Poets can be a petty, vindictive lot. This was never true of Anthony Hecht (1923–2004), though he sometimes suffered the vindictiveness of others. In the 1960s he recommended Louis Simpson for a Guggenheim Fellowship. Simpson responded, tit for tat, by promising he would nominate Hecht for readings on University of California campuses. As it came to pass, Guggenheim smiled on Simpson, and that was the last Hecht heard of it—no invitation from the Golden State. Recalling these events in a letter to the English publisher Philip Hoy in 2000, Hecht was characteristically urbane: “And so, after the passing of years I was living alone in quiet bachelorhood in Rochester, NY.” A phone call came from the California poet Henri Coulette, who wanted to interview him. “I was delighted to agree, and he duly turned up, and I came over with a bottle of booze, and we sat around his motel, drinking and talking for the better part of an afternoon.” At the end of the interview Coulette revealed why the invitation to read in California had never arrived. Hecht writes:

Henri had proposed my name with enthusiasm, but Louis Simpson, representing Berkeley, demurred. He explained that I suffered from a very pronounced speech defect, and that it would be a kindness not to expose me to public terror and humiliation. . . . Since Simpson was the only one of the group who could claim to