The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht

2. World War II, 1943–1946

 T W O World War II 1943–1946 Ninety-three letters, including a few v-mails, postcards, and telegrams, survive from Anthony Hecht’s nearly three years in the army. These constitute a continuous and remarkable record of his activities during and immediately after the war. The only major gap in the epistolary record, from October 1943 through March 1944, roughly coincides with his time as an ASTP (Army Specialized Training Program) candidate at Carleton College. This lacuna notwithstanding, his correspondence can be usefully divided into three phases. About one-third, or thirty-four letters, were written between June 1943 and December 1944 while Hecht was undergoing basic training in the United States in preparation for deployment abroad— although whether to Japan or to Europe was shrouded in mystery and a matter of ongoing concern for Hecht as it was for others. Another seventeen letters survive from his brief time serving on the European front—in France, Czechoslovakia, and Germany, from early March to late June 1945. He participated in what turned out to be, in April, the final campaign by the Allied powers against the German forces along the Rhine and in the Ruhr Valley. The remaining forty-two letters, dating from roughly the end of August 1945 to late January 1946, cover his time in the United States, which included several furloughs, and his subsequent deployment to Japan. 19 20 The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht On March 12, 1946, having spent thirty-three months in the army, Hecht would be discharged as Private First-Class in the 3rd Platoon, C Company, 386 Regiment, 97th Division. There has been much published correspondence by World War II veterans, including some by American poets, the most notable being those by Randall Jarrell and James Dickey. Most collections are fervently patriotic, involving the dangerous exploits of a celebrated fighting force or of a previously unrepresented group. More unusual are collections of letters that involve the reader in an extended personal saga, frequently given to matters of survival. While Hecht’s letters belong in this second category, their drama is of an altogether different kind, more reminiscent of Hamlet (an alter ego whom he frequently quotes) than Homer. These letters are, by turns, humorous, anecdotal, moody, given to self-analysis and abrupt turns of thought, laced with literary quotations and allusions, and yet often intimate and direct. By contrast, those written from Japan, when Hecht’s life was no longer in danger and he worked on stories for Stars and Stripes, are full of reportorial zeal. Hecht’s audience (variously addressed as“Dear Kids,”“Dear Folks,”“Mes Chers”) was the Hecht household at 163 East 81st Street in Manhattan— his main link to the civilized world in those years. While these salutations referred specifically to his parents, he knew that his letters would be shared with his brother Roger, Paula, the cook, and occasionally others close to the “clan.” Most notable was Kathryn Swift, a family friend who knew German and with whom Hecht shared literary interests. As much as the letters recount the unfolding saga of Hecht’s life in a world over which (like Hamlet) he could exert little direct control, they also, by the very nature of their often fraught circumstances, insist on a significant role for the recipient; in this sense the letters are not so much about their author only as they are about the persons addressed and the needed circuit of exchange that accompanies extreme conditions. Along with epistolary flair was a palpable wish to receive in turn. The pitch and timbre of the letters differ according to their underlying circumstances. Those written while Hecht was in basic training are often crafted out of a sense of boredom and ennui; those from the front, from a sense of purposeful activity; and those from the final phase of his service, though initially fraught with postwar depression and uncertainty over his future, are characterized by exhilaration over the favorable turn in occupation duties in Japan. Throughout his many moods, one quality is constant: Hecht’s concern for his immediate readers—the Hecht household. Letters were often written to spare anxiety, allay fears of his whereabouts, or apolo- World War II, 1943–1946 21 gize for occasional moodiness or depression. When he was at or near the front, his letters home did not dwell on the details of war or depict military actions. In their reticence, an...