The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht

Introduction

INTRODUCTION In one of the characteristically amusing observations that makes reading his letters so enjoyable, Anthony Hecht remarked to his friend and English editor, the poet Jon Stallworthy: It occurs to me that in the murky future, when it has been at length determined that I am a poet of sufficient interest to merit the publication of a volume of “Selected Letters,” the editor of that book will be at a loss to convey what may, in the last analysis, be the most sprightly, various, and original part of my correspondence: my letter paper. (December 22, 1976) What is characteristic about the humor here is the note of self-deprecation in Hecht’s gradually, tellingly unfolding syntax. Initially imagining, with some small effort,a time in the murky future when his letters might be deemed worth collecting, the author manages to prick the puffery of this thought—although not before nicely amplifying it with three well-chosen adjectives—with the admission that the most valuable thing about his letters is the stock they are written on. How seriously are we meant to take the claim, we wonder? Not terribly. After all, Hecht only says what “may” be the case in the future. But the momentarily modest gesture has done its work. It disarms the passage of its potentially heavy freight involving posterity and lets us enjoy the airy possibility that his stationery is more valuable than his thinking, even as we smile over the sprightly claim that thought on paper has produced. Hecht was speaking in this letter about nothing less than a duel to the finish with his friend and arch epistolary rival William MacDonald, the Roman architectural historian.The subject involved which of the two could come up with the rarest letterhead; and while MacDonald had an initial professional advantage, his work taking him to many distant lands, the more geographically circumscribed Hecht still had some tricks up his sleeve. He employed friends (“spies” as he calls them) to bring back stationery from all sorts of exotic and unusual places, even the White House. At one point, Hecht surix x Introduction mised that the most valued of all such heists “would be the paper of the Warden of the Regina Coeli Prison in Rome”(March 30, 1983).A Google search reveals that there is such a place and office, although I don’t believe Hecht ever succeeded in this particular venture. But Hecht could be a persuasive fabricator of his whereabouts. So cleverly matched, in one instance, is the stationery from the Imperial Hotel in Japan with the description of a view of Mt. Fugi from the balcony in a letter written in 1979 that I had to check the biographical record to see if Hecht had ever returned to Japan after the time he spent there as a solder in the 1940s. He hadn’t. And part of the joke, I quickly saw, was that the stationery itself had somehow survived as a relic from an earlier era. The Imperial Hotel had been torn down in 1968. There is a great deal of this kind of mischievous fun in Hecht’s letters, which will not be surprising to readers of “The Dover Bitch” and “The Ghost in the Martini,” as well as much serious thought, as readers of “Rites and Ceremonies” and “The Venetian Vespers” might rightly expect. But his comment to Stallworthy also contains an important editorial truth. A published book of letters cannot perfectly represent the material conditions of their original epistolary circumstances. Whether as handwritten letters sent from camp or v-mails written from the military front or choice stationery bearing letterheads of the most elaborate and unusual order—often artwork in itself—the technology of book reproduction can only selectively hint at these visual features. But equally to the point, we should remember (although the fact is often forgotten) that there is always a gap between the “life” and the faithful representation of that “life” that letters are assumed to convey. There is always a rhetorical context operating, even one as encompassing as a world war, and to read an author’s letters only to arrive at a record of the self—how devious that phrase is?—performs a disservice of another kind. It is to miss the artfulness of letter writing, something Hecht seems to have understood instinctively. Or at least he came to understand it at a very early age, as the youthful letters written from summer camp suggest, with their...