Book Review: The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht

The Selected Letters of Anthony HechtEdited by Jonathan F. S. PostJohns Hopkins University Press, 2013 All is not well, American poet Anthony Hecht writes in his poem called “A Letter,” “with a man dead set to ignore/The endless repetitions of his own murmurous blood” – a typically stiff and sonorous sentiment from this most patrician of modern poets, and yet the man’s own letters, written in a current as natural and perpetual as breathing, were hardly ever stiff and were only sonorous because that was how language worked its way out of Hecht, in beautiful rolling coils. In a world (as he wrote in another poem) “gone pale and neuter” those letters, scratched on their starchy stationary, enlivened with doodles, capacious, were always “riddled with fresh delight.” He mocked their inconsequentiality, but he knew they weren’t fading things and often fantasized about just such a “selected letters” volume as Jonathan Post has now assembled. The entries in such a collection, if read in too-big chunks, can often drill like roadwork, and readers seldom leave them yearning for more; the truest compliment that can be paid to Post’s efforts here is that any reader will wish the result were twice as big.The letters span a century, from Hecht’s boyhood at camp in Maine in the 1930s to almost the very week of his death in 2004 (in the collection’s final entry, a letter to Eleanor Cook, he mentions having been diagnosed with cancer … and then rambles on delightfully about Albrecht Durer and Piero della Francesca and an essay he wants to write about the vagaries of taste). Readers tour his student years at Bard and Kenyon, his time in the army in World War II, and his long postwar years (including a brief stint at the University of Iowa, from which dates the fey and evocative photo that should have been this volume’s cover shot, instead of the curiously muted image chosen by jacket designer Chip Kidd). The major events of Hecht’s life – his unfortunate first marriage, his exceptionally fortunate second marriage, his well-managed hospitalization for depression, the death of his beloved brother, his winning of the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, the publication of his magnificent Flight Among the Tombs in 1996 – sometimes ping and resonate in these letters but more often don’t; like most inveterate bookworms, Hecht tended to fill his correspondence with titles, authors, and happily unprintable asides.When confronted by a review of his masterpiece Venetian Vespers in The New Statesman, he can’t refrain from mentioning to Jacqueline Simms, poetry editor for the Oxford University Press, that the piece was full of  “wearied irritation and lofty incomprehension” and was written by “a certain Andrew Motion (which sounds like a term in the physics of outer space).” And to John Hollander in 1984 he’s equally – presciently – blunt:

In my crotchety latter years I find myself becoming increasingly impatient with anti-semites, and my impatience increases if, at the same time, they regard themselves as infallible prophets. Harry [Ford] just sent me a new biography of Hilaire Belloc [by A. N. Wilson], and by the time I finished reading it I was uncertain whether it was Belloc or his biographer (a rather disingenuous apologist) I most detested.

(One can’t help but wonder what he’d have made of Wilson’s recent disingenuous apologetics regarding another noted anti-Semite).Post breaks up this lifetime of correspondence into discreet periods and furnishes an introduction to each period. This is an excellent practice not often enough done in letter collections, although it has the unenviable side-effect of placing Post’s prose alongside Hecht’s, which is both an unfair comparison and an unflattering one, since Post is writing for the public in a way Hecht was not, and since unlike Hecht, Post can sometimes drift toward the pompous:

Hecht would occasionally say that when he couldn’t write poems, he would turn to writing criticism. One doesn’t want to be altogether solemn about the alternation between these two habitual modes of thinking and practice, and regret one for the sake of the other. It is clear that, at some level, these were deeply intertwined and mutually reinforcing pursuits for Hecht, even if they didn’t occur with the same breath.

(Far less excusable are the little snobberies Post occasionally shares with his subject, as when, mentioning the sheer skill of Hecht’s letters, he writes, “Hecht grew up in a cultured household on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, we’re reminded, where lettered expectations were the norm.” We’re never reminded of that by Hecht, only by Post, and it’s just faintly possible that Hecht’s “lettered expectations” were formed as much by his generation as by his hoity-toit street address growing up; in the immediate postwar demographic, even unwashed baboons from the savage Midwest had one or two lettered expectations to call their own).The list of Hecht’s famous correspondents is naturally long, but it’s charming how many of them were also his friends and wouldn’t have cared two hoots about his fame. Foremost of these is his fellow poet James Merrill, but there’s also Donald Hall, Richard Wilbur, Joseph Brodsky, and, famously, Anne Sexton. He delicately gauges each letter to its recipient. In one to classicist Bernard Knox, for example, he’s lavish with details about a Greek statue he saw at an exhibit in Venice, but he’s also careful to preemptively defuse the old familiar (and  very much best avoided, however amusing) Knox admonition about judging the ancient past by the present:

Except for this clothing [a long gown], there was nothing in the least androgynous or effeminate about the figure, which was unambiguously beautiful, though in some strange way the effect was unsettling. It was not the effect of seeing some modern man in drag, which is either comic or satiric or painful. There was no diminishment of nobility to this figure, and any feeling of being “unsettled” may well have been due to the parochialism of being a modern American.

And although Hecht worries often in his letters about “enfeeblement,” he never shows even the faintest sign of it, writing to William Maxwell in 1988 with the linguist ardor of a man half his age:

When I myself think about taking a shower, I think of the accumulating warmth, the Turkish-bath atmosphere clouding the mirrors and beading the tiles, a steamy world of Brazilian luxuriance, obscurely scented with ferns and mango. So that if you stood in a shower bath long enough your fingertips would shrivel and turn leperously whitish, as would the soles of your feet.

Post has done posterity a great service sifting through an enormous pile of correspondence and plucking out these gems to illustrate a soul “alone,/Sufficient, nimble, touched with a small grace” (as the narrator describes himself in Hecht’s amazing, haunting poem “Peripeteia”). If his implication is correct – if the email age is growing less and less capable of appreciating the subtle artificiality of postal correspondence (and all the ways a master could manipulate it) – then young newcomers to both letters and Hecht might well find this volume mystifying. But in fairness, it isn’t really meant for them.