Homage to Paul Fussell (1924-2012) [by Robert Pinsky]

            On March 15, 1945, Paul Fussell, a lieutenant in the 103rd Infantry Division, who would later become my teacher at Rutgers, underwent an intense barrage of German artillery, lying facedown in a clearing alongside his platoon sergeant and military tutor, Edward Keith Hudson. Fussell was twenty years old. Hudson was thirty-seven.

Fussell wrote vividly about that day in a 1982 piece for Harper’s entitled “My War”:

      <<< I was psychologically and morally ill prepared to lead my platoon
in the great Seventh Army attack of March 15, 1945. But lead it I did,
or rather push it, staying as far in the rear as was barely decent.
And before the day was over I had been severely rebuked
by a sharp-eyed lieutenant-colonel who threatened court martial
if I didn’t pull myself together. Before that day was over I was sprayed
with the contents of a soldier’s torso when I was lying behind him
and he knelt to fire at a machine gun holding us up: he was struck
in the heart, and out of the holes in the back of his field jacket
flew little clouds of tissue, blood, and powdered cloth. Near him
another man raised himself to fire, but the machine gun caught him
in the mouth, and as he fell he looked back at me with surprise, blood
and teeth dribbling out onto the leaves. He was one to whom early on
I had given the Silver Star for heroism, and he didn’t want to let me down. >>>

A German shell wounded Fussell terribly all down the back of his body and legs. The same shell killed Sergeant Hudson, the working-class older man who had forgiven young Lieutenant Fussell many mistakes, while teaching him how to lead a rifle platoon.

            Facedown, pressed against one another, the two men were holding hands. That was a custom for mutual reassurance, as Fussell in his old age explained to an interviewer: reassurance that neither of the two men would run away—as many officers had done. So my teacher says for the camera, his old man’s voice rising on the plural noun in rage and contempt. Edward Keith Hudson’s violent death, he says in the same interview “is behind everything I’ve done.”

from chapter eleven of Jersey Breaks by Robert Pinsky (Norton, October 2022). Photo credit:  Eric Antoniou. 

Paul Fussell's books include Poetic Meter and Poetic Form andThe Great War and Modern Memory. 

From The Guardian, May 24, 2012:

The US writer Paul Fussell's 1975 book The Great War and Modern Memory was, according to the British military historian John Keegan, revolutionary. Fussell, in what he called "an elegaic commentary", shaped a picture of the horrors of the first world war, and the cold stupidity of its leaders, made more trenchant by his own experiences in the second world war. He also used the writings of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and others to show how the romanticising of the war and its heroes provided the creative spark for modernism, and the sensibility of disillusion and distrust of authority that characterised the so-called "lost generation".

The success of that book, acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic – though Philip Larkin thought it "obscene nonsense" – and the winner of America's National Book and Book Critic Circle awards, propelled Fussell, who has died aged 88, from a scholar of 18th-century English literature into a position as a public critic. From that position, the influence of his early subjects, such as Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson, became evident in his scalpel-like dissections of American society. >>>

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/24/paul-fussell

Comments

[Angela Ball]

Wonderful homage to a man whose writing changed the way we think about war.

[robert atwan]

I'm so glad Robert Pinsky posted this tribute. Paul was an outstanding teacher as well as essayist. He was one of my inspirations when I started the Best American Essay series in 1985. I took his course on Whitman and American Poetry at Rutgers in the 60s and we planned a field trip to my hometown of Paterson while reading W C Williams. Unfortunately, it didn't happen as Vietnam was raging and I was waging an ongoing battle with the Paterson draft board that swallowed up most of my time that tense semester. As fate would have it I now live in Paul's hometown of Pasadena. He was truly a great literary figure.

[David Lehman]

Thank you, Angela and Robert, for these much-appreciated appreciative comments.