May 20, 2007
Whatever Happened to the Aviators? II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:10 PM EST John Steele Gordon titled a blog entry on Charles Lindbergh with the question “Whatever happened to the aviators?” The question is answered in the piece itself, which notes that within something like half a century an extremely rare experience—heavier than air flight—became a very common one, and correspondingly a more difficult experience to romanticize. The (sometimes black) magic of flight is not quite gone; most movie footage of helicopters (I recently rented Blood Diamond, where this was still true) or fighter bombers (any episode of 24 where the USAF is attempting to shoot down a terrorist cruise missile, on the evidence of that show a curiously ubiquitous weapon in the terrorist arsenal) still assumes the romance of aviation, at least of military aviation. But in general, I concede the point; flying now seems humdrum to a lot of people. If our species is unlucky, this very fact may make our age impossibly glamorous to posterity. We’ll be the ones who mastered the heavens, and then fell, Icarus-like, in some catastrophe; we’ll probably be simultaneously thought justly punished for our hubris and almost inconceivably magnificent. If, on the other hand, the species is lucky, people will rather marvel that we ate imperfectly thawed garbage while packed together like sardines, merely to fly very slowly in machines efficient only at depleting the ozone. This will be a little like the way I cannot quite credit the astonishing dangerousness of early steam trains, and the fact that people boarded them other than at gunpoint. Early aviation was hazardous and achieved an ancient and for millennia apparently hopeless ambition, so early aviators were justly famous. I think Charles Lindbergh, at least, was romantic for additional reasons. He was American, in a decade when that generally meant hope and hypermodernity to Europeans (and to most other peoples who’d heard of us), and he did what he did quite alone, in an age when merely collective endeavors in both war and economic life seemed the common fate. So Lindbergh’s feat was both atavistically heroic and forward-looking. There is a nice essay on Lindbergh and the imagination of modernity in Modris Eksteins’s Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, part of a large, ambitious, and interesting (if not entirely persuasive) argument. In any event, while the romance that gilded First World War fighter pilots was probably the result of an attempt to preserve the ethos of The Iliad in an age of industrialized slaughter, Lindbergh’s feat was dangerous without being murderous; he was a distinctly postwar hero, and at first blush an appealingly modest and taciturn one. He came a cropper only when he took the Luftwaffe at its leaders’ boastful valuation and in consequence developed some eventually ugly politics. Subsequent events took the shine off Lindbergh, but not off all pilots, because the Luftwaffe, too, came a cropper, at the hands of a smallish number of other pilots. That last bunch remain, for those who remember them, the most romantic heroes of all time. Aviator now sounds not only period, but camp; Spitfire, on the other hand, sounds period, but it is not yet camp, and I am not sure it ever will be. Back in 1981 I remember eating my lunch at a pub opposite the British Library, idly watching some other patrons, lean, silver-haired men in beautiful suits. One of their number was talking, with slightly unusual animation for someone who looked like that, about something he’d done that weekend. His arm waved, and the blade of his hand described an arc, which the arms and hands of speaking middle-class Englishmen rarely did, and I realized he was describing having recently flown a small airplane. With a sudden thrill, and perhaps a little too much imagination, I told myself that they were all old enough. It was suddenly like seeing Odysseus and Ajax talk about old times, except insofar as it wasn’t, for it was more morally satisfying than that first sight would have been. Perhaps the glory of aviators is not entirely dead.
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