HOWARD, Richard (Joseph)

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Nationality: American. Born: Cleveland, Ohio, 13 October 1929. Education: Shaker Heights High School, Ohio; Columbia University, New York (editor, Columbia Review), B.A. 1951, M.A. 1952; Sorbonne, Paris, 1953–54. Career: Lexicographer, World Publishing Company, Cleveland, 1954–56, and Funk & Wagnalls, New York, 1956–58. Since 1958 freelance literary and art critic, and translator. Since 1988 Rhodes Professor of comparative literature, University of Cincinnati. Poetry editor, American Review, New York, Shenandoah, Virginia, New Republic, Paris Review, and Western Humanities Review; director, Braziller Poetry Series. President, P.E.N. American Center, 1977–79. Professor of English, University of Houston, 1987–97; since 1998 professor of practice, School of the Arts, Columbia University. Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1966; Harriet Monroe memorial prize, 1969, and Levinson prize, 1973 (Poetry, Chicago); American Academy grant, 1970, and award of merit medal, 1980; Pulitzer Prize, 1970; American Book award, for translation, 1983;P.E.N. medal for translation, 1986; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1987; France-America Foundation award, for translation, 1987; Academy of American Poets fellowship, 1989. Fellow, Morse College, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. MacArthur fellow, beginning 1996. Member, American Academy, 1983. Address: 23 Waverly Place, New York, New York 10011, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Quantities. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1962.

The Damages. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1967.

Untitled Subjects. New York, Atheneum, 1969.

Findings. New York, Atheneum, 1971.

Two-Part Inventions (includes radio play The Lesson of the Master). New York, Atheneum, 1974.

Fellow Feelings. New York, Atheneum, 1976.

Misgivings. New York, Atheneum, 1979.

Lining Up. New York, Atheneum, 1984.

Helenistics. New York, Red Ozier Press, 1984.

No Traveller. New York, Knopf, 1989.

Selected Poems. London, Penguin, 1991.

Like Most Revelations: New Poems. New York, Pantheon Books, 1994.

Trappings: New Poems. Turtle Point Books, 1999.

Plays

Wildflowers & the Lesson of the Master (produced New York, 1976).

A Phenomenon of Nature (produced Massachussetts, 1977).

Two-Part Inventions (produced Chicago, 1979).

Other

Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States since 1950. New York, Atheneum, 1969; London, Thames and Hudson, 1970; revised edition, Atheneum, 1980.

Michel Delacroix's Paris. New York, International Archive of Art, 1990.

Editor, Preferences: 51 American Poets Choose Poems from Their Own Work and from the Past. New York, Viking Press, 1974.

Translator, The Immoralist, by André Gide. New York, Random House, 1954.

Translator, The Voyeur, by Alain Robbe-Grillet. New York, Grove Press, 1958; London, Calder, 1959.

Translator, The Wind, by Claude Simon. New York, Braziller, 1959.

Translator, The Automobile Graveyard, a play by Fernando Arrabal (produced New York, 1961). Published with The Two Executioners, 1960.

Translator, The Grass, by Claude Simon. New York, Braziller, 1960;London, Cape, 1961.

Translator, Two Novels (Jealousy and In the Labyrinth), by Alain Robbe-Grillet. New York, Grove Press, 1960.

Translator, Najda, by André Breton. New York, Grove Press, 1961.

Translator, Last Year at Marienbad, by Alain Robbe-Grillet. New York, Grove Press, and London, Calder and Boyars, 1962.

Translator, Mobile, by Michel Butor. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1963.

Translator, Manhood, by Michel Leiris. New York, Grossman, 1963; London, Cape, 1968.

Translator, Force of Circumstance, by Simone de Beauvoir. New

York, Simon and Schuster, 1963; London, Deutsch-Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965.

Translator, Erasers, by Alain Robbe-Grillet. New York, Grove Press, 1964; London, Calder and Boyars, 1966.

Translator, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, by Alain Robbe-Grillet. New York, Grove Press, 1966.

Translator, The Poetics of Paul Valéry, by Jean Hytier. New York, Doubleday, 1966.

Translator, Natural Histories, by Jules Renard. New York, Horizon Press, 1966.

Translator, History of Surrealism, by Maurice Nadeau. New York, Macmillan, 1967; London, Cape, 1968.

Translator, Histoire, by Claude Simon. New York, Braziller, 1968; London, Cape, 1969.

Translator, May Day Speech, by Jean Genet. San Francisco, City Lights, 1970.

Translator, Professional Secrets: An Autobiography, by Jean Cocteau. New York, Farrar Straus, 1970; London, Vision Press, 1972.

Translator, The Fall into Time, by E.M. Cioran. Chicago, Quadrangle, 1970.

Translator, The Battle of Pharsalus, by Claude Simon. New York, Braziller, and London, Cape, 1971.

Translator, Dramatic Personages, by Denis De Rougement. N.p., Kennikat, 1971.

Translator, A Happy Death, by Albert Camus. New York, Knopf, and London, Hamish Hamilton, 1972.

Translator, Critical Essays, by Roland Barthes. Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 1972.

Translator, Rosa, by Maurice Pons. New York, Dial Press, 1972; London, New English Library, 1973.

Translator, Project for a Revolution in New York, by Alain Robbe-Grillet. New York, Grove Press, 1972; London, Calder and Boyars, 1973.

Translator, The Fantastic, by Tzvetan Todorov. Cleveland, Case

Western Reserve University Press, 1973.

Translator, Quebec versus Ottawa: The Struggle for Self-Government 1960–1972, by Claude Morin. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1976.

Translator, France and Algeria, by Germaine Tillion. Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1976.

Translator, The Motorcycle, by André Pieyre De Mandiargues. Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1977.

Translator, The Poetics of Prose, by Tzvetan Todorov. Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1977.

Translator, Roland Barthes, by Barthes. New York, Hill and Wang, 1977.

Translator, Song for an Equinox, by St.-John Perse. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1977.

Translator, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, by Roland Barthes. New York, Hill and Wang, 1978; London, Cape, 1979.

Translator, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, by Roland

Barthes. New York, Hill and Wang, 1979.

Translator, The One Pig with Horn, by Laurent de Brunhoff. New York, Pantheon, 1979.

Translator, The Girl Beneath the Lion, by André Pieyre De Mandiargues. New York, Riverrun Press, 1980.

Translator, New Critical Essays, by Roland Barthes. New York, Hill and Wang, 1980.

Translator, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, by Roland Barthes. New York, Hill and Wang, 1981; London, Cape, 1982.

Translator, The Girl on the Motorcycle, by André Pieyre De Mandiargues. New York, Riverrun Press, 1981.

Translator, The Trouble with Being Born, by E.M. Cioran. New York, Seaver, 1981. Translator, An Introduction to Poetics, by Tzvetan Todorov. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1981.

Translator, The Margin, by André Pieyre De Mandiargues. New York, Riverrun Press, 1981.

Translator, Ideologies in Quebec: The Historical Development, by Denis Monière. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1981.

Translator, Les Fleurs du Mal, by Baudelaire. Brighton, Sussex, Harvester Press, 1982; Boston, Godine, 1983.

Translator, Witches' Sabbath, by Maurice Sachs. Chelsea, Michigan, Scarborough House, 1982.

Translator, Empire of Signs, by Roland Barthes. New York, Hill and Wang, 1982; London, Cape, 1983.

Translator, Corydon, by André Gide. New York, Farrar Straus, 1983.

Translator, with Matthew Ward, The Fashion System, by Roland

Barthes. New York, Hill and Wang, 1983; London, Cape, 1985.

Translator, Drawn and Quartered, by E.M. Cioran. New York, Seaver, 1983.

Translator, The Complete War Memoirs of Charles De Gaulle, 1940–1946. New York, Da Capo Press, 1984.

Translator, The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays, by Marguerite Yourcenar. New York, Farrar Straus, 1984.

Translator, The Grain of His Voice 1962–1980 (interviews), by Roland Barthes. New York, Hill and Wang, 1984.

Translator, The Conquest of America, by Tzetvan Todorov. New York, Harper, 1984.

Translator, The Responsibility of Forms, by Roland Barthes. New York, Hill and Wang, 1985.

Translator, William Marshal: The Flower of Chivalry, by Georges Duby. New York, Pantheon, 1985; London, Faber, 1986.

Translator, A Strange Virus of Unknown Origin. A.l.D.S., by Jacques Leibowitch. New York, Ballantine, 1985.

Translator, The Flanders Road, by Claude Simon. New York, Riverrun Press, 1986.

Translator, The Last Flowers of Manet, by Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge. New York, Abrams, 1986.

Translator, The Opposing Shore, by Julien Gracq. New York, Columbia University Press, 1986.

Translator, The Temptation to Exist, by E.M. Cioran. New York, Seaver, 1986.

Translator, The Rustle of Language, by Roland Barthes. New York, Hill and Wang, 1986.

Translator, Michelet, by Roland Barthes. New York, Hill and Wang, and London, Blackwell, 1987.

Translator, Past Tense: The Cocteau Diaries, vols. 1 and 2, by Jean Cocteau. San Diego, Harcourt Brace, 2 vols., 1987–88.

Translator, Balcony in the Forest, by Julien Gracq. New York, Columbia University Press, 1987.

Translator, History and Utopia, by E.M. Cioran. New York, Seaver, 1987.

Translator, The Traitor, by André Gorz. New York, Routledge, 1988.

Translator, Amyntas: North African Journals, by André Gide. New York, Ecco Press, 1988.

Translator, The Semiotic Challenge, by Roland Barthes. New York, Hill and Wang, 1988.

Translator, The Pink and the Green, and Mina de Vanghel, by Stendhal. New York, New Directions, and London, Hamish Hamilton, 1988.

Translator, Love in Two Languages, by Abdelkebir Khatibi. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1990.

More than 100 other translations of French works published.

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Critical Studies: "Cleaving and Burning: An Essay on Richard Howard's Poetry" by Henry Sloss, in Shenandoah (Lexington, Virginia), 29 (1), 1977; "A Conversation with Richard Howard" by Paul H. Gray, in Literature in Performance: A Journal of Literary and Performing Art (Chico, California), November 1981; in Salmagundi (Saratoga Springs, New York), fall-winter 1987; "A Chronicle of Vanishings," by Robert Richman, in The New Criterion (New York), December 1989; "Choosing Our Fathers: Gender and Identity in Whitman, Ashbery, and Richard Howard," by David Bergman, in American Literary History (Cary, North Carolina), summer 1989; "Physical Measures," by Jeffrey Donaldson, in Salmagundi, fall-winter 1991; "The Figure of Edith Wharton in Richard Howard's Poem The Lesson of the Master," by Adeline Tintner, in Edith Wharton Review (Brooklyn), fall 1992; "Reading Off the Wall: Recent Books by Richard Howard," by Bin Ramke, in Denver Quarterly, fall 1995.

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Since the appearance of his first book, Quantities, in 1962, Richard Howard's distinguished career has firmly established him as one of our most prolific poets, critics, editors, and translators. The course of his poetic development seems to me to represent the difficult and treacherous job of surmounting and transforming his learning, sophistication, and brilliance instead of simply displaying them. As with Auden, for example, an acknowledged model for Howard, he is so good at writing interesting and skillful poems that he tends to be taken in by his own cleverness.

In Quantities, with its variety of subjects, flexibility and power of language and structure, and penetrating insight, Howard has much to say, coupled with a virtuoso ability to say it. "The Return from Montauk," for example, presents a beautifully balanced moment in terms of a natural yet complex and ambiguous symbol. The speaker is riding a train at nightfall, and, looking to the east, he sees an image of the setting sun reflected in a window. The double perspective is completed when he turns toward the west and sees through the train window the actual setting sun, imagining, however, in line with the logic of his previously established conception, that it is the rising sun. Thus, at the moment of sunset he can envision out of the literal structure of the perception itself the sunrise, and at the moment of despair, the rebirth of hope. It is a clear and delicate poem, intricately wrought, suggesting implications that go far below its pellucid surface. It also is a thematically central poem in the book as a whole, for Howard characteristically deals with the knife-edge upon which opposites are balanced. His vision of the abyss that falls between them is neither deep nor powerful, however, and hence the tension in his poems is sometimes not strong.

With The Damages we find an increased assurance and depth coupled with an increasing prolixity and confirmation of his glib knowingness. In "For Hephaistos" there is the inevitable and moving confrontation with Auden, who "taught me, taught us all a way /To speak our minds," and the speaker's grateful sense of being free of his master: "only now, at last /Free of you, my old ventriloquist, /Have I suspected what I have to say /Without hearing you say it for me first." In "The Encounter" we find a marvelously erotic and mysterious confrontation between the nameless Hero and The Female that rises convincingly to the level of myth. There are, on the other hand, Jamesian and Proustian vignettes of childhood ("Seeing Cousin Phyllis Off," "Intimation of Mortality," "Private Drive"); poems of friends, literature, and travel ("Seferiades," "Even the Most Beautiful Sunset"); and clever poems such as "To Aegidius Cantor," "Eusebius to Florestan," and "Bonnard: A Novel" that continue Howard's own line of literary ventriloquism and that anticipate the extended fascination he was to develop for the dramatic monologue in subsequent volumes.

Untitled Subjects, which won a Pulitzer, consists entirely of fifteen such monologues (mostly in the form of letters), spoken by such nineteenth-century worthies as Scott, Ruskin, Thackeray, and Mrs. William Morris and arranged chronologically from 1801 to 1915. Howard alludes to Browning in his dedication, "the great poet of otherness," and quotes the poet's saying that "I'll tell my state as though 'twere none of mine." This clearly implies that Browning was writing about himself while pretending to be speaking in the voices of others, which I think was true. But I do not think that this makes him simply a poet of otherness or that Howard's dramatic monologues are similar to his master's. What Howard's poems do, in fact, is "to bring history alive," as the jacket blurb for a historical novel or costume drama might say. They bring the past closer to us, first, by treating it as if it were present and, second, by making it personal and intimate, putting back in, as it were, what the official histories leave out. What they do not accomplish often enough, however, is catch the character in a moment of crisis, confrontation, and self-revelation, as Browning's usually do.

Similar poems make up the first part of Findings, and in the fourteen-page poem "November, 1889" Browning himself speaks as he nears the moment of death. It is revealing that Howard puts these words into the master's mouth:

     what is dead or dying
   is more readily apprehended by us
           than what is part of life.
           Nothing in writing is
        easier than to raise the dead.

Perhaps this is more Howard than Browning, and so he moves on in the second part to personal poems of love and friendship.

Two-Part Inventions varies the form by expanding the monologue to the dialogue and by broadening Howard's range of subjects to include Hölderlin, Wilde's visit to Whitman, Ibsen at Capri, Edith Wharton, Rodin, and Di Fiore. Fellow Feelings returns to the more usual lyric mode but deals, nevertheless, in its first section with Hart Crane, Randall Jarrell, Valery Larbaud, Auden, and Goethe. Although the second section occupies more personal ground, poets, a Howard himself says, make "themselves public /without making themselves known." In the third section he characteristically comes back to beloved objets d'art by Donatello, Simone Martini, Bellini, and others. Misgivings contains commentaries on the subjects photographed by Nadar, poems about people from the Renaissance to the present, and a series of love poems.

With Lining Up, however, we find an increasing self-awareness and hence an increasing depth of feeling and insight. Although Howard continues to employ his intricate Marianne Moore-like syllabic stanzas and although he still favors the ventriloquist's and the connoisseur's approach, he nevertheless penetrates to deeper levels of intensity. Indeed, it almost seems as if he is acknowledging earlier criticisms of his dandified and objective manner when he writes, "I go round on the back of that other life /my reading relinquishes /like the little Egyptian heron that lives /on the backs of cows. The shoe fits perfectly" ("Homage"). Elsewhere he says, "Figures /speak, that is the assumption: /we receive our riches only when they come /to meet us on another's voice" ("Attic Red-Figure Calyx"). In the context of this volume the remarks are more than a mere apologia; they signify, rather, the achievement of an enriched ars poetica, an indication of Howard's developed ability to raise the objective to the level of the subjective. In defending Jane Austen against Charlotte Brontë's characterization of her as passionless, he says, "Wisdom's secret is detachment, not /withdrawal" ("On Lately Looking in Chapman's Jane Austen").

"Move Still, Still So," as an example, is an astonishingly brilliant erotic poem. Gladys, one of Lewis Carroll's nymphet photography models, now grown up, is talking in 1925 to her psychiatrist. Interspersed are Carroll's directions to her in 1895 as she poses in the nude. The gist, something that is not quite stated and so must be inferred from the dramatic context, is that she has a way of becoming immobile in order to release her orgasm, a curious passivity that she learned from the pleasure she felt when she held still as Carroll prepared to snap her picture but that confuses her husband into thinking that she is unresponsive during sex. The implications are delicate and pornographic at one and the same time, and the Browningesque moment of self-revelation is brilliantly managed.

Howard's volume No Traveller begins with a thirty-page series of letters about a strange encounter with Wallace Stevens in 1953 ("Even in Paris"), and it ends with an even stranger twenty-two-page monologue spoken by Vera Lachman ("Oracles"), an aged and sibylline professor living out her days at a scholar's retreat in Greece. Especially in the latter Howard verges on the mystical, a rite for "the discovery /of a god reborn." In between are shorter poems dealing with Loie Fuller, Proust, Rodin, Wordsworth, Fuseli, Kafka, and Woolf and with several domestic and family situations. Howard shows in this volume that he has become not only one of our most skillful but also one of our more significant poets.

Howard confronts the theme of feeling and art directly in the title poem of the volume Like Most Revelations, in which he rings the changes in a tightly organized lyric on the puzzling, intricate, and mutually destructive and creative relationships between the "movement" of a poem and its "form." The remainder of the volume opens up a rich display of dramatic and semidramatic monologues, lyrics, and elegies, all done in his characteristically low-keyed style—sometimes deliberately prosaic—and arranged in what seem like intricate syllabic stanzas. Thus we have the expected gallery of historical and more modern personages, including Henry James, Matisse, Isadora Duncan, Gertrude and Leo Stein, Disraeli, Mozart, Beckett, Frost, and Stevens, as well as many less specifically located poems about art, writers, and artists. There is also an increasingly gnomic strain emerging, in which Howard includes epigrammatic sayings in his poems. Examples include "Humanity has always been the story-telling animal /that must lie to itself in order to believe"; "Unnatural acts are assigned to many, but it is always /nature which has shown—even by concealing—the way"; and "Love is /not love until it is vulnerable." Evident here also is the emergence of a new and difficult subject—the death of friends from AIDS. In addition to elegies for Donald Barthelme, Robert Phelps, James Boatwright, and others, there are specific mentions of the plague in the elegies for Matthew Ward and David Kalstone and in the long poem that concludes the book, "Man Who Beat Up Homosexuals Reported to Have AIDS Virus."

—Norman Friedman