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Jeffrey Hart, R.I.P.
Thursday morning in Hanover, New Hampshire, the finest teacher I have ever known will be laid to rest.
Jeffrey Hart, who died Sunday at 88, taught at Dartmouth for thirty years. By 1975, when I matriculated at the College, he had become a campus celebrity, one of the professors every student learned about as a freshman. In a town in which the faculty all seemed to own Volvos, Jeff would drive to work in a limousine, a gift from his friend, William F. Buckley, Jr., pulling up each morning to Sanborn House, the home of the English Department, where he would occupy not one parking space but two. At football games, Jeff would appear in a raccoon coat. If you saw him on campus—Jeff loved to stroll down to the athletic fields to watch the tennis team practice—he would invariably be smoking an elaborate pipe. He owned a churchwarden a foot-and-a-half long and meerschaum that looked as though it had belonged to Sherlock Holmes.
Yet Jeff was impossible to dismiss as a mere character or eccentric. He published widely in his field, English literature, earlier in his career on the eighteenth century, then on the mid-twentieth century, especially on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Eliot, and Pound. His non-academic work proved at least as impressive. Twice a month he flew to New York to help edit National Review, the leading conservative journal in the nation, and twice a week he published a column that appeared in newspapers across the country. Colorful, even outrageous, Jeff was also erudite and prolific.
Both aspects of his persona proved compelling to undergraduates, such as me, who found themselves drawn to conservatism—but felt intimidated by the liberal ethos on campus. Conservatism, unintelligent? How could that be? Jeff Hart was brilliant—indisputably brilliant. Conservatism, dour? Grim? Pessimistic? Again, how could that be? Jeff Hart enjoyed sports, loved to laugh, and followed pop culture. (After a drink one night at Peter Christian’s, Jeff had me follow him across the Green to Sanborn House so he could play a new record for me. What did he place on the turntable? “Werewolves of London.”)
Jeff’s capacity for friendship proved limitless. He would invite undergraduates to dinner at his farmhouse, talking with us deep into the night. (Most of what I know about Dante I learned over the course of several evenings at Jeff’s kitchen table.) He would offer career advice, particularly helpful to those of us who wanted to go into journalism. (Jeff introduced me to Bill Buckley, who recommended me to then Vice President Bush, who hired me as a speechwriter.) And he would talk with us about religion. A Catholic convert, Jeff didn’t particularly want to believe—if it had been up to him, he would have changed quite a few of the Church’s strictures—but he had concluded all the same that the Church’s claims were, simply, true. (At a party he threw at his farmhouse the evening before my class graduated, Jeff made a comment that would lead to my own conversion. “Peter,” he said, sipping a daiquiri, “the Catholic church is the Church. Everything else is footnotes and criticism.”)
But the classroom—that is place to which my thoughts keep returning. Before graduating, I took every course Jeff offered. An introduction to poetry that ranged from “The Canterbury Tales” to “The Wasteland.” The Augustan Age. The Age of Johnson. Hemingway and Fitzgerald. “In all his courses,” as I wrote in an appreciation in National Review a few years ago,
Jeff stressed two skills, reading and writing. These sound commonplace. As he approached them, they were not. He asserted that a great poem or novel can sharpen its readers’ perceptions and enlarge their understanding—but only if they submit to it and read it. Jeff was never rude in the classroom, but whenever a student started talking about how a poem made him feel, Jeff would shift the discussion to the poem’s historical context, its rhythm and rhyme scheme, or its diction. He was not interested in a 19-year-old’s ability to emote; he was interested in the text.
In The Age of Johnson, Hart gave an exam that consisted only of a list of names drawn from Boswell’s Life. The students were asked to identify each character in no more than a sentence. I missed half of them, including—this has stayed with me—Topham Beauclerk, Dr. Johnson’s close and much younger friend. Like many students, I found the exam infuriating. The big ideas! That’s what should have been on the exam! To this grumbling Jeff responded calmly: Do your reading. Experience the characters the author presents. Enter his world. If you don’t know who Topham Beauclerk was, you have done a deficient job of reading Boswell’s text.
“I trust,” Boswell wrote of the death of Dr. Johnson, “I shall not be accused of affectation, when I declare, that I find myself unable to express all that I felt upon the loss of such a Guide….I shall, therefore, not say one word of my own, but adopt those of an eminent friend:
“‘He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up.’”
Published in General
What a lovely tribute.
Condolences Peter. Thank you for introducing us to Professor Hart. Requiescat in pace Professor Hart.
Beautiful Peter. And without the sentimentality that your teacher would likely have been less than patient with.
If, like me, you had to look up what a churchwarden is, it’s one of these.
A beautiful tribute, and one that reminded me of perhaps the finest teacher I have ever known, my friend Bernie (who, let it be known, was quite eccentric himself. It may just go with the territory).
One evening at a dinner party, Bernie was confronted by a slightly drunken parvenu and ignoramus who decided to show off his own shortcomings, and demean his companions, by pulling out the old saw, “Those who can, do; Those who can’t do, teach.”
Bernie just sat quietly, shook his huge head once or twice, stroked his long beard, smiled, and then said,
As he did, with his whole heart and mind and soul. Just like Jeffrey Hart. What a “life of service,” a “life well and greatly lived,” and what a legacy. May he rest in peace.
Wow. Yes, teaching is the highest calling.
Sorry for your loss, Peter. Losing an inspirational teacher is like losing family.
Love this.
I once considered becoming a high school teacher of Math and consulted with some educators in the family (English and History). They explained I would be asked my “philosophy of education” in the application process. The implication was the Department of Education was looking for candidates who would de-emphasize their love of the subject and spout some sentimental hooey about “teaching students,” not subjects. I decided it wasn’t for me.
I think I would have loved (most of) my students and my students would have benefited from my passion for the subject. Sounds like Jeffrey Hart was that kind of teacher.
RIP.
Great Tribute Peter!
“Peter,” he said, sipping a daiquiri, “the Catholic church is the Church. Everything else is footnotes and criticism.”
This reminds me of a famous Rabbi Hillel quote when he was asked to explain the Torah:
A man asked Rabbi Hillel to teach him the entire Torah while standing on one foot. Hillel replied, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor: that is the whole Torah while the rest is commentary; go and learn it.”
Jeffrey Hart was clearly a wise man. Sorry for your loss.
With thanks, condolences, and prayers, Peter…