Paul Fussell got here first.

Despite never having met him, I'd like to induct Paul Fussell into my Handbook Book Club (doubling the member count to two).

See, while I've never met Mr. Fussell, we have a certain commonality of experience. Though he's been retired from teaching for some years, he's a former professor at Rutgers, where I went to grad school a few years back. I read two of his books (Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Class) when I was in my mid-teens, at exactly the right age to be vaguely scandalized but not entirely understand why. Class, especially, threw me, instilling a lifelong horror of the word "home" instead of "house," as well of as decorating with artificial plants. I'm only a little ashamed to admit this. Seriously, Class was a weirdly revelatory book -- a little troubling and making explicit some aspects of American culture I'm not entirely comfortable with. Regardless, it turns out that Mr. Fussell wrote another book of particular personal interest to me.

In 1983, when I was but a wee little thing, he published The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations," a series of essays on American and British culture, travel, and (most of all) his experience in World War 2. TBSHaOO is hard to track down these days -- I had to get it pulled out of storage at the Brooklyn library -- but worthwhile. See, he and I have a similar interest in the Handbook as a historical document, but rather than looking at the 1911 edition, he examines the 1979 version. This makes the whole concept doubly-cool. While the title essay is only six pages long (meaning that, in going to and from the library, I walked 1/3 mile for every page of this essay), it's a great view of another Handbook edition.

In some ways, the Handbook has hardly changed since the 1911 edition. "A complex sentence," Mr. Fussell observes, "is as rare as a reference to girls," and endless focus on self-improvement, care for nature, and wide-ranging practical knowledge remains. What I find most interesting, though, are the two complaints Mr. Fussell puts forth: the excessive use of the phrase "free world" and enthusiastic urging of religion, to the point of packing a Bible when camping -- but not a knife. This sent me back to the 1911 edition. Thanks to Project Gutenberg, I know for a fact that "free world" doesn't appear even once (take that, Mr. F!). The biblical references, though, are a little more tricky. See, the world of 1911 was a simpler one than the world of 1979, and pearhsp one, even, in which Lord B-P didn't feel as if he really needed to emphasize the importance of religion -- it was just obvious. The 1979 Handbook's increased focus on carrying a Bible, or on praying for guidance, is absent from the 1911 edition because we don't really need to be reminded. (It's worth noting here, as well, that I'm not idealizing the world of 1911, and I appreciate Mr. Fussell's remarks upon the inclusion of Harriet Tubman as an admirable American, and his observation that the later Handbook calls for "the prayer book of your faith," implying that Christianity is not a scouting requirement.)

As he tends to, Fussell brings George Orwell into the picture (he is also the subject of an essay in Thank God for the Atom Bomb, as well as four other essays in TBSHaOO), pulling the Handbook into a post-Watergate world ("A scout does not bomb and invade a neutral country, and then lie about it") that's still relevant, um, three years ago, but I feel a little funny about it. I'm hesitant, I think, to politicize the Handbook more than I have to -- and I'll offer up this photo of Nixon (as Vice-President) addressing a Boy Scout Jamboree to seal the deal. Honestly, though, despite my personal feelings on the subject (strong), and even despite my personal feelings on certain issues without scouting as a movement (irrelevant at the moment), I worry that taking this kind of approach might weaken the Handbook as a historical document. Of course, anything is a product of the time in which it was written, but I have my own doubts about this particular interpretation, as taken from this particular document at this particular point.

Ultimately, Mr. Fussell's essay delighted me with its recognition that the Handbook is more than an instruction book for teenage boys in neckerchiefs. His read of it -- a "[repository] of something like classical ethics, deriving from Aristotle and Cicero" is one of the truest going. And, therefore, Mr. Fussell? Welcome to the club.