Purely Academic

This satirical novel, published in 1958, is, as its title suggests, set in an American university. The central character, Henry Schneider, is a modern historian in a Midwestern university and there are interesting accounts of curriculum committee meetings and anodyne undergraduate lectures. Schneider’s a schemer and he sets about advancing his own career by pretending to be undertaking a top-secret state security role, thus rising in the esteem of colleagues and administrators alike. His specialism of diplomatic history is also put to good use in negotiating for a better salary, playing one university off against another.

The author, Stringfellow Barr (born 15 January 1897), was the son of an Anglican clergyman and grew up in Virginia and Louisiana. He studied English at the University of Virginia and after obtaining his M.A., enlisted in the army. He served with the army medical corps in France for two years. After the war he studied modern history at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He taught modern European history (as did the central character of this novel) at the University of Virginia from 1924 to 1936. He was president of St John’s College, Annapolis from 1937 to 1946 and was a radical innovator there, introducing the Great Books curriculum with the intention of shaping learning around the Western literary canon. He was the author of a wide variety of books, including textbooks, a cookbook and a children’s book. Purely Academic was his only novel.

Given that Henry Schneider was teaching the same subject as the author, it seems safe to presume a high degree of autobiographical content. It's likely, therefore, that the author imagined that Schneider had served in the First World War. In Chapter 14 Schneider delivers an undergraduate lecture on the First World War with considerable passion and perhaps some trauma:
“He paused and looked about him as if in sudden pain. Some of his students stared curiously. Breathing harder, he began again.
‘From this bourgeois, Baconian Eden modern man was ejected with a sudden violence unique in his experience. In a few days, millions of men were mobilised to kill and be killed. It was as if some terrible madness had seized on the citizens of the city that Matter and Force has so benignly ruled. Across the tranquil, smiling, midsummer countryside of Europe swept vast armies, bearing more deadly weapons than man had ever known. The earth rocked and the sky reeled. The great gray ships of the British Royal Navy hurried silently to their appointed posts. It was the summer of 1914.’
Suddenly such violent emotions arose in Schneider that he knew he could not go on. He glanced at his watch. There was lots of time left — but it was time he could not use. His throat became dry; his voice came to his own ears as if from a great distance. He felt slightly dizzy.
‘I cannot discuss the First World War today. I am sorry.’
He bowed slightly, rose clumsily to his feet and left his classroom.”