“BUT AT LAST, TODAY, / I REMEMBERED THAT HILL”: THE IMPERATIVES OF MEMORY IN ANTHONY HECHT

6 3 R ‘‘ B U T A T L A S T , T O D A Y , / I R E M E M B E R E D T H A T H I L L ’’ T H E I M P E R A T I V E S O F M E M O R Y I N A N T H O N Y H E C H T G E O F F R E Y L I N D S A Y Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time. – Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending Anthony Hecht’s last volume of poetry, The Darkness and the Light (2001), contains a piece titled ‘‘Memory’’ that begins, ‘‘Sepia oval portraits of the family, / Black-framed, adorned the small brown-papered hall, / But the parlor was kept unused, never disturbed .’’ The poem describes an old-fashioned room with ‘‘dried hydrangeas . . . the hue of ancient newspaper,’’ ‘‘matching seashells ,’’ a ‘‘large elephant-foot umbrella stand,’’ and a teak table complete with Bible and magnifying glass. ‘‘Memory’’ ends with the only movement in the poem, apart from the careful observer’s eye: Green velvet drapes kept the room dark and airless Until on sunny days toward midsummer The brass andirons caught a shaft of light For twenty minutes in late afternoon 6 4 L I N D S A Y Y In a radiance dimly akin to happiness – The dusty gleam of temporary wealth. Readers encountering the poem where it first appeared in the Southwest Review and who were unfamiliar with the body of Hecht’s work would be forgiven if they considered it to be not just the description of a memory but a metaphor for the way memory itself typically functions, given that the title is ‘‘Memory,’’ not ‘‘A Memory.’’ The metaphor may be especially applicable to the very elderly, whose collection of memories is as time bound, color faded, and dated as the items in the room, but whose fond and occasional vivid recollections may indeed provoke, for them, ‘‘a radiance dimly akin to happiness – / The dusty gleam of temporary wealth.’’ But for Hecht, memory has rarely been so benign or so predictable , at least as it has been expressed in his poetry. Take ‘‘A Hill,’’ for instance, the celebrated poem that opens The Hard Hours, Hecht’s Pulitzer prize–winning volume. It begins with the speaker in a sunlit piazza in Rome. Suddenly the colors and noise of the market around him disappear and a ‘‘vision’’ – a particularly vivid memory – of a bleak landscape replaces it, centrally defined by a hill, cold, bare, and desolate. The vision fades, but not before the speaker is shaken, ‘‘scared by the plain bitterness’’ of what he has seen. Ten years later the memory resurfaces, dredged up from some subconscious realm: ‘‘but at last, today, / I remembered that hill,’’ the speaker says, and he realizes that the hill was one he stood before for hours in winter as a child. The question of why the unnerving experience would occur in Rome and then resurface ten years later moves us deep into the mystery of memory itself and its imperatives in Hecht’s life and poetry. For Hecht, as depicted in ‘‘A Hill,’’ recollection is often painful and is sometimes traumatic, but it is also an imperative, a driving force in the process of poetic creation that impels him to reexamine experience – both autobiographical and fictional – in ways that lead him to insight. Memory, both voluntary and involuntary, becomes a device to explore and sometimes to reshape the past and thus to inform and create the present as Hecht fashions the narrative selves of both speaker and poet. In studying the imperatives of memory, I will consider poems of T H E I M P E R A T I V E S O F M E M O R Y I N A N T H O N Y H E C H T 6 5 R an autobiographical cast and those that are more clearly...