"Doing Battle" on Christmas

Merry Christmas.

This possibly may be a Christmas thought. If there is by any chance some kind of intangible guiding spirit, call it kismet, coincidence, spirit visitation, God, or a reason to collapse on the sidewalk speaking in tongues, it found me three times in recent days. Two are thoughts too personal to share, a half waking dream that astonished and a snippet of conversation overheard while walking down Eighth Avenue that cut right through me. The third can be told.

Two days ago I strolled to the local library in desperate need of books for diversion. Often having three or four books in waiting or underway at the same time, an empty unread bookshelf was disconcerting. Looking through the new fiction was to be confronted mostly by the usual drek, nothing of interest there, so escapism beckoned. Back to the mystery section for old standby's like Westlake or his pseudonym Stark, I passed by the biography section and took a quick glance. What stood out was "Doing Battle" by Paul Fussell, a 2003 memoir by the author of "The Great War and Modern Memory". How about that, something likely to be both entertaining and of consequence comes out of nowhere.

The central facts that bind the book together are Fussell's wartime experience as a junior officer in an infantry division in Europe and the serious injuries that resulted. There are three parts to the memoir. First an insightfully written story of his mostly idyllic childhood in Pasedena and his early college years, depicting an era of innocence in a wealthy suburb and the mores of pre-WWII privileged life. Then comes induction into the army, boot camp training, and on to the front lines in Europe with horrific observations and experiences, and eventually consequences. The third section moves into his battles in academic life and the literature - history, essays, fiction, and poetry - that channeled his intense anger from wartime into a creativity that led to a National Book Award among other honors. The first two sections are seamlessly written and the third meanders a bit but the highs when arrived at are highlights of the book.

This was the right book at the right time, a memoir that fit my mood and writing that was worth the time. Fussell is no cupcake when expressing opinions about what he has observed and experienced, and what he has read. A few excerpts:

---Speaking of moving forward with the infantry and advancing against German lines, "As we went on, we became always more aware that the idea of war is synonomous with the idea of moral blunders".

---"Others in the war were learning this new, un-American view of the instability of human hopes and the unpredictability of human actions. A D-Day observer of the surprising sinking of the clever dual-drive tanks off the Normandy beaches, which went down like stones with the helpless puzzled crews inside, said later that for him this catastrophe 'diminished forever the concepts of strategic planning and of tactical order; it provided me instead with a sense of chaos, random disaster, and vulnerability."

---It was unusual for a person from Fussell's background to be on the front lines with an infantry division and his observations reflected that as in, "Those remaining after the Air Corps, the navy, the coast guard and the marines had exercised their choices and were expected to bear the main burden of sustained battle. A hell for the men and a hell for their leaders. I have speculated since why no one at the time seemed to care terribly. Perhaps the reason is that the bulk of those killed by bullets and shells were the ones normally killed in peacetime in mine disasters, industrial and construction accidents, lumbering, and fire and police work. No one we knew, certainly. Wasn't the ground war, for the United States, an unintended form of eugenics, clearing the population of the dumbest, the least skilled, the least promising of all young American males...Their fate constituted an unintended but inescapable holocaust."

---"In 'Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War', I continued campaigning against the ignorant notion that the war wasn't really so bad. My adversaries were all those who could see nothing significant in the elimination of the ironic quotation marks around Studs Terkel's title "The Good War".

---In closing he notes that as Professor Fussell he eventually "stopped teaching Herrick because he found it hard not to cry in public when he came upon lines from 'To Daffodils' like:
'We have short time to stay as you,
We have as short a spring:
As quick a growth to meet decay
As you, or anything."

Being familiar with Fussell's work but not with the man at all, it is impossible to know whether this memoir is a full representation of his life, probably not in fact. He frequently admits to being impatient and argumentative, he is unabashedly elitist, and it's clear that he is not one to easily compromise. There may well be different views of him but who cares. His work here is entertaining, informative, well written, and thought provoking.

And I could have been reading a crime novel.