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The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht PDF

398 Pages·2013·14.882 MB·English
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THE SELECTED LETTERS OF Anthony Hecht (cid:2) (cid:2) (cid:2) 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 This page intentionally left blank 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 This page intentionally left blank 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

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