Beat Punks

by Victor Bockris

  RUMOR: Do you think it’s making a dent in the establishment?

  BURROUGHS: Well, the establishment is full of dents! I don’t think there IS an establishment anymore. I mean, who is the ‘Establishment’ in America? There IS an establishment still in England. Which is sort of an anachronism, but it still exists, as people still do want the Queen and the royal family. And there are still these five or six hundred very rich and powerful people who really control England. That’s why they can’t pay anyone a living wage. By the time the people at the top get through splitting it up there isn’t enough to go around. But in this country, I don’t know what you’d say was the establishment.

  I am not a punk and I don’t know why anybody would consider me the Godfather of punk. How do you define punk? The only definition of the word is that it might refer to a young person who is simply called a punk because he is young, or some kind of petty criminal. In that sense some of my characters may be considered punks, but the word simply did not exist in the Fifties. I suppose you could say James Dean epitomized it in Rebel Without A Cause, but still, what is it?

  I think the so-called punk movement is indeed a media creation. I have, however, sent a letter of support to the Sex Pistols in England because I’ve always said that the country doesn’t stand a chance until you have 20,000 people saying bugger to the Queen. And I support the Sex Pistols because this is constructive, necessary criticism of a country which is bankrupt.

  It turned out that Susan Sontag was another of Richard’s favorite writers. When I asked her if she would like to have dinner with him, Susan, who was intrigued by the punk phenomenon, immediately and happily accepted. This is one of my favorite and most enduring pieces.

  18

  Susan Sontag Meets Richard Hell

  New York City, 1978

  It was the evening of the fifteen-foot snow blizzard in 1978 and SUSAN SONTAG was due at my Greenwich Village apartment from her 107th Street penthouse at seven pm. Feeling certain she wouldn’t make it – or shouldn’t be expected to struggle through it on her own – I had gamely offered to pick her up in a cab. Everyone laughed, but when I stepped out of my apartment, allowing ample time to scour the streets for any vehicle, a large empty Checker was idling at the curb. Consequently I arrived fifteen minutes early at Sontag’s residence.

  Fifteen minutes of cab driver talk later, Susan appeared looking ravishing, having completely recovered, after recent visits to Venice and Paris, from two investigatory operations. As we rode downtown she brought me up to date on her apartment-hunting travails. “Basically,” she reported, “there are no apartments available in New York.”

  Meanwhile, RICHARD HELL was struggling through the snowdrifts outside his Lower East Side apartment, trying to find a cab. I had insisted on keeping the interview dinner date since Hell is in the middle of making a movie with German director Ulli Lommel, and Susan is working on three books all to appear this year. It had been difficult enough to find an evening which they both had free.

  However, in the cheery ambiance of my apartment, with a fire roaring in the grate and a chicken roasting in the oven, we thawed out pretty quickly while Susan and Richard, who were meeting for the first time, found numerous common interests to chat about.

  SUSAN SONTAG: Are you from New York?

  RICHARD HELL: No, I’m from Kentucky. Where are you from?

  SONTAG: I grew up in Arizona and Southern California, came to New York when I was twenty-five.

  HELL: You look really great. I was expecting to see you sort of wasted looking, you know …

  SONTAG: No I feel okay. I don’t know, I feel terrific.

  BOCKRIS: Did you see the story in the Voice about asexuality? Unless you have a full time live-in person, most people don’t have the time to get sex.

  HELL: I think it has to do with nature; it’s the overpopulation. I think people want to have less and less children because it’s an evolutionary step.

  BOCKRIS: But John Waters (film director – Pink Flamingoes – ed.) said that it’s a classical thing when societies break down that there’s a separation of the sexes. I never heard that in history, have you?

  SONTAG: No. I don’t think it’s true. I think on the contrary that the sexes have always been separate and that’s one of the things that’s wrong with the past. I think there’s probably less separation now.

  BOCKRIS: Isn’t it possible for a man and a woman to have a relationship …

  SONTAG: I should hope so.

  BOCKRIS:… where they don’t have to live together or get married, but where they can see each other naturally or something?

  SONTAG: I like the way you say “naturally”. Yes, sure it is.

  HELL: That’s the only way to live.

  SONTAG: But there’s something that happens to people when they get older, which is that they start accumulating things.

  BOCKRIS: Accumulating what, people?

  SONTAG: Accumulating things: accumulating their lives; accumulating their responsibilities; it’s less and less easy to change.

  BOCKRIS: You’re twenty-eight, aren’t you Richard?

  HELL: Uuuuhhhaah … I’m twenty-six.

  BOCKRIS: Oh, yeah, I told Susan you were twenty-six. Do you remember what it was like Susan?

  SONTAG: I was having a terrific time. I did something inadvertently very clever, which is that I got married at seventeen and divorced at twenty-five, so I had all that behind me. I had never had an adolescence, and at twenty-five my adolescence began and lasted until I was thirty-five. When did you come to New York, Richard?

  HELL: When I was seventeen.

  SONTAG: Do you still have folks back home in Kentucky?

  HELL: They’ve since moved to Virginia. I have a sister who’s moved to Mexico. She’s a year and a half younger than me, pretty and she’s a lesbian, which just last year got her completely cut off from my mother who regards herself a feminist and is leading all kinds of strikes and stuff on campus at the school where she teaches. My mother couldn’t deal with it.

  BOCKRIS: I think it’s really still harder to be a lesbian in America.

  SONTAG: Well it’s just harder to be a woman.

  BOCKRIS: I was talking to Chris Burden (conceptual artist – ed.) the other day and he was saying how he really hated his girlfriend, and I realized that I really hated my girlfriend.

  SONTAG: Does she know?

  BOCKRIS: Yeah, I told her.

  SONTAG: You mean you broke up!

  BOCKRIS: No, no, we still see each other all the time.

  SONTAG: Why do you see somebody you hate?

  BOCKRIS: It’s more exciting.

  HELL: Do you have a napkin or something?

  BOCKRIS: Toilet paper.

  SONTAG: Bring me some.

  BOCKRIS: Sorry, this is so embarrassing. This is a cross between a punk dinner and a chic dinner. We have a fire, we have a reasonable apartment, it’s okay, we have flowers and everything, but then we do have the punk sensibility as well. (Richard goes into the bathroom, comes out with a roll of toilet paper, and passes around wads of it.)

  HELL:… anyway, the difference between popular art and elitist art is elitist art is too judgmental. Elitist art is satisfied with itself aesthetically only. Popular art is the kind of art where you want to affect your culture and to have some influence on the way people think. That’s pretty clear, that distinction.

  SONTAG: I don’t know. I mean Dostoyevsky had an influence on people. Yet I’m sure that when he was writing he must have thought he was doing the best thing he could do, just satisfying himself in a room.

  HELL: The distinction has to do with your own personality whether you’re interested in affecting the culture, or whether you’re just interested in creating something beautiful. You see, the way I feel is that the generation I belong to has more in common among its members than any other generation that ever existed because of television and public school systems. What I’m relying on is that if I go as far as I can being myself that it will a
rouse something in all those people, but the problem is that you then become merchandise – another essential difference between popular art and elitist.

  SONTAG: You know if you would talk to most writers or most painters or most serious musicians, they would probably complain about the same thing. There are privileged moments when it all comes together. I mean you’ve written a book of poems. But you know that the lyrics of your songs will have an audience far beyond the poems that you might publish because they are carried by music. People will either take those words in, or they won’t, but the music is something that people will relate to. It has a kind of energy or sexual feeling so you’ll be giving them two for the price of one …

  HELL: But I wasn’t complaining about it. I’m not complaining …

  SONTAG: Alright you were implying …

  HELL: Let me finish what I’m saying: you realize that as a commodity, who also has all the same intentions and attributes of somebody who’s working in high art, the way to protect yourself is to regard celebrityhood as being your real art form. It’s just your personality that’s the commodity and not your work. That’s the only way to escape being packaged by the merchandisers. They then become your tool rather than you becoming theirs.

  SONTAG: I didn’t mean to say you were complaining about it. Most people who are involved in so-called high arts, if they have any degree of success, would describe very similar things. One way of being a celebrity is to make yourself totally inaccessible and never manifest yourself and never do anything and be as pure as the driven snow. Your purity will become a product, and it can be sold and it can make your reputation. It has to be consistent, it has to be of a certain volume. Let’s say, your absence could have a certain weight, somebody like Salinger or Pynchon here, or Beckett in France.

  HELL: No, no, no. I don’t think so. Salinger, Pynchon, Beckett … those names would mean nothing to the man in the street.

  SONTAG: No that’s not true, but they are within. There’s an awful lot of writers who think they have to break their asses to go out on publicity tours and have interviews etc. In fact, it can be done in a smaller way.

  HELL: But these are not popular artists, Pynchon and …

  SONTAG: But listen …

  HELL: Beckett does not affect in any way the way people feel.

  BOCKRIS: No, Beckett has enormous influence. People don’t walk around saying “Oh, this is because of Samuel Beckett,” but they’re picking up on things that Beckett has put into the culture without knowing it was Beckett.

  HELL: I don’t know.

  SONTAG: I think Victor’s right. It’s true that it isn’t direct in terms of names and recognition. Look at surrealism …

  HELL: I think Bob Dylan had an infinitely greater impact.

  BOCKRIS: Bob Dylan stole most of his stuff from Jack Kerouac, there are many lines that come straight out of Kerouac.

  HELL: Kerouac was pop.

  BOCKRIS: But I mean the thing is that you get people like William Burroughs and Beckett whose language has infiltrated the culture to such an extent that people are quoting them without knowing they’re quoting them. That’s even more extreme than quoting a line from Bob Dylan.

  HELL: We’re talking about a scale, we’re drawing a line between people who have impact and people who don’t, and there’s bound to be a no man’s land in between. The difference between Beckett and The Beatles is so great there’s no way they could possibly be …

  SONTAG: It’s certainly true the names aren’t as well known, but I was thinking of an example of the surrealist artists of the Twenties and Thirties. Very few people could name the names of the famous surrealist artists, but you just have to look at the windows of any major department store and you will see their impact.

  HELL: It took forty years to be assimilated and it’s dead by then – completely superficial. The fact that it’s in the store window is a symptom of how totally it’s been absorbed. That is banal. Look how big an influence Kafka had. He was at a frontier in his period and thirty years later that frontier has arrived as the environment.

  SONTAG: That’s a very good example. Everybody else catches up. Somebody said that the artist is the early warning system. But do you think, Richard, that rock has really changed people? I know it has changed me, but then my whole being is interested in being changed by what I experience. I’m open to change.

  HELL: Oh yeah, incredibly. By marijuana legalization, by Jimmy Carter getting elected, by hair lengths. The fact that on the radio every day during the Sixties there was this information coming across that affected what happened to the world …

  SONTAG: But I remember popular music when I was a kid. This is before rock and roll, when I really only got interested in popular music around the time of Johnny Ray …

  BOCKRIS: He was the guy who cried all the time, right?

  SONTAG: Yeah I …

  HELL: His career was ruined when he was found in a motel room with a guy in some place.

  BOCKRIS: With a guy?

  SONTAG: Oh really, I didn’t know that. Anyway, he was the first one that I paid any attention to. What I remember as a kid, is that I wasn’t interested in popular music. Pop music was something you played when people came over and they wanted to make out – purely background for making out. It was not something that had any real autonomy.

  HELL: There weren’t teenagers then.

  SONTAG: Well they weren’t in the same sense, right. But then what happened in the Sixties was really interesting. People started buying records and listening to records the way they were buying and reading books. You’d play a record and listen to a record by yourself and talk about it. That did not exist before the Sixties.

  HELL: There was an extraordinary number of teenagers in the Sixties. There became this thing where suddenly there was this specific period of life – teens. There was acknowledged a period between being a child and being a grown-up and this became power.

  SONTAG: Then, it didn’t occur to me that there was anything in between.

  HELL: It is a very subtle consciousness, being a teenager …

  SONTAG: Which can last to approximately thirty-five.

  HELL: It’s the most attractive consciousness to speak with. It’s the most sensitive because it hasn’t solidified yet.

  SONTAG: It hasn’t completely sold out. Essentially what’s happening is that everybody’s got ten more years, that’s my idea. In other words, for a woman to be in her early forties now is just like to be in her early thirties a generation ago. It used to be when you were over thirty you were old, you were out of it, finished. Now people start to have that anxiety at forty, and even at forty they manage to stave it off and go on. Also it’s terrific how people have a much longer time in their lives to be young and they look better.

  BOCKRIS: How old are you?

  SONTAG: I’m forty-five.

  HELL: The way I feel, I want to encourage in my songs and stuff, that feeling of being an adolescent throughout your whole life, of rejecting the whole idea of having a self, a personality.

  BOCKRIS: Are you writing a lot of songs during this period while you’re making movies?

  HELL: I just wrote one last night: ‘The Kid With The Replacement Head’. No, I haven’t actually written any since the album came out until last night because I have been working on this movie. What I usually do really as a policy is to do it at the absolute last minute. I figure you know more at the last minute than you did at the next to last minute.

  SONTAG: I always put everything off until the last minute too, but it’s just that I’m so disorganized I can’t get myself to do it. I’m supposed to turn in a book tomorrow, literally tomorrow morning. It’s this essay on illness, it’s going to be a little book, and I was supposed to make some changes in it. I’ll do it when I get home …

  BOCKRIS: Oh yeah, you’ll do a lot of work tonight when you get home, sure.

  HELL: I was just thinking about that essay on illness today when I was thinking that I was going to c
ome over here. And the fact that you had cancer means now …

  SONTAG: That I’m interested in illness … exactly.

  HELL: And that cancer is going to become …

  SONTAG: Well, it is a big subject, but people don’t know how to talk about it.

  HELL: It would not have happened if you had not gotten cancer.

  SONTAG: Sure, if I were in a plane crash, I’d probably be writing about planes now … I mean that is the way I do it.

  HELL: It’s just ideas, like the way you …

  SONTAG: No, no, I’m not writing about my experiences. I said if I were in a plane crash I’d be writing about airplanes, not about plane crashes.

  BOCKRIS: I bet you’d write an article in relation to the possibility of their crashing.

  SONTAG: No, I don’t think so because the fun of the essay is not to write about my experience, which is very banal, the fun is getting interested in the subject.

  BOCKRIS: I think the most interesting thing about you as a writer is the extent to which you prefer writing fiction to writing essays.

  SONTAG: Oh I much prefer it, but I can’t help getting interested in all these subjects.

  HELL: Did you write anything outside Death Kit?

  SONTAG: Yeah, I wrote a novel before that called The Benefactor, and then I’ve written some stories, which are going to come out this year as a book, and I’m working on another novel and a couple of stories.

  HELL: How about movies, are you still …

  SONTAG: Yeah, I’d love to make movies but I had a very discouraging experience with distribution. I had a very good experience making them. I’m not enough of a businesswoman to know how to do this distribution thing. You know there aren’t any theatres anymore; that’s something you’re going to discover with this movie you’re in, Richard, and I hope it goes well. That’s the most heartbreaking part of it. You have this thing, and then maybe it goes to some festivals, okay, and gets some reviews and where is it? It ends up in some colleges.