Jerusalem has had its share of drifters, but Robert Friend mayhave been its longest-abiding and most comfortably ensconced sojourner. He arrivedin 1950, in his mid-thirties, with degrees from Brooklyn College and Harvard,and a dozen years of travel behind him, living first in Puerto Rico, and then Panamaand Europe. These had been Edenic years which soothed perhaps the hardships ofgrowing up poor in Brooklyn between the wars. Friend had worked at a variety ofodd jobs – inspector of fire-extinguishers, military censor, gas inspector – thoughfor the most part he’d taught English as a second language.

Robert came, I suspect, on a lark, and then tarried. For one,the fledgling English Department of Hebrew University was eager to press him into itsranks, Old photos suggest that Friend must have cut an impressive figure: tall,slim, in coat and tie, with a slightly owlish look. He was, by then, somewhat of acosmopolitan, speaking Spanish, and some French, German, and Yiddish. He had also begunto make a name for himself as a poet back in America, publishing poems in Poetryalongside verse by Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop,Carl Sandburg, and Hugh MacDiarmid, and bringing out his first collection of verse,Shadow On The Sun, in 1941.  Friendtook up the offer to teach English and American literature, though again I doubt he believed he was committing himself to anythinglong term.

 It may have been primarily the city that appealed to him andmade him linger. This was long before the Six-Day War and the so-called reunificationof Jerusalem. The city was smaller, plainer, even drab-looking, with wide open fieldsof bramble, olive and rubble separating a handful of dusty neighbourhoods. Just beyondthe rusting barricades and barbed wire fence loomed the Old City walls, and beyond thewalls the domes and spires of the Arab medina itself, all under Jordanian control.It was a sleepy town, with little to offer other than the lively, though somewhatpeculiar, spirit of its denizens, who were at once friendly and intensely turned in upon themselves.Jerusalem was above all a city of verbal engagement; talk, whether low orhigh, the rant of its not insignificant number of madmen roaming its streets, or the labyrinthinesentences of its rabbis and uprooted German scholars, not only gave the cityits charm but cloaked it in intrigue. Robert felt immediately at home in such an atmosphere.

He soon found himself a small basement apartment in the old,formerly Arab neighbourhood of Talbia, commenced teaching, and, more importantly,swiftly, effortlessly, became a Jerusalemite: holding on tightly to his mother tongueand ‘foreign’ manners, he threw himself, body and soul, into the hothouse atmosphereof new-found friendships, of liaisons and betrayals, and intimate, desperatetalk, which in the endwould serve as nourishment for so many of his poems. The largerissues of nationhood,religion, Zionism, it almost goes without saying, had nothingto do with Friend’sdecision, if one can call it that, to remain in Jerusalem. Muchlater in life he would writeof such questions, though in the most insouciant of manners.

Friend’s verse during his early days in Jerusalem – witty, meticulouslycrafted, a touch arch – showed no overt signs of having been written inhis new home. There was no trace of the scarred Judean landscape, not even a pine or cypressinserted itself into the poetry to shade the poet’s musings; nor, for that matter,did he allude to traditional Jewish texts, or the Bible – a favourite pastime of newcomersto the Holy Land. Salt Gifts, Friend’s second volume of verse, published in 1964,could have been written in an English tea garden. His poetry remained insistently elsewhere,and although the poet had by now become very much a member of  the Anglo-Saxon community (a local term applied to residents hailing from any English-speakingcountry), he made a point of retaining for years his temporary resident status at theMinistry of the Interior.

And yet the poetry’s detached, inward-looking gaze, itsshadow reality of innuendo and thwarted desires, does seem to curiously mirror theelusive, dreamy underside of the city, in which so many of its wraithlike inhabitants havewandered, heedless of time and place, not unlike the poet’s hunchback who “studies inthe mirror / how well his hunchback fits.” Jerusalem has always at heart belonged tothe defeated. And the poet’s early poems partake of that world, even as they turnaway from the uncertain realm of a common reality in their insistent “practice ofabsence.”

There came a time – the summer of ‘67 to be exact – when, walkingout of his front garden, with its huge mulberry tree, Robert could amblethrough the half-wild olive field just beyond his home, and then turn down into what had beenno-man’s-land, before taking the steep incline leading to Jaffa Gate, or Babil-Halil, the Western entrance to the Old City. For a while, at least, the results of the Six-DayWar appeared as a boon. Israelis poured into the Old City, tourism was on the rise,and tiny, backwater Jerusalem began growing at a maddening pace. Robert,undoubtedly, shared in the general elation of the opening up of the city and the consequentuneasy mingling of the two populations, Israeli and Arab. There was, in addition, apersonal side to his interest in the Arab community. Friend was gay, and casual pickups inEast Jerusalem were generally plentiful and uncomplicated. The poet’s encounterswith Arab men rarely remained solely physical, however. There were lovers andthere were long-term friendships, which above all else Friend valued. There werequarrels and eventual reconciliations. There was also a genuine concern for the welfareof Palestinian friends who were detained by the Israeli military authoritiesduring the Intifada, a concern which often turned into concerted action on their behalf. Andall along Friend made persistent efforts to learn Arabic.

He didn’t get very far in his Arabic, but neither, for thatmatter, did he ever really acquire a sound knowledge of Hebrew. This didn’t deterFriend from beginning to translate Hebrew verse. A certain insularity from theHebrew tongue seemed to help, keeping him at a slight remove from the meaning,the semantics, of the Hebrew text, while allowing him to concentrate on itsmeter and rhyme. Robert’s natural preference was for the traditional moderns, like Natan Alterman andLeah Goldberg, both major Hebrew poets who began writing in the 1930s. The latter wasalso a friend of the poet’s, and Menard Press in London would publish hissplendid selection of her work in 1976.

A year earlier Tambimuttu published a slim Selected Poems ofFriend’s under the imprimatur of Seahorse Press. The verse in that volume is coy,vulnerable, with a by-now characteristic penchant for the redolent, at times over-felicitous,phrase. The “Complicated lover” who is “at sixes and sevens / with allhis heavens” softly revels, even as he is stifled – and the tone is at once resigned andproud – by the tight fit of his own artifice. And yet a handful of poems offer a glimpse ofwhat is yet to come. I am< thinking in particular of such poems as “The IrrationalSource,” “A Crucifixion,” “Young Man and Kitten,” “My Turn,” “Absence,” where Friendcautiously lowers his guard:

    A little more of irresponsible love

    and a little less of responsible affection

    could have saved. Your code

    of honor breeds pestilence of stone,

    a clean, dead world where nothing grows.

    Justice, too, out of a pure sky

    can murder. A little water,

    the irrational source, will defeat error

    till roses and wheat spring from arid eyes.

    Order is a perfect ring – a noose.

    Who dangles there is I.

By 1980 Friend had inadvertently become a respected figure. Ageneration of Israeli poets, Yehuda Amichai, Natan Zach, Dalia Ravikovitch, amongothers, while undergraduates had attended Friend’s class in modem American poetry,and had listened to Friend reciting from Frost, Stevens, Moore, and Pound, ashe stood or leaned against the large desk in front of the class. Aspiring poetsapproached him for advice, Hebrew poets asked him to translate their poems. After muchneedling from the English department he would even acquire a doctorate. And ahost of poets passing through Jerusalem had by then visited, or rather descended, intohis cat-filled apartment, overheated in winter and poorly ventilated in summer –little more than twolarge, low-ceiling rooms divided by bookcases: Frost, Auden,Alfred Chester (whodied in Jerusalem of an over-dose of barbiturates), and Lowell.who, legend has it, was seen pinching Leah Goldberg’s bottom during one such socialevening.

Friend’s sense of having a proper place, after thirty years inJerusalem, seemed to translate itself into a greater openness in his life and work.Undoubtedly his willingness to speak and write about his own homosexuality was connected,as well, to changes occurring around the world in gay communities, includingIsrael. He was, moreover, acutely aware of the fact that over the years he had practicallylost his American readership. American poetry had undergone a sea-change in the1960s, and Robert, whose literary models were Housman, Auden and Larkin, hadn’tquite found a way to combine his own inner needs for greater directness with hisgift and hunger for formal playfulness. He now set about to make that adjustment,or find that voice, which would accommodate itself to both “the public nude” and thedisciplined elegance of the artificer.

1980 was also the year that Menard Press published Friend’sfourth collection of verse, Somewhere Lower Down. Though appearing when the poetwas sixty-seven, it is his most youthful, spirited collection. I rememberattending a reading shortly after the book came out. Robert read with a verve whichoccasionally lapsed into bluster. It was a side I hadn’t recognized in the poet before. And infact it didn’t flare up again, at least not with such force, in later readings. But at thetime a certain flamboyance and audacity was very much part of the new poetic self Friendwas experimenting with: “Nose-picker, peeker through a bedroom shutter, / farter ina suburban swimming pool, / my lower self, you are a perfect fool.” Thus numerouspoems are governed by a sort of late-in-the-day adolescent fever and daring. Thoughhere too the need to shock is more often than not reigned in by neatly rhymed quatrains:

    Only because the trains are running

    and planes are flying in every direction

    to somewhere where a god lies sunning,

    waiting for him with an erection,

    does he pretend the world is real,

    that it means something to rise and greet it.

    He gives a shine to an old ideal,

    and boils an egg and is glad to eat it.

I don’t believe Robert was completely satisfied with SomewhereLower Down. It did mark an increased directness in speaking of matters of the heart,that “old slob,” and flesh. And yet, as in the above stanzas from “Only Because,”the poet’s treatment of love and sex was most often cavalier – as if nakedness, the strippingof the self, could only lead to self-ridicule.

Fifteen years would elapse between the publication of SomewhereLower Down and Robert’s last, large collection, The Next Room, also publishedby Menard Press. It is a long period, even for a poet who published at long intervals.During this time Friend translated and published a selection of verse by the poet GabrielPreil. Preil was a splendid anomaly on the Israeli literary scene: a leading Hebrewpoet who was born in Estonia and lived a solitary, near-anonymous life in New YorkCity. He was, so he said of himself, the last of the Hebrew poets living inexile, a poet who refused the comforts of writing in one’s homeland and made onlythree brief visits to Israel rather late in life. It was the perfect match: an Americanin Israel, endearingly holding onto his expatriate status, and an Estonian-bornHebrew poet living in the Bronx.

During this time Friend was slowly, painstakingly, and at a latehour, trying to consolidate the disparate elements in his new-found style. TranslatingPreil’s free-verse poetry might have actually helped, for Preil’s rueful poems ofdislocation are most often skillfully poised between the serious and the comic. Andthis is especially true when the poet, an incorrigible romantic, speaks of the frailtiesof old age.

Friend, two years younger than Preil, made every effort tohide the fact that he too had reached his seventies. He was, after all, a certifiedhypochondriac, forever checking for draughts in friends’ homes, adjusting his woolscarf around his neck, and calling his physician at all hours of the day. But agewould catch up with Friend and – perhaps taking Preil’s cue – the poet set himself downto record, with the lightest touch, “the way a word travels / in a light wind,” itsincursions.

Age, then, would be Friend’s grand, insistent theme, duringhis last years. And time and its vagaries are treated most successfully when the poetchooses the most abbreviated of forms: fifty-odd pages of compact poems, first published inpamphlet form as Abbreviations, in which the poet speaks with grief and humourof the body’s decline after open-heart surgery, and of the demise of friends and lovers.Friend had reshaped, in his late seventies, a style and voice pared down to his needs,as he would admit in “The Poem”:  “Mr. Friend, meet Mr. Friend, / and so I was born. / The terrible journey began. / I rushed home to write the poem / I fearedto forget. . .”

The poems would come, with unexpected ease, irregularly rhymed,casual-looking,frank, even “raw,” as the “unfinished creatures / we are oftenglad to be.” He would write of pissing into the garbage pail instead of the toilet,of foul-smelling undershirts, of eye examinations and of heart failure, of lostcats, of late-night conversations on the phone, of the ice-cream man, his “sweetsummoner,” and of dying with his “wretched Hebrew” on his lips, desperately tryingto remember the words for “Quick, I’m dying.”

There would also be a slow accumulation of longer poems, eventually included inthe second section of The Next Room, where Friend looks back athis childhood and youth, and, most strikingly, pays tribute to friends and poets:Alfred Chester, LeahGoldberg, Frost, Larkin, Preil, Edward Field. Friend was eighty-twowhen TheNext Room appeared in print. For someone who’d written somuch about “the last gameof dying,” he was in the best of health. He’d travelled to Egypt,the United States, andlastly to England, upon publication of his book. He’d also publishedanother volumeof translations, from the Hebrew of the early twentieth centuryRussian-born Ra’hel, andwas preparing a volume of translations of verse for childrenby the Hebrew Nobel laureate, S.Y. Agnon.

Two years later, however, in 1997, cancer was diagnosed. He wasgiven three to

four months, and managed to live, out of sheer determination,for just over a year.

Before anything else Robert decided half defiantly, half-jocularly,to publish  

privately an envelope-size book of sex poems, titled After Catallus,which vexed some of

his friends and delighted others. He then put his affairs inorder, sold his old flat, and,

refusing to stay in a hospice, rented a small, ground-floor apartmentwith plenty of sunlight and a view of a majestic, old date palm. Here he was caredfor by Nizar, his Palestinian male nurse, and here he entertained, translated,and wrote, propped up in his bed, his last poems.

“I’m all bruised bones,” he sadly confessed after staring athis emaciated figure in

the mirror, picking up the thread, as it were, of a conversationwe’d had recently on

Hopkins’s “Carrion Comfort.” But during these last months Friendwas also “sheer and

clear,” and he talked, in the best manner of an old-time Yerushalmi,or Jerusalmite, of

friends and family and books, with a lucidity that comes afterthe chaff has flown.

I visited Robert in hospital a few days before he died. Itwas by then difficult for

him to open his eyes, let alone talk. But, with the tracingsof a smile, he did manage a

single complete sentence: “my sequiturs are non,” he sighed,before silently sinking back

into the pillow.

Several months earlier he had written, “They tell me I am goingto die, / why don’t

I seem to care? / My cup is full. Let it spill.”