A Curmudgeon For All Seasons

Paul Fussell is our most clear-eyed writer about World War II. In fact, Paul Fussell is clear-eyed about most everything in the modern experience. If this is (fair & balanced) curmudgeon-esteem, so be it.

Paul Fussell

A native of Pasadena, California, he earned his BA at Pomona College, and his MA and Ph.D. at Harvard University. He served in the military as an Infantry officer in the European Theater during WWII, and received a Bronze Star and Purple Heart. Mr. Fussell retired as professor of English Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He has edited six books and authored fifteen others including: The Great War and Modern Memory and The Boys' Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945. Mr. Fussell has received numerous honors and awards.

[x Psychology Today]
The last curmudgeon (interview with author and teacher Paul Fussell)
by Annie Paul

He'll rip off your rose-colored glasses, because he's at war with simple-minded optimism. But as News Editor Annie Paul found out, he'll do it with class, taste, and style--all the things he writes about.

PT: I enjoyed reading your memoir, Doing Battle, very much. I was struck by the way you constructed it, as a before-and-after narrative with the war as the transformative experience. Is that the way you actually think about your life?

PF: Absolutely. The war changed everything. I tried to make the book as honest a reflection as I could of that fact. My whole life has been an attempt to suggest a dimension of horror and shame that most people don't know. The expression "a good war" wiped out any impetus for anybody to find out what it was really like to be in it.

PT: That's the way most people want it--they don't want to know?

PF: They don't want to know because it's painful and requires adjustments to their assumptions that obviously they don't want to make.

PT: You're committed to stripping away those illusions.

PF: Yes, but it's part of my general intellectual operation. It's what I do to literature as well and have done through a long career of university teaching. I rub my students' noses in the most offensive critical materials. When they want to read Mark Twain, I say, all right, let's read Democratic Vistas, in which Mark Twain surprises us by finding the United States one of the worst places in the world. It shocks most people. That wakes up students and gets them ready to use their minds freely.

The war book and the war understanding are part of my general career of stripping off the wrappings from things which make them look pleasant or acceptable and showing how complicated real life is. In order to save Europe, you destroy it, which is what we did in the Second World War. In order to turn the Germans into democratic people, we killed a great number of them. I like to be the agent of such interesting truths from time to time.

PT: People sometimes prefer delusion to the truth because it's easier. But sometimes people do it to protect themselves. They couldn't go on if they faced the truth.

PF: Yes. It's not something to be easily sarcastic or satiric about. One should be sympathetic with people who need a false world, because the real one is intolerable. It's the lesson of all literature since the Greeks.

As T. S. Eliot put it, humankind cannot stand very much reality. Hence we have religion, art, higher education. All that is beneficial, but it all stems from our difficulty in dealing with actuality, which is too nasty to look at--the shortness of human life, which wipes out everything you do; the pain of death; the pain of love. Love always ends badly, as Hemingway said. Unless the two people die at the same time, once they undertake a relationship, they're asking for misery and they're going to get it.

Those truths aren't pleasant to contemplate. And therefore we go into Disney fantasies and fool ourselves about how easy it is to recover our lost youth with surgical operations, exercise. It's all hockey. One's going to get older, and it's not going to be much fun. One should get ready for it early and not be surprised when it happens; it's a way of joining the human race.

PT: Do you ever think, "This is more reality than I can stomach"? You're never tempted to protect yourself?

PF: No, because I have a sense of humor. I think the whole thing is funny. The Greeks thought the gods were jokers, essentially, and enjoyed practical jokes. Living in a society that began as a Christian society where God is sincere and doesn't play games, it's harder to embrace that attitude, but it's not hard for me.

PT: Is it harder for us as Americans because we didn't have an antiquity or a Middle Ages...

PF: It's harder for the Americans, or other countries that have styled themselves upon the American promise. That's one of the tasks of education. The high schools have utterly failed in it, by the way We need to chip away at this optimism constantly, at this sense that when the stock market goes up, it's not going to go down.

Wouldn't it be nice if life were like the life depicted in Snow White, and we had cute little dwarfs to amuse us and no evil that cannot be easily dealt with? Now and then, there is something like that utterly motiveless mass murder accomplished by the two children in Arkansas that ought to shake our sensibilities. But it doesn't. We can easily override it with optimism. We say, "well, we'll have better gun control" or "there must be a solution to that problem."

There's no solution to it. It's a human problem. People are meaninglessly wicked sometimes. Religion used to show why, but religion doesn't help any more at all. Psychiatry used to show why, but that's discredited now. Most Americans don't like when I say it, but most problems have no answer.

That's not really a pessimistic philosophy. It says you can survive this bizarre life without damage if you have the right attitude and regard the whole thing as a massive irony

PT: Do you think that's a cultural immaturity, to not want to face up to that?

PF: Yes, I do, but we're only 150 years old. This kind of philosophy comes much more readily to Europeans, which is one reason why I love living in Europe. There's a natural joyous pessimism, which encourages people to expect the most awful things and to laugh about it.

PT: Is that perspective handed down through the culture?

PF: Absolutely There's nothing like Christian Science in Europe. That's an American invention. So is gun control and all of these optimistic things.

Americans have great advantages over other people, but great disadvantages, too. Unless they've gone to high-class institutions of learning and have read and thought a great deal, they're likely to overlook the bad news. You have to bring the bad news together with the good to have a complete awareness of being alive. That's why I'm distressed when I find universities teaching nothing but business courses. That doesn't help you at all. When you're 85 and dying of cancer of the rectum, having taken a business course has given you nothing appropriate.

PT: Given that you do enjoy and appreciate European culture so much, why haven't you lived your life there?

PF: Because I love living here. You can really never fit in there because you don't know the culture the way they know it. But I go there as often as possible to experience it.

PT: Do you stay here partly because you enjoy being a critic of America?

PF: No. I've shelved that role; I have nothing more to say. But I stay here because I'm used to it. And because I admire many things about the United States and deplore their absence abroad. One is the First Amendment. It's terribly important to any writer and any critic. The freedom to assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances. Living abroad encourages one to see how rare and how important they are.

PT: What was your aim in writing a memoir?

PF: To clean the slate. To see whether I could sum up my experience in a shapely form.

PT: Was it cathartic?

PF: I'm not sure. I never think of it in psychological terms.

PT: Was it emotional? Was it very personal?

PF: No, because I'd done a lot of this before, in an essay called "My War," or even in the book I wrote about the First World War called The Great War in Modern Memory. It was much more emotional then. Frequently, thinking of other people's bad experiences in war reduced me to tears. I think I've toughened a bit. I read about it so much.

PT: Has the anger that seemed to animate a lot of your life died down?

PF: No. It's worse than ever. At the breakfast table, as I read the Times and the awful Philadelphia Inquirer, there's a sort of theater of outrage. My voice can probably be heard a block away as I read certain things. The takeover of the book business in this country by vendors of motor oil or something.

PT: Do you find that anger is something that sustains you?

PF: Yes. I couldn't live without it. It's as much a part of me as my sense of humor. It overlaps, of course. I think of myself as a satirist, somebody who sees what's wrong and tries to awaken people to noticing it by turning it into black humor. But the anger never disables me at all. It's a motivator.

PT: Does it ever threaten to become toxic or consuming?

PF: No. Sometimes it threatens to become unfunny, and that's fatal. The things I like to deal with, even serious things, have to have an element of play.

PT: Do you find that sometimes readers take something meant satirically too seriously?

PF: Very frequently. And then I usually utter the words, "Nobody knows how to read in this country."

The high schools are nothing but playgrounds; they don't teach people to read. The illiteracy rate in this city is forty percent and that figure is probably designed to flatter people. I'd say it's about sixty percent. An author can't live in that kind of an environment.

I mean readers who are capable of telling a lie from a truth and perceiving even the crudest irony. I get letters from people who utterly misunderstood things I've written because they have no sense of irony. They think that everything that's uttered is a literal truth, which is the death of wit. That's the death of literature.

PT: You see yourself as a satirist and ironist. Do you reject "cynic"?

PF: Yes, because a cynic assumes that all human actions are motivated by self-interest. I don't believe that. I think people can be persuaded into acting in such a way that serves the public good. I'd say I'm a satirist. Even my writings on war are really satires, because there's lots of unexpected humor and outrage and irony I believe in the redemption of mankind, actually, by the application of intelligence; now and then I see a glimmer along that line.

PT: A motive that runs through your memoir is the importance of self-respect.

PF: That's very important. That's the ultimate solution of a life which isn't spent in apologizing for itself.

PT: Where does self-respect come from?

PF: You generate it by learning how to read and learning how to do well things that other people do badly, like understanding and describing and speaking. You don't brag about those things, you just do them. Arriving at self-respect is the ultimate duty of everybody alive. Otherwise, you're a drag on the universe, apologizing for yourself or doing less well than you could. I was brought up by a very puritan family who insisted that the purpose in life was to succeed and not to survive. And to leave it better than you found it. I've never gotten over those superstitions.

PT: So you didn't leave all of "Boy Fussell" in Europe. There are things from your childhood that you brought back with you. Yet you feel that you were transformed totally.

PF: Yes. It made me serious for the first time. I was a joker before I knew Europe well. And, of course, knowing Europe began with my experience in France during the war.

PT: You draw on other people's experiences throughout the book. Is literature something you turn to as a way of understanding your own experiences?

PF: Absolutely. And as a way of understanding the world in general. Because the world has more people in it than are alive at the moment. It has all the people constituting what used to be called the dead majority: fictional characters, wisdom people, authors, artists, musicians, painters. To ignore their continued presence is to blind oneself to all the dimensions of human life. That's what education ought to be about--to enlarge one's awareness. That's why I'm so opposed to business education. It enlarges nothing.

PT: What did you learn in the war that you didn't know before?

PF: I learned that life, in essence, was not benign, which is what Disney and Pasadena had taught me it was. War has nothing to do with justice. The whole operation of the war was madly irrational, no matter how necessary.

This is a motif that runs through everything I've written about war, including Thank God for the Atom Bomb. That was designed to shake people up, and it has. Dropping a bomb and killing 180,000 men, women, and children is certainly irrational. That's the sort of thing you do in a war; it reverberates through history. Presumably it is less offensive than the alternative. You have to keep choosing unpleasant alternatives.

PT: You make the point that often the people in the infantry, who did the fighting, were not the articulate, educated people who could bring that story back.

PF: That's why we know so little about it. Because the people who engaged in it are not autobiographers. Their ideas are dissipated in narratives over the dinner table. Most of them don't like to talk about it at all. It's just a bad moment in their lives and they hope to move on. Most have.

PT: Did your interest in social class grow out of being in the war?

PF: My social interest began years ago when I used to watch the Indy 500 auto race. It came to my mind that nobody at Princeton was in that stadium. I began to wonder why Why does a certain class of people love anything connected with motor cars driven at very high speeds and dangerously? I decided to go to Indianapolis and see these people and talk to them. I spent a week there. In Indianapolis I began to notice flower beds outlined in dead lightbulbs, little tricks that would never take place in Princeton or Pasadena, distinctly upper-middle-class places. And I got interested in differences in clothing and speech, even floral arrangements. I got the sense that as long as we are playing an act for an audience, which means being alive, we are playing it in such a way that involves social class, and it's fun to know the signals. I began inquiring into some of the signals.

PT: That's another thing Americans don't like to think or talk about: the existence of class.

PF: Yes. They can't bear it. Once you show them it's not dangerous, it's fun to talk about. I've had wonderful letters in response to my book Class: A Guide Though the American Social System, from people saying, "Thank God, you've relieved me. For years I've been worried about being working-class, and you have shown that it is the best class of all to be in in this country. You don't pay any income tax; you get to drink beer all the time; you get to go to baseball games; you're never troubled with a serious thought."

PT: Did you ever worry that your academic colleagues wouldn't take you seriously because of a book like that?

PF: No. I was saying things like that for years.

PT: You have a reputation as a curmudgeon. Do you enjoy that?

PF: It doesn't bother me. A long time ago I got over any kind of anxiety or even interest in what other people think of me. The only way to pursue your own career as a writer, as a thinker, is not to worry about the effect of what you're doing or what people think about it. Just do it. Do it as well as it requires and forget it. The alternative seems too self-conscious and utterly inhibits production.

PT: So you have to become the judge of the quality of your own work.

PF: Otherwise it's worthless. It's only the author who knows the worth of what he's doing, and he's frequently deceived by vanity. But other people can't do it at all.

PT: What do you think about young people today, after teaching for years?

PF: They're the same as young people always are.

PT: But they will probably not have the transforming experience that you had.

PF: It doesn't bother me in the least. I think the way to lead a happy life is not to think about what's going on inside you. You have to learn the habit of paying attention to what's going on out there. That's the important thing. And a book is out there. The Iliad and The Odyssey are not you; you have to adjust yourself to fit their requirements.

The classics are always true, because despite technological change, political change, people basically are always the same. The ways of being frightened are limited; there are no new ways. There are no new ways of falling in love. The way to understand life is to go directly to the old stuff and see what's in it that you haven't noticed before.

PT: I imagine you don't have much use for a therapeutic approach to life, a psychoanalytic approach to life.

PF: It depends on whether it's credible. I have no respect for chemical therapies of any kind, depending upon pills to cheer you up or to make things seem more significant. It's got to be intellectual or spiritual--in the form of language, not chemistry Not mechanical. As long as they don't oversimplify human experience or human awareness.

We're beginning to see how Freudian psychology has simplified the complexities of the brain and of awareness. When I was 25, Freudian analysis seemed the way to solve every personal problem. It was popular because it was expensive and, therefore, seemed exclusive and was associated with New York City But it didn't usher in the new emotional world at all. It was broadcast as something universally true and useful, which it has proved not to be.

PT: Would you say that's because so many human problems are essentially unsolvable?

PF: Yes. And we should see that as the beginning of wisdom. They're not totally unsolvable, but they're not solvable in the simple-minded form that is frequently argued for.

PT: Do you think the therapeutic approach poses the danger of becoming self-absorbed or too focused on the self?

PF: Yes. Egotism is the ultimate human sin. To care too much about you?self and your own ideas and your own program causes people to be blind to the infinite number of other programs that are available out there.

PT: You always seem to defy what people expect.

PF: Exactly. Because I found out that I could get away with it. I did this even in college. Before the war, I was a C-student and spent most of my time drinking beer and horsing around. After the war I spent all my time at being a good student, at reading everything I hadn't read before, redeeming myself in one sense. Going to graduate school, becoming a teacher--that had been unheard of before the war.

I'm an example of what can be done if you care a lot about it. The lack of talent doesn't matter as much as the lack of willpower. Sacrificing everything to the object in view: that becomes harder to do every moment because of all this stuff flowing in from outside. I notice how many people can't think unless the radio is on. They don't know how to concentrate, which is the simplest avenue to distinction of any kind.

PT: You haven't tried to please people and yet you've been very successful.

PF: Yes, but I have learned, largely from studying the behavior of artists and authors, of how little importance wanting to please people is to significant achievement. Michelangelo didn't go around kissing ass. He set to work on his marble. And stayed up late to serve the artistic end he had in view.

PT: So it's a product of willpower.

PF: Anything of value intellectually is accomplished by a single, lonely person doing it whether it's popular or not, resisting advice of all kinds.

Art is what we have instead of religion. It requires of us the same kind of single-minded, single-hearted devotion--that's not the wrong word, devotion--to an object we recognize as more valuable than ourselves.

It's lonely. You have to have a great deal of--it sounds as if I'm flattering myself--intellectual courage. This kind of courage isn't often recognized.

PT: If you had one piece of wisdom to impart, what would it be?

PF: Do something that you respect. If you can avoid writing ads designed to deceive people, or false news reports, or the celebration of the worthless, you can't help but augment your self-respect. And then you'll probably be happy.

COPYRIGHT © 1998 Sussex Publishers, Inc.

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[x Orlando Sentinel]
HISTORIAN FIGHTS AGAINST `GOOD WAR' AURA
Reviewed By Roger Moore

In a recent radio interview, noted historian Paul Fussell admitted that he wrote his new book, The Boys' Crusade, as a "response" to the works of Stephen Ambrose and Tom Brokaw. Fretting over rose-colored obituaries highlighting Bob Hope's USO shows ("Front-line troops never saw Bob Hope") and Brokaw's pervasive "greatest generation" sugar-coating, Fussell wants to set -- or reset -- the record straight.

And Fussell, a decorated World War II infantry veteran and the author of The Great War and Modern Memory, as well as other authoritative works on how time and revision gild combat history, is just the guy to do that.

In 184 footnoted and pointed pages, Fussell reminds sentimentalists how furious the British were that the U.S. military and its troops brought their racism to the British Isles along with their pre-D-Day gear. He ridicules the misty-eyed last two-thirds of Saving Private Ryan. He reminds the reader of the near mutinous infighting within the Army -- 19,000 men who deserted in the 11 months U.S. troops fought in France, the Low Countries and Germany. He details the "friendly fire" blunders and intelligence failures that cost thousands of lives.

The boots on the ground, Fussell writes, knew all this. Whatever the "morale" back home or in the rear echelons, where Bob Hope put on his shows, the men on the lines were simply trying to stay alive.

And Fussell makes the point, over and over again, that the staggering casualties of the first months after D-Day meant that the U.S. Army in Europe grew younger, more poorly trained and "worse" as the war went on. Hundreds of thousands of young draftees were uprooted from their lives and sent to save the Brits and free the French, who didn't much care for them, in spite of their sacrifice.

Fussell has statistics, letters home, on-the-scene accounts and his own memories to bolster his arguments.

"Many officers neither had nor deserved the confidence of their men," one general of the day noted.

Pentagon "spin" was as vigorous then as it has proved since. Failures were covered up, lives wasted and young men left embittered by the friends they saw used up and spit out for a war most had a hard time understanding.

The word "crusade" that so many historians use to describe the Allied war effort? Fussell says that would have made your average infantryman laugh. Until, that is, the last days of the war, when they liberated the first concentration camps. Then, the "boys" of Fussell's army, got it. But that wasn't why they were there. They were drafted.

Fussell's point is that Brokaw, Ambrose and others do no one any favors by making "the Good War" more righteous and less savage than they should. World War II history should not be mythologized nor sanitized to create best sellers gobbled up by rear-echelon heroes, stateside warriors and the generations that came after them. Romanticizing an earlier war is the easiest way to drum up support for the next one.

The Boys' Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-45 By Paul Fussell Modern Library, $19.95, hardcover, 184 pages.

Copyright © 2004 The Orlando Sentinel