This Book on World War I Changed How I Think of Nonfiction

New York Times

13-02-2025

Paul Fussell, the historian and social critic, didn't think much of optimism — or optimists. Told to have a nice day, he'd respond: 'Thanks, but I have other plans.' He wasn't always such an ogre. But Fussell, who died in 2012, had what George Orwell called 'a power of facing unpleasant facts,' so much so that he took Orwell's phrase and, in a memorable 1988 essay, unpacked it like a baleful shaving kit:
Fussell did some of this killing himself. He served as a second lieutenant with the 103rd Infantry Division in France during World War II; at 20 he was gravely wounded and received a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. His memoir about this experience, 'Doing Battle' (1996), is notably cleareyed and typically first-rate. Its subtitle — 'The Making of a Skeptic' — is crucial when considering anything this inimitable and lethally witty man ever wrote.
But the book that stands above the rest is Fussell's 'The Great War and Modern Memory' (1975), a bristling history of trench warfare on the Western Front during World War I, as seen through England's soldier-writers. It blends form and function to audacious effect, and is Fussell's greatest claim on posterity.
'The Great War and Modern Memory' turns 50 this year. It did not go unrecognized when it was published. It won a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked it No. 75 on its list of the 100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century.
It now seems distressingly neglected. 'The Great War and Modern Memory' is worth a revisit, and a new generation of readers. I would slide it forward, like a runaway checkers stone, at least 30 places on the Modern Library's list, on writerly merit alone. It is filled with close and tragic perceptions, yet Fussell's sentences crunch like tanks snapping woodland into twigs.
I first read it when young, and it is one of two books — Jessica Mitford's 'The American Way of Death' was the other — that changed my idea of what nonfiction could be and ruined me for most other writers. If Fussell could write this intrepidly about war, and Mitford about death, topics that have lent themselves to more lugubrious prose than almost any others, I thought, why couldn't every nonfiction book — histories, biographies, memoirs — blend fact-finding with such high-stepping intellection, with such loathing for the bogus and with such literacy, glee and fury?
'Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected,' Fussell writes. 'Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.' He stretches mortal ironies until they shiver.
Robert Stone called the Vietnam War 'a mistake 10,000 miles long.' Fussell reminds us that the trenches dug by both sides during World War I stretched to about 25,000 miles, 'equal to a trench sufficient to circle the earth.' These furnaces of experience were 25,000 miles of muck and dung and blood.
Those back home, in the early years of the war, were assured that trenches were clean, well-lit and almost jolly places. Soldiers' subscriptions to newspapers, and to The Tatler and The Spectator, were not interrupted. The front lines were achingly close to London. An officer might breakfast in the trenches and, that evening, dine across the Channel at his club.
Even the fighting was made to feel matey — almost like a sporting match. Allied soldiers would sometimes dribble a soccer ball toward enemy lines, and preface their attacks with long, beautiful, arcing kicks.
'The Great War' is about the absolute loss of innocence that would follow. This war would be about squatting in filth, not about questing. First the corners were knocked off men's idealism, and then the foundations crumbled.
Fussell's book is humane because it pays such close attention to soldiers' experiences — to the more than eight million men who died because a single man, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, had been shot. It is provocative because Fussell is such a determined foe of euphemism. Attentive people back home eventually learned, he writes, for example, that military reports of 'brisk fighting' or 'sharp retaliation' meant that 50 or more percent of a company had been killed or wounded.
Fussell singles out Thomas Hardy as the pioneer of modern English poetry because, in verse written before the war, he was 'the first to invite into poems the sound of ominous gunfire heard across the water.' He moves through the work of war poets, novelists and memoirists such as Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden. Words meant more back then, before the arrival of cinema and television. Indeed, Fussell writes, 'Sometimes it is really hard to shake off the conviction that this war has been written by someone.'
He also takes in oral histories, newspaper headlines, letters and personal ads. 'The critic should read everything, all the time,' he wrote in a different book. He was an immense digester; he ate books alive; he was an intellectual who never sounded like an academic.
Modernism was still waiting in the wings. 'There was no 'Waste Land,' with its rats' alleys, dull canals and dead men who have lost their bones: It would take four years of trench warfare to being these to consciousness,' Fussell writes.
Fussell was born in Pasadena, Calif., in 1924. He was educated, before and after World War II, at Pomona College, and then Harvard. He married a fellow Pomona student, Betty Harper, who would become the perceptive food writer Betty Fussell. She wrote a classic memoir, 'My Kitchen Wars' (1999), about their lives together and, yikes, it was not altogether loving.
In 'The Great War and Modern Memory' Fussell analyzes how trench warfare led to widespread hysteria; he charts the spread of pernicious and long-lasting myths; he considers male beauty. Because low sun exposed troops by backlighting them, Fussell writes, in a typical observation: 'Dawn has never recovered from what the Great War did to it.'
Many fine books have been written about this war, including John Keegan's 'The First World War' and Barbara W. Tuchman's 'The Guns of August.' Fussell's book did not attempt to report on the entirety of the thing; he stuck to the trenches, to intense effect.
Eight million dead. Another horsefly of a writer, the art critic Robert Hughes, described some of the war's almost limitless damage this way: 'If you ask where is the Picasso of England or the Ezra Pound of France, there is only one probable answer: still in the trenches.'