The Air Marshal's Story
By JOHN DAVENPORT
Tr is twenty-five years since Rex Warner's The jAerodrome first appeared. It sums up very well the political and, indeed, the moral con- fusion of England in the 'thirties; but was Mr V. S. Pritchett right when he wrote that 'the only outstanding novelist of ideas whom the decade has produced is Rex Warner'? And, in his preface to this new edition,* is Mr Angus Wilson justified in praising the book's political symbolism and 'metaphysical strength'? Allegory is a tricky form, and Mr Warner now seems to have oversimplified the issue, to have made too easy an antithesis between the destructive and evil power-complex symbolised by the aero- drome and its opposite—love, that can acknow- ledge 'mystery, danger and dependence.' The epigraph is taken from that poem of' George Herbert's, in which he writes of the 'two vast, spacious things, Sinne and Love.' Auden, pre- sumably, was using the word in Warner's sense when he said that 'we must love one another or die.'
The metaphysical and structural weaknesses of Mr Warner's fable are apparent when one compares it with such a work as La Peste. Camus succeeded in integrating his allegory com- pletely. Its inexorable logic makes The Aero- drome seem sentimental, deeply felt and beauti- fully written though the Englishman's book is. It is wry English, like its author. For Mr Warner is 'a true-born Englishman,' not in the delightfully ironic sense of Defoe's satire, but in the sense that the later Kipling and T. H. White were—acutely conscious of the value of tradition and aware of the dangers threatening it. That is to say, that the interest of the - book is strictly localised, and perhaps the more valu- able as a social document because of its very parochialism.
Planted in the enfeebled muddle of traditional democracy, represented by the village, is the dangerously glamorous and efficient aerodrome, symbol of fascism. In order, presumably, to emphasise that these are two aspects of the same national culture, Mr Warner has tied his cen- tral characters together with a darkly incestuous Sophoclean bindweed. The narrator, Roy, has a love affair with the local publican's daughter, Bess, and later marries her; only to find that she is the bastard daughter of his father, the rector. She cuckolds him with the dashing Flight Lieutenant, who has (accidentally?) killed the rector—'I'm afraid I've potted yofir old man.' It later appears that Roy is the son of the rector's wife and the Flight Lieutenant the son of the squire's sister. Their father is the Air Vice- Marshal, a Lucifer-like ex-priest whom the rector wrongly imagined he had murdered many years ago. The Flight Lieutenant escapes from the aerodrome with Roy's new mistress and they are both destroyed by the Air Marshal. It appears that Bess is indeed the rector's bastard by the publican's wife; and she and Roy, not, after all, brother and sister, come together again.
Before this happy conclusion, Roy has become the most brilliant young officer in the aero- drome, far surpassing the Flight Lieutenant he had invested with imaginary attributes, and who turns out to be rather wet, saying sloppily of the dim villagers, 'Somehow these people fit better into the country than we do'; or, more vaguely, `I sometimes wonder what it's all for,' * Bodley Head, 25s.
meaning the ruthless discipline of the dedicated flyers. Roy has been seduced into the service because it seems to offer a positive solution to the political muddle and because he is in a psycho-social muddle himself. The alternative's are clear-cut. It may be true to say that Kafka was a source of inspiration, but this is misleading, except superficially. It might be equally true to claim the influence of John Buchan, although that would be unfair to Mr Warner. I only mean that The Aerodrome is not enigmatic, suffers from oversimplification, and has no coherent metaphysical basis. The Air Marshal, in part of one of his pep-talks, recalls the earlier pronouncements of Sir Oswald Mosley.
It reminds one of the pathetic vulnerability of the lost young hungry sheep of the 'thirties, who were exposed to such plausible stuff; plausible, because there was—and still, unfortu- nately, is—an element of truth in it:
And in the cities you will find even worse things. There you will find people whose pre- occupation is not even with an out-of-date machine, but whose lives are devoted to the lowest and meanest of all aims, the acquisition by hypocrisy of large and small sums of money. This is the type of man which our historical tradition has produced in our age, a monster, whether he be sensualist or ascetic, a man whose poWer, if he is successful, is accidental and not deliberate, a slave in himself to the most commonplace modes of thought and action, a creature whom you will agree with me. I hope, to treat with undeviating contempt All very fine; the stuff, in fact, to give the troops, a potent mixture of the dreamy and the pragmatic. The cloven hoof is glimpsed in the final words. The Air Marshal's programme is based on negatives. There is nothing positive - about it except violently destructive action. The `big show' that is promised can only end in a desert of disaster.
Roy comes to realise this, but his solution is,' to say the least of it, unsatisfactory, even though the disillusionment restores him to humanity. "'That the world may be clean." I remember my father's words. Clean indeed it was and most intricate, fiercer than tigers, won- derful and infinitely forgiving.' That is to say, his return to Bess, his rediscovery of physical love in its deepest and most normal sense, gives him a rebirth. This is poetically conceived and finely expressed, but he remains exposed to the forces of evil. Can the dark powers of the aero- drome be overcome by such quiescence? There is a weakness here. Or is it too demanding to ask for more intellectual fibre and less emotion? The answer presumably lies in the fact that when this extremely interesting book first appeared in 1941 we were actively if belatedly engaged in war with fascism, a war that was militarily suc- cessful. The trouble is that we are back in the same sort of mess, although our terminology has changed. This justifies the reissue of Mr Warner's book, so revealing about the intellectual laziness and fundamental decency of our race. As a document, The Aerodrome retains its value. As a work of art, it must be accounted a brave failure; ironically enough, because of its very truthfulness. George- Orwell remains the only Englishman of our time with the intellectual ability to see the unchanging face of totalitarian- ism beneath its many masks and the creative power- to fuse' fact and fable into an enduring work of art.
Previous page
