Two Nations
By Fredric Smoler
“Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets.”
Disraeli published Sybil, or The Two Nations in 1845, when his two nations were very famously the rich and the poor. The thought the phrase encapsulates is in part obsolete, for modern societies combine increasing economic inequality with a striking amount of cultural egalitarianism via a pervasive mass culture. In another respect, the phrase is very far from obsolete. A little over a year ago Elizabeth Samet published a fascinating book about a meeting of two nations between whom there is nowadays disturbingly little intercourse and sympathy: American military officers, and academics who have very confident opinions about what military officers are like. A couple of generations ago, when military service was a norm, most people had family members who had served, but for current undergraduates at the better colleges (the sort of person Ms. Samet herself used to be) this is much more rarely the case. I started teaching in 1980, and to the best of my knowledge I have taught only one child of a serving officer; none of my current colleagues have ever been in uniform, the last one to have served in combat retired around a decade ago, and only a couple of my students have had a father who served in Vietnam.
So who is Elizabeth Samet? If you Ggoogle her, you will find, inter alia, some information on a woman who went to college in Boston. That Elizabeth Samet has a B.A. in aArt history and an M.B.A. The first job a web site records for her dates from 2002, at which point she was Marketing Director for a company in the financial services industry, and from 2007 she has been a Senior Associate Brand Manager at Kraft. I find this a perfectly plausible career for someone with a B.A. in the humanities from a school in the North East, and rather more plausible than the one made by the Elizabeth Samet under review, who also possessed a B.A. from a good school in Boston. I can easily imagine the first woman going to grad school, studying Titian, then succumbing to the lure of the financial services sector near the crest of the longest boom in financial history. I have more trouble imagining an Elizabeth Samet graduating from Harvard College, earning her doctorate in literature from Yale, hitting the job market in 1997, and then applying for and accepting a job at West Point. But that is what the second Elizabeth Samet did. The first thing she wrote about her experience dates from 2002, and in 2007 she published soldier’s heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point, which means that she took the West Point job when she was twenty-seven years old. Reading between the lines, it seems likely that had she not been a slight demographic oddity - her father, whose stories fascinated her, had served in the Second World War - Samet would have been less likely to pursue the job at West Point, and her book would not exist.
The book has been very well received, and for good reason: it is generally wise, and at times extraordinarily moving. As its author notes, when she began teaching at West Point most of her students had no reason to be confident that they would ever practice the skill their professional education valued all others: since 1945, the vast majority of several professional generations of American officer did not fight in wars. Now, of course, some of Samet’s students, and some of her colleagues, have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and two of her colleagues have died in Iraq, because most professors of literature at West Point appear to be serving officers who rotate between teaching and other duties. I suspect that this may be a more jarring revelation than would once have been the case: John Maynard Keynes, at one time the bursar of a Cambridge college where I was several times a temporary member of High Table, argued against professionalizing the post he then held, asserting that it was “much easier to make a Bursar of a Fellow than a Fellow of a Bursar.” Maybe so, but on the strength of the available evidence I have the uneasy suspicion that it may also be easier to make a professor of an infantryman than it would be to nowadays work the reverse transformation. This has not always been true: Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain taught college, commanded the 20th Maine on Little Round Top, saved the Union, and went back to teaching college. Two years ago I found the first syllabus for a very creditable university some GIs (one of them a friend’s father) had set up on Okinawa after taking that island from the Japanese, while waiting for enough then-scarce shipping to arrive to take them back to the States. Americans used to like that sort of story: as recently as Saving Private Ryan (1998), Tom Hank’s very capable Ranger captain reveals that his peace-time job is teaching expository writing, a revelation which is expected to move us, and does. But academics and soldiers are no longer widely imagined to be perfectly fungible. While it has become unfashionable to say that 9/11 “changed everything,” and in the case of most professors I know it hasn’t, for professional soldiers 9/11 did change everything, and there are hints in her book that it also greatly changed Samet. That she has been changed is not too surprising: to paraphrase Ruskin, who wrote that the soldier’s trade lies not so much in slaying as in being slain, she has spent a decade teaching teenagers who are learning how to die.
Her title is, I think, a multi-layered pun. The phrase “soldier’s heart” dates from the American Civil War, when it was a mistaken diagnosis for what First World War physicians would call shell shock, my father’s generation called combat fatigue, and my brothers-in-law were informed was post-traumatic stress disorder. Samet’s former students, who seem to stay in touch with her, are quite aware they run the risk of it - since 2001, almost all of them have been sent into combat soon after graduating. This alone makes their experience compelling - we want to know many things about them, including how they will fare in war, but not least what they make of the canonical literature they are made to read at West Point, and of the civilian woman who teaches it to them in an environment where almost everyone is career military, and most are male. Given their formality and great civility - they always address their instructor as Ma’am - she (and we) want to know what they really think - what they think in their hearts. It turns out that Samet’s students tend to find literature’s intrinsic ambiguities radically unlike most of what they study, and in consequence at least initially very difficult, but on the evidence she presents the ones who stick with it care about literature’s aesthetic properties, and about what they take to be its truths, with a passion that seems to have become less than central to the professional study of literature. This is a paradox, and not an uninteresting one, but perhaps less of a paradox than one might first think: for one thing, cadets are taught to admire what is arduous.
It is appealing to read about a cadet blurting out, after spending a lot of effort on Shakespeare’s 73rd sonnet, “That cat’s a genius, ma’am!”; our expectations are less wholly subverted when we find out that a lot of the cadets pretty quickly learn to love the Aeneid, War and Peace and Wilfred Owen. People who have never been in a war have been fascinated by the nature of the experience since recitations of the Iliad started packing them in. Perhaps predictably, the cadets respond passionately to Achilles; Samet at one point suggests that cadets, whose lives are strikingly regimented, are naturally drawn to rebellious heroes. She thinks Hector, on her account a bit closer to a citizen soldier defending home and hearth, is the more American military ideal, then observes that West Point cadets are not citizens who in an emergency have become soldiers, and that the Founders were suspicious of professional soldiers. I’d imagine both Achilles and Hector are in one respect equally hypnotic to cadets, because combat is, at least in the popular mind, the very heart of war, and Samet observes what one would expect: that West Point cadets, most of whom have never been in a war, are deeply interested in how literary characters (and about how they themselves) will behave in a battle. They naturally wonder whether, in several senses of the word, they have the heart for it. They are deeply interested in courage, and in what it will mean to kill. In the wake of Abu Ghraib, she is deeply interested in what will become of them in a war that seems to have made some of the Americans who fought in it heartless - and her students turn out to worry about that too.
She is also more broadly interested in their profession - about what is at its heart. She quotes Samuel Huntington, who in the late 1950s suggested that American professional officers are Spartans in Babylon. That phrase evokes many things: on the one hand, obscurantist bellicosity, on the other heroic asceticism. In their late teens West Point cadets choose the risk of death and mutilation, the near-certainty of a pretty modest income and four years of extremely rigorous discipline, in a culture that celebrates hedonism and the pursuit of wealth. In my experience patriotism is at best unfashionable in the American professoriat, at least in the branch that teaches the humanities - in a bit under thirty years in the business, I am not sure I have ever heard the quality praised. Samet seems to be a patriot, and has spent a decade around people for whom patriotism ranks among the highest virtues. Because they are professionals, they are in a crucial respect not much like the American soldiers we have come to most admire, the citizen soldiers of the Second World War, or their mid-nineteenth ancestors, the Northern farm boys, hard as hickory, who brought the Jubilee. Samet’s students are entering a profession pledged to defend, at potentially infinite cost to themselves, a society some of them may well deplore, and a few despise - American officers have come to be disproportionately religious, not necessarily tolerantly so, and there is evidence that they are nowadays much more Republican than is the country at large.
There is also some evidence that parts of their country - the profession for which Samet trained, for example - have at best imperfect sympathy with the American military. Her book, Yale PhD gal meets the cadets, potentially the stuff of comedy, or of bitter debunking, is pretty much humorless and in no way a debunking. It rather recounts a mutually respectful meeting of opposites, and is in part scrupulous ethnography. It contains a fair amount of terse but interesting literary criticism - she discusses quite a few of the books and poems she teaches, and there is some bleak reportage (on the nature of modern wounds, for example). Her picture of the American officer corps is unlikely to be wholly representative - almost everyone she quotes or describes seems to be scrupulously honest, and many are eloquent, which certainly isn’t true for any other profession - but her deep curiosity about and profound respect for this other nation seems entirely admirable. Her book did not change my views on soldiers, a subject I may have known more about than did Samet at the very beginning of her career among them (although no longer), for I trained in part as a military historian. Her book has, however, changed my opinion of American professors of literature. I happen to be one, and for a number of reasons - above all, Samet’s very quiet but also quite absolute certainty about the value of canonical literature for people pursuing lives outside the academy, and her combination of moral seriousness and rhetorical restraint when talking about war - I have not in many years thought as well of my nation as I did while reading soldier’s heart.
From October, 2009
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