Losing Two Legends of a Lost Art: Ted Solotaroff and Rust Hills

I'm often on the obit desk here at Omni central, and were I not on vacation last week I would have liked to note the passing, nearly in tandem, of two legends of the rather narrow field of magazine fiction editing, Ted Solotaroff (mostly at his own paperback-style journal, The New American Review) and Rust Hills (mostly at Esquire, back when it was the best magazine in the business, and then later when it wasn't). But happily, especially since my knowledge of their careers is mainly second- and third-hand, others have stepped in, including Thomas Beller in Slate, who speculates why both men still had a hunger to find and edit new work long after they had left their powerful positions:

Editing is really about deciding—you have to decide whether you like the overall voice and content of what you are reading, and if you do, you have to make certain decisions about the internal life of the piece. Editing can be at its most profound when it involves making a vague, almost aphoristic remark that might change a writer's entire focus, and it can be most profound when it entails wrestling with minutia, adding commas or subtracting them and, in this tiny way, changing the whole style and feel of a piece of writing. The malleability of a piece of writing as it is experienced by the reader in draft form makes reading more taxing than it would be on the printed page. But it also brings with it a bump of excitement. It lends a feeling of power and adventure to the reading experience. I assume that this feeling of power—and also, if you are discovering a writer, the vicarious sense of accomplishment and, finally, the bright moment of seeing beyond what is there on the page to what could be there—is what draws people to being fiction editors, especially fiction editors for magazines, which is one of the strangest and hardest-to-describe professions. There used to be so many of them! Where have they gone?

Beller also recommends the "bracing" charms of "Writing in the Cold," an essay of Solotaroff's describing all a young writer is up against (collected in A Few Good Voices in My Head, and also, as far as I can tell from the publisher's site, in the more recent--and still in print--collection, The Literary Community).

You can read what the embalmer of record, the New York Times, said about Solotaroff and Hills; Bruce Weber's Hills piece is notable both for its fantastically glamorous 1973 photo (my god, that hair!), copied above, and for this equally fantastic sentence: "With a brilliant smile and the early facial creases of happy dissipation, he was known for being cranky, curious, passive-aggressive and, most of all, persnickety." Weber quotes Ann Beattie as saying he was "great at titles," a talent he took to excess, in a 70s-time-capsule sort of way, in what Weber calls his "fussy-man trilogy" of essay collections, How to Do Things Right: The Revelations of a Fussy Man, How to Retire at 41, or Dropping Out of the Rat Race Without Going Down the Drain, and How to Be Good, or the Somewhat Tricky Business of Attaining Moral Virtue in a Society That’s Not Just Corrupt But Corrupting, Without Being Completely Out-of-It. Hills's most notorious achievement was his stunt feature in Esquire in 1963 diagramming, unapologetically, "The Structure of the American Literary Establishment," grouping writers, agents, publishers, etc., around the "red-hot center" of American writing (which I think was The Paris Review). Has no enterprising and nostalgic young blogger dug out that old issue and scanned the map? I can't find it anywhere on the web...

Also in Slate, fairly-legendary-himself editor Gerald Howard contributed an appreciation of Solotaroff's New American Review, which lasted from 1967 to 1977 as a one-of-a-kind literary phenomenon that it seems could only have existed (barely) at that cultural moment: a regular highbrow anthology, curated by a single visionary editor and published in mass market form, selling 100,000 copies in drugstores as well as bookstores. Howard's list of some of its remarkable contributors is too long to reproduce, but his assessment of the "best literary magazine ever" isn't: "Man, did it deliver."

As Beller notes, there were enough copies of the NAR bought that you'll still run across old issues in used bookstores all the time: a few have passed through my own hands over the years, although I can't find any on my shelves now (maybe because I ran across them so much I just figured I could dip my hand back down in the stream any time to pick out another). An assiduous user of our search mechanism could put together her own inexpensive collection, including the first issue, an inscribed copy of which Howard counts among his most valued possessions.

--Tom

Comments

[Gerald Howard on August 28, 2008 at 05:45 AM]

Thanks for that . . .

[Gerald Howard on August 28, 2008 at 06:08 AM]

By the way, I did not quite take in that that was Rust Hills in the photo. My God, how glam lit! THAT'S what an editor should look like! I met Rust all of once, in the early eighties at the offices of Viking Penguin, along with another TRULY legendary editor, my beloved mentor and friend Cork Smith. These two ur-WASP gentlemen were tossing around what might be the contents of the eventual anthology GREAT ESQUIRE FICTION, and it was sort of wonderful to watch them and then it was sort of excruciating, as there was a lot of fumbling around and opinions that never yielded any concrete result and pointless general woolgathering. I eventually absented myself, but the book of course lived up to its title. By that time Rust Hills' devotion to gin and smokes and good food had turned him fairly corpulent, so my mental picture of him barely accords with that photo. I remember having a phone conversation with him a few years later -- I have the vague recollection that he was seeing if we might be inclined to republish his Fussy Man trilogy -- and what I do recall is that he was calling in the middle of the afternoon from Key West and the sound of ice cubes clinking against the glass of his G and T was quite insistent. The sun went over the yardarm very early in Key West apparently.

To wrap this all up, interested readers should not only find the exceptionally accurate "Red Hot Center" chart that Rust did up for Esquire, but should also read Ted Solotaroff's riposte, "The Red Hot Vacuum," to be found in his book of the same title.