The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht

398 Pages·14.689 MB·English

by  Hecht, Anthony, Post, Jonathan F. S., Project Muse

THE SELECTED LETTERS OF
Anthony Hecht

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THE SELECTED LETTERS OF
Anthony Hecht
Edited with an introduction by
JONATHAN F. S. POST
THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Baltimore
© 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2013
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
All letters by Anthony Hecht © 2013 The estate of Anthony Hecht.
The Johns Hopkins University Press
2715 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363
www.press.jhu.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hecht, Anthony, 1923–2004.
[Correspondence. Selections]
The selected letters of Anthony Hecht / edited with an introduction by Jonathan F. S. Post.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4214-0730-2 (hdbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4214-0785-2 (electronic) —
ISBN 1-4214-0730-2 (hdbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-4214-0785-X (electronic)
1. Hecht, Anthony, 1923–2004—Correspondence. 2. Poets, American—20th century—
Correspondence. I. Post, Jonathan F. S., 1947– II. Title.
PS3558.E28Z48 2013
811(cid:2).54—dc23
[B] 2012012914
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Frontispiece. Anthony Hecht, late 1960s, around the time that he received the Pulitzer Prize
for The Hard Hours. (Courtesy of Helen Hecht)
Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information, please
contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936 or [email protected].
The Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including
recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-consumer waste, whenever
possible.
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations vii
Introduction ix
Brief Chronology xxi
1 Childhood and College, 1935–1943 3
2 World War II, 1943–1946 19
3 Back Home and Abroad, 1946–1952 69
4 Marriage and Single Life, 1954–1967 101
5 A Second Life, 1968–1982 131
6 Critic and Poet, 1983–1992 203
7 The Flourish of Retirement, 1993–2004 249
Acknowledgments 347
Credits 349
Index 351
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ILLUSTRATIONS
Anthony Hecht, age 13, at Camp Kennebec, Maine, 1936 2
Ninety-seventh Regiment in Czechoslovakia, spring 1945 18
Troop train, postwar France, 1945 59
Anthony Hecht, age 24, University of Iowa, 1947 68
Anthony Hecht, in his study at the American Academy in Rome, 1954–1955 100
Helen D’Alessandro, 1971 130
Anthony Hecht, James Merrill, among others, for T. S. Eliot Centennial Celebration
in St. Louis, 1988 202
Copy of original letter with elaborate letterhead, typical of the kind used by Hecht
in his exchanges with William MacDonald 212
Anthony Hecht, in front of the New York Public Library, 1995 248
Edward Simmons, Willard Metcalf, Childe Hassam, J. Alden Weir, Robert Reid;
William Merritt Chase, Frank W. Benson, Edmund C. Tarbell, Thomas W. Dew-
ing, Joseph R. DeCamp 270
Following page 128
Melvyn and Dorothy Hecht, ca. mid-1950s
Roger Hecht, late 1930s
Anthony Hecht, Ingrid North (wife of the artist Philip North), and Robie
Macauley, University of Iowa, 1947
Hecht in Ischia, 1951, with Elsa Rosenthal and Irving and Anne Weiss
Patricia Harris Hecht, Ischia, 1954–1955
Anthony Hecht, at a café in Europe, late 1960s
Evan Alexander Hecht, age 5, and father, 1977, Rochester, New York
With sculptor friend Dimitri Hadzi, in the Hecht back yard, Washington, D.C., ca.
early 2000s
Chip Kidd, J. D. McClatchy, Anthony Hecht, and Kathleen Ford, 1998, on the occa-
sion of his 75th birthday
Anthony Hecht, Nicholas Christopher, Edward Hirsch, and Joel Conarroe,
92nd St. Y, 2003
Helen and Tony Hecht, New York City, 1998, on the occasion of his 75th birthday
vii
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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 de-
termined that I am a poet of suffi cient 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 fi n-
ish 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 geographi-
cally 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 sur-
ix