The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht

3. Back Home and Abroad, 1946–1952

 T H R E E Back Home and Abroad 1946–1952 A striking snapshot of Hecht in 1947, now included in the Wikipedia entry for him, seems to capture the peripatetic spirit of the young poet in the years immediately following the war and leading up to the publication of his first volume of poetry, A Summoning of Stones, in 1954. Hecht is dressed in the casual fashion of the day: open-collar shirt, sports jacket, jeans rolled up. Hands in pockets, he rests comfortably on a trunk or footlocker, facing us but staring off into the distance, as if thinking about what? Where he has come from? Or where his next stop will be? At the time, Hecht was briefly a student and instructor in the Iowa University Writer’s Workshop. The photograph, taken by Charles, or “Chuck,” Cameron Macauley, who became a celebrated photographer and filmmaker during the second half of the twentieth century, was Robie Macauley’s younger brother. The photo hints at the literary circle that Hecht was drawn into immediately after the war. His army friend Robie Macauley, more than three years his senior and an aspiring fiction writer, had graduated from Kenyon in 1942 and urged Hecht to study there. At Kenyon, Hecht seriously pursued the study and writing of poetry, primarily under the tutelage of John Crowe Ransom (two poems of his would appear in the 1947 autumn issue of The Kenyon Review). He also took courses in Seventeenth-Century English 69 70 The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht Poetry, Studio Art, and Moral Philosophy. This association, in turn, would lead to his meeting Allen Tate, William Empson, and young but already established poets like Robert Lowell. Hecht’s letters from this postwar period tell the story of a young man very much on the move—literally, and indeed exhaustingly so at one point for Hecht, and, in retrospect, complicated to piece together. After the year at Kenyon, Hecht spent the summer of 1947 on Cape Cod, with Robie Macauley , among others—“it’s morning; I’m tight already. Beer & sunshine. All in excellent spirits,” begins one postcard. Then on to Iowa for 1947–1948, in the company of Macauley and Peter and Eleanor Ross Taylor, where he would meet Flannery O’Connor and Paul Engle. Hecht’s time at Iowa was also marked by his having to withdraw temporarily from school in early November. He suffered what he later described as a version of postwar traumatic stress, but he returned after Christmas to finish out the year. For the summer of 1948, he was again at Kenyon, this time affiliated with the newly founded Kenyon School of English. In the fall, he returned to New York City, where he studied informally with Allen Tate and also taught Tate’s poetry workshop at New York University. In the academic year of 1949, Hecht enrolled in Columbia University’s master’s program in English, where he met Mark Van Doren, among other notable literary figures. (While at Columbia, he would also meet aspiring younger poets and later lifelong friends Richard Howard and John Hollander.) Hecht spent the summer of 1949 in Europe, mainly Paris, before he returned to New York to complete the degree. He then again set sail for Europe in July 1950 for what would turn out to be a two-year stay, mainly in Italy, his time abroad extended when, to his complete surprise, he was awarded the Prix de Rome at the American Academy in Rome, becoming the first Fellow in Literature. Hecht did not return home until the end of August 1952, when he assumed an instructorship at his alma mater, Bard College. In early 1954, A Summoning of Stones was published, dedicated to his brother Roger. From one angle, the letters from this period tell a familiar postwar story of the itinerant American student/artist supported at home by the G.I. Bill and buoyed abroad by a robust dollar (and in Hecht’s case by occasional financial help from parents and grandparents). Lowell and Richard Wilbur, both living in Europe, figure into Hecht’s letters, and the traffic of familiar faces flowing through Paris, including former classmates, family friends, army acquaintances—or appearing along the remoter shores of Ischia, off Naples—makes it seem, as it must have appeared to Hecht, that he had never Back Home and Abroad, 1946–1952 71 quite left the...