I'll be fucked if you can't

… ‘For many complicated reasons,’ Anthony Hecht said, ‘my childhood was a rather bitter and lonely one.’

The problem is that this was written many years later, when the Hecht persona, in all its solemnity, was well in place. The letters he wrote when he was a teenager – which now appear, along with a great many from the war, in a thorough Selected Letters – suggest that there was a distance between the inner life and the outer life, or the life as it was later remembered. Like most of us, Hecht was probably able to keep them wonderfully apart. The letters he wrote from summer camp at the age of 12 were perfectly happy. A letter from 1936 to his father concludes: ‘Love from your best pal.’ An undated letter, which the editor suggests might have been written in 1938, when Hecht was 15, reads:

Private: To Dad

Dear Dad –

Story — Two men were going to a masquerade ball as a cow, one to be the front, the other back. They were walking across a field when suddenly a real bull started chasing them. The back man said: ‘Can you run?’ Front man: ‘I’ll be fucked if I can.’ Back man: ‘Well, you’ll be fucked if you can’t.’ End –

Tony.

He might have meant ‘I’ll be fucked if you can’t.’