PT: Is that perspective handed down through the culture?
PF: Absolutely There's nothing like Christian Science in Europe.
That's an American invention. So is gun control and all of these
optimistic things.
Americans have great advantages over other people, but great
disadvantages, too. Unless they've gone to highclass institutions of
learning and have read and thought a great deal, they're likely to
overlook the bad news. You have to bring the bad news together with the
good to have a complete awareness of being alive. That's why I'm
distressed when I find universities teaching nothing but business
courses. That doesn't help you at all. When you're 85 and dying of cancer
of the rectum, having taken a business course has given you nothing
appropriate.
PT: Given that you do enjoy and appreciate European culture so
much, why haven't you lived your life there?
PF: Because I love living here. You can really never fit in there
because you don't know the culture the way they know it. But I go there
as often as possible to experience it.
PT: Do you stay here partly because you enjoy being a critic of
America?
PF: No. I've shelved that role; I have nothing more to say. But I
stay here because I'm used to it. And because I admire many things about
the United States and deplore their absence abroad. One is the First
Amendment. It's terribly important to any writer and any critic. The
freedom to assemble and petition the government for redress of
grievances. Living abroad encourages one to see how rare and how
important they are.
PT: What was your aim in writing a memoir?
PF: To clean the slate. To see whether I could sum up my experience
in a shapely form.
PT: Was it cathartic?
PF: I'm not sure. I never think of it in psychological
terms.
PT: Was it emotional? Was it very personal?
PF: No, because I'd done a lot of this before, in an essay called
"My War," or even in the book I wrote about the First World War called
The Great War in Modern Memory. It was much more emotional then.
Frequently, thinking of other people's bad experiences in war reduced me
to tears. I think I've toughened a bit. I read about it so much.
PT: Has the anger that seemed to animate a lot of your life died
down?
PF: No. It's worse than ever. At the breakfast table, as I read the
Times and the awful Philadelphia Inquirer, there's a sort of theater of
outrage. My voice can probably be heard a block away as I read certain
things. The takeover of the book business in this country by vendors of
motor oil or something.
PT: Do you find that anger is something that sustains you?
PF: Yes. I couldn't live without it. It's as much a part of me as
my sense of humor. It overlaps, of course. I think of myself as a
satirist, somebody who sees what's wrong and tries to awaken people to
noticing it by turning it into black humor. But the anger never disables
me at all. It's a motivator.
PT: Does it ever threaten to become toxic or consuming?
PF: No. Sometimes it threatens to become unfunny, and that's fatal.
The things I like to deal with, even serious things, have to have an
element of play.
PT: Do you find that sometimes readers take something meant
satirically too seriously?
PF: Very frequently. And then I usually utter the words, "Nobody
knows how to read in this country"
The high schools are nothing but playgrounds; they don't teach
people to read. The illiteracy rate in this city is forty percent and
that figure is probably designed to flatter people. I'd say it's about
sixty percent. An author can't live in that kind of an
environment.
I mean readers who are capable of telling a lie from a truth and
perceiving even the crudest irony. I get letters from people who utterly
misunderstood things I've written because they have no sense of irony.
They think that everything that's uttered is a literal truth, which is
the death of wit. That's the death of literature.
PT: You see yourself as a satirist and ironist. Do you reject
"cynic"?
PF: Yes, because a cynic assumes that all human actions are
motivated by self-interest. I don't believe that. I think people can be
persuaded into acting in such a way that serves the public good. I'd say
I'm a satirist. Even my writings on war are really satires, because
there's lots of unexpected humor and outrage and irony. I believe in the
redemption of mankind, actually, by the application of intelligence; now
and then I see a glimmer along that line.
PT: A motive that runs through your memoir is the importance of
self-respect.
PF: That's very important. That's the ultimate solution of a life
which isn't spent in apologizing for itself.
PI: Where does self-respect come from?
PF: You generate it by learning how to read and learning how to do
well things that other people do badly, like understanding and describing
and speaking. You don't brag about those things, you just do them.
Arriving at self-respect is the ultimate duty of everybody alive.
Otherwise, you're a drag on the universe, apologizing for yourself or
doing less well than you could. I was brought up by a very puritan family
who insisted that the purpose in life was to succeed and not to survive.
And to leave it better than you found it. I've never gotten over those
superstitions.
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