1954 was quite a big year for you. You published your first collection, you won your first Guggenheim award, and you got married. Was it the Guggenheim that enabled you to give up instructing at Bard, not to resume teaching until you went to Smith, in 1956?
Yes, a Guggenheim allowed me to return to Rome for a year at the American Academy once more, where Richard Wilbur was also in residence.
Wilbur had already published The Beautiful Changes and Ceremony by that time. Did you know his work well?
Yes, I think I did. But the curious fact is that I own no copy of the first of his books, and my copy of the second is dated September, 1960. In those youthful days, knowledge of the work of new poets was something to be acquired, as it were, monthly, or at least quarterly. Everyone, myself included, read the leading ‘little magazines’, some of them very élite, and we came upon the newest and latest poems one by one as they appeared in the best and the most avant-garde of those journals. I knew Wilbur’s poems of that time entirely by their isolated periodical publications. I was an avid reader of all the earliest and most advanced of those journals, including transition, Hound and Horn, and Cyril Connolly’s Horizon, and it was in the last of these that I, an American, discovered the work of Eudora Welty. As for Wilbur’s work, I must have known it from the New Yorker, among other places, and from anthologies, such as Oscar Williams’s Little Treasury of American or Modern Poetry series. Wilbur and I had actually met at a rooftop cocktail party given by Williams in downtown Manhattan.
How did you get the job at Smith College, and what did it involve?
Let me answer the second part of your question first. I taught freshman English at Smith, and nothing else the entire time (three years) I was there. Freshman English consisted of analytical study of short-stories, a novel, and a good deal of lyric poetry. The authors we read included Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, Conrad, Chekhov, and the more or less usual catalogue of poets. Among my students was one who, by a kind of miracle, and many years later, would become my second wife. As for how I got the job, the simple truth is that I don’t remember. I suspect that what I did was what most job candidates did in those remote and simple days: I sent off applications and vitae to any place that seemed likely, either because they advertised a vacancy or because rumour (which was abundant, there being many academics in Rome and at the American Academy) led me in that direction.
Did you get to know Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes while you were at Smith?
Yes. Sylvia was a colleague of mine at Smith College. I liked them both very much, but this was a particularly troubled and unhappy period of my life. During my three years there two sons were born, one of them during my first year. His mother got breast fever immediately after the birth, and could not nurse him, or, for that matter, do anything whatever. Consequently, I did all the shopping for food, all the cooking for my wife and myself, all the laundry, including the diapers (there were no disposable ones then), and there was no clothes-drier where we lived so that all the laundry had to be hung on lines and taken down when dry. Moreover, there was the formula for the baby to make, and all the night feedings to give, and during this time I was teaching full time. The chairman of the English department in those days, a rather self-absorbed, near-sighted martinet, upbraided me for not providing enough written comment on the papers I returned to my students. I was too dumbfounded to explain my predicament, which he should have been fully aware of in the first place, since other faculty were. In her journals, Sylvia also expressed a bewildered irritation at the fact that my wife and I never returned the hospitality she showed us. This was because my wife simply refused to entertain – in part, at least, because she couldn’t cook, and was embarrassed about it. Immediately after our second son was born she went ice-skating and broke her leg, so I had to go through the whole routine – cooking, shopping, laundry, formulas, night-feedings – all over again, and, of course, while teaching full-time as before. Still, there were a few good people at Smith while I was there, beginning with Ted and Sylvia. There was also Daniel Aaron, who became a friend later on. There was Newton Arvin, a gentle and brilliant man, and a critic of the first order, now seriously undervalued. There was Helen Bacon, a gifted classicist, with whom I was later to collaborate on a translation of Aeschylus. And of all of them, the one most dear to me, Elizabeth Drew, an English woman who wrote on modern poetry, was a friend of Auden’s, and the soul of kindness. She was fully aware of my marital plight, so there was no reason why the fidgety chairman should not have been as well. Anyway, Smith contrived profoundly to offend Ted and Sylvia in a manner that made them decide to leave after a single year. Sylvia was teaching the same courses as I, and Ted stayed at home, writing, keeping house, but fretful, with too much time on his hands. He wanted to teach too, and Sylvia arranged a meeting for him with the chairman. Ted was told they couldn’t hire him because he had no teaching experience, though this had been no barrier to their having appointed Sylvia, who had none either. But of course she was a Smith graduate. The indignation Sylvia felt about this, and which Ted probably felt as well, though he kept his feelings under better control than she, was little short of explosive. They firmly resolved to leave at the end of the year, and they did so, to the utter astonishment of the chairman, who hadn’t the slightest clue he had offended them. They settled for a year or so in Boston, where Sylvia joined Anne Sexton and George Starbuck in one of Lowell’s classes at Boston University.
Your teaching at Smith came to an end in 1959, the year you won your second Guggenheim. It was also the year in which you and your wife separated, taking your two boys with her. How did all these developments affect you? Are you the sort of person who can go on writing in the midst of great turmoil, or are you the sort who, as Kafka might have put it, needs both hands to ward off the blows?
When I’m troubled or unhappy my faculties are paralyzed and I can’t write at all. And, alas, I was unhappy virtually throughout my first marriage, which lasted five-and-a-half years, to be followed by my total separation from my children. The divorce decree required her to live within a certain distance from New York City, so that I could continue to see them regularly. But in due course she found herself engaged to a very wealthy young Belgian, and she told me, ‘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.’ Against such an argument I was quite powerless.
How very sound; and how chastening.
Philip Hoy was born in 1952, and educated at Glastonbury High School in Surrey, and at the Universities of York and Leeds. He has a Ph.D in Philosophy, a subject he taught for many years, in the UK, and, more recently, overseas. Since returning to the UK, in 1996, Hoy has been writing, editing and publishing. His most recent publications include "The Starry Night": Snodgrass's Van Gogh Reconsidered' (Agenda, London, 1996), "The Genesis of On Certainty: Some Questions for Professors Anscombe and von Wright' (Wittgenstein Studien, University of Passau, 1996), the proem and afterword to Peter Dale's Da Capo (Agenda Editions, London, 1997), "The Will to Power #486/KGW VIII, 1 2, 2: A Knot that Won't Unravel?" (Nietzsche Studien, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 1998), W.D. Snodgrass in Conversation with Philip Hoy (BTL, London, 1998), Anthony Hecht in Conversation with Philip Hoy (BTL, London, 1999, 2001, 2004), Donald Justice in Conversation with Philip Hoy (BTL, London, 2001), "The Interviewer Interviewed: N.S Thompson talks to Philip Hoy, editor of Between The Lines", The Dark Horse, 15, Summer 2003: 40-46. (If you would like to read this article, please follow this link: http://www.waywiser-press.com/imprints/darkhorse.html). Hoy is managing editor of Between The Lines, and executive editor too of The Waywiser Press, the press of which BTL is an imprint. He lives in Surrey.
Anthony Hecht was born in New York City in 1923, the first son of Melvyn Hahlo Hecht and Dorothea Hecht (née Holzman). His brother Roger, who would also become a poet, was born two and a half years later. Hecht was educated at three of New York City’s schools, and then, in 1940, enrolled as an undergraduate at Bard College, an experimental adjunct of Columbia University, situated at Annandale-on-Hudson. It was at Bard, while still a freshman, that he made up his mind to become a poet, having been introduced to the work of Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas and others by an inspiring teacher called Lawrence Leighton. WWII obliged Hecht to give up his studies before graduating. At first, it looked as though he would be assigned to do intelligence work, but the special training programme he was inducted into was cancelled at the last minute, with the result that Hecht found himself en route to Europe, and some of the bloodiest fighting of the war. Any reader curious to know why the subject of cruelty recurs so frequently in Hecht’s work need look no further than this period in his life for the explanation. After the war was over, Hecht – whose B.A. had been awarded in absentia – took advantage of the G.I. Bill of Rights and went to Kenyon College in Ohio, where he resumed his studies, this time under the supervision of John Crowe Ransom, one of the most gifted men of letters of the day. It was Ransom who gave Hecht his first English classes to teach, thereby setting him on the path to a long and distinguished career as a professor; and it was Ransom, too, as editor of the Kenyon Review, who published some of Hecht’s earliest poems, thereby setting him on the path to an even longer and still more distinguished career as a poet. In the fifty years since his days as a student at Kenyon, Hecht has published seventeen books of poetry, three books of criticism, and a large number of essays, reviews, discussion pieces, forewords, prefaces and introductions. He has also done acclaimed work as a translator and editor. Hecht’s endeavours have been rewarded with a string of prestigious prizes and awards, amongst them: the Prix de Rome (1951), the Brandeis University Creative Arts Award (1965), the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the Russell Loines Award (1968), the Bollingen Prize in Poetry (1983), the Librex-Guggenheim Eugenio Montale Award (1984), the Harriet Monroe Award (1987), the Ruth B. Lilly Poetry Prize (1988), the Tanning Prize (1997), the Corrington Award (1997), and the Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal (2000). Other honours to come Hecht’s way included two Guggenheim Fellowships (1954 and 1959), The Hudson Review Fellowship (1958), two Ford Foundation Fellowships (1960 and 1968), a Rockefeller Fellowship (1967), a Fulbright Professorship in Brazil (1969), an Honorary Fellowship with the Academy of American Poets (1969), Membership of the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1979), Chancellorship (1971) and Chancellorship Emeritus (1995) of the Academy of American Poets, and Trusteeship of the American Academy in Rome (1983). He was also Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. (1982-1984). As well as the B.A. he was awarded by Bard College in 1944, and the M.A. he was awarded by Columbia University in 1950, Hecht has received honorary doctorates from Bard College (1970), Georgetown University (1981), Towson State University, Maryland (1983) and the University of Rochester (1987). Hecht has three sons, two by his first marriage, to Patricia Harris, which ended in divorce in 1961, and one by his second, to Helen D’Alessandro – the author of several renowned cookery books, and a successful interior designer – with whom he lives in Washington D.C.