In Search of a Sense of Tragedy : DOING BATTLE: The Making of a Skeptic.<i> By Paul Fussell (Little, Brown: $24, 320 pp.)</i>

“Southern California was simply a metaphor for optimism, or a prop to advance its cause.” Thinking that, and nearly drained of optimism himself by his experiences and wounds as a combat infantryman in World War II, Paul Fussell Jr. turned his back on Pasadena, where he had grown up; on Balboa, where he had summered; and on his undergraduate school, Pomona College. In the summer of 1947, he headed east to earn his PhD in English at Harvard, and he remained on the Atlantic Coast for his teaching career--with visiting sojourns in Europe--concluding his work with distinction as professor of English literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

Fussell--who went on to reap international acclaim for his penetrating studies of soldiers during World War I and World War II--knows now that the Harvard graduate studies he imagined would set him apart from anything available in the West were no better than what he could have found at the University of California. Moreover, America in general has become a metaphor for the optimism he has never been able to regain. In “Doing Battle,” Fussell writes of his California years, his family and some of his teachers at Pomona with considerable fondness as well as with an acute eye for the color and character of Southern California before his war.

The bitterness nourished by that conflict remains, however, and how the war changed him is the main theme of his new memoir. In Pasadena and Balboa, he was an innocent, as he remembers it; his innocence, his boyhood, were stolen by his time in the Army and particularly by his combat ordeals as a second lieutenant leading the 2nd Platoon of Company F, 410th Infantry, 103rd Division in the 7th Army in Alsace. There, on March 15, 1945, shrapnel tore the left side of Fussell’s back and more deeply his right thigh. But it is not just the loss of happily remembered boyhood that rankles him--it is its loss to his own mistakes in combat, which were abetted by a thoroughly messed-up, bungling, stumbling Army. It all happened on behalf of a cause whose admirable aspects he cannot deny, but in a war where he found no other redeeming qualities, no glory, but only incompetence and horror, Fussell says he lost his innocence to waste and futility.

Before the war, Fussell had already cultivated a certain cynicism about humanity; indeed, he may not have been so innocent as he says. After the war, cynicism turned into a tragic sense that a species capable of perpetrating the war must be irredeemably lost. He left Southern California because he found there no appreciation for the sense of tragedy underscoring the human condition. He has not found much more appreciation for it anywhere else in America.

And so he has spent his life doing battle--not only in the Army but against empty-headed optimism everywhere. In fact, this memoir is not really Fussell’s first autobiographical work. The book that cemented his reputation as a scholar, a literary critic and a penetrating observer of humankind, “The Great War and Modern Memory” (Oxford University Press), is about himself and his war as much as it is about its apparent subject, British soldiers’ responses to the experience of the Western Front of 1914-18. “Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War” (Oxford University Press) is an only slightly less personal cry of rage at the blundering American methods of waging World War II than the present memoir.

Enough time has passed since World War II that most of the American combat veterans one meets have shed Fussell’s bitter recollections of functioning within scarcely mitigated lunacy. The prevailing tone of remembrance nowadays is that of 1995’s numerous 50th-anniversary observances, which celebrated American fighting men as gallant and the death of a loathsome tyranny as their legacy.

This reviewer, who was lucky enough to be too young to experience anything but the exhilarating home-front atmosphere of World War II, believes that anyone who chanced to read only Fussell would carry away a distorted historical impression of what World War II signifies: that we ought indeed to feel a certain national satisfaction over what our country did to rid the world of various monstrosities. Still, “Doing Battle” offers a useful corrective to a good deal of historical nonsense. Fussell’s portrait of the American Army of 1941-45 is closer to the truth than the half-century commemorative affairs would suggest, and our having won the war has generally stifled, to this day, serious critical consideration of whether the application of intelligent thought to its prosecution had much to do with winning it.

All of which is not to say that Fussell is unwilling to concede his country’s having done anything right in the war. He enjoys assaulting hypocrisy and cant, no matter their source--and not only when they emanate from the super-patriotic. Slated to take part in the invasion of Kyushu, Fussell rejoiced when he heard of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and he has never regretted doing so. He brims over with contempt for those who were not in danger should Japan have to have been invaded, or were not yet alive, but who nevertheless pass easy moral judgments reproving the decision to use the bombs. Here, too, his ultimate quarrel is with the prevalent American absence of a sufficient awareness of evil. Only utopians are likely to imagine that an endeavor so intrinsically evil as war could have somehow been nicely patched over in the late summer of 1945--that having chosen war, the Japanese would not follow the Germans in using every resource to test us with its horrors.

Fussell’s discontent with all of us--with the Californians among whom he grew up and the rest of us Americans--springs from the ubiquity of such utopians in our midst. His memoir offers the public service of reducing their numbers by however many read the book seriously.