In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

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...

Buckley died in early 2008, before the Obama phenomenon, but my fast answer is "yes".The more considered answer will take this post, one tomorrow, and possibly more. With his contemporary Hugh Hefner, he developed a new kind of persona in the 1950s, the publisher as public dilettante. His depictions in media rotuinely show him vamping and mugging for the camera to a remarkable degree, but it's always a question of tone and style, not substance. He espoused Catholicism, but he never did it with any particular rigor, and it's difficult to know if the Buckleys were Catholic in any readily distinguishable way from, say, the Kennedys. By the same token, the intellectul figures the National Review embraced included Edmund Burke, whom I've always tended to regard as another public dilettante. While his political writings are best known, he also wrote on the sublime (an essay that I think is better and more important than the other stuff). But he had no center, which i...