Paul FussellCritiques

I had almost forgotten that back in 1980 people still wrote books like this - flamboyant prose style and page long slabs of personal opinion in between actual literary criticism. The book is quite entertaining though, and at its best makes the interesting point that 'going South' to the beaches and parasols of the Med, to shed clothes and have affairs and worship the sun, was for the British between the wars a kind of pastoral idyll, replacing the pastoral idylls of bleating flocks on English sward and babbling brooks beneath venerable elms (from an earlier time when the British didn't travel as much). Unlike much literary criticism these days Paul Fussell is actually grateful and appreciative of good quality travel writing, and literature in general, and expresses his enthusiasms in this book (he also complains about modern tourism in an understandable but somewhat ploddingly predictable manner). The book is worth reading as an entertaining survey of some of the best travel writing ever written.

Started out as a funny field guide to the American class system. Written in 1983 it’s astonishingly up-to-date, although of course a few things have changed. But it’s really wild how much is still exactly the same. Anyway, it started out funny but as it went on it just started seeming nastier and repetitive. If you can find it, you may enjoy the first few chapters, but you may as well bail out halfway through.

ADDED: Well this is just plain weird, the day after I review this obscure 37 year old book, it gets mentioned in a NYTimes opinion piece (great essay BTW): https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/10/opinion/television-culture.html?referringSour...

Paul Fussell's THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY (1975) is not a book one can hurry though. I spent about a month on it, taking frequent breaks, because there's just so much to absorb, to learn, from this amazing volume of research, scholarship, and heartfelt commentary. Fussell came away from his own war, WWII, deeply and permanently scarred, and spent the better part of his professional life trying to understand the horror of war and the personal damage it can cause, but he was also deeply intrigued by the countless literary works that came from its participants and victims, evidenced here. He looks at not just works from the Great War, but other more recent wars too, up through Vietnam, and makes some very thoughtful and credible comparisons. Enough said; read this book. I enjoyed a brief correspondence with Paul before his death in 2012, and was deeply saddened when he left us. I will be thinking about this book, and his personal memoir, DOING BATTLE, for a long time. RIP, Paul.

- Tim Bazzett author of the memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA

3/30/22

Paul Fussell's WARTIME (1989) worked well as an "in-between-books" reader for me this past week. I've admired Fussell's work since seeing him (along with his late friend, Sam Hynes) in Ken Burns' PBS special, THE WAR, some years back. I enjoyed his memoir, DOING BATTLE, immensely, and this collection of essays were nearly as good. They don't really have to be read in order either. I skipped around sampling the ones with the most intriguing titles, e.g. "Chickenshit: an Anatomy," and "Drinking Far Too Much, Copulating Too Little," or "Reading in Wartime" and others. None of these pieces disappoint. Because Fussell was there, a combat lieutenant in the European theater, who was seriously wounded, so he knows about the filth and fear, the mud and blood, as well as the boredom interspersed with utter terror. And after the war, like Hynes, he became a writer, professor and knowledgeable historian of his own and other wars. Many of these hard-edged and clear-eyed pieces could be prose companions to Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" or Remarque's ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, because Fussell draws many apt comparisons here, of his war to the Great War. Fussell aims to explode the myths and patriotic nonsense often glorifying war, and he succeeds to the nth degree. WARTIME deserves to stick around and be read for a long, long time. If more national leaders and politicians read books like this, and took them to heart, there would be fewer wars. Fussell is gone now, but his books will live on - I hope. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

importance of uniforms to society

Fussell argues that, despite our ideas that we are somehow above "class" in America, there are rigid class boundaries here. They aren't, as they are in Great Britain, determined by speech or dialect and aren't even really determined by economics. But language is a factor, and we betray our status by phrases we use and behaviors we have.

One that sticks out in my mind was the use of the term "home" to describe your house. This identifies someone as a person in a middle class who is trying to feign membership in a higher class. Another is fiance.

I was quite interested in the x class he identifies, where the ultra-rich and the bohemian poor eschew such class symbols -- the wealthy guy who drives a chevrolet, wears the most common clothing.

It was an interesting and quite convincing read.

Paul Fussell’s book is an unusual contribution to the Modern Library Chronicles series. Whereas most volumes provide short introductions to their respective subjects, as other reviewers have noted, this is not a straightforward military history of the war with Germany. Instead, Fussell offers a much more idiosyncratic work, a social and cultural history of the American riflemen who fought in northwestern Europe after Normandy.

This is not to say that this book isn’t worth reading – quite the contrary. Throughout this book, Fussell dispels much of the “greatest generation” mythology cultivated in recent years by writers such as Stephen Ambrose. A veteran of the war, Fussell provides a much more complicated portrait of inexperienced young boys thrown into the chaos and violence of combat. In a series of short chapters, he covers topics ranging from the interactions with the French to the treatment of the wounded and the dead to the discovery of the work camps – all of which he addresses with the same blunt and insightful analysis that is a hallmark of his work. Anyone seeking to get a more accurate portrait of what the “good war” was really like for the men who fought in it would do well to start here.

A challenging read, not to be taken as a straight history of the First World War but as an informative and engaging tour of the way literature and drama both informed and were informed by the war, in pursuit of the author's thesis that the predominantly ironic mode of understanding life in the twentieth century has its roots in WW1.

The title essay is not only the best in the collection but pretty much the last word on the bomb, as far as I'm concerned. Other highlights include a really sharp appreciation of Orwell, a look at "naturalist" beaches, and a critical but not condescending appraisal of the Indy 500. If you don't get the book, at least read the title essay online. It's incredibly well done.

From the WWI reading program. Author Paul Fussell points out the number of terms that became permanent parts of the language due to WWI - "in the trenches", "going over the top", "no-man's land". (I was thinking more of terms that no longer have a military meaning, or at least not a primarily military meaning. People who talk about going "over the top" nowadays no longer associate the idea with getting a burst of machine gun fire in the chest.) I can't think of anything similar from WWII; maybe "blitz"? Or the popularity of calling people you disapprove of Nazis? I wonder how many trenchcoat wearers realize the big pockets are for grenades, the d-rings are to strap equipment down, and the double flap over the front keeps your buttons from being caught when you crawl under barbed wire.

There are a lot of eerie moments - the description of the summer of 1914 being one of the best in memory provokes me a little, because for the life of me I can't remember what the summer of 2001 was like.

Fussell makes the argument - which I find possible but not fully convincing - was that the experience of WWI for the Allies prolonged the course of WWII. Supposedly, the US was so horrified of casualties that it wasted many opportunities to be aggressive, thus allowing the Nazis to do an organized retreat. He does not cite any specific example of a battle or part of the 1944-1945 campaign where a more aggressive strategy could have been used, however. Certainly, Patton's push out of the Normandy beaches and Market-Garden were aggressive to a fault; I can't think of anywhere else where a more offensive approach would have helped.

Fussell seems to be pretty much a literate liberal. One particular item of note is he is the author of the famous essay "Thank God for the Atom Bomb", which got him no end of FLAK from the intelligentsia. Fussell was waiting to go in a part of Operation Olympic (so was my father, adding some personal relevance) and he recalls he first reaction to the news of Hiroshima as "I'm going to live after all". To Fussell's credit, he doesn't just express this as a personal feeling, but poses some cogent arguments against the accepted liberal doctrine about "The Bomb". For example, to the argument that the war would have been over in "a few months" even if the bomb was not used, he points out that Allied soldiers were dying at the rate of a few hundred a week even at this late point, and that several thousand Japanese soldiers and civilians were dying each week. Thus "a few months wait" might have actually cost more Japanese lives, not just Allied lives, than using the bomb.

I'm also grateful to Fussell for introducing me to the poetry of Randall Jarrell, who is the only English language WWII poet of the same stature as the WWI poets. I wonder why? Maybe some of the stuff that happened in WWII was beyond poetry.

Fussell examines the immediate impact of the war on common soldiers and civilians. He describes the psychological and emotional atmosphere of World War II. He analyzes the euphemisms people needed to deal with unacceptable reality (the early belief, for instance, that the war could be won by "precision bombing," that is, by long distance); he describes the abnormally intense frustration of desire and some of the means by which desire was satisfied; and, most important, he emphasizes the damage the war did to intellect, discrimination, honesty, individuality, complexity, ambiguity and wit. Of course, no Fussell book would be complete without some serious discussion of the literature of the time. He examines, for instance, how the great privations of wartime (when oranges would be raffled off as valued prizes) resulted in roccoco prose styles that dwelt longingly on lavish dinners, and how the "high-mindedness" of the era and the almost pathological need to "accentuate the positive" led to the downfall of the acerbic H.L. Mencken and the ascent of E.B. White. He also offers astute commentary on Edmund Wilson's argument with Archibald MacLeish, Cyril Connolly's Horizon magazine, the war poetry of Randall Jarrell and Louis Simpson, and many other aspects of the wartime literary world.
SEE Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory was one of the most original and gripping volumes ever written about the First World War.

I rarely read non-fiction, but this just took my breath away. It's both a wonderful (and achingly sad) introduction to the poets and writers who emerged (or didn't) from World War I, as well as an eye-opening description of how that conflict shaped modern life.

un grande libro di storia che non ha bisogno di generali, battaglie e cannoni per raccontare la fine di un epoca e l'annichilimento della generazione che l'ha vissuta combattendo nelle trincee d'europa.
Alla fine solo dalla memoria, rivissuta e ricordata, può venire, forse, la cura per un orrore che non vuole passare.
Chi ama la storia non può non leggere questo libro.

Literary analysis of the importance of language and literature in shaping our memory of WW1. Brilliant book, especially the sections on Sassoon, Graves, and Blunden. Also the parts on the importance of Ruskin and landscape painting on how the physical world was perceived and depicted. This is the first book that has made Northrop Frye's theories comprehensible to me, to I was amused that in the afterword he said that was the part he would have altered, because it reads as dated now. Which it does, but there are still people using Frye's concepts so having a lucid exposition of them with examples that made sense to me was valuable.

This book is full of interesting insights about social class in the US. The beginning was very informative, then it turns into a long series of examples of social class, ending with the artificial X group (which was fun to read). Among the interesting tidbits of information is the social status granted by owning a Mercedes-Benz which, remarkably, the author says was very negative in Germany. According to this author (in 1983), Mercedes-Benz was a car

"'which the intelligent young in West Germany regard, quite correctly, as 'a sign of high vulgarity, a car of the kind owned by Beverly Hills dentists or African cabinet ministers.' The worst kind of upper-middle-class types own Mercedes, (…) Speeders are either young non-Anglo-Saxon high-school proles hoping to impress girls of a similar sort, or insecure, status-anxious middle-class men (…) The requirements of class dictate that you drive slowly, steadily, and silently, and as near the middle of the road as possible.'" (91–92)

I am reminded that Mercedes-Benz cars were popular in the 1980’s among rulers such as Ceauşescu, Mugabe, Idi Amin, and Ferdinand Marcos. It was also in a Mercedes-Benz that the president of Deutsche Bank, Alfred Herrhausen, was killed by a bomb which resulted "in a mass of copper being projected toward the car at a speed of nearly two kilometers per second, effectively penetrating the armoured Mercedes.” (Wikipedia) Perhaps, back in 1983, all this made Fussell think Germans did not think highly of owning a Mercedes-Benz car. However, a quick glance through Google does not give me any hint that Fussell’s interpretation of the view that Germans had on Mercedes-Benz is valid today.

This book is literary criticism, but does not read like one. I actually enjoyed reading this book - even though my eyes did glaze over when the author discussed books I did not know. This is also a good book to read if one is interested in the British and WWI. It's somewhere between a history and lit crit book, but without being boring!

I had read and heard about Fussell's classic for years, so finally I bought myself a copy and read it. This book is all it claims to be and more. Fussell examines how British slang, British drama, poetry and memoirs from the First World War have shaped the ways we remember and think about war.

While it's true that Fussell prefers later memoirs to more immediate accounts of the war and doesn't conclusively prove that the First World War was history's first or most ironic war, "The Great War and Modern Memory" remains a wonderfully engaging and useful example of intellectual history. Fussell does a very good, very thorough, and very thoughtful job of examining the mindset of those who fought in the war and describing that era's intellectual climate. Though relatively free of statistics and accounts of wartime strategizing, the book is serves as a subtle portrait of the war's multitudinous horrors, which made death more mechanical and, in a sense, less traditionally dramatic than it had ever been before. Fussell writes convincingly about the breach that the book opened up between civilian and military life, homoeroticism before and after the war, how experiences of the war changed our ideas about wartime honor and heroism, and, perhaps most interestingly, examines how soldiers used ironic and theatrical motifs to process experiences that simply couldn't be put into words. Fussell's assertion that the Great War had an extensive influence on how civilian life during the rest of the twenty-first century is probably more controversial, but he ably shows how many of the institutions of modern life (the form letter, for one) were field-tested, so to speak, during that conflict. What I personally enjoyed most about this book is the sense of importance that Fussell lends to his ideas: he makes the poems that soldiers wrote and the self-conceptions their societies had seem as critical as any piece of armament you could name. "The Great War and Modern Memory" does exactly what any academic treatise should: make ideas seem vital and alive. This one should be required reading for students of all things Modernist.½

A short, brutal history of the Good War in the European Theater of Operations. Fussell is not as succinct as General Sherman in making the same point, but he does document the assertion that war is hell with statistics, first-hand accounts, and his own eperiences.½

This covers observational class markers from the 1970's and early 1980's, having been published in 1983. It is woefully out of date for the 21st century, as class markers have shifted around.

I cannot tell a lie: What I actually have (along with four, count them four, other LT members) is the British publication of this book, which has a different ISBN as well as a different title, Killing in Verse and Prose. (It was put out by something called Bellew Publishing; apparently no established British publishers wanted to be associated with the argument of the title piece. The paperback is ugly and the cover art is baffling as well as hideous.)

Anyway, I was already familiar with Fussell as a controversialist; I didn't know about his literary criticism, of which the samples in this volume are excellent. Evidently it is still permissible for an academic to write lucid and attractive prose -- or maybe once you have tenure, you can turn off the fog nozzle and get away with it.

Very enjoyable, very thought-provoking, but not necessarily very convincing, Fussell's sui-generis book is an extended literary criticism masquerading as social history – or perhaps the other way round. There are various arguments going on in here, but the main thrust is that much of how we think about the modern world – indeed our whole contemporary mindset – has its origin in ideas that came about as an attempt to respond to the unprecedented scale and irony of the 1914-18 conflict.

‘Irony’ is the crucial term. And a famously vague one; let me first, like a teenager giving a graduation speech, turn to the OED's third sense of the word:

A state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what was or might be expected; an outcome cruelly, humorously, or strangely at odds with assumptions or expectations.

For Fussell, ‘Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends’; and ‘the Great War was more ironic than any before or since’. Highlighting the insanity of trench warfare, and the ‘ridiculous proximity of the trenches to home’, Fussell first traces the various ways people responded to this grotesque irony, and then considers how it has affected language, culture and thought processes since.

Though he does look at some contemporary letters and diaries, his main sources of evidence are the great literary responses to the war, especially Sassoon, Graves, Blunden, Owen, and David Jones, and he locates the source of all their techniques in ‘irony-assisted recall’.

I love this attention to irony as the defining quality of the war; but it also epitomises a sense I had that Fussell was claiming a special status for the First World War that it didn't really possess. After all, irony is hardly new. To me, it seems to be a central part of war literature almost as far back as you can go: Homeric irony is almost proverbial.

Similarly it seems quite a claim to say that 1914-18 was unusually marked by a ‘sense of adversary proceedings’, an ‘us against them’ mentality, since this is surely characteristic of the whole notion of what war is. If anything, the WWI literature I've read has been notable for its awareness that the other side was exactly the same as them; I think of the German and French soldiers trapped all night together in the shell-hole in All Quiet on the Western Front, for instance.

Just one more example to make my point. Fussell believes there is something unusually theatrical in the English conception of this war:

During the war, it was the British, rather than the French, the Americans, the Italians, the Portuguese, the Russians, or the Germans, who referred to trench raids as ‘shows’ or ‘stunts’ […] And it is English playwrights – or at least Anglo-Irish ones – like Wilde and Shaw who compose plays proclaiming at every point that they are plays.

But this is weird, not just because of the qualification he needed in that last sentence, but because when I think of deliberately artificial stagecraft I think of Brecht – a German – and the term used for this in modern theatre studies is a German one, Verfremdungseffekt. In general his idea of specifically national characteristics seems a bit strained (he uses Manning's Her Privates We as an example of how English writers were saturated with Shakespeare; but Frederic Manning was an Australian).

There are several more such quibbles I could adduce, but none of them stopped me enjoying Fussell's arguments, most of which are brilliantly constructed. He is especially convincing on the pervasive influence of the Oxford Book of Verse on contemporary patterns of speech and thought, and he has a fantastic ability to spot poetic echoes buried in the most unlikely places. When CE Montague writes of one destroyed battalion, ‘Seasons returned, but not to that battalion returned the spirit of delight in which it had first learnt to soldier together…’, perhaps it is not too difficult to discern the presence of Milton's ‘Thus with the year / Seasons return, but not to me returns / Day, or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn…’. But Fussell also finds parallels to both Sassoon's ‘The Kiss’ and Owen's ‘Arms and the Boy’ in Bret Harte's ‘What the Bullet Sang’ – and there are other, even more obscure examples.

An American, he seems fascinated by the extent to which the idea of ‘English Literature’ was a part of daily life for so many British soldiers, and he gathers a great deal of evidence from letters and diaries showing how common this was among all ranks.

Carrington once felt ‘a studious fit’ and sent home for some Browning. ‘At first,’ he says, ‘I was mocked in the dugout as a highbrow for reading “The Ring and the Book”, but saying nothing I waited until one of the scoffers idly picked it up. In ten minutes he was absorbed, and in three days we were fighting for turns to read it, and talking of nothing else at meals.’

Perhaps the most interesting chapter for me was the one about the homoeroticism of war writing, which examines certain tropes in First World War literature and traces them back to the influence of Housman, the Aesthetes and the Uranians, with their veneration of wounded or dying soldier ‘lads’, forever stripping off and bathing in handy streams. Here and elsewhere, Fussell follows the variations forward in time as well, to modern war literature, where he sees Heller's Catch 22 and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow as especially representative. For him, this style of heavily ironised, conspiratorial writing has its roots in the Western Front: ‘Prolonged trench warfare, whether enacted or remembered, fosters paranoid melodrama, which I take to be a primary mode in modern writing.’

Well, maybe. I enjoyed seeing the argument made even if I'm not sure I believe it.

Fussell himself fought in Europe the Second World War and was awarded a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart; in a certain sense this book is personal, and it has to do with exploring the gap between ideas of war and the reality. The way he reacted to the fighting in Alsace was in some sense (so at least he seems to be arguing) pre-moulded by society's experience of the Somme and Paschendaele. And indeed, like many other writers I've encountered recently, Fussell notes that one can easily ‘conceive of the events running from 1914 to 1945 as another Thirty Years' War and the two world wars as virtually a single historical episode.’

He wanders a bit and sometimes has a clever ( perhaps he would call it ironic) tone that seems frivolous in light of what he deals with, but ultimately the book delivers. A view of how these second rank authors (Sassoon, Graves, Blunden, et al)! Have a power and importance because of what they lived through. I sometimes questioned whether WW1 was really so different, so epoch-changing - after all Sherman had called war hell half a century before,, the 100 years War was grisly and long too, but WW1 combines scale, destructive power and at least some sense of random pointlessness in its own unique way. Intriguing points include: dawn and sunset only feature as objects of admiration and poetising from the mid 19th century, scarcely appear in shakespeare ( i had to google check that and it seems true); 1914 was a unique high point in the valuing of Eng Lit, both the upper classes steeped in it and the lower classes seeing it as a road to self-improvement. The critical apparatus mainly Northrop Frye, seems irrelevant and i was glad to see him agreeing with me in his afterword- itself one of the best parts of the book. His scholarly knowledge of the texts including changes in different editions could be pedantic but is in fact revealing and throws light on the changing cultural attitudes of our times, esp towards homosexuality. The section on the homoerotic is disturbing and nuanced - the vulnerability of male flesh!

With the 100 year anniversary of World War One upon us, there has been an outpouring of new books on the war. Some of these are very good indeed, but reading a few new ones drew me back to this classic. I think it may be the best book I have ever read on the War, for two reasons.

First, while the book is mostly about the war in literature and memory, Fussell captures and shows the actual day-to-day experience of the soldiers in the trenches more vividly than anything else I have read. He was in combat in Europe World War II, so he knew things in visceral terms that non- combatants don't know (and, as he points out, very often did not and do not want to know). Also, while much of his research was literary, the rest of it was about as immediate as you can get: he spent three months in a room at the Imperial War Museum, reading the Museum's (unsorted) archive of papers of the British troops in World War I. In so doing, he says, "For three months I lived in the trenches with the British soldiery, accompanying them on raids on the German trenches across the way, consoling myself with their rum, pursuing and crunching lice in my trouser seams, and affecting British phlegm as they jumped the bags and dashed directly into machine gun fire."

The day to day experience he conveys is horrible, claustrophobic, and increasingly pointless. Soldiers on both sides began to believe that the war would never end; "the war", indeed, begins to seem a great pitiless machine that chews up rank after rank of men, and spits out corpses. This is not a new thought -- no one who has read much about the War is going to believe that trench life was fun. But Fussell conveys more strongly than anyone else I have read just how awful, and endless, it was. He intended his description to make war look horrible, and it does.

Second, Fussell's most important literary observation, it seems to me, is less about literature per se than about a way of thinking -- the modern way of thinking, if you will. He goes through key themes as they appeared in the writings of several major authors of the War. What emerges overall, however, is a sense that for many the ability to believe in ideals was killed in the war, shifting the postwar world to an attitude of pessimism and irony. Many have criticized Fussell's focus on a small group of British writers, but I think his point is still valid. The First World War made it impossible for thinking people to believe in human progress, or in the basic goodness of humankind. In the century since then, it has been too easy to remain disillusioned.

This is a terrific book, for those whose interests are primarily historical, as well as for those who have literary inclinations. Read it.