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PARTISAN REVIEW
"Death the Hypocrite," "Death Demure," or "Death Sauntering About,"
watching the living while we discuss "questions of form, the inscrutable
ways of chance, / As edges of shadow harden." But the idea of death as a
mute, mocking limit to human life gives way to something much more
unsettling. The disguises of death compose a
Grand Guignol
on the shapes
of human will; they speak to the deathly life of our living appeti tes and
desires. Death shows itself as a spirit wound up within our postures of
knowledge, our forms of inquiry, making, and mocking. It inhabits our
sympathy as much as our hatred; it creeps into our irony, our self-doubt,
and our wonder. Hecht's dense, eerie shifts of tone are intended to train our
ears: in the elisions and oversights of these speakers-Death the Judge,
Death the Archbishop, Death the Knight, Death the Oxford Don, Death
the Mexican Revolutionary-one feels not merely the vanity but the bit–
ter intelligence, the self-wounding rage, and the cruelty that can haunt our
work, our shifting masks of mastery. Death abides in all our human occu–
pations, and preoccupations. The impersonations are complex in their
rhythmic variation, their allusive density, in the knife-edge balance between
dark satire and sympathetic comedy. "Death the Inquisitor," for example, is
at once a patient schoolmaster, a natural scientist, a speculative theologian,
a torturer, and a conspirator in creating nature itself-his arch questions
echoing God's grand speech at the end of the Book ofJob, where the deity
displays his power through the mirror of monsters like the Leviathan.
The sequence is also an emblem book, each poem faced by a suitably
stark, often grotesquely comic wood engraving of Death by Leonard
Baskin, the poet's co-conspirator. Unlike their models in Hans Holbein's
Dance
of
Death,
however, Baskin's Deaths are not mocking skeletons that
taunt and ape a series of ordinary human victims-housewife, farmer,
miser, priest, or apprentice. Each of Baskin's skeletons or skulls stands
alone, as if it represents both tormentor and victim at once. (They often
look back at
us.)
If death is the face of our activity in the world, it is no
accident that so many of these poems interrogate the violence and play of
the artist's work; Death the poet joins Death the painter, cabinet-maker,
film director, and clown. So, for example, "Death the Copperplate Printer,"
who turns "Christ's cross till it turns Catherine's wheel, / Ixion's wheel
becoming Andrew's cross":
The bitten plate, removed from its Dutch Bath
Of mordants, has been set below a screw
That will enforce my will
Like the press that crushed Isaiah's grapes of wrath.
My lightest touch can kill,
My costly first impressions can subdue.
