The Literary Legacy of World War I

...The classic literature that came out of it—not only the English memoirs, but Hemingway, Dos Passos and Cummings—was the dying gasp of this kind of fighting...

...Always subtle, erudite and astute here, he is particularly admirable on Blunden's poignant Undertones of War, "an extended elegy in prose" that celebrates the Arcadian richness of the vanishing rural past against the ravaged landscapes of the battlefield, "a whole sweet countryside amuck with murder...

...In those stalemated bloodbaths called tactical maneuvers, for which the swollen wartime army was appallingly unprepared, England's vulnerable innocence vanished forever, and irony, with its attendant distrust and cynicism, became "the dominant form of modern understanding...

...Fussell is a profoundly reflective critic of the works that bore witness to the extremities of horror, to the filth and futility of the trenches...

...For another, it is unlikely that the three Americans can have read much of the English memoirs of the Great War...

...World War I was the last European war in which combat between men—rather than just tanks or planes—had some strategic importance...

...Similarly, Fussell feels World War I was responsible for the casual abundance of combat imagery in everyday language—rank-and-file, bombard, barrage, tactics—just as vestiges of the conflict continue to be part of the texture of contemporary British life, in pub-closing hours, Summer Time (England's daylight-saving time), wrist watches, national security laws, paper banknotes, and the inexorably deepening crisis of the British economy since 1918...

...Fussell argues that the experience of trench warfare on the Western front between 1914 and 1918 constituted a trauma neither England nor the rest of the modern world has yet recovered from...

...But a single skimpily educated soldier citing a scene from Richard III in one of his letters does not begin to prove that the troops were all "vigorously literary...

...However, when Fussell is writing not about literature but about less concrete issues of culture and history, he can be haughtily arbitrary and recklessly indifferent to the stern demands of plausibility...

...Not until our own time, Fussell concludes, with "puritan lexical constraint" finally overthrown, has the obscenity of trench warfare been fully exposed...

...This is Heller's stumbling block in Catch-22, for after pounding away at the lesson that all wars are a crazy fraud, he reverses himself in the end, gripped by the sheer inescapable malignancy of Nazism...

...But this, I think, mistakenly assumes that Pyn-chon means to endow his "myth" with some measure of the moral outrage that informed the memoirs of Blun-den and Sassoon...

...unhappily, he is far less persuasive about the paradoxical and elusive interweaving of demonic history and literary recollection...

...The unprecedented use of the machine gun, Fussell insists, separates the First World War from the conventional conflicts of history, making it a technological war like the Second...

...There developed as well a special jargon of euphemistic prevarication (to make the grim reality of the trenches palatable to a literate mass population) that is still distorting political rhetoric...

...When Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914, he observes, the country was romantic and optimistic, nourishing an understated nostalgia for the sweet rural peace of a pastoral world that was in fact rapidly becoming extinct...

...he has little patience for the uncontainable subtleties of cultural history that spill over from one era into another, and sometimes back again...

...And technological war, as we were incessantly reminded in the 1960s, is the meaningless and inhuman purpose of a technological society...

...If neither Hitler nor the Holocaust were myths but threatening evil realities, then one can certainly speak of a crucial distinction between the vile and meaningless slaughter of the century's second decade and a campaign that had urgent reason to be fought...

...Neither do we find evidence in Akenfield of a deep-rooted nostalgia for the pastoral on the part of poor farm workers who saw action in World War I. Blunden's idealized Arcadia is an incorrigibly literary vision that no peasant dependent on the caprice of nature for his livelihood would have been willing to accept...

...Fussell forgets, too, that it was not the First but the Second War that was wholly technological...

...By this logic, Fussell traces the Mailer-Heller-Pynchon metaphor of war as the condition of contemporary man, a black comedy of the absurd, squarely back to Sarajevo...

...Finally, despite his categorical links between World War I and current sensibility, Fussell pays curiously scant attention to the fact that the modern movement in literature began long before 1914, and that none of its outstanding innovators—Woolf, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Yeats—was involved in the War...

...Mailer, Joseph Heller, and Thomas Pynchon are examples of what I mean...

...Writers & Writing THE LITERARY LEGACY OF WORLD WAR I BY PEARL K. BELL PAUL Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 363 pp., $13.95) is an ambitious, perceptive, sometimes exasperating inquiry into the effects of World War I on the culture, literary imagination and collective consciousness of England...

...Gains of a few thousand yards, bought one day with thousands of lives, were wiped out the next at the cost of thousands more...

...There is something even more troubling about treating the two World Wars as one unending absurd carnage...

...For one thing, no valuable fiction was produced from the European ground-war of the '40s...

...It ignores Hitler and Fascism, against whom the Western Allies had both an ideological and a defensive motive for fighting...

...Because Fussell is, first and last, a literary critic, the best sections of his book deal with classic memoirs of the conflict by some gifted survivors—Edmund Blun-den, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves—and with the war-haunted poetry of David Jones, Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg...

...Moreover, there is little ground for Fussell's allegation that "Prolonged trench warfare, whether enacted or remembered, fosters paranoid melodrama, which I take to be a primary mode in modern writing...

...Surely, too, the habit of "gross dichotomizing" that Fussell emphasizes is as ancient as the Greeks, who regarded all outsiders as inimical barbarians...

...this conjectural leap from the trenches to present-day American novelists is both unconvincing and confused...

...Widespread literacy did not by any means make the treasures of the country's literature second nature to the lower classes of England in 1914, as Ronald Blythe's remarkable study of an English village, Aken-field, graphically demonstrates...

...Toward the end of his book Fussell shifts his attention abruptly from England to America, where novelists "too young to have experienced [the Great War] directly" have been obsessed with its themes and memories, simplifying them "into myths and figures expressive of the modern existential predicament...

...As a disciple of Northrop Frye, Fussell can discern the mythical in prose that to other readers remains stubbornly temporal and mundane...

...He began with Hardy and ends with Pynchon, yet what Pynchon offers may not be myth procreated by history and memory, but only a brutal mockery of both...

...By 1940, soldiers had largely been replaced by machines...

...Though the airplane was initially used as a military weapon 60 years ago, it was a primitive instrument at the time, and the battles of the flying aces had some of the romantic glamour of hero-to-hero combat in the Trojan War...

...In addition, Fussell makes extensive use of unpublished diaries and letters by ordinary, forgotten soldiers...

...Even more dubiously notional is Fussell's rather modish view of the two World Wars as another Thirty Years' War, "virtually a single historical episode running through the whole middle of the 20th century...

...Its young men went naively into the unspeakable slaughters of the Somme, the Ypres Salient and Passchendaele, battles planned with high-minded and devout incompetence by the infamous General Douglas Haig and other staff bunglers...

...and he points to the shocking episode of Gravity's Rainbow where a senile and coprophagous English Brigadier literally reenacts his military memory of the excremental mud of Passchen-daele...

...One of the more common legacies of the Great War, he believes, was a penchant for "gross dichotomizing" —dividing things into then and now, or us and the enemy—that did not exist before 1914...

...His own habit of "gross dichotomizing" leads him to a stark vision of a Great Divide between innocence and irony...

...This, actually, is the central theme and purpose of Gravity's Rainbow, a work of fiction immersed in technology, and only tangentially concerned with ritualized memory of the trenches...

...England's fighting men, in his opinion, were not merely literate, they were "vigorously literary," and the Oxford Book of English Verse, that stout vade-mecum of national taste, was practically standard equipment in the kit bags of infantrymen and staff officers alike...