If you would like to add a profile to the Alumni Scholars Page, please send an e-mail to the PCC Alumni Office at alumni@pasadena.edu.

 

PAUL FUSSELL

What is “modern consciousness,” and what “modernized” it? A resounding answer was published in 1975, by Oxford University Press. The book is titled The Great War and Modern Memory, and its author is one Paul Fussell. Its subject is the impact of World War I (tendentiously dubbed “The War to End All Wars” after the 1918 armistice) on English literature, language, and perception. Fussell argued that the shell-churned soil of the Western Front was the graveyard not merely of millions of wasted men, but of pious optimism and blind conformity. His book made a persuasive case that the cynicism and irony that underpin modern literature and sensibility are direct and unprecedented products of the First World War.

Joseph Heller, author of Catch 22, called it the greatest book he knows of about World War I. John Keegan, the foremost military historian of our time, has described the book's effect as “revolutionary.” The Great War and Modern Memory won the 1976 National Book Award in the Arts and Letters category. Three decades after its publication, its influence persists.

When The Great War and Modern Memory was published, Paul Fussell was a 51-year-old professor of English at Rutgers University. His previous writings concerned the rarified subject of 18^th century English poetry and prose. The book sparked Fussell's very public transformation from typecast specialist in arcane literature to angry and articulate combat veteran, although his signature vehemence would only emerge with his later writings.

Fussell was born in Pasadena, California, in 1924. In his 1996 autobiography, Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic, he describes the Pasadena of his day as “a highly privileged suburb—the word had not yet taken on pejorative overtones. It was a dull, safe, trim little city of some sixty thousand where those who commuted to the tougher Los Angeles eleven miles away returned in the evenings to raise families in gentility and peace.” He describes the local education system of his time this way:

“Like other ‘progressive' cities, in 1928 Pasadena had adopted for its public schools the six-four-four plan. This meant that a pupil spent six instead of eight years at grammar school, then four years at a junior high school, and finally attended a junior college for either two years (for the college bound) or four (for those earning associate degrees and going to work right away.)” Fussell entered Pasadena Junior College, on the college-bound track, with something resembling pride. “Everything the college undertook had a professional, nonchildish air . . . . This whole costly package was proudly supported by the taxpayers of Pasadena, happy to have something called a ‘college,' if only junior grade, in their town. To be sure, the California Institute of Technology was there too, but it enrolled few Pasadena students and seemed quite out of reach. Local pride centered on PJC, and to go there was to feel you were accomplishing something valuable and admirable. I never heard the place condescended to.”

Fussell matriculated from PJC in 1940. Looking back on his days at Pasadena Jaycee, as it was then called, he wrote, “There were so many of us graduating that only the Rose Bowl could hold us, and there one evening, in dark suits and white dresses, we listened to the speeches and sang “Land of Hope and Glory,” whose British colonialist sentiments no one apparently found inappropriate or anomalous. We pretended to find the whole proceeding ridiculous, but no one snickered, and we behaved ourselves as we'd seldom done before as we formed two long lines on the grass and filed by to be handed our diplomas. It would only be a year and a half before such gatherings would be prohibited, lest, it was held, Japanese bombers seek out such large crowds.”

Fussell had joined the Reserve Officer Training Corps upon entering PJC, in which service he continued at Pomona College. He received his commission in May 1944, and was sent to France as a second lieutenant of a U.S. Army “replacement battalion.” There was no euphemism to conceal what “replacement” meant. He was “introduced into the line,” as he put it, on the night of November 10, 1944. Fussell would dedicate The Great War and Modern Memory

 

To the Memory of

Technical Sergeant Edward Keith Hudson, ASN 36548772

Co. F, 410^th Infantry

Killed beside me in France

March 15, 1945

Fussell has written more than twenty books, ranging in subject matter from the Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England (1966) to BAD, or the Dumbing of America (1991). After The Great War, his most important book is probably Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (1989). It seeks to dispel the romantic fog in which World War II has been enveloped by the popular media. Wartime examined how newly emerged mass-marketing techniques were used to mold public perception of the war on the home front, how those same techniques backfired badly when directed at those doing the actual fighting, and in general about “the damage it [the war] did to intellect, discrimination, honesty, individuality, complexity, ambiguity, and irony, not to mention privacy and wit.”

In sum, the “post-Augustan” phase of Paul Fussell's career has aimed to communicate certain undesirable truths about modern war: its numbing carnage, but just as importantly the damage it inflicts on critical thinking, wit, decency, and individual freedom. Fussell has repeatedly emphasized that he is not a pacifist. In his often-stated view, war is sometimes unavoidable, and must be fought to the end, no matter the cost. He has strongly defended the atomic bombings of Japan.

“America has not yet understood what the Second World War was like, and has thus been unable to use such understanding to re-interpret and re-define the national reality and to arrive at something like public maturity.”

Fussell is now retired, as the Donald T. Regan Professor Emeritus of English Literature, University of Pennsylvania.

Michael Lecky

Harvard, Mass.

PCC Class of 1973

Sources:

The Great War and Modern Memory, by Paul Fussell. Oxford University Press, 1975

Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic, by Paul Fussell. Little, Brown and Company, 1996

 

Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War, by Paul Fussell. Oxford University Press, 1989

Interview with Paul Fussell, The Guardian, 7/31/04, by Susanna Rustin