Anthony Hecht & William MacDonald's A Bountiful Harvest Reviewed

Posted today at Los Angeles Review of Books is a fascinating look at friendship and poetry, with a dose of Roman history, in the letters of Anthony Hecht and William L. MacDonald, a renowned architectural historian. The letters between the two friends have been collected in A Bountiful Harvest (The Waywiser Press, 2016), edited by Philip Hoy. At LARB, Patrick Kurp writes: "A Bountiful Harvest reads like an epistolary novel, complete with drama and comedy, subplots and ancillary characters." More about how the two men met and their correspondence:

When Anthony Hecht and William MacDonald first met in Rome in 1954, both were young, unknown, and unproven. Hecht, 31, had just published his first poetry collection, A Summoning of Stones, and was on a Guggenheim Fellowship; MacDonald, 33, was on a Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy. Hecht went on to become one of the leading postwar American poets, and MacDonald would occupy a comparable place in the field of architectural history. A Bountiful Harvest, edited by the British publisher Philip Hoy, documents their 36-year correspondence. That may sound dry and academic, especially as both men were, in fact, academics. But it isn’t. Seldom has a collection of letters read so consistently laugh-out-loud funny, before turning unexpectedly sad. Hecht and MacDonald were men with well-exercised comic senses, not afraid to be ridiculous, whimsical, scatological, or scathingly critical of acquaintances and public figures. Their letters are filled with puns, put-ons, mock pedantry, and even a protracted exchange of Polish jokes. Both possessed a gift for inspired Monty Python–esque silline­ss.

Hecht and MacDonald were also strongly competitive in an adolescent sort of way. Each tried to outdo the other in the outlandishness of the letterheads on their stationary, even enlisting friends to scout for exotically unlikely sources. MacDonald types on paper from the Byzantine Institute, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, and the Tom Sawyer Motor Inn in Albany, New York. Hecht replies with letterheads from Dubai InterContinental Hotel, Fudan University in Shanghai, and Croisière de Musique à bord Mermoz. They address and sign their letters and postcards with goofy pseudonyms: Admiral Dewey, Milton of Saudi Arabia, Walter Ego, Irving of Arimathaea, Comrade General Ivan Ivanovich, Ethelred the Moderately Well-Prepared, Timon of Brooklyn, and, with a nod to W. C. Fields, A. Pismo Clam. Hecht and MacDonald, serious and scholarly men, never lost their giddy sophomoric streak.

But it's not all fun and games. Head to Los Angeles Review of Books to find out what led to a grave falling out in 1990...