INTRODUCTION
Recognition and Reversal
per·i·pe·’tei·a: noun, formal, a sudden reversal
of fortune or change in circumstances …
Anthony Hecht came to a turning point in his life in 1967, when he was in his mid-forties. He had not published a book of poems in thirteen years. His first marriage had ended. His memories of World War II still nagged at him, its traumas close to the surface. His life in New York City, where he had been raised, was coming to a close. Never completely at home as a child, now he was without a home, a physical and spiritual exile; it was a period he looked back on as “the hard hours.”
Things had been bleak for a long time. Several years earlier, his wife, Pat, had divorced him and taken their two young sons to live with her new husband in Belgium. Hecht broke down. Losing his sons was more than he could bear. In 1961, he checked himself into Gracie Square Hospital, near the East River, where three months of Thorazine treatments made him dull and groggy. His family’s medical history would have given his doctors pause. During the Depression, his father fell into despair and attempted suicide. (He would make several attempts over the years.) And there were other childhood anxieties, chiefly caused by the chronic illness of his brother, Roger, whose epileptic seizures prompted mysterious, upsetting treatments.
As a Private First Class in Germany, he had served as a translator at the liberation of Flossenbürg Concentration Camp, near the Czech border, an hour’s drive from his Jewish great-grandfather’s hometown of Buttenheim. His company had passed right through it, a horrible homecoming. What he saw in that camp and in combat ruined his sleep. He would “wake up shrieking,” and these nightmares persisted for the rest of his life.1 He “experienced a very profound and fully conscious sense of guilt at surviving when others, including friends, had not.”2 This guilt was compounded by a secret that Hecht harbored, which he spoke of only once: a confession about the war that he kept to himself for nearly thirty years.
All of this weighed on him, so much so that he feared he would go mad.3 Forty-three, bearded, and both playful and brooding, he was finishing his final semester of teaching at his alma mater, Bard College, before taking up a new post at the University of Rochester. The move caused many ripples: geographic, professional, cultural, and—importantly—meteorological. (Hecht took puckish delight in lambasting Rochester for its punishing winters, even skewering the city in a satiric sestina.4) Personally, he was at loose ends: an itinerant professor-poet, single, and, though widely acknowledged by his peers, relatively unsung. But everything in his life was about to change—and, blessedly, for the better.
He had just completed a new book of poems called The Hard Hours. The new poems were blistering, more forthright than his previous collection and roiled by misgivings. For the first time in his life, under intense emotional strain, Hecht wrote poems of “absolute raw simplicity and directness.”5 The fluent, at times fulsome, ornamentation of his first collection, A Summoning of Stones, was simplified, as if worn down, by grief. The Hard Hours won the Pulitzer Prize for 1968.
Hecht’s ultimate reversal—his peripeteia, as he termed it, after Aristotle—remained just over the horizon. True, the prize had bolstered his reputation and his career. He was much in demand for readings, and further honors followed. But Hecht described the most profound change, when it came, as a rebirth. He acknowledged that, like Ferdinand, saved from drowning in Shakespeare’s late romance The Tempest, he had “received a second life.”6 In March 1971, Hecht met Helen D’Alessandro, a young editor at the publishing house of Walker and Company. Or, rather, they met again after many years; Helen had been his student at Smith College. They married three months later.
Both felt as if something supernatural had intervened. Helen had been in love with Hecht since college. After their marriage, the two were seldom apart: they traveled together to readings and lectures, and, after Hecht’s retirement in 1990, to Venice each summer. At their wedding, lines from The Tempest were read out in the courtyard garden of Helen’s apartment on East 94th Street:
Look down, you gods,
And on this couple drop a blessèd crown;
For it is you, that have chalk’d forth the way
Which brought us hither!
Visitors to Hecht’s grave at Bard College can see a selection of these words carved there, backgrounded by a field of green.
In public, Hecht came across like one of his own poems—formal on first acquaintance, at times even dandyish, but with a fraught inner life. His eyes gleamed with wit, and he could be raucously funny, but he was slow to reveal this side of himself and then only to trusted friends. His personal style was essentially professorial, but with an aristocratic bearing and flare: a pocket square; a bow tie; a neat, Renaissance-style beard, and swept-back hair.7 To those who did not know him well, he could appear intimidating. An interview from 1982, when he was US Poet Laureate, attests to his keen self-awareness: “I think I am a moody, generally good-natured person with an impish sense of humor, subject to occasional fits of melancholy and self-doubt, troubled by the standard vanities and fears that go with being a poet.”8
Then there was his accent, a mid-Atlantic lilt that struck some American ears as mandarin or even British.9 One acquaintance, Nancy Lewis, wife of the critic R. W. B. Lewis, described it as resembling an English public school boy’s accent; she wondered if it weren’t a protective measure.10 It also may have been a way of fitting in:
I’ve heard my voice recorded and by now I feel it sounds like me. Doubtless it’s a mask of some sort; a fear or shame of something, very likely of being Jewish, a matter I am no longer in the least ashamed of, though once it was a painful embarrassment.11
Part of it was the stage actor in him, a voice he developed as a young man performing in plays; his manner was a choice he made, a product of self-creation. His younger brother, Roger, by contrast, sounded exactly like a born-and-bred New Yorker.
Hecht’s surfaces could be deceiving. As he puts it in The Hidden Law, his book on W. H. Auden, “everything that counts is well veiled.”12 He would never write “confessional” poems like his friends or colleagues W. D. Snodgrass, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. “I work at disguising the autobiographical,” he told one reporter.13 “What I hope to do,” he told another, “is to conceal my identity by putting it into a whole cast of characters in which the reader can’t tell who the real Anthony Hecht is.” He saw how Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens “contrived to deal with very personal, sometimes emotionally devastating matters in their poetry. In Frost’s case this is well recognized, even when he took certain precautions.”14 Hecht was “urged by the same sort of tact and discretion” to avoid raw disclosure. A slight scuffing of the surface, however, reveals the searingly personal.15 “There are, after all, poets, like Frost, whose poems are remarkably intimate, once you crack their codes,” he acknowledged.16
Like Frost, Hecht became a poet with a key. In his poems, “a bleak and forlorn landscape” could “assemble and convey a deep sense of despair.”17 Into seemingly offhand images, Hecht could encode the carnage of war. “Death the Whore,” for example, unfolds beneath a sky of “German silver,”18 a column of smoke rising.19 “Still Life” ends abruptly with an act of re-experiencing typical of post-traumatic stress; the speaker is transported in an instant from a peaceful natural setting to standing “somewhere in Germany, / A cold, wet, Garand rifle in my hands.”20 Several autobiographical undercurrents animate “The Venetian Vespers,” including a father’s mysterious disappearance.21
Hecht understood the complex connections between a poet’s life and work. His lengthy appreciation of Auden, which came pouring out of him after his retirement from teaching, led him to the conclusion that “it may ultimately be impossible to pluck out the core of the mystery of any man after his death.”22 But Hecht, like Frost before him, left clues. They are there, often beneath a layer of leaves and twigs, in the dank landscapes of his poems. His life holds essential keys; turning them opens realms at once “impersonal” (in the sense that T. S. Eliot praised) and deeply felt. Hecht never broadcast his pain, nor did he succumb to it. Writing poetry brought him joy. After long suffering came a reversal, almost as an act of grace. And the poems tell this story, too. No poet of the twentieth century has better expressed the trauma to the American psyche caused by the Second World War, a horror deepened by his experience of his own German Jewish heritage as well as the bitter legacy of antisemitism he encountered in his youth. No American poet has expressed such traumas so exquisitely, steeped in the language of Shakespeare and the Bible, and fluent in the fine arts of painting, music, and drama. His poems are an indelible record of suffering and joy, darkness and light.
Copyright © 2023 by David Yezzi