Richard Howard, 1929-2022 [by David Lehman]

John Hollander, Richard Howard, and David Lehman about to enter the Bowery Poetry Club for a reunion of the Columbia Review editors, 2005. (photo © Stacey Lehman)

Richard Howard, distinguished poet, critic, teacher, guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1995, friend of five decades, died yesterday. All the many students, poets, readers guided by Richard's ecumenical taste, readers of French literature as Richard translated so much of it, are in mourning, and for good reason. Richard was as generous an editor, as encouraging and supportive a teacher, as one could hope for. He made a huge difference in the careers of so many! Our thanks go to David Alexander, who took such good care of Richard when he could no longer manage on his own. David's grief we share.

Last October, when Richard turned 92, I prepared the following and posted it on our blog:

How Rich

The root of influence is astrological and is related to influenza. . . .

Forty-five years ago I met Richard Howard in the same place where we have met many times since: his fifth-floor apartment in a building called the Waverly Mews near Washington Square Park in New York. It was wall-to-wall books, except for the bathroom where every inch of wall and ceiling space was covered with photographs of writers and artists. Richard wasn’t drinking but offered his guest a glass of white wine, then displayed some newly acquired books and drawings, asked lots of questions and smiled encouragingly, told an anecdote about how he had learned French in five days from an aunt on an automobile trip from Ohio to Florida when he was a little kid, and finally read aloud a just-finished poem, doing the voices in his flamboyantly theatrical manner. 

Eliot said Henry James had a mind too fine for an idea to violate it, clearly not a problem Eliot suffered from . . .

I was a cocky young assistant professor at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, where I had a brutal teaching schedule but got to run the readings and lectures series. By the time I left Richard that afternoon, he had agreed to come to Hamilton to give a poetry reading and two lectures – “The Art of Digression” and “The Art of Boredom” – in October. He also gave me three of his books, each one signed with a flourish and a witty inscription, and made me promise to send him some of my poems. At the airport waiting for his plane, he read aloud to Joel Black and me, his poem in which Oscar Wilde meets Walt Whitman and they duel in dramatic monologues.

Innocence versus experience is Blake’s way of presenting Oedipus and the Sphinx. . .

Richard is one of poetry’s great pinch-hitters. This is flash-forwarding some twenty-five years. Twice I asked him to step in for a fallen colleague and give a poetry reading on short notice. We had scheduled John Hollander for a Monday night appearance at KGB Bar, but John wasn't feeling well enough to come to the city from New Haven, so Richard volunteered to read Hollander's work. In 2003, on very short notice, he agreed to teach a literature seminar at the New School  when the regular faculty member had to cancel, and this on the eve of opening day. Three at bats, three home runs.

Henry James does to language what art does to life. . .

The authenticity of Richard’s love of poetry, of poetry and ideas, is inspiring. One way it expresses itself is in his commitment to young poets, the mentoring of whom he takes as a civic responsibility. I know no one who has done more personally to mentor younger poets -- making editing suggestions, publishing their best work. In my own case, Richard was my first reader at a time when I urgently needed his candor and high intellectual standards. Unlike others, Richard does not compete with his students, begrudge them their recognitions, or expect them to turn into disciples and epigones.

Grammar is an etymological variant of glamour. . .

At one time or another Richard has served as poetry editor of New American Writing, Shenandoah, Western Humanities Review, The New Republic, and The Paris Review. Mark Strand cracked that Richard needs to be poetry editor of at least two magazines concurrently. When I launched The Best American Poetry in 1988, I knew I could count on Richard to discover fresh talent and help it make its way. Inevitably, I asked him to be the guest editor of the 1995 volume, an experience as enjoyable in the doing as it was pleasurable in the product.

Prose is to bread as verse is to cake. . .

In the early 1990s, Richard spent each fall on the faculty at the University of Houston. Twice I rented his apartment and lived in it. I took it as an auspicious sign that the dry cleaner downstairs was called Erudite, the one around the corner Faust, and the third one in the area Aphrodite. It gave Richard a kick to phone me and say, “My dear, would you get volume four of Byron’s correspondence from the top shelf in the kitchen and mail it to me?”

In this course we will consider the discrepancy between the name and the adjective derived from it: Socratic, Platonic, Christian,  Machiavellian, Elizabethan, Byronic, Marxist, Victorian, Freudian, Kafkaesque. . .

Richard's syllabi for the literature courses and seminars he gave at Columbia are inventive, reflecting his erudition and wide-ranging curtiosity, and I have tried, vainly so far, to gather them and publish them, in a literary journal of note. 

How rich
how hard
do I
draw war

How rich
how rad
oh dice
or cad

I row
a chair
raid a
raw hoard
arch war
had id

          Thank you, Richard, for the best four-word definition of the difference between prose and verse: “Prose proceeds, verse reverses.”

          Form is arbitrary.
          Three words, one
          Line, why not?
          And what if
          Proust in French
          consisted of short
          sentences in the
          Hemingway manner and
          the elaborate style
          were his translator’s
          invention? If grammar
          be but a
          variant of glamour
          I see the
          Great domed head
          Of Henry James
          On your shoulders,
          My dear Richard.

From the archive; posted November 5, 2021. The  word / world photo is by Bill Hayward.

Comments

[Emily Fragos]

Cannot find the words I need right now. Thank you, Richard. May you rest in peace, dear, generous man. With my love and complete admiration.

[Mary Maxwell]

The first conversation I had with Richard was after a class he taught at the N Y State Writers Summer Program at Skidmore. At the break I was looking out the window. He came over and asked me what the odd building our there in the woods was for. I told him it was a chapel and that it was quite nice to sit there on its steps surrounded by trees and ponder. I told him the door was always locked, so I didn't know what it was like inside. What kind of chapel is it? he asked. Ecumenical, I told him. Well, he said, keeping it always closed is really the only way to guarantee a chapel remains ecumenical!

I think that I laughed so hard was what guaranteed my relationship to him...

Richard could put your feet to the fire and show you how to walk through it. I had written to him about my ongoing readings of Yves Bonnefoy's translations of Shakespeare. And suddenly he called me up and asked if I could talk to his translation seminar at Columbia about it. And I thought, I can't do that, I have no authority on this, but I can't disappoint Richard with my cowardice. So I did it, and I did OK. Which then made it possible for me to do that sort of thing in other contexts. A gift.

One of the last times I saw him at his apartment, my young daughter was with us and was enthralled by him. Though he had trouble reaching for words out of his head at that point, he read one of his more recent poems (which was kind of astonishing, about feeding pigeons). Afterward I told my daughter that it was an experience she would be talking about in her own old age and that she should be sure to put it all to memory.

And here I am talking about it, already, just a little ahead of my own old age. But with such sadness and affection.

[Emily Fragos]

In my youth, I was a classical cellist. Richard knew that and he loved to discuss music, especially Bach, with me. He asked about the famous cello suites and the violin partitas and sonatas. I heard that Richard enjoyed listening to music during his final days. His devoted partner, David, cared for him so lovingly. On March 31, I realized that dear Richard had passed away peacefully on J.S. Bach's birthday.

[Larry Rosenwald]

That’s just beautiful, David, beauiful and inspiring and heartbreaking. Thank you, thank you

[Catharine R. Stimpson]

David, thank you for evoking Richard so justly and for printing the photo of him in an orange fedora and shirt and glasses with a bright frame. Last night my spouse, Elizabeth Wood, and I sat and read his poetry out loud, and began to permit ourselves to feel the extent of our loss--although we could read and hear his words in all their colors and precision. We also thanked our friend David Alexander for his tireless care and love for Richard. Catharine Stimpson

[David Lehman]

Thank you, Kate. I hope you will post for us soon. Maybe a Bryn Mawr brief memoir beautfully meditative and brilliantly modulated?

[David Lehman]

Thank you, Larry. I hope you're faring well.

[dora]

Richard encouraged me even when I wrote drivel like this:
<< When I approached my publisher on my knees,
and said "please,"
it was as easy as a breeze
that rhymes with the trees.
And if you don't know how to rhyme
writing a novel is not a crime
and you can sell it if it's good
to a medium sized studio in Hollywood. >>

[Terence Winch]

I knew him only through correspondence, but I had great respect for him and his work. His death represents a major loss for all of us.