05.24.12
Paul Fussell
Late last night an obit at the New York Times informed author Paul Fussell had died at the age of 88.
The lede:
Paul Fussell, the wide-ranging, stingingly opinionated literary scholar and cultural critic whose admiration for Samuel Johnson, Kingsley Amis and the Boy Scout Handbook and his withering scorn for the romanticization of war, the predominance of television and much of American society were dispensed in more than 20 books, died on Wednesday in Medford, Ore.
Long time readers of this blog have endured my quotation of Fussell, usually from this book BAD many, many times.
Most recently, a month or so ago:
In Paul Fussell’s BAD, the title is defined:
“BAD is … something phony, clumsy, witless, untalented, vacant or boring that many Americans can be persuaded is genuine, graceful, bright or fascinating.”
That was in 1991. BAD was a thin book. Today it would be a set of encyclopedias.
Just about everything in America is now BAD.
The US military, despite being the largest, most well-equipped and capitalized of any in world history, is BAD. It smashes weakling countries and bombs the guilty as well as the innocent who have nothing in the desperate places of the world, delivering it all with a special brand of American pomposity that tolerates no soul-searching or regret.
Fussell’s Class, along with BAD, or at least the acerbic style in them, informed much of what has gone into my writing, paid and unpaid, from the Crypt Newsletter, to the Virus Creation Labs, to today. Without it this would have been a much different place.
Of Class, the New York Times wrote:
In “Class: A Guide Through the American Status System??? (1983), he divided American society into nine strata — from the idle rich (“the top out-of-sight???) to the institutionalized and imprisoned (“the bottom out-of-sight???) — and offered a comprehensive and often witty tour through the observable habits of each.
The blog’s original mascot, the image drolly named ‘pennsyltuckyvoter,” was scanned from an illustration in Class.
Bad news, lads. Bad news. Paul Fussell has died.
Fussell’s books on war were also influential. Three of them, The Great War and Modern Memory, Wartime and Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic, are in my library.
Unsurprisingly, Fussell detested war and all the pretensions western, and American, culture attach to it.
The last decade has seen this country transform mechanized war and the news of it into an unimaginably execrable and worthless national image and product. Had Fussell still been writing even his great capacity for personal outrage would have been challenged.
Fussell, touched upon, here and here. (The first link, to a piece for The Register, is the closest outright imitation of Fussell I ever did.)
Under bad magazines, scorn was reserved for the successful Soldier of Fortune, a magazine aimed at “the mentally ill… for people who fantasise about plunging a trench knife into a foreigner of colour, generally smaller than themselves”.
(Don’t be too smug. Fussell described The Monthly Royal Review “for people who get an erection when they think of the Queen Mother – or rather her privileges, furniture and jewels…”)