Herbert Hart and jenifer williams and sexuality and nicole lacey and deepening connection

It might at first seem strange that I am writing two essays on the love life of HLA Hart in this "legal essays" page. After all, what does love have to do with law? Maybe everything. I am writing them because I was entranced by Nicole Lacey's chapter, in her recent biography on Hart, on the ambivalence and nature of Hart's love life. In this and the next essay I will illustrate the nature of the burgeoning relationship between Hart and Jenifer Williams through their correspondence in 1937.

A Few Background Facts

Hart was born in 1907, the third of four children to a prosperous Jewish merchant in the town of Harrogate outside of Leeds. Because of the relative paucity of Jews in that town (about 40) compared to Leeds and the prosperity of the Hart family, Hart always felt a sort of pressure to assimilate and hide the "Jewish" features of his personal identity. He excelled at New College, Oxford and became a lawyer of some note in London in the 1930s. His wife-to-be, Jenifer Williams, was four years his junior and came from a more cultivated worldly-wise family, where her father was a significant international lawyer and author of several books on the League of Nations. Jenifer spent much time in France and Switzerland as a child, and she rebelled against her somewhat privileged background by adopting a sort of devil-may-care-attitude, a whole-hearted commitment to the Communist Party in the 1930s and a freedom of sexual and verbal expression that was unusual for a woman of the time.

Hart and she met at a house party with friends in 1936. They fell into deep and earnest conversation over Arnold Toynbee's theory of history, and she later said she was immediately impressed with the range and power of his mind. Always one impressed by a man of cerebral accomplishment, she sought out his company, and they began seeing more of each other the next year.

A Deepening Connection

Lacey skillfully traces the stages of their growing intimacy. For sake of simplicity these might be denominated the "humor," the growing enchantment, the fearfully honest and then "head over heels" stages of love. Though this puts a rather too mechanical interpretation on what was certainly a fluid process, it seeks to highlight also that relationships must overcome fears as well as explore deep feelings in order fruitfully to endure.

The "Humorous" Stage

Hart's letters often chided Jenifer about her Communist sympathies (Hart was himself a liberal), international upbringing and coarse language.

"I think to discharge any debt of mutual gratitude in respect of the holiday we might undertake not to shoot straight when we sight each other across the Barricades a few years hence. Or won't the Cell allow that? Ever, Herbert" (68).

Or, on another occasion as he was just beginning to explore French literature, he said, "I've just begun to read Baudelaire--though no doubt you lisped him in the nursery." With respect to her tendency to use shocking language, he said:

"I feel that unless I am to lose my peculiar status in your eyes, this letter should open with a volley of obscenities and blasphemies and be at least six pages long" (69).

This humor didn't replace the normal informative and/or intellectual dimensions of their correspondence, though it illustrates how humor can be used as a means to open up dimensions of human intimacy.

Growing Enchantment

Lacey notes that by the summer of 1937 Herbert and Jenifer had become attached to each other, even as some humor persists. He writes to her:

"I thought viciously about you all the wekeend but as I can't express my feelings otherwise than in the debauched formulae of the bourgeoisie...Only I love you love you love you except when I have awful feelings of panic and think you have sent me a six month notice..." (70).

And then, continuing with the legal language, he says:

"Give me some sign that the lease is still on foot, even if on foot--even if only a notice raising the rent, or objections to dilapidations."

And she, writing back, minced no words in responding to him:

"I will become landlord tenant slave cook whore anything you like.."

In the summer of 1937 each of them had a bout of ill health, and the touching emotional tone especially overlaying her letters to him while she is recuperating at her family's Cornwall home is striking.

"I long for you here almost to the screaming point--for although the sea is lovely in a way and the corn fields most exciting, as no doubt you found, too, and there are comforts and attentions to a stultifying point, I somehow can't appreciate anything and would rather be in a back kitchen with you....You are Picasso against a background of the 19th Century, Mozart compared with the previous 18th C.."

And then, when she finally received a letter from him she says:

"I was so thrilled when your letter came I rushed from one room to another wondering which was the nicest to read it in.. Christ I decay without stimuli."

She knew that because of her sickness she couldn't concentrate, yet she so much wished she could. She tried to read a novel without luck. Halevy's history was not really very good. She read a dreadful review of The New Republic by Christopher Hophouse and couldn't focus. And so she finishes her letter: "I am a vegetable unworthy of you. Please stick pins in my brain. Jenifer."

But these stages of humor and enchantment then led to the next stage, a stage of painful self-revelation. The next essay considers this theme.

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