Professor Hammer

Professor Hammer is the narrator’s former teacher, an intellectually formidable host, and a onetime Communist who has remade his political convictions around the defense of America. His significance lies in the tension between those identities: he regards his youthful Communism as a mistake that helped make him who he is, yet he also insists that American power is necessary to defend freedom. In his conversation with the narrator, the language of civilization and barbarism offers a confident framework that the narrator’s own experience of political violence soon makes difficult to sustain.

Identity and Background

The narrator first encounters Professor Hammer as a figure of intelligence and taste. Claude had mentioned the professor’s homosexuality before the narrator arrived at college, explaining that he did not want his student to be surprised. The narrator, who had never known a homosexual, expected to see someone fundamentally different and imagined the West as the natural setting for homosexuality. Instead, Professor Hammer seemed like anyone else to him, except for his acute intelligence and impeccable taste. The narrator’s assumptions about where homosexuality belonged thus meet an ordinary person whose life does not confirm the exotic distinction he had expected.

Professor Hammer has a partner, Stan, a doctoral student at UCLA who is about the narrator’s age and is writing a dissertation on American literary expatriates in Paris. At dinner, Stan’s easy physical affection for Professor Hammer unsettles the narrator, who had thought of the professor chiefly as a mind rather than as a person with a body and intimate relationships. The moment reveals less about a conflict in the couple than about the narrator’s own difficulty reconciling the intellectual mentor he admires with the embodied life he had not imagined for him.

Teacher and Benefactor

Professor Hammer’s connection to the narrator extends beyond the classroom. His hand-me-down clothes help the younger man present himself with confidence among the displaced South Vietnamese officers he knows through his work as the General’s aide. The narrator wears the professor’s blue blazer with gold buttons and gray flannel slacks, altered to fit him. The clothing is a practical gift, but it also marks the difference between the narrator’s circumstances and those of the exiled men around him: the officers have lost military rank and status, while the narrator can draw on his teacher’s resources to appear smartly dressed among them.

The professor also remembers the narrator’s undergraduate thesis on The Quiet American and praises it as one of the best he has read. Claude, sitting beside the narrator, responds with disdain for the novel’s representation of its Vietnamese girl, reducing her to her activities and mocking her speech. Professor Hammer interjects with a brief rebuke. The exchange brings together his attention to literary study and the limits of representation: the book can be an object of serious academic work, while Claude’s complaint exposes the demeaning image of a Vietnamese woman that the story presents to its readers.

Dinner and Political Conversion

The professor hosts the narrator, Claude, and Stan in his Pasadena Craftsman bungalow on the occasion of Claude’s imminent return to Washington. He prepares a three-course dinner—mixed greens, duck confit with rosemary potatoes, and tarte Tatin—served after martinis and with pinot noir. Later, the group moves to the living room, where books line the walls and the professor changes records from his extensive jazz collection. Their conversation ranges across bebop, the nineteenth-century novel, the Dodgers, and the approaching American bicentennial. The carefully arranged domestic setting makes room for a more personal account of the professor’s political past.

With Stan beside him, Professor Hammer recalls that he was once young, impressionable, passionate, and eager to change the world. Communism had attracted him, as it had many others. He does not regret having been a Communist: in his view, only by making that mistake could he have become the person he is now. He calls himself a born-again American, presenting the phrase as an irony rather than a simple return to an unchanged belief. His account treats political conversion as part of the history that formed him, not as a past he can simply erase.

America, Civilization, and the Narrator’s Doubt

Professor Hammer’s present convictions are emphatic. He argues that the defense of freedom requires the strength only America can provide. The college’s teaching, as he understands it, serves both to explain America to the world and to defend it. Asked what happens to people who have not learned what the college teaches, or who will not learn it, he offers no easy solution. Instead, he describes a recurring division between civilization and barbarism, reaching back to the first people who discovered fire and judged those still living in darkness. Each age, he suggests, names its own barbarians.

That distinction remains unsettled in the narrator’s mind. After dinner, as he and Claude leave near midnight, he considers the killing of the crapulent major in terms the professor’s framework cannot neatly resolve: was it barbarism, or a contradictory act undertaken in the name of revolutionary change? The narrator recalls that the major had a right to live while also believing himself justified in killing him. His question about the major’s innocence gives personal force to the dinner’s abstract discussion. Professor Hammer offers a history of political conversion and a defense of American power; the narrator is left confronting the possibility that opposing one form of injustice can make him responsible for another.