.

 

RW: Oh, and a new piece by Leo Bersani.

 

RH: And there's a piece about him that's quite interesting. [The phone rings, and RH answers it. Is that Dorothea? That's right. Mine is gone, but David is still suffering. Well, I've never had allergies. But I'll ask him if he thinks that's a possibility. Yeah. Well, no, but I think I'd better ask him and we'll talk more about it. Because I think it's very important. Yeah. Umhm. Yes, I'm very interested and I think it might be really the case. Well, I'lI talk to David tonight and we'll call you tomorrow. ..... Yes, do. Yes, we should but I didn't. I think he was thinking if today it wasn't better he was going to call his doctor. But ...... yeah, yeah, of course.Umhm... No. If the coughing was bad I would take a medicine and then I would spit up a lot of mucus. Yes. Phlegm, yes... Mucus! Yes! Well, I'm very interested and I'lI talk to David about it and we'll call you back... Alright. Good. Alright.] 

Dorothea Tanning

 

RW: Did you know Leo Bersani?

 

RH: Yeah, very well. Though he was slight, he was very attractive. And I think everybody thought so. I certainly did. But he was not at all interested in me.

 

RW: Is he your age?

 

RH: I think he's a little younger. Although he was always around Dick and those guys and they were a couple of years older than me.

 

RW: Dick Poirier?

 

RH: Yeah.

 

RW: Did Bersani spend time in New York?

 

RH: Before going to California, yeah. Oh, yeah, he was here all the time. I thought he was very attractive and very bright. I am a little bit mistrustful of the work he's doing now because he's so insistent on the superiority of everything gay to everything else, and I just don't think that really gets very far.

 

RW: Because you don't think that's true?

 

RH: Yeah. I just don't think you can convince somebody else of it whether it's true or not. I mean, gay people are likely to think that. David thinks it, Sandy thought it. We all have some notion of ourselves as belonging to a different tribe. But Leo is so.... Well, you'll see when you read it. Especially the piece about him, which is very strong. I'm really shaken by the appalling nature of some of the assumptions that he makes. But he's very likable. And very good-mannered and charming and so forth. And he's very well-educated. He reads very carefully. He's good at what he does.

 

RW: What about Richard Wolheim, did you know him?

 

RH: I didn't know him but I have a couple of his books here.

 

RW: Do you like his books?

 

RH: I don't know.

 

RW: I don't know either. Painting as an Art I always thought of as a great book, but I don't really know if it is or not.

 

RH: I don't know either.

 

RW: I love his book on Freud.

 

RH: Yes. And Leo's Freudian books are very interesting. But the idea that barebacking is heroic and a sacred activity is, well, I just take a very medical view. Especially now that there is some way of controlling HIV. Then you can't use that excuse anymore, that it's really sacred and all that. It isn't. It's just sickness.

 

RW: But there must be something driving these people that one could presumably take seriously. There's something they want, or need, that they get from barebacking that they can't get otherwise.

 

RH: Mmhm.

 

RW: Why do you think that the phallus has such power as a living symbol, especially a man's erect penis?

 

RH: Well, I think that is the thing.

 

RW: But why?

 

RH: Well, I feel it to be that, and I have felt it to be. Most occasions.

 

RW: But why do we need a phallus in our lives?

 

RH: Well, we may need only our own.

 

RW: Most of us need another one, more than one.

 

RH: But that may still not be another one. It may still be our own. The one that we think

we need.

 

RW: Are you as interested in ass as you are in cock?

 

RH: No. I mean, I'm perfectly eager to... be in that whole thing... But, no, I'm not, no. And I think in the last five years or so of our thirty-two years together David and I are no longer as interested in fucking as we are in the rest of it.

 

RW: But you still have an active sex life?

 

RH: Yeah. Oh, yeah. It happens about three times a week. And.... David likes it before dinner. He feels that's a good time, not sleepy time, but lively and so forth, and it is lively for both of us. I'm at the age where I take a Viagra half an hour before we make love. So we always plan on it, you know. And I know that does assist me in always having not only a high-pitched sexuality but a real ejaculation. It really works. And I didn’t think it would always work at 81 and a half or whatever I am. So I'm used to that. That seems fine. We'll pretty much try anything, you know, and do.

 

RW: What do you mean try anything?

 

RH: Well, who decides to be top or bottom and all that, I mean we'll do anything.

 

RW: Do you ever involve other people?

 

RH: No, we haven't. Not so far. I can imagine such a thing happening. But I doubt it will, I'm too old. But David is not, and he might want to sometime.

 

RW: How do you cope with the allure of the new when it comes to sex?

 

RH: Well, I used to think that was really "it." But I don't any longer. I've really found that the constant return to this person I really love and enjoy and also from the beginning enjoyed sexually, and we repeat very often these scenes which become quite fantastic. I mean they are repetitions, they're revisions of things we've done before, and that seems to me the real meaning of what we're getting at and it has been very exciting for both of us. 

 

RW: In Sontag's journal published last year she says something like "Repetition is the meaning of marriage,” or something like that. The point of marriage.

 

RH: Well, I think that's really so. I had a friend who told me that that was so and that promiscuity was really trivial. I didn't believe it because I really enjoyed promiscuity very much. But I wasn't enjoying sex when I was enjoying promiscuity.

 

RW: Did you feel frustrated by promiscuity?

 

RH: No, no, not at all. I just enjoyed whatever I could get.

 

RW. You never suffered from sex addiction?

 

RH: Only in the sense that I think most men, especially most gay men, who have a larger sense of sexuality than most straight men, are concerned with thinking about sex all the time. And I think that's fine. That's really the thing. But that's not the addiction you speak of, I don't think. It hasn't anything to do with action. I just like thinking about it in the abstract, and I like walking down the street and seeing fifteen people it would be wonderful to sleep with. 

 

RW: How much effort did you make to sleep with some of them? 

 

RH: Almost none at all.  It depended on how much recognition of me there was there, or interest in me. When there was some, I would act on it, do something about it. 

 

RW: You went to bars? 

 

RH:  Oh yeah. I liked baths better than bars during that time. That was just before the plague began. In this city and others. Chicago. And in California. The early ‘70s

 

RW: St Mark’s? 

 

RH: Yeah, sure. 

 

RW:  I remember my first experience in a bathhouse, at around 3:00 a.m. I was kind of scared that I'd gone to some other side, that I would inevitably fuck my life away, or fuck myself to death, that I had become a sexual beast out of control.

 

RH:  Well, I think I was in favor of that. Insofar as I could ever even arrive at that. But I don't feel that very often they were times when I thought it would be terrific to just stay there and do that all the time. I thought that was wonderful, and I'd meet people on the street or at parties, and it went very far in terms of not so much young people but people older than me. I was interested in a wide range of men, there was no problem about that. It was always interesting and exciting. And amusing sometimes, funny.

 

RW:  Did you ever have sex with someone just because he was famous?

 

RH:  I don't think so. It happened, partly because I was able to qualify as somebody who would be a likely person for someone who was famous and nervous about who he was going to be sleeping with. I represented some kind of… safe problem. But I never thought there would be nothing but sex and that it would be terrible. It was always enlivening, and when it was functional, when it was working, it was terrific. And I didn't have any trouble calming down afterwards. The thing was, there was always someone to fuck, and I was very interested in that. The idea of walking out of the house and enumerating the people you passed or saw who would be possible, that was wonderful. I've never had anything but positive feelings about it, I think. I think that's right.

 

RW:  When you translated Barthe's Lover's Discourse, did you recognize yourself? Did you have devastating love affairs, did you fall madly in love?

 

RH:  Only twice. David Osborne was one. And there was another, but you have to go back quite a ways to get to that one. But David was really the most remarkable of those.

 

RW: He died? 

 

RH:  Yes. Of several things, but he certainly had AIDS. I don't think that's what he died of, I think he had some other problem.

 

RW:  So what happened when you fell in love with him? Was it reciprocated?

 

RH:  It was pretty much reciprocated. He wanted to fuck everybody in the world. But there were times when he was with me when he would say, This is really what I want and I'm very happy with it right now. He'd say, If it could always be like this, it would be fine. He'd say that once in a while. Not always.

 

RW: He was a beauty? 

 

RH:  Oh yeah, it was remarkable. Very smart and all of that.

 

RW: When did you first meet Susan Sontag? 

 

RH:  She reviewed Manhood by Michelle Leiris, which I had translated in the early 1960s and we were somewhere together and talked about that. She was interested in what I could do. And there weren't that many people around who spoke French. She was interested in everything. More than I was. I wasn't interested in popular culture at all. Her big thing was that she was eager to brush away high culture insofar as it was exclusive. She wanted to include all that other stuff. She changed about that. She gave it up. But she was very democratic about popular culture, music, theater, social everything. I don't think she liked everything, but she was interested and sometimes you have to appear to like things in order to find out about them, and she did. She would dress up as a man and go to those rather extreme bars on the far west side. The Anvil, The Toilet, those places. She was very brave, or very pertinacious about all that.

 

RW: Did you know Philip Rieff too? 

 

RH:  I met him. But I was much closer to David, their son, who I “sat” for a great deal. She didn't see Philip then, she didn't like him anymore. When I said I really liked Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, she said, Oh you really liked it? Well, I wrote it.

 

RW: It is better-written than his other books. 

 

RH:  Well, if not better written, more cogently written. His other books are very deep and interesting but so nutty and irritating.

 

RW: What’s happening with the Charlus project? Are you still intending to do that? 

 

RH:  Yeah, if I live long enough. Charlus is referred to a great deal by Marcel, but when he's on stage and talking, not so much, and that's the part I would translate. It would come to maybe 300 or 400 pages.

 

RW:  It would be a selection from all seven volumes meant to be read as a new book?

 

RH: Yeah. [Answers the phone again. Hello? Hello? Hi, dear. Oh fine. Yeah, he's still here. OK. Yeah, Dorothea called. First she said, Oh, I don't want to talk now, it takes too long. Then she called right back, forgetting she had just called me, and asked if our colds might be allergies and I said well I don't think so but I don't know she said she talked to her doctor about it and what she said was very likely and I said we would have to talk about it.]

 

RW:  What about Julia Kristeva? Did you know her?

 

Rh  Oh yeah I took her to the baths that were kind of a public thing even though they were gay on Broadway and 74th Street or something. She just wandered around and I followed her. I don't know if Philippe, when they were married, took her to such places. I don't know if he was very queer, but he might have thought he should be. To shock her. I don't know what they did. I like her quite a lot, and I like some of her books. She continues to be very interesting, because she's interested in a lot of people that write and do interesting things. She's really very lively about that, and I like that about her. There are three books about modern women, and they're all very good. I like Kristeva, but she's tough to know. She's demanding, sort of like Susan in some ways. She's made herself into a rather elaborately official person, and you can't be casual with her. She summons up from her education and her accomplishments a great deal, of which anything you say is merely anecdotal and rather mild compared with the depths to which she reaches. She's something. She was married to Philippe Soller who was a real monster. I translated his first two books. He's written all sorts of things. I don't like any of them. He's very efficient, kind of a bossy type. He's not pleasant. He's very French and his mannerisms can be very disagreeable. He turns on people. After Roland died he wrote a portrait of him in Paris, about how Roland was always chasing after these boys and it was so pathetic and so on. And it wasn't awful at all, Roland was exactly right about the way he did it. I think Philippe was just wanting to get rid of somebody who in terms of public impression was much more interesting than he was. He didn't like that. I don't think anybody's translating his books anymore. My friend Francoise Choay used to say about somebody who had just won the Nobel Prize or something and was coming for dinner, Il est le seul vrai genie du … moment.” Claude Simon, for example,  just before he won the Nobel Prize, was that person. And is not anymore.

 

RW:  Tell me about meeting Breton.

 

RH: Of course. I was translating him so I went to see him. He was very nice and I think at one point I asked him if it really was a degeneration for him to be translated by a gay person, and he got very ruffled about that and didn't want to answer that. I just really wanted to know what he would say, knowing as I did that he was known to be quite homophobic. And then so many of the people involved in surrealism turned out to be gay. Then he would dismiss them. Cut them off. I don't think he knew what to do about me. He was very pleased about my translation of Nadja, which is still in print. But he was sort of above it all. He really didn't think about what was happening outside of France. He was an old man when I knew him, but he was homophobic.

RW: Tell me about E. M. Cioran. 

 

RH:  Well, I was asked to translate something for the Evergreen Review. And I liked it very much. I did ten or so of his books, and there are others I'll probably get to. We were going to do his journals, but that didn't happen. So that may be the next thing.

 

RW:  What was he like?

 

RH: He was charming and adorable, and his wife was wonderful too. They were very interesting. She had been with him a long, long time so she found some of his mannerisms absurd, but we all loved him, Susan and me and my David and David Rieff, my little circle. His journals are a thousand pages. We cut it down to 300. It's over there on the windowsill. It's written in a very different manner from his beautifully written, extremely mannered books, which appear to be 18th century French. But this is something else. It's very good. It's the same man, but it's a different thing. I'll get to it someday.