The departed Fussell and the Great War, now both receding in memory.

Another news item I missed in May was the passing of the writer Paul Fussell. His death is noted in the New York Times:

Paul Fussell, Literary Scholar and Critic, Is Dead at 88

Paul Fussell, the wide-ranging, stingingly opinionated literary scholar and cultural critic whose admiration for Samuel Johnson, Kingsley Amis and the Boy Scout Handbook and his withering scorn for the romanticization of war, the predominance of television and much of American society were dispensed in more than 20 books, died on Wednesday in Medford, Ore. He was 88.

But The Economist's sole weekly obituary invariably gets to the heart of the matter.

Paul Fussell, warrior against war, died on May 23rd, aged 88

IT WAS never clear to Paul Fussell just when his innocence was lost. It might have been that November night in 1944 when his rifle platoon took a wrong turn in a small wood in Alsace. He was 20. The ground was cluttered with strange objects; when the sun rose, he found himself among the open-eyed corpses of Germans who had been killed the day before.

I first read "Great War and Modern Memory" in the early 1980's, and during subsequent trips to European locales where the Great War was fought, Fussell's book was never far from my mind. However, one of author's most memorable literary references did not completely resonate until 1999, when our reading group's inaugural novel was "Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon. If you've read them both, you'll know exactly what I mean. If not, it's difficult to explain, but unshakable.