His classic study, The Great War and Modern Memory, was rooted in his own bitter experience of loss and waste in combat
Paul Fussell, who died on Wednesday at the age of 88, was the classic public intellectual who wrote on everything from poetic meter to the role of class in American society. Like the late Christopher Hitchens, Fussell had the intellectual confidence to tackle any subject that interested him.
But what made Fussell more than just a versatile and gifted academic (he had a long and distinguished teaching career at Rutgers and the University of Pennsylvania) was his writing on war. His insight into the first world war, achieved in his breakthrough 1975 study, The Great War and Modern Memory – which received the National Book Award for Arts and Letters – was brought full circle by his own combat experience in the second world war. He was wounded and awarded the Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts.
The Great War and Modern Memory made Fussell's critical reputation. At its emotional core is the British experience on the western front and Fussell's own anger at how the language of the first world war seduced so many young men into needlessly sacrificing their lives.
For Fussell, the murderous idealism of the Great War was summed up in a newspaper notice a young volunteer published two days before the declaration of war. "PAULINE", the notice read, "I will dash into the great venture with all that pride and spirit an ancient race has given me."
Fussell believed such idealism, naive as it may appear to us now, had to be taken seriously. In his eyes, pronouncements like this summed up centuries of misplaced faith in the power of personal action and Christian sacrifice.
In The Great War and Modern Memory, the answer to such murderous idealism is countered by the reaction to the trench warfare felt by such British writers as Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves. Particularly revealing is Fussell's analysis of Graves's celebrated first world war memoir, Goodbye to All That.
Fussell treats Graves's book not as a gritty documentary (an English version of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms) but as deliberate farce in which the British army – with its emphasis on rank and top-down orders – becomes a death trap for its most dutiful soldiers. Fussell admires Graves because he harkens back to the satirical tradition of Ben Johnson and looks forward to that of Joseph Heller in Catch-22.
Fussell's own second world war experience as a second lieutenant, who carried a leather-bound New Testament into battle because he thought it might slow down shell fragments, came very close to duplicating the experience of Graves. Fussell, too, was wounded in battle and, like Graves, he took no pride in the suffering he endured. On a night-time mission that should have never been undertaken, Fussell was struck by German fire that killed the two men next to him.
Fussell's response to his injuries and those he saw in the fighting leading up to Germany's surrender was not satirical, however. On hearing the news of his friends' deaths, Fussell was overcome by a "black fury" that, as he goes on to say, "has never entirely dissipated".
For Fussell, who was 20 at the time he entered the army, the result was a life-changing experience. He was, he knew, lucky not to have been killed. What his time with the infantry showed him was that as far as his commanders were concerned, he was expendable.
Fussell's postwar military experience (he was not discharged until 1946) only deepened his hatred of the army and large institutions in general. "I am entirely serious when I assert that if I have ever developed into a passable literary scholar, editor, and critic, the credit belongs to the United States Army," Fussell observes midway through his 1996 memoir Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic.
But Fussell's observation is not merely ironic. It also explains the passion that lies at the center of his best work. All too often, Fussell was described as sardonic when, in fact, he was a deeply caring critic who wanted the world he lived in after second world war to avoid the wartime chaos and violence he saw firsthand before he ever entered college.
In no place in his writing is the pleasure Fussell took in basic decency on greater display than in his much-overlooked 1982 essay, The Boy Scout Handbook. Fussell begins his essay by lamenting that the famed critics of his generation never turned their attention to The Official Boy Scout Handbook. They should have, he argues, and to demonstrate that he is perfectly serious, Fussell goes through the Handbook, with meticulous care before concluding that it is a "compendia of good sense".
At no point in The Boy Scout Handbook is there ever a hint by Fussell that ordinary life demands less attention than high poetry. Instead, he concludes his praise of the Handbook by reminding us: "The generously low price of $3.50 is enticing, and so is the place on the back cover where you're invited to inscribe your name."