A Life: James Heffernan ‘made a life out of appreciating and loving literature’

James A.W. Heffernan in 1965. (Family photograph)

James A.W. Heffernan in 1965. (Family photograph) Family photograph

James A.W. Heffernan with his extended family (daughter-in-law Heidi Rose Robbins, son Andrew, daughter Virginia, and grandchildren Kate Heffernan, Ben Samuels and Dylan Heffernan) in 2014, at a celebration of his 50th wedding anniversary on board the Sir Isaac Evans tall ship in Maine. (Family photograph)

James A.W. Heffernan with his extended family (daughter-in-law Heidi Rose Robbins, son Andrew, daughter Virginia, and grandchildren Kate Heffernan, Ben Samuels and Dylan Heffernan) in 2014, at a celebration of his 50th wedding anniversary on board the Sir Isaac Evans tall ship in Maine. (Family photograph) Family photographs

James A.W. Heffernan with his wife, Nancy Coffey Heffernan, at Occom Pond in Hanover, N.H., in 2022. (Family photograph)

James A.W. Heffernan with his wife, Nancy Coffey Heffernan, at Occom Pond in Hanover, N.H., in 2022. (Family photograph)

By ELLE MULLER

Valley News Correspondent

Published: 10-12-2024 5:01 PM

Modified: 10-15-2024 9:08 AM


HANOVER — As a Dartmouth College professor, writer and father, James Heffernan inspired those around him with his love of literature and passion for life.

Heffernan’s children, Virginia and Andrew, affectionately called their father’s lust for life “Heffervessence.”

“His life was shaped by what he loved,” Heffernan’s son, Andrew, said. “He found literature early on, and he was deeply passionate about it.”

Demonstrating the vivacity and enthusiasm that had long characterized him, Heffernan, who died in July at age 85 of metastatic prostate cancer, wrote 100,000 words of his memoir in the first few months of hospice care.

His final book is that memoir and has been posted on his website, jamesheff.com. It details his life from his childhood in the Boston suburb of Jamaica Plain, his education at Georgetown University and Princeton, his teaching at Dartmouth and the life in between.

Heffernan grew up in a Catholic family as one of eight siblings; it would have been nine, but one died shortly before Heffernan was born in 1939 to Roy J. and Kathleen Heffernan. His father was the Kennedy family’s doctor in Boston.

“It was a crowded house,” Andrew said. “... But I think he found refuge in literature. There was this window into the world of the mind and a more considered, deeper way of moving through the world, instead of just crashing around. He made a life out of appreciating and loving literature. That affected the way he lived.”

Besides a poetic history of Heffernan’s life and Dartmouth, since he first joined the English Department in 1965, his memoir includes a blueprint for the future of the humanities at the college, which includes the revival of a required year-long course for first-year students covering ancient to modern texts.

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“I think he wanted to write this final letter to the world,” his daughter, Virginia, said of the memoir. “His father had published a beautiful book for his grandchildren about his life; I think that was partly on his mind. He also had things he wanted to make sense of. I think he wanted to leave it for his children and grandchildren, and it has a lot of thanks in it.”

Holding true to his love of literature, he used references of well-known authors to describe important moments in his life such as meeting his wife, Nancy. They met through a friend and colleague, Conrad Warlick, who had attended the University of Virginia with Nancy.

“When Nancy opened the front door for me, I was dazzled,” Heffernan wrote about the first time they met, as he picked her up to attend a party hosted by a friend. “As William Wordsworth wrote of Mary Hutchinson, the woman he married way back in 1802, ‘She was a phantom of delight when she first gleamed upon my sight.’ ”

The couple married in Lynchburg, Va., in 1964, the year before Heffernan joined the faculty at Dartmouth, where he taught literature until retiring in 2004. Afterward, he continued writing and publishing about literature, Dartmouth and the Upper Valley.

Over the course of his career, he published 10 books and dozens of articles which ranged from studies of ancient epics to explorations of modern novels and investigated the complex relations between literature, visual art and history.

“Jim was such a prodigious scholar that one is staggered by the sheer number of the books that he wrote and published,” said Edward M. Bradley, a colleague and friend, said during Heffernan’s funeral, which was held Sept. 14 at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Hanover.

Heffernan’s book “Hospitality and Treachery in Western Literature,” published in 2014, “is, quite simply, a masterpiece of enormous research, vast learning, and keen critical analysis,” Bradley, a professor emeritus of classics, said. “Jim Heffernan was the most distinguished scholar in the humanities that I ever encountered in my more than 40 years as a member of the faculty of Dartmouth College.”

Publishing his memoir online was just one example of how Heffernan was hopeful that technological advancements, such as the internet, would benefit the humanities and bring more readers to literature.

“He got really into word processing early. He started Review 19, which was his site to review books about 19th century literature that wouldn’t have been reviewed,” Virginia said. “It was this interesting idea that the humanities could benefit from the web.”

He also found value in old fashioned conversation.

“We would talk about literature as though we were talking about something in the news,” his daughter said. “He never worried about going over our heads, he expected you to keep up with him.”

His son recalled that they referred to his office on the third floor of their Hanover house “the Lurkum,” after the Oncelor’s lair in the Lorax.

“There was this feeling of a craftsman’s workshop, there was clearly a lot going on in that space,” Andrew said.

At times, Andrew would try to sneak up to his father’s study.

“I never could because he’d see me, but he had this level of concentration and focus, it wasn’t a delicate thing, he was able to work in the midst of anything,” Andrew said. “I’d go up and hear typing because he often did write on a typewriter.”

Outside of his scholarship, he was active in the Upper Valley community and shared his opinions through the Valley News perspectives pages regularly.

In one such op-ed, which he wrote in November 2023, shortly after his prostate cancer diagnosis, he focused on prostate cancer screening. In it, he critiqued the fact that in 2012 the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) advised that men over 70 no longer needed PSA testing — which tests for the prostate-specific antigen that signals the presence of cancer.

“Back in 2012, when my internist at Dartmouth Hitchcock passed on to me the original advice of the USPSTF, I decided to follow it and stop getting tested annually for PSA,” Heffernan wrote. “It was the worst mistake I ever made.”

One of Heffernan’s first responses in a moment of serious life-threatening news was to write and share his experience with the Upper Valley.

Bradley visited Heffernan weekly in the last months of his life. “He was unchanged, his voice was vigorous and strong,” Bradley said in an interview. “We would talk about all kinds of things: books, politics, society, our own lives.”

Bradley described Heffernan “orchestrating” his remaining moments “as if he were inviting us to a concert of beautiful music designed to celebrate his life joyfully and not at all to mourn it in dejection.”

Elle Muller can be reached at daniellewingmuller@gmail.com.