To prepare this section, I owe a huge debt to William Blazek (whose 1986 dissertation on the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps and Harvard Aesthete poets reveals many biographical details about Hillyer). ^[1]

Robert Silliman Hillyer (1895-1961) was born on June 3, 1985 in New Jersey and attended Harvard University in 1913 (graduating in 1917) while poet E.E. Cummings entered in 1911 and novelist John Dos Passos entered in 1912. The three literary-minded students (and S. Foster Dawson) worked together on Harvard's undergraduate literary magazine and formed the Harvard Poetry Society in 1915 which invited poets such as Robert Frost, Vachel Lindsey, Conrad Aiken and Amy Lowell to give readings. (In 1917, English war poet Siegfried Sassoon who had just returned from the war front gave a reading there as well). The society had a social dimension as well; critic Malcolm Cowley (three years younger than Hillyer) recalled a 1915 costume party where Dos Passos arrived as John the Baptist while Hillyer "looking like a wicked cherub" came dressed as Cupid. At the same time, studying poetry at Harvard provided a great foundation for literature and art plus an atmosphere of friendly competition. Cowley described this group of poets as the "Harvard aesthetes": ^[2]

This perhaps is an exaggeration. Spending one's university years in rarefied academic pursuits at Harvard could make it easy to lose touch with the main parts of U.S. society. On the other hand, some at Harvard aspired to the broad cosmopolitan idealism and reformist zeal embodied by the Harvard gentleman-scholar Charles Eliot Norton and his son Richard Norton (who went on to found the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, a volunteer service for young men to aid France in the war effort). Harvard poets like Hillyer, Cummings and Dos Passos actively sought contact with society outside the Harvard bubble and believed that artists had an essential role to play in society, both as a moral voice and critic. ^[3]

During their Harvard studies, Cummings had already started exploring free verse and innovative modernist styles while Robert Hillyer stuck to traditional pastoral forms and sonnets. In 1917, Cummings, Hillyer and Dos Passos contributed to the anthology Eight Harvard Poets (and later Harvard would publish a separate collection by Hillyer that same year). During this time, the Harvard campus was full of talk about the European war and what actions should be taken. Opinion pieces were regularly published in campus publications. By the second year of the war, sympathies had coalesced around the Allied cause, yet many still embraced neutrality and even nonviolence. Hillyer, Dos Passos and Cummings were motivated to do something, and joining the Norton-Harjes ambulance corps became their way to get involved.

In fact, many young adults of that period (and writers) were becoming ambulance drivers including Ernest Hemingway, Somerset Maugham, Malcolm Cowley, Robert Service and Louis Bromfield. ^[4]By accident two volunteers (E.E. Cummings and William Slater Brown) became separated from the main group and ended up spending five weeks wandering through Paris before being wrongly arrested by Paris police. (These events were famously described in Cummings' 1922 autobiographical novel, The Enormous Room).

By contrast, Hillyer reported to the American Red Cross headquarters in Paris on June 2, 1917, went through training and was later joined by Dos Passos in July. At about that time Hillyer and Dos Passos made plans to collaborate on writing a "Great Novel" about their European travels. In August Hillyer reported to a small village and two weeks later he was driving ambulances near Verdun during a French offensive to recapture Mort Homme. He served there for a week. Then his unit moved to the Argonne region west of Verdun. After being honorably discharged, Hillyer returned to the US deeply affected by what he saw during those three months. So harrowing was his time driving an ambulance in France, Hillyer reportedly never drove an automobile again. ^[5]

After staying in America for six months, Hillyer returned to France (via London) in late March or early April 1918. In a letter to Dos Passos, Hillyer explained that he was a sergeant in the Ordnance Department at the US army, working as secretary to the captain, translating and interpreting French (Hillyer was fluent in French). In contrast to his previous work with the ambulance service, this position was considered to be safe and relatively comfortable. He told Dos Passos that his departure from the US had been hastened after a New York woman told Hillyer she was pregnant, causing them to get married quickly. Tragically, the bride miscarried on the wedding night, but that led Hillyer to have second thoughts about continuing with the marriage. With the help of his brother-in-law (who was a lawyer), Hillyer and the woman agreed to a divorce after a certain amount of time had elapsed. Hillyer recounted that his mother begged him to stay out of the country for a while to avoid any embarrassing situations from this marriage.

Hillyer finished out the war in the Ordnance Department. Immediately after the armistice, he served as a military courier for the 1919 Peace Conference (just as Edward worked as a military courier in the novel). This position often sent him to various European cities and provided a behind-the-scenes perspective of the negotiations by politicians and business interests (which only confirmed his suspicion that the war had been fought for reasons of political expediency rather than any democratic ideals). For a short time Hillyer shared a Paris apartment with Dos Passos. After briefly returning to the US, Hillyer received a scholarship to learn Danish and translate Scandinavian verse. He lived in Copenhagen between 1919-1920 where he and Samuel Foster Damon edited and published A Book of Danish Verse: Translated in the Original Meters in 1922.

Hillyer and Dos Passos kept in touch regularly over that time (a friendship which would continue over Hillyer's lifetime). Although both had contributed pieces to that same poetry anthology in 1917, Dos Passos was more politically engaged and eager to write sprawling novels. Noting a parallel between Robert Hillyer and the John Andrews character (the musician-poet character who appeared in the Three Soldiers novel by Dos Passos), Blazek comments: ^[6]

During their time in France, Dos Passos and Hillyer had been working on a "Great Novel" (or "G.N.") which also went by the title of Seven Times round the Walls of Jericho. They wrote alternate chapters in Paris together while waiting to be sent to the Verdun front. After Hillyer returned to Paris in 1918 and met Dos Passos again, they continued working on this novel some more; when Hillyer returned briefly to the US in mid-1919, he brought the manuscript to show to various New York publishers. Dos Passos continued making revisions on it, but in 1921 he wrote Hillyer to tell him he was abandoning the project – though he planned to incorporate parts of it into other novels. Commenting on Hillyer's contribution to the "great novel," Dos Passos said that it had "genuineness" and that Hillyer should try writing fiction. "... your chapters undoubtedly have more tone than mine. They are certainly superior to anything I did while we were partners."

After Hillyer finished his fellowship in Copenhagen, he returned to teach at Harvard, publishing two more poetry books. In July 1926 Hillyer married Dorothy Hancock Tilton, had a son Stanley and began an assistant professorship at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He returned to Harvard, published several more poetry books and in 1933 published Collected Verse of Robert Hillyer which won the 1934 Pulitzer Prize.

Literary Recognition and Evolution of a Style

In 1932 Hillyer did eventually publish a novel called Riverhead, about a young man's coming of age in New England. In a significant week, the narrator Paul Sharon who comes from a family racked by tragedy and decline, takes a canoe trip up the river to visit a mysterious godfather. A New York Times book review described it as "a simple story of the experience through which a boy comes emotionally and spiritually of age; but in every line the reader is pursued by intimations of a wider meaning, by a magic that cannot be trapped or examined." ^[7] While generally praising the novel, this review noted that "his sociology resembles Sherwood Anderson's and his characterizations those of Richard Hughes" while finally concluding that the great weakness of the novel is that the author "never lets his meaning be pinned down." Another lengthier review ^[8] notes that the reception to Riverhead by other reviewers was "half-hearted" and that the "contrasting planes of realism, symbolism, and mysticism on which the story moves simultaneously was puzzling to reviewers and readers alike. People did not know what to make of it." This reviewer defended the book from several criticisms, saying the "blending of the most brutal parts with passages of lyric beauty is a proof of the skill and sincerity of the author. His realism and his poetry spring from the same feelings and convictions...."

Despite the reasonable success of this first novel, it seemed clear that Hillyer was more comfortable writing verse than prose. He had been publishing regularly in literary journals and publishing books every year or two in the 1920s and 1930s. He had found regular teaching jobs – culminating in his appointment as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard (which lasted for seven years), followed by a three year appointment at Kenyon College and another at University of Delaware. His poetry was respected for its mastery of form, but at the same time some critics faulted the poems for not trying new forms. One early negative review in New Republic noted that

This review is probably unfair and overstating its case, but a few years later, another critic, reviewing the Pulitzer-winning Collected Verse of Robert Hillyer years later, wrote that

I think such quotations illustrate that serious readers were embracing new trends in poetry – free verse, fragmented narratives, more personal or confessional points of view, more cosmopolitanism. In contrast, Robert Hillyer's embrace of traditional poetic forms and pastoral subjects seemed out of touch with a world beset by world wars, social anomie and even totalitarianism. That was the perception at least.

Bollingen Prize Controversy and Battling against Stereotypes

In the late-1940s Hillyer was caught up in a public scandal that fed into these perceptions.

After Ezra Pound won the new Bollingen Prize for his Pisan Cantos in 1948, Hillyer published two articles in the Saturday Review of Literature ("Treason's Strange Fruit: The Case of Ezra Pound and the Bollingen Award" and "Poetry's New Priesthood") which were a very public airing of grievances about the major new poetry award (funded by Paul Mellon and judged by the Fellows in American Letters of the Library of Congress).

Hillyer made several criticisms and even accusations. First, he believed that Ezra Pound was undeserving of such a distinguished award because of his character and behavior during World War 2. Pound had suffered from mental illness and was institutionalized after making un-American pronouncements on the radio during the war. Several poems were criticized for being anti-Semitic and making a mockery of Christian war dead. Second, Hillyer's essay implied that the selection process was flawed because some of the judges (like Carl Jung and T.S. Eliot) were foreign born. (Hillyer even implied that Jung had pro-Nazi sympathies). Finally he objected to the aesthetics of Pound, saying that the Pisan Cantos "are so disordered to make the award seem like a hoax... they are merely the landslide from the kitchen-midden of a heart long dead: broken memories, jagged bits of spite, splinters of a distorting glass wherein the world is seen as it is not, a hodge-podge of private symbols, weary epigrams, anecdotes, resentments, chuckles, and the polyglot malapropisms that pass for erudition among the elite." ^[11]

After this initial essay brought an outcry, the same journal published another essay by Hillyer. This second essay tried to ground the original critique in aesthetics and used it as a pretext to criticize not only the award but the new literary orthodoxy that championed poets like Eliot and Pound. ^[12]

Taken together, these two essays provocatively challenged current trends in poetry at a time when American society was becoming suspicious of foreign elements (be it anti-Semitism, Nazism or Communism). Certainly it was fair to wonder if awarding a major poetry award to Pound right after World War 2 was the right thing to do, especially given the implied mission of the American Letters of the Library of Congress was to highlight cultural works exemplifying the American spirit. Hillyer's essay stirred up considerable disagreement and even calls for political action to remove certain jury members. Because of the controversy, this privately funded prize ended its affiliation with the Library of Congress and appointed Yale University to manage the award (exposing it to less political pressure). This prestigious award is still managed by Yale, without much scandal or incident.

Malcolm Cowley eloquently defended the awarding of the prize to Pound. ^[13] Cowley wrote that "for thirty years he (Hillyer) has been a poet and professor involved in the literary and academic struggles of his times. He regards Eliot and W.H. Auden as his poetic rivals and he has attacked them often, in articles that revealed an obsessed rage. ... his two articles in the Saturday Review are an attempt to carry this private warfare into a national or international field where all the issues have become inflated and falsified." Cowley believed that Hillyer's motivation for writing the essay was simply to warn future jury members that the public will be watching their future award choices. "Worsted in a struggle among his colleagues and compatriots, he (Hillyer) has appealed over their heads and under false colors to the great hostile empire of the Philistines."

Cowley may have exaggerated the extent of Hillyer's personal vendetta against these poets; people on all sides might have blown things out of proportion. After examining private notes from jury members 50 years later, Karen Leick wrote that the judges did in fact consider the pros and cons of awarding the prize to such a contentious figure, and yet they still voted overwhelmingly to give it to Pound. The alternatives (not awarding a prize that year, or giving the prize to the poet with the second highest number of votes) seemed anti-democratic and almost an abandonment of the judges' commitment to poetic excellence. Leick suggested that the Saturday Review editors had been courting controversy and specifically sought out contributions from poets like Hillyer to attack the award choice. ^[14]

As president of the Poetry Society of America, Hillyer's stature as a poet gave him a unique ability to make this kind of criticism for a mainstream publication looking to stir up controversy. Hillyer may not have anticipated the response or blowback from this essay. Unexpectedly, the controversy led to a public questioning of the circumstances of Hillyer's teaching appointment at Kenyon College, and rather than fight it, Hillyer simply resigned. Hillyer was not really a polemicist, and it's unlikely that Hillyer's goal was to silence or censor Eliot or Pound. Nonetheless, the controversy seemed to reinforce the perception that Hillyer belonged to a previous generation out of touch with current trends in poetry and publishing. Unlike Dos Passos, for example, Hillyer never really had a political axe to grind in his writings and rarely made political statements except to make occasional anti-war proclamations in his poems.

Moreover, as an instructor of verse and literary critic, Hillyer had demonstrated an appreciation of various kinds of verse (even if his own poetic muse was fairly straightforward and predictable). His droll journal-essays in the Atlantic in the 1940s (titled "Farrago") capture a poetic sensibility that resists a single aesthetic vantage point and instead appreciates the kind of verse that is simple, accessible and evocative. Unlike the scholarly introductions or book reviews that Hillyer wrote on occasion, these three essays were revealing about many things: his life as a poet, his New England family life and some of his youthful European adventures. True, the Farrago essays did weigh in on poetic trends: decrying (for instance) the tendency to classify poetry into various schools. (If we had a "school of Shakespeare," Hillyer wrote, all English poetry since 1600 would be involved.) Hillyer wrote: ^[15]

The Farrago essays also include several anecdotes about Hillyer's Paris adventures. In one anecdote Hillyer accosts a man with a cab to ask for a ride, only to learn that the man was not a chauffeur but a full-fledged Marquis who was "happy to place his car at the service of American officers." In another, he mentions encountering his old poetry teacher from Harvard (LeBaron Russell Briggs) at the Crillon hotel in Paris (a haunt which served as a hub for the Versailles Peace conference and appears several times in My Heart for Hostage). To Hillyer's surprise, Briggs, who was teaching versification at the Sorbonne, was mobbed by various American diplomats and secretaries who recognized him from Harvard. Hillyer also recalls going with a music critic to visit Eric Satie only to learn that he had been arrested and that the French critic had been the unwitting cause of this arrest. Hillyer also made a point to visit the famous poet Anatole France to ask him to write an inscription to one of his books. Later, this inscribed book was stolen from Hillyer and turned up for sale by a French bookseller, only to be discovered by the French poet himself a few months later (who apparently was irate enough to mention the "regrettable" incident with the "rogue" American officer in his memoir). If we remember that Hillyer shared a flat with Dos Passos for a summer, it's safe to say that Hillyer had all kinds of unusual cultural encounters to draw from for his later novel.

Final Decades, Enduring Friendships

Despite entering the public fray on the Bollingen Prize in the late 1940s, Hillyer had continued to flourish as a poet working in academia until his death.

Between 1937-1945 he was the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard and taught several poets including Howard Nemerov, James Agee and Theodore Roethke. After that appointment ended, Hillyer taught at Kenyon College between 1948-1951 and ultimately finished his teaching career at University of Delaware between 1954-1961. Remarkably, the University of Delaware recorded several public readings by Hillyer between 1953-1960 (These audio recordings are online and linked on Robert Hillyer's Wikipedia Page.) These public readings include Hillyer reciting poetry of various poets from the centuries and then reciting his own poems. The May 31, 1954 recording includes a recitation of the complete long narrative poem Death of Captain Nemo.

Given the amount of time Hillyer spent teaching, it is probably no surprise that he published two guides to versification: First Principles of Verse, (The Writer: Boston MA, 1938) and In Pursuit of Poetry, (McGraw-Hill: NYC, 1960).

After My Heart for Hostage in 1942, Hillyer also published four more poetry books and in 1961 (before his death) a 235 page Collected Poems which took notable poems from all of the collections. Although generally appreciative, the New York Times review acknowledged that the "reader does not turn to 'Collected Poems' for commentaries on the cold war, the H-bomb or the existential agonies of modern man.… It is as though Whitman, Hopkins and Eliot had never lived."

These criticisms may be accurate, but hardly fair. There is nothing wrong with trying to keep alive poetic forms and subjects which appealed to earlier poets; also, in an age of declining biodiversity and climate change, it may be artistically brave to keep the focus on the natural world in a more pristine state; poets like Mary Oliver and Pattiann Rogers have found the natural world an endless source of inspiration. Perhaps Hillyer's early poems relied too much on allusion and mythology for the contemporary reader's tastes, but over the years, Hillyer's poems used plainer language, employed more points of view and started addressing social themes. Blazek, quoting Paul Fussell's Great War and Memory, writes, "Recourse to the pastoral is an English mode of both fully gauging the calamities of the Great War and imaginatively protecting oneself against them." For Hillyer, distinctly "English" in his art, the pastoral mode was also a mode of cultural criticism. Blazek argued that ^[16]

Perhaps one of Hillyer's most interesting friendships was with Robert Frost (who was 21 years older and died in 1963, two years after Hillyer did). Hillyer first met Frost in 1915 when Frost gave a reading to the Harvard Poetry Society, and they corresponded over several decades. He met Hillyer one last time in May 1959 at University of Delaware to give a reading. By that time, Frost's poetry had become so famous he was practically a household name, and yet the affection of the two poets was clearly evident by the introduction Hillyer gave before the reading. Hillyer declared that the "world knows that Robert Frost is our great poet – not only of today but indubitably ... of all time." Acknowledging the gracious introduction, Frost started off by saying that he and Hillyer had been "running side-by-side all these years, and he knows that I think of his poetry as he thinks of mine: with affection ... (and) ... admiration...."

Two decades earlier in 1937, Hillyer had published a long poem, Letter to Robert Frost, which later became the title for a book of letter-poems. The title poem uses heroic couplets to convey a tone that is often conversational and even satirical. The poem ponders many things: the vicissitudes of friendship, changing tastes in poetry and art, the ongoing war between mechanization and nature, the drowning out of poetry by political ideology. Unlike his traditional pastoral poems, (which generally seem unbothered by the turmoil of modern living), Letter to Robert Frost ponders the world and its irrationalities – and even its cruelties. Referring to Hillyer's own experiences as a WW1 ambulance driver, the poem says:

Ultimately, optimistically, the letter-poem returns to the personal, recalling moments from a late night conversation with Frost ( .... The truth / Remains that my few perfect moments seem / Eternal, and the bad ones but a dream) and relishing the simple challenge of having to mind a country house in Vermont (for Frost) and Connecticut (for Hillyer):

My Heart for Hostage – Publication History

Hillyer's second novel was published in October or November 1942, with a spate of reviews appearing in national publications in November.

At the time, the US and Europe were embroiled in a world war, and France was under German occupation since 1940, with Petain "running" the Vichy government in conjunction with the Nazis. Already, French police officers were starting mass arrests of Jews in Paris for later deportation. The Americans had only recently entered the war in late 1941, but during 1942 the Americans were not engaging with the Germans directly in Europe (the Allied invasion of Italy only began in July 1943). 1942 must have been a time when Americans felt the loss of Europe and especially France without any immediate hope of victory.

Just a month after My Heart for Hostage was published, the iconic Casablanca movie was released. In addition to being a love story, that movie reminded American viewers of why they should care about the fate of Europe. The movie ultimately played into people's nostalgia for cities like Paris ("We'll always have Paris" Rick says). As Mark Schorer wrote in his review of Hillyer's novel, "It is impossible to read this novel of Paris in 1919 without thinking on every page of Paris today, impossible not to bear the hollow echoes of history in these pastoral avenues of idyl." ^[17]

Although My Heart for Hostage is about a former US soldier in Paris after World War 1, there are no political messages, just an evocative attempt to remind readers of what was so charming and magical about Paris. It's no surprise that Random House would publish such a book at that time. The original book cover was designed by a German immigrant of Jewish descent named George Salter.

Original cover by George Salter (1897-1967)

The Book Review Digest shows eight book reviews of the book, with probably the most significant being Mark Schorer's review in the New York Times (Oct 11, 1942) which called it a "superbly written book, written perhaps as only a poet familiar with and expert in the disciplines of verse could write it." A review in Saturday Review echoes this sentiment, calling it a "nostalgic memoir of Paris, 1919, done in prose with all the effects of a lyric poem, all the haunting echoes and overtones, the distilled emotions, the evocative understatement. A poem could not have told this tale, but the tale, thus heightened by a poet tells everything it wants to, and suggests more." ^[18]

Given Hillyer's reputation as a poet, it is no surprise that reviews would focus more on the poetic style than the story itself. Rose Feld, while acknowledging that the story was "slight ... as novels go," wrote that "the two young lovers are drawn with a tender sympathy and compassion for youth; the old people with a lustier stroke and, at times, with satiric subtlety." While acknowledging the book's "exceptional quality" in individual scenes, Edward Weeks wrote in the Atlantic that "I wish Mr. Hillyer had made young Reynolds more likable: Edward's distrust and his inhibitions cool off the romance too early, and incidentally cool off our sympathy."

In 1942, several of the books topping the bestseller chart were historical novels and novels related to the war. ^[19] That included a historical novel about a nun (Song of Bernadette by Franz Werfel), a novel about an imaginary invasion of a Northern European town (The Moon Is Down by John Steinbeck – which eventually won the Pulitzer Prize), a novel about Nanjing peasants before the 1937 Japanese invasion (Dragon Seed by Pearl S. Buck) and a thriller about prisoners trying to escape a Nazi prison camp (Seventh Cross, by Anna Seghers, translated from the German). The war had disrupted the literary world in many ways; the Nobel prizes were suspended between 1940-1943, European writers were living in exile (Thomas Mann in California, Andre Gide in Tunisia). In 1943 the journalist and screenwriter Gene Fowler had written several letters to Hillyer about the idea of writing a screen adaptation of My Heart for Hostage for David O. Selznick (Oscar-winning director of Gone with the Wind and Rebecca). But all this remained just talk. ^[20]

Significantly, Hillyer's novel never made it into a second printing, a clear sign of disappointing sales. In contrast to many of his contemporaries (like Robert Frost, Dos Passos and E.E. Cummings), the literary works of Hillyer have hardly attracted any critical attention after Hillyer's death aside from a few pieces about the 1948 Bollingen Prize hullabaloo. Perhaps that will change with the re-publishing of this novel and the increased availability of public domain works by Hillyer and recently found audio of Hillyer reciting his poetry.

Hillyer died in 1961. US copyright law at the time required that authors renew their copyright 28 years after initial registration, so Hillyer's estate would have needed to filed the paperwork in 1970. Tragically, his only child, Stanley Hillyer, died in August 1969 at the age of 42, and in the midst of all that, no copyright renewal for the novel was filed.

Rediscovery and Republishing

Brad Bigelow runs a literary blog, neglectedbooks.com, "where forgotten books are remembered." Mostly Bigelow writes about out-of-print novels that are only available in the used book market (usually for lots of money). In 2019 he wrote a long blogpost about Hillyer's novel: ^[21]

Of course, that review piqued my curiosity, and after finding a copy of the book, I was happy to proof and format a new ebook version. Although I definitely enjoyed the original 1942 book cover illustration by George Salter (which sketches a couple walking down a Parisian street beside the river), I wanted the new ebook cover to have a more contemporary feel and focus more on the psychological element of the couple's relationship. Using contrasting colors and multiple images of the same woman, artist Brittany Betherum captures the angst of a man struggling over memories of a lost love.