Revising Intention
Philip Hoy: Anthony Hecht in Conversation. London: Between the Lines.
During the first half of the century, biography was viewed as a sub-intellectual genre, a suspicious undertaking which damaged rather than illuminated the work of the artist. Eliot’s assertion that personality should not influence poetry meant that the details of a writer’s life were at best irrelevant, at worst a titillating distraction from the formal achievement of art. The life, like the work, “should not mean, but be”.
Despite the inarguably “literary” quality of recent biographies by Jon Stallworthy, Hermione Lee, and Roy Foster, the label still carries a slightly pejorative ring within academe. An entertaining illustration of this point occurs in A.S. Byatt’s Possession, in which Dr Maud Bailey refuses to acknowledge her role as biographer:
‘I’m writing about Christabel La Motte.’
‘Ah,’ said Lady Bailey. ‘A biography. How interesting.’
‘As a matter of fact, it isn’t a biography. It’s a critical study.’
What upsets Maud is the idea – perhaps a Modernist hangover – that biographers are somehow not “real” scholars. What upsets the Academy about biography is that it sells: ergo biographers are sell-outs. Ezra Pound’s feeling that his “naughty boyography” would prove more sensational (and profitable) than his poetry underscores the kind of intellectual condescension the genre still wrestles with today.
Perhaps it is for this reason that Anthony Hecht in Conversation opens on a defensive note: “Some would deny that any useful purpose is served by putting questions to a writer which are not answered by that writer’s books”. Philip Hoy challenges this idea by insisting that it is “impossible to know too much” about a writer you love. This is a somewhat romantic way of stating what literary biographers have long argued: intention is not meaning, yet it can illuminate meaning. And indeed, this study does shed light on much of Hecht’s work. At 118 pages, it lies somewhere between interview and memoir – perhaps the closest we will ever come to knowing Hecht, who has no intention of writing an autobiography. For this reason the “conversation” is all the more valuable, and will surely provide thesis fodder for decades to come.
Yet for all its cleverness, insightful questioning, and erudite testimony, Anthony Hecht in Conversation is somewhat misleading. For it is not, in fact, a conversation. Instead it is a long letter, conducted entirely by post and fax over a period of ten months – not, as the title suggests, face to face and within the span of a few hours. This may seem a trivial point, especially when one allows that a word like “conversation” often stretches the boundaries of its own definition. Yet the fact that both Hoy’s and Hecht’s words were written, not spoken, means that we are essentially reading preconceived answers to preconceived questions. The effect is somewhat like learning that what you thought was a spontaneous photograph had in fact been staged.
Hoy initially sent Hecht one hundred questions by post and asked that he complete his side of the interview within six months. To Hoy’s amazement, Hecht returned the completed manuscript within a few weeks, accompanied by the following note:
I have had much pleasure writing my part of this interview. So
much so that, while I abandoned my typescript of it when we
went abroad for two weeks to Italy, it haunted me enough that I made notes for it in Venice, and returned home with a number of touches that I think may give pleasure... Perhaps we should regard the enclosed pages as a “first draft”, subject to as much revision as you think is warranted.
Notes? Drafts? Revision? Surely this is not a free-flowing dialogue in which the interviewer, by asking the right question at the right moment, might bring the writer’s unplumbed depths to light. And yet, despite the time and distance involved, Hoy often manages to do just that. His questions are polished and probing; his tone persuasive rather than insistent. The strategy works. For example, when Hoy delicately broaches the subject of Hecht’s wartime experiences in Germany, the poet is moved to relate one of his greatest traumas: the slaughter of a group of German women and children who approached his army unit from the enemy position, “waving flags of surrender fixed to staves and broom handles”. After a moment of silent deliberation, his fellow soldiers shot the entire group, then spent the rest of the day nervously justifying the massacre. The event left the poet permanently sickened, as did the liberation of the concentration camp Flossenburg, near Buchenwald: “For years after I would wake screaming”.
The revelation of such traumas surely helps to explain the bleak vision and “defeated landscapes” of a volume like The Hard Hours. This is the point where the details of a life illuminate the intention of a work, and hence where this book is at its best. It succeeds in giving us a glimpse into what Ford Madox Ford called “the literary personality” – the mind of the intellectual at work, called above his domestic, social and professional duties. Thus we encounter Hecht pondering the link between poetry and mental illness, recounting his discussions with Auden, or denouncing American English departments and the “French disease”. Remarkably, the narrative does begin to feel like a conversation – familiar and directionless enough to convey the impression of the spoken word. It is only when we encounter quotation after literary quotation that one remembers this is carefully pruned prose rather than raw, transcribed speech. The use of quotation is impressive, though it seems Hecht sometimes uses others’ words as a shield to deflect deeper probing – one wishes to hear more of Hecht and less of Weil, Ruskin, Blake, Bishop, and Matisse. One would also like to see more intellectual sparring; Hecht’s “answers” are almost too agreeable, and as a result the text lacks a certain tension. Finally, the book is suspiciously free of begrudgery; nearly all Hecht’s accounts of fellow poets (such as Auden, Tate, Wright, Sexton, Plath, and Hughes) are courteous and admiring. One wonders whether a real conversation might have caught him more off-guard.
The advantage of writing, rather than giving, an interview is of course aesthetic: Hecht’s prose is subtle and moving, with none of dialogue’s rough edges. If one reads this narrative as self-portrait rather than interview, there is little to disclaim. Philip Hoy might just have developed a new biographical genre – without selling out.
Page(s) 75-77
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The