In Conversation with James Wyn Hart
“I don’t know why, but the things I took to in life I took to at a very early age.”
These were the kinds of things I’d come to expect from James Hart, or Wyn—his middle name—as he’s known in music circles. Wyn is a violinist in the Colorado Symphony and a partner in the law firm of Choquette and Hart LLP.
“They’ve never changed in the slightest,” he continued. “Since I was seven years old I was reading history for fun and playing Mozart on the piano. At ten I started violin. I always loved French food.”
There was a thoughtful pause.
“And throwing a football.”
That wasn’t what I was expecting to hear next, but I suppose some things are universal in a Texas background. No matter how often football came up it always seemed like it was the first time he mentioned it, but his reminiscences of throwing a football with a friend were always accompanied by a bemused expression of satisfaction one might see on the face of a person recalling good times with the long-lost lovers of youth.
“Did you read history even as a child?”
“Dad had a wonderful library, and I would ask him questions about current events all the time. The current events of the late 60's were of course civil rights and the war in Vietnam. As a matter of fact, my first memories are of my father carrying me on his shoulders in marches against the Vietnam war and in favor of civil rights in ’68 when I was three. We even participated in a die-in to protest a company in town that was manufacturing Agent Orange.”
I think it was the end of the sentence, but at the very least I cut off his train of thought.
“Wait. You participated in a die-in...when you were three?”
“Yes, although mother had to give me a jar of peanut butter and about a year's supply of crackers to get me to lie still so the helicopters that were filming wouldn't see me bouncing around in the back seat of the car. Then after that came Watergate. War, civil rights, and then scandal led very naturally to my asking my father about these events, and to the history books in his library that told about similar events in far off times. He would show me books about everything from Rome to the Cold War. I fell in love with—and still do love—tying events in history to current events, and an understanding whence events come.”
“You mean ‘from whence’?”
“Actually that is a modern mistake; since ‘whence’ means ‘from where’, ‘from whence’ means ‘from from where’. “
For the longest time I thought the use of antiquated English words like “whence” in his everyday speech had come from his years of law school in the early 2000’s. It seemed like something a lawyer would say anyway, but over time I realized it was a natural outgrowth of a person who reads Lincoln like a novel, not a subject. The simple fact is that Wyn is exactly as described: a lover of Classical and Romantic music, history and law, and classic French cuisine. In short, a man born a century too late.
Perhaps it was because the Hart family tree was still fed by the past century’s roots. The pocket watch his great-great-grandfather carried to Texas from Hartsville, TN after the Civil War sits appropriately on a small marble table in his home. Something to be sensed every day in passing in and out, occasionally run through the fingers, and if taken note of by an inquiring guest, an impetus to storytelling. It had passed to his grandfather, who it turns out was a Texas Supreme Court Justice, to his father—also a lawyer—and finally to him.
However, it must not be lost that passing on an heirloom watch is to pass on its inner machinations as well. The values of old Southern manners and education are the same gears and pinions that turned the hands of his father and grandfather. There is no denying it; the Hart line reckons the hours the same way, with the expectation that the casing be gilded, not just polished.
After discussing his father's side the family, the natural question would have been to ask about his mother's. I did so reluctantly because I knew his mother had been killed in a car accident when he was 19 and it was not easy for him to talk about. Ultimately, I felt it would be a disservice to both Wyn, and more so to her not to extend the option.
"How do you remember your mother?"
"I think that most sons think their mother is an angel. I was no exception. She gave everything to her family, and always seemed like she gave more back to the universe than she received from it. But she was the most tender and loving person I ever knew."
I decided to leave it at that.
"Who was your most influential teacher?"
“My favorite teacher, Max Rabinowitsj, was very influential in my life. I began studying with him when I was 13, and then resumed lessons as a 19-year-old during the summers when I was attending Oberlin and Peabody. He had a gift for putting summer festivals together in the most beautiful places, and my first year he took a group of us to play in an 11th century castle in Southern Provence, in a town called Entrecasteaux. Our first night we took our mattresses up to the turret and slept under the stars. I often thought of when Jefferson said ‘everybody has two countries: his own and France’.”
“Wait, you actually lived there? You...stayed in an 11th century castle in Southern Provence...playing chamber music all summer.”
“Yes.”
This reaffirmed my theory that there is a reason to hate anyone if you talk to them long enough.
“They must have renovated it, right?”
“Well, it was renovated in the 14th century.”
It was quickly cleared up that it had modern facilities, but I couldn’t help wondering how much they would have cared.
“So who exactly is Max?”
“He is a graduate of the Curtis Institute and has had a very distinguished career, including serving as Concertmaster of the St. Louis Symphony. His grandparents were Russian Jews who immigrated to Belgium through Holland, and a Dutch customs official added a ‘j’, as one often sees in Dutch names.
They eventually settled there, and lived in a small town that ended up being in the path of the Nazis in 1939. Everyone in the village decided they would make a run for the French border, but as they were fleeing across the fields German planes strafed them, killing almost everyone. Max was five, and he grabbed his mother and said ‘We must go back to the village or we will die.’ He pulled her back by the shirt sleeve, and they went into hiding until the end of the war. It was very similar to Anne Frank’s story, although of course, Max survived.”
“I have to say, that’s pretty incredible for a five-year-old. It sounds like he saved both their lives.”
“My first summer there was in ’85 a few months after mom had been killed. For months, I was completely numb, and—‘depression’ isn’t the right word—consumed by tragedy. What I love about Max, and what he did for me that first summer in France, was that he pulled me back to the world.”
“How did Max pull you back into the world?”
“At nineteen I had never heard the Mendelssohn Octet or the Brahms a minor Quartet. That experience of playing chamber music on that level with Max in a French castle with all new European friends, all so full of love, is what brought me back. We played them both that summer, and for the Brahms Max insisted he play second violin and I play first, making a point that he thought my playing was too English and I needed more of what he called ‘Yiddishamama’.”
“Give me a second to catch up typing. How do you spell that?”
“I have no idea. Frankly, I have no idea if it’s even a real word. It was one of Max’s expressions. ‘Wyn, you need more Yiddishamamma in your playing!’ Whatever it is, he was right. I still take lessons with him once a year.”
“Even to this day? How old is he?”
“Eighty. He has beautiful house on Lake Erie, and a winter home in Naples, FL.”
“Do you take a quick lesson and come back, or spend a few days out there?”
The moment I asked I realized it was a stupid question.
“Oh no, we spend a few days together reminiscing, talking about everything from politics to his days at Curtis with Steinhardt and Laredo. In retrospect, I think what drew me to him as much as anything was that we had a similar outlook on life. My father said something very interesting once: ‘A well-lived life is one of paying attention to great things and small things.’ The arc of history on one hand and the smell of spring air on the other. Do you know the passage from Tuchman about the last time the great heads of state were seen before World War I?”
Wyn always has his favorite quotes at the tip of his tongue, and if he is unsure he can pull a book of his shelf and turn exactly to the page. I often wondered if he refreshed himself periodically or simply had the kind of lingual memory that made him the top lawyer in his graduating class. I’d never asked him, but my suspicion was that he rolled them over in his mind once or twice a day during life’s small caesuras. (His response upon reading this was “{Expletive} you. No I don’t.”) I happened to know this quotation precisely because I had heard him recite it, and had used it in several of my lectures at school.
He continued on, “She says of the last gathering of the great heads of state in The Guns of August:
‘The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to been seen again.’
There’s something about the symmetry and artistry of that sentence—using the clock figuratively and literally—that is masterful. Whether it is the great prose of Tuchman or great music like the first movement of Mozart’s Prague Symphony, there is something similar in the way they are constructed, although it’s impossible for me to explain or understand what that is.
When I see Max, we visit and go out to a restaurant with a good wine list or he or his wife Mary will cook a spectacular meal at home. I play for him, and he says profound things about the smallest phrase. There’s a little beauty in every moment of his life. To me that’s very French, and it has instructed my adult life.”
“Which do you prefer, law or music?” He paused for a moment. “There’s a letter from Jefferson to Adams—from 1826 I think—where he writes ‘I have loved in my life most that which I loved first’. I loved the violin first.”
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Wyn has always been a curiosity of conversational juxtapositions. One moment you’re talking about how great football is, and the next he’s desperately rummaging around in a drawer trying to find an old recording of Rosenkavalier because a snippet of one of its scenes somehow threaded its way into the slowly rotating kaleidoscope of pleasantries. Games end, but the urgency of a reminiscence dominates the field. Another of Wyn’s favorite quotes is from Durant’s Caesar and Christ: “De nobis fabula narratur: Of ourselves this Roman story is told.” I always forget the Latin, but I’ve never heard him indulge in such expediency. As repetitive and predictable as a historical narrative is, for Wyn, the perpetuity of its chalice seems to lie in the impetus to dip the cup, not the quenching of cyclical thirst.
It would be easy to draw psychoanalytical conclusions to simplify the man; the trauma of his mother’s death in a car accident embedding a desperation to cling to the skirt folds of the past, for instance. His erudite manner could manifest from an underlying desire to live the romance of the Old World. The times I’ve attempted to articulate a deeper understanding of his character have inevitably been met with a balk, followed by a mumbling along the lines of “...no, I wouldn’t say that...”.
Ultimately, I think the reason the attempt to summarize Wyn fails is quite simple: it would be too casual. At the risk of having a summary judgement awarded against me, for all his observational powers, vast repository of knowledge, and his love of the finer things, he is above all else emotionally intuitive. Yes, there’s an irony there, and perhaps that’s where a small piece of true insight is to be found. The core of a fine pocket watch is its escapement. The refinement of its components produces a precision and regularity, but it is the caprice of the heartbeat introduced by the ticking of the pallet fork on the wheel that lends its inexorable whimsy and charm.
In that sense I suppose his penultimate comment, “To me that’s very French, and it has instructed my adult life,” is like the final sentence of Finnegan’s Wake—both an end and a beginning.
If you leave it there you have the most incomplete understanding. But ask, "Is it the castle? Is it the phrase? Is it the smell of the air?" and it brings you around to another quote from a great orator or an aria from Figaro, and the joy of a man who has shared something close to his heart. While Wyn must prove his point in law, amongst friends a glass of wine and good conversation will do nicely. I’m inclined to agree, and to me, that’s very French.