Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War - Hardcover

Fussell, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195037979 ISBN 13: 9780195037975

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1989

Synopsis

Winner of both the National Book Award for Arts and Letters and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory was one of the most original and gripping volumes ever written about the First World War. Frank Kermode, in The New York Times Book Review, hailed it as "an important contribution to our understanding of how we came to make World War I part of our minds," and Lionel Trilling called it simply "one of the most deeply moving books I have read in a long time." In its panaramic scope and poetic intensity, it illuminated a war that changed a generation and revolutionized the way we see the world.

Now, in Wartime, Fussell turns to the Second World War, the conflict he himself fought in, to weave a narrative that is both more intensely personal and more wide-ranging. Whereas his former book focused primarily on literary figures, on the image of the Great War in literature, here Fussell examines the immediate impact of the war on common soldiers and civilians. He describes the psychological and emotional atmosphere of World War II. He analyzes the euphemisms people needed to deal with unacceptable reality (the early belief, for instance, that the war could be won by "precision bombing," that is, by long distance); he describes the abnormally intense frustration of desire and some of the means by which desire was satisfied; and, most important, he emphasizes the damage the war did to intellect, discrimination, honesty, individuality, complexity, ambiguity and wit. Of course, no Fussell book would be complete without some serious discussion of the literature of the time. He examines, for instance, how the great privations of wartime (when oranges would be raffled off as valued prizes) resulted in roccoco prose styles that dwelt longingly on lavish dinners, and how the "high-mindedness" of the era and the almost pathological need to "accentuate the positive" led to the downfall of the acerbic H.L. Mencken and the ascent of E.B. White. He also offers astute commentary on Edmund Wilson's argument with Archibald MacLeish, Cyril Connolly's Horizon magazine, the war poetry of Randall Jarrell and Louis Simpson, and many other aspects of the wartime literary world.

Fussell conveys the essence of that wartime as no other writer before him. For the past fifty years, the Allied War has been sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by "the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant, and the bloodthirsty." Americans, he says, have never understood what the Second World War was really like. In this stunning volume, he offers such an understanding.

About this title

About the Author

Paul Fussell is Donald T. Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of nine other books, including The Great War and Modern Memory, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars and The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations

Reviews

Most of the men who fought World War II were young--with those over 27 or 28 likely to be called "Dad." For most of the troops, the war's purpose seemed remote and vague, according to Fussell. He contends that many Americans had little comprehension of Nazism; to "our boys" the war was about revenge against the Japanese. In this sequel to The Great War and Modern Memory , Fussell presents American and British soldiers as alcoholically insulated against reality, suffering boredom, absurdity, sexual deprivation and, above all, full of subversive contempt stoked by the official mix of optimism and euphemism that falsified the war experience. Separate chapters cover wartime rumors and blunders, service slang, the despair in the trenches, and the sanitized, sanguine messages emanating from radios, films, songs and high-minded literature back home. This brilliant, engaging cultural history quietly subverts our whitewashed collective memory of the war. Illustrations. First serial to the Atlantic.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Fussell won the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award for The Great War and Modern Memory (LJ 7/75). Here he provides a staggering counterpoint to most popular accounts of World War II (on paper or on screen) that depict purposeful strategies and noble exploits. The war, says Fussell, turned on industrial output; its brutal meaning was thus found in chaotic ordeals of mass-produced death. This truth could not be concealed from front-line soldiers. These men devised a compensatory language whose inventiveness, obscenity, and irony contrasted with the ideological simplifications, literary sterility, and mindless cheerleading on the home front. The analysis of war novels, most of which were poor, is excessive. But Wartime is an important and indispensable book. It belongs in all high school and college libraries. First serial rights to Atlantic .
- Mark C. Carnes, Barnard Coll., Columbia Univ.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195037979
• ISBN 13: 9780195037975
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 350