A stroll round Cynthia
EDMUND CRISPIN
First on the Moon: A Voyage with Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, Edwin E. Aldrin Jr written with Gene Framer and Dora Jane Hamblin, epilogue by Arthur C. Clarke (Michael Joseph 50s).
Si monumentuin requiris, look up at the night sky rather than down at this tedious hook. When Apollo 11 was mooted, a prece- dent carve-up of book rights was to be ex- pected. Even so, one could hope a little: the achievement was to be gigantic, and just possibly its description would be given to someone notable in the concurrent flowering of American literature.
Well, so we're all naive sometimes: in fact, what has bathetically occurred is a longish piece put together by two of the staff of Life magazine. The neatly typed file-cards —elaborately cross-indexed by teams of secretaries—build up in the cabinets. The neatly coiffed research team goes out to pick up its dribs and drabs, duly filing those along with all the rest. A final tedium remains, that of assembling a lengthy piece of more or less consecutive prose.
'Authorised'. here it is. But now the file- cards have to be organised. The tableau mustn't of course be omitted: 'On July —, 19—, eleven men sat in a third-floor room of the Pinkerton Building, on West Thirty- fourth Street, New York. NY, USA. In front of each of them was a sharpened pencil, an ashtray, a blotting-pad and a scratch pad.
Their names were . After that, of course, your slightly awkward flashbacks and flash- forwards. Still, you can always stop those to make room for an acervation of names and figures; and when that seems to be going on rather long, you switch to human in- terest—an astronaut's wife burning the edges of a fried egg, or mildly rebuking a too- boisterous infant.
Reduced by this book—and indeed by all the communications media — to a horrid averageness, Collins, Armstrong and Aldrin, the astronauts themselves, are made to seem little better than conventional middle-class dullards. And this, in a sense, is what was wanted: to present them as exceptionally intelligent, resourceful and courageous (as of course they were) would have ruined all Possibility of the identification which PROS, if no one else, are convinced is essential to mass empathy. Yet even so. mere braggard accumulation of facts occasionally, ac- cidentally, lets a scrap of individuality show through: • Aldrin, with his little carafe of communion wine; Armstrong, with his tape of Vaughan Williams's Hodie: Collins. bored by unnecessary jargon, and also by the
incessant, wholly unimaginative diet of steak and mashed potatoes.
In the long run, however, poor C., A. and A. merge—in this book—into a generalised tasteless aspic of conventional characters: the faithful secretary (eighty-one dollars a week); the beloved Irish nurse; the mildly comic German Pad Controller; the Negro Quality Controller (no racial trouble there); the elderly rocket theorist feted for the oc- casion. In the background. no doubt making valuable contributions, lurk various sorts of top brass, amongst them Wernher von Braun (still sometimes remembered in London for his work on the V2s).
And beyond this top brass again, of course, the giant American corporations, which gained profit and prestige from manufacturing the hardware. It would be improper, however, for us to hear too much about that; and a decent discretion is in fact preserved.
In an 'official' account of the moon lan- ding most of the foregoing was to be an- ticipated: not unreasonably, with twenty- four billions of American taxpayers' money being spent on the ten-year programme, standardised Americana could be expected in commemoration of the ultimate huge suc- cess. Other defects, however, not being particularly national in origin, are less forgivable. The flight programme is never properly'explained; nor, even in elementary terms, is the functioning of the giant four- stage rocket. Possibly the Life people felt that we simply shouldn't understand—and the suspicion once in a while arises, particularly when they're attempting to describe the 'docking' procedure, that they don't really understand either.
On basics they're sound enough: viewed from earth, we learn. the moon is a 'tan- talising crescent, quadrant or full circle (depending on the day of the month).' Beyond such modest observations however, Life seems not to sec its way entirely clear. Even a round-up of historical opinions about the moon somehow lacks substance. Still, even President Kennedy, we are told, had history in mind when making his great decision:
'This was in the spring of 1961. President Kennedy was a scholar, or at least a well- read man; he knew about Erasmus, and he must have known about the reference to the moon being made of green cheese. Was it worth the gamble to check out Erasmus?'
Arthur C. Clarke, epilogising this mass of homogenised ditchwater at some length, leaves Erasmus out of it, and indeed seems not entirely disinclined to leave Apollo 11 out of it. too. In science fiction, Clarke is of course the most knowledgeable and accurate vaticinator ever, and there are only trivialities which he got wrong in writing about moon landings twenty or even thirty years ago. A plain stylist rather than an at- mospheric one, his prose nevertheless at long last creates, as far as First on the Moon is concerned, some semblance of animation and interest.
Formidably arguing against the 'but-the- money - would - have - built - four - thou- sand-hospitals' school, he moves through detailed suggestions for better moon landings to a considerable, by no means fanciful. sur- vey of the practical possibilities of explqring, in no very long time, the entire solar system. A Manichaean by temperament. 1 doubt his optimism. What I don't doubt. after reading him, is that he—or at any rate, someone, of some merit—ought to have been corn- missioned to explain and expound man's first significant adsenture into space. Collins, Armstrong and Aldrin deserve something a lot better than this stereotyped mass-circula- tion journalism whose solemn dullness has debased their astonishing accomplishment.
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