Interview: Jeffrey Hart ‘51

Interviewed by: Jane Carroll

Place: Baker Library, Hanover, New Hampshire 

Date: July 15, 1997 

Excerpts: 

Carroll:  

Today is July 15, 1997, and I am speaking with Jeffrey Hart, Class of ʻ51 and Professor of English, Emeritus. I am curious how you came to choose Dartmouth as the institution for undergraduate learning. 

Hart:  

It was chosen for me. My father went to Dartmouth, Class of 1921 [Clifford F. Brown ʻ21]. Then he went to Columbia School of Architecture and got his Bachelor of Architecture there; but he was extremely loyal to Dartmouth and I felt that his four years at Dartmouth were probably the happiest of his life. He always seemed to be seriously connected with Dartmouth and I was, as a matter of fact, registered or enrolled in the Class of whatever, enrolled at Dartmouth when I was born. So I grew up understanding that I would go to Dartmouth. However there was a bump in that road since I got heavily involved with junior competitive tennis and felt that I probably would like to go to Stanford. His position was that I could go to Stanford. That would be fine, but he wouldnʼt pay for it. [Laughter] I could go to Dartmouth or I could go to Harvard if I got a scholarship. I did get some kind of tuition break at Dartmouth and that was the best deal, and I was perfectly happy to go to Dartmouth. 

Carroll: Did you play tennis here, then?  

Hart: Yes. I played on the freshman team and then played varsity tennis. Then I left Dartmouth and took a year off. I worked for a publisher in New York. Dual, Sloan and Pearce and began writing fiction and, as a matter of fact, decided that I would not continue with college education because, with the exception of two or three professors, [Thomas] Tom Vance in English and [Eugen] Rosenstock-Huessy in philosophy and one or two others, I felt that I was not learning anything much. I recall a course on the novel where much of the time was taken up by putting up plot diagrams on the blackboard. After all, if you had read the novel, you didnʼt need to have the plot diagrammed. It was like putting a “Hi Marx” outline up there.  

So one day I sat down and said, at the end of sophomore year, “Is it worth it?” I was perfectly happy with the environment and had decided “No.” If I wanted to write, I would go back to New York and then do that. Why not learn to write by writing? So I worked for Dual, Sloan and Pearce as a sort of office boy and junior editor. A jack of all trades. Then I was persuaded…one step back…as connected with the publisher, I went to book parties and that kind of thing and met people from Columbia who said “Why arenʼt you in college?” And I said exactly what I have said to you. So they said “Give Columbia College a chance.” I did and that worked out very well. The professors were…I suspect that Columbia had the best English Department in the country from the end of the war…probably before the war… but at least from the end of the war through about 1965, ʻ68, in there, when people retired and then it changed. But it certainly was a very good department when I was there and when I taught there.  

Carroll: Did you change your teaching at all when the women arrived on campus?  

Hart: No. I got into, as Red Barber used to say for the Dodgers, a bit of a rhubarb when I was teaching a big course in the Literature of the 1920ʼs. I had to teach The Sun Also Rises and we have Jake Barnesʼ problem, the trouble with Brit and all the sexual problems in the book. So I had to, you know, talk about them. One female student wrote a letter to the Chairman saying that Professor Hart is talking about sex all the time. Fortunately, two students were recording these lectures and another student in shorthand, so I could prove that, you know, I wasnʼt talking about sex all the time. I was just teaching this book.  

Carroll: And [Ernest] Hemingway does a lot of talking about sex.  

Hart: Yeah. What else? [Laughter]  

Carroll: Itʼs interesting. Do you think there were growing pains during coeducation or did it go rather smoothly?  

Hart: For me, it did. I can understand being…you know, the first group or groups of women might have felt excluded, maybe abused. I donʼt know; but I do not frequent fraternities or dormitories. I remember when I first came in ʻ63, I was invited to a cocktail party. I think at SAE and I found out that their idea of a cocktail party was beer in paper cups at 8 p.m., plastic cups at 8 p.m. It just didnʼt cut the…[Laughter]  

Carroll: That doesnʼt do it. There was also, I have read about it, in The D after the Cambodian Invasion, a large protest on campus. Kemeny is just in office and he calls off all classes and has a teach-in. Do you remember that event?  

Hart: Yeah. I held my classes anyway.  

Caroll: What was the atmosphere on campus like at that time?  

Hart: Near hysteria. I suppose…well, the hysteria had been increasing since 1968 when we had the terrible events in Chicago at the Democratic Convention. I was tear-gassed at the Republican Convention in Miami. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War rushed the auditorium and the State Police came out of the ground with riot costumes. They had tubes that looked like mortars and were popping off these grenades. I said, “Wait a minute. Iʼm for Nixon.”  

Carroll: We were talking about the role of traditions at Dartmouth and I was curious, what do you think are the traditions that define Dartmouth?  

Hart: Outdoors. Environment. I mean, inextricably, it is going to be different from Columbia or Harvard. Therefore, you will have people who, for example, might like to play football but also like to ski. That type of person is going to want to use the environment. Or hike or go to Moosilauke or so on. Also, New Hampshire has itʼs own feeling, well expressed in the whole ambiance of Robert Frost, which is a kind of tough minded and skeptical attitude toward existence. Very different from Walt Whitman or someone, you know, who is just not going to give that much. You have to find it in the poem and New Hampshire is a conservative state in that sense; although, I think Libertarian adds its impulses, too. Highly individualistic. So Dartmouth is in New Hampshire which does have consequences.  

There are funny things about Dartmouth…a lot of funny things. Superficially, one funny thing is the absence of beds of flowers. That might have to do with the climate. It would look much better if you had…I spoke recently down at Washington and Lee… it is south…but in May the place is full of roses and petunias. It is sort of a happy kind of a thing. Dartmouth is very austere.  

Carroll: Very puritan. 

Hart: Yeah. A lot of pine trees. [Laughter]  

Carroll: Thatʼs true. I will have to look around again. So many times when alumni protest something, it is with the reasoning of tradition behind them, and I think it is wonderful to sort of put it in perceptive what traditions counted and what donʼt. Whose role is that to do?  

Hart: I think you canʼt invent a tradition, you know. The Dean comes out one day and says “Men. Weʼve got a new tradition. We are going to sit on that fence over there.” It either happens or it doesnʼt; but you should not…responsible people should not, without great consideration, attack customary usages, let alone frivolously.  

Singing is a tremendous tradition at Yale. The Wiffenpoof are sort of at the top of the pyramid, but there are hundreds of these groups, apparently. I stay at the Yale Club often. I have my shirt there. Once a year, they have a tradition called Singing through the Club and all these groups come down to New Haven and they are singing all over in banquet halls and in rooms, and they pass through the main lounge and the thing finally ends up with the Wiffenpoofs, and all the groups come together and they all sing together. It is great power. If I were a secondary high school student and interested in voice, I would certainly be drawn to Yale. So why should they fool around with that?  

Carroll: You are quoted as saying in 1980 that the curriculum at that time was fragmented and it lacked what you called narrative content… That the parts were greater than the whole. I was wondering if you could explain that a bit.  

Hart: Well, it is almost a commonplace in cultural history that close to the center of the Western mind is what is called Athens and Jerusalem, Socrates and Jesus. Athens, being both a city and a symbol and the symbol meaning a tradition of cognition; Jerusalem both city and tradition, a tradition of holiness. And you can see these, Athens and Jerusalem, emerge first in Homer, where you have the nobility of the warrior, but which presumes a kind of nobility of soul, too. The warrior is in the foreground. What Socrates does is internalize the heroism of Homer, or Achilles, Odysseus. The hero becomes the philosopher, what he knows. On the other side, you have Moses, who was an epic hero in many ways like Achilles…warrior, leader, nation builder; but you get the beginnings of a holy tradition with his teaching of the Ten Commandments as expanded in the rest of the Homeric mosaic epic. And he dies like an epic hero, looking at the Promise Land from Mount Pisgah.  

So, as Socrates internalizes the Homeric heroic, Jesus internalized the Mosaic heroic where Moses looks out to behavior. “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Jesus says “Thou shalt not look upon a woman with lustful thought.” Or Moses says “Thou shalt not commit murder…  kill”. He means murder. It is in the context of the law. Jesus says “You shall not look upon someone with anger.” So, the whole thing becomes an internal heroism which people call “holiness”. Now, everybody has been talking about this paradigm, Werner Jaeger…what is his name… [Sextus Empiricus?] Empidea, [Claude] Lévi-Strauss, [Friedrich] Nietzsche.  

Nietzcheʼs superman is the man who can combine Athens and Jerusalem. Caesar “with the heart of soul of Christ”, he says which is, of course, a myth. So, you have these paradigms and they come together in first century Near East. Principally, in the figure of Paul, but backed up by the Evangelists, all of whom wrote in Greek. Greece came to the Near East through the conquests of Alexander the Great. You can start with Alexandria and eighty other cities. You get the synthesis of Athens and Jerusalem in Paulʼs uneasy synthesis. But Paul was a Roman citizen…wrote in Greek. He is a rabbi and John, at the beginning of his gospel says in the beginning was the “word” which is the Greek, logos. It comes out of Greek philosophy. So, you get this dialectic, which is there in the beginning, and rattles right thorough history, through all of the great literature of the West and I think makes the West different from China.  

The Chinese symbols are the Wall and the Forbidden City and the millennia of silence. There are no contradictions in China. There is no Athens in Jerusalem…no polarities of that kind, so they donʼt have much to say.  

The West moves from St. Augustine to Voltaire through the Enlightenment, which moved far in the direction of Athens and philosophy. But Dostoyevsky says no to that and Raskolnikov kisses the crossroads and we are in St. Petersburg. So, you get the great cathedral of Chartres and you get the Golden Gate Bridge in the West.  

And that is what I would mean by a paradigm for a curriculum or one course. I am going to teach a version of that next spring at a small college in Massachusetts…Nichols College…and see if I can do it by teaching The Iliad, The Inferno and, say, Hamlet and The Tempest for four weeks.  

Carroll: Thatʼs a lot to put into four weeks.  

Hart: Yeah. Have a quiz every morning.