Richard Hell and the Voidoids' Blank Generation by Astor Pete

Author:Astor, Pete
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

the decadent nineteenth-century French writers were

drawn. And so was Hell: ‘the Romantic poets in England

were reformers, as were the hippie poets who learned

from Allen Ginsberg’.82 Hell’s allegiance was to ‘the

twisted French aestheticism of the late-nineteenth

century like Rimbaud, Verlaine, Huysmans, Baudelaire’.83

Hell cast himself as an outsider, and the work of

Isidore Ducasse, who wrote under the name Le Comte

de Lautréamont, particularly the surreal misanthropy of

Les Chants du Maldoror, was another key influence. Hell describes it as ‘a rhapsody of evil, of antiromance, revelling in the voice of aggressive disgust with and opposition to

life, opposition to all sentimentality and received corny

humanist ideas’, of how, ‘it bypasses convention to speak

directly from wild unfiltered vision’.84 Indeed, he used

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B L A N K G E N E R A T I O N

part of the text in a poster for a run of Voidoids shows

at CBGB’s in 1978, invoking Lautréamont’s descriptions

of ‘prolonged shrieks of the most poignant agony’ and

descriptions of Maldoror, wandering ‘from land to land,

hated by all’.85

Charles Baudelaire was perhaps the defining voice of

French nineteenth-century poetry. He published a book

of poems, Les Fleurs Du Mal ( The Flowers of Evil), using the voice of the unfettered individual, focussing on the

transgressive, taking Romantic ideas of personal freedom

to new extremes. Other French writers of the time, like

Lautréamont, Gérard de Nerval, Joris-Karl Huysmans

and Arthur Rimbaud embodied attitudes and behaviours

that would be key to defining the style and feeling that

Hell and some of his contemporaries – notably Patti

Smith – wanted to achieve in the New York of the early

1970s.

Gérard de Nerval’s influenced Andre Breton and

the Surrealists, his books being driven by images from

the unconscious, his having a pet lobster has been

seized on by many – including Sam Shepard and Patti

Smith in their 1971 play Cowboy Mouth – to represent absurdist behaviour outside of society’s norms. Another

key contribution to Hell’s punk blueprint was Huysmans’

character Des Esseintes in his 1884 novel Á rebours

( Against Nature) , where the central character rejects bourgeois values and creates his own world. Here again

is someone who, in placing himself against naturalistic

Romantic values, celebrating the virtues of a cosmetic,

man-made world, pre-figures the values of the Warhol

crowd, setting themselves against the values of the hippie movement. Des Esseintes has no time for ‘natural’ beauty.

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P E T E A S T O R

He finally has to give up living in his self-created world, the architect of his own downfall, caused by an arrogance

born of vulnerability, articulating the mindset of the

permanent teenager perfectly.

The actual teenage embodiment of the ‘twisted

aestheticism’ of Baudelaire et al., was Arthur Rimbaud,

writing both A Season in Hell (1873) and Illuminations (1874) before he was 20 years old, then giving up

writing and travelling around Europe, mostly on foot.

Rimbaud then embarked on various businesses in then

very far-flung places such as Java (now part of Indonesia) and Cyprus, eventually settling in Abyssinia (now part

of the Yemen), where he became a merchant, dealing in

coffee and weapons. He died in 1891, at the age of 37.

But it was his early poetic work

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