Aug 15 2008
Death of a Fussy Man
In the space of a week, another great editor has died. First Ted Solotaroff, and now L. Rust Hills, dead at age 83 and one of the finest fiction and magazine editors, as well as one of America’s most neglected humorists. Hills’ run at Esquire, where he edited everyone from Norman Mailer to Raymond Carver, was covered pretty thoroughly in his Times obit.
I will speak up for Hills-as-humorist. As someone who has spent half his life quoting Hills’ axiom, “Cleaning up as you go along is half the fun,” I am squarely in the camp of Hills’ idealized “fussy man,” the sort of reader who found Hills’ 1972 book How To Do Things Right: The Revelations of a Fussy Man both rib-tickling and soul-satisfying. This collection of comic essays, gathered from Esquire, The New Yorker, and other publications, were models of the sort of precise, unadorned prose Hills valued in the more literary writers he edited, while also containing just the right amount of obsessive crazy-juice that would compel a man to explain the proper way to eat an ice-cream cone. (”First, revolve the cone through the full three hundred and sixty degrees, snapping at the loose gobs of ice cream […] Then, with the cone still ‘wound,’ which will require the wrist to be bent at the full right angle toward you, apply pressure with the mouth and tongue to accomplish the overall realignment, straightening and settling the whole mess.”)
In an essay such as “How To Refold A Map,” Hills can be read as a precusor to early Nicholson Baker, of the Mezzanine era, with Hills’ languid, meticulous descriptions of everyday objects yielding a fresh way to look at banal items. Looking back to writers preceding Hills, there was an element of Robert Benchley-ism to his advice, the sense that the world (frequently in the more immediate form of the family) was looking over his shoulder wondering why Husband/Daddy was being such a stick-in-the-mud, when of course what he was trying to do was nothing less than impose order upon an increasingly anarchic (or in Hills’ comic framework, messy) universe: “…You may have to inspect the road map carefully to determine which is the original crease. Use a flashlight at the picnic table, if necessary, if it’s getting late and the family is gathered around you, watching anxiously. Don’t hurry. Be careful. Explain it all to the young ones-the theory, the practice, the inevitability of the second fold after the first fold, the beauty of the conception…”
There was another side to Hills’ comic writing, however, an aspect that may today strike us as being at odds with his “fussy man” strictures: The smoking, hard-drinking, priapic suburban man he was, or at least suggested he was, when he devised such Platonic concepts as “the Three-Legged Stool, supported by Booze, Coffee, and Smokes, which interdepend essentially.” And then there is Hills’ deathless comment on the essential problem with those who engage in adultery: “Split-second timing is required of the sort of people who may not even wear a watch.”
Like the magazine era over which he commanded such influence throughout the 1960s, the humor writing Hills practiced will seem ever-more quaint as the years go by, I suspect. But re-reading How To Do Things Right after hearing of Hills’ death, I was exhilarated once again at the tangy zest of his approach to both writing and life, of his enviable raffishness, of a WASP-y charm that makes the TV show Mad Men seem like a kiddie, aspirational text when compared to Hills’ artful, effortless embodiment of it.
–Ken Tucker