My Favorite Old Coot

An old coot will squint one eye and say: I'll tell you one damn thing. Paul Fussell does not support W. Fussell would agree with Dr. Samuel Johnson who said that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Fussell doesn't mince words when he says If you don't get angry about this war (in Iraq), you don't deserve to be alive. Amen, Paul Fussell. If this is (fair & balanced) curmudgeonry, so be it.

[x The Guardian
Hello to all that
by Susanna Rustin

Review of The Boys' Crusade: American G.I.s in Europe - Chaos and Fear in World War Two.

Paul Fussell: nostalgic for a more literate age 
Scarred by his experiences in France in 1945, Paul Fussell has sought to demystify the romanticism of battle, beginning with his literary study of the Great War. His latest book is about American GIs in Europe; his next concerns the nature of generalship. Now 80, he identifies with Robert Graves, loves travel and is nostalgic for a more literate age.

On November 11 1944, Paul Fussell woke up surrounded by corpses. Drafted into the American infantry 18 months before, he had been in France just a few weeks and this was his first night in the line. "Until that moment," he writes in his memoir Doing Battle (1996), "the only dead people I'd seen had been Mother's parents." But now, in the forest where he had been ordered to rest after a botched attack, there were "dozens of German boys in greenish grey uniforms, killed a day or two before by the company we were replacing. If darkness had mercifully hidden them from us, dawn disclosed them with staring open eyes and greenish white faces."

The horrors inflicted by and on ground troops, Fussell believes, are almost never acknowledged. "American readers needed someone to tell them what war was really like," he says, "because by the 1970s the romanticising of the second world war had already begun. And so I tried to cut away parts of it - tell them what a trench smelt like and what dead GIs smelt like and so forth."

For his friend Edmund Keeley, a retired Princeton English professor, Fussell's classic literary study, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), is without question his most important work. In it, he set out his stall, emphasising tactical errors and blunders, drawing the reader's attention to the hordes of terrified, disgusted deserters. He described the everyday texture of life at the front, from freezing cold, rats, lice and terrible food, to horrific mutilations and murders. But what distinguished the book from other critical accounts of the world wars, or of Vietnam, was its literary emphasis. "I think he was the first to see the connection between those various wars and the way they were described and who was doing the describing," says Keeley. "Style, how you use words, how you use rhetoric, can end up being a kind of symbol of how a whole generation is thinking."

Fussell showed that the British were masters of a euphemistic diction whereby, in wartime, friends became "comrades", danger was "peril", to die was "to perish" and the dead were "the fallen" or "the dust". He suggested that to call the killing fields of the Somme a "battle" was "to suggest that these events parallel Blenheim and Waterloo not only in glory but in structure and meaning". In the work of the soldier-poets and memoirists who were the focus of his research, Fussell discovered a series of ironic contrasts. Poppies and roses, symbols of blood and passion spent, were reminders too of a pre-war pastoral idyll. Sunrises and sunsets, moments of ritualised terror in the trenches as soldiers were required to "stand-to", became, in the poems, ripe with moral and religious suggestion.

Military historian John Keegan, author of The First World War (1998) and a friend of Fussell's, calls The Great War a "simply superb book that will be read long after he's dead." He says its effect was "revolutionary", in that it showed how literature could be a vehicle for expressing the experience of large groups: "How many good books are there about the first world war at the individual level? What Paul did was go to the literary treatments of the war by 20 or 30 participants and turn them into an encapsulation of a collective European experience." Geoff Dyer, whose grandfather fought in the first world war and who cites Fussell as an influence on his book The Missing of the Somme (2001), sees him as a pioneer, "one of the first people to investigate the question of remembrance". Joseph Heller called The Great War "the best book I know of about world war one".

Born in 1924, Fussell turned 80 on March 22. With eyes that crinkle up when he smiles and a wry expression, his sentences often end with a chuckle. As a student he was a fan of the New Yorker humourists, but says he learned in 1944 that his favourite satirist, HL Mencken, "was deficient in the tragic sense". After the war he discovered other writers: second world war veterans such as Heller and EB Sledge; the 18th-century giants Swift, Burke, Pope and Johnson (on whom he wrote his PhD); the modernists Pound, Eliot and Waugh, the last of whom earns a cameo role in The Great War - even though he was only 15 when it ended - thanks to his witty send-up of the Field Service Post Card, a prototype of the ubiquitous modern form, which allowed soldiers to delete as necessary from such options as: "I have been admitted into hospital sick/ wounded, and am going on well/ hope to be discharged soon".

But it was Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden and Robert Graves who were to have the biggest impact, and whose brave attempts to make sense of what had happened to them were at the heart of The Great War. Throughout his career as a scholar, teacher and author, most recently with The Boys' Crusade: American G.I.s in Europe - Chaos and Fear in World War Two, published in the UK next month, Fussell has looked to these writers as role models. "Sometimes I feel I am the colleague and the friend of Graves," he explains. "The fact that he's dead and I'm not is irrelevant to me. I regard the whole thing as a big continuum." Fussell sees the accounts of survivors as central to any real understanding of war. He calls such writers "true testifiers" and says: "I think people who haven't been through it are unfit to write military history because what happens in close combat is absolutely unknowable - it's so fantastic what it does to you. The temptation to run away, especially if you're a leader of troops, almost never gets a look-in [in history books] and it's a very important part. It's a struggle about manhood as well as a struggle to keep from being hit from flying metal."

Fussell is highly critical of such "military romanticists" as the writers Tom Brokaw and Stephen Ambrose, and of Steven Spielberg's film "Saving Private Ryan." Generals are condemned for their poor judgment and lack of sympathy, as are "a great deal of very stupid officers and staff officers" with whom he served. He says: "With any man my age who hasn't been in the war there's a distance necessarily between us - it's never mentioned but it's there all the time. I'm tougher than they are." When Michael Walzer, UPS Foundation Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and author of Arguing About War (2004), responded to an essay Fussell had published in the New Republic defending the use of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Fussell replied by pointing out that in 1945 Walzer was only 10. Walzer says: "It's a common argument in politics - people who claim to be the tough-minded practitioners who get their hands dirty and know what it's like are opposed by intellectuals with their heads a little too high in the air. Those of us who join the argument from the other side have to deal as best we can with those claims."

If there had been no second world war, Fussell thinks he would probably have followed his father into the law. Paul Fussell Sr was a successful corporate lawyer who drove the 20 miles from Pasadena to Los Angeles every morning. Paul Jnr's mother, born Wilhma Wilson Sill in Indiana in 1894, met her future husband in high school, and they settled down happily enough in comfortable, conservative suburbia. His paternal grandmother was also a presence, and on Sundays the family trooped off to church and back to a badly cooked Sunday dinner. His uncle was a runaway liberal who, while Paul Snr was arguing the case for offshore drilling, was writing editorials against it in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Fussell lives in Philadelphia, in an apartment building near a well-kept garden square, with his wife Harriette Behringer. They met in 1983, when she sent him a postcard introducing herself, after reading an article about him. Now retired, she worked in journalism and public relations. With a singsong voice, she seems a sunny character, and they clearly enjoy each other's company.

His father's family came from Pennsylvania, so in a sense the move east was a return, but his parents were distressed by their son's rejection of California. He says: "I was always a very critical youngster. Flaubert describes spending his spare time as a child secretly listening behind the door at his mother's parties. He is appalled at the stupid things that get said. I had the same experience constantly. Where I was brought up it was an extremely genteel society, and even before the war I was beginning not to be genteel at all... Obviously I couldn't live there."

His elder brother, Edwin, led the way, first to Pomona College where they edited a magazine together, and then, after military service, to graduate school at Harvard. Fussell portrays himself as a "supine and incurious" student, who preferred driving while drunk and practical jokes. Ed was very much the senior partner at this point. When they both became English professors this balance shifted, and Paul says Ed was bitter about his young brother's greater public success. Ed was fired from the University of California for refusing to sign a loyalty oath during the McCarthy scares ("I would have simply signed it, cynically"), and later converted to Catholicism, but, despite their differences, they remained friendly until Ed died two years ago. The boys had a younger sister, Florence, and a large group of friends at Balboa, where the family had a beach house. Looking back, Fussell describes the summer holidays as his own pre-war idyll. Certainly, once in the army training camps where he was bored and bullied for a year-and-a-half after being called up on May 6 1943, it must have felt as if he had fallen a long way.

Fussell served as a second lieutenant in France for four months. Leading his rifle platoon in an attack on an Alsace town in March 1945, he was on the roof of a bunker when it was hit by a shell. With pieces of metal in his back and leg - Fussell receives a 40% army pension - he was patched up and sent to hospital. Earlier that day he had been rebuked for hesitating, and still believes he would have taken cover had he not been trying to prove his bravery. When his companions were killed, he felt he was responsible, and The Great War is dedicated "To the memory of Technical Sergeant Edward Keith Hudson".

He says: "After the war, which was ugli-ness incarnate, I sought any outlet that was artistic." Having given up on early attempts to write poems, at Harvard he discovered an enthusiasm and aptitude for poetry criticism, a "rhythmic under standing" that he attributes in part to years of cello lessons. Fussell saw himself as waging war against old-fashioned literary critical dullness, and became an advocate of the more rigorous "new criticism" practised by Northrop Frye. His first book, Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England, based on his PhD thesis, was published in 1954. The following year he was offered a job at Rutgers University.

Anger became a source of intellectual energy and ambition. "American literature was taught as a collection of sinceri ties which was quite wrong - Thoreau was thought to be a very great man, I regarded him as just a bum like the kids of the 1960s," he says. Instead, he focused on formal questions, and found in the post-Renaissance worldview of the Augustan humanists, particularly Johnson, a template for the kind of sceptical attitude he had decided to cultivate. New-world optimism was simply inadequate: "Americans are hopelessly bogged down in the celebratory mode - I call it Disneyfying events." Twain and Whitman were the honourable exceptions.

The seeds of Fussell's Anglophilia, along with his secular views, had been sown by his father, who had spent some time in Cambridge and found in English middle-class life "his idea of heaven". In Princeton in the 60s, as part of a circle that formed around the critic Richard Blackmur, Fussell became friendly with Kingsley Amis. He says he was "always drawn in the direction of England because it didn't laugh at its own jokes - you could say something extremely comic with a totally straight face. Unlike America where innocence is treasured, in England it was a good thing to know things. Especially if you were a university professor, you were supposed to know much more than your subject."

Confident that his contribution to 18th-century scholarship was original, he submitted The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism (1965) to Oxford University Press: "I didn't have any contract, I just sent it, and eight months or so later I got a letter back saying 'we like your book and we're going to publish it', and that was the beginning of my understanding that I could do something in writing that was going to succeed."

By this time Fussell had two small children. Betty Harper, whom he met as an undergraduate in California, worked for publisher Alfred Knopf in New York. They married in 1949; Rosalind, known as "Tucky", was born in 1955, followed by Martin, called "Sam". Fussell speaks with pride of Tucky's career as a high-school language teacher. She worked in Pakistan until recently but now lives in Boston. Sam, a writer, is nearby in Philadelphia, and Fussell and Harriette, whom he married in 1987 after his first marriage broke up, have lunch with him on Fridays.

If the profound doubts brought about by the cruelty and absurdity of the second world war primed Fussell to admire 18th-century literature, his studies equipped him to tackle the subject of war head-on. He was outraged by the Vietnam war, and influenced by the memoirs he had been reading he began to frame his thoughts about the first world war as the event that "reversed the idea of progress", a modern-day fall of man. Fussell is at pains to point out that he is not a trained historian, and although there are those who regard war literature as a sentimental distraction from political and strategic considerations, when it came out in 1975 the book was an instant success. John Keegan says: "he started out as a perfectly conventional academic literary critic, and his early books are just that. It's as if the muse descended upon him, and I literally mean that, and he suddenly became possessed and turned what he read in those books into an extraordinary work of art."

Fussell called The Great War an "elegiac commentary", and describes writing it as an emotional experience. His next book registered a loss of a different sort. Subtitled "British Literary Travelling Between the Wars", Abroad (1980) examined the travel books of Waugh, Graham Greene, DH Lawrence and Robert Byron. Always a keen traveller, Fussell, who describes a recent trip to Italy as an "absolute psychic necessity", had been to Germany on a Fulbright lectureship and spent a year with his young family in Nice. His book was one of the first to take 20th-century travel writing seriously, and he clearly identified its fictional qualities long before these were more widely understood.

"As long as he sticks to reading the individual books of his travellers, Mr Fussell is the best kind of critic; sensitive, adroit, infectious," wrote Jonathan Raban in a review of Abroad for the New York Times. But Raban rejected his argument that the 20s and 30s represented "the last age of travel" as "bad-tempered nonsense", and suggested that by emphasising the cruise ships and Baedekers of old, and pouring scorn on package tourism, Fussell had written a work of "valedictory nostalgia". Fussell, who hit back with a review of Raban's Old Glory (1981) in the TLS, admits to a nostalgic thread in his work "because it's a way of criticising the current, suggesting things were once much more interesting and better". If The Great War was an outpouring of grief for a lost generation, Fussell was also in mourning for what he saw as a more literate culture, in which references to Shakespeare, Pilgrim's Progress and Victorian poetry were widely understood. Even soldiers, it seems, were better in the old days. In Wartime ( 1989 ) , which set out to debunk the myths of the second world war, he complained: "The terrible fact is that the comic-book was the book of [that] war."

On the one hand, Fussell was outraged that any kind of college course was enough to get you out of the draft, meaning that the 50,000 American soldiers killed in Vietnam were disproportionately poor and badly educated. On the other hand, he says he gets "very sick and annoyed at certain proletarian performances", and he doesn't like "social life in which the man who comes to repair the refrigerator calls you by your first name". With its Nancy Mitfordish lists of the tastes that define Americans as "upper", "middle" or "prole", Class (1983) saw its author elevated to the status of "world-class curmudgeon" by the Washington Post. The only escape from such classifications, Fussell suggested, was by joining what he called category "X" - a self-selecting aristocracy of the talented and clever. Today he says the book was a bit of fun and not meant to be taken seriously, but he remains an unashamed elitist.

The book came at the end of a difficult period in Fussell's personal life, and he regrets that he didn't handle the break-up of his first marriage better. Keegan, who describes Fussell as a "very complicated", unusual person, suggests that the fame The Great War brought him may have been a factor, but adds: "he's marvellous company, very good to talk to. He once came to lunch with me and stayed until 10 o'clock in the evening. Another American friend of mine was there and we both became completely bewitched by Paul's company."

In 1984 Fussell was offered a prestigious chair at the University of Pennsylvania. An opponent of what he calls the "social justice mode of literary interpreta tion", he objected to the impact of "political correctness" on universities and believes that adjusting language to cater to changing sensibilities is dishonest: the word "wog" is used twice in Abroad . But he was a critic too of the corporatisation of higher education, seeing intellectual values compromised by the new emphasis on vocational and business courses. Looking back, Edmund Keeley says: "I don't think there was any place that seemed to us as exciting as the American academic scene in the decades after the second world war. Right through the 60s all of us believed that the humanities were going to be the salvation of our society. We came out of the war with an almost religious belief in the power of art and literature. There was a sense of calling about being a teacher." Now retired, Fussell misses his students, but has lost interest in literary criticism, which he sees as "wholly temporary", and is disappointed by the dominance of the novel, his least favourite form.

Fussell is a man of strong opinions, and there are many things he either loves or hates. American football is in the former category: "There's not much language associated with it and there are no authors, like the intelligent authors who glorified baseball in the 1920s. That's one reason I've hated baseball, because it's phony. Whereas football seems to me very honest - I mean you hate each other so you tackle hard." He thinks Bill Clinton is "wonderful", and argues that anti-semitism was one reason why Americans were so eager to punish his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Contemptuous of American religiosity, which he sees as largely contrived, he says: "Conservatives know that I cannot be trusted... I hate them in general, I grew up in that atmosphere, my father was a corporate lawyer and always voted Republican - that's one reason I decided not to. It's a standard boy's reaction. If your father's a dentist you either become a dentist or you ridicule dentists for the rest of your life." Philadelphia appeals to him because it was the first American city and is full of the 18th-century history that interests him, but he calls it "a sort of hick town, it has one newspaper, which is terrible. Amateur, amateur paper, it's really pathetic, nobody knows how to write a news story. If you're any good here, you read the New York Times."

As a young man Fussell was a "parlour Leninist", radicalised by the war, but now he thinks Harriette is more "progressive": they argue constantly about Cuba - she visits, he won't - and censorship. "I'm very American in that way," he says. "This is a country of dissent. When people start unifying, and agreeing on the same thing, we're in deep trouble." He admires John Edwards, "the loudmouth from North Carolina, who is a really rugged attacker", and, though he rarely goes to the cinema, he saw Fahrenheit 9/11 the week it opened and hopes Michael Moore will help John Kerry get elected.

Fussell was vigorously opposed to last year's invasion of Iraq: "If you don't get angry about this war you don't deserve to be alive." Under no illusions about the cruelty of frontline troops (in Doing Battle he describes how his own platoon murdered weeping, surrendering German soldiers, and elsewhere reflects on the fashion among American troops in the Pacific for collecting Japanese skulls), he regards the torture of Iraqi prisoners as "absolutely predictable - it's usually practised by soldiers upon each other". Sadism, he says, is ordinary in war: "That's why it has to be so carefully guarded by rules - the Geneva convention and so on."

"The greatest irony," Fussell wrote at the end of The Great War, "is that it is only now [after the relaxation of censorship in the 60s], when those who remember the events are almost all dead, that the literary means for adequate remembering and interpreting are finally publicly accessible." In a close reading of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, he picked out Brigadier Pudding, tormented by the image of Passchendaele and its "shell-pocked leagues of shit in all directions", for whom ritualised sexual humiliation becomes a compulsive means of remembering. When OUP asked Philip Larkin for a comment on Fussell's book, the poet called this final section "obscene nonsense". Fussell, who went further than most in his discussion of the profound damage, to minds as well as bodies, that could be the long-term effect of war, says: "It strikes me as almost cruel, to write about the last seconds of the lives of young people who are scared to death, as if war were a matter of battalions and staff organisations and so on. It's unimaginative, hopeless - it doesn't do any good."

He thinks the fantasy of the "smooth, rational victory" will never go away. But for all his pessimism, he does not seem inclined to give up: his next book, about General Patton, will ask, "Is success in generalship related to the perversion of being a bully in social life?" Fussell built a successful career on the most damaging experience of his life, and in the story of a man who has spent many enjoyable years writing about the thing he hates most, he agrees there is a paradox. Keeley says the second world war "was the making of him, but it left scars - both literal and psychological. I don't think anyone goes to war and comes back without some scars. I think part of the passion of his writing comes of the war scarring. It's a way of making what you had to pay there, pay for you somehow."

Paul Fussell

Born: March 22 1924, Pasadena, California.

Education: 1941-43, '45-46 Pomona College; '47-51 Harvard University, PhD.

Married: 1949-87 Betty Harper (two children, Rosalind '55; Sam '58) divorced; '87- Harriette Behringer.

Career: 1943-45 military service; '55-83 Rutgers University. '84-94 Donald T Regan Prof of Eng Lit, University of Pennsylvania.

Some books: 1954 Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England; '65 The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism; '71 Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing; '75 The Great War and Modern Memory; '80 Abroad; '83 Class; '88 Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays; '89 Wartime; '94 The Anti-Egotist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters; '96 Doing Battle; 2002 Uniforms; '04 The Boys' Crusade.

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