In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Poet and The Historian
  • Mary Jo Salter (bio)

I begin with a confession of bias. I am lucky enough to have been acquainted with both of the hilarious letter writers whose fruits are gathered in A Bountiful Harvest: The Correspondence of Anthony Hecht and William L. MacDonald, edited by Philip Hoy. I knew the first of these men very well, and on the second I made less of an impression, apparently, given that he reports in these pages having run into "Mary Lou" at the supermarket.

Fair enough. I ought to be confessing, though, that back in the 1980s, when the venerable poet Hecht and his second wife, Helen, a brilliant chef and writer of cookbooks, would invite my then-husband and me, young writers under their wing, to a dinner party, and their architectural historian friend MacDonald happened to be in attendance, I would relish the general air of mischief and laughter—but was too lazy, when I got home, to write down a single one of their jokes.

What I do remember is that Hecht—whose eminence is founded on poems that are almost forbiddingly formal both in their technique and in their high diction, poems that dare to showcase humankind at our worst and most cruel—was a very funny guy with a belly laugh. It sounded remarkably close to yuck, yuck, yuck.

And I remember one cause of the laughter when MacDonald, distinguished in his own right, was present: the competitive boasting between the two men—both born in the early 1920s, and frequent correspondents from the late 1950s onward—as to who had procured the best stationery. As explained by this volume's editor, Philip Hoy, the two correspondents had locked horns in a decades-long skirmish. Their goal was to deploy the most recherché letterhead paper possible. [End Page 385] Open this book on a random page (356, if you're checking) and you'll find MacDonald, who usually wrote from his home in Northampton, Massachusetts, typing his missive on Tom Sawyer Motor Inns stationery, although tucked into an envelope marked Ohio Stater Inn. Not to be outdone, Hecht, who in earlier years usually wrote from Rochester, New York, and later from Washington, D.C., responds to MacDonald on letterheads such as "Dépôt des Principales Verreries & Cristaux, Quai des Luisettes, Angers, France." Hecht was always more committed than his friend to the purloining of letterheads in foreign languages and from foreign locales, while MacDonald betrayed an enduring taste for bedside notepads from provincial American motels. The latter man maintained, however, a lofty preference for thick paper stock. One ought to get extra points, MacDonald felt, if the letterhead words were embossed and indentations could be felt on the verso, but Hecht made clear that he found such distinctions pitiful. Each man liked to impersonate others by means of stationery he had stolen. One wonders what Leo Sternberg, Benjamin Franklin Professor of the History of Art, University of Pennsylvania, thought about MacDonald's using his.

You are surely waiting, with diminishing patience, to hear about the content of the friends' letters, but let me pause first to applaud the light-heartedness they'd convey before writing even their first paragraph. Envelopes typically offer a dubious claim about the identities of both correspondents. Again, at random (page 235): MacDonald's envelope proposes the sender to be "The Grand Master of the Knights of Cabiria," and the recipient "Anthony Hecht, Seer." The letter itself opens with the salutation "O Titan!" and closes with "Yours in the undergraduate sense, Admiral Dewey."

Undergraduate sense indeed: The humor can be sophomoric. I could do without the Polish jokes, which seemed funny once, but times have changed. (Anyone who has read Hecht's poems concerning the Holocaust, particularly "More Light! More Light!" and "The Book of Yolek," knows that his actual empathy with Poles ran deep.) You can't resist all the jolliness, though, once letters have been set up with greetings [End Page 386] like "My dear son," "Hey there Bud," "God's Feet," "Ole Hoss," "Fellow Deliquescent," "Now see here, Fenwick," and "Peasant!" The signatories to these letters include, but are hardly limited to, "Rutyard Coupling...

pdf

Share