The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht by Jonathan F. S. Post (review)

Now that the great age of letter-writing is over, and we cringe as we await The Collected E-mail of (insert the name of your least favorite poet there), we can wistfully remember the letters of John Keats or Hart Crane, with their candid revelations of the poet’s life and convictions about the writing of poetry. To that slender shelf we might add the lively correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, recently issued as Words in Air (2008), and now the insightful letters of Anthony Hecht.

Hecht was a conscientious craftsman, highly aware of his methods as a poet, and a brilliant critic of the works of others and of himself. In some of these letters he chides a poet for writing metrical verse of monotonous regularity, argues for rendering rhymed poems in rhymed translations, and questions the assumption that images in a poem are always necessary. This compilation spans his years from boyhood until the siege of cancer that ended his life at eighty-one.

Not that the letters reveal all we might care to know. To Jon Stallworthy he describes his childhood as “a rather bitter and lonely one,” but in writing home in his twelfth year, he comes across as a happy summer camper. To learn more about his traumatic experiences in World War II, we can turn to his booklength Conversation with Philip Hoy (1999). There he tells of being an infantry rifleman in the Battle of the Ruhr Pocket, crawling along a battlefront under fire; of the liberation of Flossenbürg concentration camp, where he beheld prisoners dying of typhus by the hundreds; of seeing a group of German mothers and children attempt to surrender, only to be mowed down by American machine-gun fire. There are, Post tells us, “dark years from which no letters survive.” One such period began in 1962 when, after yielding his two small boys to their mother who took them off to Belgium and remarried, Hecht underwent a severe depression and spent three months in a mental hospital. In 1983, long after those grim days, he recalls them in one letter to J. D. McClatchy. Editor Post bridges gaps in the correspondence with summaries of Hecht’s life, so that the book can be read as an outline for a biography.

Perhaps because of his Pulitzer-winning collection The Hard Hours (one edition had a doleful morning-after portrait on the cover), Hecht acquired a reputation for gloom. Yet he co-invented with John Hollander that ingenious comic form the double dactyl (in Jiggery-Pokery, 1967, the same year as The Hard Hours), and many of these letters abound in deft wit. One includes a mock report that Hecht might have submitted when retiring as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress:

I am pleased to claim that, besides driving the vers librists underground, virtually stamping out their pathetic journal, Free Feet, I was able, with the aid of my wife, to design a special garment to be worn by all recognized American poets. There is first of all the floppy, Wagnerian velvet hat, black for major poets, magenta for minor ones. Then the waterproof Inverness cape, lined in yellow silk, with a large manuscript pouch at one side. Special attention has been paid to shoes and boots, and any poet who lays claim to a variable foot is liable to immediate amputation.

Besides, Hecht occasionally shared with correspondents his original light verse, of which Post gives a few samples, among them this limerick:

Proust wrote in his “Recherché” one day:

“There is nothing so cute, I must say,

     At least to my mind,

     As a young boy’s behind

If one’s given to derrières pensées.”

One source of interest in reading poets’ letters is to learn what each writer thought of his contemporaries. This book will not disappoint. Hecht had no patience with poets who misuse their poems...