Anthony Hecht's Transmutations
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry ANTHONY HECHT'S TRANSMUTATIONS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL The Venetian Vespers (Atheneum, 91 pp., $10.00), Anthony Hecht ruminates on the truism that from the air the world looks like a model...
...The tone is now more meditative, less tense...
...The humanism of both poet and translator was outraged by the notion that the destruction of thousands might serve some beneficent purpose...
...In The Hard Hours (1967) Hecht focused on even more lacerating images of helpless suffering...
...But this time it reveals to a lovesick chambermaid that life has passed her by...
...The Deodand" returns to the theme of sex and cruelty...
...Nevertheless, the poem depends on the tension created between the two voices, not the decision as to who is right...
...The Venetian Vespers" is, among other things, about art's relation to life...
...The pleasure of art, similarly, may seduce us into a cult of estheticism (which is why Plato banished poets from the Republic...
...The Grapes" again tackles the transcendent vision...
...But ultimately, this house of cards collapses as adult reality intrudes: the stock market crash, family illness, and his German governess' hints at the relationship between sex and cruelty, which in his mind he comes to associate with the onset of fascism in Europe...
...But The Venetian Vespers, for all its pain, celebrates "the joys and forces of invention/That can transmute to true/Gold these base matters floated in suspension...
...It is equally famous for its decay...
...The conflict between comfortable or uplifting illusions and the hard realities is beautifully delineated in Stones...
...Auden insisted that "Poetry makes nothing happen...
...Apprehensions," the most interesting example of this new style, is a longish narrative about a boy's misperceptions of the mysterious adult world, and his attempt to counterbalance this obscurity with the optimistic, albeit bowdlerized picture of life in The Book of Knowledge...
...But many poems in this transitional volume eschew the neometaphysical manner that had previously characterized Hecht's work...
...The sad events of the protagonist's story are not even tragic, only sordid...
...in this, as in other respects, Hecht is his disciple...
...The book's masterpiece, though, is the very long title poem...
...But his vision of the world is by no means ingratiating...
...Having no earth to speak of, garbage and offal are everywhere underfoot, the canals are fetid, and the streets haunted by members of the seamy underworld...
...The narrator, an expatriate American, observing the derelict beggars and whores, decides that the mind Can scarcely cope with the world's sufferings, Must blinker itself lo much or else go mad...
...Mourn rather for all Who breathlessly issue from the bone gates, The gates of horn, For truly it is best of all the fates Not to be born...
...Hecht has always understood the danger of such overviews: Remoteness can lead to arrogance...
...His own existence is useless to society...
...The poem most characteristic of Hecht's early work was, ironically, a translation of Voltaire's "Upon the Lisbon Disaster, or, An Inquiry into the Adage, 'All Is For The Best.'" The Lisbon earthquake was the greatest natural calamity of the 18th century, and the French cynic used it to try and shake the Age of Enlightenment's complacent faith that Providence had man's best interests at heart...
...The Vow" explores a father's reaction to the miscarriage of his child...
...The exotic "Gardens of the Villa d'Este," designed for 16th-century amorous revels, engender Controlled disorder at the heart Of everything, the paradox, the old Oxymoronic itch to set the formal strictures Within a natural context, where the tension lectures Us on our mortal state, and by controlled Disorder, labors to keep art From being too refined...
...Nothing left for me now, nothing but years," she says, resigning herself to join those victims who have abandoned hope...
...A vision vouchsafed him in a thunderstorm seems to give him a transcendent understanding of esthetics...
...He was raised by a kind uncle, who had adapted to America successfully and established a prosperous chain of grocery stores...
...Since the publication of A Summoning of Stones in 1954, Hecht's work has been praised for the delicate and intricate structure of its forms, as well as its classical erudition and wit...
...The bombadier may even find an artistic satisfaction in the pattern of his target, But in the toy store, right up close, Chipped paint and mucilage represent The wounded, orphaned, indigent, The dying and the comatose...
...Hecht may, indeed, be speaking of his own methods...
...These qualities certainly make him pleasant to read...
...Still, his perceptions of the world around him strive to be truthful—are even beautiful at times—and thus secure a value that makes them precious...
...By a thrifty recycling of their own human waste for fertilizer, they spread the parasite, Schistosomiasis Japonica: "This fruit of their nightsoil/Thrives in the skull, where it is called insane...
...Hecht himself could have composed the dark conclusion: Sharing the sickly human heritage, In the soul's midnight, searching for one poor spark, I've learned to suffer, silent, in the dark...
...Recovering, he takes up residence in Venice, supported by his Claudius-uncle's profits, "no better than a viral parasite," but "full of the splendor of the insubstantial" light and clouds that endow the city with its singular beauty...
...In the people's frailty, the stereotypes disappear, and they become like us...
...This life-denying homunculus does not get the last word, though, for the father definitely promises a life of joy to his future children...
...The robber-merchants of Venice who acquired its treasures by deceit are more colorful versions of his guilty uncle...
...His theme is our helplessness in the face of injustice in a world that is, beneath its facade, a natural hell, often made more hellish by the periodic outbreaks of our interior demons...
...He is a product of the dark side of the American Dream, having grown up as the child of East European immigrants in that bastion of the Puritan work-ethic, Lowell, Massachusetts...
...The bridges, matchstick and minute, Seem faultless, intricate and cute, Contrived for slight, aesthetic ends...
...It is famous for "lightness, buoyancy, its calm suspension/In time and water, its strange quietness...
...It is one of Hecht's most incisive poems...
...A complacent childhood ended with the revelation that the uncle had betrayed the narrator's father, allowing him to be mistakenly kept in an institution for 20 years because to recognize the family connection might tarnish the uncle's respectability with the gentile neighbors...
...More Light!," a poem that contrasts the grisly execution of a Marian martyr, sustained at least by his religion, with a Nazi atrocity, where the victims' deaths are robbed of any significance...
...Japan" explores changing stereotypes of that country's people: ingenious manufacturers of minute toys, monsters of oriental treachery, Zen masters—but always inhumanly clever...
...There is even less resolution in "More Light...
...A nd She bargain thai we make for our sanity Is the knowledge thai when at length il comes our turn To be numbered with the outcasts, the maimed, the poor, The injured and insulted, they will turn away, The fortunate and healthy, as I turn now...
...Yet 1 suspect that his formal strictures save him from a greater peril: a sensibility that would spill over into formless anguish if uncontrolled...
...The narrator, convinced that happiness is composed only "Of clouded, cataracted, darkened sight/Merciful blindness and ignorance," suffers the mental breakdown in reality that his father was wrongly suspected to have had...
...The aborted fetus, like a tiny Greek chorus, tells the grieving parents: Do not recall Pleasure at my conception...
...The Venetian Vespers further develops this new manner, and confirms the Tightness of these longer narratives for Hecht...
...Venice is a city where the extremes of beauty and ugliness coexist...
...On Poetry ANTHONY HECHT'S TRANSMUTATIONS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL The Venetian Vespers (Atheneum, 91 pp., $10.00), Anthony Hecht ruminates on the truism that from the air the world looks like a model train board: Such the enchantment distance lends...
...As the poet grimly reminds us, however, "Human endeavor clumsily betrays/Humanity...
...This man, whose vocation is loneliness, has, it appears, not turned away often enough...
...And this ability to wrestle with suffering so unflinchingly, and yet win some pleasure from the struggle, has made Anthony Hecht one of the strongest poets of our time...
...The tension between illusion and reality has become more complex...
...Millions of Strange Shadows (1977) showed a change of manner that disappointed some critics...
...I am redeemed From pain and sorrow...
...Renoir's painting of bored Parisian girls masquerading as captives in an Arab harem is juxtaposed with the humiliation of a French soldier forced by his Algerian captors to dress up as a woman and act as a scapegoat for France's colonialist sins...
Vol. 62 • December 1979 • No. 24
