Letters and life …

… The Poet and the Historian – The Hopkins Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

For years and years, though, the two men’s letters were rarely wholly serious. They engaged often in forms of cultural satire, as when MacDonald tries to commission an article from Hecht for The Distinctive Howard Johnson’s Review: “Our honorarium will consist of free postage for all your business letters to Madagascar for twenty days. Please, do not write on more than two sides of the paper.” Hecht writes an entire letter in the person of “Astrophel, Acting Chairman, Department of English” to deny MacDonald a job: “We are obliged to confess, with some embarrassment, that we already have too many Capricorns on the department staff. . . . [W]e do not see our way to offering you an appointment in the near future. What we really need at present is a nice Gemini and a couple of Scorpios.” Academic politics are a constant theme: The friends had met in 1957 as fellows at The American Academy in Rome, and they knew firsthand all the pleasures of dedicated study, though on the home front it was conducted under less than ideal conditions. Explicitly deplored here are the drudgeries of committee work, the piles of appallingly written student papers, the mysterious ways of deans and provosts.