Until the Wright man came along
Montagu Curzon
A PASSION FOR WINGS: AVIATION AND THE WESTERN IMAGINATION by Robert Wohl Yale, £25, pp. 288
t least the 20th century has added a passion to the range available. Wings were the reserve of angels, the bad precedent of Icarus warning off mortals. Very holy peo- ple were said to levitate, but only a few feet, and sometimes tethered. Spiritual flight had long exercised monastic souls, West and East, and great passion they had expended: but of course it remained inter- nal. Wilbur Wright fixed all that. The passion evoked by this switch to external flight in the early years of this cen- tury is the subject of this excellent, original, rather moving book by Robert Wohl, pro- fessor of cultural history at UCLA. It is not at all a work limited to aviation fiends, with technical descriptions and abstruse terms kept to a minimum, ditto heavy academic analysis. Instead Wohl has cleverly steered down the middle to give a refreshing reminder of the fervour, virtual intoxica- tion, caused in the Western imagination by the discovery of powered flight, now infinitely remote from our numbed passage from huge planes through gigantic airports. Then the crowds were of wild enthusiasts, not quite sure whether they were witness- ing a miracle or a technique, rushing in tens of thousands to see whilst, in the stands, gentlemen flung their hats into the air and ladies sat, rapt, under their para- sols.
Even in this happy dawn Wohl points out the corrupting forces. Personal competi- tion, of course, with the laconic, flinty Wright flying at Le Mans while the French pioneers gnashed their teeth, and the dash- ing Hubert Latham was pipped at the cross-Channel post by the quiet, deter- mined Bleriot. But nastier currents were running: nationalism at its rankest. Writers were quicker than generals to foresee the military potential of powered flight, but journalism was quickest of all to grasp its openings for sensationalism and propagan- da in the years leading up to the first world war. Once this broke out the dawn was over. Wohl spares nothing of the terrible exploitation implicit in the 'ace' system of the air. The aces were covered with medals, had breakfast with princes and the Kaiser, and then crashed, devoured by the war god which wept copiously and laid on a grand funeral, whilst looking for the next in line. The photos show bright-eyed, hawkish young men become quickly grim, as if haunted by the fate that awaited them. Guynemer seemed to welcome it: 'If I had not given everything, I had given nothing,' he said just before he disap- peared. 'Really there's no point', said Manfred von Richthofen on his last leave, when his mother wanted him to go to the dentist.
The aeroplane passed very rapidly from marvel to killing machine in the public mind; the originality of this book is to study the process of this change rather than the technical developments which brought it about. Powered flight had been widely pre- dicted, from Tennyson's 1842 vision:
Saw the heavens filled with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales ...
Nietzsche took a gloomier view: 'And if man were to learn to fly, woe, to what heights would his rapaciousness fly?' Once the flights began, imaginations vaulted ahead of the flimsy reality of the machines. H. G. Wells's The War in the Air foresaw an apocalyptic attack on New York by a fleet of German airships: it appeared in 1908, the year Bleriot flew the Channel. In Ger- many Rudolf Martin wrote of similar vast air fleets that would render the contest for naval supremacy, then raging, obsolete: England would be invaded by 50,000 aero- planes, not by one almost lost Frenchman. In France Emile Driant was equally violent and nationalistic; now that imperialism and exploration were running out of steam as ideas, here was aviation to ginger up west- ern spirits, latterly weakened by romanti- cism and sentimentality, to rekindle manly virtues, and cow awestruck natives into place. Of course there were many, more pacific voices raised to the lyrical, aesthetic aspects of flight, but, with war in the offing, they were not the loudest.
The aviators were not too bothered by these sinister undertones. For them there was the chance of glory, and wealth. The Wright brothers were keen capitalists, fierce in the defence of their patents. Oth- ers risked all for the tempting prizes offered by newspaper magnates like North- cliffe. The French were in the van, with Henri Farman, Santos-Dumont circling the Eiffel Tower, Bleriot, Latham and Roland Garros. In Germany Graf Zeppelin had ideas that appealed to the Kaiser, and the Russians were keen. The British were very much behind; in fact Northcliffe's purpose was to get them weaving before a serious strategic disadvantage came about. Most planes in England before the war were French.
Since the pilots had more or less to teach themselves they were usually well co- ordinated sportsmen rather than technicians (except Wright). Wohl likens them to modern tennis players, travelling around from prize to prize, much adulated. To the public they were bird men, almost demi-gods, invested with mythic qualities by their return from the realm of birds and angels. Fifty thousand attended the first air show at Rheims in August 1909. No small part of the lure was the distinct possibility of a crash, death the penalty for challeng- ing gravity, and the morbid were quite often gratified. Kafka vividly described the next airshow, at Brescia, where Gabrielle D' Annunzio was scouting for material for a heroic novel.
The idea of flight, this 'Passion for Wings', was also fuelled by acute social and political tensions. For a new century a new element: marvel had followed marvel dur- ing the last half of the 19th century and now a serious one was needed to enliven jaded appetites, preferably one which flat- tered western man's taste for doing the apparently impossible, especially one which lifted eyes above the conflicts of industrial society, the alarming, filthy crowded cities, the deadlock between stifling, frightened bourgeoisies and proletariats burning with injustice. From all this the wings were an escape intensely welcome.
Wohl rightly considers the influence of flight on the artists of the time as a side- effect of the passion. Avant-garde painters, and particularly the Futurist movement, adopted aeronautical themes. Many dread- ful paintings are here excellently repro- duced, such as Delaunay's widely regarded liornmage a Ble'riot' . Picasso painted 'Notre avenir est dans Pair' in 1912, and with Braque often went to watch the planes flying outside Paris. Le Corbusier was another enthusiast.
Good, correct Californian, Wohl also considers the role of women in the matter. The ideology was definitely anti-feminine, flight being seen as breaking the bonds of the Mother (Earth) to enter a cleaner, purer world. Maybe, but much the same could be said of travel, seafaring and other rigorous activities. Still he offers some doughty aviatrixes, including a Russian princess who shot two lovers.
The book is notably well produced and extremely well illustrated, with many of the beautiful early French posters. There will be further volumes on aviation as cultural history. This one works well, a balance of charm and menace, innocence and corrup- tion, a fine study of a passion.
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