Controlled chaos: Anthony Hecht

“I have been one acquainted with the night.”  Robert Frost

Anthony Hecht (1923-2004) came from a wealthy Jewish background.   As a child he had a posh Manhattan address, governesses (the German was grausam, or cruel, the French one charmant), private schools, summer camps and a luxury trip to Europe.  Yet with an ineffectual father, a domineering and critical mother, and a severely sick brother, he felt his childhood had been lonely and bitter, and was suffused with self-pity.

His father, who had graduated from Harvard and served in the Navy in World War I, repeatedly failed in business but was cushioned by the family fortune.  He had several nervous breakdowns and three half-hearted suicide attempts.  Hecht’s younger brother, Roger, was epileptic, partly paralysed and half-blind.  Hecht remained close to Roger, who was confined to the family’s flat, and probably felt survivor’s guilt since he had escaped affliction.  Their emotionally distant mother gave all her love and attention to her disabled son, but disapproved of and ignored Anthony.  Yet he kept in close touch with his damaging parents, and his abundant letters to them are the main source of information about his early life.

Though Hecht in German means “pike”—a fierce and malevolent killer in the poems of Ted Roethke and Ted Hughes—Anthony described himself as moody and melancholy, fearful and suffering.  He balanced this with the public persona of a dandy.  He wore a double-breasted blue blazer with a natty bow-tie, grew an “aristocratic” pointed beard, adopted a mid-Atlantic accent and a theatrical voice.

Though he’d graduated from the elite Horace Mann school in 1940, he failed his interview at Harvard and Swarthmore had already filled their Jewish quota for the year.  So he made the unusual choice of Bard College, in the Hudson Valley two hours north of Manhattan, which had fewer than 150 students.  Hecht later profited from great teachers and influential poets.  After the war he studied with John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate at Kenyon  College in Ohio.  On Ischia in the Bay of Naples he had private discussions with W. H. Auden, and told Tate that their first sensitive interview, “which lasted about two and a half hours, was somewhat tense, due to our not knowing one another very well, and his concern lest I should be wounded by any of his remarks, and my sense of his concern.”  But he revered Auden, who praised his poems, and observed that the older poet took “the same contorted pains to conceal his kindnesses from public notice the way most of us conceal our vices.”

The wartime army was the most painful experience of Hecht’s life.  He trained as a private soldier for nearly two years (June 1943 to March 1945) before reaching the battlefields of France.  He hated the army and, urged by his father, had a chance to escape with a plea of mental illness.  He recalled that when he appeared before the medical board, “I really felt that my life that morning was in my own hands.  At the same time, I felt unwilling to fake, and was ashamed of what my father had done” to arrange the deception.

Three traumatic military experiences hurt him for the rest of his life—but also inspired his poetry in Millions of Strange Shadows (1977).  His infantry company was sent on a suicidal attack across a river and into heavy machine-gun fire, which killed or wounded half the soldiers: “an officer wittingly sent men out to their almost inevitable death on a mission that could never be accomplished.”  Another horror took place when five German women, leading small children by the hand and waving white flags of surrender, reached the Americans and “two of our machine guns opened up and slaughtered the whole group.”  Hecht secretly protested by never firing his rifle in combat, which merely intensified his guilt for dereliction of duty and failing to protect his comrades.

Worst of all was his horrific confrontation in April 1945 with the Flossenbürg concentration camp in the Bavarian forest near the Czech border.  He’d learned German, had been transferred to the Counter Intelligence Corps and interrogated Nazi prisoners to extract information for use in their war-crime trials.  The other soldiers tended the sick and buried the piled-up bodies of the dead.  After surviving the war in Europe, he was sent to the Pacific to take part in the potentially bloody invasion of Japan, but was finally saved when America exploded the atomic bomb.

Psychologically frail and shell-shocked after he’d watched his friends being blown up, Hecht suffered his first nervous breakdown in 1947, was hospitalised and treated with drugs.  A poet-friend wrote that Hecht “stopped writing, dried up completely, and was very shaky and dark about himself and about life”.  His father’s visit, against doctor’s orders, made things even worse.  His father seemed pleased that his son was now the sick one and, Hecht bitterly commented, “his grin was terrible, almost triumphant, I was revolted.  We exchanged no words.”

Now, two decades after his death, Hecht’s first biography has appeared: Late Romance: Anthony Hecht—A Poet’s Life (St. Martin’s Press, 469 pp., $40). The misleading title Late Romance applies only to the last quarter of this biography (the publicists may have wanted a more upbeat title).  Hecht’s intelligent soulmate, the poet David Yezzi, unveils the life in a clear, incisive style.  He’s especially good on the nourishing influence of the Bible and Shakespeare on Hecht’s poetry, on relating the poems to the major events of his life and on Hecht’s disastrous first marriage.

Psychologically wounded by war, Hecht had no serious love affairs before he married the stunning model Pat Harris in 1954.  Unlike the gloomy and depressed poet, Pat was exuberant and funny, attractive and flirtatious, promiscuous and emasculating.  Peter Matthiesen declared “I don’t like to stand in line” to sleep with her.  After her miscarriage with their unwanted child, Hecht wrote about his unborn infant in “The Origin of Centaurs”: “In the third month, a sudden flow of blood . . . blood of my blood, nearly my child.”  The Jamaican poet Louis Simpson had satirised Hecht and Pat in North of Jamaica, his roman à clef. He put the knife in again by emphasising her infidelity in a poem: “But when he woke and woke alone / He wept and would deny / The loose behavior of the bone / And the immodest thigh.”

The marriage ended with the birth of Pat’s second son, Adam, whose paternity was uncertain.  Hecht knew he was not the father, but raised the boy as his own son.  When Pat left Hecht she literally cleaned him out, taking his baby grand piano, though she couldn’t play a note, and all but $500 in their joint bank account.  He bitterly and poignantly observed that though his marriage had been painfully unhappy “from the start, its failure was a terrible blow to my self-esteem, and it was not I who sought to terminate it.  When it was over I invested all my frustrated familial feelings on the two boys whom I saw, like most divorced fathers, on weekends, making those days unhealthily emotional, and completely without any ease or naturalness.”  Like most New York divorced fathers, he never again wanted to see the Central Park zoo and playground, which he turned into instruments of torture:

And certain sandpits, slides, swings, monkey bars

Became the old thumbscrews of spoiled affection

And agonized aversion.

Pregnant with her daughter, Pat soon married a fabulously wealthy Belgian baron.  Contravening their legal agreement to live close to New York so Hecht could see the boys regularly, she transported them into her European whirlwind of chauffeurs and chalets. Using the boys as emotional hostages, she insouciantly remarked: “Of course, you have a legal right to make me stay here; but if you do, I will be very unhappy, and if I’m unhappy, the children will be, too.”  Even if she’d left the boys with him, he couldn’t have taken care of them by himself.  In 1961, when Hecht’s marriage collapsed and he lost his sons, he had a second nervous breakdown.  Despite his best efforts, he became estranged from his older son Jason, who never fully recovered from the divorce.  Jason took drugs, “was a mess”, and though his stepfather was extremely rich, frequently hit the guilty Hecht for money.  Jason did not cooperate in this biography and is not thanked in the Acknowledgments.

Hecht’s poetry was often compared to the work of his close contemporary Richard Wilbur (1921-2017).  In his verse tribute to Hecht, Wilbur alluded to Horace’s dulce et utile and wrote: “How style and agile intellect / Can both instruct and greatly please.”  In one of his five letters to me (signed Anthony Hecht, Anthony and Tony) he wrote that Robert Frost “was almost a solitary defender of formal poetic values during the Modernist period when formal practices were being widely trashed.”  Yezzi sharply notes that in the late 1960s “free verse, long in ascendance, had become the dominant mode, and poets who availed themselves of the music of traditional prosody were viewed by some as crusty and out-of-touch (at best) or anti-Democratic and reactionary.” It’s unfortunate that no poet writing today has the technical skill of Hecht and Wilbur, and that so much of contemporary poetry sounds like prose in broken lines.

Hecht believed that “poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions.  It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch’s brew,” and he tried to do justice to the horrors of existence he had seen and suffered.  In “ ‘More Light! More Light!’ ” he returned to Goethe and the dark German wood.  The German poet spoke these famous last words, echoing God’s creation of the world with “Let there be light,” as his illustrious life faded into the darkness of death.  Yezzi calls it an “excruciating poem of murder, coercion and moral compromise”.

Hecht was the deserving recipient of a golden rain of awards, prizes and honours at a time when these things were actually based on merit.  He had two stimulating stays at the American Academy in Rome, and settled comfortably into the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, the Bogliasco Center near Genoa and the super-luxurious Bellagio Center on Lake Como.  He won a Fulbright, two Guggenheims, two Ford Fellowships and the coveted Pulitzer Prize for The Hard Hours (1988).  He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, became Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and was the two-term Poet Laureate of America in the early 1980s.  He won grants and a $10,000 fellowship from the Hudson Review, the Eugenio Montale Prize and the spectacular Dorothea Tanning Prize of $100,000.  En route, he taught at the Salzburg Seminars and picked up three honorary doctorates.  He repaid all this bounty with superb poetry.

Hecht never found a satisfactory teaching position.  He spent three years (1956-59) at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.  But he thought the place had a “dead-end feeling” and found the faculty, with one minor exception, “pathetic and unpleasant”.  This is surprising since his extraordinary colleagues at the small college included the distinguished critics Daniel Aaron and Newton Arvin; the artist and rare-books printer Leonard Baskin, who became a close friend and inspiring collaborator at the Gehenna Press; and, above all, the young Ted Hughes and his not-yet-famous wife Sylvia Plath, who should have been his natural allies.  After Plath’s death Hecht expressed his “dislike of her as vain, malicious, envious and monstrously self-indulgent.  Many people’s lives have been far more warped by misery than hers, without their lapsing into such terrible self-pity.”  Hecht, who often felt self-pity, thought he was just as miserable as Plath and a worthier candidate for the most-wretched Kafka award.

In 1962 he returned to Bard, his alma mater, which had fewer than 500 students, and escaped to his Manhattan flat at weekends.  Dissatisfied with the low-level teaching, poor salary and lack of promotion,  in 1969 he got a job at the University of Rochester.  But he felt banished, like Ovid on the Black Sea, in the frozen gulag of upstate New York, with only a barbed-wire fence between him and the North Pole.  The city was provincial and depressing, the students boring to teach.

In 1985 he was rescued by a job at the Catholic Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.  But trapped once again, he found the faculty dull and the poetry students untalented.  Outrageously severe in his Shakespeare class, he awarded 15 F’s to a cadre of 41 students, but couldn’t possibly have gotten away with it.  The failures would surely have stampeded to the Dean and forced him to retract.  Hecht said his full-blown detestation of the Georgetown University English department was provoked by the “embattled, intransigent factions demanding exclusive allegiance in behalf of their own mostly ideological agendas: feminism, black studies, gay studies, prison literature, deconstruction, structuralism, disestablishmentarianism, all manner of angry causes that were only marginally related to literature.”

Still emotionally wounded and wary, Hecht had a brief affair with a married woman on Fire Island; and another, doomed to failure, with a rabid Scientologist.  He had intense but chaste relations with the poet Anne Sexton, whom he felt “was too much like Pat—self-involved, high-strung, a professional model.”  Sexton defensively responded, “I wasn’t talking about fucking.”  He later said no-sex Sexton had the same faults as Plath: both exploited “their hospitalisations and periods of dementia.”

In 1971 he met his former Smith student, the editor and decorator Helen D’Alessandro, fell in love with her immediately and married her two months later.  His second marriage, the antithesis of the first, was joyous, and he exclaimed, “My real life—that is, the life that means most to me—only began in 1971; what went before was either painful or negligible; what followed after became increasingly fine and valuable and happy.”  The following year he had a third son, Evan (his own middle name), and developed a loving relationship with him.  Love poems poured out, including one for a friend about apples:

The dearest curves in nature—the merest ripple,

The cresting wave—release

All our love, and find it in an apple

My Helen, your Elisse.

Always sensitive to criticism, Hecht was crushed when his great friend Joseph Brodsky published a negative and rather misguided comment on his poem “See Naples and Die”.  But he compensated for this solecism by calling Hecht “the best poet writing in English today” and added that he “would like to be as perfect as Hecht and Wilbur.”  Hecht’s elegy for Brodsky, who died aged just 55, admired his heroic endurance of personal pain:

Reader, dwell with his poems.  Underneath

Their gaiety and music, note the chilled strain

Of irony, of felt and mastered pain,

The sound of someone laughing through clenched teeth.

By contrast, his old enemy Louis Simpson and the critic Helen Vendler offered perfect examples of academic jealousy and spite.  Though Hecht was an accomplished and dramatic reader of his poems, Simpson squashed his invitation to read at Berkeley by claiming that Hecht suffered from a pronounced speech defect and would be humiliated by a public reading.  Vindictive and sometimes tin-eared, Vendler blocked Hecht’s nomination for an Academy of American Poets’ Gold Medal so that she could push forward her less talented epigones.

Old friends can get very touchy in lonely old age and sever relations when many companions have died.  In 1990 Hecht asked his dear friend William MacDonald, a historian of Roman architecture, why he hadn’t corrected the errors in Hecht’s poem “The Cost” before it was published in a book.  MacDonald said that since it was “only” a poem, it didn’t have to be factually accurate.  Yezzi notes that his response “disappointed and enraged Hecht, who felt both betrayed and condescended to.”  After an acrimonious phone call, the former friends lapsed into a permanent silence.  Toward the end of his life Hecht suffered a series of illnesses: deafness, a weak heart that needed a steel stent, kidney failure that required dialysis, and pancreatic cancer that finally proved fatal.  It was amazing that he lived to 81.

Hecht’s poetry has striking images and exalted themes, penetrating intelligence and impressive learning, profound ideas and moral vision.  He’s been praised for his brilliant formalist technique, his sophisticated tone and language, his intricate metrics and rhymes.  In a kind of controlled disorder, his art makes a chaotic world coherent.

Jeffrey Meyers will publish James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist on February 7, 2024 and Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath in August or September 2024, both with Louisiana State University Press.

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