For social historian and critic Paul Fussell, the most enduring moments of truth came as a 20-year-old platoon leader in France during World War II. German shrapnel tore up his back and thigh. The blood and guts of fellow soldiers were spewed on him. His staff sergeant died in his arms. He realized there was nothing romantic about war, only mud, cold, death, outrage and fear.
“The war,” Fussell told The Washington Post decades later, “is behind everything I do,” beginning with his book “The Great War and Modern Memory,” a classic 1975 critique of art and literature after World War I that showed how that conflict forever changed Western society and culture.
“Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected,” Fussell wrote. “Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.”
“The Great War and Modern Memory,” which won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, turned Fussell, a little-known expert on 18th century English literature, into an intellectual celebrity.
Fussell, 88, who died of natural causes Wednesday in Medford, Ore., “was a serviceman to the world in terms of understanding the horrors of war,” said his stepson, Cole Behringer.
Several of Fussell’s books dealt with war, including “Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays” (1988), “The Boys’ Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945” (2003), and his memoir, “Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic” (1996).
He also was an aggressively opinionated interpreter of societal maladies. In “Class: A Guide Through the American Status System” (1983), he expounded on class distinctions, which he viewed as essentially a matter of taste manifested in one’s choice of cars, houses, athletic obsessions and clothes. In his analysis, owning a Mercedes-Benz is a sign of upper-middle-class pretension, while a threadbare Oriental rug authenticates a higher status.
Some critics, including Alison Lurie in The New York Times, found the book witty; on the 25th anniversary of its publication in 2008, Sandra Tsing Loh wrote admiringly in the Atlantic of “this snide, martini-dry American classic.” But other critics were harsh, including James Fallows in the Washington Monthly, who called it “one long, mean-spirited sneer.”
In “BAD, or: The Dumbing of America” (1991), Fussell was unremittingly sarcastic, listing alphabetically many aspects of modern life that he found crass. “Bad,” he wrote, “is something like dog-do on the sidewalk, or a failing grade, or a case of scarlet fever — something no one ever said was good. BAD is different. It is something phony, clumsy, witless, untalented, vacant, or boring that many Americans can be persuaded is genuine, graceful, bright or fascinating.”
The son of a corporate lawyer, he was born Paul Fussell Jr. in Pasadena, Calif., on March 22, 1924. After completing his military service — which earned him a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts — he graduated from Pomona College in 1947 and moved to the East Coast “as a rebuke to California” and the stultifying upper-middle-class milieu he grew up in. He went on to Harvard, where he earned a master’s and a doctorate in English, and an academic career teaching at Connecticut College, Rutgers and the University of Pennsylvania.
He wrote conventional academic books — on poetry, Walt Whitman and Samuel Johnson — before creating what he later termed his “accidental masterpiece,” the study of World War I’s cultural impact.
“The Great War and Modern Memory” sought to demythologize combat by calling attention to such inconvenient truths as tactical errors, deserters and the smell of rotting corpses. He relied in particular on the accounts of “true testifiers” such as poet Robert Graves, who was severely wounded at the bloody Battle of the Somme.
“I think people who haven’t been through it are unfit to write military history because what happens in close combat is absolutely unknowable,” he told the London Guardian in 2004. “The temptation to run away, especially if you’re a leader of troops, almost never gets a look. … It’s a struggle about manhood as well as a struggle to keep from being hit from flying metal.”
Both a commercial and critical success, “The Great War” made “profound and far-reaching” claims for the meaning of war that “set the agenda for most of the criticism that has followed him,” Vincent B. Sherry wrote in “The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War.”
Fussell’s first marriage, to writer Betty Fussell, ended in divorce. (She wrote disparagingly of him in “My Kitchen Wars,” a 1999 memoir.) He is survived by his second wife, Harriette Behringer, whom he married in 1987; two children from his first marriage, Sam and Rosalind Fussell; four stepchildren, Cole, Rocklin, Marcy and Liese Behringer; a sister, Florence Fussell-Lind; 10 step-grandchildren; and six step-great-grandchildren.
©2012 the Los Angeles Times
Dear Readers of the Bangor Daily News: I found this online, and it is a review of Betty Fussell’s book, from the NY Times, 13 years ago. I thought it was humorous, as apparently, like Senator John Edwards, Bill Clinton and others, famous men have a side they would not wish to show to their admiring public….LOL Roger PTSDvet
October 31, 1999
Skewered
In her memoir, Betty Fussell takes revenge on her prizewinning former husband. By SUSAN BOLOTIN
long time ago, when my girlfriends and I were all single, we would amuse ourselves by arguing about whether it was better to have a guy cheat on you with a woman or a man. (We were inspired by the example of one member of our group, who had been told by three consecutive boyfriends that they were gay.) I wish Betty Fussell — food writer, biographer and now memoirist — had been around for the debate. She’d have made a lively participant, since she still seems, nearly 20 years after the fact, to be trying to eke out every possible bit of revenge against her former husband, the historian and social critic Paul Fussell, whom she says she discovered rolling around on a couch, ”buck naked” and drunk, with a male student. (How it must have galled her when he published his memoir, ”Doing Battle,” three years ago! In his version, the Fussell marriage fell apart because of a late-1970’s confluence of alcoholism and social change. In his version, there is no male student, only the ecstatic happiness discovered with the perfect second wife.)
Who can blame Betty Fussell for wanting to get even? After reading ”My Kitchen Wars,” I wonder only how she managed, for the more than 30 years that they were married, to direct her kitchen cleaver anywhere other than at Paul Fussell’s skull. When they met after World War II at Pomona College in California, where he was doubly honored as an intellectual and a wounded veteran, he found her ignorance of literature ”pathetic.” He celebrated their engagement by giving her ”a drawerful of socks to darn and a number of buttonless shirts to mend.” Once they were married, he sat in his closed-door study, working and reading, while Betty, a wall away, played with the children, planned dinner parties and questioned her sanity. She was, of course, complicitous in the arrangement. She believed that her job was taking care of her husband; she dismissed ”the ideologues of the feminist movement” as ”narrow and dogmatic.” But as his fame grew (”The Great War and Modern Memory” won both the National Book Critics Circle and National Book awards), so did her resentment. She wasn’t jealous, she insists; she just wanted thanks for her part in his success.
This is a familiar story. Indeed, it’s so familiar a story that we might be inclined to pass it by. How many women have given men the gift of time and space only to realize, too late, that the recipient hasn’t even noticed? And yet Fussell’s memoir keeps our attention because of her distinctive use of metaphor. She marks the passage of time through foods eaten, tastes discovered, pots and pans employed — and then ladles on salacious detail as the gravy.
Fussell’s pursuit of the food angle manages to be fun — her development from casserole cook to Cuisinart wizard mirrors 20th-century American social history — despite the fact that its roots lie in sadness. Her mother committed suicide by swallowing rat poison; her stepmother was a dreadful woman obsessed with the body’s plumbing and anything that could make it work overtime. Betty was taught that the virtue of food rests in its ability to make the bowels more active; she Fletcherized her meat (50 chews per bite) until she went away to college. And so her discovery that food provides pleasure, along with her decision to become expert at its preparation, is a delightful rebellion. But enough of that.
How about those drunken picnics in Princeton that ended in grass-stained gropings? The brandy-soaked evenings that led to spouse-swapping on the rug? Kingsley Amis propositioning her in the bathroom? Philip Roth’s first wife, Maggie, coming into her bed after a drunken dinner, only to be gently turned away? Her seven-year affair with a colleague? Paul Fussell’s obsession with his body? (”He took to wearing nylon bikini briefs in Day-Glo colors,” she reports. ”When I stayed up talking with friends late into the night it wasn’t unusual for Paul to descend the stairs nude and parade about the room until someone said, ‘Oh, Paul, go back to bed.’ But now I would find, when I came to bed, that he’d shaved off all his pubic hair.”) Wait, there’s more. When she writes to him, ”You’re breaking my heart,” he leaves her an index card on the kitchen table. ”Cheer up: remember, you could have been born hideously deformed.” This is juicy stuff.
And, in the end, probably the reason to read the book. I don’t like siding with her former husband — hey, I’m on the other team — but I wish Betty Fussell hadn’t made such a point of reporting one conversation they had many times: ” ‘You can’t write,’ he’d say. ‘Why don’t you do something you’re good at?’ ‘Like what?’ she’d say. ‘Cooking.’ ”
I wouldn’t know about the compliment, since I’ve never sat at her table. But some passages make one wonder about the complaint. Take as an egregious example this exploration of Fussell’s career-related angst, which overwhelmed her after a trip to Auschwitz: ”Having babies and vacuuming floors was what you did with your left hand while you got on with your real work. Arbeit Macht Frei. But what work would make me free?”
Still, I can forgive Betty Fussell almost anything, even a tone-deaf evocation of concentration camp propaganda, sympathizing as I do with a woman who bore the psychiatric diagnosis of ”exacerbated environment” so deservedly. More than one wounded war veteran lived in that family: Betty Fussell was merely the victim of a different kind of battle.