GLR January-February 2023

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. Aweek later, I re ceived 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 Shad ows , for he was already a distinguished man of letters, and I

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 signifi cance. Because, as a gay man, as a Jew, as an American, as a person of great learning, he was constantly refining his under standing of culture and his instrument of expression. The last time I saw Richard, I’m not sure whether he knew

was a novice, a naïf. Second, while his re jection of the book may appear to be snob bish, I think it was actually something very different. I had a boyfriend who was a pro fessional French horn player, and he was very careful when and if he kissed me be cause he said he had to protect his em bouchure. 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.

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 re sponded to the music of language, to the

Much of his œuvre consists of dramatic monologues whose speakers reveal more than they wish to and test readers’ powers of discrimination.

very presence of language. What makes Richard Howard so discomforting and so im portant (the two in my mind are always linked) was his insa tiability, 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 mo ments that we share together. Nothing could be queerer than this insatiability.

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, Truf faut, 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 cock sucker,” when difficult friend and Richard are both. Auden’s reply is that he never knew Howard was Jewish. It takes a per fectly 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 per formed 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 expres sion 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 cul tural context in which it is performed, but our failure to under stand 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

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January–February 2023

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