A Heaven of Hell
[image id: "Television is the band that originally brought Hell to prominence, but the details of his split from the band are vague, and āMarquee Moon, their definitive album, is barely mentioned. Despite the years that have elapsed, Hell seems too close to the material to talk about it. The wounds are just too raw. Just as Patti Smithās relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe is what made Just Kids so moving, <yellow highlight begins>Hellās relationship with Tom Verlaine gives I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp its emotional anchor,<yellow highlight ends> only Patti Smith had lived long enough away from these events that they no longer felt current. <yellow highlight begins>Thereās no such closure or distancing to Hellās prose,<yellow highlight ends> and the result is exhilarating in exactly the same way his music and the music it spawned is exhilarating. <yellow highlight begins>Hell is still angry at Verlaine, still doesnāt want to talk about Marquee Moon, still anxious to proclaim his own genius and still possessive of the importance of āBlank Generation.ā Heās angry about slights that took place forty years ago.<yellow highlight ends> He still wants to fuck the girls he was fucking when he was 19, and still is racked with injustice over girls he didnāt get to fuck. Heās still jealous of the Sex Pistols, and he still misses heroin. Itās childish, bratty, and fantastic.
<yellow highlight begins>Hellās account of his relationship with Verlaine effectively ends less than halfway through the narrative. Yet that relationship remains the central story of his memoir.<yellow highlight ends> Too often, stories about youth told by people who are not young focus, incorrectly, on romantic love. <yellow highlight begins>But traditional, romantic love is not what defines our formative years.<yellow highlight ends> As we emerge into, out of, and back and forth from adolescence, what defines these years of self-formation are the friendships. <yellow highlight begins>Hell and Verlaine, in their early years together, after they escape from the same boarding school and then meet up again in New York, are not simply constant companions. They define and mold each otherās emergent personas.<yellow highlight ends>
<yellow highlight begins>Hell talks about this blending of self, the way in which the two became inextricable creations of one another:<yellow highlight ends> āOur mentalities got intermixedā¦.People thought we were brothersā¦ <yellow highlight begins>Our speech tones and patterns even became similarā people mistook us for each other on the phone. [ā¦] It was the most meaningful friendship Iāve had, I think, and the last male friendship of its importance.ā<yellow highlight ends>
<yellow highlight begins>People would mistake Hell and Verlaine for brothers, Hell recounts. The mistake is exciting because they arenāt. Their sameness is trained, chosen, rather than ordained from birth.<yellow highlight ends> This kind of love is a rebellion, a freedom from the strictures of home and family. <yellow highlight begins>Punk is friendship, not love.<yellow highlight ends> It is the friend with whom we are literally or figuratively cutting class and hiding behind the gym, smoking and making plans to run away. <yellow highlight begins>In counter-cultures that refuse and reject patterns of domesticity, tradition, and adulthood, we define ourselves far more by strange friendships, by relationships that mimic not the love our parents were (or were supposed to be) in, but the camaraderie we had with our childhood best friends.<yellow highlight ends> These are the people with whom we first discovered connections outside of the familial, ties outside of those dictated by blood and DNA.
Hell describes staying up all night talking with Verlaine in the early days of their friendship. <yellow highlight begins>āThereās an eternal, godlike feeling to sitting with a good friend in the middle of the night, speaking low and laughing, lazily ricocheting around in each otherās minds,ā<yellow highlight ends> he writes, then calls those nights, those endless conversations <yellow highlight begins> āthe strongest dose yet of my favorite feeling: of leaving myself behind for another world.ā<yellow highlight ends> He goes on to compare this feeling to the one he got from sex or drugs, but more so. <yellow highlight begins>The friendship with Verlaine is the strongest thing in an arsenal of rebellious behaviors<yellow highlight ends> by which Hell is defining himself and mapping out his own world.
If punk is making up life for yourself, <yellow highlight begins>Verlaine and Hell make up life for each other,<yellow highlight ends> and make up the other for themselves. <yellow highlight begins>Relationships like these are always about self-definition. They teeter on the border between family love and romantic love, and come to define a time when everything is liminal,<yellow highlight ends> when everything is a negotiation of borders and boundary-spaces. Throughout the early parts of the book, Hell narrates influences to which he introduced Verlaine and vice versa, everything from poetry and philosophy to drugs and getting gigs for the band. They create a language out of what they share with each other. <yellow highlight begins>Both their stage names, which each kept all his life, are collaborations. Hell describes searching for the perfect reference to a French poet, why nothing worked except āVerlaine,ā and how āHellā with its reference to A Season in Hell linked them by making them into a new version of Verlaine and Rimbaud.<yellow highlight ends> They create themselves through this other person, through mimicry, imitation, and agreed-upon invented languages.
<yellow highlight begins>In talking about Verlaine, Hellās narrative voice turns from that of a cool and wise poet to that of a wronged child.<yellow highlight ends> He complains about things he discovered for which Verlaine was credited, things Verlaine learned or outright stole from him, all in the jealous, immediate language of a break-up in the present tense. <yellow highlight begins>āWe hated each other,ā explains Hell, āas only best friends can.ā<yellow highlight ends> After Hellās departure from Television, Verlaine is barely mentioned, but itās clear that Hell remains attached to Verlaine and to the idea of punk itself,Ā despite his having left both the man and the scene decades ago. /end id]
