Hecht's Hard Hours and Hard Lessons

On David Yezzi's Biography of Anthony Hecht

David Yezzi’s biography of Anthony Hecht has received significant attention since its release in the fall of 2023. I recently finished it, so I thought I would offer a brief review and a few links to some insightful, fuller pieces on the biography.

Not all poets had interesting lives. Hecht did by any measure. His first publications appeared in his high school lit journal (common enough)…alongside the writings of a hard-partying football standout with a literary streak named Jack Kerouac. Dr. Seuss was an acquaintance of the Hecht family. While studying at the University of Iowa, Hecht once went on a double date with Flannery O’Connor. (Hecht’s buddy Robie Macauley was O’Connor’s date.) In Paris, he competed with Marlon Brando, who had broken through on the stage but not yet on the big screen, for the attention of a model. And she chose Hecht! Here’s Yezzi: “Cici was flirty with Brando, but she preferred Hecht’s more refined company.” As an apprentice writer, Hecht studied with John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon and Allen Tate at NYU and played charades with W.H. Auden on the island of Ischia. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath were frenemies during his time at Smith College. In later life, his students included Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen and the actor Chevy Chase. The latter became a good friend.

But “interesting” is an ambiguous term, and Hecht’s life was also full of struggles, tragedy, and trauma. He grew up in New York City in a wealthy and cultured, but also downwardly mobile, family. The home of his childhood and youth was never a particularly happy one. Some of his earliest memories were of a sadistic nanny. In high school, where he had finally found a comfortable community, a nasty English teacher used Shakespeare as an excuse to deliver anti-Semitic diatribes. His parents were often aloof, at times dismissive of his talents and literary ambitions, focused instead on his sickly younger brother Roger. His father struggled in business and struggled mightily with mental health issues. At one point, an undergraduate Anthony had to leave Bard College, one of the few other happy havens of his life, because of worries that his father, who had gone missing, might try to abduct him. Anthony had his own mental struggles even before his service in World War II. This service included some hard fighting in the closing months of the war, and Hecht’s unit also helped free the Flossenbürg concentration camp. Hecht, skilled in German, interviewed the survivors and the captured Nazis. Nightmares tormented him for many years, and he long struggled with PTSD. His first marriage was ill-matched and ended in failure…calamity might actually be a better word.

But then, amidst a dark midlife, Hecht reconnected with his former Smith College student Helen D’Alessandro, who claimed to have loved him since freshman English class. They soon married and lived out the happiest of marriages until Hecht’s death. Hence, the “late Romance” of Yezzi’s title, with an intended Shakespearean double meaning.

It is a gripping biography. As one would expect, Yezzi is especially insightful on Hecht’s development as a poet. Yezzi’s own wisdom as a poet and a teacher of poetry often shines through. Consider this remark that Yezzi offers after Auden and the young Hecht have their first long conversation about the latter’s poetry:

Their meeting was cordial, despite the two not seeing eye to eye on certain fundamental aspects of poetry, a disagreement that went largely unspoken at the time. Younger poets, in order to become truly accomplished, must hold strong convictions, even if they later recant them—something that Auden himself must have understood.

Yezzi offers illuminating, albeit brief, readings of many poems and of Hecht’s poetic practice in general. For instance, Yezzi claims that Hecht’s many “biblical poems are a midrash: they interpret the ancient narratives in a modern context, in ways that shed light both on the original verses and on their meanings for a modern reader.”

There are tantalizing asides about Hecht’s intellectual influences beyond poetry. This is where I often would have liked more from the biography. Hecht was friends with Hannah Arendt, for instance, and read her work with interest. I’d love to know if there are annotations in Hecht’s copy of The Human Condition.

In the final paragraph of his biography, Yezzi concludes, “The music of Shakespeare brought [Hecht] back from desolations after the war, and the music of the Bible sustained him through emotional and spiritual crises.” I have pondered this conclusion in the days since I finished the biography. Yezzi shows that Hecht tried not only to write morally serious poetry but to live a morally serious life. These aims were, of course, inextricably bound up with each other and with Hecht’s reading. One of the perennial questions of literary criticism is whether reading literature leads to moral growth. Posed in this broad way (as is often the case), the question is somewhat hopeless, with endless arguments and counter-arguments, evidence and counter-evidence. (Hecht knew well-read yet murderous Nazis firsthand.) What matters most is how one approaches literature. What is one reading? How receptive is one to it? What questions does one ask and in what fashion? What kind of reflection and self-reflection does the reading facilitate? How does reading relate to other life practices and disciplines? Hecht’s life sheds some light, I think, on how one can read literature in morally serious and morally formative ways.

Steven Knepper edits New Verse Review.

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Elijah Perseus Blumov offers his own reflections on the biography in this episode of his excellent Versecraft podcast. Blumov goes on to offer an insightful close reading of Hecht’s unsettling narrative poem “The End of the Weekend,” from his collection The Hard Hours, which won a Pulitzer in 1976 and catapulted him to literary fame.

Ernest Hilbert interviews Yezzi about the biography in Literary Matters. The interview ranges from the genesis of the project to the process of writing it to Yezzi’s own poetry. Here is an excerpt:

I think the biggest revelations for me had to do with Hecht’s Army service, and the way in which his experiences in training, combat, and at the liberation of Flossenbürg concentration camp haunted him for the rest of his life. I knew, of course, his great poems about the war and the Holocaust—“‘More Light! More Light!’”, “‘It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You, Avoid It.’”, “Still Life,” “The Book of Yolek,” and passages from “The Venetian Vespers”—but I was surprised to find the same motivating traumas underlying a great many of his poems. McClatchy had noted, and Hecht had talked about, the presence of war trauma and childhood trauma in “A Hill.” I learned that it runs through much of his work.

There have been many reviews of A Late Romance. Most of them run through the same quirky details I note above (Kerouac, Brando, Steely Dan). I found Adam Kirsch’s review in The New Criterion to be particularly insightful. Here is its closing paragraph:

Perhaps the best gauge of that [marital] happiness is that Yezzi spends some three hundred pages on Hecht’s first four decades, but needs just a hundred pages for his last three. Yezzi says that in his final months, after a lifetime of writing difficult poems on difficult subjects, Anthony Hecht “wished to acknowledge his gratitude for the good fortune that came to him after the traumas of his youth, the way that tragedy sometimes resolves unexpectedly as comedy.” As readers of poets’ biographies know, such happy endings are as rare as they are gratifying.