Robert Friend: A Life in Poetry
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WHEN I read the poems of Robert Friend, I always sense the relationship to my own poetry. It is true that W. H. Auden and Constantine Cavafy were major influences on me almost from the beginning, but first there was Robert Friend:

A crowded floor of couples at a dance
and only I,
his tail wrapped round us both,
dancing with a tiger.
Soft lights, music,
social happiness,
but suddenly
— what had I said to him? —
the strong grip loosened,
the tongue at my ear
stopped licking,
and he growled. …

— “Dancing with a Tiger”

I met him in l948. I had dropped out of NYU, where I was in a state of complete distraction, the result of an unrequited passion for a handsome African-American man who had led me on a merry chase night after night through the byways of Harlem. To escape the humiliation of flunking out and the disaster of my melting savings—I was the one who shelled out for all those evenings at Small’s Paradise—I booked passage to France. On the ship, by the imperatives of the alphabet, Field and Friend were seated next to each other in the dining room. I quickly learned that the bookish man with dark curly hair and owlish glasses seated next to me was a published poet, and, though I had no grounds for claiming that I too was a poet (except that I wished to be), Robert Friend accepted me at face value. Ten years older than I, he had been teaching in Puerto Rico and Panama for some years, and had finally landed a job at Queens College, a lucky break that would bring him back to New York again. So he was celebrating by going to Paris for the summer.

During the sea voyage, there gathered around him a group of young men who were taking the thrilling leap into a Europe that had been closed to the outside world during the long years of the War. Robert Friend was a natural teacher, and it was with evident pleasure that he led the group’s discussions in the ship’s lounge. It has been true through the ages that when there is sexual interest on the part of the teacher, the student blossoms in the glow of this attention. Face-to-face with Robert Friend, discussing literature and ideas, was nothing like school. I didn’t respond to him physically, I just loved the attention. In fact, he was having a more rewarding flirtation with a French boy from Toulouse.

Robert and I continued the “class” in Paris, where intellectual and sexual life flourished in spite of the rationing. We sat in cafés for hours, poring over the poetry in an anthology of modern verse. Modern Poetry’s first principle seemed to be obscurity, which only goaded us to puzzle it out. And in those decades, when being openly gay was dangerous, obscurity was a useful device for gay poets like Hart Crane, whose elaborate syntax and layers of meaning obscured the sexual content of his poetry. I also studied Robert’s own poems through draft after draft and in that way learned from him how poetry was made. He often dealt with gay issues even then, seeing himself in the outsider—or, in his lower self, even as a cripple or a hunchback: “I am glad to be as I am:/ too twisted/ for others’ melting adoration” (“The Cripple”).

Such self-hate was common not only to homosexuals in that era, but also to Jews. And despite the struggle for sexual liberation that we all believed in, Friend’s verses often bemoaned the loss of innocence, where sexuality was seen as a cruel predator rather than something to celebrate: “Children, children, on the world’s white shore,/ by the glitter of sea and the open gate,/ run before manhood leaps with a cry/ and seizes you by your little soft throat” (“Warning”). But the difficulty of two people ever connecting remains a continuing theme, reflecting his lifelong inability to establish a long-term relationship with another man: “A little more of irresponsible love/ and a little less of responsible affection/ could have saved. Your code/ of honor breeds pestilence of stone” (“The Irrational Source”).

He was a product of a Depression-era, poverty-stricken childhood in the Jewish immigrant slum of Brownsville, after his father deserted the family. Many nights his mother had nothing to feed them, and he remembered going to bed hungry.

Because his family could not pay the bill,
the electricity had been cut off,
so in the evening the boy of seventeen
had to write his poems by candlelight. …
His mother wrung her hands, his father fled
to the warmer darkness of woman after
woman,
but he, luxuriating in the candles’
shadowy romance, went on writing.

— “History”

It was the Depression that sent him to Puerto Rico as a teacher, which became his opportunity to discover a sexual self that had been stunted by the homophobic society he grew up in, as well as a sensuality that his æstheticism had blinded him to: an appreciation of his body. In the tropics, it was William Carlos Williams, a distinguished visiting poet, who opened his eyes. Robert presents himself as:

The perfect paradigm
of the young poet —
quivering, sensitive,
painfully sincere…

Dr. Williams was waiting
at the San Juan hotel lobby,
and having listened

somewhat impatiently
soon diagnosed the case…
he led him to the terrace
that overlooked the sea,
and said:
Look,
pointing to the bathers
running along the beach
and sporting in the waves.

— “Ars Poetica”

Robert took this advice and went to “sport in the waves” with those boys, who, he quickly learned, were ready to play. Throughout his life he always made out well with Latin Americans, who liked his professorial looks. But by the evidence of the poems he remained the professor, even in bed:

That afternoon
he was wearing nothing but a crucifix
that dangled from his neck
I, not even that.

Between the fervor of our probings
that were somehow turning metaphysical,
I began to question God.

Startled out of our embrace,
he leapt onto the floor,
where kneeling by the bed
he made the sign of the Cross.

He must have been absolved,
for jumping back into our bed again,
he finished with the blasphemer.
— “The Catholic Lover”

After his summer in France in 1948, he couldn’t return home, even to the long-desired teaching job in New York, and though his funds were dwindling, he stayed on and we continued to meet at our café. When he finally ran out of money, he got a job in occupied Germany teaching American soldiers. But there he learned that, because of a brief membership in the Communist Party a decade earlier, his passport was going to be taken away, which would force him to return to the States, at that time in the grip of Cold War paranoia. One step ahead of the authorities, he fled to Israel. Living on a kibbutz at first, he studied Hebrew and soon got onto the faculty of Hebrew University, settling in Jerusalem, where he lived the rest of his life, gaining recognition as the foremost English-language poet in Israel and as a translator of Hebrew and Yiddish poets.

Although homosexuality was illegal in Israel during most of the half-century that he lived there, he reported to me on his lively sex life, including afternoons at a hammam at which groups of Hassidic boys would come and make out. There was also a park nearby where gays congregated, though he himself never functioned in that kind of scene, nor in bars. His lovers came from his daily life—for instance, taxi drivers who would stop in to see him after their night shifts ended. He was always open about his homosexuality, and now began writing openly gay poems. “The Teacher and the Indian” tells the story of his love affair with a student:

Though the teacher had trained himself
never to notice the looks of his students,
he noticed this one … sitting in the last row,
his good looks declared themselves at once.
Brown-skinned, dark-eyed. …

The Indian … kept coming up to his
teacher’s desk
to express his gratitude …

The teacher … suddenly felt a tug at his
sleeve
and heard a voice saying, “Come on. Let’s go.”
It was of course his Indian… The teacher
allowed himself, consenting even as he
protested,
to be pulled away by a firm arm meaning
business.

So, on an empty afternoon in an empty bar,
the teacher found himself improbably
drinking beer with his student …
as they stared hungrily at each other.

The game was won by both. That night
they found themselves in a single bed.

The plot continues as the Indian tells about his first hot affair with a cowboy, and continues through the ensuing complications—truly a masterpiece of erotic narration.

While a staunch believer in Israel, Robert was also open to the culture of the Palestinians and studied Arabic. Having sex with Palestinians was a bridge to an understanding and appreciation of Palestinian life, the essential ingredient that seems to be missing today in the Israelis’ dealings with Palestinians. Later, when he hired Palestinian houseboys, he visited their families on the West Bank. He had always lived alone until these last years, when he was cared for by these devoted attendants whose mothers would send him fresh bread.

Robert had a difficult side and our friendship was not without its stresses. We were never lovers, but he treated me like one, a faithless one at that. Once, when he was on sabbatical in New York, I was preparing dinner for a couple of friends who were due any moment and he telephoned that he had just broken up with his lover, could he come by? Thinking he would pour out his tale of woe all evening, I told him, hard-heartedly, that it was impossible. He was devastated. All his life he would complain that all I had to do was “lay another plate,” that I respected him more as a poet than as a friend, and go on and on listing my derelictions in friendship, like the time in France, thirty years before, when I didn’t—something. Finally I told him that my faults were indeed many, and gave him an ultimatum: Either drop his litany of my betrayals or I would break with him. This led to a hiatus of several years in our correspondence. Finally, neither of us could keep it up, and we resumed, and over the years we evolved into a mutual admiration society.

His own loyalty was immeasurable. I will never forget that in 1971, when I had spent the summer bumming around Afghanistan, and with all kinds of intestinal bugs and a deep bronchial infection, I knew if I could just get to Israel, and to Robert, I would be saved. I barely made it to his door—and he took me in, cared for me, and restored me to health.

Poems are from Dancing with a Tiger: Poems 1941-1998, by Robert Friend. Edited, with a memoir by Edward Field, and Introduction by Gabriel Levin (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2003).