By MICHAEL SNYDER


James Leo Herlihy in his backyard with friends, Key West, 1960s.
All photos by Bud Lee. © Bud Lee / The Serge Group James Leo Herlihy was born in Detroit in 1927 and raised there and in Chillicothe, Ohio. He lived in New York City, Los Angeles, and, off and on from 1957 to 1973, in Key West, where he became "captivated," finding it "a wonderful place to work and write."

"The town excited me too much," Herlihy told Key West Literary Seminar co-founder Lynn Kaufelt. "I spent all my time exploring, walking the streets. The place was mysterious, funky, indescribably exotic. It had much of the charm of a foreign country, but you had the post office and the A&P and the phone worked, so life was easy." Key West was still "a pretty well-kept secret," neither a tourist favorite nor a literary and cultural hotspot: "Nightlife was delightful, totally unsophisticated, nonliterary."

Herlihy's work brought him celebrity in his own time. Like his close friend and mentor Tennessee Williams, Herlihy was a gay author whose works delved into taboo subjects and broke new ground for what was acceptable to major publishers. His 1958 play Blue Denim confronted teenage sexuality and abortion and was praised in a newspaper column by Eleanor Roosevelt. His novels were acclaimed by writers like William S. Burroughs, Paul Bowles, Nelson Algren, and Williams, who praised Herlihy's writing as "luminous," "true," and "perfect," hailing him as the most significant new writer since Carson McCullers. His novel Midnight Cowboy was made into a film starring Dustin Hoffman, and won an Academy Award for Best Picture despite being given an "X" rating.


Herlihy (seated) with Tennessee Williams, a friend and mentor, in front of the travelers' palms at Williams's Duncan Street home. Key West's influence on Herlihy is plain from the settings of his fiction. In All Fall Down (1960), the adolescent protagonist Clinton Williams follows his idolized but ne'er-do-well older brother Berry-Berry all the way down to "Key Bonita," a stand-in for Key West. His 1967 short story "A Story that Ends with a Scream" is set in Key West, as is "Ceremony for the Midget," in which the midget is an apparition or hallucination symbolizing the spirit of a beloved bar that is closing. "The Day of the Seventh Fire" captures the mood of Key West in the 1930s. And at the end of Midnight Cowboy, Joe Buck and Ratso are riding a Greyhound to the sunny Florida of Ratso's dreams when tragedy strikes.

One of the most exciting things about Key West for Herlihy was the presence of Tennessee Williams. He told Kaufelt, "Before Tennessee had a pool installed, he and I went swimming off the Monroe County pier nearly every summer day at twilight . . . it was inexpressibly comforting to have the daily company of a kindred spirit; just knowing we were involved in the same sort of lunatic pursuit provided some essential ground that meant everything to me." Williams told Kaufelt of their regular ritual of meeting at County Beach, trading lines from their favorite Wallace Stevens poem, "The Idea of Order at Key West," before diving in. As late as 1976, when Herlihy's mother died of cancer, Williams was there for him. Herlihy wrote Paul Bowles that year that he spent three months in Key West with his dying mother: "Tennessee was in Key West during much of that time, and he was enormously considerate. Sent flowers, messages. Cooked for me. Even showed up at the funeral mass, volunteering to act as pallbearer. I was impressed and moved by it all."


Herlihy beneath a young mango tree in his backyard. Along with Williams, Herlihy became part of a circle of friends and lovers in Key West– mostly gay writers and "theater people"– that included James "Jimmy" Kirkwood Jr., co-writer of A Chorus Line and author of cult novels and plays including There Must Be a Pony!; Evan Rhodes, the author of The Prince of Central Park; one-time singer and agent Dick Duane, to whom Herlihy dedicated two of his finest novels, All Fall Down and Midnight Cowboy; and to a lesser extent, visiting writers like Truman Capote and Gore Vidal. Author Christopher Isherwood paints the scene in an entry from his diary in August 1959: "(Broadway producer Walter) Starcke came by, en route for Japan and round the world . . . 'Now I live by grace,' says Starcke. 'I live every hour of every day to its fullest.' Actually he is in Key West, dealing in real estate and having parties with Herlihy and his friend which sometimes go on until morning. Lots of sex."

“Key West, unfortunately, is becoming rather literary and artistic.”– Wallace Stevens.
Photo of Robert Frost and Stevens at the Casa Marina Hotel in Key West, ca. 1940,
reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.


"Robert Frost was on the beach this morning and is coming to dinner this evening." So did Wallace Stevens write to his wife Elsie in February of 1935 from the Casa Marina, a hotel on the Atlantic Ocean where he spent part of each winter in Key West for nearly 20 years. Frost and Stevens today are broadly acknowledged as literary peers, but in 1935 the two poets' reputations were leagues apart. Frost had won the Pulitzer Prize twice, while Stevens had published only a single volume, Harmonium, more than a decade earlier. While Stevens had earned the approval of influential readers including Poetry editor Harriet Monroe, Frost was not among them, once complaining that he didn't like Stevens's work "because it purports to make me think."

While he craved the sort of literary acclaim that Frost routinely garnered, in Depression-era Key West Stevens would have seen his fellow Harvard alum as an equal. After all, Stevens was a highly successful businessman and a familiar semi-resident of the town where Frost was but a first-time tourist. Welcoming Frost to the neighborhood, Stevens presented him with a bag of sapodillas, the sweet tropical fruits of which he'd grown fond in Cuba and Key West, and planned to share conch chowder, another local staple, with Frost that night.

Before the dinner could take place, Stevens and his friend Judge Arthur Powell hosted a cocktail party. As he sometimes did in Key West, Stevens had too much to drink. He later wrote to Monroe, saying "the cocktail party, the dinner with Frost, and several other things became all mixed up, and I imagine that Frost has been purifying himself by various exorcisms ever since." The two poets apparently argued, and Frost was so scandalized by the evening that he gossipped about Stevens's drunken behavior to a lecture audience at the University of Miami.

When Frost's gossip got back to Stevens later that summer, he apologized, insisting he was only being "playful," and would "treasure the memory" of their meeting, which, he reminded Stevens, "I was in a better condition than you to appreciate." Eager to smooth things over, Frost continues, "Take it from me there was no conflict at all but the prettiest kind of stand-off. You and I and the judge found we liked one another. And you and I really like each other's works. At least down underneath I suspect we do. We should. We must. If I'm somewhat academic (I'm more agricultural) and you are somewhat executive, so much the better: it is so we are saved from being literary and deployers of words derived from words."

Frost's easy disdain for "words derived from words" and poetry that "purports to make me think" suggests how far apart were the sensibilities of the two poets. For Stevens, the author of poems like "The World as Meditation" and "Men Made out of Words," Frost's presence had begun to spoil the "paradise" where Stevens once relished a freedom to "do as one pleases." "Key West is no longer quite the delightful affectation it once was," he wrote to Philip May from the Casa Marina. "Who wants to share green cocoanut ice cream with these strange monsters who snooze in the porches of this once forlorn hotel." To Monroe, he wrote "Key West, unfortunately, is becoming rather literary and artistic."

Against his better judgement, Stevens was back at the Casa Marina five years later. The place had become "furiously literary," with the comings and goings of literati so well known that a young Elizabeth Bishop went to "the 'fancy' hotel" one day looking for him, she wrote, "almost provided with opera glasses." Frost was there again, too, traveling with his official biographer, Lawrance Thompson, who set down for posterity the argument between the poets. Echoing Frost's letter to Stevens five years earlier, Thompson's account further caricatures the divergent poetics of these incongruous masters:

    "The trouble with you, Robert, is that you're too academic."
    "The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you're too executive."
    "The trouble with you, Robert, is that you write about– subjects."
    "The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about– bric-a-brac."

Stevens never again returned to Key West. In 1954, not long before Stevens died, he rebuffed an invitation to attend Frost's 80th birthday celebration at Amherst, saying coolly "I do not know his work well enough to be either impressed or unimpressed." It is hard to imagine that Stevens had not read Frost, and Jay Parini suggests instead that the two "worked from such contradictory, even exclusive, aesthetics that neither could really read the other with much satisfaction." And so Frost, who wanted "to get away from earth awhile / And then come back to it and begin over," and Stevens, for whom "Reality is the beginning not the end," would share sapodillas and conch chowder but remain isolated from one another's poetry, in which each was the other's only peer.

Sources: Letters of Wallace Stevens, selected and edited by Holly Stevens; Letter from Robert Frost to Wallace Stevens, July 28, 1935, from The Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915-1938, by Lawrance Thompson; Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938-1963, by Lawrance Thompson and R.H. Winnick; Robert Frost: A Life, by Jay Parini; Secretaries of the Moon: The Letters of Wallace Stevens and José Rodríguez Feo, edited by Beverly Coyle and Alan Filreis; Wallace Stevens: The Later Years, 1923-1955, by Joan Richardson; and One Art: Elizabeth Bishop Letters, selected and edited by Robert Giroux.

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."

Richard Wilbur, John Malcolm Brinnin, and Philip Burton, at the January 4 1993 dedication of Elizabeth Bishop's former Key West home as a Literary Landmark.
Photograph © Richard Watherwax.

Harry Mathews is often introduced as "the only American member of the Oulipo." The introduction is obscure, as few Americans know anything about the Oulipo, and many of those who do came to it by way of Mathews. Short for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or "Workshop for Potential Literature," the Oulipo is a group of mostly French writers and mathematicians who invent constricting forms as a means of creating literature. The famous example is George Perec's novel La Disparition, written (to the length of 300 pages) without use of the letter "e." It was subsequently translated into English, as A Void, by Gilbert Adair, also without recourse to that ever-useful letter. While the constraints gather all the attention, like an Olympic sprinter with prosthetic legs, a successful Oulipian text renders them almost beside the point. To his readers, Mathews is known first as a writer of strange and eminently pleasurable novels. None are overtly Oulipian, but each (I'm thinking of The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, My Life in CIA, and The Journalist) is marked by sensations unfound elsewhere in literature. One suspects something is going on, that some exotic form is master of the content, before coming to the sure conclusion that Mathews is the prudent master of each.

Mathews and his wife Marie Chaix divide their time between France and Key West, where, from 2001-'04, he served as a member of our board of directors along with Irving Weinman. In 1998, Mathews, Chaix, and others celebrated the Key West marriage of Weinman to poet Judith Kazantzis. To honor their union, Mathews turned toward Perec's Oulipian re-imagining of the Epithalamium, a traditional poetic form which celebrates bride and groom. In Perec's version, the basic rule is that the letters used are restricted to those of the names of the betrothed. In Mathews' 5-part Epithalamium, a further refinement was added, limiting the letters of the first section to those of the bride's name, the second to those of the groom's, alternating until the final section, where the letters of both names are freely mixed. It sounds complicated, and is, especially when you consider the strict alphabet of this bride, j-u-d-i-t-h-k-a-z-a-n-s, and this groom, i-r-v-n-g-w-e-n-m-a. But what results is a gorgeous rendering of two distinct, isolate, fully-composed entities, finally coming together in a union richer than the sums of each. It is a marriage of language, in other words, to celebrate a marriage of friends.

Until now, Harry Mathews's Epithalamium for Judith Kazantzis and Irving Weinman, with collages by Marie Chaix, has been available only to those friends who attended the wedding of Judith and Irving on February 22, 1998, and received one of the ninety-three copies printed by the Grenfell Press. By special arrangement with Mathews and Chaix, we have created a digital version of the Epithalamium, following the design of the original. Click here to view the Epithalamium as a series of images in a pop-up window. Click here to download a .pdf of the Epithalamium, which will allow you to magnify text size as desired.

Photograph of Harry Mathews is ©Sigrid Estrada.

We've now identified each of the writers in this photo, taken on Hidden Beach in 1984. Thanks to Liz Lear, Holly Merrill, and Don Kincaid for their help. Read the appended post here. Click here for a full-size version.

from top left: James Merrill, Evan Rhodes, Edward Hower, Alison Lurie, Shel Silverstein, Bill Manville, Joseph Lash, Arnold Sundgaard, John Williams, Richard Wilbur, Jim Boatwright.
from bottom left: Susan Nadler, Thomas McGuane, William Wright, John Ciardi, David Kaufelt, Philip Caputo, Philip Burton, John Malcolm Brinnin.

How many words is a picture worth if its subjects have penned more than many thousands of bestselling words apiece, already read by tens of thousands of readers? If in their beach bags are five Pulitzer Prizes, a few National Book Awards, two Bollingen Prizes, and office stationery from the U.S. Poet Laureate?

Thanks to Bill Wright for loaning this excellent group portrait. Liz Lear arranged the event, at Hidden Beach. The photographer was Don Kincaid. Click here for a full-size version. Thanks to Liz Lear, Holly Merrill, and Don Kincaid for their help in identifying the authors.

Key Westers bemoan change. You should've seen it twenty years ago. You should have seen it last week. But look far enough, and you'll see we've made a habit of proclaiming ruin. Still, it's better here than not, and gems do turn up in what looks like faceless change. Today, it's condominiums. Yesterday, it was the Navy. Here's Elizabeth Bishop, in 1942:

Marjorie and I are leaving for Mexico on the fifteenth. We're flying to Mérida, where we'll stay awhile. Then we're going up to Mexico City and then find a cool place—on a lake—to stay for the summer—in fact maybe for "the duration," I don't know. It is impossible to live here any longer. The Navy takes over and tears down and eats up one or two blocks of beautiful little houses for dinner every day. Probably the house on White Street will go, too.

The local build-up for the war was an unprecedented disruption, with thousands of young servicemen and the bustle of war preparations altering the pace of daily life. Though only a part-time resident, Bishop owned a home and had begun to feel at home here. These new transients shook her claim on the place. Who were these crass military men who displaced Miss Bishop?

One of them was nineteen year-old James Schuyler, future Pulitzer-prize winning poet, "simply the best we have," according to John Ashbery, and member of the so-called New York School of poets, along with Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch. That's Schuyler in the image above, enrolled in sonar school in Key West during the summer of '43, a year after Bishop's complaint. By delighful coincidence, Schuyler and Bishop worked on the base together as fellow patriots that summer. Neither was aware of the other, but Bishop wrote to Marianne Moore of her adventure in the Navy:

I first heard of the fist-fight between Ernest Hemingway and Wallace Stevens in KWLS co-founder Lynn Kaufelt's book, Key West Writers and Their Houses. It didn't ring quite true, somehow, and yet the story's skeleton alone begged frequent repetition. Hemingway, man of action and hard drinking, fan of violence in so many forms, and Stevens, cerebral, executive, ironic, each gave as much to American writing in the 1930s as any. That they both spent considerable time that decade in tiny Key West was improbable enough. That they actually came to blows over their no-doubt-innumerable differences was gravy, perhaps a fiction but, with apologies to Wallace, a supremely pleasurable one.

It turns out the story is true. Let's let Hem tell it:
Nice Mr. Stevens. This year he came again pleasant like the cholera and first I knew of it my nice sister Ura was coming into the house crying because she had been at a cocktail party at which Mr. Stevens had made her cry by telling her forcefully what a sap I was, no man, etc. So I said, this was a week ago, "All right, that's the third time we've had enough of Mr. Stevens." So headed out into the rainy past twilight and met Mr. Stevens who was just issuing from the door haveing just said, I learned later, "By God I wish I had that Hemingway here now I'd knock him out with a single punch."