"Jeffrey Hart, Conservative Stalwart Who Denounced Modern-Day GOP"

This was the title of Buckley associate Jeffrey Hart's obituary in the Washington Post in early 2019. Dartmouth classmates contacted me as soon as the news broke. I think it's fair to say that for the time he taught there, from the early 1960s to 1995, Hart in many ways was Dartmouth. By the time of his retirement, his lectures had to be held in the largest auditorium facilities available.

I was always more ambivalent. I went to graduate school in English at the University of Southern California, where partly under Hart's influence, I specialized in eighteenth century. But early in my time there, the professors who became my mentors took me aside. They'd been looking at my Dartmouth transcripts and had seen all the courses I'd taken from Hart. They explained to me in not quite the same words that Hart was a public dilettante, someone not to be taken seriously. Indeed, one of those who spoke to me was Donald Greene, acknowledged at the time to be Mr Samuel Johnson. Hart was celebrated in the Dartmouth farewells as a Samuel Johnson scholar -- I began to learn soon enough that Hart's Johnson expertise was nothing more than reading droll passages from Boswell to his packed lecture halls.

I think Hart's success, if he had it, was to convince a generation of students that Samuel Johnson was just another public dilettante, on a par with Burke, who was one, and Hart's model, Buckley. Greene, on the other hand, saw Johnson as something more like a pre-Freud Freudian, which Greene thought was perfectly OK. On a lifetime's reflection, I think Johnson was a deeply tormented figure, problematic intellectually on the same plane as David Hume, though for different reasons -- like Greene himself, Johnson was someone who had effectively left Christianity behind but was still low church.

I have no idea what Hart would do if I tried to submit a paper to him about this. But the Jeffrey Hart I knew in the 1960s was not the Jeffrey Hart in the photo above. The hair is shaggy and unkempt, and although the lower part of his face retains the tight-lipped deadpan, the eyes have a farawsy stare. The photo at left is from 1966, when he was teaching my sophomore survey. The photo above, which shows him reading from a newly-publisshed When the Going Was Good, must date from 1982.

Why the difference? Hart in 1966 is firm and clean-cut; Hart in 1982 is shaggy and haunted. The 1960s Hart converted to Catholicism from Episcopalianism in 1968, an example that at least partly inspired my own move much later. Yet the obituaries point out that he divorced his first wife in 1981, which may well explain his condition in the 1982 photo. He married his second wife in 1984, which brings us to a conundrum. The Post obituary says,

As a scholar of 18th-century English literature, Dr. Hart was guided by the orderly writing and minds of historian Edward Gibbon, essayist and lexicographer Samuel Johnson and political philosopher Edmund Burke. He admired the conservative values of tradition, cultural stability and social decorum.

Well, Johnson's writing and mind were anything but orderly, but leaving that aside, what about the disorder in Hart's personal life, probably reflected in his appearance as of 1982? Divorce and remarriage are not Catholic or orderly things at all. And the disorder in Hart's family continued. His son Ben, touted in histories of the Dartmouth Review as a founder while he was a Dartmouth student, went on not to become an important intellectual, but to build a career as a direct mail consultant, authoring such books as How To Write Blockbuster Sales Letters.

Worse, Ben's first wife, having divorced him, wrote a blog and became a syndicated columnist, author, and speaker as Betsy Hart, building her career writing of her ex-husband Ben Hart's betrayals and the dilemma this posed for her as a modern woman.

Hart himself in later writings insisted that the women students he'd taught at Dartmouth were fully entitled to have abortions there -- after all, they'd come to Dartmouth to build careers, not to raise kids. Tradition, cultural stabiliy, and social decorum indeed. Edmund Burke indeed.

In 2004, Hart endorsed John Kerry for president. In 2008, he endorsed Obama. Buckley kept him on at National Review as senior editor and even gave him writing projects there until Buckley died in 2008. His successors quickly fired Hart. I had some dealings with him, more or less indirectly, in the mid 2000s when I wrote for the Dartmouth Review during the alumni trustee controversies. His obituaries uniformly reported that he passed away from complications of dementia. I had the impression that the staff of the Dartmouth Review was covering for problems in that area even at that time.

I try to talk about all this when I now and then run into my schoolmates from the 1960s. But Jeffrey Hart to them is Dartmouth. To ask questions about Hart is to ask questions about Dartmouth. They won't have it.