Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic Book

I read this book when it came out in 1996 and now, after re-reading it, I realize how much I came to internalize many of Fussell's thoughts about war, the military, and society. I was already starting to come to some of these opinions, but it was Fussell who gave voice to what had been unformed thoughts. For instance, I served in the Navy, and while I have no regrets about doing so, Fussell reminded me not to view those years through rose-tinted glasses and focus only on the good times. I understood exactly what he meant when he wrote "I realized what a lot I had in common with Robert Graves, who wrote in Good-Bye to All That, 'What I most disliked in the army was never being alone, forced to live and sleep with men whose company, in many cases, I would have run miles to avoid.'" (p. 77)

Fussell served as a second lieutenant in combat in World War II, and what he remembered most were the hardships and suffering of the infantry, and the war as one bloody, blundering episode after another, where men were as likely to be killed by friendly fire, or their own defective ordnance, as by the Germans. There was no glory in this kind of fighting, and if there was any honor at all it was to be found in keeping to one's own internal values and in the comradeship of fellow soldiers. The war was just a slog: kill, advance, kill again, and hope that you might be among the lucky ones who survive more or less intact, physically and mentally. Audie Murphy, one of the most decorated American soldiers of the war, and a man not known for introspection, when asked how combat soldiers survived having been in a war said, "I don't think they ever do." (p. 183)

The book starts with Fussell's childhood in Pasadena, California, the happy, protected son of an upper middle class family. It was a carefree lifestyle, with a summer house on the beach and his own sailboat, and he was untouched by the Great Depression. When the war broke out he joined the Army, apparently without giving it any thought. He managed to pass the officer training program, just barely, and found himself assigned to the 103rd infantry division. In the spring of 1945 he was seriously wounded by artillery fire and spent the rest of the war in Europe recuperating, then was transferred back to the US for do-nothing assignments until finally released in 1946.

He used the GI bill to complete college, then went to Harvard for a PhD in English. He eventually gained a reputation as an expert in 18th century English literature and poetry, and moved to Rutgers University. Toward the end of his career he joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania.

The war was never far from his mind, and the older he got, the less patience he had for cant, hypocrisy, and stupidity. American leaders had learned nothing from World War II, and would continue to blunder into conflicts because they could be used for narrow political ends. Fussell saw what was happening and hated it. "Attending these new impulses was revulsion, almost physical, at fraudulent language, especially patriotic clichés" (p. 177) He also started to travel overseas, and began comparing the ancient cultures of Europe with the superficiality of American society. "I perceived that America was not just a bit different but entirely different. It had no antiquity, no Middle Ages, and no Renaissance, and thus lacked, among many other valuable things, a sense of evil and of infinite human complexity. It remained, it seemed to me, mired in the general optimism of the eighteenth century." (p. 181)

The passing of years did not mellow him. After starting with anger he moved on to a sense of throw-up-your-hands resignation, but it was always grounded in close observation of society. For instance, the following statement is, if anything, more true today that it was in his time: "American culture seemed more than ever bellicose, ignorant, selfish, and greedy, shot through with quasi-religious fraud and hypocrisy." (p. 229)

He could also be funny in a curmudgeonly sort of way, as in "I began to see American colleges as little more than overgrown and pretentious high schools, where genuine education seemed increasingly unlikely. It was hard to forget Mencken's satire of the American 'proliferation of colleges.' 'They are even spattered,' he notes 'over such barbaric States as Mississippi and North Dakota, where it would be dangerous to be educated in any real sense.'" (p.235)

Fussell saw where he could be of most use to society. "I was now convinced that my duty was criticism, meaning not carping, but the perpetual obligation of evaluation." (p. 176) Using this understanding he reflected on his own early education.

They were excellent teachers of what they knew. They just didn't know enough, or they didn't know enough about ideas and values and their shifting history. Or if they did know, they didn't regard that as the most compelling focus for those learning to be grown-ups. To sum up this situation, they'd not been persuaded that their most important responsibility was criticism - artistic, literary, intellectual, political, and social. (p. 56)

The defining moment in his literary career was the publication in 1975 of The Great War and Modern Memory, which brought the First World War out from the shadow of the Second, exploring how soldiers raised on Victorian and Edwardian pastoralism interpreted and internalized the war. Published just as the war in Vietnam was winding down it also offered a way to reflect on fortitude, suffering, and military incompetence in a way that transcended any one particular conflict. It is still considered an essential introduction for anyone wishing to understand the Great War.

He closed out his career as an essayist and social critic, publishing half a dozen books of commentary, all of them worth reading. He possessed a keen insight into what motivates people to believe the things they do, and was perfectly willing to evoke outrage in his readers so long as it got them to reflect on what they were mad about. For anyone not familiar with Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory is the book to start with, but all of his books are worth the reader's time.