Paul Fussell died May 23, 2012. I’m sorry that he’s gone, but his influence lives on. Here’s a story I often tell students when I teach Senior Seminar. It goes back to my second-last year in graduate school.
I was writing a dissertation on dialogue in eighteenth-century English literature—how he said / she said was used within a work and represented on the page. My second reader was Fussell, recently appointed as Donald T. Regan Professor of Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. I had known and admired Fussell’s work before he arrived at Penn, in particular his Great War and Modern Memory, a work about the impact of World War I as seen through contemporary poetry and literature. It is a great book (in my estimation), a smart book; and as a graduate student I especially admired its prose. Fussell wrote in a tough, spare, no-nonsense style. He had the ability to purposefully misdirect (so did Milton). A first sentence seems perfectly reasonable, then a second derives logically from the first, then a third. All the while I nod my head, “Yep, that seems right.” But then he shifts his direction abruptly, and as it turns out, appropriately, in order to expose the fallacy of the logic he has been espousing. I loved his tough-minded writing.
When he agreed to be my second reader—essentially a co-advisor—I entertained fantasies about office visits sharing the secrets of careful editing and Fussellian style. We would be great friends. The graduate student / Professor bond would grow and flourish. It was with some excitement and expectation, therefore, that I knocked on his office door in Bennett Hall at the appointed time one afternoon. Three weeks before I had delivered the first 150 pages of my dissertation, the fruit of two years labor. Fussell had read it through. Today we would begin what surely would be a long, detailed, and fruitful conversation.
Fussell’s office was capacious, three times the size of other English faculty at Penn; a twenty by twenty foot Persian rug spread across the center of the room. Built-in floor to ceiling bookcases, with tasteful glass doors, covered each wall; they were filled with books. Fussell was sitting at his desk and motioned me to sit opposite. My dissertation sat before him.
I took a seat and asked how he was. “I am well,” he responded. We sat in silence for a moment. I inched forward expectantly. Then Fussell executed a strangely elegant gesture. Using the three middle fingers of his right hand in a sort of twisting motion, he pushed my dissertation across the desk and toward me. It slid quietly, lightly, turning as it went, and stopped inches from the edge where I sat, perfectly aligned facing me. It was at once a graceful motion, and disdainful.
“Mr. Kinsella,” he said to me, “about your dissertation. Think smarter; write better.”
I sat erect, dumbfounded, reddening. “That is all,” he said, and watched as I stood up, collected my dissertation, and moved toward the door. “Thank you,” I mumbled as I quietly left the office. But thankful I was not. I was beginning to rage. “What sort of advice is that!” I thought. For the next two weeks I repeated that same question to myself and to my fellow graduate students. I stuck to my dumbfoundedness so tightly that friends held an intervention and told me bluntly, “Get over it, move on.”
So I did. With a cooler mind, I carefully considered the advice. I admired Fussell—if he told me to think smarter; write better, perhaps it was good counsel. And I came to believe that it was. We could have sat on that first day and begun to discuss and edit my work, but Fussell wanted my best efforts before we opened discussions of that sort. There was no sugar coating—he wasn’t concerned about my ego—he was brutal, honest. In retrospect I saw that I had not given him my best work. So I read more, tried to think smarter, and eventually wrote better.
The reception of my next draft is another story; I will simply remark that our second conversation was longer than the first.