Dearest Girl
Richard Howard to Susan Sontag
Readers may know I love Richard Howard—and that, with any number of reservations, I also love a certain Susan Sontag, especially as the author of The Volcano Lover (even if I also have a qualified, queer defense of her homophobic exhusband). I’m working on a project now that involves looking back over Howard’s letters to Sontag (which I drew on in my essay on her). Some random nuggets of Gerede include…
In the 60s, literary critic and Raritan editor Richard Poirier procuring Moroccan boys with Leo Bersani:
Howard and his then-partner Sandford Friedman helping Lee Krasner (“Lee Pollock”!) name her paintings, including Gaea:
Gaea, in case you don’t remember:
Howard was an important interlocutor for Krasner over the years, and an interview he did with her in the late 70s is still grist for commentarial mills; it’s funny to see him here, in contrast to the public-facing praise he gave her, slag her off to Sontag with the equivalent of that dumb bitch!
Friedman btw was the author of an ok gay coming-of-age novel, Totempole, which is notable to me chiefly because the climax comes with the protagonist, a nice Jewish boy hung up about his sexuality, sent off to the Korean War where he gets railed by a local in what must be one of the first, or at any rate, most lavish early accounts of a bottomy rice queen—something for which, indeed, we still lack a proper word…
Howard was always praising Sontag, but also offering gently, obliquely, encouragingly, some advice (he was three years older and could be a bit big-brotherly), such as in this instance, to lighten the fuck up:
A couple decades pass with little correspondence, since they’re in the same city (Paris or New York) or telephone each other. Cut to the 80s.
Howard reassures Sontag (‘86) that even though she’s too broke, at 53, to afford an apartment, she at least has a body of work (Annie Liebovitz would later buy her an apartment, but they won’t meet for another two years):
Howard himself, although he translated something like a hundred books, many of them best-sellers, was even in advanced middle-aged in a somewhat precarious financial state and had to do some rounds of teaching in the provinces (Cincinnati, Houston), which, truly, he was too good for!
Cut to 1988, and here’s Leibovitz, not yet perhaps gf, supplying a photo for AIDS and its Metaphors. Howard was always supportive, even effusive, about whatever Sontag had just published (including absolute shit like The Benefactor and Death Kit), although here he manages to avoid saying anything about her dreadful AIDS ‘book’ and pivots, as another politely shady Queen did, to the visuals:
I have no idea, unfortunately, to what photo Howard could be referring! Surely not this 1988 one, although it’s the only thing by Leibovitz of Sontag for that year that comes up in a cursory google image search (one could I suppose search all the reviews for the AIDS essaylette and see what photos accompanied them but in this our brief existence I can’t be bothered):
Finally, Howard’s (pretty awful!) poem to celebrate the The Volcano Lover launch party:
This is gold! more of these letters, pls!!
Bravo! More savory gossip. I was eagerly reading and trying to like Howard’s poetry from about 1980 onwards. No idea that Sandford was his partner — I read Totempole around the same time (early 80s), I think it was published by North Point Press. And erased it from my mind as soon as I’d finished. Also wicked remarks on Poirier, who knew his Moroccan proclivities? I’m a big fan of his book on Robert Frost from the late 70s… I want to read it again, that was a while ago. I saw/heard Sontag read at the Art Institute on Illness as a Metaphor, as a good number of my friends & Sidetrack acquaintances were dealing with AIDS. Sontag full of hauteur, fairly intolerable, lecturing her crowd from the mountain top. Howard was right, that girl needed to have fun. — Gearing up for your piece on Wiman which promises to be provocative. You would have loved Chicago in the 1980s, Blake.