Paul Fussell, *Requiescat in pace*

I find nothing more depressing than optimism. - Paul Fussell (1924-2012).
I see, from the commemorative tribute in the star-studded* 

*McWhorter (linguist John, not the Guinness-records guy) on Romney's time-warped way with words, the Middle-English table cracker Geoffrey Wheatcroft on a certain "pretty nice girl" of few words but of many throneward-bound years recently toasted over even more belliesful of wine, the canonic Cynthia Ozick on the Hebrew-American ... canon, Paul Berman on Kropotkin (the Russian anarchist-aristocrat, not Severn Darden's nebbish KGB man in The President's Analyst ["you ask any KGB man, he'll say there's nyet thing we can do..." - Glenn Tolstoyfreysky, "Smuggler's Reds"]) and his Chinese baton-passers, Deirdre (The Illinois Economist/Historian/Lit Prof Formerly Called Donald) McCloskey on "happiness economics", Peter Green (the British classicist, not the Fleetwood Mac founder) on Achilles' many ... well-heeled ... translators from the United States of - d'Oh!merica, Maya Jasanoff (the innovative young historian of the British empire, not the freckled SNL comedian and daughter of Minnie "Lovin' You" Riperton) on Emma Rothschild's C18 imperial anatomizings, and Christopher Benfey (not Buckley) on Gertie the Steinosaur. What, that's not enough for you? It's a regulah c. 1965 Encountah, I tells ya!

June 28, 2012 issue (now paywall-free since that nice young man from The Facebook came in with the deep angel-pockets, already) of The New Republic by Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard and among our most distinguished cultural historians of the American Civil War, that Paul Fussell, literary scholar and essayist, died on May 23, aged 88. 

I began to read him while in high school during the late 1970s; as a contributing editor to TNR Fussell published such essays as the comically incisive anatomy of American social strata that he would expand in 1983 into his popular book Class, which, along with his much-laureled work of literary history from 1975, The Great War and Modern Memory, 

Every war is ironic, because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation, because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its ends. Eight million people were destroyed because two persons, the archduke Francis Ferdinand and his consort, had been shot.

copper-riveted his slot in the American literary landscape where the academy - he spent his earlier decades deep within the campus catacombs of C18 English lit, as the Swift-meets-Johnson moral timbre of his later work would indicate - meets what used to be called the higher journalism. 

As with the Englishman Henry Fairlie, another TNR contributing editor then, and William Manchester, bestselling historian and Churchill biographer, both of them like Fussell early-1920s babies, he brought to his writing an at once wry, tragic and curmudgeon sensibility shaped by the epic unspeakabilities of the Second World War,

This book is about the psychological and emotional culture of Americans and Britons during the Second World War. It is about the rationalizations and euphemisms people needed to deal with an unacceptable actuality from 1939 to 1945. And it is about the abnormally intense frustration of desire in wartime and some of the means by which desire was satisfied. The damage the war visited upon bodies and buildings, planes and tanks and ships, is obvious. Less obvious is the damage it did to intellect, discrimination, honesty, individuality, complexity, ambiguity, and irony, not to mention privacy and wit. For the past fifty years the Allied war has been sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant, and the bloodthirsty. I have tried to balance the scales. - Wartime (1989)


“Before that day was over I was sprayed with the contents of a soldier’s torso when I was lying behind him and he knelt to fire at a machine-gun holding us up; he was struck in the heart and out of the holes in the back of his field jacket flew little clouds of blood, tissue and powdered cloth. Near him another man raised himself to fire, but the machine gun caught him in the mouth, and as he fell he looked back at me with surprise, blood and teeth dribbling out onto the leaves.” - "My War", Harper's (1982)

in Manchester's case its Pacific theater, from whose dreaded and prospective mainland assaults the deus ex machina of the atom bomb had arguably saved both Manchester 


Bill R says:
May 29, 2012 at 3:56 am
The author William Manchester was one of those waiting to take part in the invasion of Japan. He gave a lecture saying he was “ecstatic” when he learned of the bomb. The news meant he would see his next birthday.
After the talk, he was a approached by a Japanese gentlemen, an ex-soldier who had been waiting to repel the invasion. The Japanese said he wanted to talk about the word “ecstatic”. Manchester started to apologize, saying that he was ecstatic he would live, not that all those people died. The ex-soldier interrupted him.


“Don’t apologize. I was ecstatic too.”

and the France-fighting Fussell (Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays, a collection from 1988 which included a memorable exchange with the prestigious left-liberal political philosopher and just-war theorist Michael Walzer, was among Fussell's signposts). 

Not surprisingly, he, like they, was disinclined by second-natured experience to suffer gladly fools from any quarter, whether they with masks of purloined get-out-of-jail-free victimhood issued from the student, multiculturalist, feminist or politically-correct left(s), from the by-turns risible and rebarbative Republican right(s), or, in their deepest lodgings at all levels, from among those charged with the keeping up and running as ever-going concerns our inflight-magazine/USA Today/CNN corporate culture of bland official euphemizing and no-boats-rocked-please good cheer, slavish boot-licking, arse-covering and self-fellating-cum-congratulation at all levels of bureaucracy public and private, diversely brummagem therapies and something-for-nothing quackeries for body and soul, and, not least, the treadmill of restless anxiety, social climbing, anti-social greed and spoiled-rat crybaby entitlement that affords American "civilization" - what a concept, were it but possible! - fully nine-tenths and more of its élan vital. 

Those among our op-ed essayists in "comic sociology" two generations and three tiers down from Fussell owe something to his wryness, but in that moral and verbal and referential neutering for the Sunday chat-show circuit to which they have haply submitted themselves with blandly becoming may-I-have-another servitude, nothing whatever to his avant les sept mots que tu ne peut pas dire sur la télévision Carlinesque capsaicin bite.

Jewelry is another instant class-lowerer, like the enameled little Old Glory lapel pins worn by the insane and by cynical politicians working backward districts. - Class (1983)

It will be interesting to see as, pace the set-piece onward-and-upward-and-coward liberal optimism of either the bushy-curled Steven Pinker and Malcolm don't-get-mad-badly-get Gladwell, or of the Lad-of-the-Locks-Lost Matt Ridley, the world prepares for its latest-scheduled if always schedule-changing global vomiting of blood, already in deck-swaying seasick progress, who among those still green of literary leaf might even now be germinating their Fussell seed. 

We few enough of us now in autumn brown or winter white may be around to greet them on our barking wii-wiiPads, our ParkingSpaceBooks, or our farking Twatter feeds, but we may vouchsafe those among our surviving natty nephews and even neater nieces those pleasures of style and sensibility that, in piling up in tidy rows the ashes of apocalypse with quill rake in android hand, promise as lords and ladies of the web rings of the day after tomorrow to sweat 

Sam, son, the Fussell Muscle man. Daughter Rosalind Fussell did not trade barbs, in either City Room or sitting room, with Cary Grant in His Girl Friday.

from muscle in Mordor those bracing cups of bitters that the far more literate among their grandparents once ground from mortar and Fussell.


Not merely did I learn to kill. But I learned to enjoy the prospect of killing. You learn that you have much wider dimensions than you had imagined before you had to fight a war. That’s salutary. It’s well to know exactly who you are, so you can conduct the rest of your life properly. - Interview with Sheldon Hackney, Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities, upon publication of Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic (1996)

William Manchester on an earlier Swiftian-American curmudgeon, via his epigraph opening Mencken: The American Iconoclast by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers (2005):

Fifty years ago I spent my mornings reading to an old man who suffered, as I now suffer, from a series of strokes. He was a writer. He was H.L. Mencken. I have never known a kinder man. But when he unsheathed his typewriter and sharpened its keys, his prose was anything but kind. It was rollicking and it was ferocious. Witty, intellectual polemicists are a vanishing breed today. Their role has been usurped by television boobs whose IQs measure just below their body temperatures. Some journalism schools even warn their students to shun words that may hurt. But sometimes words should hurt. That is why they are in the language. When terrorists slaughter innocents, when corporation executives betray the trust of shareholders, when lewd priests betray the trust of little children, it is time to mobilize the language and send it into battle.


When Mencken died in January 1956, he was cremated. That was a mistake. He should have been 'rolled in malleable gold and polished to blind the cosmos.' I still miss him. America misses him more.