Paul Fussell (1924–2012)

I had almost forgotten that back in 1980 people still wrote books like this - flamboyant prose style and page long slabs of personal opinion in between actual literary criticism. The book is quite entertaining though, and at its best makes the interesting point that 'going South' to the beaches and parasols of the Med, to shed clothes and have affairs and worship the sun, was for the British between the wars a kind of pastoral idyll, replacing the pastoral idylls of bleating flocks on English sward and babbling brooks beneath venerable elms (from an earlier time when the British didn't travel as much). Unlike much literary criticism these days Paul Fussell is actually grateful and appreciative of good quality travel writing, and literature in general, and expresses his enthusiasms in this book (he also complains about modern tourism in an understandable but somewhat ploddingly predictable manner). The book is worth reading as an entertaining survey of some of the best travel writing ever written.… (more)

Started out as a funny field guide to the American class system. Written in 1983 it’s astonishingly up-to-date, although of course a few things have changed. But it’s really wild how much is still exactly the same. Anyway, it started out funny but as it went on it just started seeming nastier and repetitive. If you can find it, you may enjoy the first few chapters, but you may as well bail out halfway through.

ADDED: Well this is just plain weird, the day after I review this obscure 37 year old book, it gets mentioned in a NYTimes opinion piece (great essay BTW): https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/10/opinion/television-culture.html?referringSour...… (more)

Paul Fussell's THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY (1975) is not a book one can hurry though. I spent about a month on it, taking frequent breaks, because there's just so much to absorb, to learn, from this amazing volume of research, scholarship, and heartfelt commentary. Fussell came away from his own war, WWII, deeply and permanently scarred, and spent the better part of his professional life trying to understand the horror of war and the personal damage it can cause, but he was also deeply intrigued by the countless literary works that came from its participants and victims, evidenced here. He looks at not just works from the Great War, but other more recent wars too, up through Vietnam, and makes some very thoughtful and credible comparisons. Enough said; read this book. I enjoyed a brief correspondence with Paul before his death in 2012, and was deeply saddened when he left us. I will be thinking about this book, and his personal memoir, DOING BATTLE, for a long time. RIP, Paul.

- Tim Bazzett author of the memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA… (more)

Paul Fussell's WARTIME (1989) worked well as an "in-between-books" reader for me this past week. I've admired Fussell's work since seeing him (along with his late friend, Sam Hynes) in Ken Burns' PBS special, THE WAR, some years back. I enjoyed his memoir, DOING BATTLE, immensely, and this collection of essays were nearly as good. They don't really have to be read in order either. I skipped around sampling the ones with the most intriguing titles, e.g. "Chickenshit: an Anatomy," and "Drinking Far Too Much, Copulating Too Little," or "Reading in Wartime" and others. None of these pieces disappoint. Because Fussell was there, a combat lieutenant in the European theater, who was seriously wounded, so he knows about the filth and fear, the mud and blood, as well as the boredom interspersed with utter terror. And after the war, like Hynes, he became a writer, professor and knowledgeable historian of his own and other wars. Many of these hard-edged and clear-eyed pieces could be prose companions to Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" or Remarque's ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, because Fussell draws many apt comparisons here, of his war to the Great War. Fussell aims to explode the myths and patriotic nonsense often glorifying war, and he succeeds to the nth degree. WARTIME deserves to stick around and be read for a long, long time. If more national leaders and politicians read books like this, and took them to heart, there would be fewer wars. Fussell is gone now, but his books will live on - I hope. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (more)