He had the most brilliant take on the Second Amendment, which was that if people wanted to bear arms as part of a "well regulated militia", then they should be well regulated -- there should be training weekends for gun owners. Once a month, every Saturday, they'd have to go out and drill.

Happy Birthday!

Im glad you posted this. I had some high school teachers who introduced me to Fussell and I fear what my feelings about our recent wars would have been if I had never read his books.

He was always entertaining to read, even when he was obviously wrong. "Thank God for the Atom Bomb" is probably the best example. It's a great read, and really drives home the point that a soldier or sailor who had survived the European war, and was now facing the invasion of Japan, would see the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a godsend. However, he seemed to think that this is the only viewpoint that counts.

@4 - I think its important for people to understand that for guys like Fussell the whole "will dropping the bomb save lives" debate is not an academic exercise. It was their lives. If it was me, not sure I would give a shit what other viewpoints there were either.

@4, he makes a hell of an argument, though. The atom bomb saved lives. Remember, it wasn't theoretical for him; he was one of the several hundred thousand boys who were suited up and ready to go into the meatgrinder of the War in the Pacific when those bombs were dropped. It was quite apparent that Japan wasn't going to surrender on the basis of anything other than total destruction, which we offered them a small taste of. Boom: war over.

You can dispute that, but I have never heard anyone do so in a way that was more powerful than his argument.

He also wrote Poetic Meter and Poetic Form which is the best guide to English prosody ever published; in fact, it's one of the ONLY serious guides, aside from Nabokov's Notes on Prosody (published as part of his massive Eugene Onegin project but available separately as well.

His pop-culture books Class: A Guide Through the American Class System and BAD, Or the Dumbing of America are hilarious, brilliant, and spot-on, even today.

His look back at his friend Kingsley Amis, The Anti-Egoist is a charming yet penetrating look at probably the greatest English (country, not language) novelist of the 20th century.

TGWAMM is, of course, the greatest work of literary criticism ever published, and one of the greatest works of history as well.

If you read his wife Betty's memoir My Kitchen Wars you get a rather different picture of the man, brilliant but a philandering asshole; it's a great book in its own right.

RIP Fussell and thank you for Class and BAD, two of my favorite and readily recommended non-fiction reads.

I forget by way of which author I arrived at Fussell - but I"m glad I did. And even though I hang art made by family members in my house, I still like him :) The book on prosody was over my head but I read pretty much everything else he wrote with great pleasure. I will have to check out the wife's book and see the curtain pulled away.

As for TGFTAB, the bomb ended WWII in the quickest way, saving hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides, and it helped restrain the Soviets. By those two metrics it was the likely the best strategic choice and certainly defensible. The only part of it that haunts me is Nagasaki (see the Vonnegut speech ending with that word) - did we need to drop two? That's more debatable and I don't have clear an comfortable opinion about it.

@6: I have to disagree about Class. To me it was two hundred pages of snide condescension towards people he considered his social inferiors, complete with a few digs at the rich and a chapter about social mobility tacked on at the end to make it seem less ugly. The cartoons of drooling, mindless proles were just the icing on the cake.

@9, I think you missed the point. The "social inferiors" were not the villains of the piece. His enemy was always pretension; there's nothing wrong with being cheap, simple, or ordinary; there's something wrong with being ordinary but pretending to be classy. Poshlost, in other words.

Regarding my comments on "Thank God for the Atom Bomb": I'm not necessarily disagreeing with his conclusion about the bomb; I'm disagreeing with the argument that having a stake in an issue is more important than having real information about it. If it were just a moral question about whether it was okay to use the bomb as a tool to avoid having to invade, I'd side with Fussell's argument that the viewpoint of the GIs is the most important one. However, if the question is whether it was necessary to drop the bomb in order to avoid having to invade, I don't see how the GIs' experience is more relevant than actual historical knowledge.

#6: Thanks for bringing up Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. This book changed my life. After years of trying to enjoy poetry, and failing, it opened my eyes to what I wasn't seeing and wasn't hearing.

#9 & #10: Class is entertaining, but I'm not sure if even Fussell took it seriously. (The "mail bag" section at the end seemed like a giveaway.) I really want to believe some of the things he says in the book. In particular, I love the idea that the very poor and the "invisible rich" have more in common with each other than with everyone in the middle, because neither group is subject to the insecurity about status that drives everyone else. However, his description of class "x" -- those enlightened souls who drop out of the American status system -- is just the classic bourgeois bohemianism that I thought he'd been criticizing throughout the rest of the book.

I have just finished "Class".
I grew up and was educated in Britain.
I moved to the US, via Canada, in 1959.
There is no question in my mind that I have benefited, in the US, from my UK origins and accent.
This would fit with a lot of Paul Fussell's theories on US Anglophillia.
I have found, though, that I did not fit at all into the US class system nor subscribe to any of its inclinations.
My British origins have provided me with anonymity regarding those origins and my education.
I must say that I really did not fit-in in Britain either.
The last chapter of "Class" was a winner for me. Up to that point I had not found a place to 'Hang My Hat'.
I am a Category 'X' person without a smidgen of doubt!
I will have been self employed for 43 years come this September One.
Never regretted a minute of it. Thank you USA.