Why Paul Fussell Thinks He's Better Than You

...Fussell was shrewd enough to realize he could not get away with this when talking about blacks-but could safely use vicious stereotypes about working-class whites...

...It proves that he knows...

...Sennett and Cobb employed their profound understanding, not to sneer at other people’s inadequacies as Fussell has done, but to point readers toward an understanding that less insightful people might not have found...

...He takes no critical distance from the wondrous X-style he is describing...

...Proles take to visor caps instinctively, which accounts for the vast popularity among them of what we must simply call the prole cap...

...Above all, it is designed to place its author at the top of the heap...

...But why should I try to paraphrase...

...And a further similarity: members of both classes carry very little cash on their persons:’ This is a fair specimen of the book’s “iconoclastic wit!’ But Fussell pays only cursory attention to the extremes...

...This last comment may seem like a disingenuous sermonette: why would anyone write except to display his talents to their best advantage...

...But I suspect the real reason is that he understood he would get into trouble...

...In his article about Hiroshima, he said ‘that infantry soldiers-of which he was one-cheered when they heard that the bomb had been dropped...

...sometimes acid, sometimes affectionate...

...Larry Flynt has tried to laugh it all away by saying that, contrary to appearances, he is actually making fun of racial stereotypes and building goodwill...

...More fatuous words have rarely been written...

...Is the explanation merely economic-the hope of big sales...

...They resemble apes in the zoo...

...But remember Sennett and Cobb...

...Having put so little effort into gathering material, Fussell naturally makes sloppy, easily avoidable mistakes...

...They are: “Probably the most awful class division in America, one that cuts deeply across the center of society and that will poison life here for generations, is the one separating those whose young people were killed or savaged in the Vietnam war and those who, thanks largely to the infamous S-2 deferment for college students, escaped...

...Similarly, to support his theme that the Sunbelt as a whole is unacceptable to the upper class, Fussell says: “It’s not considered good form to live in New Jersey, except in Bernardsville and perhaps Princeton, but any place in New Jersey beats Sunnyvale, Cypress, and Compton, California!’ What’s wrong here...

...They can make one business more resilient than another...

...Some of the opposition to school busing plans arose from simple racism, but more of it concerns class: class tensions between the judges who lived in Wellesley and the students who lived in South Boston, as well as fears about the underclass black culture of violence and disruption...

...As Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb demonstrated, they deserve the most careful study...

...It could be larger, for many can join who’ve not yet understood that they have received an invitation...

...The places where X people choose to live usually have a decent delicatessen or good wine store...

...But not from Paul Fussell-not from the man who, in The Great War and in his New Republic article about dropping the bomb on Hiroshima (he was for it, because of the infantrymen’s lives it saved) explored the soul of the men who, when out of uniform, would be wearing those inelegant suits and living in those tacky trailers...

...They affect the adaptability of our economy, our ability to pay our way...

...Paul Fussell knew these things, and still he produced this book...

...Black men are lured into traps with watermelon as bait...

...James Fallows is Washington editor of The Atlantic and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...This conclusion has all the graciousness and dignity of a Mensa official’s encouraging his friends to apply because-who knows?-they just might be able to qualify...

...But this time, he used his intellect and erudition not for understanding, but for aggression...

...On occasion he will even read best-sellers, but largely to see if their cliche content is as high as usual...

...In any case, he presumably could have still earned money with a respectable book, even one on this very theme, which he has been writing around for at least the last ten years...

...Such are his powers that he might even have been able to suggest alternate ways to conceive of “success” and “class...

...Except when describing the sainted Xs, Fussell mainly talks about traits that reflect “choice” less than circumstance: accent, level of schooling, family connections, physiognomy...

...How could Fussell have left out race altogether...

...What his magazine in fact dishes out is brutal, racist hatred, a hundred times more offensive than anything that Earl Butz or James Watt ever said in public and considerably worse than what Hustler does to its female models, who presumably participate voluntarily...

...If the upper orders have yachts, what do the proles have...

...Zf those proles are so dumb and ugly, why not let them go get shot...

...Each gradation within this range suffers its own fallibility, in Fussell’s view: the uppermiddles are driven and lack the self-confident freedom of the true uppers...

...Perhaps I am not doing Fussell justice...

...Another prole problem is difficulty with the complex sentence, resulting in structures displaying elaborate pseudo-correct participles like ‘being that it was a cold day, the furnace was on: ” The high proles and the middles may try to dignify their “mean little houses” with brass eagles and other classy ornamentation, but they only trumpet their insecurity in making the attempt...

...My animus against this book does not arise from the source Fussell suggests in his introductory section: the discomfort many Americans feel with the very notion of “classI’ Indeed, I have invested much of my time in the last few years trying to understand the same subject...

...dressed in poor taste...

...He could have explored our obsession with social gradations, instead of pandering to it...

...He could have helped still that tense inner voice, whispering within a million brains, How am Z looking...

...This is not quite the same collapse as William Faulkner’s writing drivel for the “Lux Video Theatef but it’s in the ballpark...

...They’re good at languages...

...How can I make the other guy slip more...

...Then you’re middle class!’) The striving middle orders think they are dignifying themselves by acquiring collections of functionless items-beer mugs, porcelain thimbles...

...But if his last chapter is not a parody-if it is as totally lacking in self-awareness as it seems-then its very clumsiness is the strongest evidence that Fussell’s book is merely misconceived, rather than cynical...

...please do not bore me...

...Have Zslipped up yet...

...indeed, that is how they live...

...His explanation is that he has stuck to those class traits “that reflect choice...

...Differences of taste and style exist, as they always have...

...The bomb killed 100,000 people, mainly civilians...

...Sennett and Cobb immersed themselves in a study of class and status differences in order to understand how to blunt their destructive psychological and economic effects...

...Regardless of the style of the cuisine, X food is always 1) good, and 2) unpraised by the company, its excellence taken for granted...

...Fussell asks the reader to imagine himself facetoface with the results of such pitiable behavior: “You realize with a start that this country must be swarming with middle-class novelty-thimble collectors...

...And so on...

...Most of Fussell’s “evidence” consists of quotes from the standard class-in-America reading list, which runs from Thorstein Veblen and C. Wright Mills to Andrew Levinson and Paul Blumberg...

...Anyone uncertain about class consciousness in this country should listen to a working-class father whose son was killed...

...Class is a cruel book, meant to inflict new wounds and open old ones...

...Paul Fussell could have helped us understand how our sense of class limits us, as individuals and as a society...

...Fussell also knows something more important, something...

...The moral agonizing, he said, came from genteel civilian strategists, thousands of miles from the war zone, who ran no risk of being killed in an invasion of Japan...

...Paul Fussell could have done the same thing-he has done versions of it in his previous works...

...Their bitter intensity contributed to the downfall of Detroit and Youngstown, and their comparative absence is part of the explanation for the economic boom in the Southwest...

...Fussell, when not writing, teaches English at the University of Pennsylvania, and his vision of the X people bears great resemblance to the vision many college professors have always had of themselves and their class...

...The Class stage of Fussell’s may tell us more about class than the text of his book...

...When the proles speak, it is from-who knows where, since the book contains not one citation or reference note...

...What’s even funnier about the lower and middle ranks is that they don’t know how pathetic they are...

...What they have is a command of refined distinctions-how they do it in Karachi, how they say it in Madrid...

...Their sublimely refined taste guides them to the truly fine things in life...

...The professors’ yearning for a meritocracy of taste is entirely natural: They do not make as much money as others with comparable education, such as doctors or lawyers, and they do not have political power...

...He knows that class differences are not simply a matter of having a tractor-tire planter in your front yard versus having a curved driveway...

...One indication is Fussell’s determination omit any mention of race-more precisely, to speak only of class division among white Americans...

...And in calling Fussell a snob, I realize that I run the risk of seeming like a bigger one...

...The other possibility is that Paul Fussell understood exactly how this book would look and sound, and went ahead anyway...

...A still stronger piece of evidence for the hypothesis that C/as is just a gigantic miscalculation is Fussell’s final chapter, on the people in “Category XI’ Happily enough for such people, they alone are free of the pains of class...

...Fussell’s vision of the X people also bears great resemblance to the way Fussell apparently thinks of himself...

...Try as they might, they can’t conceal their vulgar tastes and habits-even their pretensions to culture give them away...

...One possibility is that Fussell just made a big but innocent mistake He may have thought it was all in good fun and not have realized that he sounds like a complacent jerk sneering at proles and reading them out of consideration as fullyhuman beings...

...But SMU, of course, is Texas’s answer to Princeton, and the sticker would be more natural on a Dallas stockbroker’s Cadillac or big Buick in Highland Park...

...The Lux stage in Faulkner’s career tells us something abouf the distortions imposed on artists’ lives by the need to make a living...

...His finest book, The Great War and Modern Memory, which won the National Book Award in 1976, will endure...

...Following the logic of his “prole” portrayals, he would have to start talking about thicklipped, kinky-haired “niggers” and randy “bucks...

...The gulf between the gentlemen-officers and the workingclass Tommies of the British army was the subtext of The Great War...

...The evidence, I fear, points to this conclusion...

...Many blacks are doing better than ever before, but many others-a growing proportion-are doing worse...

...They give white women the business with their stupendous sexual tools...

...Class A Guide Through the American Status System...

...There is no “research:’ in the normal sense of the term, in the book, nor any indication that Fussell interviewed a single person to develop or check his views...

...she thinks it’s valuable, and that’s the awful thing...

...it probably saved the one million lives, Japanese and American alike, that would have been lost in a D-Day style invasion of Japan...

...But when a formidable mind wrestles with a crucially important topic, the reader expects more than a sleazy tag-team match...

...Fussell has been, until now, one of the handful of writers I most admire...

...Taken at face value, Fussell’s book is a taxonomy of the nine different classes of American society, defined mainly by their tastes...

...Are you sent to an extraordinary degree by the cuckoo in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony...

...After all, he has told us that one sign of the Xs’ freedom is their eagerness to “eschew euphemism” and tell it straight...

...They are not fat...

...While their book differs from Fussell’s in its higher craftsmanship, the more fundamental difference is the authors’ intention...

...In contrast to Fussell’s impervious proles, too obtuse to notice what they’re missing, Sennett and Cobb portrayed a never-ending struggle in which “proles” attempt to measure up to the wider world’s standards of success and mercilessly hold themselves accountable when they fail...

...A second indication of Fussell’s cynicism is his whole history as a writer...

...I began Class with high hopes...

...You can hear him telling his academic colleagues that only earthbound morons could possibly take the book for what it seems to be: one long, mean-spirited sneer...

...Nor, as that might indicate, are my views twisted by professional jealousy...

...He makes the “deeply ironic” suggestion that the “Top out of sight” and the “Bottom out of sight” classes display a “curious similarity, if not actual brotherhood...

...Far from being “fun” or “ironic:’ Class* is in fact a contemptible piece of work, reeking of the very attitudes it means to mock, a shameful misuse of Fussell’s great talents...

...the middle live in meek terror of putting a foot wrong...

...Instinctively unprovincial, X people tend to be unostentatiously familiar with the street layouts and landmarks of London, Paris, and Rome-and sometimes Istanbul and Karachi...

...Fussell makes it so much more vivid himself “When an X person, male or female, meets a member of an identifiable clg-iss, the costume, no matter what it is, conveys the message ‘I am freer and less terrified than you are: or-in extreme circumstances-‘I am more intelligent and interesting than you are...

...I, for example, hope your reaction on finishing this piece is not, “This guy is a dope...

...you can be good at it and still keep your prole fatty tissue decently covered...

...This is in accord with their habit of knowing a lot for the pleasure of it...

...Trying to conjure up a vision of proledom, and to suggest how little a college degree means when even the proles can get one, Fussell hypothesizes a pickup truck with a threerifle rack in the rear window and a Southern Methodist University sticker on the bumper...

...That book, published nearly ten years ago, drew on a painstaking, subtle effort to understand how people really felt about their class position in life...

...It is precisely Fussell’s stature that makes the book such a shock...

...They do what they like, without fear of being thought either uncouth or stuck-up...

...If Fussell truly thought himself part of the aristocracy of taste, free of the status anxieties that hamper everyone else, then why not share his blunt, “ironic” views about the proles...

...but the true importance of this passage is what it reveals about the author...

...Perhaps Fussell omitted the blacks because it would have meant actual research, of the sort he has otherwise avoided...

...He says that the jokes are in the same affectionate spirit as two blacks calling each other “nigged’ I doubt that even Flynt can believe this...

...fast food and beer are two of the causes, but anxiety about slipping down a rung, resulting in nervous overeating, plays its part too, especially among high prolesI’ (This one has a drawing of a prole couple, she with hair in curlers and thighs bursting out of checkered polyester pants, he with no neck, a gaping mouth, and an untucked shirt in an American flag motif...

...worse...

...What could have made a serious author write 200 pages of this sort of thing...

...I know, even to argue about his classifications is to play Fussell’s own game...

...He did not do those things, and that is the final evil of his book...

...They try to overreach by using big words, but their blunders reveal their ignorance: “Proles signal their identity partly by pronunciation, like the Texan on the [William F.] Buckley show who said pro-mis-kitty and ‘I am a prole’ at the same time...

...From the creators of the Official Preppy Handbook or the assorted “dress (eat/buy/pray) for success” tomes, lectures about the ugliness of Montgomery Ward clothing and of mobile homes are just what we’d expect...

...They affect the way we make our public choices, do our business, fight our wars...

...Fussell is right, of course...

...difficult-to-define swath that excludes only the chronically unemployed at one end and those with inherited wealth at the other...

...his real quarry is the vast “middle” and “working” classes, the...

...The rest comes from TV shows he’s watched, items he’s clipped from the National Enquirer (the easiest way to do cross-class reporting), or things that caught his eye while he was making his round in town...

...Paul Fussell, Summit Books, $13.95...

...For example: “The prole either has his jaw set in bitterness and defiance or his mouth open in doltish wonderl’ (This is accompanied by a nice pair of drawings, one showing the over-bred, slightly equine profile of an “upper middle:’ the other the swinish features of a “prole!’) “It’s the three prole classes that get fat...

...They dress to please themselves...

...He ends the X chapter-and the book-with a hint that others might someday share the freedom he and other Xs enjoy: “The society of Xs is not large at the moment...

...for the list of California cities, he seems to have been content to work from a map...

...The three towns in California, which Fussell apparently finds indistinguishable, could hardly be more different...

...Daily life has apparently taught him about Bernardsville, so he drops in that accurate allusion...

...Here his fabled irony is nowhere to be found...

...This hypothesis is supported by the overall shoddiness of the book, considered simply as a work of literary craftsmanship...

...Perhaps the most important contemporary class difference is that within black America...

...That he has instead aroused those fears is our loss, and his shame...

...Who can say...

...Could the man who described those feelings not know how repugnant it would be to write about fat, ugly proles...

...The X reader reads everything, his curiosity being without limit...

...It’s one sport you don’t have to strip down to play...

...I am not suggesting that every word published between every set of covers need have a redeeming social purpose...

...and as for everyone else, whom Fussell consistently refers to as proles, they are fat, ugly, unlearned, uninteresting, and usually...

...Instead of the occasional dress-up foreign word of the middle and upper-middle classes (gourmet, arrivederci, kaput) Xs can deliver whole paragraphs in French, Italian, German, or Spanish, and sometimes Russian or Chinese as well!’ There is much, much more, all in the same vein...

...When the upper class speaks in his book, it is through quotes from Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney’s memoirs...

...Regardless of the precise style of the prole cap, it seems crucial that it be ugly...

...And this sweet lady who’s showing you her collection thinks not merely that it’s interesting...

...They are every bit as smart as Fussell...

...You don’t think so...

...His most powerful and eloquent writing has been about warfare and the military, and some of his most affecting passages concern the class identities and anxieties that soldiers bring with them to battle...

...Paul Fussell, who has more in common with Flynt than was previously apparent, would probably also say that he is making fun of class stereotypes by writing a book about them that is, according to his publisher, “deeply ironic:’ rich with “iconoclastic wit...

...he may have thought that Category X was such a broad and obvious joke no one would take it seriously...

...The overall rate of illegitimate births and teenage pregnancies is rising among blacks-even as those black families that stay intact enjoy dramatically higher incomes than ten years ago...

...But to compare the two books is to see two fundamentally different uses to which intelligence can be put...

...Well, consider this: “Just as the tops are hidden away on their islands or behind the peek-a-boo walls of their estates, the bottoms are equally invisible, when not put away in institutions or claustrated in monasteries, lamaseries, or communes, then hiding from creditors, deceived bail bondsmen, and gulled merchants intent on repossessing cars and furniture...

...Bowling...

...He knows that the very attitudes he will go on to promulgate in the rest of the book helped create the tragedy he describes...

...Journalists used to display a milder version of the same trait, before their status revolution of the last generation left them with bigger salaries...

...Compton is a hard-bitten, mainly black, industrial portion of Los Angeles, while Sunnyvale is the high-rent heart of the Silicon Valley, and Cypress is a standard suburb in Orange County...

...1 feel very sorry for this woman!’ Why did he do it...

...Significantly, the one book from the class-inAmerica canon from which Fussell does not quote or cite is Richard Sennett’s and Jonathan Cobb’s brilliant The Hidden Injuries of Class...

...The clinching evidence against Fussell occupies a mere eight lines near the beginning of the book, lines entirely out of character with everything that follows...

...My point is not to debate Fussell about where SMU or Sunnyvale should be ranked but to illustrate how little he cares about getting things right...