An American Feat
IN February, 1927, Lindbergh stretched a piece of grocery string on a globe in a public library and found that the distance from New York to Paris was 3,600 miles. The aeroplane which gives this book its title, and dominates the first third of it, now hangs in honour above the showcases in the Smithsonian, its proportions recording a jealous private vision. For this young mail pilot knows what he wants and gets it. He prefers extra fuel to a navigator and settles for 400 gallons, to lift which he will need a long wing and Bellanca's Whirlwind engine. Based on these features, to which parachute and radio are sacrificed, design proceeds. Equipment betrays a rigorous perfectionism ; even the maps are shorn of superfluous paper. Frequent headlines announce the doings of rival flyers, all well placed to steal a march on him and all in turn eliminated- Nungesser and Coli by disaster in the Atlantic twelye days before his own take-off, the others by lesser misfortunes. He sticks to his plan, and charts it from outline through ever finer detail with a lucidity that completely outclasses all else—and there is too much else—in these early pages., Once the flight has begun the focus shifts from aeroplane to pilot. The former reflects its faultless preparation in almost faultless per- formance ; the latter, faced with an ordeal then unique and perhaps by now unrepeatable, had barely slept an hour. Leaving Long Island at 7.52 a.m. he is already fighting fatigue by late afternoon. As the hazards multiply, each imposing the need for calculation, he feels less and less able to cope with them, and by the time he discovers the ammonia capsules in his first-aid kit he is too far gone to feel their effect. Ice threatens his wing, and a magnetic storm sends his compass wandering ; he weaves his way between moonlit cloud- mountains but cannot see the sea and so cannot estimate the tail- wind. In the tiny drumming cabin he fights and nearly loses a
'desperate battle to which the log entries, and the course-corrections following each successive lapse of concentration, supply an effective, because monotonous, note of contrast. By dawn he can scarcely face simple arithmetic ; an estimate of possibilities, achieved after repeated and exhausting failures, suggests that he may be hundreds of miles off course, either north or south. (As if all this were not enough, the fuselage is infested with " presences " which peril- ously resemble station-mess gremlins. In this and certain other passages one sighs at the embarrassing mysticism of so many physical heroes ; together with the long reminiscences, often spectacular in content, for which each wavering of his mind is made the occasion, they fall well below the level of the main narrative.) But his personal resources are deep and rare. By deliberately brooding on death he rallies his will to survival—apparently without experiencing fear. This is surely an authentic case of " conventional " heroism. Again, when his conscious mind can no longer reason or discipline his body he finds a third entity in gentle control, and for all his mental defeats his landfall is accurate. The Lindbergh legend was not built on mechanics alone.
In discussing this book it has seemed best to ignore the period background (" hectic," " jazz age," etc.) in which, chronologic- ally, the enterprise belongs. This is due to the character and style of the author. As he reveals himself here he embodies an older American tradition—serious, reserved, at its best alone against nature, imbued with a high, platonic, Morganesque but in this case convincing idealism.
In him his ancestry appears in the famous diffidence, the Scandi- navian recoil from the haunts of men. (" You big Swede ! " exclaims a fellow pilot on the eve of an earlier exploit.) Nor is it accident that the talk and the men in this record=except Bellanca- are easily forgotten, whereas the things achieve a memorable preci- sion. Perhaps Lindbergh, like his writing, must stand or fall by his non-humanity. " In science," as he naively declares, " men are measured by what they really do."
This book is mainly about Col. Lindbergh's great deed of 1927 ; my review copy was accompanied by a publisher's handout defend- ing the author'g political attitude and activities in the years imme- diately preceding the war. Criticism of this document would be as invidious as its distribution was unnecessary.
H. M. CHAMPNESS
Previous page
