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The Fussy Man Feted
November 18, 2008

L. Rust Hills, the longtime Esquire magazine fiction editor  who died last summer, was the "nerve center" of the literary world for much of the last forty years.  Last Friday, he was honored at the New York Public Library in an event more than one attendee -- and this is not a crowd given to hyperbole -- called as epic, as competitive, as extravagant and maddening,  as the man himself.  I couldn't be there, but it seems everybody I know and admire was.  What follows is a letter from a friend of mine -- and more importantly, of Hills.   

In the gorgeous Jeffersonian trustees' room at the NYPL at the cocktail hour on a Friday night in November, 
L. Rust Hills was invoked and admired, quoted and toasted by 120 people. It was a little like an Esquire reunion, onstage and off. In addition to former Esquire editors Byron Dobell, Lee Eisenberg, and Terry McDonell (bottom, left) and old hands like Bob Brown, Will Blythe, Binky Urban, Betsy Carter, Lisa Grunwald, David Hirshey, Rob Fleder, Bruce Weber (Rust's former assistant, who wrote his obituary for the New York Times), Dominique Browning, Michael Solomon, Larkin Warren, Erika Mansourian, Cynthia Stuart, and Marilyn Johnson, to mention a few, there were writers who had contributed to Esquire over the years, chiefly James Salter and Richard Ford (top, left). Christopher Buckley, Jim Harrison, and Tom Jenks couldn't make it but were quoted Beverly Lowry recalled Rust's kindness to her as an unpublished writer. Joy Williams [who was married to Hills], Don DeLillo, Jesse Kornbluth, and Philip Gourevitch were in the audience.   So were longtime Esquirers, Bill Tonelli and Joe Hooper. Atmosphere was provided by a Juilliard student who played Jazz standards on a keyboard before and after; the wine flowed. A large black and white photo, taken by Nancy Crampton, of the grinning editor at his home in Stonington, Connecticut, was propped on an easel and explicated to everyone's amusement by Eisenberg, who pointed out the chinos, the nearly-empty Scotch glass in one hand and the Camel in the other, the organized stacks of paper and the tools of trade of the low-tech editor: paper, sharpened number two pencils, scissors, and tape. 

A friendly rivalry, a competition between the boys, fueled the comments: Dobell thought Rust's literary issue of July, 1963, with its multiple stories and literary chart with its red hot literary center had turned Esquire into a literary player; Eisenberg thought their collaborative Fifty Who Made the Difference issue in 1983 was the best (exhibit A was an original handwritten chart that Rust had constructed for tracking assignments, including a column for him to check off when he first approached the writer with a "friendly letter.") Terry McDonell brought a photo of a pyramid of post-its Rust had constructed, ranking writers, and Will Blythe, who had helped Rust make the pyramid, remembered shifting writers up before they came in for meetings or lunch. The rivalry extended to other magazines. Jim Salter remembered the lengths Rust went to to wrest one of his stories away from the New Yorker and into Esquire, where he thought it belonged. Richard Ford, in a fiercely realized profile of the editor, remembered him calling immediately, full of praise, after getting a story from Ford, 
"Communist." The next day he called again, and said, Well, I don't know, it's about a bloodsport and our readers don't appreciate bloodsports. I just can't use it. And that was that. Will Blythe recalled Rust asking, even after he retired, to "send me something to read -- send it now, before you forget." Rust's daughter, Caitlin Love Hills, read Chris Buckley's wonderful rollicking remarks of the fun he had had with Rusto simply going on errands, or driving fifty miles for a ritual barbecue. 

"In the end,"she read, with willed steadiness,  "the fussy man went out without a fuss." 
 

Posted by Sara Nelson on November 18, 2008 | Comments (2)