WARTIME: UNDERSTANDING AND BEHAVIOR
IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR
Paul Fussell
New York: Oxford University Press, 1989
XII + 348 pp., $19.95
I think I know a new myth and this is it:
The strength having gone out of certain old men,
Formerly terrible, they are changed to gulls
And follow over endless ocean hulls
Of their rejecting states, wishing for them
Catastrophe. But we shall prosper yet.
From "Transport", by William Meredith
Paul Fussell is completely and characteristically explicit in announcing, and then honorably following, the outlines of the text and the subtext of Wartime. The opening paragraph of the preface succinctly says it all and deserves to be quoted in its entirety; for Fussell fully adheres to his intentions even as he is strictly conditioned by them. Those who share the identified values and virtues he celebrates are here reassured. Those who view the history of the times somewhat differently--and there will be plenty of these, some parting company from the author on account of personal history and experience, others out of more abstract, intellectual quibbles or quarrels--are adequately warned:
This book is about the psychological and emotional culture
of Americans and Britons during the Second World War. It
is about the rationalizations and euphemisms people
needed to deal with an unacceptable actuality from 1939 to
1945. And it is about the abnormally intense frustration
of desire in wartime and some of the means by which
desire was satisfied. The damage the war visited upon
bodies and buildings, planes and tanks and ships, is
obvious. Less obvious is the damage it did to intellect,
discrimination, honesty, individuality, complexity,
ambiguity, and irony, not to mention privacy and wit.
For the past twenty years the Allied war has been
sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by
the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant, and
the bloodthirsty. I have tried to balance the scales.
Fussell's Aim
The readers needs to keep in mind that the aim of Wartime is corrective (in that sense close to satirical)--to overcome the dangerous imbalance of fifty years by whatever means necessary, within the author's announced, self-established guide-lines. That is, he will try not
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