You don’t know me, reader, and I don’t know you. Nevertheless, I urge you to buy a copy of Kevin Hart’s Dark-Land: Memoir of a Secret Childhood and read it as soon as you can make time for it. Warning: once you’ve started, you’ll find it very difficult to put down. Such, at least, was my experience.
I am 76 years old, and I’ve lost count of the memoirs and autobiographies I’ve read over the decades, going all the way back to the 1950s (I think the first memoir I read was by a missionary, but I can’t recall any of the details). Some of these made a lasting impact: Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned (one massive volume in Russian, but divided into two for the English translation), Thomas Bernhard’s Gathering Evidence (one volume in English translation, several slim volumes in German), and Anthony Burgess’s Little Wilson and Big God, to name just a handful. From others, I retain a strong impression, like a distinctive taste. Many more, alas, hardly raise a stir among the neurons.
Of all the memoirs and autobiographies I’ve ever read — literary or otherwise — Dark-Land is among the very best. The currency of praise is debased these days. I loathe the endless hype that has taken over so much writing about books, as if that were the only way to get readers’ attention. But not to acknowledge a genuinely astonishing achievement, out of a fastidious fear of being mistaken for one of the shameless boosters, would be a crime.
So. Telling some bookish friends about Dark-Land when I first read a bound galley, I discovered that the name Kevin Hart, at least not referring to the famous stand-up comedian, didn’t ring a bell. (A couple of my friends wondered if he was related to David Bentley Hart.) That’s odd, in a way, because he has been widely published; just last year, the splendid University of Chicago Press published Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation, based on his Gifford Lectures. He’s the author of more than a dozen books of poetry. He is the Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Studies at the University of Virginia. (If you are into phenomenology of the French varieties, you will probably be familiar with him.) “In Fall 2024,” I quote from Wikipedia, “Hart will assume the Jo Rae Wright University Distinguished Professorship at Duke Divinity School, with a courtesy appointment in the Duke University Department of English.” Neither fish nor fowl, in other words, so it won’t come as a great surprise to you to hear that his memoir is sui generis.
Hart was born in 1954, the second child of an ill-matched couple who nevertheless stuck together and did their best. His only sibling — a sister, Pauline — was nearly 10 years older. Like you, I suspect, I have read a fair number of accounts of everyday life in working-class London during this period of grimy austerity. Hart’s is the least cliched I have ever encountered, at once appalling and funny, rich in visceral detail; the same can be said of his memories of family life and (grotesque) early schooling.
But what makes the book most unusual is Hart’s account of his inner life. He mentions near the end that he wrote this memoir over a period of two months(!), often working well into the night. Somehow he managed to reinhabit himself as a young boy and then a teenager. The back cover copy of Dark-Land (the title, by the way, alludes to The Pilgrim’s Progress, which entered Hart’s imagination when he was a boy and never left) describes it as a “searing, yet at times hilarious, narrative of his first thirteen years.” But that’s misleading, even though it accounts for a substantial chunk of the book.
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In 1966, when Hart turned 12, his family emigrated to Australia. Page 123 (of 233) finds the Hart family setting out for the series of flights that would take them from London to Sydney. A far from negligible part of Dark-Land is devoted to their time as a family Down Under. Later on, we glimpse Hart as an adult in Australia and the United States (he emigrated in 2002, having spent some time in the U.S. earlier). Early in this second part of the book, we get an account of the revelatory experience — in an algebra class! — that changed the trajectory of Hart’s inner life and set him on the course for what amounted to a new identity. I won’t try to describe that here; you must read it yourself.
If you are a professor teaching about the art of the memoir in general or religious autobiography in particular, add Dark-Land to your syllabus. If you are in a book club, nominate this one. Give copies to some of your literary-minded friends. Spread the word.
John Wilson is senior editor of the Marginalia Review of Books.