Obbligati: Essays in Criticism

by Anthony Hecht

Essays discuss the pathetic fallacy, W.H. Auden, Othello, Emily Dickinson, Richard Wilbur, Robert Lowell, The Merchant of Venice, and houses as metaphors

Hardcover

First published December 31, 1986

Reviews

[Jeffrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shortly after the 1986 publication of Obbligati, Anthony Hecht’s first book of collected essays, the young literary critic Bruce Bawer published a scathing review in The New Criterion, calling the book “a substantial disappointment.” Hecht, a poet then working at the height of his powers, probably read the review with a mix of indignation and bemusement, no less because the cocksure Bawer’s primary target was Hecht’s humility as a thinker and a writer. It’s an ironic thought, the overconfident kid accusing the mature and thoughtful essayist of being too humble. But my issue with Bawer’s review is not his brazenness, but rather the way in which he appears to understand the nature of the essay more generally.

If Hecht uses rhetorical restraint to signal the provisionality of his arguments, it is because that is what the essay as a form fundamentally demands. Think of the essayist as a researcher interested in surveying animals, stand-ins, in this case, for the ideas that interest the essayist. He can visit a zoo, but there he will encounter artificial habitats and ideas in cages. It’s better for the essayist to travel to a big game park where elephants and baboons and ideas of all shapes and sizes roam free. Doing so, though, entails risk. The essayist might encounter unexpected ideas, or his mind might become lost given the scale of the park. Some ideas might look harmless but prove to be misguided. That being the case, it makes sense when an essayist uses language like this: “Let me begin by acknowledging how provisional and circumspect my commentary on Emily Dickinson’s poetry is going to be. I present no better credentials than those of a poet who delights in poetry.” Bawer, who furnishes the same quote, reacts to it negatively. Had he, though, sought out a more balanced reading, he might have ornated his review with this quote from the end of Hecht's essay on Robert Lowell: “If I began with a deceptively easy comparison of Lowell with Byron, I hope you will allow me to amend that judgement…” A conclusion like this justifies the caution that Hecht uses when he sets out on his own walk across the game park, or, as the case may be, to write an essay.

Bawer’s immodest criticisms, however, go beyond Hecht’s humility. He also takes issue with Hecht’s high-minded use of English, which he says is arrogant and pretentious. He fails to see the elegance of intellect that is so often visible in Hecht’s prose. Take for example this beautifully crafted sentence:

My regard for Shakespeare in those days was limitless; and in some ways, of course, thoughtless, being unwittingly a trusting veneration of the editors and textual scholars who certified the texts for me, and, without my having to do so much as trouble myself with doubt or thought, furnished me with perfect, completely coherent, intricately knit poetic dramas by a matchless author who always did everything right, who above all, was never guilty of any lapse of dramatic intelligence, never given to literary sloth, and whose texts arrived unimpaired as from his pen.

This kind of Proustian prose is, without a doubt, old-fashioned. But to criticize essayistic language as “inexcusably wordy,” as Bawer does, is to miss the point of literary non-fiction. Interested readers enjoy essays because of sentences like these, not in spite of them. Bawer, on the other hand, demands language that appeals to the lowest common denominator. I may be wrong, but I think many readers will enjoy Hecht’s more formal tone.

For me, in fact, these essays reach their most thrilling heights when Hecht is making the case for more formal writing, such as in his essay on the poetry of Richard Wilbur:

There may be those, viewing the whole enterprise of formal poetry with suspicion or derision, who will suppose that this richness of inflections, this abundance of verbs, has been forced upon the poet by the ruthless exigencies of stanzaic form: the necessity, one way or another, of digging up a rhyme. For those to whom formal poetry is itself unnatural, or archaic, an embarrassed or twisted parlance of one who is self-consciously ill-at-ease holding the floor, any unusual feature of poetry, even its most towering graces, can be thought of as no more than the by-products, the industrial waste, entailed by meter and rhyme; and therefore (in the name of directness, of authenticity, of courage, of any number of Rousseauian virtues that belong exclusively to the underbred and ill-educated) to be deplored as a victimization, as no grace at all but rather a crippled response to life and language.

When Hecht concludes this thought and states that the arguments against formal writing are “marvelously self-serving,” I couldn’t help but think that his remarks were written with a mind toward Bawer himself. Ironically Bawer, now the same age as Hecht was when he published his review of Obbligati, has come to be associated with a group of poets known as the New Formalists. As might be inferred, they are advocates for a return to rhyme and meter.

While Hecht appreciated the formal language of poetry, he expressed concern that the poets of his generation were no longer effectively using the power of narrative. “By its concentration, its narrowly focused point of view, its determined elimination of anything but the absolutely pertinent, its inviolably single tone, the lyric has elected to exclude … the chief textures of our lives,” and thereby, “our very sense of reality.” The best essays in this collection are those that explore poetic narratives, the textures of human life, and our subjective sense of reality; essays such as W.H. Auden’s “In Praise of Limestone” and Robert Lowell. Othello and The Merchant of Venice: A Venture in Hermeneutics are also brilliantly erudite, the latter being an 80 page discourse that is the heart of the collection. In it Hecht reveals himself both a biblical scholar and a highly learned reader of Shakespeare. To read so intensively requires an attention that goes beyond the average reader’s capabilities. Aware of this fact, Hecht proves gracious in providing generous helpings of support in remarks like these: “Before reading part of the poem, let me offer these annotations…,” or “there follows immediately a covert but very important reference to one of the gospels…” This makes otherwise difficult material both enjoyable and illuminating. Hecht’s attentiveness is the essence of what makes Obbligati successful.

In the end, however, that attentiveness fails to impress Bawer, whose review reveals as much about his confidence as a man of letters thirty years ago as it does about Hecht's book. He concludes his piece by noting the difficulty of publishing essay collections. Mulling over the fact that Hecht’s Obbligati, in his estimation a deeply flawed book, was nonetheless issued by a major publishing house, Bawer thinks the work even more disappointing. Philip Lopate in his 2010 In Defense of the Essay Collection recognizes that even today, three decades later, it is difficult to market and sell collected essays. Nonetheless, he points out how important these works are to contemporary literature. Accordingly, he says, “[t]he premier essayists of our time should be treated with greatest respect when they put out a new collection—in the same way as our major poets and short story writers deserve to be, and often are.” Obbligati is not without imperfections, it's true, but Bawer’s indictment goes too far. In no way can a work of this scope and erudition be called a substantial disappointment. © Jeffrey L. Otto, August 13, 2015