The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations

The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations By Paul Fussell Oxford, 284 pp., $15.95 If the word were not so often connotative of illiteracy, it would be tempting to call Paul Fussell a “sociologist” of books. In this collection of essays one finds him gingerly explaining literature in terms of the real circumstances from which it springs and in which it gets read. He takes on such jobs as exposing the racial sanitizing of Booth Tarkington’s Penrod in our squeamishly enlightened age; celebrating the “classical ethics” of “The Official Boy Scout Handbook”; explaining the exhausting mania that drives the machinery of South African sex censorship (“Smut-Hunting in Pretoria”); and discoursing upon the reasons for our current appetite for things Edwardian. He can read photographs and places with the same casual brilliance he brings to a text. The essays in each of this collection’s five parts—“Americana,” “Hazards of Literature,” “Going Places,” “Britons, Largely Eccentric,” and “Versions of the Second World War”—come from a steady faith in what empiricism and common sense can do when leavened by language that has wit and precision.

It is all done with a fine lack of stuffiness. Fussell finds, for example, that the supposed polarity of Whitman and Poe is actually bridged by the “bit of P. T. Barnum in both”; and if their descendant Harry Crosby “had studied and thought and practiced all his life he might just might -have become a fourth-rate Hart Crane.” E’ussell would, one feels, rather like a book than dislike it, but when his duty is to put it down he does it: “Not all Dr. Ober’s essays are ridiculous. Some are pointless . , .” He has a nice unacademic fondness for contractions and mild profanit\ and jazzy parentheses. (One parenthetical cavil of my own: in the name of good taste and humanity can we retire the use of the term “final solution” in any other context but its appalling original one?) The only pedagogical baggage he brings to this book from his job at Rutgers is the occasional use of the examination: “Notes on Class” and “Can Graham Greene Write English?” come with exercises and quizzes appended. So read carefully; there will be a test.

TM

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Thomas Mallon

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The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations By Paul Fussell Oxford, 284 pp., $15.95 If the word were not so often connotative of illiteracy, it would be tempting to call Paul Fussell a “sociologist” of books. In this collection of essays one finds him gingerly explaining literature in terms of the real circumstances from which it springs and in which it gets read. He takes on such jobs as exposing the racial sanitizing of Booth Tarkington’s Penrod in our squeamishly enlightened age; celebrating the “classical ethics” of “The Official Boy Scout Handbook”; explaining the exhausting mania that drives the machinery of South African sex censorship (“Smut-Hunting in Pretoria”); and discoursing upon the reasons for our current appetite for things Edwardian. He can read photographs and places with the same casual brilliance he brings to a text. The essays in each of this collection’s five parts—“Americana,” “Hazards of Literature,” “Going Places,” “Britons, Largely Eccentric,” and “Versions of the Second World War”—come from a steady faith in what empiricism and common sense can do when leavened by language that has wit and precision.

It is all done with a fine lack of stuffiness. Fussell finds, for example, that the supposed polarity of Whitman and Poe is actually bridged by the “bit of P. T. Barnum in both”; and if their descendant Harry Crosby “had studied and thought and practiced all his life he might just might -have become a fourth-rate Hart Crane.” E’ussell would, one feels, rather like a book than dislike it, but when his duty is to put it down he does it: “Not all Dr. Ober’s essays are ridiculous. Some are pointless . , .” He has a nice unacademic fondness for contractions and mild profanit\ and jazzy parentheses. (One parenthetical cavil of my own: in the name of good taste and humanity can we retire the use of the term “final solution” in any other context but its appalling original one?) The only pedagogical baggage he brings to this book from his job at Rutgers is the occasional use of the examination: “Notes on Class” and “Can Graham Greene Write English?” come with exercises and quizzes appended. So read carefully; there will be a test.