Dwight Garner on Richard Hell

Mr. Hell’s intellectual progress consisted of defining himself as against, rather than for, things. He scorned the Beats and their “insistence on spontaneity.” (“I’ll be spontaneous when I feel like it,” he says.) Hippies were too soft. Rock music peaked in the 1950s, he decides, “before the Beatles homogenized and corrupted everything.”

His band with Mr. Verlaine was a reaction against the downtown music scene. “We wanted to strip everything down further, away from the showbiz theatricality of the glitter bands, and away from bluesiness and boogie,” he declares. “We wanted to be stark and hard and torn up, the way the world was.”

His worldview led to philosophical vexations. “If your message is that you don’t care about things,” he asks, “how can it be delivered?”

The split with Mr. Verlaine was ugly. We read about Mr. Verlaine’s “coldness and egotism” and about what Mr. Hell calls his “globally sour” demeanor. One of the final straws, Mr. Hell reports, was when Mr. Verlaine “told me not to move around onstage while he sang.”

There is a great deal of sex in this book, some of it dire, some of it quite funny. When Mr. Hell had a fling with Patty Oldenburg, who was then separated from the pop artist Claes Oldenburg, their sex was so ferocious, Mr. Hell says, that the painter Larry Rivers, living in the loft upstairs, drilled a hole through the ceiling to watch. His nickname for Mr. Hell was “Tarzan.”

The good writing in “I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp” (the title comes from a snippet of Mr. Hell’s childhood prose) can jostle against the bad or merely inexplicable. One young woman has large breasts that “looked like twin Eeyores.” About the first Central Park Be-In in 1967, he writes: “ ‘Be-In’ makes me think ‘doughnut,’ internal doughnut. The DNA of humankind as stale crullers.”