On Hart and His Books

The death of a writer is a unique occurrence in mortal passings. Behind him is left not only loved living family and friends but loved dead letters and books, notes made with “little black ink” as de Maistre called them. In this sense, when Hart was alive, he was always moving among the deceased, passing his time with a literary and philosophical lineage from the likes of Dante to Kierkegaard to Hemingway. All scholars are in way or another like Bartleby in the Office of Dead Letters.

Nevertheless, Hart’s life was anything but that of the dormant academic in a dusty Faustian studio, high in the northern ivy tower. From the offices of the National Review in New York to the White House, all the way back up to Hanover, Hart traversed the East Coast as a dynamic political and intellectual figure. His life and work recalls the poet-scholar, TS Eliot, who pervades Hart’s writing, from Acts of Recovery (1989) to his final book The Living Moment: Modernism in a Broken World (2012). Eliot’s discontentment with the modern world, his desire to return to the individual (and the individual’s tradition), and his belief in something like transcendence—religious or otherwise—is likely what made dear to Hart.

Hart, like Eliot, was an aristocratic conservative, which is exceedingly hard to come by these days. Rather: it nearly doesn’t exist. Most to the Right are proud to be “deplorables,” and few will say they’re proud to sip Dewar’s on the rocks while reading Burke or Milton. The ideas, mentalities, and mannerisms of the old guard, embodied by William F. Buckley, is now mostly accessibly to younger generations through YouTube videos of Firing Line.

Hart, like Buckley, like Burke, was a man of the “politics of reality.” He was anti-ideology, because ideology was the foundation of the French Revolution and everything that came after it (see Hart’s chapter “What the Hell was Socialism?” in Acts of Recovery). Original conservativism—the principles upon which Hart founded the Dartmouth Review—are not ideological, but rather a priori, fundamental. Hart articulates better than anyone in his book The American Dissent: A Decade of American Conservativism (1966), when he writes: “conservativism does not normally exhibit itself as a ‘position’ or as a system of ideas, but remains implicit, unarticulated, relying on the various understandings and intuitions upon which an actual civilization is based. Conservative theory does not originate in a tract or a manifesto, but is written, as de Maistre put it, ‘in the hearts of all countrymen.’” (Hart is here likely referring to de Maistre’s citation—in Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques (1809)—of the 16th century Parisian lawyer and writer Jérôme Bignon, who wrote that conservativism exists “in the hearts of all Frenchmen.”)

It’s the unsaid, the mysterious, that both de Maistre and Hart latch onto here. Even this can be seen in Hart’s support for Obama over Bush—“I loathe populism,” he writes. Hart held a mental dynamism, an ability to shift in thought, to alter perspective while remaining true to his principles of old conservativism.

Hart’s final book, The Living Moment: Modernism in a Broken World (2012) covers the greats, his personal Western canon—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Eliot, and Mann. It’s a work about the great themes, about life and death, joy and pain and suffering. There is really nothing new under the sun. Hart favored the major to the minor, the great—if at times poetically reductive— truths of the world. For this reason, Martin Heidegger appears more often than not as a guide to the book, emerging from his little hut in the Black Forest to guide Hart’s reader. The central claim to Heidegger’s philosophy is that we moderns have forgotten Being (Sein). It is the first question of philosophy, of metaphysics, and it has been lost since the Greeks. For Heidegger, what matters is knowing how to be-in-the-world (in-der-Welt-sein).

Heidegger’s entire oeuvre combined poetics with philosophy, often using Hölderlin, Heraclitus, and Trakl to illuminate critical points about fundamental ontology. In the same way, Hart uses key American writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald to talk about the human condition (though Hart would likely laugh at the comparison). In Hemingway, Hart finds terror, screams, drunken sailors and soldiers and suicides. Hemingway portrays the rawness of humanity can perhaps only be written with whiskey and typewriter. Similar to Heidegger’s claim about forgetfulness, much of what we as moderns have forget is tradition. The Latin tradere—to pass down, to hand over for safe keeping—cannot be done if we have no one from whom we can receive. Hart was one of the last college professors who knew about the old tradition of the Western canon and was willing to pass it down, to keep it safe. The fight today is that we do not forget from
where this tradition comes.

Beyond the literary, Hart’s work has much to tell the young reader about the state of the higher education and contemporary culture. He explains that today’s “reader will be surprised by the authority the college universe has for Fitzgerald. But during the 1920s far fewer people went to college than is the case today; the Ivy League colleges had more distinctive personalities and were available as aspects of characterization for a novelist.” This was Old Dartmouth, and for all its problems and shortcomings, its identity was so strong and coherent, one could say it had one. This is what Hart means when he speaks of the New England aristocrat, who did not only exist within a hierarchy, but whose very life itself was a hierarchy, moving from step to step, school to school, phase to phase, creating a coherent identity. To some this sounds monstrous, to others, the very thing that makes a man.

This book reflects a late Hart, one reflecting on death and finitude, on pain and the last times. He quotes Virgil from the Aeneid “sunt lacrimae rerum,” “there are tears at the heart of things,” but suggests that for Hemingway, and perhaps for all of us moderns of this time, there are in fact screams at the heart of things. Screams from the inside and out.

Hart was from a different time, a lost time. This is why he harkens back to often to Paris in the Twenties, something longed for by aesthetes today. Men wore more buttons, suede jackets, leather shoes; there were codes, morals (and violations of them); strange traditions. Things were
not better, not worse. But there were more distinctions between things—this made more better art and better culture. With lines, with divisions, one could then transgress and violate. This is how art emerges.

Hart’s primary intellectual influence was his professor at Columbia, Lionel Trilling, author of the great The Liberal Imagination (1950) and Sincerity and Authenticity (1971). The former, the role of which cannot be overstated in the intellectual development of Hart, defends the classical liberal ideas of the Western canon, which Trilling at the time of writing saw at under attack. The book is only more important on today’s college campus, where free speech all but forgotten, and towing the party line of some unnamed progressivist party is rule and law.

Hart’s wise words are perhaps most apt when reflecting on the literature spirit of tradition in the closing lines of his final book. Hart sees the writer as the being who gives shape to world, who directs its very legacy. The writer is never alone, he is always in a lineage, even when he appears to be the truly singular romantic genius, as Eliot remarks in his famous essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. So “as Eliot looked back to Dante and Donne, we will look back to the modernists,” and we will look back to Hart. “Fare forward, Voyager…” writes Hart. Farewell, Jeff.