Paul Fussell, 1924–2012

“I entered the war when I was 19,” literary and cultural critic Paul Fussell once wrote, “and I have been in it ever since.” Sent to France as a second lieutenant in late 1944, he saw his rifle platoon decimated by chilling cold and the shells of ragged, retreating Germans. On March 15, 1945, he was crouching behind a machine gunner who “was struck in the heart, and out of the holes in the back of his field jacket flew little clouds of tissue, blood, and powdered cloth.” The same day, Fussell himself was hit by shell fragments in the back and legs, and his combat days were over. In all his later works, Fussell wrote, “the voice that’s audible is that of the pissed-off infantryman.”

Born in Pasadena, Calif., the son of a corporate lawyer, Fussell grew up in a “stultifying upper-middle-class milieu” that he was keen to reject, said the Los Angeles Times. After the war, he graduated from Pomona College, and then earned a doctorate in English at Harvard before taking up teaching at Connecticut College, Rutgers, and the University of Pennsylvania. “He wrote conventional academic books—on poetry, Walt Whitman, and Samuel Johnson—before creating what he later termed his ‘accidental masterpiece,’ the study of World War I’s cultural impact.”

The Great War and Modern Memory, published in 1975, made Fussell “an intellectual celebrity,” said Slate.com. The book “chronicles the loss of the old rhetoric, of high pieties, of sacrifice and roseate dawns,” in favor of what Fussell called “blood, terror, agony, madness, s---, cruelty, murder, sell-out, pain, and hoax.” Its influential thesis, as Fussell put it: That “there seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding; that it is essentially ironic; and that it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War.”

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Fussell later turned his excoriating eye to an American culture he saw as “teeming with raucously overvalued emptiness and trash.” He wrote that Steven Spielberg’s film Saving Private Ryan should be made into a 20-minute short called Omaha Beach: Aren’t You Glad You Weren’t There? If he’d lived to Memorial Day, said The Seattle Times, “Fussell would honor the dead while making a point not to honor war.”