Archie Ammons, Bob Huff, Lew Turco & Dick Frost at Bread Loaf in 1961
In 1959, while I was still an undergraduate at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, Harold Vinal began to ask me to review books for his magazine Voices. He had been publishing my poems for about five years — ever since I was a post-high school sailor in the Navy — so he knew my work. I was flattered, though it had never occurred to me to be a critic, but I accepted, and in the second review that I wrote for him, titled “The Poet’s Court,” published in 1960, I first ran into the work of Robert Huff. I said that in Huff’s first book, Colonel Johnson's Ride and Other Poems (1959), the poet did not particularly believe in visual image. Except for "Porcupines," which was startling because it imitated prose paragraphs and came in the middle of the book, he stuck with quatrains, couplets, and other common stanzas all set down matter-of-factly and pushed over to the left hand margin. Robert Huff's sound however, was full. He often mixed sweet words with tough language, as in "King Salmon":
A gravel deathbed for the king of fish.
Nuncle, the mad Kingfisher had you hooked
From birthrise, hauled and schooled, and heaved
From saltsea silver up brown rapids run
To rest your milt-white crown upon these stones.
Hear how the windy guts of gulls
Rejoice above your ghost beginning now.
They grow for so much Godspent majesty.
Huff occasionally mixed the pastoral with the mechanical. Sometimes this worked and sometimes it didn’t, for readers were not yet used to having machines and bombers described in lyrical fashion. His best poems had to do with mood and nature, an assertion that might best be illustrated by quoting the whole of "Although I Remember the Sound," which I admired:
Although I remember the sound
The young snag made when I felled it,
It was not noise or music mattered then.
Briefly, the tree was silent on the ground.
Of what it was that mattered I recall
Simply, among the chips and dust
And keener near the center of the cut,
The sweet, new smell which rose after the fall.
The natural world was far and away Huff’s best subject, although he tried satire, moral objection to war and portraits with good success.
The ideas that Huff was attempting to embody, however, were somewhat unclear in my opinion. He might give us a scene and a mood, the characters, the plot, and then he would not draw his conclusion, though he might hint at it. Depending on the degree of empathy between the reader and what went on early in the poem, we might or might not understand what he was talking about. I, for one, was uncertain how to react when, in "The Smoker," the poet described a blind man blowing smoke rings with (perhaps) "his hearing aid turned off" so that not only could he not see the poet, he wouldn’t be able to hear the poet's conversation either, but he might later appear in the bard’s dreams, "A slow smile smoking, circled to the thighs / And screws both of his thumbs into my eyes / And will not stop to listen to my screams." In general, however, the total image of one of his poems was pleasing, if a bit too careful. All in all, though, I liked Huff’s work well enough to remember him as standing out from many of the books I was considering for Mr. Vinal.
This turned out to be a good thing because at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Middlebury, Vermont, during the last two weeks of August the next year, 1961, Robert Huff, Miller Williams, Richard Emil Braun and I were poetry Fellows, A. R. Ammons, was a Scholar, and Richard Frost was attending on a Danforth grant. Frost, Huff and I shared one of the little cottages near Treman Hall.
One night we were sitting around in the cottage reciting limericks to one another and, of course, laughing and carrying on after each recitation. We made enough noise to arouse the ire of some women who lived in another cottage close by, and they complained to John Ciardi, director of the conference, that we were making too much noise. John came by — it must have been after ten p.m. — to do his duty and tell us to quiet down. He asked us what we were doing, and after he had fulfilled his function as policeman he sat down with us and began to recite limericks himself from his prodigious memory, most if not all of them original. All those present became, over the course of the next several hours, hysterical to the point that our sides ached. We were making much more noise with John present than we had been making before he arrived. I have no idea what the women did, or how they managed to get any sleep at all that night.
The recently deceased Welsh poet Dylan Thomas was one of the fabled people of our generation, and Bob Huff and I used to have Dylan Thomas sound-alike contests — of course, we had listened to his recordings. Huff was good, but I had the advantage of reading original material, for the year before, in my First Poems, I had published my
DIRGE A LA DYLAN
When I was a curled boy, short and long-
shadowed beneath an apple moon,
I peeled my dreams out of cider skies
and toasted them crisp each fiery noon.
When I was a birch young man I pruned
my dreams until they grew green and tall.
I plunged brown seed upon mossy days,
urged them to lunge and be done with the fall.
Then, when I was a hairy man,
I grasped my past by both its ears
to feed it on cabbages and grass
until it turned pink-eyed with the years.
Ah! curled small lad; O birch young man,
hairy elder: apple hours
are lying, prune-dry, upon cellar shelves,
choking black seed within vinegar cores.
I had been teaching by that time for a year at Fenn College in Cleveland, what is now Cleveland State University, and the following year, 1962, I founded the Poetry Center of Cleveland there. Of course, among the first to be invited to give programs there were some of my Bread Loaf confreres. Dick Frost read his work on August 24th, and Bob Huff come to read on October fifth: as I recall we had all of twenty people in the audience. Both Dick and Bob stayed with my wife, Jean, our daughter, Melora, and me in the four-room apartment that we had recently moved into in Euclid, a Cleveland suburb. Jean was shocked to discover what a hard drinker Bob was. The first thing he did when he woke up in the morning was light a cigarette and take a pull out of a bottle he took from his briefcase. “He did it right in front of me,” Jean said, “and made a wry comment about it!” (I trust there was no pun intended on my wife’s part.)
Bob had come to Cleveland from the University of Delaware where he was a member of the faculty. On May 1, 1964, Elizabeth Bishop wrote to her correspondent Robert Lowell, “I don’t know why I am giving advice. I have a hard time finding words, remembering faces, wiping the glaze from memory. The stay at Delaware was an empty time, except for the company of Peter Taylor: a stiff English department, a drunken poet, Robert Huff, an amiable cowed messy weak [Theodore] Roethke, boisterously carrying a dull weight of defeat, pen women, nice and not very nice, with their little poems and stories written for themselves, a dearth of students, many handed in work but never appeared.”1
In 1963. Bob was a MacDowell Colony Fellow in Peterborough, N.H. The following year I was given my walking papers from Fenn, and I began searching for jobs. Two that I was offered were at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, and at Bellingham State College in Washington. I had spent five years in the Midwest, and both Jean and I were yearning to return to points farther east. I was also offered two other positions, one at the State University of New York College at Oswego, and the other at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan. I preferred the Oswego job, but they were taking too much time to decide, and I was becoming fretful waiting for them, so I opted for Hillsdale — a vast mistake — and turned down the other three.
Hilo was hit by a tsunami in 1965, but Hillsdale was also a disaster, a John Birch Society undertaking cloned from Parsons College. I wrote Oswego to ask if that job were still available; it was, and I took it the following year, in 1965 — this time I waited until the middle of the summer when it was confirmed. I stayed there thirty-one years.
At the same time that I was firing myself from Hillsdale Bob Huff, it turned out, was looking to get out of Delaware, so he took the Bellingham position I’d been offered. Bob stayed at Bellingham for many years as well, and he wrote three other collections along the way, The Course in 1966, The Ventriloquist in 1977, and a bird chapbook, Shore Guide to Flocking Names, published in a limited edition in 1985. I reviewed the last of these sometimes rueful, usually descriptive, always light-verse pieces. They were enjoyable to read, but perhaps the audience for which they seemed to be intended — older children — had little chance to see them in this package.
Bob Huff retired from Bellingham in 1989. He died in a fire at his home there in 1993 at the age of sixty-nine the victim, apparently, of his last cigarette and the final toast he drank to his Muse. His passing was sad, but he was a great boon companion, Richard Frost has a tale to tell of just how boon he could be:
Some Memories of Robert Huff
Bread Loaf 1961 was my introduction to the social mysteries of the poetry world, and Bob Huff seemed the perfect poet hero. I had published in Poetry and in Harper’s Magazine and some other good places, which gave me some authenticity as a poet, but really I had been nowhere to witness how poets behaved. Bread Loaf was my baptism. Hard-drinking big-voiced Huff looked to be my best chance to hang out with a figure resembling Dylan Thomas, but the infatuation proved hard to sustain.
Bob Huff was a sweet, generous, gregarious guy with a big resonant voice. He read aloud beautifully, his own poems and all the others he liked. He and Lew Turco and sometimes Miller Williams and I would sit on the front porch of Bridgeman and read and recite and criticize and praise and drink vodka-&-tomato juice for hours. I’ll never forget Bob’s big affirmative infectious smile when he liked something. We all consumed bushels and gallons of poetry. This was, for my money, the way it was supposed to work.
In the year after Bread Loaf, Bob and I exchanged a few letters and once or twice talked on the phone. During the summer of 1964, when I was visiting my parents in California, with my first wife and our young son and daughter I drove to Bellingham, Washington, to see Bob, there in that big old house, the one he later set afire. It was a pleasant enough visit but sort of flat — with our two wives there, we didn’t talk freely, and Bob was drinking heavily. We stayed up most of the night. Bob had promised my son that he would take him fishing in the morning, and I doubted that it would happen. But early the next day, long before I was out of bed, Huff arose and took my son fishing. He was hung over, but he wasn’t going to disappoint the kid.
The next, and last, time I saw Bob was in the fall of 1972. I invited Bob to read at my college, SUNY Oneonta, and it was altogether a mistake. He was drunk the whole time. Carol and I drove to meet him at the Binghamton airport but had to wait there several hours because he had missed his flight — had been removed from the plane, he told us, because he fit the profile for a terrorist. He had been to see James Dickey, who had sent him away with a bottle of Kentucky bourbon, which he still was carrying, half-full. He frightened us both, twice threatening to leave the car as we drove up Interstate 88.
The next day Bob was scheduled to visit my poetry workshop. He had gotten up on time, and Carol made him breakfast, which he supplemented with the rest of the bourbon. I drove him to the College for the class, which we met on time. I introduced Huff to the class, reminded them that I had told them about him, and turned the class over. Huff addressed himself to the blackboard. He drew a horizontal line with chalk, turned to the class, and spoke to a young woman at a front desk: “Do you love your father?” he said. Not waiting for an answer, he turned and wrote “Robert Lowell” on the board. He then asked for questions. I don’t remember the rest.
That afternoon we visited a bar, and that evening there was dinner at the home of one of my English department colleagues. We were not terribly late for Bob’s reading; the small auditorium was almost full. My poet friend and colleague Don Petersen introduced Huff, who then set his briefcase on the table and began looking for his manuscript. He searched for ten minutes, pulled out the papers he had previously rejected, and read. Not in his mellifluous Dylan Thomas manner I remembered, but with a hoarse tipsy mumble.
That was the last time. The next day my colleague Paul Lilly drove Bob to the airport. Then—how many years later? — I learned that he had fallen asleep in his chair with a lighted cigarette and had set his house on fire and had died, and his wife had died in the fire too. I have a Kodachrome print — Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, 1961: Archie Ammons, Bob Huff, Lew Turco, myself, shoulder-to-shoulder in brilliant August sunshine on the front lawn of Bridgeman. We’re all young, brighteyed, and all set for the future.
— Richard Frost
Considering everything, it’s amazing that Bob lived to be sixty-nine years of age. Archie Ammons managed to make seventy-five, I’m seventy-seven, Miller Williams is eighty-one, and Dick Frost is eighty-two. Most of us are still hanging in there.
______
1Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Thomas Travisano, Editor, New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2010,
