Poetry After Flossenbürg

In the spring of 1945 Anthony Hecht found himself in Buttenheim, the small town in central Germany from which his great-grandfather had emigrated to America in the middle of the nineteenth century. Having been transferred from an infantry unit to the Counter Intelligence Corps, which required his skills as a translator, Hecht was on his way to Flossenbürg in the Oberpfalz Mountains of Bavaria, near the Czech border. Although relieved to be out of the firing line, he found the horrors awaiting him in Flossenbürg concentration camp even more traumatizing than the two weeks of combat that he had experienced as part of the Allied advance east. “When we arrived,” he told Philip Hoy in 1998, in a book-length interview published in Hoy’s excellent Between the Lines series,

the SS personnel had, of course, fled…. Since I had the rudiments of French and German, I was appointed to interview such French prisoners as were well enough to speak, in the hope of securing evidence against those who ran the camp. Later, when some of these were captured, I presented them with the charges levelled against them…. The place, the suffering, the prisoners’ accounts were beyond comprehension. For years after I would wake shrieking.

It was in Flossenbürg, David Yezzi writes in Late Romance, his sensitive and well-researched biography of the poet, that German shepherds were trained to savage the genitals of stripped and spread-eagled male prisoners in a competition known as the X-game, a practice that was then adopted in other camps. A few weeks before Hecht arrived on April 28, some 15,000 of the surviving prisoners had been evacuated, and indeed it was the stench of the decaying bodies of those who failed to survive the rigors of this death march that first alerted the 97th Infantry Division to the existence of the camp. The report of Hecht’s unit, which he may have written, records:

Bodies of once healthy men were now skeletons of bones covered with taut, yellowish colored skin. Many had died with their eyes wide open staring into space as if they were seeing over and over again all the torture the Germans had put them through—their mouths open, gasping for that last breath that might keep them alive. All of them were nude and as they died fellow prisoners carried them through the fence to the incinerator where they were stacked. The stench was unbearable.

Testimony such as this became part of the evidence for the prosecution in the Dachau trials that began the following summer, which resulted in fifteen death sentences for those involved in running the camp.

Hecht was twenty-two at the time, and not an eager combatant. Forced to interrupt his studies at Bard, where he’d been devoting his time to reading and writing poetry, he found army training stupefying and action itself best summed up by the popular GI acronym FUBAR—Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. He gave a grim example of the latter to Hoy in their immensely informative interview. In the lull after an exchange of fire with German troops, his company spied a group of women and small children approaching them, waving white flags tied to staves and broom handles:

They came slowly, the children retarding their advance. They had to descend the small incline that lay between their height and ours. When they were about half way, and about to climb the slope leading to our position, two of our machine guns opened up and slaughtered the whole group.

Witnessing this massacre by anxious, frightened conscripts left him “without the least vestige of patriotism or national pride”—and indeed he confessed to his second wife, Helen, that even during fierce fighting he never aimed at the enemy, either firing over their heads or not firing at all.

These traumatic experiences barely register at all, however, in Hecht’s first collection of poems, A Summoning of Stones (1954). Only a handful of its thirty poems, such as “Japan,” “Christmas Is Coming,” “Drinking Song,” and “A Deep Breath at Dawn,” gesture toward his nearly three years in the army. In “Japan” he contrasts the clichés imbibed during his childhood about Japanese acrobats and delicate paper flowers that unfold in water with the warnings issued by the War Department—beware the “treachery compounding in their brains/Like mating weasels,” “remember Pearl and Wake” (the December 1941 attacks on Pearl Harbor and Wake Island).

The more visceral “Christmas Is Coming” obliquely recreates the experience of crawling through undergrowth in bitter weather, probably with a rifle, staying low: “Keep to the frozen ground or else be killed.” This line encapsulates the reticence that pervades much of Hecht’s first volume, for it is itself more or less frozen, an artful and unmoving confection of baroque conceits issued by an aspirant poet searching for an idiom in a decade that specialized in elaborately well-wrought urns and pastorals far chillier than any imagined by Keats.

It is astonishing to trace how New Critical directives of the sort propounded by Hecht’s mentors John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate could embalm what were presumably powerful or memorable experiences in a baffling display of irony and allusion. “Drinking Song,” for instance, appears to be about billeting in some German mansion after a firefight that cost the lives of five of the speaker’s comrades-in-arms, and it at least makes room for a single line of band-of-brothers banter—“I’ll be around to leak over your grave”—only to withdraw instantly and sardonically into the echoing caverns of the literary tradition:

And Durendal, my only Durendal,
Thou hast preserved me better than a sword;
Rest in the enemy umbrella stand
While that I measure out another drink.
I am beholden to thee, by this hand,
This measuring hand. We are beholden all.

Durendal was the name of the sword wielded by the hero of the medieval chanson de geste The Song of Roland and is presumably here applied to Hecht’s Garand rifle (the one he refused to fire). Battle fatigue, shell shock, survivor’s guilt, and the longing to escape the memory of combat through alcohol faintly haunt these lines, but one is above all conscious of the crushing weight of modernism on those writing in its aftermath.

Much, indeed, of A Summoning of Stones reads like a pastiche of Wallace Stevens, W.B. Yeats, and W.H. Auden. The relevant influence is often frankly advertised, as in a title such as “Le Masseur de Ma Soeur” (echoing Stevens’s “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”). While Hecht appears to have set about parroting their locutions and style as a means of demonstrating his fitness to enter the lists of modern poetry, the expert ventriloquizing throughout ends up suggesting just the sort of vulnerability that one doesn’t find in his confident modernist masters. In this he resembles the ghostly soldier who returns in “A Deep Breath at Dawn,” which adopts the mode of Yeats’s elegy “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” to brood on the death of a comrade during the war. This friend is imagined appearing in Hecht’s garden one morning some six years later, a “poor, transparent thing,” his “chest showing a jagged vacancy/Through which I might admire the distant view.”

Despite the elaborate rhetoric in which the poem is encased, there is no Yeatsian dignifying of the revenant. Hecht rather callously confesses that they probably wouldn’t have much to say to each other, and surely the thought of admiring the view through his blown-away chest, even by the ruthlessly unsentimental standards of the New Critics, is somewhat unnerving. Yet it is precisely the transparency and inner vacancy of this ghost that look forward to the imaginative dynamics enacted in so much of Hecht’s subsequent poetry: the protagonists of nearly all of his long poems—such as “The Grapes,” “The Short End,” “The Venetian Vespers,” “See Naples and Die,” and “The Transparent Man”—suffer from an analogous sense of vulnerability and hollowness, and it is through the “jagged vacancy” shared by these characters that Hecht develops vista after vista, unleashing a mania for description that evokes the dramatic monologues of Tennyson and Browning more insistently than the work of their modernist descendants.

While A Summoning of Stones reveals little of its summoner and, for all its earnest wit and ingenuity, is pretty stony ground, its successor, The Hard Hours, published thirteen years later and awarded a Pulitzer Prize, immediately establishes a confiding relationship with the reader. Much had happened in American poetry between 1954 and 1967, and the volume’s opening poem, “A Hill,” addresses itself directly to “the plain bitterness of what I had seen.” Hecht rarely forsakes formal rigor for expressionist immediacy in the manner of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath (both of whom he knew), yet the pressure behind many of these poems is insistently personal.

“A Hill” relates an episode of catalepsy: the opening lines present a sunlit piazza in Italy, across which the narrator is sauntering with his friends, but this joyous scene suddenly and inexplicably dissolves into a childhood recollection of a hill in winter, “mole-colored and bare,” a visionary embodiment of “cold and silence/That promised to last forever.” This hill, he now remembers, “lies just to the left/Of the road north of Poughkeepsie; and as a boy/I stood before it for hours in wintertime.” Like a patient disclosing a formative memory to an analyst, the poet traces first the dissociation that overwhelmed him in Italy and then, a decade later, the equally involuntary recovery of the original experience that prompted his fit.

Not everything, as both Hecht’s interview with Hoy and this first biography by Yezzi make clear, can be blamed on the war. Hecht was born in 1923 to (initially) wealthy parents, both from German Jewish families. His hapless father, Melvyn, seems to have failed in every business venture on which he embarked and ended up attempting suicide several times, while his mother, Dorothea, lavished all her attention on Hecht’s younger brother, Roger, born three years later: from an early age Roger was prone to seizures and was eventually diagnosed with epilepsy, as well as a host of other ailments. Worse still, despite their declining fortunes, the Hechts employed to look after the boys a sadistic German governess who was “replete with the curious thumb-print of her race,” as Hecht puts it in his autobiographical poem “Apprehensions,” “that special relish for inflicted pain.”

While their circumstances may have seemed enviable to many who lived through the Depression—a large apartment on the Upper East Side, holidays to France and Switzerland, camp each summer in Maine—Hecht unambiguously describes his childhood as “unhappy.” Roger’s illness, his parents’ ongoing conflicts, Fräulein’s terrifying regime—which included beating him with a toy rake—left him with dismal convictions of the kind that one finds in the poetry of Philip Larkin: “Sex,” as Hecht puts it in “Apprehensions,” “was somehow wedded to disaster,” and “pleasure and pain were necessary twins.” Fräulein eventually vanishes from his life, but not from his imagination:

We two would meet in a darkened living room
Between the lines of advancing allied troops
In the Wagnerian twilight of the Reich.
She would be seated by a table, reading
Under a lamp-shade of the finest parchment.
She would look up and say, “I always knew
That you would come to me, that you’d come home.”

There’s no need to specify of what precisely that lamp shade’s parchment is made.

In the years following his time in the army—which included a six-month stint in Japan—Hecht read widely in Holocaust literature, and this reading often informs his poems. The second half of “‘More Light! More Light!’” (supposedly Goethe’s last words), for example, derives from an incident recounted in The Theory and Practice of Hell (1950) by the concentration camp survivor Eugen Kogon. It happened near Weimar, where Goethe lived, which is itself not far from Buchenwald:

We move now to outside a German wood.
Three men are there commanded to dig a hole
In which the two Jews are ordered to lie down
And be buried alive by the third, who is a Pole.

Not light from the shrine at Weimar beyond the hill
Nor light from heaven appeared. But he did refuse.
A Luger settled back deeply in its glove.
He was ordered to change places with the Jews.

This refusal precipitates the Pole’s own death, and, it goes without saying, his heroic act of defiance doesn’t save the two Jews from being buried alive either. The poem ends with one of Hecht’s many evocations of the industrial genocide carried out in Buchenwald and throughout the Reich: the black soot rising from the “mute/Ghosts from the ovens” is pictured settling on the eyes of the murdered Pole.

The long gestation of The Hard Hours was the result of many factors. The year A Summoning of Stones was published Hecht married Patricia Harris, just a few months after they’d met. Pat was only twenty and is described by Yezzi as exuding “a siren-like sex appeal that drew men to her in any room in which she set foot.” High-spirited, transgressive, an occasional model, not much interested in literature or poetry, she proved a disastrous choice, and Hecht later characterized their marriage as, like his childhood, “consistently unhappy.”

“Marriages come to grief in many ways” reflects the doomed husband of “See Naples and Die,” and theirs unraveled slowly but painfully over the second half of the 1950s. A son, Jason, was born in 1956, and two years later Pat gave birth to another son, Adam, but he, it seems, was the product of a brief fling with a man who has been identified only as “a sort of society guy” who would take Pat out for drives in his fancy sports car. Their divorce was finalized in 1961, and the following year Pat decamped with the boys to Europe, having married a Belgian aristocrat named Baron Philippe Lambert. Plunged into a deep depression, Hecht spent three months in Gracie Square Hospital on the Upper East Side, where he was put on the antipsychotic drug Thorazine; from there he wrote to Anne Sexton, with whom he had an intense but nonsexual relationship, “I feel sort of like a zombie, and nothing that happens seems important or interesting.”

The narrator of one of Hecht’s most memorable and harrowing poems, “Behold the Lilies of the Field,” is presented as recuperating in a medical facility. His monologue is repeatedly interrupted by an italicized voice attempting to soothe him—“That’s enough for now. Lie back. Try to relax”—or advising him to concentrate on the bowl of flowers in his room. The poem makes brilliant use of anachronism, for the bulk of it describes the torture and death of the Roman emperor Valerian, who was captured in 260 AD by the Persian king Shapur I. The speaker is an anonymous Roman soldier who has to witness Valerian being fitted with a metal collar, flogged, and then forced to get down on all fours and serve as a mounting block for the barbarian king. Finally, in a grand ceremony, the emperor is flayed alive, “As slowly as possible, to drag out the pain./And we were made to watch.”

After his slow and agonizing death, Valerian’s skin is tanned, sewn together, stuffed with straw, and suspended from the palace flagpole. “And with him,” comments the soldier, “passed away the honor of Rome.” In its trancelike lingering on the horrifying details of Valerian’s ordeal, the poem mimes the inexorable mental scenarios that torment the unwilling witness of atrocity.

Hecht was driven, as “Behold the Lilies of the Field” illustrates, to think long and hard about how poetry could deal with what he’d seen during his time in the army and with what he subsequently learned about the Nazi regime. His response to Theodor Adorno’s assertion that one can’t write poetry after Auschwitz is best encapsulated by a quote deployed in his 2003 essay on Auden, where he approvingly cites Edmond Jabès’s riposte: “Yes, one can. And furthermore, one must.”

Crosscutting between antiquity and the present had become, since The Waste Land, a staple device for twentieth-century poets, and in his most ambitious response to the Holocaust, “Rites and Ceremonies,” which took him over a year to complete, Hecht splices together quotations from numerous books of the Bible, such as Job, Ecclesiastes, Zechariah, Ezra, Isaiah, and Psalms, along with snippets from Goethe, Hopkins, George Herbert, King Lear, and Joachim du Bellay, to create a collage of suffering and persecution.

His decision to call the second section of this poem “The Fire Sermon” (the title of part 3 of The Waste Land) registers as a deliberate rebuke to Eliot, whose antisemitism seems here to be arraigned, along with that of many others. This four-part poem juxtaposes medieval mass hangings of Jews—who were deemed responsible for the Black Death—with scenes from a sixteenth-century carnival in Rome in which near-naked Jewish runners were whipped as they ran, and with an unflinching recreation of the gas chambers:

An old man is saying a prayer. And now we start
To panic, to claw at each other, to wail
As the rubber-edged door closes on chance and choice.
He is saying a prayer for all whom this room shall kill.

“Rites and Ceremonies” interleaves its tableaux of horror with Herbertian invocations of the divine and with the words of Old Testament prophets, whose sweeping cadences attempt to mitigate or at least render bearable the poem’s anatomy of prejudice, torture, and death. Religious mantras, as the poem ironically demonstrates, can of course be used in unholy ways: the poem’s opening strophe refers to Emmanuel, the Hebrew term for the Messiah, meaning literally “God is with us”—after which Hecht cuts to the belt buckle of a Wehrmacht soldier bearing the same phrase in German, Gott mit uns. Literary allusions are shown to be similarly double-edged: Goethe’s lyrical invocation of birds asleep in the woods in “Wanderer’s Night Song II” is juxtaposed with “The Singing Horses of Buchenwald,” the epithet bestowed by guards on prisoners laboring in a quarry not far from the cabin where Goethe’s poem was composed. Unlike Goethe’s birds, they could not fall silent, for the guards insisted that they chant as they worked.

Hecht’s life, as Yezzi recounts it, falls neatly into two halves: there is before he ran into his former student Helen D’Alessandro at the National Book Awards on March 4, 1971, and there is after. A whirlwind romance followed, and they were married in June. It’s a division that would, it seems, have been endorsed by Hecht himself, who happily reported in a letter nearly thirty years later that this second marriage proved all-transformative: “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.” Hecht was forty-eight when this vita nuova began, roughly the age at which Shakespeare composed his late plays now known as romances, such as The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest.

His first post-Helen collection, published in 1977 and dedicated to her, draws its epigraph from Ferdinand’s final speech in The Tempest: “Of whom I have/Receiv’d a second life.” The book’s title, Millions of Strange Shadows, also derives from Shakespeare, from Sonnet 53: “What is your substance, whereof are you made,/That millions of strange shadows on you tend?” This too is a tribute to his new wife, since the sonnet mentions Helen of Troy and concludes with a celebration of the beloved’s “constant heart.” And a further Shakespeare-inflected compliment is paid in the blank verse poem “Peripeteia,” in which the narrator attends a production of The Tempest and is amazed when “Miraculous Miranda”

                         steps from the stage,
Moves up the aisle to my seat, where she stops,
Smiles gently, seriously, and takes my hand
And leads me out of the theater, into a night
As luminous as noon, more deeply real,
Simply because of her hand, than any dream
Shakespeare or I or anyone ever dreamed.

Unlike most American poets born in the 1920s, Hecht was more than willing to accept and indeed dramatize the literariness of his means of experiencing the world: while, say, Lowell or Plath or Allen Ginsberg or Frank O’Hara encourage us to feel that they are breaking through bookish readings of life to life itself, and forged their distinctive idioms by jettisoning the template of the intricately constructed and elegantly self-ironizing lyric, replete with nods and winks to its poetic forebears, Hecht often made his poems into dialogues with writers and artists whom he admired. “Devotions of a Painter,” for example, is an homage to Claude Monet, “Coming Home” is quarried from passages in the journals of John Clare, and “A Love for Four Voices” is an Audenesque fantasia on A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Hecht did, however, resemble most poets of his generation in earning his living by teaching in America’s burgeoning English literature and creative writing departments. He was on the books, for varying periods, of Kenyon, Bard, Smith (where he became friendly with Plath and Ted Hughes, as well as with Leonard Baskin, the illustrator he shared with Hughes), Rochester (where he spent nearly twenty years), Washington University in St. Louis, Harvard, Yale, and finally Georgetown. Compounding his happiness with Helen and their son, Evan, were his friendships with almost every notable poet of his era (including Auden, James Wright, Joseph Brodsky—whom he translated—and Derek Walcott), as well as the praise of critics such as Harold Bloom. Cheering also must have been the seemingly incessant conferral of prestigious awards and prizes, of grants that made possible extended sojourns in Italy, of honorary degrees. From 1982 to 1984 Hecht was consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress—a position now designated as poet laureate. Young poets of a formalist bent, such as J.D. McClatchy, Nicholas Christopher, Brad Leithauser, and Mary Jo Salter, signaled the importance of his work to their own.

His most enduring discovery during the second half of his life was what he might achieve in the venerable Victorian genres of the dramatic monologue and the extended blank verse narrative. The best of these are included in The Venetian Vespers (1979) and The Transparent Man (1990). They are spoken by, or are about, various marginalized and unhappy characters, and to an extent resemble the New Yorker short stories of J.D. Salinger—who, like Hecht, was a New York–born Jew drafted to fight in World War II. In both Salinger’s early stories and Hecht’s later long poems, one experiences an unnamed trauma percolating through the layers of description, an ever-modulating tension between the careful registering of detail and setting and the never-quite-articulated raison d’être lying behind the fiction developed.

Why Seymour Glass decides to kill himself at the end of “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is famously left unexplained, and analogously Hecht’s reader is left asking what “jagged vacancy,” to return to the phrase used in “A Deep Breath at Dawn,” he is attempting to fill with his extensive descriptions of, say, the cushions collected by the alcoholic Shirley in “The Short End” or the extravagant evocation of the interior of St. Mark’s Basilica in “The Venetian Vespers”: “A heaven of coined and sequined light,/A splatter of gilt cobblestones, flung grains/Or crumbs of brilliance…a vermeil shimmering/Of fish-scaled, cataphracted golden plates.” Hecht lavishes on the mise-en-scènes created in his extended character studies and monologues an intensity frequently at odds with the life story each poem gradually unveils. And while it is not impossible that the speaker of “The Venetian Vespers,” who seems to have had little education (he enlisted for the war when only eighteen and was mustered out two and a half years later, classified as “mentally unsound”), might be capable of the fine Ruskinian writing that he here performs, it seems unlikely.

It was the element of the overwilled or voulu in one of these monologues that occasioned a spat with Brodsky, who reported himself unimpressed by “See Naples and Die”: “The verse has escaped the narrative,” he complained when Hecht submitted it for inclusion in a pamphlet Brodsky was assembling. “It meanders and promises far more than it delivers.” Hecht’s highfalutin response that this poem, on the surface about a disastrous holiday in Naples taken by a middle-aged couple who end up divorcing, was in fact a “commentary on the events in Genesis: the temptation, the fall, and the expulsion” is unpersuasive, but that doesn’t mean the poem is a failure or that Brodsky was right in advising Hecht to “ditch this piece altogether.” For while the disjunction between story and verse diagnosed by Brodsky is operative in nearly all of Hecht’s long poems (in a manner that is not true of, say, the monologues and narrative poems of Robert Frost), this dissonance can be seen as expressive of the conflicts that these poems dramatize and is itself a symptom of the “jagged vacancy” they attempt to fill.

From this angle, Hecht’s formal intricacies, his stately sonorities, his complex orchestrations of sound and color and light, his drenching of his poems in “fine particulars” are like the book of etiquette that the corporal who is remembered in “The Venetian Vespers” used to carry into battle. In the intervals between action, this corporal, who grew up in an orphanage, would quote choice extracts from Emily Post:

At a simple dinner party one may serve
Claret instead of champagne with the meat.
The satin facings on a butler’s lapels
Are narrower than a gentleman’s…
When a lady lunches alone at her own home
In a formally kept house the table is set
For four.

“He haunts me here,” the unnamed protagonist, who is whiling away his life on an annuity in Venice, observes, “that seeker after law/In a lawless world.” Alas, we soon learn that not even Emily Post could save the etiquette-loving corporal from the world’s lawlessness:

He was killed by enemy machine-gun fire.
His helmet had fallen off. They had sheared away
The top of his cranium like a soft-boiled egg,
And there he crouched, huddled over his weapon,
His brains wet in the chalice of his skull.