Remembering Rust Hills

We note with sadness the death, earlier this summer, of Rust Hills, our friend and collaborator for more than 20 years. He was 83.

The importance of Rust Hills to the world of American letters, particularly as fiction editor at Esquire, is well conveyed by the obituaries which ran in The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. The enduring value of his own crisp, laugh-out-loud prose is plainly apparent in the idiosyncratic trio of books gathered together as How To Do Things Right. But Rust, who arrived in Key West in the early 1980s with his wife, the writer Joy Williams, was also a man who loved a day on the water; who played anagrams and poker, threw cocktail parties and chatted over the fence; and who will be remembered and missed by the many who knew him, first and finally, as a friend.

For this memorial, we turn to a handful of those who knew Rust in Key West. Recollections follow from writers Harry Mathews, Phyllis Rose, John Leslie, and William Wright, from former neighbor and barman John Vagnoni, and from sculptor and printmaker John Martini.

     "More than twenty-five years ago I met Rust Hills when he and Joy first came to Key West. For two or three winters they rented before eventually buying a place of their own on Pine Street. Cocktail parties galore ensued– once, twice, sometimes three times a week as they got acquainted with the denizens of Key West. All the literati were invited, along with a varying group of Key West roustabouts. Rust was about sixty then, a few years younger than I am now. I can still see him shuffling between the hibachi grill filled with fragrant kielbasa, and the bar. Liquor bottles bloomed, then wilted on the kitchen countertops– the Emerald Isle as it became known at Pine Street. In his trademark khakis and button-down Brooks Brothers' shirt, a beloved Camel cigarette in one hand, a glass of Scotch in the other, Rust observed the unfolding parade. Never once did he waver in his identity. Re-inventing himself would have been unthinkable. With Rust, what you saw was what you got, as they say. And what he often said was, "No change is good change." He was as resolute in his habits as he was steadfast in his friendships. The weekly games of poker and anagrams, the many lucid days on the water– for me, Key West will not be the same without him."


     "Rust was like an old shoe. He was just a great guy. He and Joy would come in to the Green Parrot when we used to have the poetry slams. They'd order margaritas and stand outside the doorway, listening. When we were neighbors on Olivia Street, we'd bullshit across the fence– this or that, whatever was going on, and I'd walk away and get goosebumps a little, thinking about who this guy was, what he'd been responsible for. I mean I grew up in awe of Mailer; Cheever and Carver and those guys; and Rust– he was the guy. He made it happen. That picture in the Times— boy, what a good-looking guy, drink in hand, laughing. The world was his."