In a brief heyday of about a dozen years, they set records for distance and speed, crossed oceans and uncharted mountain ranges, explored entire continents, flying in every kind of weather and more by instinct than by instruments. It was exciting, difficult, often dangerous work. Many of them were killed. Six were lost trying to fly the Atlantic Ocean before Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., the finest pilot of the era, flew the 3,610-mile stretch from New York to Paris nonstop and alone, without radio or sextant, in a single-engine plane of only 223 horsepower. He was twenty-five years old, and the historic date was May 21, 1927.
These were no amateur pilots. They were intensely professional, intensely serious about the craft of flying and about their own role in history. They were also, on the whole, extremely good-looking, which added greatly to their glamour. Amelia Earhart, Beryl Markham, and the idolized Lindbergh were as handsome as screen stars. If an exception like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry looked, as somebody remarked, more like a tall, tonsured monk, he could draw amusing pictures and do card tricks on the level of a professional magician.
But most remarkable is how many of them proved to be writers of exceptional grace and vision, authors of more than a score of books. Lindbergh wrote seven, beginning with We, a hugely popular account of his early life and the Paris flight, which was rushed into print that same year. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, her husband’s copilot and radio operator on later expeditions, was a diarist and poet who hardly ever stopped writing. Her first published work, North to the Orient, described the unprecedented survey flight the couple made in 1931 in a small seaplane from New York to China by the great circle route over northern Canada and Alaska, touching down in eastern Siberia and Japan. Sinclair Lewis called it “one of the most beautiful and great-hearted books that has ever been written.”
Like Lindbergh, the Frenchman Antoine de Saint-Exupéry began as a mail pilot, flying the Sahara and the Andes, and is known worldwide for the novel Night Flight, for his now-classic children’s fable The Little Prince and for the autobiographical Wind, Sand and Stars, which was a best seller and winner of the National Book Award in 1939. His Wartime Writings 1939-1944, a collection of his letters and articles, was published here in 1986.
Beryl Markham of Kenya, who looked a little like Greta Garbo, was the first woman to fly the Atlantic from east to west (in 1936). She wrote a high-spirited, often poetic “remembrance” called West with the Night that was only rediscovered and reissued a few years ago.
Others included Nevil Norway, an English pilot and aeronautical engineer who wrote novels on aviation under the name of Nevil Shute; John Grierson, another Englishman and a veteran long-distance flyer, who wrote a half dozen books about his adventures, and Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly the Atlantic alone, who wrote three books, including Last Flight, which was compiled after her death by her husband, the publisher George Palmer Putnam.
Though of different nationalities and differing abilities as pilots, these aviator authors were alike in their love of the freedom of the profession, their love for the still unspoiled, distant corners of the Earth and their affection for their fellow pilots. “The dignity of the craft is that it creates a fellowship,” said Saint-Exupéry.
Further, aviation was their common cause. With the advance of the airplane, they were sure, the old barriers of time and distance would give way, bringing humanity closer together. That they would share a common crisis in such faith is also part of their story. Ironically, it would be Lindbergh who later renounced with the greatest fervor the whole idea of progress through technology of any kind.
They made of their pioneering time and its aftermath a body of literature like none other. Everything seemed fresh in that time of “early morning horizons,” as Anne Lindbergh remembered.
This is how Beryl Markham in West with the Night describes her first flying lessons:
We began at the first hour of morning. We began when the sky was clean and ready for the sun and you could see your breath and smell traces of the night. We began every morning at that same hour, using what we were pleased to call the Nairobi Aerodrome, climbing away from it with derisive clamour, while the burghers of the town twitched in their beds and dreamed perhaps of all unpleasant things that drone—of wings and stings, and corridors of Bedlam.
Why should these pilots have written so much and so well? The early days of railroading produced no literary works of distinction. We have had no literary stars among race-car drivers, or among astronauts as yet. So why these aviators? And why works of such beauty and power that speak to us still after so long a time?
Part of the answer, I believe, is in their feeling for the earth and its beauties. They flew with the land, as Lindbergh described in the striking first paragraph of his Pulitzer Prize—winning The Spirit of St. Louis, a larger, more detailed and contemplative account than We of the Paris flight. It was September 1926, when he was flying the mails:
Night already shadows the eastern sky. To my left, low on the horizon, a thin line of cloud is drawing on its evening sheath of black. A moment ago, it was burning red and gold. I look down over the side of my cockpit at the farm lands of central Illinois. Wheat shocks are gone from the fields. Close, parallel lines of the seeder, across a harrowed strip, show where winter planting has begun. A threshing crew on the farm below is quitting work for the day. Several men look up and wave as my mail plane roars overhead. Trees and buildings and stacks of grain stand shadowless in the diffused light of evening. In a few minutes it will be dark, and I’m still south of Peoria.
Lindbergh is removed from the ground like a young god, his vantage point the gift of a machine, a De Havilland biplane with a 12-cylinder, 400-horsepower Liberty engine. With night coming on, he feels the earth’s curve and turning. He has the wind in his face as he looks down from his open cockpit. He is close enough to the farmland to pick out details. He marks the cycle of crops, the signs of seeding and harvest. He is in touch with the earth, and he is in touch with his fellow men who, importantly, are harvesters. He sees them; they see him and wave.
It was their practical need to fly with the land that, more than anything, distinguished these pilots from those who would follow. The sky was their frontier, their element. Something about the sky stirred them to their souls, as Melville and Conrad had been stirred by the sea. But they were never detached from the land in mind or spirit. It was of necessity, to keep their bearings, that they flew with rivers and kept eye contact with mountains and plains. Lindbergh, in his vivid, carefully composed paragraph, fixes our attention on the good earth of Illinois before saying a thing about the adventure of flight. Our true bearings, he tells us, are south of Peoria.
There is often a nearly sensual feeling for airplanes as well. The aviator writers prided themselves, found the most realistic kind of reassurance, in knowing their airplanes.
“So he had found his world again,” Saint-Exupéry wrote of his valorous pilot Fabien as he takes off in the novel Night Flight.
…A few digs of his elbow, and he was quite at home. He tapped the dashboard, touched the contacts one by one, shifting his limbs a little, and, settling himself more solidly, felt for the best position whence to gauge the faintest lurch of his five tons of metal, jostled by the heaving darkness. Groping with his fingers, he plugged in his emergency lamp, let go of it, felt for it again, made sure it held; then lightly touched each switch, to be certain of finding it later, training his hands to function in a blind man’s world. Now that his hands had learnt their role by heart, he ventured to turn on a lamp, making the cockpit bright with polished fittings and then, as on a submarine about to dive, watched his passage into night upon the dials only. Nothing shook or rattled, neither gyroscope nor altimeter flickered in the least, the engine was running smoothly; so now he relaxed his limbs a little, let his neck sink back into the leather padding and fell into the deeply meditative mood of flight, mellow with inexplicable hopes.
The airplane offered a spiritual pilgrimage in ways other machines never ha
d. These aviators wrote of being lifted out of themselves by the very act of flight, of becoming part of something infinitely larger than themselves. This was the discovery of all discoveries in their farflung ventures that mattered foremost. He was never so aware of all existence, never less aware of himself, Lindbergh said, than when flying. The miracle of the airplane, wrote Saint-Exupéry, is that it plunges us “into the heart of the mystery.” For Anne Lindbergh, the sensation of flight was more like that of great music and art, or the brilliant, clear passages of a book. Beryl Markham used the word religion and wrote of seeing things for the first time in proper proportion: “I saw the alchemy of perspective reduce my world, and all my other life, to grains in a cup.”
The only daughter of an Englishman who settled in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley to raise racehorses after the turn of the century, Markham took up aviation as a means of earning a living. From 1931 to 1936, she flew mail and supplies and occasional passengers to the distant reaches of Kenya, the Sudan, Tanganyika, and Rhodesia. Encouraged by Baron Bror von Blixen, husband of the author Isak Dinesen, she started a business spotting big game from the air, working closely with Blixen and Denys Finch-Hatton, the classics-quoting white hunter portrayed by Robert Redford in the film of Dinesen’s Out of Africa.
Whether, as has been said, Markham was Dinesen’s rival for the attentions of Finch-Hatton, I don’t know. But he and Blixen figure prominently in West with the Night, while Dinesen receives no mention. Indeed, Finch-Hatton is described as the most charming of companions, “a great man who never achieved arrogance.” Markham and he flew often in the new plane, a bright yellow Gypsy Moth, that he had brought by boat from England. In one of the book’s memorable scenes, her old flying instructor, Tom Black, for reasons he can’t explain, tells her not to accompany Finch-Hatton on the flying expedition in which he was ultimately killed.
Because of her glamorous looks and several unsuccessful marriages, Markham was a popular topic of conversation in Nairobi society. When her book appeared in 1942, the gossip was that she hadn’t written it. The real author, supposedly, was her third husband, who was not a flyer but a hard-drinking American ghost-writer named Raoul Schumacher. The charge, which she denied, seems unfair and unlikely, though Schumacher’s encouragement and editorial help were undoubtedly important, as she acknowledged on the flyleaf.
For all the pilot writers, the prospect of death was something to be faced with every takeoff. “I was in sheer physical terror the whole time,” Anne Lindbergh wrote privately after one long, grueling flight with her husband. John Grierson crashed three times flying the Arctic route to Canada. Saint-Exupery—”Saint-Ex” to his friends—crashed in the Egyptian desert en route from Paris to Saigon, and for three days he and his mechanic survived on a pint of coffee, a little white wine, a few grapes and an orange, until found by passing Bedouins. But then, Anne Lindbergh noted in her diary, Saint-Ex was always crashing. He was too much the artist to be a proper pilot, she thought, and he would be killed if he kept flying.
Were they aviators who wrote or writers who took up flying? That is difficult to say, though I suspect that Saint-Exupéry and Anne Lindbergh would have written under any circumstances. The appeal of aviation as they knew it and the appeal of writing were much akin. There was a corresponding chance for independence and individuality, the exhilaration of risk, the appeal of the inevitable solitude demanded in both lines of work. On the practical side, they knew their notoriety meant a public.
They knew, too, that whether they as individuals survived the next flight, or the next, the pioneering age they were part of was certain to be short-lived, that with the steady advance of aircraft and instruments, their kind of flying would soon be a thing of the past—which only intensified both the experience and their need to record it.
“After this era of great pilots is gone,” observed Beryl Markham, “as the era of great sea captains has gone…it will be found, I think, that all the science of flying has been captured in the breadth of an instrument board, but not the religion of it….And the days of clipper ships will be recalled again—and people will wonder if clipper means ancients of the sea or ancients of the air.”
In the introduction to his wife’s book Listen! The Wind, Charles Lindbergh foresaw the day when passengers flying the Atlantic would have no more contact with the elements or the water below or any of the beauties of the earth’s surface than if they were riding a train through a tunnel. For the feeling of real flying, he said, future travelers would have to turn to books like Listen! The Wind, an account of ten days during the most ambitious flight of the Lindberghs’ career together—a 30,000-mile circumnavigation of the Atlantic made in 1933, the year after the kidnapping and murder of their infant son.
What began in the mid-1920s was pretty much over by the late thirties. The end of their era should be marked in 1937, the year Hitler’s Luftwaffe practiced mass bombing on the Spanish city of Guernica, and Amelia Earhart, attempting to fly around the world, was lost in the Pacific near the Marianas. By August 1939, over supper on trays in a summer house on Long Island, Lindbergh and Saint-Exupéry were comparing notes on “that thrilling period of aviation that is past,” as if it were already ancient history. “But I never know,” said Saint-Exupéry with a laugh, “whether it is not my own youth I am regretting.” He would soon be facing the Luftwaffe over France.
Lindbergh by this time had made a widely publicized trip to Germany, where he was given the red-carpet treatment by the Nazi high command. He toured their aircraft factories, flew their latest fighter planes. His visit had the secret blessing of the American military, as a means to determine German strength. But when, at a dinner at the American Embassy in Berlin, Air Marshal Hermann Goering surprised Lindbergh with a medal, the shock and outrage at home were not to be forgotten.
On his return to New York, furthermore, Lindbergh joined the isolationist America First Committee. Believing another conflict so soon after the First World War would mean the end of Western civilization, he was convinced the United States should stay out of it. He grew increasingly strident in his public statements to the point where many thought him a traitor. Later, after Pearl Harbor, he flew combat missions in the Pacific.
In Flight to Arras, a book that had great effect in the United States, Saint-Exupéry portrayed the valor of his comrades in the French air service as they tried—with terrible losses—to hold back the Germans. When Saint-Exupéry was reported missing after a reconnaissance mission over the Mediterranean in 1944, Anne Lindbergh, grieving over the news, wrote that there was something especially terrible about the word “lost.”
“It has a special agony of its own,” she wrote, “quite distinct from death…”
The airplane made it a war such as was never dreamed of, as Saint-Exupéry noted in 1940. Lindbergh, seeing the devastation of Europe after the German surrender, felt only revulsion for the whole of science and technology, especially aviation. The man who had been its greatest hero longed now to renounce his profession and live with nature. This was in the spring of 1945, before Hiroshima.
Beryl Markham gave up flying and went back to her father’s trade of raising horses. She never wrote anything more. Nevil Shute left England for Australia and wrote On the Beach, the most haunting evocation we have of a world dying of radiation after an atomic war.
“What frightens me more than the war is the world of tomorrow,” Saint-Exupéry told his mother in 1940. Central to all he wrote was the theme of responsibility. In The Little Prince, it is the fox, finally, that tells the Little Prince what really matters in life, by reminding him of the flower, the single rose, he had cared for at home on his own small planet. “Men have forgotten this truth,” says the fox. “But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose.”
Writing of his friend Guillaumet, an intrepid mail pilot, in Wind, Sand and Stars, Saint-Exupéry said that moral greatness derives more from a sense of responsibility than fro
m courage or honesty. “To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible.”
When he was eleven, Lindbergh traveled to Panama with his father to see the canal in its final stages of construction. In his lifetime the senior Lindbergh had seen the abolition of slavery, the advent of the telephone, and now the canal. “Great changes are coming,” he told the boy. Probably the change he would have least expected—or understood—was the view his son had arrived at by the time he reached his father’s age.
The evil of technology was not in technology itself, Lindbergh came to see after the war, not in airplanes or the myriad contrivances of modern technical ingenuity, but in the extent to which they can distance us from our better moral nature, our sense of personal accountability.
In the last book he wrote, his Autobiography of Values, published posthumously in 1976, he described a bombing run over the Japanese-occupied city of Rabaul in New Guinea during World War II:
When I pressed the red button on my stick, it was hard to believe I had released a high-explosive bomb. But there it was, deadly and irretrievable, apparently floating in the air. I saw it clearly for a moment as I climbed, and within seconds a pinhead puff of smoke appeared behind me in the city of Rabaul, a puff so small and far away that I could not connect it to the button on my stick, or realize the writhing hell it covered on the ground. I had carried out my mission, and felt little responsibility for what I had done.
In Africa, Beryl Markham was drawn to kinship with life’s elemental forces that she saw in the Masai people, the same people, interestingly, that Lindbergh was drawn to in the final phase of his life. “Africa is less a wilderness than a repository of primary and fundamental values,” Markham wrote.
Lindbergh was told by a Masai warrior that civilization is not progress. “We have known freedom far greater than yours,” he told Lindbergh, and Lindbergh never forgot the moment. “The primitive,” he wrote in Autobiography of Values, “teaches that life itself, unforced life, is progress, a fact our civilization tends more and more to overlook.” He became obsessed with the essence of life and concluded that we all must for the sake of the survival of humanity. He had called his first book We, because he saw the Paris flight as a victory of man and the machine. Later he wrote of the “vicious circle” of technology. He no longer trusted rationality. Quite the contrary: “I have found that the irrational gives man insight he cannot otherwise attain.”
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