In the late 1980s when I was graduate student at the University of Utah, Richard Howard visited for a whole semester. As a fiction writer I didn’t have much access to him, certainly not as much as my fellow poetry students, many of whom Howard championed in their writing careers.
Mark Strand and Larry Levis were the poetry faculty at the time and between them they personally knew many luminaries of the poetry world. Octavio Paz and Joseph Brodsky visited. Charles Simic and Helen Vendler. Probably more who I lost track of. Around this time, Strand received a MacArthur Foundation grant, a genius award. It was said he spent it on a house on the coast of Ireland and some Italian suits. Richard Howard, I researched, never received a MacArthur, a criminal oversight in my opinion, a reminder, as if it were needed, of the arbitrary folly of such awards.
The semester he was at Utah, Howard offered a course, a weekly lecture that was open to the public. We attended with the fervor of religious novitiates. I don’t recall if there was a formal subject. Literature? Books? Henry James? These were the topics. Howard sat in an easy chair, as I recall, and spoke to the audience as if we were guests in his drawing room. Richard Howard could make me like Henry James in a way that Henry James himself could not.
The tone of his conversation, a monologue really, was that he was talking with friends whom he had personally invited, and for that space and time we were all intellectual equals (which, most obviously, we were not). I remember leaving the talks feeling giddy, inspired by his erudition and charm.
Once I met him walking his dog on campus and somehow engaged him in conversation. I may have had my dog with me at the time, enabling conversation. My dog was a sled dog, a runner, who not once obeyed a voice command, and was one time arrested on campus for running through a flower garden. Richard carried his dog, a French Bulldog, which he treated as a human child. But what I remember most, was that his manner was natural, and he spoke as if we had conversed many times, old friends. We talked about David Hwang and Madame Butterfly. I can’t imagine that I had one iota of insight to contribute to the conversation. He flashed a smile that I have not forgotten, the same smile of approval Gatsby once and forever flashed at Nick.
I mentioned he was kind to some of my poet friends in their young careers. He was particularly kind to my friend G., who would take his student loans the day they arrived, jump on his motorcycle and fly across the salt flats to Wendover, and gamble all his money away at the casino. He married quickly and divorced disastrously even faster. Richard Howard helped him publish poems in national venues. G was a rock star. He suffered from terrible health problems and I never heard if he finished his degree, which wasn’t uncommon; some of the best writers didn’t. I never heard another word about him, until . . .
Fast forward to around the turn of the century and I run into G. at a Joy Williams reading hosted by Prairie Lights in Iowa City. I had forgotten he had midwestern roots. He had just barely survived his health problems, had some kind of psychotic break, and was living in his mother’s basement in one of those prairie towns that the modern world has left behind. I was living in just such a place myself. G said he would never write another poem. Language made no sense to him.
Somewhere he had run into Richard Howard again, which was hard to imagine as G. was essentially underground, as hidden from the world as a federally protected witness. Howard had been his champion. And now, Howard was mad. He felt like G.’s failure to continue writing was a kind of personal betrayal. “Like you let him down?” I asked.
“Letting Richard down was the least of my problems,” G said.
That night Joy Williams was cranky behind her sunglasses, and after I said goodnight to G. I never saw him again, nor heard from him nor of him.
This wonderful remembrance of Howard by Craig Morgan Teicher appeared in the Paris Review online: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2022/04/01/remembering-richard-howard/
I was deeply saddened to learn that at the end Howard had suffered from dementia. So profoundly unfair for a mind as capacious (Teicher’s word, the right one) as his. Teicher describes Howard saying of someone, dismissively, “They don’t read.” But for anyone who did read there was hope, almost as Goethe said, “He who strives unceasingly upward, him we can save.” If you read, you could be saved.
I was not surprised to learn that Howard’s spouse had declared the “book in, book out” rule for their house wildly overfilled with books. That rule has been declared here, too, and I have already dispersed hundreds of them, and gone so far as to acquire electronic copies of new books (which mostly backfires because if I love an electronic book, I am then compelled to acquire a hard copy, paying for it twice).
We were all shocked when Larry Levis died, not quite 50 from a heart attack, less surprised when Mark Strand died. He was 80 and known to have been ill. Richard Howard was 93. They’re in a salon now, I like to think. W.S. Merwin and Susan Sontag are there, also many French Bulldogs.
If we’re finding Whitman under our boot soles, I am looking for Richard Howard between the lines of Barthes’ Camera Lucida, one of dozens of his masterful translations from the French. Surely he is close at hand, beaming his generous beatific smile at whoever has found him there.
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