The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations
Fussell, Paul
one more graphic instance of the center's not holding, of things' falling apart. Indeed, one suspects that this slim, overpriced book of reportage would not have had an appreciably different...
...on nothing less than his stint as a combat platoon leader in WWII: "The careful reader," he writes, "will discern in all the essays in this book a speaker who is really a pissedoff infantryman, disguised as a literary and cultural commentator...
...A hard-hitting analysis of the controversy surrounding the World Health Organization's International Code of Breast milk Substitutes, a Code which called upon each nation of the world to ban the advertisement of infant formula and to control the dissemination of information about it to health care personnel Miller provides a devastating critique of the WHO Code based on his exhaustive study of both the scientific evidence and the moral assumptions of the Code's supporters...
...But at what may be its fundamental level the novel is about the decline of Hemingway's powers as an artist...
...And Orwell, while ironic, is always serious-Fussell's irony can't decide how serious it is or what it wants to do when it grows up: obesity, he states, is four times more visible among the lower class, "as any observer can testify who has witnessed Prole women...
...And he is failing physically...
...If only he would quit acting as if he wanted to donate his wit to the Smithsonian...
...There is, moreover, a prissiness here vaguely reminiscent of Gore Vidal, but Fussell's only avowed mentor is George Orwell...
...Salvador is essentially Joan Didion's "Letters from Central America," published originally not in the New Yorker, but in the New York Review of Books...
...Castro's hands...
...A serious moment in cultural history," he says, "occurred a few years ago when gasoline trucks changed-the warning word on the rear from Inflammable to Flammable...
...Although we ought not to be too eager to embrace jackbooted thugs of either the Left or the Right, no nation can survive in today's world by allying itself only with those leaders whom we would want to invite home to Sunday dinner...
...Unless the delusion was mine...
...When the narrative is most interesting, it consciously reminds .us of his earlier works, and does so repeatedly...
...But the claim to kinship ends there...
...If Across the River and into the Trees is viewed in relation to Hemingway's previous fiction it can be seen as a poignant and highly self-conscious analytic act...
...What she does not say is that the reason no one could be surprised by this is that the Left produces its own Kurtzes...
...But the heady candor and precision of this final, in all ways climactic essay suggest that almost everything else is indeed just so much high-grade fluff by a man who knows better and can't help it...
...It is a kind of collage, consciously making reference to the whole range of the earlier work, acknowledging the real sources of Hemingway's early power, but bidding them a conscious and highly literary farewell...
...This narrative voice draws perilously close to what would be in character for the battered and mentally scarred colonel...
...Its subject is failure...
...And it's the measure of his quirky sensibility that his chief interests-books, manners, war, and travel-are so often viewed from the acute angle of out-of-the-way if not downright frivolous texts: The Boy Scout Handbook, for example, whose ninth edition he subjects to a book review, and then there are black-andwhite photos from Life magazine, a censor's guide to taboo novels in South Africa, and even some cookietin lids from a bakery in Georgia, which provide quaint fodder for a study in historical revisionism: Does Mr...
...Fluorescent tubes hang askew...
...The great high altar is backed by warped plyboard...
...no light on the dove above the globe, Salvador del Mundo...
...Consider, for example, the following description of the Metropolitan Cathedral in San Salvador: This is the cathedral that the late Arch bishop Oscar Ardulfo Romero refused to finish, on the premise that the work of the Church took precedence over its display, and the high walls of raw concrete bristle with structural rods, rusting now, staining the concrete, sticking out at wrenched and violent angles...
...It is silly of the narrator to say-though the narrator here no doubt takes the Colonel's viewpoint-that Cantwell by Jeffrey Hart sits in a hotel dining room with "his flanks covered...
...Early in the book, we watch Reagan and Doris Day cavort on Salvadoran _television in The Winning Team, a 1952 Warner Brothers movie about the baseball pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander...
...It's as if erudition, which Fussell has in spades, were a license to entertain whatever the cost...
...The cross on the altar is of bare incan descent bulbs, but the bulbs, that afternoon, were unlit: there was in fact no light at all on the main altar, no light on the cross, no light on the globe of the world that showed the northern American continent in gray and the southern in white...
...It is highly amusing stuff but it all starts to sound like gossip-mongering in a smooth doctoral tongue...
...On the loss of the regiment, Cantwell pleads bad orders, a touch 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1983...
...Didion writes her best journalism when she is able to establish a personal connection with a place (as in her elegiac essays about the Northern California of her childhood) or when she is discovering the inherent literary qualities of a public phenomenon (as in her rendering of the Lucille Miller story in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and her deflation of the buffoonish Bishop Pike in The White Album...
...Not that he ever fully abandons the hard, tinny, and rather loveless edge to his accomplished sentences...
...Here neither is the case...
...There is Colonel-Cantwell's failure...
...If only he'd let the old soldier fade away...
...Hemingway once remarked that the novel is about the command-level performance of the U.S...
...It is silly to hear the narrator say that the Colonel "reaches accurately and well for the champagne bucket with the ice...
...It's been said that he is "untrammeled by reticence," but that puts it too daintily...
...The first of these scenes is simply a variation on all the tired Bonzo jokes that have plagued Reagan for most of his political career...
...Not just obesity but the flaunting of obesity is the Prole sign, as if the object were to give maximum aesthetic offense to the higher classes and thus achieve a form of revenge...
...He is by far the snootier, has notably less moral vision, and is less at home with tenderness...
...Much too often the narrative voice says stupid or irrelevant things: "Then she chewed well and solidly on her steak...
...Much of the rest of this book is posturing...
...Like Orwell, he revels in the tell-tale signs of class structure and social status...
...If there is any political message here, it is that El Salvador is a Third World backwater which cannot be salvaged for U.S...
...Yet before we can assess it, we must actually see it...
...The "certification" charade is required by an ancient liberal superstition, the Wilsonian notion that strategic self-interest is an insufficiently moral basis for a nation's foreign policy...
...Fidel may never have played Grover Cleveland Alexander, but he was a mediocre minor-league pitcher before becoming the Robespierre of Cuba...
...The second, however, merits further comment...
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...But it's precisely his flair for such brash insight, for the dazzling connection, that marks the 34 pieces in this book and proves him to be a gifted critic and more than a gardenvariety gadfly...
...In fact and by reputation, he is a bull in the china shop of American letters, and no wonder: he fashions himself as a kind of thinking man's John Wayne, wielding prose Ronald B. Shwartz is a Boston attorney and freelance writer...
...policy is not whether we can impose norteamerieana democracy on that troubled nation, but whether we can afford to allow a strategically located Central American country to fall into Dr...
...I entered the war when I was nineteen, and I have been in it ever since...
...perambulating shopping malls in their bright, very tight jersey trousers...
...Poe, too, it seems, has "an urge toward the outre"-a phrase not unbefitting Fussell himself, who seems to create authors in his own image...
...Indeed, one suspects that this slim, overpriced book of reportage would not have had an appreciably different message had its author stayed home and relied for her information on the network news...
...Public education had apparently produced a population which no longer knew In- as an intensifier...
...interests and that to take one side or the other there is to fall prey to the sort of selfdelusion which afflicted Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness...
...The salient question which El Salvador raises for U.S...
...Is it (as he claims) a merger of literary and social commentary, or rather a coy flouting of both, when he divines a link between two modern-day "prose genres"classified "personal" ads and protest letters by authors aggrieved by bad reviews: "They are not as distinct generically as one might imagine at first glance...
...He _has lied...
...0 Paul Fussell is a chaired professor of English who doesn't take literature -or much else-sitting down...
...That is, he sits at a corner table, presumably so that he cannot be joined by or sit next to bores...
...But Across the River and into the Trees at the same time enacts its distance from those earlier sources of power...
...S P E C T A T O R' S J O U R N A L...
...It deploys Jeffrey Hart is Professor ofEnglish at Dartmouth College and a contributing editor of National Review...
...Predict ably, President Reagan emerges as Didion's Kurtz...
...The careful reader may also dis THE BOY SCOUT HANDBOOK AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS Paul Fussell / Oxford University Press / $15.95 Ronald B. Shwartz Three New Books Of Interest from the Social Philosophy and Policy Center OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES, by Fred D. Miller, Jr...
...The last and longest piece in this collection, "My War," is also the best, and it points up the trouble with even the most brilliant of the others -namely, the infantryman's "disguise...
...And the closest she comes to "found literature" is her short characterization of American ambassador Deane Hinton, who-as a cosmopolitan man with western American roots-seems to be Didion's kind of guy...
...They share the convention of shameless self-satisfaction...
...Inside that gruff exterior might be a largely gruff interior...
...E...
...Didion rather cavalierly dismisses that consideration by observing: "no one could doubt that Cuba and Nicaragua had at various points supported the armed opposition to the Salvadoran government, but neither could anyone be surprised by this...
...Army in World War II in Europe, and that, too, is presented as a bureaucratic mess...
...When we read these letters, it is perhaps best to keep in mind that at the end of the Boca Grande novel, Didion's narrator Grace concedes: "I am less and less certain that this story has been one of delusion...
...There is the "terrible truth" that Graham Greene cannot write English and there is Nabokov's "constant pursuit of the outrd...
...The wiring is exposed...
...with a certain fetching swagger and acid humor, and blaming it all...
...Each constitutes a little arena of a very twentieth century sort of insecure egotism and self-concern, and a critic would be hard pressed to decide which bespeaks the more pitiable dependence on external shows of esteem...
...FAILURE BY DESIGN When Ernest Hemingway's Across the River and into the Trees appeared in 1950, it was greeted with hoots of scorn by the critics...
...Still, Salvador contains some pas sages which could have been written only by one of our finest prose stylists...
...Then, at the end of Didion's narrative, the Great Communicator is seen "certifying" El Salvador's progress toward political stability and human rights, even as the carnage and repression continue...
...This superstition informed the Carter Administration's disastrous stance on human rights and occasionally crops up in right-wing talk about linkage...
...U ,,I i'hil.-,phy and PoircV i . 39 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1983 cern that Fussell's portrait of the artist as ex-GI is more than a tad overdrawn and smacks of self-dramatization...
...What we get, instead, is a gallery of clowns, cads, and loons and their dark comic- frailties, with criticism just a front for the juicier stuff of caricature and psychobiography: the "neurotic" temper of Waugh's col lected letters, the "positively Hearstlike chutzpah" of Maugham, Boswell's life as "one of the most memorable satyrs of all time...
...Because her stay in El Salvador was brief and exclusively professional, Didion has no personal stake in that embattled land...
...these references in a collage-like way, much as Picasso would juxtapose an old newspaper, a pipe, a glass, a piece of a violin...
...He had been a brigadier general and had commanded a regiment but lost it disastrously and been reduced to colonel: he wears "an old combat jacket, with a patch on the left shoulder that no one understood, and with the slight light places on the straps, where stars had been removed...
...It locates the sources of literary power in the past, in earlier works and earlier experiences...
...In A Book of Common Prayer, Didion's protagonist Charlotte Douglas is a norteamericana who lives in Boca Grande, lists her occupation as una turista, and tries unsuccessfully to sell her vision of reality to the New Yorker in a series of "Letters from Central America...
...Recounting his grim first hours of combat in Alsace, France, Fussell finally remembers (instead of simply acting out) emotions for which the term "pissed-off" is apparently just a frail euphemism...
...After all, the United States joined forces with Stalin in World War II without insisting on his "certifying" human rights progress in the Gulag...
...Fussell climb such molehills and turn them into mountains "because they are there"-or is it because no card-carrying critic of somber mien ever has...
...Even when it comes to more sacred literary fare-like Waugh, Maugham, and James Boswell-Fussell's slant is off-center and mischievous, and a far cry from explication de text...
...He has lost his regiment in battle and lost his general's stars...
...Colonel Cantwell's military career is susceptible of being read as an analogue of Hemingway's artistic career...
Vol. 16 • July 1983 • No. 7
