{"id":2152,"date":"2013-05-23T19:02:26","date_gmt":"2013-05-23T18:02:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?p=2152"},"modified":"2013-05-23T19:03:48","modified_gmt":"2013-05-23T18:03:48","slug":"paul-fussell-an-anniversary-tribute","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?p=2152","title":{"rendered":"Paul Fussell: An Anniversary Tribute"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Pfussell1945.jpg\"
Lt. Paul Fussell in Paris, France, May 1945<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I was in Philadelphia recently and thought of Paul Fussell, who lived there before his death this time last year and whom I knew:\u00a0 one of the finest writers about 20th-century war, both because he wrote about the subject as a cultural critic more than military historian and because having fought in WW2 both in Europe and the Pacific, he knew what he was talking about.\u00a0 The Great War And Modern Memory is his most famous book – but I have only just read one of his very last books, The Boys\u2019 Crusade.\u00a0 Subtitled \u2018American GIs In Europe: Chaos And Fear In World War II\u2019, it highlights some familiar Fussell themes: \u00a0how many American soldiers were teenagers, how little about war they knew before they went, and how many cock-ups there were.<\/p>\n

Like all of his books – and like his conversation – it is candid and clear-sighted, just like the Augustan prose he so admired (he was a professor of 18th-century English Literature). \u00a0 Unlike most books on WW2, it is also elegantly short.<\/p>\n

But if his other achievements were not enough, he also helped in the revival of interest in travel writing, for which I am more directly grateful to him.\u00a0 His book, Abroad: British Literary Travelling between the Wars, championed travel writers of the 1930s like Robert Byron who had largely been forgotten at the time.<\/p>\n

I was once with him when a BBC executive (I was trying to get the BBC to make a programme about and with Paul) asked him if he had ever met any Germans. \u00a0Fussell gave him a stare:\u00a0 \u2018Any Germans I met during the war, I killed.\u2019\u00a0 The executive blanched.<\/p>\n

see my review of\u00a0Panther Soup, by John Gimlette<\/a>: \u00a0 ‘<\/strong>It was Paul Fussell in his magisterial\u00a0Wartime<\/em>\u00a0who picked out\u00a0the pivotal moment when the American authorities realised what they were dealing with in the Second World War<\/strong>. They issued an edict that servicemen should no longer be issued with white underpants. The war in all its messy, scrappy detail \u2013 sniping and scuffling in the vegetable gardens of Western Europe by ordinary soldiers \u2013 has always been more difficult to convey than the grand strategies of the generals who sent them there\u2026’<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was in Philadelphia recently and thought of Paul Fussell, who lived there before his death this time last year and whom I knew:\u00a0 one of the finest writers about 20th-century war, both because he wrote about the subject as a cultural critic more than military historian and because having fought in WW2 both in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[95,65,3],"tags":[109],"class_list":["post-2152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-america","category-literature","category-travel","tag-fussell"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2152"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2152\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2161,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2152\/revisions\/2161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}