Belonging and not belonging

Nicola Lacey wanted to write an ‘intellectual biography’ of Herbert Hart, on the model of Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf. It’s a tall order. How to cope with the fact that the philosophy of law is even harder to understand than Virginia Woolf’s novels? And though an academic lawyer like Lacey is the best person to understand Hart’s ideas, is she the best person to explain them to us? Is she the best person, indeed, to write a biography which should be scholarly underneath but ‘accessible’ (Lacey’s academic word for it) on the surface?

Since I raise these questions you will guess that I am not about to answer them all in favour of The Nightmare and the Noble Dream. So I should say first that I did very much enjoy reading this book. Partly that was because it included one of the best times of my own life, Oxford in the Sixties, where I had Jenifer Hart as a tutor. But I couldn’t have enjoyed a really bad book — and this isn’t a bad book. But it’s not an excellent one either.

First of all the balance between life and work seems to me wrong, at least for the general reader. There is too much exegesis of Hart’s work, not always well placed: it was a good idea to sum up The Concept of Law early on, for example, but not such a good idea to explain it all over again when we get to 1961. Nicola Lacey fears the opposite: that some readers will feel she has said too much about Hart’s sexuality and marriage. But her whole thesis is that he was driven, in both life and work, by conflicts over belonging and not belonging, as a closet Jew and a closet homosexual; and that his marriage to upper-class, Christian Jenifer, initially an answer to these conflicts, was increasingly part of them.