BOOKS
495
doubleness and unity. "The unities of home and world, and world
and page, will be observed," he writes in
Recitative,
"through the
very transition from one to the other." Of Montale: "the two
natures were always one .... any word can lead you from the
kitchen-garden into really inhuman depths." Defending his method
and subject matter: "Total, clear-eyed immersion in one's own little
world produces (especially if one is Joyce, or Montaigne , or Tolstoy)
an excellent likeness of the universe ."
Unlike Merrill in temperament, Hecht resembles him in being
a superb poet, master not only of a technique but a vision. And the
clear-eyed immersion Merrill speaks of is perhaps not so different
from what Hecht, in an essay not collected here, has called the
"state of aesthetic contemplation" which art (which "serves to ar–
rest action rather than promote it") exists in order to invite . The
sense of arrested action is present not only in many of Hecht's best
poems , but in his prose style, with its dignified pace and somber
vOice.
A sober leisureliness is the essence of Hecht's argument-and
style. When writing without restrictions of space, as he tells us was
the case with his
Merchant
essay, Hecht proceeds as slowly and
thoughtfully as a chess player-or as God arranging the world?
What is important is worth taking time over; thus we are even sup–
plied , in the essay on Marvell and Keats , with texts of the two poems
there discussed-a gracious and sensible practice we English
teachers are encouraged to discourage. The context of Hecht's rapt
attentiveness somehow imbues the already beautiful words of the
poems with some of the special savor of the essayist's concentration.
If
Merrill's genius for metaphor stands him in good stead in the
"nightmarish" realm of prose, neither does Hecht's peculiar gift
desert him when he turns to criticism. This gift isn't easy to
describe . Too simply, it might be called a knack of giving words we
might have thought worn out fresh weight and authority; too
abstractly, a compelling vision of evil. (Historic horrors underlie the
sinuous reading of
The Merchant oj Venice;
I felt the force of anti–
Semitism with brutal freshness.) This vision doesn't tempt Hecht to
oversimplify; whether he is considering Shylock or Robert Lowell,
he takes pains to understand the contradictions of (and between)
language and behavior-always with an eye to the past (his cameo
comparison of Lowell and Byron is a case in point) and to all of
literature, as well as
to
the looming categories of good and evil, of
