Books |
How to Do Things Right
L. Rust Hills
By
Published: Jan 01, 2008
Category:
Memoir
I met Rust Hills at a party on Nantucket. He was sitting in a lawn chair, nursing a drink. Though he was 81, he had the look of an aging preppy — khakis and a button-down oxford shirt. I asked if I might join him; he inspected my button-down shirt and khakis, and nodded. And thus began one of the most pleasant hours of my life.
Rust Hills had no idea who I was, but I knew a lot about him — you couldn’t be in the writing game and not be aware that he’d been, at three different times, the Fiction Editor of Esquire Magazine. Norman Mailer, John Cheever, William Styron, Bruce Jay Friedman, William Gaddis, James Salter, Don DeLillo, Ann Beattie, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver and E. Annie Proulx — he’d championed them all. And, in the process, he’d helped make Esquire a worthy competitor to The New Yorker.
As we talked about books and writers, I came to understand why one of the two greatest fiction editors of our time — the other was William Maxwell, of The New Yorker — wrote no novels or stories of his own. Rust Hills was a walking fiction, a self-created character very specific to his trade.
Rust Hills — the name suggests the ultimate patrician, but he came from Brooklyn and his father was a salesman for Sears. After the Merchant Marine Academy, World War II and Wesleyan, he became a teacher, then an editor. Along the way, his background — he never suppressed the facts— faded and the man he wanted to be stepped forward: urbane in society, sophisticated about books, flawless when he sat at his desk with a manuscript and a red pencil.
In short, he became a character, and that character became him. And, from that super-conscious vantage point, he began to write. Not fiction. Guides to living well.
How to Do Things Right is a pared-down — just 258 pages — collection of three books. The first, his guide to correct functioning, is subtitled “The Revelations of a Fussy Man”. The second is “How to Retire at Forty-One.” And then there’s “How to be Good”, or, as he alerts us in the subtitle, “The Somewhat Tricky Business of Attaining Moral Virtue in a Society That’s Not Just Corrupt but Corrupting, Without Being Completely Out of It”.
The author of these essays is a sophisticated adult with a keen nose for hypocrisy, a love of clear speech and an eternal ambivalence about mankind — George Orwell, but with a sense of humor. No one writes like this now. Few ever could do it; it’s hard to be wise without being serious. Rust Hills made it look easy.
He begins by revealing his prejudices. He is against sloppiness. He is for organization, cleaning up as you go along, and to-do lists. And because he knows that people resist this level of fussiness, he pushes it to the limit.
He writes, for example, five full pages on “how to eat an ice-cream cone.” That starts, of course, by taking proper possession of it. “Never let the man hand you the cone of others,” he advises. “Make him hand one to each kid individually.” When it comes to your cone:
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 like manner, he teaches you how to give a dinner party, and why:
What did away with the big dinner party in this country was the end of the servant class; what did away with the small dinner party was the end of the wife class.
And how to refold a road map:
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…
An orderly life is not much prized, but Hills lobbied for it hard. “Cleaning up as you go along is half the fun,” he liked to say. ”Fussiness is its own reward.” He wasn’t a jerk about it, he just valued things in their rightful places. Which is why he…
…retired at 41. He had ten acres on the Connecticut shore, and when he went there, he had a ton of chores. And just to burden himself more, he acquired a wooden sailboat — a time-consuming obligation that only lacked “a lawn to mow.” Anyone who has ever owned a money pit will delight in this section.
In “How To Be Good”, his topic is “personal morality”, which, in our time, is an oxymoron on the order of jumbo shrimp, free time and spare change. Hills is a conservative of a special kind: He favors indifference. And common sense. In a brilliant examination of extra-marital coupling — “Split-second timing is required of the sort of people who may not even wear a watch” — he considers the importance of good manners: “You are about to commit adultery. It’s either that or hurt her feelings.” Funny stuff.
There is a philosophy here, and it’s all his own: Simple is good. But not for the usual reason. It’s good because you want to use your time to create a complicated life — a life powered by a moral code you must devise yourself. He doesn’t say it directly, but I get the feeling Rust Hills would like real people to be at least as complex as his favorite characters in 19th century fiction.
Rust Hills died, in the summer of 2008, at 83. At a memorial service, he was described as a painter of small watercolors, as the ideal reader, as “wasabi for the mind”. That man is gone. In this book, the writer lives on.
To buy “How to Do Things Right: The Revelations of a Fussy Man” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular” from Amazon.com, click here.
