PORTLAND — Paul Fussell, an acclaimed literary scholar who won a National Book Award in 1976 for “The Great War and Modern Memory,” died Wednesday morning at age 88.
His stepson Cole Behringer said Fussell died of natural causes in a long-term care facility in Medford. Behringer said his mother and stepfather moved to Southern Oregon two years ago from Rochester, N.Y.
In works published over a 50-year career, Fussell wrote memoir, literary criticism, social commentary and standard English Department fare on topics such as English literature and poetic theory. He made his greatest mark writing about war, a subject he knew well, and his disdain for its romanticization.
Fussell enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War II and was later awarded a Bronze Star and Purple Heart.
“At first it was rather fun,” he said in a 1997 PBS interview with David Gergen. “It was kind of athletic and lots of fun. It was fast, and amusing, and so forth, and then all of a sudden one realized what the infantry was for. It was for killing the maximum number of young men like you.”
His writings would be forever influenced by the horrors he witnessed.
“Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends,” Fussell wrote in “The Great War,” his study of World War I that ranked No. 75 on the Modern Library’s list of the greatest nonfiction books of the 20th century.
He wrote conventional academic books — on poetry, Walt Whitman and Samuel Johnson — before creating what he later termed his "accidental masterpiece," the study of World War I's cultural impact.
"The Great War and Modern Memory" sought to demythologize combat by calling attention to such inconvenient truths as tactical errors, deserters and the smell of rotting corpses. He relied in particular on the accounts of "true testifiers" such as poet Robert Graves, who was severely wounded at the bloody Battle of the Somme.
"I think people who haven't been through it are unfit to write military history because what happens in close combat is absolutely unknowable," he told the London Guardian in 2004. "The temptation to run away, especially if you're a leader of troops, almost never gets a look.... It's a struggle about manhood as well as a struggle to keep from being hit from flying metal."
Both a commercial and critical success, "The Great War" made "profound and far-reaching" claims for the meaning of war that "set the agenda for most of the criticism that has followed him," Vincent B. Sherry wrote in "The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War."
Fussell's first marriage, to writer Betty Fussell, ended in divorce. (She wrote disparagingly of him in "My Kitchen Wars," a 1999 memoir.) He is survived by his second wife, Harriette Behringer, whom he married in 1987; two children from his first marriage, Sam and Rosalind Fussell; four stepchildren, Cole, Rocklin, Marcy and Liese Behringer; a sister, Florence Fussell-Lind; 10 step-grandchildren; and six step-great-grandchildren.
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