Book of a lifetime: The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell

From The Independent archive: Louisa Young praises Paul Fussell’s merciless but tender account of the First World War and the literature it inspired

Trench warfare: British and French troops on the Western Front in 1916 (Getty)

As a History undergraduate I took a paper called Business, Literature and Society, 1848-1914, in which we read masses of novels by Disraeli and Mrs Gaskell and Dickens about the Industrial Revolution and put them alongside the social and political history with which they dealt. Fiction as a primary source enchanted me, and the paper, with its complex and reciprocal overlaps and undertones, seemed a splendid way to learn about both history and literature.

Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, operates in a similar manner. “This book is about the British experience of the Western front,” he writes, “and some of the literary means by which it has been remembered... I have tried to understand something of the simultaneous and reciprocal process by which life feeds materials to literature while literature returns the favour by conferring forms on life. And I have been concerned with something more: the way the dynamics and iconography of the Great War have proved crucial political, rhetorical and artistic determinants on subsequent life. At the same time as the war was relying on inherited myth, it was generating new myth”.

It makes me yearn now for a companion paper: War, Literature and Society, 1910-1939. Fussell observes humanity observing the hows and to-what-ends of the work of Sassoon, Graves, Blunden, David Jones, Rosenberg and Owen. It is a history book; a personal introduction to the minds and methods of these wonderful writers; criticism; a threnody. He gives an account, for example, at once merciless and tender, of the great cliches of the Great War, from the obvious (poppies, birdsong over the ruined battlefield) to the ones you hadn’t even quite clocked as cliches (young men swimmming in rivers, sunset blazing a gilded reflection from flooded shell holes, letters). With astonishing perspicacity, he identifies them, analyses them and explains why we love them; why they have proved so rich and so powerful for so long.