James Panero ’98 on Professor Hart’s Influence on Him

I owe my career to Professor Hart. More than that, I owe my direction in life to him. Professor Hart was a mentor in the Homeric sense: a wise deity disguised as an old friend who saved young Telemachus from the suitors of the age. Lit by his own sparkling illumination, he let the lyricism of “books, arts & manners” lead the way for students. He encouraged us to turn away from ideology and look to the lessons of history and human experience. For those of us who arrived on campus after his retirement, his lessons came out of Friday lunches in “Hart’s Corner” at Murphy’s tavern, drinks at his tiny home in Lyme, and whirling dispatches by facsimile machine. We were always in class. Through these meetings he developed uncanny insights into our young interests, even if we did not know we had those interests ourselves. He introduced me to “The New Criterion,” where he was a contributor, and suggested I interview editor Roger Kimball about postmodern architecture. He showed a film review of mine to Bill Buckley and brought me to “National Review” as an intern and then as a junior editor. Seeing my own predilections and sensing that we had enough political pundits in the world, he suggested I focus on cultural criticism and, in particular, art criticism. His stationery contained a telling quote by the literary critic John Crowe Ransom: “In manners, aristocratic; in religion, ritualistic; in art, traditional.” Ransom was describing T. S. Eliot. Like Russell Kirk, Hart’s conservative mind was concerned not with winning elections but with understanding a canon, starting with “Athens and Jerusalem,” on through Edmund Burke, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and Auden’s “Shield of Achilles.” He believed in old orders and in the power of culture to reveal order. And in all this serious work, he had the time of his life—”Smiling,” as he titled one of his books, “through the cultural catastrophe.”

—James Panero ’98, executive editor of The New Criterion, former editor of The Dartmouth Review