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Oct 17, 2006 11:55 AM by James Panero
At Dartmouth, the conservative, off campus Dartmouth Review is more than a known commodity. It remains an active publication, editorially strong.
So last Saturday, at our book signing at the Dartmouth Bookstore, rather than give the standard sales pitch, Stefan and I invited Jeffrey Hart to join us for a panel discussion. Hart is a retired professor of English at Dartmouth College, Senior Editor at National Review, and advisor to The Dartmouth Review. But most importantly, Hart has been a spiritual mentor to generations of Dartmouth students--including us. So when we asked Hart to join us, what we really wanted was to hear Hart speak, which he did. Scott Johnson of Powerline once called Hart "the man who opened my eyes to the claims of the great tradition.... Professor Hart disabused me of my addled adolescent liberalism and smugness over the four years I was his student as an undergraduate." As an undergraduate himself, Hart had a similar experience with a Dartmouth Professor in the late 1940s: a man by the name of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. At the book signing, Hart discussed Huessy’s influence, which he had written about in Smiling Through The Cultural Catastrophe. "In 1947 and 1948, when an undergraduate at Dartmouth, I studied with a professor of philosophy named Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, a refugee from the Nazis. During World War I, as a soldier in the German army, he had fought at Verdun. On one occasion, during a lull in the bombardment, he wandered out into the pitted and scarred no man’s land. Suddenly, the artillery on both sides began firing again and he took refuge in a crater. He experienced extreme disconnectedness and negation. ’I was a naked worm,’ he told the students in his classroom. In 1933, he experienced another negation in the form of the Nazi revolution. Like Edmund Burke at the time of the French Revolution, he had been ’startled into reflection’ by these negations. He had felt thrust outside history, a ’naked worm,’ as he put it, meaningless, wandering on the moon. In consequence, he had thought long and deeply about education, his masters becoming Frederich Nietzsche and William James, both of whom he say as attempting to bring meaning out of despair. He had two phrases he repeated so often they remained in a student’s mind.Hart has himself been inhabiting my mind recently. I’ve just submitted an article about Hart to the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. The piece will appear in January. The Huessy story is one of Hart’s foundational tales. Another concerns his first days at Dartmouth as a young tennis player, out for a pickup game. I asked Hart to recount the tennis episode for the bookstore audience: I saw a student waiting there. Nobody around. So we played a set. Not a real competitive set. I beat the guy. Turns out he was number one on the varsity. The coach showed up while we were playing. He was really pissed off. He said ’You ask me before you go on the courts.’ I said, ’You weren’t here.’ He said, ’You wait until I’m here.’ Our relationship went downhill from there.This episode turned out to be a problem for the coach, who "played tennis in his old army trousers and black socks," according to Hart, then ranked fourth in the Junior Davis Cup squad. "To be fair, I was not lacking in self confidence." After two years at Dartmouth, Hart transferred to Columbia, where he became one of Lionel Trilling’s best students. Diana Trilling, Lionel’s wife, calls Hart one of the "Who’s Who of the gifted undergraduates of the thirties, forties, and early fifties." Hart also joined the tennis team at Columbia, where he had his revenge. I came up here Green Key Weekend and beat the hell out of the coach’s number one man. I ran the Dartmouth player all over the court. His tongue was on his chest. I was polite when the coach congratulated me. I felt like saying a few other things.Both a great mind and a great sportsman, Jeffrey Hart has that rare combination of attributes. His intellectual rivalries, including his recent disagreements with the Bush administration and the conservative movement, are a product of the two.
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