A LITERARY LIFE SHAPED BY WAR.

Byline: Richard Bernstein The New York Times

Title: ``Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic''

Author: Paul Fussell

Data: 310 pages. Little, Brown; $24.95.

Our rating: Four Stars

Paul Fussell has made a career of being an angry man, and it is a lucky thing, too.

His anger and skeptic's irritation with comforting pretense and self-delusion have produced what he calls in this engrossing autobiography ``my war against euphemism and baseless optimism.''

And that metaphorical war in turn begot two unforgettable, uncompromisingly truthful volumes on actual war, the kind where soldiers are maimed and killed and lie in ditches crying in many languages for their mothers.

Fussell's first such book was ``The Great War and Modern Memory,'' which was followed by ``Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War.'' Both are among the nonfiction classics of recent decades, and in a sense his new book, ``Doing Battle,'' is an attempt to chronicle the development of the sensibility that so powerfully informed those classics.

The 72-year-old Fussell proves equal to the task. ``Doing Battle'' is elegant, witty, caustic and moving, a frank and at the same time discreet summing up of a well-lived life.

Fussell, one of whose models is H.L. Mencken, is so quick to ferret out pervasive foolishness that he is often on the verge of sheer crankiness. After all, many men have experienced war without becoming lifelong assassins of cant. But Fussell writes with breezy charm, and he has a distanced, quizzical, unheroic view of himself. The image reflected in this work is of a man unafraid to show us what he really is, like Rembrandt in one of the later self-portraits, unaffected, undisguised and disillusioned.

Fussell begins with what was conspicuously the formative event of his life - a terrifying experience as an infantry second lieutenant in World War II when, as he puts it in his ironic way, ``in a small woods in southeastern France, Boy Fussell, aged 20, was ill treated by members of the German Wehrmacht.'' Specifically, he was wounded while around him the men under his command were being killed in a sudden artillery assault. Lying semiconscious on the grim battlefield, he drifted ``back to my serene beginning'' in Pasadena, where he grew up.

Fussell's description of Pasadena in the 1920s and '30s strikes the sweetly self-mocking tone of the best reminiscences. He talks about the life of planned innocence where even ROTC was ``a wonderland, just another subdivision of the Pasadena paradise.'' He sees Boy Fussell as a normally narcissistic, curious, overweight boy who compensated for that by being funny.

He was at nearby Pomona College around the time that the ``serpent'' of Pearl Harbor dropped into American life. He was drafted in the middle of his college years, sent to a place called Camp Roberts for basic training where he slimmed down into ``a lean, mean killing machine,'' and was introduced into the idiocy of military life that he has spent much of his life exposing. (Basic training he calls ``elaborately organized wasted time.'')

Fussell got into the war a bit late, several months after the landings at Normandy, and he participated in some rough action in eastern France and western Germany. There is one horrible episode he calls ``the great turkey shoot,'' when American boys much like himself ignored the ``visible wish'' of a group of several dozen Germans to surrender. Instead: ``Laughing and howling, hoo-ha-ing and cowboy and good-old-boy yelling, our men exultantly shot into the crater until every single man down there was dead.'' He continues, ``The result was deep satisfaction, and the event was transformed into amusing narrative, told and retold over campfires all that winter.''

It is episodes like that and many smaller ones of everyday madness in military life, that created Fussell's generalized fury.

``I was learning from these mortal-farcical events about the eternal presence in human affairs of accident and contingency,'' he writes, ``as well as the fatuity of optimism at any time or place.'' It becomes a kind of life's mission for him to expose lies, the disconnection between reality and piety, wherever he encounters them.

``Doing Battle'' from that point on turns from a memoir of war into a memoir of embattled intellectual life.

Returning to California in 1945, Fussell finished up at Pomona. Then he followed his older brother, Ed, to graduate school in English literature at Harvard, an institution for which he harbors some of the same feelings he developed toward the Army.

``From the 1950s on, my presiding emotion was annoyance, often intensifying to virtually disabling anger,'' he allows. Poetry and irony were his twin sources of both solace and revenge.

He pursued a conventional academic career, teaching first at Connecticut College for Women, then for 28 years at Rutgers University. He married, had children, divorced, married again. And all the while, he did his elegant battle with the forces of sappy conventional wisdom, poking the sharp blade of his high-cultural irritation into the most treasured pieties of philistine American society.

There is much to argue with here, in particular Fussell's relentless disdain for so much about his native country along with a preference for Europe that becomes a bit pious itself. But that is a quibble. Fussell's description of the themes of his intellectual life, in which he unifies an anthology of 18th-century British literature that he compiled and his searing studies of men at war, is full of illuminating insight. His appreciation of poetry and his hatred of the terrible cant that surrounds patriotic war are linked by a driving need for a ``dark ironic vision to form a part of anyone's experience of the future.''

This is the self-portrait of a rare and thoughtful man, one who, in the spirit of James Joyce, tried to transform ``the reality of experience'' into what Joyce called the ``uncreated conscience of my race.'' It is to our benefit that he succeeded so well.

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Photo: no caption (Book cover - Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic)