The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht

1993

May 12, 1993 Washington DC

[To William Maxwell]
Dear Bill,

Whether or not we decide to attend the annual bash—I must accustom myself to thinking of it as an “Academy” function—is yet to be determined; but Helen and I are going out to dinner tomorrow night to one of the best restaurants in Washington to celebrate my manumission and deliverance from the bonds of the academic profession—and particularly from my own local English department, years of association with which has ripened into full-blown detestation. So there is much to celebrate. I have, as you may surmise, finished grading all my term papers, and turned in my grades, and it remains only for me to clear out my office.

I should say in candor that I did not expect that I would feel this way at the end of my professional career. For by far the most part I have greatly enjoyed teaching, and have been very happy in my association both with my students and my colleagues. Former students still write and visit me, and I correspond with former colleagues at many institutions. It has taken Georgetown University to give to the notion of retirement the added glamor of serenity and gladness.

Your note about mucking around in the garden with bone-meal and night-crawlers filled my nostrils, but not with longing. Both Helen and I have black thumbs, and Nature has cursed us for this estrangement by knocking down two huge trees on our property within the space of a month. […]

This comes with love from both of us to both of you.

Tony

John Whitehead (1924–1999), a self-described “Auden addict,” was the author of A Commentary on the Poetry of W. H. Auden, C. Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender (1992).

[May 27, 1993] Washington DC

Dear Mr. Whitehead,

Your letter and copious notes have been forwarded to me by Harvard University Press, and I write to express to you my deep gratitude for the receipt of them. Your scrutiny of my book was more detailed and careful than I had any right to hope for, and if there is to be a future printing I will certainly try to incorporate as many of your suggested emendations as possible. I add that, of course, I had no illusion that my text was faultless, and had myself discovered—to my great chagrin—at least a few of the errors that you also located. I only wish I could expunge or alter them all.

At the same time, you and I differ in our views of many matters—not only from one another, but from others as well. For example, I have been chidden by critics in this country for failure to take into account what they deem as incontestably Auden’s “greatest work,” which turns out, depending on which critic is consulted, to be About the House, The Sea and the Mirror or Homage to Clio. In your case, it is The Age of Anxiety. There is certainly nothing wrong with this diversity of opinion, and my book made no pretenses as regards covering the whole ground. Indeed, while the publishers at Harvard were nervous about the length of what I wrote, I myself wished then—and still wish—that I had gone into greater detail about the materials I selected for inspection.

There are, finally, some further topics upon which we differ. Americans are not quite so ignorant of the horrors of WWII as you seem to suppose. I myself served (in France, Germany and Czechoslovakia) in the front lines of an Infantry Division that suffered such heavy losses (more than half the men in my company were killed or severely mutilated) that the commanding general was relieved of his command as incompetent. Furthermore, an English friend of mine [Bernard Knox] whose military career was far more daring than mine, and who was awarded the Bronze Star and the Croix de Guerre (he fought against the Franco forces in Spain, with the Maquis in France, and the anti-Fascist forces in Italy) read the book and found no fault with my views about the English attitude towards Auden’s move to the United States.

With all good wishes.

Sincerely,
Anthony Hecht

B. H. [Pete] Fairchild (1942–) studied under Hecht at Sewanee and is now the author of a number of books of poems. Hecht wrote the introduction for The Art of the Lathe (1998).

June 7, 1993 Washington DC

Dear Pete,

I’m grateful to you for your latest letter, though saddened by the news of your various rejections. And yet, knowing your work as I do, I feel the sort of confidence in your abilities that perhaps at the moment you cannot share. The confidence of which I speak is based on a condition of objectivity, which is probably the last thing you could bring to a view of your work. And all poets, Shakespeare not excepted, are given to moments (when they are not instead extended periods of time) of grave self-doubt—

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least, …

I think you are quite right to proceed along your patient course, poem by poem, adding to your work both in bulk and in development. I remember the curious anguish that went into the assembly of my own first book [A Summoning of Stones]. I would write a couple of new poems, and deem them better than anything written previously. So when I began to think in terms of a book I would cut out the earliest work to make room for the later, not so much out of eagerness to avoid having a book too long, but to avoid invidious comparisons (as I imagined) between early work and late. This process went on for an embarrassingly long time. Each new poem was, as it were, the death of an earlier one; so that while I always envisioned a collection of about thirty poems, the table of contents continued to change by constant addition and subtraction. I might never have published a first volume for years if I had not seen that this was a self-defeating procedure. But your work is now so firmly developed along strong and matured lines that there is probably no danger of your falling into the dilemma I found myself in. It did not surprise me, I may add, that Hopkins was as “thoughtful” about your poems as they were.

This comes to you with my warmest and most admiring good wishes,
Tony

Daniel Anderson is the author of several volumes of poetry as well as an edition of The Selected Poetry of Howard Nemerov (2003).

July 9, 1993 Washington DC

Dear Danny:

[…] Since I mentioned earlier that I have been working on the Shakespeare Sonnets, it may be worth adding that the kind of self-consciousness that modern poets invariably exhibit when the topic of literary immortality is raised was not always the emotional blight it has now become. When Shakespeare wrote “Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this powerful rime,” he was not being vain, or making a shrewd guess, or gifted with prophetic knowledge. He was echoing a literary tradition that went back to the Greeks and Romans, including Homer, Pindar and Virgil. Particularly in the era before printing, fame and the human memory of the past was conferred wholly by writers, and of these chiefly by poets, because poetry was quite simply “more memorable” than prose. To be sung about by a poet was to know that your fame would last. Hence the desire on the part of heroes in Homer, and athletes in Pindar, to be commemorated by being immortalized by bards. In our own day fame is often indistinguishable from celebrity, and both politicians and movie stars vastly prefer the second, while few desire the first, and the first rarely interests the general public, which is not interested in poetry either. There is a book on this topic that might interest you: The Frenzy of Renown, by Leo Braudy. […]

All this of course may be either familiar to you or of little concern, though it all came to mind as a result of your poem. […]

All good wishes,
Tony

Leonard Baskin (1922–2000) was a renowned graphic artist and sculptor. Hecht briefly describes his early connection with Baskin in the letter below to Eleanor Cook of January 9, 1997.

[Summer 1993?] Washington DC

Dear Leonard,

I’ve come close to clearing the decks now, and hope soon to begin on our book, about which I’ve been actively thinking for some time. I’ve finished a first draft of my Introduction to Shakespeare’s Sonnets for Cambridge University Press, and once that is completed to everyone’s satisfaction, I can turn to our collaboration. Almost from the first it seemed to be that Death might be conceived as a master actor or impersonator (The Presumptions of Death) and this would allow all the personages in our book to be nothing else than Death thinly disguised. The Ruskin quoted [below] seems to me possibly useful as an epigraph. Each of our characters—artist, physician, revolutionary—would be his own person but also Death in masquerade—a gigantic Carnival of death. (I seem imperfectly to remember a series of articles by Enid Starkie about a plague in eighteenth-century France which led to much wild abandon, the invention of new, lewd dances, and a general frivolity born of hopelessness.) This could be but one of the moods we might seek to create.

“[…] We usually speak as if death pursued us, and we fled from him; but that is only so in rare instances. Ordinarily he masks himself—makes himself beautiful—all-glorious; not like the King’s daughter, all-glorious within, but outwardly: his clothing of wrought gold. We pursue him frantically all our days, he flying or hiding from us. Our crowning success at three-score and ten is utterly and perfectly to seize and hold him in his eternal integrity—robes, ashes, and sting.”

John Ruskin, Unto this Last, Essay III, paragraphs 42–3.

Affectionately,
Tony

An expanded version of Hecht’s thoughts about Time Will Darken It appears in A William Maxwell Portrait, ed. Charles Baxter, Michael Collier, and Edward Hirsch (Norton, 2004).

August 29, 1993 Bellagio, Italy

Dear Bill,

We’ve spent a happy week in Venice, with good weather and fine food, and we’re now here in a paradisal setting, and the weather holds. While there has been plenty to do, we had the foresight to bring with us two of your novels: They Came Like Swallows and Time Will Darken It. I have read them linger-ingly, lovingly, delighted as it seems to me even now by every single detail in both books, different as they are from one another. [The first] resonates with wonderful varieties of love, all of them touching. The second book is surely the more complex one, and far more demanding on the reader’s sympathetic understanding. I found myself at first inclining to impatience with virtually all the major (and some of the minor) characters; and then I found I was being asked to be as tolerant and forbearing as they learned to be towards one another, and as their author found it possible to be towards them. I conceived a particular, strong initial dislike of Mrs. Potter, but gradually I saw that she was only an instance—irritating, amusing, fallible—of something that seemed to possess (afflict?) virtually all the characters in the novel: a heedlessness, a preoccupation, an inwardness of concern, of which Martha King’s pregnancy (which characteristically turns her inward and vaguely allows her to feel some indifference to the rest of the world) is emblematic. It is an egocentrism that is not alien to love; on the contrary, it’s what everyone uses as the basis and center of their love. But what I think made me love the book as much as I do had to do with its musical employment of three continuous and interwoven modes of discourse. Narrative and dialogue make up the first and most immediate of these. But almost equally alluring, ravishing in their clarity and symbolic weight of observation, are those passages of description—of season, weather, animals, the varying light upon furniture and rugs. They are some of the most beautiful passages of their sort that I knew, reminding me of Flaubert and Chekhov. But in addition to these two strands there is a third: a carefully weighted, infinitely thoughtful authorial voice, giving a perfect sense of control at those moments when a reader becomes anxious about the varieties of blindness and self-concern with which most of the characters are afflicted, and which in the course of the novel they manage wonderfully to overcome. This authorial voice at times reminded me of E.M. Forster’s in its modest, patient sagacity. It speaks with a wisdom not shared by a novel’s characters, but serving to give the reader an assurance that everything that happens participates in a design which is ordained and fitting. And indeed all the various threads of plot and character are unexpectedly woven intimately together at the end with quiet gestures of love and acceptance.

If I’ve rattled on so long about the second novel, this is not because I didn’t care for the first, which, though simpler, is still more musical, and more direct in its lovely expression of love. It is now Helen’s turn to read them both; and then I will read them again. But this is written—on an alien machine which puts every obstacle in my way—to say how grateful I am to you, and how delighted by these stunning books.

Tony

Alfred Corn (1943–) is a poet, essayist, and critic. He edited Incarnation: Contemporary Writers on the New Testament (1990), with a contribution by Hecht, “St Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians.” Mrs. Edward T. Chase was director of the Academy of American Poets.

December 2, 1993 Washington DC

Dear Alfred:

It seems to me quite profitless to pursue this line of correspondence. Your two letters make it clear that you see nothing wrong in finding fault with a speech of mine that you never heard, and that was imperfectly reported to you. You seem to feel entitled to lecture me on the topic of tolerance for minorities (a topic that was no part of my speech) and thereby to presume to some sort of moral superiority, hence my word “sanctimonious.” I find this all beside the point. I have sent my introduction to Wilbur’s reading to Mrs. Chase, who asked for it, and who said it would in due course be published. When and where was not specified. For the second time, I suggest to you that you would do well to read it before finding fault with it. Even in your second letter [you] write to say that if, after having read my letter “we still disagree,” we could still enter into friendly and rational debate. What you persist in failing to grasp is that there is no ground for either agreement or disagreement. I did not make any comments about cultural minorities, which seems to be the only topic on which you have elected to take issue with me. Let there be an end to this foolishness.

Yours,
Tony

Dana Gioia (1950–) is a poet, critic, editor, anthologist, translator, co-founder of the West Chester University Poetry Conference (1995–), and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (2003–2009). His acquaintance with Hecht dates back to the early 1980s.

December 15, 1993 Washington DC

Dear Dana,

Thank you for sending me a copy of your Longfellow essay, which I have read (though not quite through) with interest and with approval of your agile and flexible style. You took on a difficult assignment, and deserve commendation for your daring. You are right, I think, in feeling that it is too easy and fashionable to scoff at Longfellow, and right, as well, to compare his “popular” poetry to that of Kipling—though I would immediately add, not to that of Burns, who rejoices in a deep irony of the lower classes, a kind of pastoral and bitter knowingness; nor to Herrick, whose least efforts are classical in style and devotedly Jonsonian as well as Catullan.

Though, as I said, I have not read the essay quite through, I noted one or two things along the way that gave me pause. I hope you will not mind my pointing them out. On your p. 76 you write, “In Voices of the Night Longfellow created an influential new archetype in American culture—the poet professor. … Although the New Critics despised Longfellow, these poet professors were his cultural descendants. There is another side of Longfellow’s version of the poet professor that has been influential.” I find something disingenuous, tendentious and mistaken here, all for the sake of a petty irony involving the condescension of the New Critic Poet Professors to one who was, by your choice of language (“descendants”) their forebear. But this is not strictly true. Longfellow was appointed at Harvard as a Professor of Languages, not of Poetry, and his poetic career was as independent of his professorial duties as Wallace Stevens’ was of his duties as an insurance executive. By way of contrast, Ransom was appointed to his job at Kenyon, and Warren to his job at Yale precisely because they were practicing writers. At the time of Longfellow’s academic career, there were few if any programs devoted to “creative writing” anywhere in the country. There were few even in my undergraduate days (the early forties) and such programs, as well as the faculty who teach them, are a fairly late growth and development, and it is faulty to trace them to Longfellow.

[…]

p. 82, “Longfellow, like the Elizabethan lyricists, understood that if a poet keeps the sense simple he can make music compellingly complex.” I find myself filled with resistance to this collocation, and the statement itself; it grossly and dangerously oversimplifies. The subtlety, dexterity, emotional range and richness of allusion in the lyrics of Jonson and Campion, to take only two examples, is so far beyond the range of Longfellow as to be both pathetic and laughable. The writing of lyrics to be set to music does indeed require special skills and a careful sense of a limit to the complexities that can be allowed if intelligibility is to be hoped for. At the same time it is worth remembering that so densely packed and knotted a poet as Donne wrote songs, and they are very good. On the same page the lines of “The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls” need only be compared with some of the lyrics of Tennyson to see how feeble they are.

Finally, p. 84. “… ‘Mezzo Cammin’ and ‘The Jewish Cemetery at Newport’ (the latter surely one of the great American poems of its century.…” I think I might have allowed this to pass unremarked had I not recently examined the second of these poems with some care, having been assigned to read it in public. It is a poem with serious blemishes. To begin with the slightest one which is grammatical, consider the second stanza with its confusion of third-person-plural pronouns. “Their” in the first line refers to the buried Jews; “their” in the second refers to the trees. (There is another third-person-plural pronoun in the third line.) This grammatical awkwardness could easily have been avoided, and would have been by a more scrupulous poet. More seriously, consider the fifth stanza

“Blessed be God! for he created Death!”
The mourners said, “and Death is rest and peace”;
Then added, in the certainty of faith,
“And giveth Life that never more shall cease.”

The last line of this stanza is a totally unwarranted Christian interpolation. There is only the most fragmentary authority (based on the summoning of Saul’s ghost by the Witch of Endor) for any Jewish belief in an afterlife, a belief that is almost entirely ignored in Jewish religion, but central to Christianity. The point is that if Longfellow is going to write a poem that requires background knowledge, he ought to take a little trouble about it. (The same sort of carelessness went into the composition of “The Skeleton in Armor,” in which Longfellow built his poem on the slender historical supposition that both the ancient tower at Newport and the skeleton in armor found near Falls River, MA, were thought for a while to be Norse.)

But what is most distressing about the poem under discussion is the final stanza. It has about it all the cool antiquarian and philosophic remoteness of one who might be writing calmly and aloofly about the Phoenicians or Pithecanthropus Erectus. There is a vaguely regretful but supremely calm and untroubled feeling about an extinct species, bolstered perhaps by Darwinian confidence in the survival of the fittest, and assured in its sense of the absoluteness of these evolutionary laws. If one were to judge only by Longfellow’s poem, one could easily assume that the last of the Jews had perished, along with their quaint faith and notions. If this poem is “surely one of the great American poems of its century,” this speaks very poorly of American poetry. Happily for us we also had Whitman, Dickinson, Emerson, and some others.

I am sorry to quarrel with you in these matters, and hope you will take it in good part. This comes, for all my querulousness, with warmest Christmas greetings and best wishes for the New Year.

Tony

1994

Daniel Albright (1945–), Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature, Harvard University, is the author of a number of books on poetry and music.

January 4, 1994 Washington DC

Dear Dan,

I’m deeply grateful to you for the generosity of your letter, and the richness of your reaction to my poems. […]

Yes, our Thano-topic is what you surmised: a rather deliberate variation on the medieval “Dance of Death.” According to the traditional formula, Death invites persons of all ranks, ages and fortunes to dance with him—Schubert, Ransom, and Mussorgsky are all in this line. The idea of the “Dance,” I gather, arose out of the 14th century plague of death from ergot poisoning, in which the victims went into violent seizures and epileptic fits (resembling some sort of wild dance) just before death. In the traditional version, Death remains the same indominable figure and only his victims vary, and this makes for a certain limitation in terms of a reader’s expectations. It was, I felt, essential to overcome this handicap insofar as it was possible. And the result was to have Death play all possible human roles (reserving to himself only his secret, ultimate purpose). He could therefore adopt any age or sex, present himself as alluring, amusing, friendly, childlike, anything that advanced his purpose; and this would allow a great variety of “voice,” however insistent the central theme, as, for example, in Lydgate’s The Dance of Death.

I think you are right about Hardy being perhaps the least “debonair” of poets, and yet it seems to me that the idea of the debonair, of the insouciant, is just what he is at pains to puncture in a number of his poems, and against which his satire and irony is often directed. Nearly everyone is unwitting in Hardy, and this is not only part of the poignanc[y] of existence, but he often persuades us that this unwittingness is virtually essential to our existence, allowing us the little poise and assurance we have and without which we would instantly expire. The word “harden” at the end of the second stanza I feel sure comes directly from a Hardy poem—though not as a rhyme word. In “The Going” he writes of the moment at which, unbeknownst to him, his wife was dying, while he “saw morning harden upon the wall.” That line has always had a singular power for me.

You write: “I was intrigued by the emphasis on costume in both poems: the women’s coral gowns, Death’s preening himself in his alb and cope.” The gowns were mine, but the notion of costume probably originated in Baskin’s designs. Some figures wear what amount to emblematic regalia, the archbishop being only one of these. There will be a Mexican Revolutionary with crossed bandoliers and sombrero, a circus barker with straw hat, etc. “Gowns” seems to me a rather Victorian word, suitable for a Hardy-style poem. As you say, while the Devil often adopts various costumes at will, Death normally does not; but that is exactly what we have wanted to change. Death in these poems is at least as sly and skillful as the Devil—perhaps more so, since we can outwit the Devil but not Death.

I feel just as you do about Herbert, and think him a far greater poet than Hardy; but this is precisely one of the points of the sequence: Death can adopt any number of roles and any degree of sophistication. Herbert’s “musical metaphors” seemed an asset I could make use of, though I did not intend to suggest that Herbert himself is the clergyman who impersonates Death—merely that the sort of ascetic renunciation recommended in quite a number of Herbert’s poems (and common enough in much Christian homiletic literature) can conveniently be adopted by Death for his own ironic purposes. […]

This letter requires no answer. You are a busier man than I, now that I’m retired. But the next thing you shall get from me is my introduction to the Shakespeare Sonnets, about which I should be glad of your views. Please bear in mind that I was given a word limit. Clearly it is a topic about which I might have written at far greater length.

All best wishes,
Tony

January 30, 1994 Washington DC

[To Daniel Albright]
Dear Dan,

Thanks for your letter about the Sonnets. I’m, as always, grateful for your praise. […] Let me comment, if I may, on one or two of your comments. You write, “Eliot somewhere quotes a French scholar who noted that Shakespeare used every conceivable style except the simple …” The Frenchman alluded to here is one M. Guizot, but the one who makes note of his views is Arnold, in his Preface to Poems (1853). This is a passage in Arnold I know quite well because I find it irritating and wrong. He describes Lear as a play in which “the language is so artificial, so curiously tortured, and so difficult, that every speech has to be read two or three times before its meaning can be comprehended.” This comment fails shockingly to take account of the fact that at the dramatic and climactic moments towards the end of the play, Lear speaks with a heartbreaking simplicity that gains its power and authority precisely from its contrast with the bombast of what went before. There are few speeches anywhere in any of the plays that carry the power of “Pray, do not mock me. / I am a very foolish fond old man, / Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less; / And, to deal plainly, / I fear I am not in my perfect mind. / Methinks I should know you, and know this man; Yet I am doubtful, for I am mainly ignorant what place this is; and all the skill I have / Remembers not these garments; nor I know not / Where I did lodge last night. Do not laugh at me; / For, as I am a man, I think this lady / To be my child Cordelia.” From my point of view, Arnold and Guizot have missed the boat. […]

I am, as always, very grateful to you for your thought and encouragement. […]

Tony

Charles Tung, a student of Hecht at Georgetown, went to Oxford for graduate studies, when this letter was written. He now teaches at Seattle University.

February 2, 1994 Washington DC

Dear Charles:

[…] Now to mistier matters. I have not seen Schindler’s List, and I’m prepared to believe that it is very powerful and effective. I could half persuade myself this is the case precisely because Spielberg was too young to have been personally involved in WWII, so that for him the task was one of trying to make vivid something that for most people is difficult to believe. This is the task of most theater directors, including those who direct Shakespeare. By way of contrast, though I never suffered like those who were prisoners in the camps, I did actually see one; and I need nothing to make it vivid to me. Secondly, except for Wiesel’s Night, I have read no “literary” works about the prison camps that seem anywhere nearly as effective as straight reportorial accounts, because the facts themselves are so monstrous and surreal they not only don’t need, but cannot endure, the embellishment of metaphor or artistic design. Please note that I am not saying what Adorno so famously said: that after Auschwitz there can be no more poetry. The right answer to that is one Mark Strand offered. After Auschwitz one can no longer eat lunch, either, but one does. What I am saying is that Homer could write unflinchingly about war because it was conducted according to certain codes that acknowledged brutality but revered heroism. Nothing of that sort obtains any more; the facts are too astonishing in themselves to be framed in a comprehensible context.

And there is another matter as well. I try as a matter of principle to avoid polemical or political poetry. Robert Frost once said, poetry comes from griefs, not grievances. Indignation is a bad foundation for any art, mixed as it always is with simple-minded self-righteousness. And nothing poets can write in the hope of being shocking can come anywhere near the actual facts. For this reason I do not much care for the engagé poems of Carolyn Forché. Poetry should not put itself in the position of trying to compete with headlines. Its power must be of another kind. W.H. Auden: “Poetry is in its essence an act of reflection, of refusing to be content with the interjections of immediate emotion in order to understand the nature of what is felt.” Politically committed poetry is not interested in arriving at that understanding.

To return to another of your questions, my inability to read or write poetry during the war had little or nothing to do with its horror, at least on a conscious level; though no doubt I lived in a continuous state of fear of my life. But military training is so completely fatiguing and mind-numbing that the intelligence seems to lapse completely, as close-order drill is intended to assure. All military drills and routines makes thought both difficult and superfluous.

As for Lowell’s remark that you can say anything in poetry as long as it is correctly placed, he borders on a kind of truth. Poetry ought to be able to assimilate anything, but context and scope are all-important. Hence Homer’s ability to describe stomach-turning deaths and get away with it. Hence the many literary revolutions when both words and subject matter that once were deemed anti-poetic found a place in poetry; the Romantics were true revolutionaries in this way. Blake wrote of “shit,” which he spelled “shite.” The “pylon school” introduced industrial images where pastoral scenes had reigned. The interplay you correctly recognize between whatever we think reality is and some vision or version of it in words is always tricky, tentative, and subtle.

[…]

This comes with warmest and heartiest good wishes for the New Year,

Anthony Hecht

Frank Glazer (1915–), renowned pianist, taught at the Eastman School of Music from 1965 to 1980, before becoming Artist-in-Residence at Bates College.

February 16, 1994 Washington DC

Dear Frank,

Your dazzlingly beautiful gift of the three Brahms piano quartets arrived late yesterday in perfect condition. I had just finished some work, and felt entitled to indulge myself in some serious luxury, and I listened to the first of them. It is brilliant, and deeply moving in ways that are, admittedly, extra-musical. I first heard that quartet when I was roughly nineteen years old, during what was one of the happiest intervals of my young life. That happiness was to be cut short by the war, and for some time thereafter. And so it was both natural and easy for me to identify this music with a period in my life almost approaching bliss. And, of course, apart from these personal associations, the music is objectively lovely and eloquent in its own right. There is a shimmer to the piano part of the first movement that is like the sunlit surface of a fast-flowing stream in early spring. W. H. Auden, about whose poetry I wrote a book, and who knew and wrote about music (especially about opera and Stravinsky), hated Brahms. He said to a friend, “Perhaps my dislike of Brahms is extra-aesthetic. But whenever I hear a particularly obnoxious combination of sounds, I spot it as Brahms and I’m right every time …” There is, unquestionably something in Brahms’s harmonies and harmonic progressions (which I happen to love) that is almost his signature, though it crops up in works of his admirers and followers, like Dvorak, for example. Arnold Schoenberg, on the other hand, whose musical tastes were far more ‘advanced’ than Auden’s revered Brahms, and wrote of him, “The sense of logic and economy and the power of development which builds melodies of such fluency deserve the admiration of every music lover who expects more than sweetness and beauty from music.” It is Auden’s “extra-aesthetic” reasons that I’d like to know, but never will. It could be that he had unpleasant personal associations with his first hearing of Brahms, as I had a happy one. There’s also another possibility. There are some—Bernard Shaw is an example—who feel belligerently that to like Wagner is to hate Brahms, and no compromise is possible. Shaw was absolutely intransigent on this point. My own lack of sympathy for Wagner makes it easy for me to feel that perhaps there is no meeting ground; but I would admit that I have not given Wagner a fair chance.

Anyway, I am more grateful to you than I can easily say. It was wonderful to see you and Ruth here in Washington, and Helen and I hope you will come again and stay with us for a visit.

Affectionately,
Tony Hecht

Peter Steele, S.J. (1939–2012), was an Australian poet and critic, emeritus professor at the University of Melbourne, and occasional visiting professor at Georgetown University. The elegy on Timothy Healy appeared first in Invisible Riders (Sydney: Paper Bark Press, 1999).

February 19, 1994 Washington DC

My dear Peter:

Helen and I were delighted to have you with us last night, and we hope you enjoyed yourself as much as we enjoyed having you with us. It wasn’t until today, however, that I had a chance to examine the munificence of your gifts. To speak the truth, I have had time only to glance at the collection of essays [Expatriates: Reflections on Modern Poetry, University of Melbourne Press, 1985] (and to read only a few pages of the one about me. I also read the opening of the ones about Muir and Merwin, both of whom I admire, as you do.) But it is the poems that I have read with both delight and deep respect. Your elegy for Tim [Timothy Healy] I find wonderfully and persuasively moving; it may be the one which, for very personal reasons, I like best. But the others as well exhibit exactly the wit and intelligence, the agility and honesty that he would have been roused by. You seem not only to have known him well but to be very much, in your own words, “a pair of sorts.” He was a man I greatly loved; and after that, or, at the same time, admired and respected and rejoiced in. At his funeral service in New York, the priest who gave the homily, and who was a very old friend from college days, remarked that none of Tim’s friends was surprised that he was not canonized. This provoked a general chuckle, quite loud and uninhibited. I must have been one of the few who was silent; and more than that, vaguely hurt and offended. To be sure, Tim swore like a trooper, and he did not disguise his love of food or drink, and he knew a lot of off-color stories. He was, nevertheless, perhaps the most loving and lovable man I have known, and such failings as he had were trifles in comparison with his, as it seemed, natural capacity to love God and his fellow men and women. I can’t doubt that he would have delighted in your poems as much as I do. In any case, I send you my very complex and braided thanks, as well as my congratulations on your remarkable productivity.

Affectionately, and gratefully,
Tony

April 30, 1994 Washington DC

[To William Maxwell]
Dear Bill,

I suppose you and Emmy are pruning and weeding and carrying on in a thoroughly pastoral way, so that perhaps this ought to be addressed to you out there in rural New York; but I will risk sending this to your city address.

I thought of you, and that extraordinary memory of yours which could recall all the submissions in fiction made to The New Yorker during the time of your editorship, as I was reading an article (in The Wilson Quarterly [vol. 18, Spring 1994]) about C.S. Lewis. The author, James Como (who teaches rhetoric and public communications at York College, CUNY) writes: “Upon being told how terrible it was to remember nothing, he would reply that it was worse to forget nothing, as was the case with everything he read. Of course, this declaration would be met with incredulity and demands that he put up or shut up. And so he would solicit a series of numbers from the most skeptical guest, which he then would apply to a bookcase, a shelf within that case, and a book upon that shelf. The guest would then fetch the specified volume (which could be in any one of several languages), open to a page of his own choosing, read aloud from that page, and stop where he pleased. Lewis would then quote the rest of the page from memory.” There’s something about this I find frightening, both in Lewis and in you. Helen and I are both moderately fairly matched with poor memories, though mine used to be reasonably good. But I have to copy things down, and even then I forget them. Whenever I read a non-fiction book I underline and make marginal notes, and even then I incline to forget everything but general outlines. For example, off and on I have been reading a book I very much like by Maurice Valency called In Praise of Love, which is about troubadour poetry and its gradual development into the dolce stil nuova and the Petrarchan tradition. It is full of detailed information, and more thorough-going than C.S. Lewis’s own Allegory of Love. I’ve marked it all up like a student preparing for exams. But even as I do so I know it is all drifting away.

However, neither Helen nor I have forgotten we are to see the two of you at the Academy Ceremonial, and we look forward to that with excitement.

Affectionately,
Tony

Jeffrey Meyers published Robert Frost: A Biography in 1996. He had earlier included excerpts from Hecht’s essay on Lowell in Robert Lowell, Interviews and Memoirs (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988).

September 15, 1994 Washington DC

Dear Jeffrey,

I fear that I can’t be of any use to you as regards your projected book on Frost. I met him only a few times, and never knew him intimately. Our conversations were rather humdrum and unmemorable. I met Kay Morrison only briefly when she was very old—at Bread Loaf, I think. As for his influence, he continued the genre of the dramatic monologue, and was one of its best practitioners. He taught a number of poets that they did not have to write only in their own voice. In this, as well as in other ways, he performed a great service that has been badly needed in American poetry. He was also an almost solitary defender of formal poetic values during the Modernist period when formal practices were being widely trashed. […]

Anthony Hecht

Denis Donoghue (1928–), prolific literary critic, who had earlier reviewed Millions of Strange Shadows (see letter of March 25, 1977), is Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University.

December 27, 1994 Washington DC

Dear Denis,

Somehow during the cluster of holiday festivities, urged on by curiosity and delight, those very Paterian feelings, I have managed to read almost all of your splendid book on WP [Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls], and feel I want to tell you right away how brilliant, illuminating and valuable it seems to me. You have made a perfectly convincing case for him as a major Modern figure, with far more resonance to his “strange” ideas than I had ever given him proper credit for. I was, in fact, largely indifferent to him, when I was not actually repelled; and my unfairness to him resembled in some ways the doctrinaire antipathy Ivor Winters felt towards Wallace Stevens, and for some of the same reasons. I thought Pater a shallow hedonist, and dismissed him accordingly, all the while disapproving of the doctrinal severity that Winters brought programmatically to bear on the excellent work of Stevens. The three became an irritating cluster to me. I could often see how Winters came to Stevens with cookie-cutter attitudes with which he allowed himself, on haughty moral grounds, to dismiss or, perhaps more seriously, to misread the poems. And somehow, even as I was rising to Stevens’ defense, I knew I was bringing the very same charges against Pater.

Pater is not a lovable figure, and you are painstaking in your effort to be just and accurate in your assessments. You have made his work and its significance much clearer to me, without, I must add, endearing it or him to me. But your examination of the very prose itself, its evasions, its assumptions, its innuendos, is masterly and immensely revealing. While this is an area I am largely unacquainted with (everyone I’ve read on Pater is content to describe him simply in terms of his purple passages and “art for art’s sake”) you are the first I know of who has attempted to do a rich justice to the work and the ideas they represent. […]

Incidentally, you may not know that [Auden] took a dim view of later Stevens on what amounted to doctrinaire grounds. You’ll recall, in “In Praise of Limestone,” the lines that go “The poet, / Admired for his earnest habit of calling / The sun the sun, his mind Puzzle, is made uneasy / By these solid statues which so obviously doubt / His antimythological myth …” I had always read those lines as applying to “the generic poet.” But it seems that WHA had Stevens specifically in mind, as he wrote explicitly to Ursula Niebuhr. His letter to her is contained in Remembering Reinhold Niebuhr, p. 289.

Once again, my deep thanks for a splendid and splendidly written book, with warmest holiday greetings.

Tony

1995

Left to right (seated): Edward Simmons, Willard Metcalf, Childe Hassam, J. Alden Weir, Robert Reid. Left to right (standing): William Merritt Chase, Frank W. Benson, Edmund C. Tarbell, Thomas W. Dewing, Joseph R. DeCamp Photograph by Haeseler Studios 1908; Collection, American Academy of Arts and Letters

[April 4, 1995] Washington DC [Postcard: The Ten: American painters who seceded from the Society of American Artists in 1897]

[To Leonard Baskin]
Dear Leonard—

You see these old men? They have grown old waiting for the books they had written to be published. When will our book appear?

Love,
Tony

April 20, 1995 Washington DC

[To Leonard Baskin]
Dear Leonard,

The Presumptions arrived from Maine, and it is a very beautiful book. I am delighted by it and grateful for it, and rejoice in its physical existence. More of this in a moment.

First, I feel entitled to defend myself against charges of “ill-natured impatience.” My several inquiries about when the book would appear were due entirely to my having no clue about what to expect, and my one sardonic postcard was no more than a reflection of this eagerness to see the final product. If I was without any guidance about what is entailed in the process of sewing and binding, or did not know, until belatedly informed, that anyone was off on safari, I can at least claim that (1) my appetite was whetted by the view you gave me of unbound proofs when I visited Mount Holyoke in early March, and (2) I had been prompted to my, as it turns out, premature expectations by your having told me yourself that I could expect the book to be completed “by the end of February or the beginning of March.” So let no more be said about “ill-natured impatience.”

[…] [T]he book is wonderful and luxurious even beyond my memory of it from that too hasty perusal in Northampton. The colored papers as well as the colored prints are gorgeous, but the black and whites are wonderfully powerful in their starkness and their mystery. A number of the prints, which before I had only seen in black and white (by “before” I mean the proofs you had sent in the mail) surprised me at finding them in color. And the color of several, most notably the Society Lady, was far more vivid than anything I had been led to expect. I know that there will be people salivating down at the Library of Congress when their copy shows up. In the meantime, I send you my very grateful thanks and warm congratulations.

Affectionately,
Tony

Christopher Wallace-Crabbe (1934–) is a poet, critic, editor, contributor of double dactyls, and emeritus professor at the University of Melbourne. Although Wallace-Crabbe and Hecht never met, they occasionally shared light verse in the 1990s. Hecht’s poem is a take-off of Robert Herrick’s poem to Ben Jonson, “An Ode for Him.” Following in the footsteps of Hecht and other poets named below, Wallace-Crabbe gave a poetry reading at Winchester College, England.

September 13, 1995 Washington DC

Ah, Chris,
It’s not amiss
That to the scores
Of youngling bachelors
At Winchester
You bring the Muse, and her
Silk finery, fine feats;
She romped with Empson, Clampitt, Keats,
And lately roused the boys
With all that artfulness your verse employs.

And, Chris,
Consider this:
Among the ranks
Of pot-wabblers, pickthanks,
She would not deign
To move or choose her train,
But crowns with sereless bay
You and good Peter Steele, S.J.,
Where her orchestral thunder
Rings through the seventh heaven from Down Under. […]

All good wishes,
Tony

As a poet, Hecht received a number of unsolicited letters. I have been unable to learn more about Mr. Lord’s identity, apart from the fact that he has written abusive, rambling letters to a number of Hecht’s contemporaries as well. His response to Hecht’s humorous letter can be found in the Hecht archive at Emory University.

December 8, 1995 Washington DC

Mr. Lord (?)

I am by no means confident that this will reach you; I’ve always had the greatest difficulty making out your handwriting on your return address. But I sincerely hope this finds you in one way or another, because it is meant very firmly to discourage you from sending me any further letters or enclosures.

From the first missives of yours to arrive I have been either bored or repelled by what you have written, and I rarely got beyond the first half of the first page. For quite some time now I have merely thrown anything from you into the waste basket without troubling to open it. And, of course, I realize I could go on doing that with little trouble to myself. But I feel it is unfair to you to allow you to spend as much money as you clearly do on postage. (The most recent of your missives, containing a cassette, required $1.01 in postage). The cassette, what little of it I had the patience to listen to, struck me as at least as incoherent as your written prose.

Please save yourself some money, and save me from the small task of dumping your missives in the trash.

Yours,
Anthony Hecht

December 12, 1995 Washington DC

[To Dana Gioia]
Dear Dana,

Had I not been downed by the flu, this reply to your long, kind letter would have been more prompt. As it is, with the aid of antibiotics I am enough on the mend to thank you and congratulate you and wish you well in your resettlement—though I had been pleased to think of you as something of a neighbor here in the East. The completion of your Seneca translation is splendid news, and while I won’t be able to attend the Soho performance, I’m delighted for you. Work of that sort, of course, requires a dedication and withdrawal that, for all your reviews and broadcasts, must have been a different sort of existence. Thinking about the less public aspects of a poet’s labors reminded me of a wonderful passage in the diaries of John Evelyn (Jan. 18, 1671). Evelyn quite literally discovered Grinling Gibbons, probably the greatest wood-carver of all time: “I was walking neere a poor solitary thatched house in our Parish … I found him shut in … I asked if I might come in, he opened the doore civily to me, and I saw him about such work, as for the curiosity of handling, drawing, and studious exactnesse, I never in my life had seene before in all my travells: I asked him why he worked in such an obscure and lonesome place; he told me, it was that he might apply himselfe to his profession without interruption, and wondered not a little how I came to find him out … I found he was likewise Musical, and very Civil, sober and discreete in his discourse …” You probably know all this. […]

Tony

The book in question is Touchstones: American Poets on a Favorite Poem, ed. Robert Pack and Jay Parini (University Press of New England, 1995).

December 19, 1995 Washington DC

[To J. D. McClatchy]
Dear Sandy,

I imagine you’re away now, either in England or California (I can’t keep your travels straight in my memory) but I have just read your excellent little essay on Pope’s “Epistle to Miss Blount,” and read it not only with delight but with greatly moved feelings. Your essay, brief as it is, seems to me the best thing in the whole book called Touchstones. It is in many ways an odd book. I haven’t read it all, and don’t think I ever will; but I feel I must surely have covered both the best and the worst of it. And these “best” and “worst” fall with astonishing neatness into two distinct camps that are easy to characterize. Let me say right away that I think the “best” are, after you, Wilbur, Justice, Nims (and there may be one or two others as yet unread). The other category is more numerous, and, as I was composing it I began to think I was, as I have long been accused of being, a misogynist, male-chauvinist pig. For my list includes (in no preferential order) Linda Pastan, Maxine Kumin, Erica Jong, Clara Yu, Rosellen Brown, Nancy Willard, Chase Twichell, and (saved by the bell) Marvin Bell.

God knows when Pack first proposed this book to me (or anyone else) but he has always had a casual, informal manner about these things, and in all likelihood he simply phoned and explained what he had in mind. […] In any case, when I agreed to contribute to Touchstones all I could recall was that I was to write about a poem that I admired and that deserved greater attention or understanding than it commonly receives. That must have been your own reaction, and Wilbur’s, and Justice’s, etc. However, on the back of the book it says, “here fifty-nine of America’s best poets select their favorite verse by another writer and explore its influence on their own writing.” It’s that second clause, after the “and” that separates the “best” from the “worst” in my view. All the “worst” contributors regarded the assignment as an opportunity to write about themselves, some of them almost shamelessly. Kumin’s essay, rank with self-pity, allows her to pretend she knows something about prosody, which is nearly laughable. Jong thinks she’s in Shakespeare’s league. All of them, in any case, begin auto-biographically, with a sickening narcissism [and seem] to come to the poem they are ostensibly writing about with some reluctance. They feel all cuddly or martyred about their past, and this is what truly moves them. Pastan on Stevens is about as vapid as you can get.

But in some ways Bell deserves a special trophy for incomprehension. It’s not just that he begins with his own trifling army experience in writing about Henry Reed’s “Naming of Parts.” It’s that there is so much about the poem he fails to grasp, not the least of this being the very clear and touching class distinction between the conscript and the staff sergeant who is lecturing. The difference would be ironically amusing (or mildly offensive) under normal circumstances: the intellectually inferior lecturing his better. But in war time, such roles are either irrelevant or reversed. And the recruit must put up with them not merely because army regulations require his obedience but because his life may depend on knowing what this well-meaning oaf is trying to impart. And all the grounds for resentment are thereby cancelled, and a new, not entirely desirable, basis for existence is established. The wistfulness of the recruit for the pastoral world of harmless nature, and the recollected world of lovers, is juxtaposed, as it was in Hardy’s “In a Time of Breaking of Nations,” with the familiar irony of war-time brutality.

Anyway, the book is, but for your piece, and one or two others, a silly book, eliciting the worst, the most hopelessly self-absorbed from writers who are far too self-absorbed. I confess to feeling no sympathy whatever for the state of Maxine Kumin’s back, and I’m confident that there are far better ways to write about the metrics of Housman than the self-pitying one she has chosen. And it is worth adding that X. J. Kennedy writes about Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” as if he did not know it had been written about to great effect by Eliot. Well, it’s a sad performance.

On a wholly different topic, I don’t expect to address the new Auden biography until after the holidays. We spoke on the phone about the conversation you had with people at Pantheon, and their decision to make no more than “cosmetic” changes in the text before they issue it here in the States. As I understand it, they will only change typos. But I would want to know whether Davenport-Hines actually believes that Poe wrote a poem called “The Bell.” (That name again. It has a dying fall).

With warmest and most affectionate wishes for the holiday season and the coming year,

Tony

1996

January 2, 1996 Washington DC

[To Dana Gioia]
Dear Dana,

[…] I was touched by, and grateful for, your enclosed copy of the [Dietrich] Bonhoeffer passage. I own, and have used in the past, Letters and Papers from Prison, but I hadn’t looked at it for some time, and your enclosure sent me back to it, and in a timely way. I came across an entry for February 13th, 1944: “I often notice here, both in myself and in others, the difference between the urge to pass on gossip, the desire for conversation and the need of confession. The urge to retail gossip is no doubt very attractive in women, but I find it repugnant in men. Everybody here seems to gossip indiscriminately about his private affairs, no matter whether others show any interest or not, merely for the sake of hearing themselves speak. It is an almost physical urge … It often fills me with shame here to see how rapidly men demean themselves just for a bit of gossip, how they prate incessantly about their private affairs to people who don’t deserve it, and who hardly listen … all they want to do is to talk about themselves, whether what they say is true or not.” This, of course, was written in prison, and probably in the prison from which few if any had hopes of being released. [Bonhoeffer was put to death on April 9, 1945, at Flossenbürg.] It reminded me, curiously, of a passage in Chekhov, that runs, “In both men the egotism of the unhappy was powerfully evident. Unhappy people are egotistical, mean, unjust, cruel and less capable than stupid people of understanding each other. Rather than bringing people together unhappiness drives them further apart, and even where it would seem that people ought to be joined by a similar cause of sorrow, they make for themselves much more injustice and cruelty than in an environment in which people are really contented.” These twinned passages resonated for me this year because I found myself particularly aware of the plight of some elderly people, one of them in a “retirement home.” These people are unable, like most of the rest of us, to put aside their own troubles, largely because they can foresee no end to them. What for Bonhoeffer was prison without reprieve [or] a death sentence and for Chekhov’s characters is the “egotism” of suffering, for the elderly is a stark realization that no changes for the better are any longer possible. I fear that I, too, would become fretful and self-centered under such circumstances. For most of my life I flattered myself that the kind of life I had chosen (or that had somehow been allotted to me, i.e., the life of the mind) would allow me to enjoy even a solitary existence; and that the writing as well as the reading of books could serve for a sufficient, if not the richest and most varied, existence. But this year, alas, Christmas greetings from two friends report on their increasing blindness; and both of these were men who were devoted to literature, one as an editor, the other as an intellectual and scholar. […]

All good wishes,
Tony

January 10, 1996 Washington DC

[To Eleanor Cook]
Dear Eleanor,

Oh there is a blessing in this driven snow / That thickens by the minute, and it consists not merely in its beauty but in the leisure it confers. Here we are, snowbound, in a record blizzard that has made the news (to the televised extent that we are even aware of the news). No newspapers have reached us for several days, nor has the mail. We happen to be well enough stocked with food and liquor to have survived in comfort so far, though we must make a breakthrough some time. Meanwhile, I have been granted a chance to read, with some of the care and attention it deserves, your splendid essay on “methinks” and “methought.”1 I have read it not only with attention but with delight. And the delight of a kind and caliber I associate with the work of a critic I admire as highly as any—Empson. It seems to me he might have done what you have so splendidly done. Or, to word it another way, methinks it partakes of his gifts and insights.

Who knows when this letter will set forth. It’s my habit to put out-going mail in our mail slot, and the deliverer picks up what we are sending when he brings what has been sent to us. But that routine has gone by the board, and I am writing in that odd hypothetical frame of mind in which Boethius must have composed his Consolation. This does not in the least diminish my pleasure in considering your work or in writing to you. I hope you will not mind my venturing some idle reactions to your essay.

As regards Eve’s first reaction to her own reflected image and to Adam (PL: IV, 475–85) I have always found in these lines what seems a kind of serious comedy. Doubtless to certain embattled feminists it only confirms Milton’s misogynistic nature, which makes him present Eve as vainly self-centered and self admiring. (There might, of course, be a lesbian splinter-group that would approve of Eve’s preference of herself over Adam). But it may be that Milton is asking us to remember that Eve is, in effect, just born, and she therefore exhibits an infant’s preoccupation with itself—hence, the “unripe judgment” of which you write.

With regard to Hamlet, there is an important use of “methinks” in which something nearly visionary may be intended. In 1.2.184–6, Hamlet says, “My father—methinks I see my father.” Horatio: “Where, my lord?” Hamlet: “In my mind’s eye, Horatio.” It is a case where the idea of judgment is wholly absent.

I especially delighted in your suggestion that when Sin uses “methinks” it is parodying Milton’s prose.

As for Bottom’s dream, I have a theory of allusion about that dream. Bottom says “Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patch’d fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had.” Well, call me a patch’d fool if you wish, but I will risk a suggestion of what Bottom thought he had. My suggestion comes from The Golden Ass of Apuleius. As you know, of course, it’s a transformation tale, a metamorphosis in which a man is turned into an ass. To this extent it is at least thematically related to what Shakespeare has done. But as you may recall, near the end of that tale a rich noble woman is overcome with lust for Lucius in his incarnation as an ass. In Robert Graves’ translation, “at last she conceived the odd desire of getting to know me intimately. In fact, she grew so passionately fond of me that, like Pasiphae in the legend who fell in love with a bull, she bribed my trainer with a large sum of money to spend a night in my company.” The implications, both as regards Pasiphae and the rich noblewoman are clear; there is not much about the general appearance of a bull or an ass to win a woman’s heart, but they both have large genitals. Robinson Jeffers wrote a rather crude poem, “Roan Stallion,” about just such an appetite. And so when Bottom says “methought I had,” I suspect some part of Shakespeare’s audience would have caught his ribald note and its classical source.

Finally, there is a lovely, visionary use of “methought” by George Herbert at the end of “The Collar,” in which the voice of God speaks, or is thought to have spoken. But thought strongly enough to provoke a spoken response.

Many thanks for your essay. And also for the other enclosures regarding TSE [Thomas Stearns Eliot]. I have most recently been at work on a very short talk about the relations of prose and poetry for that outfit (Assn. of Literary Scholars and Critics) you addressed last year. They’re going to meet again, this time in Boston, in late August. And another, rather light-hearted lecture (this one for a writers’ conference at Sewanee) on how poets must deal with hostile criticism. And I may shortly find myself reviewing a new (and not very good) biography of Auden. But for the present, everything has come to a blissful standstill. And so this wishes you, whenever it reaches you, a very happy New Year.

Tony

February 30, 1996 Washington DC

[To J. D. McClatchy]
Dear Sandy,

Many thanks for sending the Brodsky elegies by [Seamus] Heaney and [Paul] Muldoon. I opened the envelope boldly, and as soon as I had identified the contents I stuffed it right back again as though it were a notice for jury duty. The fact is that I am myself engaged in writing an elegy for Joseph, and I feel superstitious about reading one by anyone else till my own is finished. For two reasons that I am aware of. The first is an honest desire not to be influenced by another poet; the second is a nervous fear that my own as yet unfinished poem will suffer so greatly by comparison that discouragement will prohibit continuing. I’m not sure that either of these reasons is the real one. Since Heaney is trying to echo Auden, and I am decidedly not, that cannot be a great danger. And perhaps I could immunize myself from any danger of Muldoon in something of the same way. My poem tries (with whatever success must be judged by others) to appropriate Brodsky’s own poetic resources, including extravagant personifications, metaphors drawn from time and space, many foreign settings, etc. Call it plain superstition, but I will still set aside those poems you sent until I have finished my own. […]

Much love,
Tony

Eleanor Cook’s comments alluded to here are from an essay published as “Fables of War in Elizabeth Bishop,” in Against Coercion: Games Poets Play (Stanford University Press, 1998), in which she also calls attention to Hecht’s use of “peter out” in his poem “Retreat” from Millions of Strange Shadows.

August 1, 1996 Washington DC

Dear Eleanor,

[…] I was delighted with your comments on Bishop’s “Roosters,” and pleased once again to be mentioned by you, though you give me more credit than I deserve, since “peter out” is no invention of mine. Like you, I’ve wondered how, at the end of the poem, “the sun climbs in,” and have tentatively decided that, initially unseen, (“In the morning / a low light is floating / in the backyard …”) it climbs into the scene itself, like Peter, first lost “among the servants and officers,” but then singled out, “following (the first evidences of light) ‘to see the end …’” It is Peter who is “faithful as enemy, or friend.” That equivocal quality in Peter may also be said of the sun (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”). Without being able to demonstrate this, I cannot rid myself of the notion that something deeply personal is being hinted at in the most delicate way in the last stanza. It might, ever so remotely, touch on some equivocal love-relationship of the poet’s, who has been awake since at least four o’clock, when it was dark outside. But now with the coming light the world is about to be roused, and it may be that some partner, up till now asleep, will return to consciousness at any moment—as friend? as enemy? faithful at least in the equivocal sense that Peter, also a figure of love, was faithful as well as both enemy and friend. If this were part of the poet’s intention, “to see the end” not only refers to Peter’s terrible potential complicity in the crucifixion, but the possible end of a relationship between the speaker and another, unknown, unnamed, unheard, person. […]

With warm greetings,
Tony

Bernard Knox (1914–2010) was a scholar of Greek literature and founding director of the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., from 1961 to 1985. Hecht is referring to Knox’s review article “The Later Stages of Greek Drama” in Arion 4 (1999): 155–173. Their friendship dated from the 1950s.

September 21, 1996 Washington DC

Dear Bernard:

[…] Your fine and richly informative Arion article evoked a tumult of immediate reactions in my mind. The question you raise (or that [Helmut] Flashar raises) about men playing female parts in Greek tragedy reminded me that when we were in Venice this summer we saw what was called “The Greek Show” at the Palazzo Grassi. It was probably the most exhausting show I’ve ever seen. Among other things, there was no place to sit down as you went continuously upward from floor to floor. Every inch of wall space was devoted to commentary, floor-plans of temples and forts, conjectural reconstructions of buildings, etc., all in addition to the objects on view, which themselves were well described on labels. The show, devoted to Magna Grecia civilization, began roughly in the Iron Age, and continued into decadent Hellenistic decrepitude. The catalogue was roughly the size and weight of the Manhattan telephone directory, which discouraged us from bringing one back. But easily the most striking item in the show, the very first, the most majestic, was placed to create maximum impact at the head of the stairs to the piano nobile. Placed on a pedestal that rose about to eye level was a very large (15 feet?) figure of a well-built Greek youth (both arms broken off at the elbows, but otherwise in fine condition). He was strong, decidedly masculine, perfectly shaped, but was dressed in a diaphanous chiton or peplos that reached to his feet, designed with the finest pleating of the sort one associates with certain statues of Aphrodite, and which served only to emphasize every modeled aspect of his male body. Except for this clothing, there was nothing in the least androgynous or effeminate about the figure, which was unambiguously beautiful, though in some strange way the effect was unsettling. It was not the effect of seeing some modern man in drag, which is either comic or satiric or painful. There was no diminishment of nobility to this figure, and any feeling of being “unsettled” may well have been due to the parochialism of being a modern American. Perhaps the catalogue will make its way to the National Gallery, where you will have a chance to see pictures of the figure. […]

Best to you and Bianca,
Tony

1997

January 9, 1997 Washington DC

[To Eleanor Cook]
Dear Eleanor:

I’m enormously, and suitably, grateful to you for your very kind and enthusiastic letter about the poems [Flight Among the Tombs (1996)]. Your heartening words were welcome for themselves, and they also serve convincingly to mitigate the effects of a moderately hostile review by William Logan which appeared in The New Criterion, where, along with Charles Simic, A.R. Ammons, Joseph Brodsky and some others, I was dismissed as among “the Old Guys.” It’s not the fact that my age is held against me that bothers me. But as I stand tiptoe upon the threshold of my seventy-fifth year I have managed to preserve the comforting conviction that my work continues to improve. Doubtless there is a self-serving element in this, and it is possibly a simple delusion, since few writers could endure if they thought they were losing their abilities. And God knows it has happened to many. Wordsworth at the end grew weak; after the Quartets Eliot wrote little of merit in the way of poetry. Delmore Schwartz sank into oblivion, John Crowe Ransom stopped writing, and Dylan Thomas took to drink, while Hemingway, fearing the loss of his gifts, and suspecting self-plagiarism, took his own life. The catalogue is long and depressing, so it’s no mystery that most writers refuse to see their own weaknesses. At the same time, there are the heartening instances of Hardy and Sophocles. Of course, there is a built-in danger to the conviction that one is getting always better. It means that as one comes to think less and less well of one’s early work, put into the shade [by] this happy progressive view, that one may be right: the early work, of which one was once so proud, may not be so good after all, and two hideous conclusions may be drawn from that. The first is that the present state of excellence may not be so great if it is merely an improvement upon what went before; and secondly, that the illusion of present merit may be just as temporary as one’s view of the past. The whole puzzle does not abide much thinking on.

Let me, in any case, try to answer some of your questions. I’ve known Baskin since 1956, when I first joined the Smith College faculty where he was teaching. (Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were there at the same time.) Even in those days Leonard’s interest in mortality was pronounced, in large part because his remarkable first wife was slowly dying of multiple sclerosis. In those years he was, among many other things, doing eloquent small bronze casts of hanged men. It was he who suggested that we collaborate on a Gehenna Press book to be called The Presumptions of Death. You are right in guessing that the AIDS epidemic played a part in my thoughts, and indirect allusion is made to it in the Circus Barker poem’s line “Entrust yourself to the keeping of my aids [“Death the Carnival Barker”].” I had considered using “aides” or “AIDS” but settled on this compromise. (There is a Hopkins poem about Margaret Clitherow, who was pressed to death for harboring a Catholic priest.)

You are astute and right in noticing my habitual recourse to six-line stanzas. I have been semi-aware of this. It probably has something to do with rhyming patterns. A quatrain is too predictable, whether ABBA or ABAB. A quatrain with an added couplet is no more than simply that. Odd numbers of lines involve at least three rhymes of the same kind for a five-line stanza, and more with a longer one. Rhyme royal and Spenserian stanzas are either too artificial and antiquated, or they call undue attention to themselves as technical problems to be solved. That, at least, is my unconsidered view of the matter, which is susceptible to much more serious thought and discussion.

The “letter” in the middle of “Sisters” is largely borrowed, or, more accurately, adapted from the single letter in The Selected Letters of Robert Frost that wasn’t written by him. It was sent to him by his sister, Jeanie, who spent most of her life in a state lunatic asylum in Maine. I’ve put her in a private Catholic institution for my own curious purposes, which, I will confess to you, were purely floral. Baskin and I are in the course of putting together a florilegium; he has done 15 beautiful woodcuts, and I have so far turned out about four poems to go with them. “Sisters” was composed to accompany the woodcut of Cyclamen. (“Pledge” goes with the thistle, “La-Bas” with the tulip. As you can see, I’ve had to be very cunning in dealing with flowers in my poems, and have taken inordinate pains to avoid Victorian valentine arrangements, pinned with golden darts. The key to writing about flowers, I find, is to approach them very indirectly. I’ve got one about sunflowers that has been written since the book appeared.)

The epigraph for the [James] Merrill poem is from a Palinode by Edmund Bolton that begins, “As withereth the Primrose by the river, / As fadeth Sommers-sunne from gliding fountains …” As for the “response” to the croupier cry in “Fortuna Parvulorum,” I should confess that I am anything but a gambling man, though I once won about four or five thousand francs (when they were not worth all that much) at Monte Carlo. But you are right in thinking that I wanted exactly this “measured” reaction to the heedless risks of youth. I am very fond of the epigraph from Aristotle, which I have been cherishing for years, hoping to find an occasion for its use. […]

With very best wishes for the New Year,
Tony

May 20, 1997 Washington DC

[To W. D. Snodgrass]
Dear De,

Warmest greetings to you and Kathy, and many thanks for the new poem, beautiful and handsomely presented.

As a stodgy old academic (long since retired) I could not help suspecting an echo of John Webster’s The White Devil in your line, “Now let the mole, the vole and the fieldmouse …” It recalled to me that strange elegy that begins, “Call for the robin red-breast and the wren, …” and later goes on, “Call unto his funeral dole / The ant, the fieldmouse and the mole …”

I have been gripped of late with the kind of infirmities that probably belong to my age, or at least to some of my age. Back problems are the most troubling and the least susceptible to correction. I have to be very cautious about my movements, and I wear a back brace much of the time. At best this is irritating.

Affectionately,
Tony

Hays Rockwell was rector of St. James Parish, 1976–1991, New York City, and then succeeded to the Bishopric of Missouri. Hecht dedicated “Gladness of the Best” in Millions of Strange Shadows to Rockwell, and he contributed his poem “Anthem,” composed earlier, to the Spring Fair festival at St. James in 1980.

May 20, 1997 Washington DC

Dear Hays,

In the more or less normal course of things I’ve found myself engaged in correspondence with a woman who lives in Florida and writes poetry. The first poems she sent me seemed to have merit, as well as being quirky and odd, the oddness sometimes suggesting lack of expertise, but the quirkiness a kind of Emily Dickinson, originality. I wrote her an encouraging letter, and thought that might be the end of the matter. But not long after new poems came from her. But this time accompanied by a few highly unusual biographical details. It turns out she is a deaf-mute, and I was profoundly astonished by her ability to write poems at all. This severe handicap (that’s not the politically correct word these days) surely accounted for the metrical and rhythmic flaws I had noticed in her work, but upon which I had mercifully had the reserve not to remark. The next letter brought still more astonishing revelations. She has not only learned English but was currently engaged in translating a French essay by Marcel Marceau on the art of mime, a topic that meant much to her because she communicates by signs except when she writes. And then came the detail that explains why I am writing all this to you. Her name is Ann LeZotte, and her father was a roommate of yours at Brown, and is godfather to one of your boys, or at least she thinks so. She says she has met you and Linda [Rockwell] a couple of times. She mentioned this by way of belatedly introducing herself “so you don’t feel I am just a crazy stranger out of the blue … Also, I speak so directly to people because I live in isolation, and I am a freak—there’s an excuse!!!”

It is not impossible, but extremely painful, to imagine what that kind of isolation must be like. It makes one feel ashamed of any lesser complaint. And so, considering all things, we are most mercifully and fortunately well, and have little other news than that Evan celebrated the first anniversary of his domestic life with a very attractive and extremely nice young lady whom we have come to know and like a great deal.

This comes with love from us both.
Tony

Kenneth Lynn (1923–2001) was professor of English at Harvard, then of history at the Johns Hopkins University and the noted biographer of Hemingway and Charlie Chaplin. Armand Schwab was a classmate of Hecht’s at the Horace Mann School, Riverdale, New York.

June 25, 1997 Washington DC

Dear Kenneth,

Your very kind and painstaking transcription of Armand Schwab’s reminiscences of days I had all but forgotten about I found wryly amusing. I’m especially impressed by the accuracy of Armand’s memory, though I think he gives me credit for having memorized more Browning than I’m entitled to. More amazing still, though I do remember mooning about that girl under the rustic-styled pergola, covered with vines, in Central Park, I would not, had my life depended on it, have been able to come up with her name. Those days seem to me like O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness [and] “The Rubaiyat,” giddy innocence and blameless fatuity. What I remember of Armand is that he was particularly bright, lively, cheerful and friendly. I know I valued those qualities in him because, for reasons I myself utterly failed to understand, or, at least to admit to myself, I was anything but cheerful. As for Pat Mayer, I dimly recall her professed love of poetry, which she somehow ingeniously employed as a sexual barrier and Browning’s “Last Ride Together” was consequently a great favorite of hers. If only she had known Marvell’s “Definition of Love” she would have rejoiced in keeping admirers at a chaste but enticing distance. There was another girl about the same time for whom I genuinely yearned. I have no idea what her name was (is), but she aroused in me whatever could pass in those premature days as lust. She had a conventionally pretty face, but her most prominent feature, of which she was supremely aware, was her bosom. All the school athletes hung around her, and it was taken for granted that she would attend the spring prom with the captain of the football team. And yet, like Browning’s Last Duchess, she had smiles for everyone, an impartiality that seemed movingly generous at the time, though I now think it was simple narcissism, and an appetite to be widely, perhaps universally, admired. She was an unashamed sexual tease, a would-be Salome or Delilah. What most provoked me about her was her open satisfaction in arousing unsatisfied yearning in almost any male in her vicinity. All these feelings about this girl and Pat Mayer were simmering at the same time we were supposed to be concentrating on Latin, French, history, chemistry and literature. As it happened, the only scholastic enterprise into which I was able to throw myself completely, and to the exclusion of any other concern, was geometry, taught by a tall, handsome, white-haired gentleman named Callahan. I greatly admired Mr. Callahan and worked very hard for him, and did well, though I was middling to bad in almost everything else.

Anyway, if you keep in touch with Armand Schwab, please greet him for me, and tell him how much I admire the reliability of his memory.

Best,
Tony

June 27, 1997 Washington DC

[To David Mason]
Dear Dave,

[…] I can understand how settling into domestic routines in Moorhead [Minnesota] may seem banal and unexciting after the adventures of the last few months, and I agree with you that at least a part of the glamour of travel is precisely that one enters a world without duties and responsibilities. This is probably always the case, though it was especially true for me when I was younger. Tourism confers a kind of magical immunity from ordinary cares; while others are going on with their lives, the tourist looks on from the sidelines and at leisure, constrained only by the limit of his funds and his time. And if you know how, you can turn a blind eye to misfortunes you encounter, and thereby preserve the tourist’s privileged gaiety. But I have found this increasingly difficult as I grow older. For this reason I have never wanted to go to India, for example, where the sight of abject poverty can scarcely be avoided. It is to be seen, for that matter, right at home, on the streets of New York and Washington. It gives no joy at home, either, but seeing it abroad means that one’s holiday is tainted by guilt and anguish, and since holidays are usually short, it seems worth trying to keep them as cheerful as possible. I’ve thought about this a long time, and, oddly, in connection with Auden. In some of what he has written he has bravely acknowledged the misery to be seen in a country he is visiting; but in other writing he manages to ignore it when that evasion serves his purpose. No doubt we all do this, both at home and abroad. But when at home we can perhaps assuage our consciences with the thought of the taxes we pay and the charities to which we make donations, while when we are abroad we are no more than privileged voyeurs. One of the reasons Helen and I are at ease in Venice is that some municipal ordinance forbids begging in the streets. (I somehow suspect that, to encourage tourism, this may be true throughout Italy, but it is a law much harder to enforce in places like Rome or Milan. Venice is also virtually free of street-crime, there being no means of hasty escape.) […]

Tony

Sunil Iyengar, editor, journalist, and aspiring poet in the 1990s, is now director of research and analysis at the National Endowment of the Arts and frequent book reviewer.

June 30, 1997 Washington DC

Dear Sunil,

Thank you for your kind and courteous letter. I’m not sure I can provide you with the sort of response about how to write blank verse that you would find helpful in a truly practical way—though I have recently written a short essay on the subject for a collection of essays on metrical and poetic forms that is scheduled to be published in a year or so.

But part of any answer would be what you already suspect. As with certain familiar and conventional dance steps, you eventually find the rhythm establishing itself in some subconscious part of the mind, and it is no longer necessary to look at one’s feet and keep counting ONE two three, ONE two three, etc. The body itself (in the case of dancing), a part of the mind (in the case of meter) habituate themselves to a regular pattern. Of course other factors are involved. One of them is that from early in my life I was, at first forced, and then chose, to commit a good deal of poetry to memory—and, in the English language most poetry is written in pentameter lines: all the plays of the Elizabethans; Milton; Wordsworth; Tennyson; Byron; Pope; Dryden; Chaucer; all sonnets; all sestinas, etc. For reasons too complicated to try to answer, the English language lends itself so naturally to both the iambic foot and the pentameter line that in Moby Dick Melville lapses into blank verse from time to time. And apart from the fact that I memorized a lot of poetry, I have spent my whole academic life teaching it, and returning to the same revered texts year after year. So that after a while a certain confidence is gained about line length and accentual emphasis. This is not to say that I never make mistakes; but I feel the kind of confidence that a musician must feel when he improvises on a theme. Yet, as I said, however confident I feel in the heat of composition, I always check to see if I’ve made any mistakes. Moreover, I have come to feel that a certain latitude is often welcome in metrical measure, and that too strict a meter can become mechanical and forbidding to a reader, so that a certain scattered number of irregularities may be welcome. These should not simply be “allowed to happen” but should be shrewdly “placed” where they are needed. The late plays of Shakespeare can be very instructive as far as this is concerned—as can both Frost and Stevens.

Good luck to you in all your undertakings.

Sincerely,
Anthony Hecht

October 24, 1997 Washington DC

[To Leonard Baskin]
Dear Leonard,

Here are the poems for the florilegium. Please remember that three poems in the sequence, “A Pledge”—thistle; “Sisters”—cyclamen; and “La Bàs: A Trance”—tulip, have already appeared in Flight Among the Tombs, copies of which you have.

Of the poems I send herewith it may be that some explanation will be useful. “Indolence” makes no explicit mention of any flower; on the other hand, mention is made of St. Matthew, and words from Matthew 6:28, “they toil not, neither do they spin,” in reference to “the lilies of the field,” is adapted in what ought to be an indicative way. “A Pair of Heroes” does not mention, but, I hope, describes the poppy. It may be that the most concealed one is “Secrets,” fittingly enough. One of the colloquial names for the foxglove is “witches thimbles.” But it is easiest simply to list the poems along with the flowers they are meant to match.

Indolence—lily
An Orphic Calling—sunflower
Illumination—crocus
Long-Distance Vision—carnation
Witness—sea-holly
Public Gardens—teasel
A Pair of Heroes—poppy
Secrets—foxglove
Despair—marigold
The Voice—mandrake
Look Deep—iris
A Fall—rhododendron

There are thirteen in all, and added to the three already published in Flight, there are sixteen altogether. […]

Let me know what you think. (I’m aware, of course, that the columbine poem is something of a cheat, but I found it a stumbling-block, its name supposedly derived from a “cluster of five doves,” which the blossom is thought to resemble.) Much as I’ve enjoyed work on this sequence, I’m relieved to be quit of it at this immediate juncture because I’m a member of the Literary Awards Committee of the Academy of Arts and Letters, and I have a formidable stack of books to read through and judge in the course of a very short time. Some are dreadful, but most have some merit, and judgment is not easy.

Best,
Tony

Laurance Roberts (1907–2002), scholar of Asian art, was director of the American Academy in Rome from 1947 to 1960. Isabel was his wife of sixty-five years.

November 13, 1997 Washington DC

Dear Laurance—

I’m deeply grateful for your kind words about the Tanning Prize. Your friendship, and Isabel’s, are very important to me, and of all my happy recollections of the Academy in Rome, none are more vivid than the excursions throughout Italy the two of you conducted. I owe more than I can say to the kindness of you both.

Sincerely,
Tony

Hayàt Nieves Mathews (1917–2003) was a Scottish-born writer of Spanish descent. Her father was Salvador de Madariaga y Rojo, Spanish diplomat, later ambassador to the United States, and the prolific author of a number of scholarly and popular works and translations, including a bilingual edition of Hamlet (1949). Her mother was the Scottish economic historian Constance Archibald. At the time of her correspondence with Hecht, Mathews lived in Italy. She was the author of Francis Bacon: The History of a Character Assassination (Yale University Press, 1996).

December 17, 1997 Washington DC

My dear Hayàt,

When, unthinkably long ago, I was an undergraduate, my best college friend was named Harry Winterbottom. He was a history major, generous, warm, and with very poor eyesight, demanding eyeglasses with unusually thick lenses. He was called up for military service in World War II well before I was, and I assumed that, given his vision handicap, the army would somewhere find a niche for him that might keep him relatively safe. He wrote back to his college advisor from some camp overseas a touching and brave letter, utterly without complaint. His advisor also happened to be the college librarian, and Harry wrote that what he wanted more than anything else upon his return was to read all the books in the college library. This went right to the librarian’s heart, and he allowed the letter to be published in the student newspaper, where I read it, and was charmed. It was a small college, and had a proportionately small library, but I knew that it would have taken Harry more than a normal lifetime to read all its books. But not for a minute did I doubt his desire to do it. Given the standard operating procedures of the army, I should not have been surprised when I learned that within two months of his call to service Harry was sent to the front lines and killed. I still think of him quite often, and always in regard to reading.

I would never dare to be so bold as to hope I could read all the books in even a small college library. But I used to think that once I’d retired I would be able finally to read pretty much what I wanted, and I had appointed for myself an informal but rather daunting list of books I wanted to get to. As well as death, life has its own way of altering expectations, and I’ve been deflected from most of my goals, but I nevertheless still intend to get around to some books very promptly, of which your life of Bacon is one. […]

Love,
Tony

David Havird (1953–) is a poet and professor of English, Centenary College, Louisiana.

December 30, 1997 Washington DC

Dear David:

An interim note in response to your last letter.

1) I do know the John Rosenberg collection of Ruskin quotations.

2) As to whether I regard my work in general as an attempt to memorialize “the burning, voiceless Jews,” I’m not sure I have a clear, uncomplicated answer. For one thing, I am not a concentration-camp survivor. I feel that undue indignation on my part would be a vulgar appropriation of the suffering of others for cheap rhetorical purposes and a contemptible kind of self-promotion. At the same time, I cannot help identifying with all Jews who have experienced persecution, for I have felt the effects of anti-Semitism throughout the whole of my life, though not in extremis, and I invariably wince at finding it widespread in Western literature. (I have written about this glancingly in an essay on The Merchant of Venice in Obbligati, and in another on the Epistle to the Galatians, in Incarnation, a collection of essays on the New Testament, edited by Alfred Corn.)

3) Turning to [Simone] Weil and her claim that “concentrated attention” is a sacramental act, comparable to prayer, Auden claimed much the same thing in an essay in The Episcopalian that I quote (pp. 386–7) in my Auden book. But I suspect that both Auden and Weil have left themselves exposed to a peculiar and unconsidered danger, which I have tried to address in an as yet unpublished essay on Auden. The sort of devoted concentration they identify with prayer is virtually impossible to distinguish from what Hannah Arendt recognized as the banality of evil: a bureaucrat’s capacity to submerge himself so completely in the paperwork details of his job that he often deliberately erases its human consequences from his thought. Much political and military jargon is widely employed for this purpose, as Orwell knew and said. The most recent one I know of is US army lingo of the Gulf War, that distinguished between “hard” and “soft” targets for bombs, the former being military installations, while the second was human beings. Technocrats are skilled at “concentration.”

All good wishes for the New Year,
Tony

1998

Edward Perlman (1947–) is a poet, essayist, and faculty advisor to the M.A.s in the Writing Program at the Johns Hopkins University.

January 20, 1998 Washington DC

Dear Ed,

I will be seeing you very soon, but I’m impatient to write at once to tell you how delighted I am, and how grateful, for your really wonderful poem, sent to honor my birthday. It is a fine poem, quite apart from the fact that I have some personal connection with it, if I am capable of distancing myself from such complicit self-interest, and from the fact that it was, figuratively at least, commissioned by Helen. Its own riches resonated in my mind in unexpected ways. For example, it reminded me that once Auden, in one of his round-robin parlor game inquiries about “where and what you would like to have been if born in another era?” responded to his own inquiry (this was one of the kindest things about him; he always took part in any such cross examination along with all the others) by saying that he would like to have been a medieval monk. Most found this a surprising, as well as unlikely, declaration, coming as it did from someone the world at large regarded as libertine, but I think it was both completely honest, and something of which he was probably perfectly capable. This, after all, was said at a time when he no longer looked for any domestic happiness with Chester [Kallman], or anyone else for that matter, and principled chastity was by no means beyond him. In Donald Attwater’s Penguin Dictionary of Saints, there’s a description of the community Honoratus founded (and composed largely of other saints) in which pains were taken by the saint “that no one in this island community should be dispirited or overworked or idle.” All by itself, that sounds very nearly ideal, and when you consider that the island was just off the coast of Cannes, it sounds nearly luxurious. Helen and I have made a few trips to the Italian town of Asolo (much beloved by Browning, Duse, Cardinal Bembo and D’Annunzio) and have stayed in the sumptuously appointed Hotel Cipriani, where, from the dining terrace one may look across an olive grove and cypress spires to a monastery, perched on an adjacent hill. I always remark to Helen that the monks must look across at us with austere disapproval, and she invariably responds that they doubtless manufacture their own consoling grappa. The consolations of your own terrace at breakfast time have clearly been enough to have allowed you to write this lovely poem, for which I send my enthusiastic thanks.

With affection,
Tony

January 21, 1998 Washington DC

[To David Havird]
Dear David,

In reply to your searching questions, let me say that the speaker of “The Venetian Vespers” is not me, though I have used some events in my life in the course of the poem. But most of the details I have borrowed from the lives of others, and of one man in particular. You remark that his loneliness, his “disengagement from the human race” goes hand in hand with his “looking.” Just so. But then you go on to inquire, “But what should he be otherwise doing? Should he relax his aesthetic concentration and do ‘real’ work—minister to ‘the outcasts, the maimed, the poor,’ … etc.?” The point is that he is unable to do this, being spiritually crippled. He has been in a lunatic asylum (see Part II) and precisely because he can so easily identify with the forlorn of the world he is eager to distance himself from them. Both his war experience and his dark family secrets incapacitate him. At the same time, I agree with you that his “looking” is a moral act, and not everything he looks at is beautiful. “The great church of Health,” Santa Maria della Salute elicits his admiration because of its beauty, to be sure, but also because it is dedicated to health, which he desires. He is, as you rightly say, the opposite of Ransom’s practical-minded man. But this man is no believing Christian, or anything else, for that matter. He would like to believe, but he doesn’t. The Madonna he speaks of in the final section he thinks of only as a Comforter, which is what certain quilts are called and what some medicines perform. He also regards himself as too old to change or to be cured. So you are right again when you suspect that “the divine presence” is absent from the poem, and that none of the intuitions of [Simone] Weil, Hopkins, Wordsworth, Shelley or Auden belong to his case. To be sure, it was I who raised the name of Weil, and called attention to her comment about “looking.” But for her, as for others (for example Ruskin, who wrote, “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way”) seeing is only the beginning of what could become a spiritual pilgrimage, and the speaker of the poem is too old, too set in his ways, too crippled in mind and spirit, to go further.

You are right, too, in feeling that my work as a whole is not primarily concerned with anti-Semitism. Others have suffered so much more than I that it would be impudent for me to speak self-righteously in their behalf. Ashley Brown, if it was he, was right in claiming that “Apprehensions” is largely autobiographical. As for the modern-but-not-exclusively-Jewish feeling about God’s abandonment of mankind, after the Holocaust it is an understandable enough feeling, but it can be found as well in George Herbert’s “Decay,” and in a number of Auden’s poems, as I take pains to indicate in the final chapter of my book on Auden.

All good wishes for the New Year,
Tony

Paul R. Gross (1928–) is a biologist and author of, among other works, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Superstition (1994).

January 30, 1998 Washington DC

Dear Paul,

If, as graduate dean at U or R [University of Rochester], you had to attend all commencements, and if you were there during Sproull’s presidency, you will remember that the ceremonies were televised. One of the administrative worries of those days concerned the dignity of the faculty, sitting, as they were obliged to do, on stage, and vulnerably visible to the TV audience as well as all those in the Eastman Theater. Would they doze off during the almost formulaic speeches? Would they disgrace the university in the eyes of its newest graduates and their parents, to say nothing of the general television public? Concern about such matters was a keen consideration of Bob Sproull’s, not to mention the TV network that did not have limitless time to allocate to such matters. Accordingly, the program was very carefully timed, particularly the speechifying part of it, the most uncertain aspect of which was the major address of a recipient of an honorary degree. All that could be done was to ask him or her in the most earnest way to try to confine their remarks to a very specific number of minutes. Most were very obliging in this, but of course, there was no control whatever about the content of the speech itself, which seemed to present the greater danger of being boring than of inciting to riot. For all the administrative worries on this point, they were quite needless. The faculty invariably seemed galvanized by whatever the speaker had to say, no matter how trite, weary or unimportant. This was because there was a faculty pool on the length of the speech. Everyone put in a buck and chose a number of minutes. Since the faculty was large, the pot was a handsome one. From the moment the speaker began the faculty were riveted, averting their eyes only fleetingly to glance at their watches. […] I never won, but I was as entranced as everyone else. […]

Tutti bestorum,
Anthony Hecht

Although modestly suggested, the “small matter” described here has the merit of offering a solution to a puzzle that has long vexed Ralegh’s editors involving the sense of the second stanza.

January 31, 1998 Washington DC

[To Hayàt Mathews]
My dear Hayàt,

[…] I myself have indulged in conjectural emendations in a small and amateurish way.

Like Tottel’s Miscellany, The Phoenix Nest was a fine anthology of poems by various hands, not all of them identified, and still open to conjecture as to authorship. One of these in the latter book seems to have been ascribed to [Sir Walter] Ralegh, and I have no quarrel with the ascription. But I do have a quarrel with the text of the poem, and I’m the more puzzled in that it has never been questioned by any critic, to my knowledge, nor by any editor of Ralegh. The poem is called “An epitaph upon the Right Honorable Sir Philip Sidney, Knight, Lord Governor of Flushing.” It is a poem written in fifteen pentameter quatrains, rhyming ABBA. And I will copy out here the first three stanzas.

To praise thy life, or waile thy woorthie death,
And want thy wit, thy wit high, pure, diuine,
Is far beyond the power of mortall line,
Nor any one hath worth that draweth breath.

Yet rich in zeal, though poor in learnings lore
And friendly care obscured in secret brest,
And loue that enuie in thy life supprest,
Thy deere life done, and death hath doubled more.

And I, that in thy time and living state,
Did onely praise thy vertues in my thought,
As one that seeld the rising sunne hath sought,
With words and teares now waile thy timelesse fate.

I have described my “theory” about what I think is wrong with these lines to Gwynne Blakemore Evans, the Harvard Shakespeare scholar, for whose edition of the Sonnets I wrote the introduction. And he was good enough to say that he agrees with me. In the end, it is, I suppose, a small matter, but I am annoyed by its editorial persistence. What I propose is that the order of these stanzas is in error, and that the second ought to be the third, and the third second. This is demanded by both grammar and syntax. It is the “I,” only mentioned in the first line of what passes for the third stanza, who is “rich in zeal, though poor in learning’s lore,” in the second stanza here. Without that first person pronoun, the stanza that regularly appears as the poem’s second one has no referent, unless it were to be Sidney himself. But that stanza is full of denigration (self-denigration, as I think) and in a poem that throughout praises Sidney to the point of fulsomeness and extravagance, a claim that he is “poor in learning’s lore” would be ridiculously out of place. I cannot tell you how many people have doubted this alteration I propose, while having no rational explanation for the stanzas in their canonical order. […]

This comes with love.
Tony

The “Tree” referred to here is Iris Tree (1897–1968), daughter of Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and poet, artist, actress, and artist’s model. Hecht probably met her sometime in the late spring of 1955.

July 25, 1998 Washington DC

[To B. H. Fairchild]
Dear Pete,

I’m first of all delighted by the news of the success of your Italian holiday, both in Rome and in Venice. Your Roman location, on the Scalinata, near the Keats house, recalls a fortunate event in my own life that I can take pleasure in recounting. Around 1955 I was living in Ischia where, in the words of Gershwin, “living was easy,” and I had a very limited budget. I attended an interesting social gathering—there was a lively expatriate community there, of which Auden was only one—and I met a striking old woman, very alert and amusing, whose last name was Tree, and who modestly acknowledged a relationship to the great actor, Herbert Beerbohm Tree. She took a liking to me because I knew the Latin derivation of “egregious.” (Proving the old adage that a little Latin is a valuable thing.) She told me she had an apartment in Rome that she would be leaving vacant for a month or so, while she went to London, where a play of hers was scheduled to open. (She turned up later in the course of things as an elderly British lady in La Dolce Vita.) Naturally I was delighted, not least because the Rome apartment was offered to me rent-free. But having gratefully accepted, I had no idea, until I arrived, what luxury I was awarded. Her apartment was at the top of the building right next to the Keats house, and one storey higher, so that it looked out over the Keats house at the Spanish Steps and the Piazza d’Espagna, across the city to St. Peter’s dome to the west, and just about everywhere else. Moreover, very neat and small as the apartment was, it boasted a very large terrace with plants and flowering oleander—just the place for cocktail parties, which, trust me, I gave for my Roman friends. […]

This comes with warmest greetings.
Tony

August 16, 1998 [postcard of the Ghetto Campo, Venice]

[To J. D. McClatchy]
Dear Sandy:

The heat here has risen to Texan heights, and the pigeons to plague proportions. John Ruskin called them “doves,” which speaks volumes about his character, as well as his grasp on reality. But the wine and gorgonzola, the painting and architecture, recruit the spirits and exalt the soul.

Love to both
Tony & Helen

Al Sapinsley, a classmate of Hecht from Bard, was a Hollywood screenwriter seeking advice about writing a novel.

December 11, 1998 Washington DC

Dear Al,

That was some letter. It requires complicated response. I’ll begin at the most elementary level, where I probably belong anyway, since I’m not in your league as regards the technology of writing. No discs or mice in my writing world. For poems, I start in longhand, and only slowly work my way to the typewriter, never advancing beyond that rather dated point. I’m barely out of the quill & inkstand stage of development, rather pithecanthropic, all things considered. And this may go a long way to explaining why my writing is so far removed from the playwriting, screenwriting, TV-writing world which is yours. I once began to write a novel, but I was shrewd enough to know I had no idea what I was doing, and quit in good time. But my career as a teacher, which went on for a long time, gave me some insights into the art that I have found useful, at least in the classroom.

Dialogue is indispensible, providing vigor, pace, drama, and immediacy; and is ultimately unimportant. Which is to say that no really good novel is remembered purely, or even largely, for its dialogue. The books one remembers for their dialogue are likely to be brittle social comedies by the likes of Nancy Mitford or E. F. Benson. To be sure, there is wonderful dialogue in Dickens, as there is in Dostoyevski; but this is not what we remember about them. I taught Crime and Punishment for years, made notes and outlines, read the critical commentaries (some of which were wonderfully illuminating) and I came to see how many descriptive elements and symbolic devices, operating subliminally, work so effectively in that wonderful book. The color yellow all by itself plays a major role in the story. Of course, in a tale that is chiefly a psychological/spiritual drama, concerned so crucially with inwardness, many meanings must be conveyed by actions or descriptions, as distinguished from the very overt means of dialogue. But Dostoyevski is not unique in this regard. T.S. Eliot has been justly criticized for writing plays in which the central action is inward, and thus cannot be dramatized in dialogue. We are never shown how Beckett makes the right choice in Murder in the Cathedral; and this is true of his other plays.

My own heroes as fiction writers are Joyce and Flaubert. After many years, I still believe that “The Dead” is possibly one of the greatest pieces of prose fiction ever written. This, too, I taught for years, and even as I bring it up much of its non-dialogic beauty floods back upon me. So you must forgive me if I offer some reflections that may seem familiar. The first word in a narrative titled “The Dead” is “Lily.” It is not uttered by any character, so it could not be incorporated into any filmic or staged version of the tale. I have sedulously avoided seeing the John Huston film, lathered in piety about Joyce though it was, because I know how much any film would have to omit. There is, of course, much dialogue in the story—a great deal more than in most of the stories in The Dubliners. But the chief point of almost all the dialogue is how misleading, evasive, deceitful, or even politely tactful, but always beside the point, all the talking is. (Chekhov sometimes uses dialogue the same way.) For all the near-hostilities, the mollifications, and awkward quadrilles of conversation, the truly important events, the events that carry the whole power of the story, are symbolic. Gabriel stands at the foot of the stairs, looking up at his wife as she listens to a piece of music, the lamplight brilliant upon her hair. What is happening to her and to him at that moment is profoundly tragic. But no one says anything. He simply entertains his thought. Indeed, his thoughts are the most important elements of the story, and they are not always voiced. And the last pages of the story, after all dialogue has been abandoned, are among the most beautiful in English prose. There is a delicacy, a tact, an artistry in Joyce beside which the skills of John Huston are little short of vulgar.

As for Flaubert, permit me to quote two favorable paragraphs from Madame Bovary:

One day he got there about three o’clock. Everybody was in the fields. He went into the kitchen, but did not at once catch sight of Emma; the outside shutters were closed. Through the chinks of the wood the sun sent across the flooring long, fine rays that were broken at the corners of the furniture and trembled along the ceiling. Some flies on the table were crawling up the glasses that had been used, and buzzing as they drowned themselves in the dregs of the cider. The daylight that came in by the chimney made velvet of the soot at the back of the fireplace, and touched with blue the cold cinders. Between the window and the hearth Emma was sewing; she wore no fichu; he could see small drops of perspiration on her bare shoulders.

After the fashion of country folks she asked him to have something to drink. He said no; she insisted, and at last laughingly offered to have a glass of liquor with him. So she went to fetch a bottle of curaçao from the cupboard, reached down two small glasses, filled one of them to the brim, poured scarcely anything into the other, and, having clinked glasses, carried hers to her mouth. As it was almost empty she bent back to drink, her head thrown back, her lips pouting, her neck on the strain. She laughed at getting none of it, while with the tip of her tongue passing between her small teeth she licked drop by drop the bottom of the glass.

Let me indulge my pedantry enough to venture three points. The descriptive elements of the first paragraph, while they might possibly be worked into a film, are almost uniquely effective as prose narrative because, as reader we come upon them in the singular sequence in which the novelist provides them, each item focused upon in its turn, and singled out by selective observation in ways a film would fail to convey as precisely “selective” and “sequential.” (The film-viewer would just think: setting; details.) But it is the painstaking notice of the novelist that is at work, and films rarely give the impression of being painstaking in matters of this sort. Notice also that at the end of the first paragraph, Charles is beholding Emma, who does not know she is being observed. The author then neatly omits her discovery of Charles’s presence, her rising from her seat, the formulaic exchange of greetings, and all that fluster. Finally, Emma’s awkward, amused, slightly clumsy attempt to get a taste of the liquor from the almost empty glass is a touching symbol of the insatiable craving for experiences that were never hers because they were unreal and belonged entirely to the realms of her imagination.

Perhaps because I have given my time so much to poetry, I tend to live in a world of description, the very one you call your greatest difficulty. This not only fills the body of my work; it becomes what I find I most relish in other writers. Because descriptive elements often bear so rich a burden of meaning. This is as true of Hardy as of Shakespeare; of Yeats as of Conrad. I acknowledge that this is the prejudice of the poet speaking for “my nature is subdued / By what it works in, like the dyer’s hand [Shakespeare Sonnet 111].” Enough pontificating. Please forgive me. It’s probably due to the fact that retirement from teaching has left me without the docile audience I had grown undeservedly used to. […]

Affectionately,
Tony

1999

Timothy Murphy (1951–) is a poet, translator (of Beowulf), memoirist, and agricultural entrepreneur, who lives in North Dakota. Hecht wrote an introduction for Murphy’s second book of poems, Very Far North (2002). Hecht’s “Instructions” is an appropriately foreshortened sonnet in thirteen lines.

January 15, 1999 Washington DC

Dear Tim:

The goings-on in this city are so depressing as to have driven me to the following:

Instructions to a Painter for the Capital Dome

Borne up on cappuccino froths of cloud,
Two grizzled gods, beefy, contemptuous,
Should look down casually at the likes of us
Benighted taxpayers, who are allowed
To view them and their kind at stated hours,
Spouters of solecistic filibusters,
Smug, well-heeled heels of the legislative powers,
The whole to be titled Venality and Greed
Triumphant over Merit and Common Sense.
Let there be drapes of scarlet, massive reds,
Gold leaf thickly applied at our expense,
And, as baroque foreshortening has decreed,
Enormous butts and little pointy heads.

Aside from the imbecilities of the Congress (with Henry Hyde supposing he was quoting that exemplary man, Sir Thomas More, about honoring one’s oath, when in fact he was quoting a film script of A Man For All Seasons; like many others, Hyde can’t distinguish between reality and Hollywood) the city has, as of last night, been sorely troubled by an ice storm, and today not only are the streets impassable, but water-mains are bursting everywhere, and the trees are glistening at every tip with brilliant glazes. All this would be tolerable from my selfish point of view except for the fact that my mother-in-law, who is 96, lives in a retirement apartment in Bethesda which is without electricity and heat because of the storm, and unless power is restored quickly, I will have to rescue her later today. The streets are fairly well cleared by now, but the city is still semi-paralyzed, like the minds of the Senate, along with those of us incautious enough to have watched the impeachment-trial proceedings [of President Clinton]. No doubt in Fargo you can smirk at our complaints about the weather. So I hope this will furnish you with a couple of laughs.

All good wishes,
Tony

January 18, 1999 Washington DC

[To Jon Stallworthy]
Dear Jon,

Many warm thanks to you for your Christmas card, as well as for your explosion of indignation at OUP for its abandonment of its modern poetry list. You were right to suppose I had heard about it before you wrote. The first to let me know was Jacky Simms, who phoned and was almost grief-stricken, and seemed to feel that she personally had let me down. I next learned of it from Philip Hoy, one of the editors of Between the Lines, who has “interviewed” me by correspondence, and who sent me copies of the news (and outbursts against it) that had appeared in the London press. Thirdly, came an embarrassed and embarrassing letter from one Andrew Potter (“Director, Music, Trade Paperbacks and Bibles Publishing”) who sent what was in effect a “form letter” that must have gone to all the poets on the list. There was no real “explanation” for the decision, and Jacky had assured me that the list “paid for itself,” and even made a profit for the press (though I imagine this was not great). I found a charming irony in the appointment of a “Bibles” director to distribute the bad news. I feel, having had time to digest the news, sorriest for Jacky herself, whose life has not been an easy one, and who now must be out of a job. Next in order, I feel sorry for those poets on the list—Porter, Enright, Wallace-Crabbe, Scupham among them—whose sole publisher was OUP, and who, cast overboard, must flounder unless picked up by some chance vessel that turns up to rescue them. Others (Brodsky, Zbigniew Herbert and I) have other resources. Still, it is a great disappointment. And not least because of the “interview” [with Hoy] I mentioned earlier. I think it’s a lively and interesting one, more detailed and more thoughtful than any I’ve given before, and the sort of thing that ought to prompt interest in my poems. But it may be that by that time they will no longer be available in England. It was very kind of you to offer to vend my work elsewhere, but I don’t want to put you to that trouble. The needs of Peter Porter, et al, are truly more urgent than mine, and it was heartening to know his work sells as well as it does. I am content to wait until fate finds me a publisher over there. […]

This comes with love to you and Jill and all the long Farm Hands.2

Tony

January 29, 1999 Washington, DC

[To David Mason]

My dear David,

[…] Meditations on mortality are altogether in order for someone my age; of the family into which I was born, I am the only survivor, my younger brother having died a good number of years ago. I have begun to feel the agues and other vexations that must have afflicted Justice Shallow. And, like him, I’m aware that many of my juniors have died. Among the poets these would include Jim Wright, Jimmy Merrill, Joseph Brodsky, Ed Sissman, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes … But it is your fortune cookie that struck a special echoic note of great importance for me. On one of the last days in February, 1971, I got a Chinese fortune cookie that told me: “Nobody will mar your happy future.” This seemed so admirable an omen that, whereas I normally paid no attention to these things, I packed this one away carefully in my wallet. On the fourth of March I met Helen. Some years later, when we were settled in our East Boulevard house in Rochester, Helen decided to compose a set of scrapbooks for me, of clippings and other memoranda of my life before we met, as well as after. This included that fortune cookie message, which I had kept. It also included my pocket calendar of that year, with notations of our meeting and of subsequent dating, and a “map” of the seating plan of the students in the Smith College class she took with me. […]

Affectionately,
Tony

Philip Hoy, editor of The Waywiser Press, and, among other writings and interviews, the author/editor of In Conversation with Anthony Hecht (1999; rev. 3rd ed., 2004).

June 18, 1999 Washington DC

Dear Philip,

[…] The director of the Rochester Memorial Art Gallery [Grant Holcomb] […] invited me to write a poem about one of his paintings.³ You may remember that I wrote a villanelle that turned out to be unsuitable [“Nocturne: A Recurring Dream”], but which I can still publish without reference to the Winslow Homer painting upon which it was nominally a comment. Having had to abandon the Homer, I turned instead to a painting that meant more to me as subject than as pictorial image. It’s by Francesco Ubertini (known as Il Bacchiacca) and it exhibits a sort of Mannerist awkwardness that in this case I find rather off-putting: puzzles about the perspectival size of figures in foreground, middle-ground and background, among other anomalies. Anyway, the painting is about the conversion of St. Paul, his “vision” on the road to Damascus. This is a topic that has preoccupied me for a very long time, and Paul is someone I have found profoundly troubling. Some of the conjectures about him I acquired from a book I have known for many years: From Jesus to Paul, by Joseph Klausner [1944] who is particularly good about the likelihood that Paul was epileptic, and, on testimony from Dostoevski and Mohamet, what the effects of seizures are like to the one experiencing them. […]

With warmest greetings,
Tony

July 12, 1999 Washington DC

[To Hayàt Mathews]

My dear Hayàt,

You and I are about to disagree on the topic you raise regarding rhyme in translation. My view has no bearing, needless to say, upon your father’s translations.4 But I have given a good deal of thought to this matter, and have compared various kinds of translations. Once you acknowledge that no translation is going to be perfect, the overwhelming problem that remains is: if perfection is impossible, what can be conveyed with the greatest fidelity? Let me quote something I said in an interview in The Paris Review some years ago, that bears on this. “In his comments on his translation of Villon, Galway Kinnell has written, ‘I decided against using meter and rhyme … What is more expressive of a poet than his images? Yet in rhyming translations we can’t even be sure that the images are the poet’s … And I wonder, do rhyme and meter mean for us what they meant for Villon? It may be that in our day these formal devices have become a dead hand, which it is just as well not to lay on any poetry.’” I find that view utterly wrong, and for two reasons. The first is the comparatively modern heresy that the most important element in a poem is its imagery. I discuss this briefly in the Mellon Lectures where I observe that “there is a fine body of excellent poetry, some of it of the very first class, that comes close to being devoid of imagery” and I instance two Shakespeare sonnets (“Farewell, thou art too dear …” and “Th’ expense of spirit…”), Robert Frost’s “Provide, Provide,” the first section of Eliot’s “East Coker,” and Thomas Wyatt’s “Forget not yet” [On the Laws of the Poetic Art, p. 20]. No less important, Villon was a great maker of Ballades, a difficult and demanding form: it is commonly 28 lines long, and contains only three rhyme sounds for the entire poem.⁵ This is extraordinarily demanding on the vocabulary, the sinuosity, the craft and deftness of the poet, and it’s easy to see why Kinnell decided to eliminate the whole problem. But no small part of our pleasure in reading a ballade consists in seeing how skillfully the poet meets this challenge. If his careful deftness of deployment of words appointed to appear at rhyming positions is surgically removed by the translator, we are being given something very diluted, and, from my point of view, unsatisfactory.

[…]

Love,
Tony

September 1, 1999 Washington DC

[To David Havird]
Dear David,

[…] I also was grateful for your comments on my poems. As to “The Darkness and the Light,” I really meant by “peat” something soft, which in the dark might seem plush and velvety, as opposed to stony and hard. The speaker is not so much “observing the twilight of a day of wine, women and song” as he is observing a twilight and diminution of all that is rich and lovely, and envelopment of life in the mounting gloom and darkness. The sparks “bedded in peat” are not meant to be dangerously combustible; they are meant to have settled into a plush darkness, like fine jewels set off on a jeweler’s tray of dark velvet. As for “Late Afternoon,” you are entirely right to feel that the joy being celebrated is the perilous joy of that single moment in time, a moment that carries no assurance of lasting, and is therefore fragile and vulnerable in its brief duration. The “caulking” was not meant to seem ominous; just to provide a strong and distinctive smell, and not an especially romantic one. In fact, it’s only her intoxicated elation that can somehow absorb into its bliss the oakum and fried smelts, the yelping of dogs, the creosote, the oil …

This comes with warmest greetings.
Tony

Hecht’s letter below was written in response to the following topic for inclusion in The Yale Literary Magazine (Winter 2000).

“In his essay, ‘Making, Knowing, Judging,’ W. H. Auden offers a model for the developing writer’s relationship with his early influences”:

A would-be writer serves his apprenticeship in a library. Though the Master is deaf and dumb and gives neither instruction nor criticism, the apprentice can choose any Master he likes, living or dead, the Master is available at any hour of the day or night, lessons are all for free, and his passionate admiration of his Master will ensure that he work hard to please him.

“Who were your masters and why? What did you take from their projects, and how did you learn to leave those voices behind to create something distinctly yours? When you write today, are you able to read your Masters without their styles creeping back into your own?”

November 3, 1999 Washington DC

Dear Messrs. [Gregory] Tigani and [Callie] Wright,

Here are some rough answers to your three questions.

My early literary heroes were Eliot, John Crowe Ransom, Hardy, Auden, early Robert Lowell, along with John Donne, Marvell, and Yeats. Of these I personally knew only Ransom; the rest I studied and emulated at a distance, receiving, as Auden says in your quotation from him, “neither instruction nor criticism.” The apprenticeship of a young poet is often a matter of servile imitation; and this is not a bad thing, if it can be controlled and overcome. Keats started out writing imitations of Spenser; Robert Lowell was imitating Milton and Marvell; Eliot imitated Laforgue; Shakespeare, in I Henry IV, in the great scene (2.4.) in which Falstaff “plays” the King, imitates these lines of Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, “Too much study doth intoxicate the brains, for (they say) although iron the more it is used the brighter it is, yet silver with much wearing doth waste to nothing; though the cammock [a crooked staff] the more it is bowed the better it serveth, yet the bow the more it is bent and occupied the weaker it waxeth; though the camomile the more it is todden and pressed down the more it spreadeth, yet the violet the oftener it is handled and touched the sooner it withereth and decayeth.” There can not be many poets of any merit who have not seriously apprenticed themselves to masters of their own choice, and often those among the illustrious dead. There was a time when I wrote too much like Lowell imitating Milton. One gets over these early crushes. And I can now read almost any poet without danger of infection from their style. It may be added that sometimes one wishes deliberately to sound like a certain poet other than oneself, especially when translating. I have, for example, (and not in a translation) tried to write a poem that resembles the verse of the Old Testament.

Yours,
Anthony Hecht

Mary Jo Salter (1954–), poet and editor, taught many years at Mt. Holyoke College. She is now on the faculty of the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University.

November 8, 1999 Washington DC

Dear Mary Jo,

You were right in suspecting that I returned to a very Mont Blanc of mail: three postal bins full of the stuff, much of it, of course, to be discarded, but it took a day to sort things out before even beginning the task of answering what called for answers. I haven’t yet caught up entirely. The worst of it is the bad news you come back to; two friends hospitalized one of them over ninety with pneumonia, another with kidney failure. Consequently, this will be a poor reply to your very long letter, and its congeries of many topics. There’s no way I could hope to address all the questions that you raise, but I would at least venture the comment that as regards the “delayed resolution” or “delayed satisfaction” of rhyme in Herbert’s “Denial” and Hardy’s “A Light Snowfall After Frost,” Herbert seeks purposeful dissonance in the final lines of each stanza until the last one; whereas Hardy simply withholds the gratification of consonance for a fairly long time, keeping our attention suspended, our appetite unappeased until he is quite ready to satisfy us. Take a comparable technique of “delayed” or “suspended” rhyme in Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” “Roar,” which ends line 9, only is granted its mate in line 22, and again in line 25. That’s a long interval to hold a sound in the ear’s memory, waiting, either patiently or impatiently, for resolution. And, as you know, there are plenty of poems in which only some of the lines rhyme, and not always the corresponding lines of different stanzas. […]

Love to you both,
Tony

December 15, 1999 Washington DC

[To David Mason]
Dear David,

[…] Tomorrow I am to be whisked to a BBC studio here in Washington, there to be interviewed by radio from New York by a young lady who is assembling a collection of such interviews, all of them about Joseph Brodsky. […] The invitation gave me a chance to reread some of the poetry, and to think about it. And in the course of thinking I seemed suddenly to remember a critical essay by Empson called, I think, “Donne: The Space Man,” or something like that. I’ve looked high and low for it, but can’t come up with it. [Empson’s essay appeared in The Kenyon Review 19 (1957)]. As I recall, it focused, reasonably enough, on the effect of the Copernican revolution on Donne’s thought and imagery. And it seems to me that Brodsky is more given to imagery drawn from the Space-Time continuum than any other poet I can think of; and among his earliest poems is an “Elegy for John Donne.” I would like to say something about this tomorrow, if I have a chance.

This comes with love from Helen as from me,
Tony

2000

Shirley Hazzard (1931–) is the author of many works of fiction and nonfiction, including Greene on Capri, a Memoir (2000), to which Hecht is responding.

February 25, 2000 Washington DC

My dear Shirley:

I’ve read through your Greene Thoughts with all deliberate loitering, delighting in so many things along the way, the lovely deployment of your language, the elegance, the ricercare, of composition, musical in its every aspect, the open and welcome candor about everything of importance, and not least about the prickly and even forbidding qualities in Greene himself. It is far more than a memoir; it is full of suggestive depths and seemingly casual riches that conduce to long mulling. Perhaps because I was in neighboring Ischia in the late 40s and early 50s, much of the landscape shows again with all its damp or warm authenticity, its steep inclines, vineyards, rural simplicities. Ischians used to boast, in those days, that they grew and pressed the grapes that were bottled and sold as Capresi wine, chiefly because Capri didn’t have enough room for sufficient vineyards, given over as it largely was to tourist trade.

I was also prompted to think, not for the first time, of the importance of silence to some writers, though not to others. As doubtless you know, Hart Crane used to play jazz music loudly on radio and records while he was writing poems. Of all sounds that would absolutely prohibit any work of mine, music of any sort, either classical or pop, would be first. It calls attention to itself, with its own syntax, its own line of development, blotting out, for me, my own slowly developing lines of thought. Random street noise I can generally disregard, unless it is extremely loud. Conversation, of course, is impossible. I used to envy the artist, Leonard Baskin, who used to work late into the evenings, doing the most delicate wood engravings or etchings, and entertaining company, me among them, while concentratedly at work, but able to converse with guests nevertheless. Nothing of that sort has ever been possible for me.

Chiefly, of course, I was led to ponder, as all your readers will be, on Greene’s extraordinary, willful, and often selfish character. I am not referring to moments of pettiness or explosive rage, though these are unpleasant enough. I’m led to mull upon his apparent need to have as his mistress a woman who is married to someone else. This cannot be set down to mere mischief. I suppose there are no end of reasons that draw people into adulterous affairs, that there’s no formula, even psychoanalytic, to describe the need that compels this triangular situation. But I have seen enough of it in the course of time—have, I confess, once involved myself in such a situation—but much more often have considered the motives of others; and rarely if ever have I thought it anything but self-indulgent as well as cruel. The role of the ego in matters of love is probably the most difficult thing to account for, and perhaps except for other-worldly love, can never be kept in decent order. But in Greene’s case it almost seems as though the compliant husband was nearly as essential to him as the indulgent wife. From the point of view which concerns itself with egotism, this is particularly striking. […]

This comes to you with love from us both.
Tony

Deborah Garrison succeeded Harry Ford as the poetry editor at Knopf. Hecht is discussing the order and format for The Darkness and the Light.

March 17, 2000 Washington DC

Dear Deborah Garrison,

[…] Regarding the introduction of “Mirror” and “The Ceremony of Innocence” into the sequence, I have given the problem a good deal of thought, and have at length decided to put “Mirror” (which, by the way, The New York Review of Books has just accepted) right after “Memory” and before “Samson.” It’s a poem that will, without danger of weakness, break up the seriousness of the sequence in which it would find itself in the way of immediate context. “Ceremony” I think will fit well between “Poppy” and “The Road to Damascus.”

As to the cover, I would like you (and Chip Kidd, if he is to have a hand in this) to consider the use of a ceiling painting by Giambattista Tiepolo of The Sacrifice of Isaac that is in the Archbishop’s Palace in Udine, and is reproduced on page 203 of Michael Levey’s Painting in Eighteenth Century Venice, published by Yale. It has, to my mind, these factors in its favor. 1) It is pertinent to the biggest poem in the book, 2) By virtue of its dramatic chiaroscuro it displays the “Darkness and the Light” of the book’s title, and, finally, Tiepolo is a favorite painter of my wife and son as well as mine. I don’t mean to sound inflexible on this point, for the painting may not be available for such use, or only after payment of an extortionate fee. There are also two Rembrandt drawings of the same subject, both to be found in Volume II of The Drawings of Rembrandt, edited by Seymour Slive and published by Dover [1965]. They are plates 471 and 530, the first in Berlin, the second in London. I am open to further suggestions on this topic.

I confess myself puzzled about your feeling that a poem dedicated to someone makes a reader feel “left out,” as though the poem were meant to be understood only by the dedicatee. I’ve never encountered anyone before who held this view. Only occasionally are poems composed with a solitary reader in mind, as when Milton addresses a sonnet to Cyriack Skinner, or John Donne or Ben Jonson address verse epistles to friends. The far more usual modern practice is to write a poem that the poet thinks good enough to serve as a suitable homage to some friend; but the poem is almost always composed first with no special audience in mind, and the dedicatee is chosen much afterwards. […]

Anthony Hecht

Henry A. Millon (1927–), dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery (1976–2000), Washington, D.C., is the author of a number of books, including the one mentioned below.

April 24, 2000 Washington DC

Dear Hank,

Through a mail catalogue I got hold of a copy of The Triumph of the Baroque, which we had earlier admired during our residence in Bogliasco, but which only now am I able to appreciate with something like the full sense of its genuinely triumphant impact and stature. […]

Early in the book, around page 61 I think, there’s a beautiful color photograph of the exterior baroque brick-work of San Andrea delle Fratte, which brought vividly to mind a visit Helen and I paid to that church one especially hot summer some years ago. The interior seemed an especially cool and welcome sanctuary from the punishing outdoor temperature, and the dimness of shadow a retreat from the glare of the streets. Gradually, as our eyes adjusted, we came upon a plaque commemorating a singular event that had taken place in the church not long since. I transcribe it here in a French account, the only one I have been able to locate, though I feel sure the plaque was multilingual, and that we read the details in English.

M. Ratisbonne, un juif, appurtenant à une très-riche famille d’Alsace, qui se trouvait accidentellment à Rome, se promenant dans l’église de S. Andrea delle Fratte pendant qu’on y faisait les préparatifs pour les obsèques de M.l de la Ferronays, s’y est converti subitement. Il se trouvait debout en face d’une chapelle dédice à l’ange gardien, à quelque pas, lorsque tout-à-coup il a eu une apparition lumineuse de la Sainte Vierge qui lui a fait signe d’aller vers cette chapelle. Une force irrésistible l’y a entrainé, il y est tombé à genoux, et il a été à l’instant chrètien.⁶

After digesting some equivalent of this, Helen and I looked at one another with something of a wild surmise, and made our way with great dispatch and delicacy out of the church. We were of course fully aware that I was not a rich man with rich Alsatian connections—something dim but persistent in my memory tells me that Ratisbonne was identified quite specifically as a “banker”—but, given the devious and acquisitive ways of the BVM [Blessed Virgin Mary], the shameless advantage that must have been taken against one who probably only entered the church to escape the heat, as we had done, it seemed best to leave. Among all its other treasures, your book will always recall my narrow escape.

Gratefully and with admiration,
Tony

Francine du Plessix Gray (1930–) is the author of many works of fiction, biography, and autobiography. The two friends referred to are, respectively, Helen Bacon and William Maxwell.

September 6, 2000 Washington DC

Dear Francine:

Thank you very much for sending me your thoughtful and eloquent memoir-cum-meditation on mortality. By striking coincidence, it arrived in the same mail as a new biography of St. Augustine, to whose life you make reference in your essay.

It seems to me as I approach my seventy-eighth year that I have been acquainted with death from very early in my life; and by acquainted I mean intimately acquainted. I no longer have much fear as regards my own death, though I dread the possibility of preliminary pains that may precede it. I am much more distressed by the thought of the misery my death will give to my family. I feel none of the need for the comforts of ritual grieving for others: there have been too many, beginning well before my front-line combat infantry service in WWII. I have felt no inclination to police my grief, or to formalize it through public acts of piety. But this does not mean any less respect for the rituals of mourning you so movingly describe.

Yesterday I spoke by phone with an old friend, four years my senior, a brilliant classical scholar, who is now wheel-chair-bound, suffers from an obscure neurological illness, and who said she doesn’t expect to still be alive when an article of hers will be published next year. She lives now in a permanent state of discomfort, as well as disability.

At the same time, I know very well, and very deeply, that I would be at so great a loss as to be virtually paralyzed were one of those I love—my wife, or our son—to predecease me. I confess I have no psychological provisions for such a calamity. Another friend told me not long ago (being at the time over ninety) that while he would never commit suicide, he felt entitled to the option of refusing to eat. About a week after his wife died, he stopped eating, and died shortly thereafter. No doubt after a certain age, the ambitions that sustain us in youth cease to play any role in our lives, and we have to fall back upon love. And when that is gone, we are truly bereft.

Thank you once again for sending me your essay.

Tony

Garry Wills (1934–) is a prolific author and emeritus professor of history, Northwestern University. The passage in question can be found in Venice: Lion City: The Religion of Empire (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2001), p. 276.

September 17, 2000 Washington DC

Dear Garry,

I’m delighted by your fine, lively and scholarly comments on the Schiavoni Carpaccios, and very grateful to you for the gift of them. It may amuse you to know that when we first visited Venice we brought our son, Evan, with us, and he was five at the time. The city’s grandeur and glamour were not at all lost on him. And one morning, pointing excitedly to Mark’s lion, he cried, “Look, my name!” And there, indeed, inscribed on the open book, were the words,

PAX	EVAN
TIBI	GELIS
MAR	TA
CE	MEUS

There was one comment of yours, about St. Augustine’s study, that puzzled me. You write: “It is a supernatural light that shines on Augustine’s uplifted face, passing through the astrolabe (symbolically, through the created universe, from beyond it). We know this light’s special character from the contrast with natural light, which enters from the opposite direction to shine on the apparatus in the recessed cabinet.”

The two directions of light might conceivably be rationalized architecturally, and without recourse to the supernatural. I must hasten to say that I am not opposed to the assertion of supernatural sources of light, and in Marilyn Lavin’s study of Piero della Francesca’s The Flagellation, she makes what seems to me an incontrovertible case for a hidden and supernatural source of light. But in Carpaccio’s painting, if we confine our sense of light initially to the study itself, the rectilinear room, and its recessed apse, all the light enters from the right-hand side where three windows admit it. This light falls on the saint’s face, his habit, his hands, and crosses the pages of an open book at his feet in a downward slant. It casts a shadow of the figure of Christ on the apse’s wall. And, indeed, all the shadows in the room—of the dog, the furnishings and the bishop’s cope, lie to the left of the objects that cast them. If we were to think of this room as giving on an open courtyard to its left, then the brilliance of circumambient morning light would flood in from the opposite side to the little room with its pyramidal book-rack. I have never had trouble reconciling these light sources in a naturalistic way, for in Venice especially the light leaps from no single source but from a rich diffusion of reflections and refractions.

I’m a little shy about sending you my comments on Galatians, but I’ll send them on later, if you really think you would like to see them. I am no scholar, or even a reader of scripture with any trained gifts or learning in the field. I wrote my essay, which was published in 1990, for a book edited by Alfred Corn, and published by Penguin Books. I was one of many laymen invited by the editor to express their views of one of the books of the New Testament. The volume itself was called Incarnation. John Updike and Reynolds Price were among the more thoughtful contributors. I suppose I would have to count myself among the more disgruntled. Though perhaps not quite as much as David Plante, a lapsed Catholic and gay rights advocate, who wrote on Romans, and held the entire Catholic Church and all its clergy responsible for the unhappiness and frustrations of his childhood and youth. Paul has seemed to me in many ways a most uncongenial and unsympathetic figure, and I have written about him in a poem I enclose [“The Road to Damascus”].

With admiring and grateful good wishes,
Tony

Philip Stephens (1966–), poet, song writer, and novelist, studied with Hecht at Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

September 24, 2000 Washington DC

My dear Phil,

Thank you for the generously inscribed copy of your book [The Determined Days] which, I may add, richly deserves the commendations on its jacket, especially mine. I’m glad to have it, though I want you to know that at least in my own case your publisher was responsible enough to send me a copy; so I have one to offer to a suitably worthy reader when I come across one. I shall, of course, retain the inscribed one with fierce pride. […]

When you write, “Any time I stand up to read the poems it feels like they were a lifetime ago, and someone else’s life at that,” you were right to add, “Maybe that’s normal.” As far as my experience goes, it is. And this is not to be regarded as a bad thing, though it is admittedly disorienting. It means that even in the brief course of, possibly a few days, between the composition of a poem and its performance in a reading, or its appearance in print, the poet himself has changed. Writing the poem was itself part of the mechanism of the change. We do alter with time, and good poets alter for the better. Pound once said that no poet was to be valued who did not change with time and this is one of the faults of Cummings, whose cute or sentimental poems are alike early and late, and there’s no reliable way to tell an early from a late one.

Phil, I would be pleased to look at some of your new work. It was most considerate of you to ask in advance; not all poets are as thoughtful. In your particular case, I so much admire what I have already seen that I look forward to new work from you.

This comes with warm affection,
Tony

Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012), wife of the surrealist painter Max Ernst, was a painter, poet, memoirist, and novelist. Katharyn Aal (Katharyn Howd Machan) is a poet who teaches at Ithaca College.

October 26, 2000 Washington DC

My dear Dorothea:

Your fine card with its Maxfield Parrish painting of “The Enchanted Prince” brought to mind a poem by one Katharyn Aal, which you may not know, but which I think you might like. It is called “Hazel Tells Laverne.”

last night

im cleanin out my

howard johnsons ladies room

when all of a sudden

up pops this frog

musta come from the sewer

swimmin aroun an tryin ta

climb up the sida the bowl

so i goes ta flushm down

but sohelpmegod he starts talkin

bout a golden ball

an how i can be a princess

me a princess

well my mouth drops

all the way to the floor

an he says

kiss me just kiss me

once on the nose

well i screams

ya little green pervert

an I hitsm with my mop

an has ta flush

the toilet down three times

a princess

We both send love.
Tony

Michael Blumenthal (1949–), poet, essayist, novelist, and peripatetic educator, was director of the Creative Writing Program at Harvard from 1983 to 1992.

October 30, 2000 Washington DC

Dear Michael,

Thank you for your letter and its enclosures. I must confess that I don’t know exactly how I feel in this matter of German guilt about the Nazi era. On a simple rational level, I would go along with your argument that just as white Americans would bridle at being held guilty for nineteenth-century slavery, or the virtual extermination of the American Indian tribes, so those Germans who were born long after the Nazi atrocities do not care to inherit a guilt for something they had no part in. Reasonable enough. But it is worth adding that neo-Nazi movements have cropped up again, and they have not done so in Australia or Finland or Spain, but in Germany. To be sure, we have our native reactionary bigots, and they form themselves into organizations with pass-words and handshakes and capes and clownish hats, though no less poisonous for all that. But no one in this country, however demented, has seriously proposed reintroducing slavery as an institution. We have, somehow, gotten beyond that. Not much beyond, perhaps; but still and all, beyond that. This, however, is not the case in Germany. It’s one reason I could not bear to go back there. I was there during the war, and I saw one of the camps, still filled with prisoners who were dying of typhus at the rate of 500 a day. I spoke to some of them. I have never had nightmares more terrible than my memories of those days. I am, I fear, unforgiving; perhaps more unforgiving than some actual survivors of the camps. My touchstones in this matter are Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi. To read them is to feel that forgiveness is not easily purchased, and that a culture that continues to produce neo-Nazis is one I would prefer not to confront.

As for my review of Amichai, I thank you for your praise of it. His book is not only superb, but would, all by itself, have merited a Nobel prize. For a while there, I thought I would get a lot of angry letters, not about my appraisal of Amichai, but about some of the rash theological and scriptural points I raised. (That may yet come to pass; the issue has not been out for long.) For example, the claim (which I can document) that the pun on Peter’s name has given rise to Protestant/Catholic hostilities. Anyway, the book is a triumph, and I’m glad you share my view of it. I just noticed that I can fax this to you, and so this comes with warm greetings on the very day it was written.

Tony

Shawn Holliday (1969–), an English professor now at Northwestern Oklahoma State University, wrote to a number of authors, hoping to put together a collection of essays on American writers and popular music.

November 6, 2000 Washington DC

Dear Mr. Holliday,

Here’s my attempt to respond to your inquiry about popular music.

With a stern purity that belongs to youthful prigs, I loftily rejected any extrinsic, non-musical valuations of music that are characterized by the commonplace expression: “They’re playing our tune.” Music for me was pure music, without bearing upon where or with whom I first heard it. With the passing of time and the acquisition of experience I began to make comparative evaluations of various performers, to feel that there was no perfect or ideal version of any composition, and that one could enjoy Scarlatti both on the harpsichord and the piano; just as one could approve different versions of a Scott Joplin rag. My puritanism began to dissolve, and I started to recall with gratitude my earliest encounters with particular performers or composers. In one way my tastes in popular and classical music exhibit a curious parallel: while there are great symphonies and concerti (by Mozart, Beethoven, etc.) that I am happy to listen to, in the course of time I have found myself increasingly drawn to small chamber works and solo performances, in which it is possible to take full cognizance of everything that is going on—to hear each voice independently and in collaboration with each of its partners. Similarly, a small jazz group (as opposed to the “big bands” of the 40s) allows complex satisfactions afforded by the improvised accommodations of all instrumentalists to one another, and in this resembles the classical form of “theme and variations.”

When I was a schoolboy, my classmates, with whom I rarely saw eye-to-eye, were enamoured of the big bands: Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, and Benny Goodman. None of these interested me at the time, though I later became fond of Goodman as a clarinetist, and I like his performances with small groups. So even my love of popular music is of a kind with my tastes in the classics: both for the earliest, and for the best established. It follows that I don’t like rock or country music, or rap, bluegrass, soul, reggae or punk. My twenty-eight-year-old son is fond of a variety (the name of which I don’t know) that is tuneless and wholly percussion, and, I understand from him, very fashionable. But at the age of seventy-eight, I’m content to be old-fashioned.

There used to be a radio program, originating, I think, in England, but copied in this country, and called “Desert Island Discs.” Like the equivalent stumper about books, it asked what you would take to a desert island where you would be indefinitely exiled to solitary meditations, and where you could seek comfort, uplift, [and] pleasure, from a very select group of works that, above all, had to prove durable. Getting old is very instructive in such matters. I used to feel confident in my choices of Shakespeare plays, for example. But time has taught me that my views of the Shakespeare canon have altered over the years, and I have learned to detect treasures where formerly I had overlooked or under-appreciated them. This can be said more fully of music, both classical and popular. One can tire of a particular performance, even an excellent one, and feel grateful for an alternative interpretation, that brings freshness to details that were ignored or overlooked in a familiar recording. For this reason I am unwilling to put any musical performances in a preferential order.

Sincerely,
Anthony Hecht

October 26, 2000 Washington DC

[To Philip Hoy]
Dear Philip,

[…] I’ll begin with the story I promised earlier to tell you about Don’s [Donald Justice’s] friend, Henri Coulette [1927–1988], who plays in it the role of the messenger in Oedipus or the Agamemnon, who reveals the great off-stage truths. As you know, I’ve been sorting out my papers in the expectation of selling them, and have been going through individual cartons of them to assist an appraiser. In one of them I found a postcard from Louis Simpson, in which he thanked me for agreeing to recommend him for a Guggenheim; and saying that from the vantage of his post at Berkeley he would see what he could do to get me invited out to read at several campuses in California. Years went by and nothing eventuated about such readings, though Louis got his Guggenheim. And so, after the passing of years I was living alone in quiet bachelorhood in Rochester, NY, teaching at the university when I got a phone call from one Henri Coulette, whose name I knew and whose work I admired, but whom I had never met. He had been awarded a grant to tour the country, interviewing poets about their work and work-habits, and wondered if he might visit me with a tape-recorder. I was delighted to agree, and he duly turned up, and I came over with a bottle of booze, and we sat around his motel, drinking and talking for the better part of an afternoon. I liked him a lot, and we had a number of friends and literary heroes in common. Toward the end of our meeting he confessed that he had phoned me initially with some trepidation and uneasiness. He had been teaching at California State [University] in Los Angeles, and the various California universities had formed a consortium by way of pooling their small resources to bring poets to read seriatim on their campuses from distant parts of the nation. Henri had proposed my name with enthusiasm, but Louis Simpson, representing Berkeley, demurred. He explained that I suffered from a very pronounced speech defect, and that it would be a kindness not to expose me to public terror and humiliation that a poetry reading by me would certainly entail. Since Simpson was the only one of the group who could claim to know me personally, his word on the subject was final. Henri explained that when I answered his phone call, he was astonished and pleased to find I could talk without difficulty. […]

I’ve written a short (700 words max) essay on Tennyson’s song, “Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white,” trying to explain the pronoun “she” in the sixth line in reference to the peacock, which is male. I’ve sent a copy to Christopher Ricks, and will let you know what he says. I’ve spoken with him on the phone about it, and he acknowledges it is a puzzle he never gave attention to before. […]

All the best to Evelina and to you.
Tony

December 29, 2000 Washington DC

[To Brad Leithauser and Mary Jo Salter]
Dear Brad and Mary Jo,

This comes with warm and grateful thanks for your generous gifts. The crimson heart was right out of [Richard] Crashaw, and now adorns our tree, but the CD is another matter altogether. Those Schumann trios are quite wonderful, and were unknown to me. The liner notes urge one to find affinities to Mendelssohn, who was admittedly greatly admired by Schumann. Nevertheless, I found myself feeling the rich effects of Brahms, who was another Schumann hero. I only recently finished reading a fine Brahms biography by Jan Swafford, which I can strongly recommend. Schumann, and, of course, Clara, both play major roles in the story, Schumann’s particularly pathetic and moving. Lots of supporting characters, chiefly Wagner, Liszt, Chopin, but plenty of conductors and critics as well. Schumann’s special brand of madness, which was suicidal, is beautifully described, and made altogether sympathetic; and this is the more striking in that one of the other presents I received this season (from Helen) was the unabridged journals of Sylvia Plath, a book that is nearly repellent in its narcissistic self-absorption, and has a number of quite mean things to say about me, some of them very peculiar indeed, such as the claim that I have my hair “professionally curled.” She was really stark raving bonkers. She also claimed that I squirreled away my Hudson Review Fellowship, wishing to hoard it at a time when both Sylvia and Ted were envious, and wished they could have a grant, and felt that I was keeping such funding from some other worthy poet. It’s especially galling to be calumniated from beyond the grave. […]

Love,
Tony

2001

From March 25, 1943, to March 31, 1946, William Dougherty was, with Hecht, a soldier assigned to Co. C-386th Infantry Regiment, 97th Infantry Division.

January 6, 2001 Washington DC

Dear William Dougherty,

I’m very grateful to you for sending me the outline of the movements of the 97th division, as well as for your postcard with the name of C Company’s first sergeant, James Hunt. The names of the women you mentioned (Nancy Clifford, Ruth Temple, Dale Thomburg) mean nothing to me, nor does the name of Fred Millard.

There used to be a conventional vainglorious boast in the army: “I’ll be around to piss on your grave.” It was partly a prayer for survival, I suppose; as well as a sort of Homeric boast. It is one of the reasons that reunions of old army buddies has such small attraction for me. I feel grief for a few friends who died, and no gratification in thinking I survived them, since I could have gone just as easily. There were a number of men I knew in the army whose injuries or deaths could just as easily have been mine but for sheer chance. I know this, and find it painful to think about.

With many thanks,
Anthony Hecht

January 8, 2001 Washington DC

[To J. D. McClatchy]
Dear Sandy,

Here, from the publication called Crossroads, issued by the Poetry Society of America (Autumn 2000, No. 55) is the imperishable item I read to you earlier today. It appears on page 11, and I copy only the first sentence of a short paragraph that serves as Preface:

Collaborations is a new series that explores the varied and provocative presence of artistic alliances in our culture …

Cinepoesia
Euphrosyne Bloom (filmmaker)
Julie Patton (poet and performance artist)

Cinepoesia is based on a series of on-going collaborations between filmmaker Euphrosyne Bloom and poet and performance artist Julie Patton. As a visual artist herself, Patton has long been interested in the material and “vegetal” nature of the written word. She believes that her handmade books, which include loose topsoil and flower petals, emphasize “the natural processes of growth and decay, and the kind of random beauty and chaos often found in nature.” Her poems and books serve as catalyst and fodder for Bloom’s process of handmade films, in which the reels are subjected to mold and other organic processes.

Not only would [S. J.] Perelman have liked this, but so would have JM [James Merrill] and WHA [W. H. Auden]. There’s not the least evidence that this was published tongue in cheek, or with any sense whatever of its absurdity. Much of the Preface, which I omitted, is ponderously solemn, and quotes Robert Creeley on how collaboration can allow the solitary writer to escape from the “romantic vision” engendered by solitude. […]

Let me know how your homily on The Future of Poetry works out.

Love,
Tony

Hecht’s review of W. H. Auden, Lectures on Shakespeare, edited by Arthur Kirsch (Princeton, 2000), appeared in The Yale Review 89 (July 2001).

January 10, 2001 Washington DC

[To Garry Wills]
Dear Garry,

I’m a little better than half-way through [my review of] Auden on Shakespeare, a volume that is brilliant and infuriating, not by turns but at one and the same time. It is brilliantly edited, the lectures being reconstituted from student notes, like Aristotle’s [Poetics]. The devotion that went into this is deeply impressive.

I suspect you got mired early in the lecture on Henry VI, where he resorts, uncharacteristically, to a very tedious plot summary. This is not the case anywhere else, and indeed so much does Auden take for granted his audience’s familiarity with the action of the plays, that he almost entirely slights that rather central aspect of the dramas. He is interested in the history of ideas, and the plays become little more than pretexts to discourse on generalities; more than half the lecture on As You Like It, for example, is devoted to ideas about the pastoral, with interesting references to Empson, Panofsky, Hesiod, D.H. Lawrence, Theocritus, Virgil, Lucretius, Pliny, Hobbes, Whitman, Spengler, Sidney, Milton, Lao-tse, John Gay and classic detective fiction (as opposed to the noir novels of Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane.) Only after he’s gotten through all that—much of it admittedly fascinating, does he get around to Shakespeare’s play, about which he does not seem to be especially pleased. He concludes by saying that civilization is a dance (his own metaphor) between the ocean of barbarism, which is a unity, and the desert of triviality, which is diverse. And who, apart from Rosalind in the play, is capable of dancing such a dance? Why, Alice in Wonderland, he concludes.

As you can see, there’s something characteristically—independent? eccentric? wayward? original? zany? (and sometimes campy)—in these lectures. There’s nothing else in Shakespeare criticism quite like them. Curiously, his editor in this book, the admirable Arthur Kirsch, tells us that, first, he used the Kittredge edition, and that he was familiar with the commentaries of Theodore Spencer, Granville-Barker, G. Wilson Knight, Caroline Spurgeon, and Mark Van Doren. These writers are largely (except for Spurgeon) concerned with problems of dramatic action, which Auden conspicuously disregards. It may be noted that his own plays are rather devoid of such action, and he is quite simply more interested in general ideas. If As You Like It is about pastoral ideas, Julius Caesar is about ideas of society, community and the crowd, i.e., political philosophy. One suspects that, given Auden’s natural brilliance, as well as his wide range of reading, it would not be enormously difficult to locate the general topics, the clusters of ideas that lie in any given text and to enlarge upon them ad lib. And this, I think, is what he did, circumscribed by little more than the time limit of his lectures and the number of the plays.

But I have not fairly conveyed the richness of what he has done, and I hope to get nearer to that when in due course I write my review.

Best wishes for the New Year,
Tony

R. W. B. Lewis (1917–2002), distinguished American literary scholar and biographer, taught at Yale for most of his career. Hecht’s musings over Brunetto Latini’s placement in Hell continues, taking an Eliotic turn, in his letter to Lewis of March 4, 2002.

August 26, 2001 Washington DC

Dear Dick:

If you’ve wondered from time to time just how rude I can be for not so much as acknowledging the gift of your brilliant and lively life of Dante [Penguin, 2001], please know that I have been mightily preoccupied with the perilous health of family members for well over two months, and neither of the two imperiled ones is yet out of danger. This has entailed daily bedside vigils, and our lives have been narrowly rescheduled to an austere pattern. I brought your book to the bedside, reading it initially in snatches, but with much delight, even in the confines of a hospice. It is full of a fine vigor, and covers an enormous amount of materials with an easy flair that is admirable and everywhere persuasive.

I was one brought up in the old school of hermeneutics, the four-fold reading of Dante as of scripture, and yours is a refreshing liberation from the undeviating solemnity of that school. But your biographical approach, enchanting as it is, raises its own problems. I was struck by this especially in your account of Brunetto Latini (your pages 38–9). If Brunetto was really not homosexual; if he is placed by Dante in Hell with the sodomites simply because Dante feels a sense of rivalry and competitiveness with him, Dante, then, by your own thesis that the Comedy is an exercise in self-knowledge and self-confrontation, must have realized that he was himself profoundly guilty of one of the seven deadly sins. Moreover, Dante’s placement of Brunetto cannot be likened to Ezra Pound’s assignment of all those he despises (with a good number of Jews among them) to some inferno of his own making, since Pound clearly does not believe in his own Hell, and is merely being venomous, whereas Dante has the whole orthodoxy of the Church, the Summa Theologica, canon law, the “works” behind his condemnation. To put someone in Hell who does not belong there must surely be a sinful act. Even to put someone in the wrong circle of Hell is wicked, if you believe, and want your readers to believe, that the whole order of the Cosmos justifies eternal punishments as meted out by this design. […]

With grateful good wishes,
Tony

William Pritchard (1932–) is Henry Clay Folger Professor of English, Amherst College, and the author of numerous critical works.

September 10, 2001 Washington DC

Dear Bill,

Many warm thanks for your letter, and for the praise therein. It’s good to know a course on major writers begins with Ben Jonson, a poet not everywhere given his due, nor even always understood. For example, it seems not to be widely recognized that “The Dreame” is what in my youth was called “a wet dream,” or, more solemnly, “a nocturnal emission.” And thank you, also, for the fine tribute to Merrill, and for your kindness in placing me alongside of the elite Amherst poets [in the Amherst College Alumni Magazine].7 You are right in everything you notice about “The Victor Dog,” all its wit and ingenuity. And the “dog’s life” to which poets are committed is beautifully tied to the bargain in “The Tenancy.” But I can’t help feeling (without being able to prove) that something else is involved as well, having to do with Elizabeth Bishop and Merrill, both of them devoted to their art perhaps in part because, both being childless, there was nothing else that could command so complete a devotion. Indeed, I know, as perhaps you do as well, certain writers (and other artists) who have had no children on principle, not wanting to let anything interfere with their devotion to some muse. (And the mention of “muse” reminds me that that splendid clergyman, Sydney Smith, told someone he had the most marvelous dream, in which it was revealed to him that there were thirty-nine muses, and only nine articles.) […]

With many thanks,
Tony

October 18, 2001 Washington DC

[To Philip Hoy]
Dear Philip,

Congratulations on the Donald Justice volume. I put my check for it in the mail yesterday, so you should get it soon. The exchange between the two of you is wonderful, not least in its easy negotiation among the various arts Justice has mastered. So many fine things about him emerge from the interview, not least his championship of others. It is not only a heartening book in itself, but it is bound to serve the good purpose of sending readers back to look at Don’s own work in poetry and prose—and perhaps music as well. There was a passage of reminiscence on page 66 that struck me as not only characteristic of Don’s profound personal honesty, but a way of distinguishing him from many other kinds of poets, some good, some bad. About returning to Florida after years of absence, he writes: “I have a distinct memory of walking out onto the golf course behind our house late one night, walking our dog, and standing there looking up at the moon as it flooded the fairway with light. Very nice. I felt touched by an emotion I must have been inventing.” It’s that last sentence I find so persuasive. […]

Best,
Tony

October 21, 2001 Washington DC

[To Peter Steele]

My dear Peter,

My complex and embroidered thanks for your gifts: the new poems and the very flattering essay. I like especially the ekphrastic poems—I recognize the Daumier, and wish I knew the Pinturicchio, an artist I greatly admire. But in all of them your lines are taut, vibrant, active, full of Hopkinsian vigor. I’m not sure I grasp “Ivory,” though it reminds me of de la Tour. And your essay made me very happy, as how could it not? One detail in it especially came home to me with much energy. Of my poem “Auguries of Innocence” you write, “The ‘small, unsmiling child’ of the first line, who is also the ‘speechless child of one’ of the last stanza, summons in his silence, and is a kind of augur of the photograph’s omens—is, in fact, a medium of the ominous. Untroubled himself, so far as we know, he is deeply troubling. Virgil, in his Fourth Eclogue, says, ‘Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem’—‘Little boy, begin to know your mother by a smile,’” and then you go on to quote Hans Urs von Balthasar to the effect that “A baby is called to self-consciousness by the love and smile of his mother.”

Now as it happens, I have been engaged in a very happy if irregular correspondence with the historian Garry Wills, who has written on many topics from “The Gettysburg Address,” and a book on “The Declaration of Independence” to Papal Sin and a biography of St. Augustine, and a book on Venice. The biography of Augustine led him to venture a translation of his own of Book One of the Confessions, which he, for good reasons, prefers to call Testimonies. His translation endeavors to preserve the artful syntax, the balanced phrases and rhetorical skills of the original. He translates, in paragraph 8, “In time I began to smile, only in my sleep at first, and later when awake—so it was said of me, and I believed it, since we observe the same thing in other babies, though I do not remember it of myself.” He provides not only the translation but a commentary, and on this passage he writes. “What Augustine first notices about the infant’s activities is its smile at its mother. Folklore cynicism has recently held that this is just a twisting of the mouth to ease the escape of gas, a kind of silent burp, but researchers find that it is one of the earliest manifestations of a sign language that precedes verbal expression and is an occasion for it—as Augustine will assert [in his dialogue, Teacher, written near the end of his life.]” What you go on to conclude about the mother’s smile in my poem is exactly right. […]

Looking over what I have written, I notice that I failed to mention that in connection with the exchange of smiles between mother and child, Wills quotes the same line of Virgil’s Eclogues that you quote.

With best wishes,
Tony

Ann Kjellberg is an editor and Literary Executor of the Joseph Brodsky Estate. Ilya Kaminsky’s collection of poems, alluded to below, was an early version of Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004).

November 27, 2001 Washington DC

Dear Ann,

Here is Ilya Kaminsky’s collection of poems. I hope you will think as highly of them as I do. But I shall not say anything to him about sending them to you, lest you should find them disappointing. If indeed you do find them wanting in some regard, I hope you will return them to me.

I have cast about in my mind for some publisher to send them to; but without coming up with anyone or anything, due largely to the fact that I really don’t know poetry editors at publishing houses, except a very few. It seems to me that New Directions is the sort of place that might look favorably on this book, but I know no one at that firm. Nor do I know the editors at the small presses, which might also be hospitable. Any advice along these lines would be most welcome.

Ilya himself was a student at Georgetown who graduated last spring. I had long since left, having retired in 1993; but he wrote to ask if I would be willing to look at some of his poems, and in his letter he expressed a great admiration for Brodsky’s work and for mine. What he showed me I thought extremely good, but somewhat hasty and uncontrolled. I invited him to visit me at home, and he proved to be a most engaging, excitable and winning young man. He now lives in San Francisco, where, I think, he has gone for a graduate degree.

I hope that between the two of us we can do something for him.

With very best wishes,
Tony

November 22, 2001 Washington DC

[To Tim Murphy]

Thanks for sending me the exchanges about “The Feast of Stephen” [on the EratoSphere blog site]. Much serious thought has been given to it, for which I can be nothing but grateful. Both Susan McLean and A.E. Stallings have sound insights into the sources and subject of the poem, which is about “what turns young men into basketball stars, or bullies, or Storm Troopers—and a conclusion that the three have more in common than we might like to think,” as one of them said. The poem’s title is meant to remind a reader of the description in Acts of the Apostles (7:58) of the martyrdom of St. Stephen, at which the Saul who would in time become St. Paul was present as a passive participant. Only the final section of the poem is clearly related to the title and the biblical passage. The first three parts merely lead up to what, at the end, becomes a lynch mob, whether of long ago or of today. I remember being struck by the fact that not a few Renaissance paintings of martyrdoms presented the torturers and executioners as vigorous and athletic young men, hateful in the glee with which they set about their task, but admirable in their physiques and sturdy bearing. I had in mind such paintings as Pollaiuolo’s The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, Luca Signorelli’s Flagellation, and Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of St. Matthew. It seemed worth meditating on what could lead men into such barbarity. And it seemed that the competitiveness that begins early in comparatively innocent games, encourages youths to attempt to “beat” one another in sports; and it would not be too great a step from that to the administration of real beatings. Everything about domestic propaganda created by the Nazis for home consumption focused on images of nordic Supermen. The second section of the poem is full of puns, jokes that make pleasantries of what is potentially dangerous and sinister, and which appears without disguise in section III. Jokes, as Freud pointed out, are a means of concealing aggression. The seed of all these dangers lies in that “self-love” mentioned in the first section which is indifferent to the condition of others, and which is purely selfish. It is a natural state of infants, and it endures for a while, and some never abandon it, remaining cruel their whole lives. The four parts constitute an account of the evolution of the persecutor.

Once again, I’m grateful for the thought and attention you have given my poem.

[Tony]

Robyn Creswell, a frequent reviewer, was appointed poetry editor of The Paris Review in 2010.

December 31, 2001 Washington DC

Dear Robyn Creswell,

Thank you for your warm response to my letter, and for clearing up my bewilderment about how Sandy McClatchy came by your review [of The Darkness and the Light in Raritan]. (I hope he signs you up as a regular reviewer.)

It seems to me you are quite right in your feeling that poems don’t console. I have never felt them to be consoling, in the usual sense of the word. Instead, they provide a curious kind of communion, which is what Auden must have meant when he said that our reading of literary works was a way of breaking bread with the dead. We become aware of certain kinds of intelligence, resonances of feeling, sympathetic vibrations of knowledge that speak to us from the words of total strangers, and it may be that we feel less alone—if that can be called consolation. I find this to be true of music as well as poetry. To be able to give full attention to a work of music—full enough attention to apprehend every quirk and turn, modulation and contrapuntal filigree—is to adapt oneself, in trust, to a complete coincidence with another mind, and to rejoice in the bond that has been so established. I should imagine that performers especially must feel that (all matters of technique apart) they are thinking as the composer thought when they are playing. For a large part of my own life I was very lonely, even when in close contact with others, and my experiences of music and literature were those I felt most intimately, and where I felt most sure of myself.

As for your suggestion that poetry criticism seems a willfully blinkered pursuit when considered against the backdrop of the Twin Towers and the bombings in Afghanistan, I think the only reasonable response for such as you or I would be that of Yeats’s in “Lapis Lazuli.” It takes the disciplines of a good part of a lifetime to command the faculties that go into the making of a good poet or a good critic, and these faculties are not the ones employed to address the calamities of existence. We should do what we have committed ourselves to doing, and do it as best we can; and if upheaval demands that we take up arms or help the wounded, we set aside our principal task until the emergency has been dealt with. Whereupon we resume what we had elected as most important to us.

This will not reach you before the beginning of the New Year, a year which must stand a reasonable chance of being better than the last; but it comes with wishes that 2002 may be happy and successful for you.

Sincerely,
Anthony Hecht

2002

January 7, 2002 Washington DC

[To Eleanor Cook]
Dear Eleanor,

Many grateful thanks for your letter about The Darkness and the Light. In reply to one of your questions, no, I did not have Browning’s Johannes Agricola in mind when writing “Indolence,” though you were perfectly right to suppose I might have. My speaker was far less a theologian/philosopher than Browning’s was. But I had [in mind], apart from the generic beatnik source, a passage of Auden in his For the Time Being. In Herod’s speech he declares that if the “rumor” of salvation by the New Dispensation is not stamped out, “Every corner-boy will congratulate himself: ‘I’m such a sinner that God had to come down in person to save me. I must be a devil of a fellow.’ Every crook will argue: ‘I like committing crimes. God likes forgiving them. Really the world is admirably arranged.’”

As to translations, they are often things that I dwell with for the longest time. I can fall in love with a poem in another tongue, and yearn to get it into some kind of English, and experiment year after year, almost always—no, always, with a sense of defeat, since no matter what I do, it will lack important elements that made the original what it is. In this book there’s a version of Charles d’Orléans’ “Le temps a laissié son manteau” which I had tried at the outset to do in a version that appeared in my first book, published in 1954. Horace is a challenge, but so are almost all poets of any worth. Sometimes one must try to settle for an equivalent music. Your husband and I share a liking for walnuts at the Christmas season.

As for the war poem [“Sacrifice”], that story about the French family was a kind of word-of-mouth lore that passed among the troops in France when I was there. It was perfectly believable. Your reflections on the conjunction of “the deeply civilized and the deeply barbaric” served to remind me that a TLS (hence, in those days, anonymous) review of A History of England by Winston Churchill declared, “The whole action of history seems to prove that it is more dangerous to be intelligent than to be warlike. Culture is not only futile but, when combined with kindness, almost always actively fatal” [April 27, 1956]. This led George Lyttelton to say that he had come to agree with a certain Bishop Creighton, “who reassured an anxious seeker after truth that ‘it is almost impossible to exaggerate the complete unimportance of everything.’”8 […]

With best wishes for the New Year,
Tony

Sherod Santos (1948–), poet and essayist, was a professor at the University of Missouri, Columbia, when this letter was written.

January 7, 2002 Washington DC

Dear Sherod Santos,

Your extraordinary letter left me virtually speechless, and it deeply moved my wife, who must be just as grateful as I am.

Having said that, I have just about exhausted my vocabulary of gratitude. Any comment of mine would now sound posturing or fatuous, though I confess that what you wrote led me to lingering ruminations about my work, as well as the work of others. Self-assessment is next to impossible, even, perhaps especially, at my age, when I behold myself, in somebody else’s words, “Beaten and chopped with tanned antiquity” [Shakespeare, Sonnet 62]. The attitudes of most poets, I would imagine, must oscillate between feeling that a number of their best effects have gone unnoticed, and feeling that they have been too generously dealt with. Usually far more of the former than the latter. It is a common hope that posterity, which Emerson called bribeless, beyond entreaty, and not to be over-awed, will come to see what once was missed. I have known some particularly bad poets who have survived on the thin gruel of this hope. Even Shakespeare endured moods of doubt, in which he found himself “Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope.” And every poet who is not a fool must resign himself to a lifetime in this equivocal no-man’s land. It is a permanently unsettled condition, sometimes, though rarely, brightened by such a letter as yours, for which I send you my deepest thanks. […]

Sincerely,
Anthony Hecht

Gerry Cambridge is a Scottish poet, with an interest in natural history, and editor of The Dark Horse, a Scottish American poetry magazine, which published several of Hecht’s poems. They met at the West Chester University Poetry Conference in 2001.

February 9, 2002 Washington DC

Dear Mr. Cambridge,

[…] I very much like your, as you say, “uncharacteristic-sounding” quotation from Randall Jarrell: “A good critic is one who likes as much as possible as persuasively as possible.” Jarrell was splendid in his enthusiasms, but I suspect most memorable in his devastations. E.g., in a review of Chorus of Bird Voices, Sonnets, Battle-Dore, Unconventional Verse, etc. by William Bacon Evans, Jarrell wrote, “Mr. Evans’ title is almost enough for a review of his book. While ailing in Syria, he wrote songs for every species of North American bird (I am no ornithologist, but there can’t be any more of the damn things); it has seldom been better done. This is poetry which instructs its writer and entertains its reader (the function of poetry, I have read); a missionary could hardly be more harmlessly employed. Mr. Evans is an amiable, unpretentious, and tolerant person—he appears to dislike nothing but cigarettes—and won my heart immediately: more than I can say for most of the poets I am reviewing. But then, Mr. Evans is no poet.” I would have to admit that in an early phase of my own reviewing career I succumbed to the temptation to be amusing at the expense of some of the writers I wrote about. And I have not yet quite stamped out a lingering streak of Alexander Pope in me, though I try to keep it under control. […]

With grateful good wishes,
Anthony Hecht

John Van Doren, literary friend of Hecht’s dating back to the early 1950s, is the son of Mark Van Doren, one of Hecht’s teachers at Columbia University.

February 16, 2002 Washington DC

Dear John:

I’m grateful to you for the candor of your response to The Darkness and the Light, which, as I think, is not much nearer to despair than some earlier volumes of my poems. But you are right in singling out that timbre, or tone, or atmosphere, as dominant. I’m not sure how this is to be explained. It may be part of my metabolic make-up. In terms of William James’s temperamental categories in Varieties of Religious Experience, I recognize myself as sharing many of the views and feelings of those he calls “Sick Souls.” It might also be that my experience and reading have contributed to this. It occurs to me that of all Shakespeare’s plays King Lear is the one I have been and continue to be most moved by. It is probably the bleakest of the plays, the most unconsoling. During the years I taught Shakespeare I always gave strong emphasis to a detailed examination of that play.

With specific regard to the poem called “Witness,” it undertakes a task I attempted once before in a poem called “Poem Without Anybody,” written in memory of James Wright. Both poems eliminate all human presence. The attempt is to avoid at all costs any employment of the pathetic fallacy, which is not an easy thing to do in poetry. A world from which human compassion, tenderness, sympathy has been removed is the external universe of Lear, as of not a few poems by Hardy. And of some classical drama. A psychoanalyst might not wrongly discover materials from my childhood to account for this posture; but in the end it is shared by a small number of others who see the world somewhat as I do. The attempt to see life steadily and see it whole permits no parti pris. I find this also in Frost’s “Design.”

At my age I must expect a few elements of feebleness to creep in, and my arthritic discomforts are among these. They are still with me. And now my eyesight is weakening. But in most regards I am well and cheerful.

This comes with warm greetings to you and Mira, and with best wishes.

Tony

This letter continues a discussion with R. W. B. Lewis begun in Hecht’s letter of August 26, 2001.

March 4, 2002 Washington DC

Dear Dick,

Thumbing about in Helen Gardner’s book on Eliot’s Four Quartets, I came across something that bears upon your book on Dante, and our correspondence about it. In the last of the Quartets, “Little Gidding,” Eliot puts in a very moving and eloquent passage in a species of terza rime, in which, instead of linked rhymes he alternates masculine and feminine endings. In this passage, which is set at night in bomb-scarred London, Eliot, in an early draft, comes upon “a familiar compound ghost” of uncertain identity, of whom, in this early draft, he inquires, “Are you here, Ser Brunetto?” This was destined to be changed to “What! Are you here?” John Hayward, to whom Eliot showed early drafts of these poems, “queried the disappearance of Ser Brunetto,” Gardner reports, and she continues, “Eliot replied that this was necessary because of the change he had made in the speech of the ‘dead master.’ There were, he said, two reasons:

“The first is that the visionary figure has by now become somewhat more definite and will no doubt be identified by some readers with Yeats though I do not mean anything so precise as that. However, I do not wish to take the responsibility of putting Yeats or anybody else into Hell and I do not want to impute to him the particular vice which took Brunetto there. Secondly, I wished the effect of the whole to be Purgatorial which is much more appropriate.”

As you can see, Eliot seems to have been far more scrupulous about consigning people to Hell than Dante was in regard to Brunetto, if your surmise is right.

We’ve had a remarkably warm winter that has been followed by an icy spring, with temperatures in the 20s.

All good wishes,
Tony

April 22, 2002 Washington DC

[To Dorothea Tanning]
Dear Dorothea,

While on the face of it the current scandals of the Catholic clergy are plainly horrifying, I find myself also amused by the continuing revelations, which for all their gravity share with the Enron mess a certain hilarity. In today’s Washington Post there is an article about a pharmacist in Kansas City who, for ten successive years, watered down expensive drugs taken by some 4,200 people with very grave illnesses, in order to “pocket hundreds of dollars per dose.” The patients being cheated were suffering from AIDS, among other terrible diseases. The pharmacist, one Robert Courtney, did this to pay more than $600,000 in taxes “and fulfill a $1 million pledge to his church.” Why, it’s enough to give religion a bad name. The Enron team were just straightforward crooks, misleading employees and investors, etc. But to endanger the lives of the innocent, or to corrupt them in the name of the church—it makes little difference which church; I suspect that Courtney was some brand of protestant—seems somehow more wicked, perhaps because the villains of the story are usually given to sanctimonious postures. Pascal: “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” Tomorrow the Pope is to meet with the American cardinals, and one fears that the burden of their discussion will tend toward cleansing and protecting “the church” as an institution, whatever the cost to those families who were betrayed, including boys driven to suicide. […]

It may amuse you to know that while we were gone I received voice mail from someone calling to congratulate me on a review of a book of mine in the New York Review of Books, which was accompanied by a David Levine cartoon portrait. The caller declared that the cartoon was very unattractive and looked just like me.

Love,
Tony

Harold Bloom, eminent literary critic, has taught for many years at Yale University. His friendship with Hecht dates back to 1971.

October 18, 2002 Washington DC

My dear Harold,

I learned around the time of the Bollingen anniversary festival that you were slated to undergo (or else had just undergone) coronary by-pass surgery. I suppose you are now still in the hospital, and things are moving along according to a schedule that is wholly in the hands of others. So this letter, wishing you a full and carefully paced recovery, being sent to your home, will await you there in the dark along with accumulated mail-order catalogues and utility bills. It invites no answer; it comes simply as a greeting from one who has gone through roughly the same experience.

As your senior in this procedure by a mere matter of weeks, I can tell you that recovery is slow and more draining of energy than you may have expected. I found it fatiguing even to read for very long. And as for writing, it took some time before I could compose more than a single letter a day. I’m only slowly now getting beyond that stage, but not far beyond it. On the positive side, however, I went through a long stretch, not yet altogether passed, during which every waking moment was a continuous Emersonian astonishment at the reality of everything around me—a new-born, born-again delight full of quiet, secret rejoicing. This feeling overrides all the bad news in the headlines—which is certainly very bad. And it is, perhaps, profoundly selfish in its willful blindness to anything beyond itself. I suspect that it teaches nothing much about mortality. At least in the course of my life I’ve come near enough to those dangers not to regard this one as a novelty.

While still in the hospital I had a small cassette-player, and was able to listen to Mozart, Haydn, Schubert and Beethoven any time I wished. I found this very sustaining; and it also served to block unwelcome noise from elsewhere. Only yesterday I spoke on the phone to William Merwin, who is to undergo major surgery this very day in Honolulu, and he, too, has fortified himself with a selection of recordings. I earnestly hope your recovery will be as tranquil as mine, which, though somewhat frustrating by dint of a lack of energy to do as much as I would like to, or feel I need to, is still something to be savored richly and gratefully—and slowly.

With affectionate wishes for your recovery,
Tony

2003

Jonathan Post, a former student of Hecht and professor of English at UCLA, was preparing to give a talk for the John Donne Society on the subject of the aubade, a subject dear to Hecht, as his late “Aubade,” written in 2004, reveals.

January 25, 2003 Washington DC

Dear Jonathan,

This will seem a shamefully tardy response to your fax of the 14th, but I can explain that the day before you sent it we departed for a ten-day, visit-cum-birthday celebration to New York, where we have acquired a splendid three-and-a-half room pied-a-terre, and where I turned a graceful, if graying, eighty. There was a fine party that included Sandy, Richard Howard, Shirley Hazzard, Mark Strand and Maria Brodsky, and a very good time was had by all.

And now, to the aubade. You mention Bishop, Larkin, Empson & Snodgrass. MacNeice wrote one six lines long; Wilbur wrote “A Late Aubade,” which is quite wonderful. There’s Pound’s “Alba” and there are dawn songs in some of the later Cantos. It may be worth informing your learned audience that “in France the term is applied also to the performance of a military band in the early morning in honor of some distinguished person” (Britannica). There is also, famously, that scene in Romeo and Juliet in which they debate about whether the birdsong they’ve heard is a lark or a nightingale. There’s another antithetical one by Baudelaire, called “L’Aube Spirituelle,” as well as one called “Le Crepuscule du Matin,” which I have translated as “The Ashen Light of Dawn,” in my most recent book of poems. The trouble is that I know perfectly well that there are others evading the reach of memory. Two more just occurred to me: Auden’s “Prime” from his canonical hours sequence, and Wilbur’s “Love Calls Us to the Things of this World.” So I haven’t altogether disgraced myself.

This comes with love to you and Susan.

Tony

Jeff Balch is a freelance writer in the Chicago area. His interpretation of Hecht’s poem can be found in Jewish Currents (September 2007).

February 11, 2003 Washington DC

Dear Mr. Balch,

In an interview (book-length) with an Englishman named Philip Hoy, and published by Between the Lines in 1999, I replied to a question about “The Book of Yolek” in roughly the following terms: There were a number of sources: my having seen Flossenbürg was certainly one. (Flossenbürg was a concentration camp annex of Buchenwald).9 There was also a memorable photograph, one of the most famous to survive from the Warsaw ghetto. It’s of a small boy, perhaps five or six, wearing a shabby peaked cap and short pants, his hands raised and a bewildered, forlorn look on his face as he gazes off at something to the side of the camera, while behind him uniformed, helmeted soldiers keep their rifles trained on him, as one of them looks directly at the camera without the least expression of embarrassment. But of course I did a lot of reading about the Holocaust. There were many books, but one in particular proved helpful to me. It’s an Anthology of Holocaust Literature edited by Jacob Glatstein, Israel Knox, and Samuel Margoshes. It contains, among other moving and terrifying, even stomach-turning accounts, a piece by Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczakowa which bears the title “Yanosz Korczak’s Last Walk.” Yanosz Korczak was a famous Jewish educator in Poland who, having been ordered to lead the children of an orphanage where he taught to an assembly point from which they would be taken to death camps, refused to part from them, knowing, as they did not, where they were headed, and went with them to their deaths. Among these children were “little Hanka with lung trouble, Yolek who was ill …” As you will notice, I recalled this account imperfectly, and gave the bad lungs to Yolek instead of little Hanka. But apart from such explicit sources, I found myself meditating on the sestina form itself, without reference to any particular subject matter. I was thinking about how various sestinas I knew operated. And it occurred to me that because of the persistent reiteration of those terminal words, over and over in stanza after stanza, the sestina seemed to lend itself especially well to a topic felt obsessively, unremittingly. And when this realization fell into one place with the other preoccupations aroused by my reading and that remembered photograph, I had the materials for my poem. The poem’s epigraph is Martin Luther’s German translation of words from the Gospel of John 19:7, which in English reads, “We have a law / And by that law he must die.” In the Gospel this demand is attributed to the Jews who sought the death of Jesus. As my epigraph, it constitutes the German justification of killing children, Yolek among them.

Best wishes,
Anthony Hecht

Ronald Schuchard is the Goodrich C. White Professor of English at Emory University and the author of many critical studies.

April 27, 2003 Washington DC

Dear Ron:

I’m very grateful for you for sending an offprint of your essay on Eliot and anti-Semitism, together with various responses to it, and your own reply to the others. The entire collection is riveting to read, and I send my warmest thanks.10

It arrived at a time when I am preparing some notes towards a lecture on Keats, about whom the charge of anti-Semitism has never, so far as I know, been raised. I’m not being entirely facetious when I write this. Even Empson, who admired Eliot almost without reservation, was able to admit that a “defense” was called for. The Horace Kallen friendship and the letters between the two men seem to me a major new element of undeniable importance; and it is to be hoped that with time more such evidence will turn up. But with regard to the question of when Eliot might first have learned about what was happening to Jews in Germany, and your quite plausible conjecture that while he was revising After Strange Gods he could well have been utterly unaware of their plight, it cannot be that he was altogether innocent of such knowledge in 1936, when that deplorable review of The Yellow Spot: The Outlawing of Half a Million Human Beings was published in The Criterion. Mrs. Eliot affirms that he did not write it, and I’m prepared to take her rather tardy word on the matter. But as the journal’s editor, he could scarcely have been unaware of its brief and dismissive contents. Indeed, the chances are good that he chose [Montgomery] Belgion to write the review, and would have had a rough sense of how Belgion would react to the volume. Certainly, as editor, he published it, and it is morally repulsive.

My own feelings about the matter are very complicated. As my essay indicated, Eliot was my first master and guide, my touchstone and literary parent. He was so for a number of my actual teachers, such as Allen Tate and Austin Warren, the latter a virtual Eliot acolyte for whom Eliot’s slightest opinion was cherished with reverence, not excluding High Anglican positions and disdain for Milton. It is hard to come to terms with such a mentor when elements of anti-Semitism seem unmistakably to appear in his poems and essays. Denis Donoghue has long felt indulgent towards Eliot, since they both take their religion very seriously, and that factor overrides all other considerations.

There is another puzzle about the notorious passage in the Virginia lectures, where Eliot recommends that “The populations should be homogeneous … What is still more important is unity of all religious background … etc.” Eliot gives the impression that he is proposing a novel experiment, but it was put into practice long ago in Spain, with terrible consequences. The fall of Granada in 1492 ended more than 200 years of civilized rule under Muslim government which gave patronage to art, literature and science, attracting many learned and skilled men to its court, resulting “in a brilliant civilization of which the Alhambra is the supreme monument,” according to the Britannica. Granada’s fall marked the end of a Spanish culture in which “Islamic, Spanish and, indeed, Judaic strands had been inseparably intermingled for centuries,” writes Lisa Jar-dine in Worldly Goods. What Spain got, after driving out the Moors and Jews, was the Inquisition, and an impoverishment of its culture. […]

Tony

April 29, 2003 Washington DC

Dear William Dougherty,

I want to thank you for your diligence and hard work in tracking down the members of C Company of the 386th Infantry Regiment. I’m grateful to have this list. But I am puzzled and saddened that so few names have stuck in my mind. Of those few, I can offer one or two comments. Joe Hastings received the Congressional Medal of Honor. He was a machine gunner in the heavy weapons platoon, and he was killed in Germany. Ferrante got a purple heart. A bullet grazed his forehead. He was very lucky. Godsell was a sergeant; a short, stocky man. Geist knew German, and served as interpreter for regimental brass. And unless I’m mistaken, Zeigler was a second Lieutenant. But what was the name of our captain, an over-weight regular army man who was not popular with the troops? And what was the name of our First Sergeant, who put in the Captain’s name for a Silver Star, which he got for action on a day when he was behind the lines with dysentery? I am most haunted by the memory of a young soldier who, like me, must have been no more than a pfc. He was tall, blond, good-looking, and stood beside me in formation at some German town we had captured, as we waited to be assigned to work details by some sergeant. Many had already been assigned and had gone off to their tasks. Of the few who remained, this soldier was assigned to locate the town’s water supply. He left the formation to address his task. And I was still standing there waiting for an assignment when that soldier returned on a stretcher, borne by two medics, having lost a leg to a booby trap. He looked at me with an expression of infinite sadness, and I immediately realized that but for accidents of fate it might have been me who had been assigned that job. Apart from those already named, I think I remember Gambill and Wilk and possibly Herrington, but no one else.

Again, many thanks for your hard work.

Anthony Hecht

May 7, 2003 Washington DC

[To Mary Jo Salter]
Dear Mary Jo,

Thanks for your marvelous book, Open Shutters, and the wonderful Ligurian setting to which the title poem refers, and which fills me with nostalgic happiness as you recall it to me. And thanks for everything else in your fine book, which I have read with pure delight. Your poem to Sarah M. Lyon [“Deliveries Only,” which includes the epigraph “for Sarah Marjorie Lyon, born in a service elevator”] reminded me that once, at the American Academy in Rome, at a very grand cocktail party at the Villa Aurelia, the director, Laurance Roberts, brought me to a corner of the room to introduce me to an English poet named Hugh Chisolm. He was moderately famous; I was utterly unknown. And, alas, the only thing I could remember about him (though I suppose I must have read some of his poems, which made little if any impression upon me) came from an item about him in the “Talk of the Town” section of The New Yorker, where it was reported that he was born in an elevator at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Mr. Roberts presented me to him, and stood aside, perhaps expecting something electric or magical to take place at this encounter of two poets. But the only thing I could think of to say was: “Is it true that you were born in an elevator of the Plaza Hotel?” He said briskly, “Yes,” and turned away to resume talking to someone else. […]

With warm affection,
Tony

2004

David Slavitt (1935–) is a translator, poet, and author. His appreciative note was about Hecht’s collection of essays: Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

February 10, 2004 Washington DC

Dear David:

How very kind of you to write as warmly and generously as you did about my essays. I’m deeply grateful, and I mean that sincerely. Such “tributes” are few and far between.

I have mused upon your inquiry regarding Housman’s choice of “nighing” rather than “nearing.” It led me to look over his Collected Poems, and I was struck by the highly unstatistical suspicion that, while we commonly think of Housman as using simple, straightforward diction, he is also given to archaisms: “The God that glads the lover’s heart,” for example. To be sure, Hardy is still more enamored of archaisms, and in “In Tenebris” he began, “Wintertime nighs.” In the “Epithalamion,” Spenser wrote “Now day is done, and night is nighing fast. / Now bring the bride into the bridal bowers.” It’s not inconceivable to me that Housman might have wanted to echo Spenser’s marriage hymn for brutally ironic purposes. But the fact is that “nigh” according to OED entries was quite widely used from about the 1200s on. I have long thought the Hardy poem very moving, and it gives special emphasis to “nighs” by putting it in a rhyming position, so that the first stanza reads,

Wintertime nighs;

But my bereavement-pain

It cannot bring again:

Twice no one dies.

Once again, let me thank you for the generosity of your letter.

Best,
Tony

One of a number of letters Hecht wrote to The Washington Post, this letter was never published.

February 17, 2004 Washington DC

[To the Editors of The Washington Post]

Today’s issue of the [The Washington] Post carried a front page article on Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ, that continued on to page 11 and was written by Caryle Murphy and William Booth. Towards its end it states, “One of the most sensational moments in the version of the film that has been screened in previews is a line from the Gospel of Matthew, in which the mob calling for Jesus to be put upon the cross shouts out, ‘His blood be on us and on our children!’ Often called the ‘blood libel’ quote, it has been interpreted in the past to call down rage and blame upon the Jews in the centuries-long tradition of Passion plays.”

This is mistaken. The quote from Matthew is accurate, but the long-standing “blood libel” is altogether separate from the Gospels, and dates instead from the Middle Ages. It first surfaced in 1144 in the city of Norwich, England. Its premise was that “once the Jews had crucified Jesus, they thirsted for pure and innocent blood. Since the formerly incarnate God was now in heaven, the Jews aspired to the most innocent of the believers, i.e., the children, the tender Christians. As a result of this reasoning, the season of the most libels or charges of ritual murder was that of the Passover festival, which was close to the time of the Passion of Jesus,” as Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson writes in The History of the Jewish People, Harvard University Press, 1976. Many such medieval claims were made, one of them by Geoffrey Chaucer in his poem The Canterbury Tales, one by Bernardino da Feltre in 1475. One of the putative motives ascribed to Jews for the murders of children was that 1) they needed Christian blood as an essential ingredient for their Passover bread, and 2) that it was a means by which they could free themselves from a tell-tale Jewish stench, foetor Judaicus, which was said to afflict them, and to which Martin Luther refers in 1523.

Yours,
Anthony Hecht

April 12, 2004 Washington DC

[To Dimitri Hadzi]

My dear Dimitri,

Helen and I were deeply distressed to learn (as we did from Judy Millon) of your hospitalization for a clinical depression. I was, if possible, the more distressed for having gone through such a hospitalization myself at one time. So I know that nothing could be more irrelevant than glib advice to cheer up, delivered with scoutmaster optimism. The hospital where I was treated was so concerned about the potential suggestivity of any “art” on its walls—posters, reproductions, etc.—that, determined nevertheless to decorate the bare walls of the place, they put up framed swatches of upholstery fabric, which were unlikely to touch on any sensitivities of any patients. The news about you was the more distressing because, when last we spoke, you were full of enthusiasm for the Athens subway project. But, as I said, I know how destructive to one’s self-esteem such depressions can be. Right now I myself have been trying to deal with a not completely latent anxiety, due to the combined facts that a) I haven’t written any poems of consequence for more than a year, and b) I’m scheduled to go off to an Italian villa to write in mid-May, and already fear that I may not be able to come up with anything. I have no firm way to deal with this, except to remind myself that I’ve often felt this way in the past, and have nevertheless, by some kind of miracle, come up with something totally unexpected. There’s a beautiful poem by George Herbert, called “The Flower,” which bears directly and persuasively on the kinds of fluctuation you and I are both subject to. Ask Cynthia if she can find a copy of it to read to you. It’s one of Herbert’s best known poems, so it should not be hard to find.

This comes to you with our combined love and admiration.

Tony

P.S. I enclose a copy of the Herbert poem.

July 1, 2004 Washington DC

[To Philip Hoy]
Dear Philip,

I don’t wish to complicate your life unduly, and I know you will be granted only a few minutes during the panel discussion; but after thinking about your topic, I made a hasty check of my published poems and find that there are a number of others that draw significantly on prose sources. There are, for starters, all the poems with biblical topics, including “The Feast of Stephen,” based on the Book of Acts. But in addition there is “More Light! More Light!” which is indebted to a book called The Theory and Practice of Hell by Eugen Kogon; “Lizards and Snakes” on the autobiography of Mark Twain; “The Book of Yolek,” on “Yanosz Korczak’s Last Walk,” by Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczakowa; “Sisters” on a letter to Robert Frost by his sister, Jeanie; “The Life of Crime” on an account of a pickpocket in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor; and “A Certain Slant” on a story by Chekhov.

This fax will be followed by a new poem [“Menassah ben Israel”], also based on a prose text, in this case a book called Rembrandt’s Jews, whose author [Stephen Nadler] I can’t identify because the book is in New York. It’s a poem I wrote this spring in Bogliasco, and Sandy [McClatchy] will bring it out in The Yale Review, in winter, I think. I thought you might like to see it.

Best,
Tony

August [17?], 2004 Washington DC

[To William Pritchard]
Dear Bill,

I’m grateful to you for your several favors: 1) the kindness of your note about my work, 2) your shrewd and just essay on Hardy (about which more in a moment), and 3) your ruminations on style as applied to Jane Austen.

I think you and I must be very close to perfect agreement on Hardy, and certainly we like the same poems pretty much for the same reasons. I am, however, ill-at-ease with Larkin’s (in my view) heavy-handed mode of distinguishing between the poetry of Hardy and Yeats, even as it applies to his own work. As for the objection of Orwell to the line of Yeats, “Or that William Blake,” there may be something slightly arch about the word “that,” and yet it could be justified by saying that Yeats’s emphasis is meant to single out “that William Blake / Who Beat upon the wall / Till Truth obeyed his call,” as distinct from, say, the William Blake who wrote, “Can I see another’s woe / And not be in sorrow too?” Anyway, if there is undeniably something histrionic about Yeats’s posture towards death, etc., a posture of braggadocio, a defiance, a curious lack of grace, clearly Hardy’s is, as you justly point out, far more circumspect. But what troubles me is that this should be an argument of Larkin’s who is himself so unpleasantly self-commiserating, so off-puttingly sorry for himself, e.g., “Home is so sad,” “Breadfruit,” and a number of other poems in which he laments how his childhood was “unspent.” My point is that it’s not as though there were only three options: Yeats, Hardy, and Larkin. But as for Hardy, what you have to say is fine and right. (I, too, admire the triolets.)

I am glad to learn you are not planning to retire, and that this is with the approval of your doctors. I, on the other hand, retired long since, and my doctors are by no means so sanguine. I’ve been diagnosed with cancer, and have already undergone the first of six sessions of chemotherapy that, when complete, will not only leave me shorn but carry me into late November. I mention this partly to explain something about a poem of mine I enclose [“Declensions”]. It was not written with prophetic vision; it is merely the meditation of an eighty-one year old.

As for the vulgarities of Ms. Sedgwick [Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick], they are all of a piece with two papers given at a 1989 MLA meeting: “Desublimating the Male Sublime: Auto-erotics in Melville and William Burroughs” and “‘The Pea that Duty Locks’: Clitoral Imagery and Masturbation in Emily Dickinson.”

All best wishes,
Tony

August 10, 2004 Washington DC

[To Eleanor Cook]
Dear Eleanor,

Many thanks for splicing observations of mine into your fine and learned essay on Enigmas.11 I feel very proud to be thus cited. And thank you as well for the postcard reproduction of the David Milne painting, who seems to bear a family resemblance to Maurice Prendergast.

I have, I regret to say, some distressing news to impart. I have been diagnosed with cancer […] and it has taken me and my wife completely by surprise. In fact, I had been taking notes for an essay I would like to write. It will be called De Gustibus, and will concern how deeply personal, quirky and often irrational, are our judgments of taste, about which we are sometimes very defensive, and about which we sometimes feel vulnerable, residing as these judgments do in some highly private inwardness, deeply severed from what we normally think of as our faculty of judgment. I suspect that [Jacques] Maritain’s startling and irrational dislike of Dürer—“We may draw in this connection a particularly instructive lesson from the great and noble illusion—and failure—of those masters of the Renaissance, especially Albrecht Dürer, who believed that a superior knowledge of the Mathematical laws of form and of the world of geometrical proportions would enable the artist to attain beauty in its unique and definite type (as if beauty were not a transcendental) and to encompass its essence in their work.” Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, p. 171n. This neo-Thomist terror of the rigors of mathematics as applied to art is amusing, since no notice is taken of the very many Renaissance artists, Piero della Francesca, Alberti, Leonardo, Palladio, Serlio, who wrote treatises on the demonstrable relation of beauty and numbers. But they, of course, were good Catholics, while Dürer was a wretched Lutheran. Was Maritain aware that his doctrinal biases were showing? Hard to say. I’ve assembled an interesting list of quirky opinions, along with speculations on why they were adopted. But I will have to put that aside for the present.

With affectionate good wishes,
Tony

SEVENThe Flourish of Retirement1993–2004

SEVEN

The Flourish of Retirement
1993–2004