While not the usual fare for this blog, this year marked the loss of one the great American essayists of the last fifty years, and a writer (by way of some professorial tough love) who became a great influence on both writing and approach to work.
Wikipedia can tell you the complete biography. For me, the introduction began with a collection of essays called Thank God for the Atom Bomb. The martial title was no chance occurrence: much of Fussell’s life was shaped by his youthful experience in World War II as a twenty year-old in charge of a company of teenagers. For him, the war was a transformative experience. It wasn’t the hero’s experience of bravery forged in the cauldron of violence, but of animal survival instincts and plain luck.
There was, though, much bravery in his writing. No flowery “dolce et decorum est pro patria mori” for Paul Fussell but the raw, red reality of of what it meant to fight a savage war with modern technology. He wrote of fear. He wrote about his feigned courage falling away in the face of live fire. He wrote of the utter absurdity of seeing a friend try to talk just as a stream of bullets ripped his lower jaw away. He wrote of becoming comfortable with death and the thought of dying.
It was a experience he would draw upon in his masterwork The Great War and Modern Memory, a book that is officially literary criticism but really serves as psychological review of how that conflict shaped generations to come. His time as a young officer was the basis for many of the essays he wrote over the years, including one from 1981 that gave its name to that collection.
“Thank God for the Atom Bomb,” first an article in The New Republic, dissected the cold calculus of choosing the use a terrible weapon in place of a more terrible invasion. It was also a textbook example of how to argue a polarizing, difficult idea brilliantly. The judgment that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was worthy of divine gratitude was certainly not one that would engender ambivalent feelings in the reader. It was published during that one-minute-to-midnight time of the early 1980s when nuclear weapons were viewed through the prism of either the “Nuclear Freeze” movement or the “winnable nuclear war” proponents. It was a piece on a controversial topic, meticulously researched and argued — something in the hands of a skilled teacher that could be used to educate a group of students how to develop those same abilities. And in the spring of 1990 it served as my introduction to Paul Fussell’s writing.
Dr. Franklin Court was tough. That rare but vital teacher who not only expected more but could see in which students a certain laziness was keeping them from producing their best work. Unlike many courses which focused on maximizing output, Dr. Court brought a Zen-like focus to getting small number of our own essays as tight and as compelling as possible. He forced us through his reviews (which were thorough and incredibly direct in their criticism) and through peer reviews (which he insisted also be tough-minded and not of the “everyone’s a winner” variety). We wrote only five essays that entire semester, honing each for weeks at time. Each one of those assignments began with an example from the Thank God for the Atom Bomb collection of how Fussell approached a similar kind of argument.
It was painful. But there was something incredibly rewarding about seeing a rough idea get better over time; of seeing those words resonate with your classmates. Sitting in that classroom, I learned the power of argument. He taught us inductive and deductive reasoning from the ground up, taught us about of logical fallacies and of economy of thought and expression. He taught us (as Fussell did) to be brave in what we wrote. And we learned something else: that no matter how great the initial idea it takes refinement and focus to make it powerful. That lesson is one that translates into software development (particularly design) and business.
I still have all five of those essays, including each of the drafts. And the lessons have stayed with me since.