Paul Fussell's Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War and Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays

...Again, what can he know?—why, when the bombs were dropped, "He was going on eight months old, in danger only of falling out of his pram...

...Summit Books, 1988...

...Having worked himself into the most terrific lather of indignation, he suddenly remembers that some forms of discourse are governed by rules...

...Just why Fussell supposes that to think of the war this way can only falsify or sentimentalize it beyond recognition is never satisfactorily explained...

...Fussell seems determined to make himself into the kind of writer who just does not care if his rancor seems excessive or his vehemence misplaced or his views eccentric...

...It is true that at one point in Thank God for the Atom Bomb, Fussell remarks, "in speaking thus of Galbraith and Sherry I'm aware of the offensive implications ad hominem...

...Fussell was a second lieutenant in the infantry and saw combat in France in 1944-45...

...Unlike the generally somber note of Wartime, Fussell's tone in his preceding book, Thank God for the Atom Bomb, a collection of essays, is cheery, with an occasional discordant outburst of disdain for his academic colleagues, "humorless critical doctrinaires with grievances (Marxist, Feminist, whathaveyou...

...There is in Fussell, as in his hero Evelyn Waugh, a pronounced esthetic distaste for the inanities and vulgar excesses of the Anglo-American war effort, and for the drab conformities of life in wartime...

...In it Fussell contends that "for the past fifty years the Allied war has been sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by the sentimental, the loony patriotic, and the bloodthirsty...

...Fussell's most recent book, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, although it contains material of surpassing interest — chiefly, the inevitably moving firsthand accounts from American and British officers and enlisted men—is a determinedly eccentric enterprise...

...This effect is intensified by Fussell's fondness for a sort of pseudo-Johnsonian diction: he speaks of tourists "conglobulating in a close mass," urges a "reprehension of this ethical indecency," and calls Norman Mailer a "professional controvertist...

...The only way to make any headway against the public's romantic delusions is to revisit every last detail of the experience of wartime as Fussell has been able to reconstruct it from his reading and personal experience...

...The Second World War, while undoubtedly savage and insensate, was not only that, and was anyway not some unitary "affair...

...Orwell had a powerful and active moral and political imagination...

...His occasional writing, which is frequently interspersed with personal asides, is entertaining but generally lacking in charm...

...Does the historian Michael Sherry think that there should have been a delay between the test explosions in New Mexico and the real thing...

...But then prejudices need not be explained, merely asserted...

...That practically all the evidence Fussell cites is from published sources, widely available for years, hardly makes this premise seem any less eccentric...

...George Orwell may be said to have possessed a little of Fussell's much prized experience of combat—after all, he had been shot in the throat in Spain...

...Was it, I wonder, in hopes of eliciting just some such informed appreciation, from just such a boon companion, that Fussell was moved to give his book its present title...

...298 pp...

...Well, what can he know about it?—he worked in the Office of Price Administration during the war...

...Now and again something like a reproving, schoolmasterish note, oddly prim, may be heard...

...After that embarrassment, less said the better...

...The first of these statements is portentous nonsense...

...Unlike The Great War and Modern Memory, Wartime only passingly acknowledges the interest and power of imaginative writing about war...

...Despite the strange turns in his career as a critic, Fussell possesses many estimable critical attributes274 • DISSENT curiosity, a lively relation to language, a sense of humor, a sociological knowingness about literature, and an ethnographic interest in manners and mores...

...If it is not at all clear what Fussell means by "some currently unfashionable theory of human mass insanity," it is fairly clear what he means by "inbuilt, inherited corruption...

...Fussell's essay on Orwell in Thank God, "George Orwell: The Critic as Honest Man," is a tribute, but it's full of revealing ambivalence...

...The heart of the piece is a highly emotional recounting of the enormous joy and relief that flooded the young Second Lieutenant Fussell when he heard about the bombing...

...We were going to grow to adulthood after all...

...The reader who comes upon the second statement may feel like pausing over the implications of such a word as "stigmatized" but is not encouraged by the tone of it and other such utterances in Wartime—the tone of aggressive barroom fulmination—to expect arguments amenable to fact or reason...

...That book earned him a reputation as a cultural historian of considerable acumen...

...What is less understandable is that he evidently regards this experience as furnishing all the justification needed for deciding in the affirmative the difficult question of whether the United States should have dropped the bombs...

...For the most part Fussell bestows his attention either on sentimental journalism and middlebrow schlock, or on such entirely nonliterary materials as the slogans on recruiting posters, training manuals, pamphlets for the consumption of the troops, the guff put out by public relations flaks for image-conscious generals, and "patriotic" display ads...

...Even less explicable is Fussell's confidence that he can decide on the merits of everyone's thinking about the bombing entirely on the basis of whether they have gone through the same experience he has...

...The significance—the blessedness—of the news for Fussell, then as now, lay all in this: that this same Second Lieutenant Fussell, in the summer of 1945 just back from the European theater, where his platoon had been virtually wiped out in front of him and where he had been severely wounded in the back and leg by shell fragments from a German mortar, was not going to be forced to take part in the planned invasion of Japan...

...It may be that Fussell is a man who feels himself too much beset by what he regards as the manifold idiocies, vulgarity, and spreading mediocrity of modern existence, and one too busy applying the corrective lash of his wit, to bother about being charming...

...He loves to present himself as one of the last honest characters in a world swarming with SPRING • 1990 • 273 Books hypocrites and fools...

...Stubbornly, he refuses to acknowledge that for all its inanities and stupidity the war did have a larger, overriding purpose: the destruction of nazism and fascism, of Hitler and his allies...

...Still, it is difficult to conceive of him ever publicly thanking God for the atom bomb...

...17.95...

...However, on the evidence of his two recent books, an active moral and political imagination is not conspicuous among them...

...More and more he seems to adopt scornful, embattled postures, substituting a ready sardonicism and a parade of prejudices for reasoned argument, as in his Class: A Guide through the American Status System, a sour and ungenerous book that traded on American 272 • DISSENT Books fears and uncertainties about class by invidious categorizations of people into "low-proles," "upperproles," "middles," and so on...

...The killing was all going to be over, and peace was actually going to be the state of things...

...he means a belief in original sin, which makes as much sense to require of historians of the Second World War as it does to imagine them beholden to putatively fashionable theories of mass sanity as they write their accounts, say, of Hitler's rise to power...

...When Michael Walzer, in his reply to Fussell's original New Republic piece, refused to be deterred from the obligation to think responsibly about the bombing (which he termed "an act of terrorism"), Fussell shot back by noting, with an evident air of settling matters, that when the bombs were dropped "Michael Walzer, for all the emotional warmth of his current argument, was ten years old...

...The authors Fussell has most consistently singled out for praise — Johnson, Swift, Arnold, and, in our time, George Orwell and Edmund Wilson—were all capable of great asperity of judgment and even excessive scorn, but their scorn and asperities are not what we remember or value them for...

...Much of the sort of thing that Fussell has assembled in Wartime—that basic training is a bore, that officers can be petty sadists, that the rationing of basic provisions was irksome, that mass advertising could be even more nauseating than it is in peacetime, that there were snafus, that Americans engaged in ugly national and racial stereotyping, that powerful explosives and high velocity projectiles kill and maim horribly, that "precision bombing" is a misnomer, that army chow was lousy, that army slang could be brilliantly funny and deadly dull— could not possibly seem like news to anyone, except on the eccentric premise of a deluded public nurtured on falsely romanticized and cleaned-up versions of the war...

...One might well imagine that to the average reader, or at least to the average veteran, Fussell's remarks could not be improved upon...

...Fussell's prayerful impulse is understandable...

...that he and his comrades were not going to be "obliged in a few months to rush up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being machine-gunned, mortared and shelled...

...that, incredibly, "we were going to live...

...Right away, though, he plunges recklessly on, asserting in the next sentence that "what's at stake in an infantry assault is so entirely unthinkable to those without the experience of one, or several, or many, even if they possess very wide-ranging imaginations and warm sympathies, that experience is crucial in this case...

...When I last visited my local hardware store, one of the few remaining redoubts for expressions of unreconstructed masculinity on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I carried with me a copy of Thank God for the Atom Bomb...

...A study of literary responses to the First World War, the book established the centrality of the experience of the trenches in shaping the modern imagination of war...

...It is this experience of being released miraculously from imminent and hideous death, coming after a prolonged previous exposure to violent death on the battlefield, that prompts Fussell to thank God for the atom bomb, forever and ever, world without end, amen...

...Does John Kenneth Galbraith think that the Japanese would have surrendered by November without an invasion...

...The New Republic printed Fussell's title essay (under its inoffensive original title, "Hiroshima: A Soldier's View") in 1981, on the occasion of the forty-second anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...

...But Fussell's excursions into what trendy English departments like to call "semiotics," or "mass culture studies," are far from the most noticeable irritants in a book that provokes mainly by such (quite representative) remarks as the following: "It [the Second World War] was a savage, insensate affair . . . hardly approachable without some currently unfashionable theory of human mass insanity and inbuilt, inherited corruption," or "The war seemed so devoid of ideological content that little could be said about its positive purposes that made political or intellectual sense, especially after the Soviet Union joined the great crusade against what until then had been stigmatized as totalitarianism...

...It is perhaps this which renders Fussell, for all that he finds to admire in Orwell's "stylistic techniques," a little uncomfortable in his appraisal...

...Spying the title, a brawny, grizzled old guy who was ordering massive quantities of what looked like plumbing fixtures turned to me and said, "I don't know what that book is or who wrote it, but he's right—and I oughta know 'cause I was there...

...Since then, Fussell's work, while almost always lively, has rarely lived up to the high standard of his first foray beyond a specialized readership...

...SPRING • 1990 • 275...

...Paul Fussell is a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, a specialist in eighteenth century literature who first came to attention outside the academy in 1975 with the publication of The Great War and Modern Memory...

...But this is evidently close to what he believes...