Excerpt of Soldier's Heart by Elizabeth D. Samet
(Page 5 of 6)
Printer Friendly Excerpt
"You teach at West Point? I know someone who went to West Point! Maybe you
taught him. Honey, what was Margie's son's name? William, Willard, Wilbur? Don't
you remember?"
"I don't know. I thought it was Mark."
"Well, anyway, his last name is Johnson, and he graduated about two years ago."
"Seems to me it was longer than that. More like five, I'd say."
"Oh, maybe five then. Did you know him?"
Recommended Books & Films
Prince Andrey lying wounded on the field, unable to move after
the Battle of Austerlitz, and staring up at the sky’s “blue
infinity,” is one
of the most enduring images of
War and Peace.
In a less celebrated
but equally revealing scene that takes place before the battle,
Andrey
visits a Vienna bookshop, where he goes “to lay in a stock of books for the campaign.” I like to speculate about what titles
he chose to take with him: Were they novels or histories? Old books
or
new? Were they French, German, or Russian? Was their subject
peace or war?
Joey took a copy of Anthony Briggs’s new translation of
Tolstoy’s
epic novel (Penguin Classics) with him on his most recent
deployment. Many readers still enjoy older translations of
War and Peace
by Constance Garnett (Modern Library) and by Louise and Aylmer
Maude (Everyman’s Library Classics). My former student Nick
sends a copy of Joseph Heller’s
Catch-22 to every friend who returns
from Iraq or Afghanistan. I like to see graduating seniors off
with a copy of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy
(Everyman’s Library); paperbacks of Waugh’s three novels
Men at Arms,
Officers and Gentlemen,
The End of the Battle
are also available individually (Back Bay Books).
Books I know to have sustained Joey and other former students
and colleagues both at home and abroad include Fyodor
Dostoyevsky’s
Crime and Punishment;
Charles Dickens’s Bleak
House;
Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth;
Ernest Hemingway’s A
Farewell to Arms; James M.
Cain’s Double Indemnity;
Dashiell Hammett’s
The Maltese Falcon;
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
and A Room of One’s Own; J. M.
Coetzee’s Waiting for the
Barbarians; Zadie Smith’s
White Teeth;
Jonathan Franzen’s The
Corrections; David Hinton’s
translation of Li Po’s Selected Poems (New Directions); the poetry
of Andrew Marvell (a complete edition of which is available in
Penguin
Classics); Wallace Stevens’s
The Collected Poems (Vintage); Horace’s
Odes, translated by David Ferry
(Farrar, Straus and
Giroux); the plays of Shakespeare, especially Macbeth,
Othello,
Troilus and Cressida,
Measure for Measure,
Henry IV Parts 1 and
2, and Henry V;
Sophocles’ Antigone;
Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience; the
essays of Michel de Montaigne (which are available in complete and selected editions in Penguin Classics). Francis Palgrave’s
Golden Treasury, introduced into
the West Point
curriculum by Lucius Holt, has been reissued and edited by John
Press (Oxford).
Among the books my father remembers reading in Armed Services Editions during World War II are Joseph Conrad’s
Lord Jim;
James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice;
A. J. Cronin’s
The Citadel; Ben
Ames Williams’s Leave Her to
Heaven; Somerset Maugham’s
The Moon and Sixpence, Of Human Bondage,
and The Razor’s Edge; and
C. S. Forester’s The African
Queen and Commodore Hornblower. Armed
Services Editions have become collectors’
items, but all or most of these titles are easy to find in
modern editions. A full list of ASEs is available online from
the Library of Congress Center for the Book:
www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/becites/cfb/84600198.html#appendix. Anyone interested in what literature can tell us about war and war about literature would do well to start with Homer’s
Iliad and
Odyssey, in
translations by Robert Fagles or Richmond Lattimore;
and Virgil’s
Aeneid,
in the Fagles translation or that of Robert Fitzgerald. The Civil War stories of
Ambrose Bierce are available in multiple editions, while the work of World War
I’s soldier-poets can be found individually and in collections. Recommended
editions include The Poems
of Wilfred Owen, edited by Jon
Stallworthy (Norton);
Collected Poems, 1908–1956, by
Siegfried Sassoon (Faber and Faber);
The Poems of Edward Thomas,
edited by Peter Sacks (Handsel Books); and
Isaac Rosenberg: Selected Poems and
Letters, edited by Jean Liddiard (Enitharmon
Press). Useful anthologies of poetry from World War I and other conflicts
include The Penguin Book of
First World War Poetry, edited by
Jon Silkin; The Oxford Book
of War Poetry, edited by Jon
Stallworthy; and the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets volume
War Poems,
edited by John Hollander. The poetry of World War II has been largely neglected.
Poets of World War II,
edited by Harvey Shapiro, collects the work of several soldier-poets of that war
(Library of America). “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” and other war
poetry by Randall Jarrell can be found in
The Complete Poems
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Excerpted from Soldier's Heart by Elizabeth D. Samet. Copyright © 2007 by Elizabeth D. Samet. Published in October 2007 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
