Book Review

THE FOLLY AND THE SQUALOR

Schama, Simon, Simon Schama is a professor of history at Harvard University. He is the author of "Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution."

1989

Overview

[Paul Fussell] is a connoisseur of fiasco. His acclaimed work on World War I, ''The Great War and Modern Memory,'' drew much of its ironic power from the discrepancy between grandiose strategy and pointless slaughter. The tone of that powerful book was tragic. In ''Wartime,'' the note struck is more often darkly comic. Early on in his account, the author relates the episode of Slapton Sands - the aptly named location in Devon of a botched rehearsal for the American landings in Normandy. The chaos of the exercise was such that in the dark some German gunboats managed to slip themselves into the Allied flotilla, causing tremendous havoc and leaving more than 700 dead. For Mr. Fussell, Slapton Sands is a paradigm of World War II, a great bloody pratfall, immediately recognized as such by the troops who had to endure it but later suppressed in the interests of perpetuating the myth of an unblemished moral crusade. What ''Wartime'' wants to do is to strip away those pieties and recover memories closer to Evelyn Waugh than Herman Wouk, less the bracing ''Winds of War'' and more stumble and bumble. The author's irritation with the military interruption of civility, moreover, leads him to bizarre emphases. [Cyril Connolly]'s Horizon magazine rates some 14 pages (including an interminable list of contributions), while popular culture (except for military language, on which the author is very good) gets much meaner rations. For the all-important contribution of the BBC, Mr. Fussell has a tin ear. Listening to the comic wireless genius of Tommy Handley (unmentioned in the book) with his ''Ministry of Mysteries and Aggravation'' might have persuaded Mr. Fussell that there were plenty of astringent antidotes in British wartime culture to the sugary cheerfulness of Vera Lynn (not that I see much wrong with that either). To discuss the song ''Run Rabbit Run'' without invoking the strained tenor of Bud Flanagan and the gravelly bass of Chesney Allen and to condescend to J. B. Priestley is to miss entirely the authentic feeling of a community sustaining itself in terrible times that, as Tom Harrisson's brilliant work ''Living Through the Blitz'' has shown, was not at all a myth but a reality in World War II Britain. A repeated taste for high-cultural skepticism leads Mr. Fussell to the manifestly absurd claim that Churchill's broadcasts and speeches had little effect on popular morale, a statement based on the not exactly dependable authority of Evelyn Waugh.

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: FUSSELL, PAUL / SCHAMA, SIMON