In this engaging, elegant, and enlightening study of WW II. Fussell
(Class; Abroad; Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing, etc.)
continues the revelatory work he did in his National Book
Award-winning The Great War and Modern Memory (1975). By turns
amusing and shocking, Fussell's unforgivingly cleareyed vision
takes in both official and uncensored ephemera - along with
published accounts - to overturn the upbeat view of the war
promulgated by both the government's publicity machine and the
general media. Beginning with a discussion of our total
unpreparedness and general incompetence - "precision" bombing often
fell on our own troops; the RAF were in danger from their own
frightened ground support - Fussell turns to the popular rumors,
slang, stories, and humor of the troops. A chapter on "chickenshit"
reveals loathsome small-mindedness endemic in the system; the
chapter title "Drinking Far Too Much, Copulating Too Little" nicely
sums up the G.I.'s preoccupations. But Fussell is at his best as he
examines the forced high-mindedness of official wartime rhetoric
and the growth of "Accentuate the Positive"-toned publicity as a
distinctly essential facet of modern war. Finishing with a survey
of wartime literature, including Cyril Connolly's Horizon magazine
and the paperback publishing programs that flowered with the war,
he concludes that even now "America has not yet understood what the
Second World War was like. . ." Funny, upsetting, at times
brilliantly illuminating. (Kirkus Reviews)
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.
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