Paul Fussell, RIP

[Mark Kohut]

More on Paul: 
This from a friend of mine: 
I loved Fussell and enjoyed working with him at Oxford University Press. We met at a book-signing I arranged for ABROAD; no one showed up and no books sold. He felt so badly for me that he treated me to lunch. We spent the balance of a very liquid day hanging out at his Princeton home. His then wife, Betty, refused to come down to meet me. We killed a bottle in his backyard. He loved to gossip and, then, 1980 [?] he claimed that Joyce Carol Oates was stalking him. He once offered to blurb a Blackwell book I sent him for review only on the condition that he not have to read it. He hated teaching, especially grading papers and said that if God liked him he would have made him really really rich. He was an open, loving curmudgeon who lived to  upset people, especially if they were pompous academics or critics. In ABROAD, he led me to one of my happiest reading experiences, THE ROAD TO OXIANA, "the Ulysses of travel literature. " Here's his TIMES obituary:
 


----- Original Message -----
From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
To: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>; rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
Cc: "“pynchon-l at waste.org“" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, May 25, 2012 10:23 AM
Subject: Re: Paul Fussell, RIP

I was lucky enough to have met him too. I spent an afternoon taking him around
to Chicago-area bookstores to sign copies of CLASS. He was so pleasantly happy.
He listened when I talked about the bookstores. One thing 
he told me that, in researching his next book, he wanted to know what books 
were in print during WW2, for example. He said even the Library of Congress
DID NOT KEEP the annual Books In Print Reference volume(!), since it was
 judged, as a reference, outdated when the next year's Books in Print volume
was published. (L of C sort of like a set missing its own subset--a remark neither 
he nor I made then, although I think I did stumble toward saying something like it and
he nodded). 
 
He had had a People Mag feature on him for this book and he told me how they wanted
him 'paired with a female" although he was not married or was separated at the time, so he
is pictured with a work colleague seemingly implying a different relationship. 
 
And last and least, I think I internalized a lot of observations from CLASS but the only one
that has stuck overtly in my head and I've repeated over the years is this one: the very rich and
the poor man are the two kinds of men who do not carry much money around with them.
 
 The very rich have others pay for them.
 
 Read this observation in a Bill Gates story years later. 
 


----- Original Message -----
From: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
To: rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
Cc: "“pynchon-l at waste.org“" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2012 11:46 AM
Subject: Re: Paul Fussell

On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 9:14 AM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:

> Paul Fussell died this week

I met him!  Someone came up to me once @ work and asked, have you seen
Paul Fussell (fully expecting me apparently to know [a] who shewa
talking aboiut, and [b] what he looked like)?  "The Great War in
Modern Memory guy?" I asked.  Turns out to be his wife.  I'd never
seen him before, but could spot him instantly.  Just happened to have
my copy of the book in my l,ocker, so i got it + he signed it.  I
still have his card marking the Pynchon pages.