Paul Fussell...........

[dutchbarge]

Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, page 1, sentence 1, "By MID-DECEMBER, 1914, BRITISH TROOPS HAD BEEN FIGHTING ON THE Continent for over five months".......Unless I'm missing something, the BEF first landed on the Continent in the first week of August.........so by mid-December wouldn't British Troops have been fighting on the Continent for over four months?  Seems a rather glaring mistake to make in the first sentence of his book........Rather made me wonder what else he got wrong.............Cheers, Bill

Edited 19 January by dutchbarge

[michaeldr]

 
Never noticed that before, but you're right. Which calendar does Rutgers University use? 

 

[PRC]

17 hours ago, dutchbarge said:

By MID-DECEMBER, 1914, BRITISH TROOPS HAD BEEN FIGHTING ON THE Continent for over five months"..

Depends what sort of dramatic impact you want to have and how literal the writer and the readership want to be.

If you start a task at 23.59 and finish two minutes later at 00.01 has it taken you two days, i.e. 48 hours, to perform the task - of course not. But you have worked part of two calendar days, so saying it took "two days" to do it isn't untruthful, it's just disingenuous\misleading - and very human!

In this case the British Army had been fighting over the course of five months - August, September, October, November and December 1914. Again was that more than at least 150 days, (i.e. 5 x 30), then of course not. What makes it slightly contentious is the "fighting for over five months" - and that "for" could be the sort of thing slipped in by a proof reader \ editor.

As a writer you want your opening statement to be dramatic enough to get readers to carry on reading. But having worked on guidelines for written presentation for my last company, a fundamental was never put anything in a first sentence that would get the reader bogged down. A frustrated \ unhappy reader is unlikely to finish reading, and those that do will doubt everything and be unreceptive. The author might as well not have bothered.

Cheers,
Peter

Edited 19 January by PRC
Typo

[michaeldr]

Thanks Peter; a thoughtful post

[kenf48]

17 hours ago, dutchbarge said:

Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, page 1, sentence 1,

Rather made me wonder what else he got wrong.............Cheers, Bill

Quite a lot...

that said he was a cultural and literary historian rather than a military historian, a distinction that is especially relevant to the myths of the Great War, most of which depend on the cultural historian rather than historical accuracy concerning strategy and tactics and their development in 1914-1918.

It is a must read, though a challenge to get to the end.  The argument is encapsulated in this critique

https://academic.oup.com/eic/article-abstract/64/4/436/412634?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=true 

Fussell (and I have his book on my bookshelves) looks at the war through the lens of the war poets. His case studies are the poets  Sassoon, Owen, Blunden and especially Robert Graves and 'Goodbye to all That' (1929) which I remember reading in the 1960's a Penguin classic with a version of  Paul Nash 'We are Making a New World ' on the cover.  He also digs out accounts from the archives without acknowledgement and with no consideration of their provenance and veracity.  As Gary Sheffield has observed, whilst acknowledging poetry is a valid expression of reaction to war, that the war poets are no more valid than a study of fifteenth century Anglo-French relations is to Shakespeare's Henry V. (Forgotten Victory).

As Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson point out in their forensic dissection https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/096834459400100105?download=true Fussell takes no account of political and military history not that he ever claimed to be a military historian, n fact the opposite he was determined to deconstruct their arguments that the war had to be fought and the revisionists were wrong, Terraine was especially scathing in an article in the Times.

An English professor his book follows the principles of literary criticism. His protagonists too, were more concerned with making a living and riding the wave of 'war books' published in the late twenties and thirties, by which time disillusionment with the war had set in.  Fussell therefore concentrates on the aspects of the conflict that are burned into the populist view of the Great War.  Published in 1975 as Saigon fell, it received much traction in the 'futility of war' and peace movements of that era. 

That's not to dismiss it, it is a valid if somewhat dated view of the historiography of the Great War, but don't look for historical accuracy or an in depth review of the origins of the war and the development of tactics and strategy.  

Fussell was wounded twice while serving in WW2 and his companion volume for WW2, which I have not read, did not achieve the same critical response and is almost forgotten and seldom cited. His argument failed in that volume because WW2 in 'Modern Memory' is regarded as a 'good war' whilst the Great War is seen as chateau generals sending brave working class lads to their doom in the stalemate of the Western Front. 

 

 

 

 

[ilkley remembers]

Yes The Great War in Modern Memory has flaws, don’t all books (well apart from anything written by Jane Austen of course), but I don’t think that you can look to military historians likePrior and Wilson to identify them.

 

Fussell was a literature scholar who never claimed to be a historian and ‘The Great War…….’ Is not a history and should not be read as such; a point which he highlights in the preface tothe book. He was a man deeply affected by his own military service and saw war in a context which he called ironic and this largely influences his choice of poets ie those who conformto  his own personal view of war.

 

Prior and Wilson in their 1994 article clearly don’t get this and in attempting to malign Fussell simply resort to attacking his alleged historical inaccuracies by  parroting facts abouttrenches etc that are essentially Western Front trivia. To be honest it must have been difficult for two military historians to grasp the nuances of literary critique when they normally existin a study area where the pool of material has depth but little width ie strong on battlefield statistics but weak on broader wartime context.

 

‘The Great War…’ certainly has faults not least because in limiting himself to just a few voices he ignores the voices of  many others. And the voices that he does chose are ‘male andpale’ and largely drawn from a small section of British society. Yet despite this Fussell’s book was genuinely groundbreaking and its influence extends to modern academic historianssome 50 years after it was first published.

Edited 20 January by ilkley remembers
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[seaJane]

I read Paul Fussell's book as an English graduate* (albeit one who bolted from the 19th and 20th centuries asap to take refuge in Old & Middle English, Old Norse and Medieval Latin). Although I was intrigued by most of the book as a study of the impact of the Great War on poetry and fiction, I really struggled with the last quarter of it.

With hindsight, I seem to remember being frustrated that there wasn't much/enough about David Jones. Which makes me wonder whether he (DJ) sparked the beginning of my deeper GW interest.

*before I knew much about the GW

[dutchbarge]

As the one who started this thread I thought the members who have so generously and learnedly responded might be interested in hearing my impressions of Fussell's book.  This, my third attempt to plow through the text was, like the first two, unsuccessful.  I found my interest beginning to bog down following Fusssell's most engaging discussion of the many ironies of the Great War.  Timeless stuff, really. Restlessness set in during his torturously long dissection of, well, just about everything that followed.  I'm guessing that he was playing to an audience of academics and aesthetes.  As an America, perhaps he had set out to disprove the notion then held in British literary circles that,  'if it weren't for yogurt, there would be no culture in America at all'.  Whether or not it was his intent, the book comes off as a not so subtle dig at the The British upper classes.  They really do come off rather badly.  Poor dears, their privileged years of luxurious living being brought up short by the horrors of trench warfare; perfectly understandable when their entire pre-war day could be ruined by an improperly ironed newspaper.  And all because of a tiff between royal cousins.  But to give credit where due, one must grant that the upper class had a lot more to lose than someone from the lower classes (whose life was viewed as a short, unpleasant struggle culminating in a cheap funeral) and acquitted themselves well as warriors (if not military planners).  We Americans (at least the remaining few still engaged by British culture and history) have always had a difficult relationship with the UK.  On one hand we long to be accepted as equals by the sniffy lot while at the same time wanting to clearly establish that we are definitely not of the sniffy lot.  While it is an absurd notion, we like to think we are a classless society.  So we are as repelled by the thought of what would have happened to Tommy Atkins if he had written and made public his own denunciation of the war (probably not a cushy berth at Craiglockhart as Sasoon) as we are attracted to the romance of the British upper classes.  Off hand I can think of no romantic American war heroes.  'Damn the torpedo's, full speed ahead' just can't compete with, "Colquhoun, I'm done!".  Cheers, Bill

Edited 24 January by dutchbarge

[kenf48]

On 23/01/2024 at 23:51, dutchbarge said:

Timeless stuff, really. Restlessness set in during his torturously long dissection of, well, just about everything that followed.  I'm guessing that he was playing to an audience of academics and aesthetes.

Thanks for the feedback, even academics and aesthetes would find his turgid propose difficult. I doubt many get to the end, I didn't.

As for American academics dissecting British culture I find Samuel Hynes (Princeton) 'A War Imagined The First World War and English Culture' (1990) much more engaging and wide ranging.  Hynes dwells less on the poets but includes the often neglected war artists. I could be said he is building on Fussell but only because he published fifteen years later when the study of the Great War was arguably becoming more nuanced.  Hynes draws on a much wider range of sources and is more readable for that.  

Even better I see it is on archive.org so can be downloaded for free

https://archive.org/details/warimaginedfirst0000hyne

Fussell may have been influential at the time but fifty years on from the gestation of his book his central argument, based on his limited sources that the Great War is illustrative of the 'futility of war' is past its time.  Though as reflected in  many posts on here still ingrained in the British psyche trench warfare has its critics.

Scholarship has moved on, not just the military history  'revisionists' but also the literary criticism of the 'war poets'. Not least the splendid biographies of Fussell's main  'characters' by Jean Moorcroft Wilson though she too has not been immune from some critical reviews but she is not, as noted above Jane Austen.

[ilkley remembers]

I, too enjoyed ‘A War Imagined’ along with the other two books that comprise Hynes trot through the British artistic and literary contributions from 1900 to 1939. It is interesting that like Fussell his background is literature and service in WW2 albeit as a pilot rather than slogging through the mud of northern France. However, I find that where Hynes is cool and largely detached Fusssells analysis is powerful and far more sympathetic and empathetic towards those  who fought on the Western Front. A War Imagined’ certainly is far easier to read than The Great War in Modern Memory but where is Hynes conclusion about the nature development of the WW1 ‘myth’? In my view he doesn’t really come to one and simply relies on a series of suggestions backed by his broad  appreciation of British culture during the first half of the 20th Century.

Fussell was been the subject of  criticism over the years; often by far inferior writers, but I really do not agree that he can be dismissed out of hand as merely out of date and no longer relevant neither of which are true. Indeed it is clear that many modern historians still see that his analysis as a starting point of their own researches. Yes Fussell can be difficult to read and his personal view hard for some to appreciate but that has also been said about the works of Miss Austen over 200 years after her death.

[kenf48]

48 minutes ago, ilkley remembers said:

Fussell was been the subject of  criticism over the years; often by far inferior writers, but I really do not agree that he can be dismissed out of hand as merely out of date and no longer relevant neither of which are true.

Thank you, I respect your view and thanks to @dutchbarge for initiating this interesting discussion. In the end we will agree to disagree but have to say more of these debates are what keeps the GWF relevant.

[ilkley remembers]

14 hours ago, kenf48 said:

In the end we will agree to disagree

As you wish @kenf48. I'm not trying to have the final word but thought that forum members might like to read this brief article written by Mark Connelly, Prof of Modern History at Univ. of Kent who has written extensively about WW1. It describes his own personal relationship with Fussells 'Great War' and how it changed over time. Perhaps it addresses the issues and opinions raised by both sides of 'this house'.

https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/munitions-of-the-mind/2021/11/03/ironic-and-iconic-my-relationship-with-paul-fussells-the-great-war-and-modern-memory/

[michaeldr]

Ilkley, thanks for the above link.

And my thanks to all who have contributed here for a very informative & balanced discussion.

Michael

[Pat Atkins]

I’ve enjoyed reading this debate, and the informed (and courteous) opinions: thanks, all. As it happens, I rather enjoyed both Fussell’s books, too, though I think his very academic, intellectual style isn’t to everyone’s taste - nor mine, really - and seemed oddly discordant with his basic theme (especially the WW2 book). For me, Fussell was an intellectual who applied an academic approach to a subject he was, after all, personally acquainted with. His views are worthy of exactly this kind of thread.