The Human Arrow

by Félicien Champsaur

  It ought perhaps to be remembered that spy fiction was in its infancy in 1917—its origin was, in fact, a side-effect of the paranoia regarding German spies that gripped England and France in the run-up to the Great War—so the ridiculous transformation of Nasenberg’s character, the ineptness of his actions and the ineffectuality those eventually taken against him might be partly explicable in terms of lack of narrative precedent. That does not, however, excuse the general ineptitude of the entire construction of the 1917 supplement, although the fact that it must have been written in a tearing hurry, improvised ad hoc, goes some way to providing an explanation. Unfortunately, the net effect of adding the 1917 supplement was seriously to undermine, and perhaps to spoil, the import of the original text. Champsaur was obviously aware of this when the possibility of a further reprint came up in 1927, and he was presumably very glad to be able to dump the 1917 supplement almost in its entirety, only retaining the first five paragraphs of the first supplementary chapter in order to set up an alternative—but conspicuously weak—“explanation” of why Rozal’s invention had been lost to the history imposed upon the original text by the march of time.

  Could Champsaur have done otherwise? In practical terms, probably not. Had he waited until the war was over and offered the original version of the text to a publisher, it would surely have been rejected as hopelessly out-of-date; an imminent future that might have seemed plausible in January 1914 could not simply be transplanted to January 1919 or any later date. It is, of course, much easier for readers in the early twenty-first century to displace themselves imaginatively to the implicit viewpoint of Champsaur’s original text than it would have been for readers in the period between the wars, because we are now familiar with an entire genre of “alternative history” stories that require mental gymnastics of that sort. In theory, however, the author could have produced a very different supplement to the original text in 1917, mapping out an alternative history of the Great War in which both sides entered an “arms race” to develop and diversify much more powerful engines.

  That would, in fact, have been a fascinating thought-experiment, because such developments would have made the long stalemate of trench warfare redundant, and might have permitted the “alternative war” to be concluded more rapidly—and, of course, to be much more destructive, introducing blitzkrieg far ahead of its actual historical schedule. It was, however, a task that was probably beyond any writer active in 1917, and surely not one that Le Renaissance du livre could have tolerated. It would have seemed equally alien in 1927, when Champsaur’s primary motive in licensing a new version was presumably to restore something more like his original text, even at the cost of a further supplementary fudge.

  It ought not to be forgotten, of course, that Champsaur had had other alternatives while drafting his original text. In particular, he could have given the story a different ending. In theory, at least, Rozal could have landed successfully in New York, become instantly rich and famous, and then got back together with his beloved Nelly, so that they could live happily ever after. Many readers, in fact, might have been surprised and disappointed that that was not how the story ended.

  Perhaps, had Rozal done that, in the alternative history of the novel, he might even have fulfilled the wish stated in the early chapters, feebly reiterated in the 1917 supplement, that his invention might put an end to war, by making it unthinkable. Perhaps, on seeing—even as late as the first of August 1914—what French technological ingenuity could produce, Kaiser Wilhelm might have thought twice about the wisdom of attempting to implement the Schlieffen Plan, pulled his troops out of Belgium, and reverted to more traditional diplomacy. Even in the alternative history that Champsaur did construct, however, and in spite of the author’s ostentatious optimism about the future of aviation, his protagonist failed in his larger ambition. Why?

  The simple, if slightly unfair, answer is that it was mere authorial cowardice. Champsaur was prepared to dabble in scientific romance, but not to go the whole hog. He was prepared to lay imaginary groundwork for a changed world, but was not prepared to go “too far” in upsetting the apple-cart of the status quo within the context of his actual narrative. He wanted his readers to be able to retain the complacent conviction that, although the world was bound to change eventually, it did not have to do so yet. In that respect, of course, the advent of the Great War played him a doubly dirty trick. To describe Champsaur’s cautiousness in not wanting to make his sciencefictional innovation too sweeping in its immediate effect as “mere cowardice” is, however, to neglect the fact that there are certain other factors to be taken into account.

  It is worth noting that there is a distinct tendency for love stories written by men to end badly. Although genre romance, when it became stereotyped in the twentieth century, made happy endings virtually compulsory, male writers operating outside the labeled genre have often preferred the tragic variant, from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet through Alexandre Dumas fils’ La Dame aux camélias and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to such post-Champsaurian examples as Robert Nathan’s Portrait of Jennie and Erich Segal’s Love Story. If Champsaur departed from this tradition in the climax of Les Ailes de l’homme, it was only in the fact that he martyrized the male lover rather than the female—as he had to do, of course, in order to support his brief misogynistic homily about women always being the ones to clip human wings and bring the noble thrust of masculine ambition down to Earth. The more important point, however, is that, even though French literary language often construes heureux [happy] as meaning “settled with a wife and family,” there are a lot French works of literature in which love—or, at least, infatuation—leads to a very different destination.49 What on Earth would tragedy do without such fuel to feed it?

  Although Félicien Champsaur was, first and foremost, a writer of love stories, to which such literary trappings as ancient history, the art-world, politics, the circus, the occult—and, of course, scientific innovation—provided occasional colorful addenda, he was, essentially and inherently, a cynic, who insisted on seeing little or no evidence of love-fueled happiness in the world around him. Some might reckon that to be imaginative cowardice, but others would see it as a kind of courageous opposition to popular mythology, a matter of standing up for the truth. At any rate, although another writer might have handled things differently, it was always going to be the case, in a Félicien Champsaur novel, that Henri’s love-affair with Nelly was going to crash and burn, and take his marvelous aircraft with it, even though the author was then not merely prepared but determined to move on to another and more explicit moral—which, thanks to the book’s eccentric history, eventually had to be rendered three times over, in slightly different terms. The summary whole of this conviction is that love kills, but cannot interrupt glory.

  Whether Champsaur was familiar, in 1914, 1917 or 1927, with the ideas of Sigmund Freud I do not know, but if he was conscious of possible symbolic interpretations of the details and conclusion of the final flights made by Henri Rozal and Georges Turner, much of what transpires in those eccentrically lyrical passages might be evidence of his sense of humor rather than his gloom regarding the essential perfidy of womankind. Either way, though, when the first giant phallus crashes into the bushes and the second into a floating vessel, with equally fatal consequences, after a preliminary delirium, the ultimate outcome of both deflations is a defiant hymn of praise to future erections, raised in earnest. Whether or not we sympathize with the way he handled his climaxes, and their oddly-compromised aftermath, we can at least see where Champsaur was coming from.

  Perhaps we ought not to sympathize at all, either with Champsaur’s misogyny, or with his anti-Semitism, or his failure of imagination in relegating his protagonist’s aspirations to the unconvincing shadow-realm of secret history. We can understand all these failings, as commonplaces of the milieu in which he was brought up, but perhaps we ought not to forgive them, in spite of the prescriptions of proverbial wisdom. If so, then we ought to co
ndemn the original Human Arrow, as well as its two published versions, as a bad book. Even if we make that harsh judgment, though, we remain free to console ourselves with the knowledge that what really should have happened, in the original as well as the patchwork modifications subsequently made to it, was something very different—and we can still reconstruct that utopian parallel fictional universe in our own agile minds.

  At a bare minimum, Rozal and Nelly should not have behaved like utter idiots in the interests of building melodramatic tension. Rozal should not have signed either of Nasenberg’s bits of paper, at least as they stood, but, having signed something to keep his research ticking over, he should then have devoted himself much more earnestly to paying his debts, and should never have married Nelly without telling her everything in advance. For her part, Nelly should have held on to the convictions she had before the marriage, and should have given her husband every possible encouragement and assistance to continue his great work, instead of trying to stifle it. Rozal should have tested his aircraft more thoroughly and made certain of the success of his publicity stunt. He should have become instantly rich and plowed his money back into his business. Mass-produced gas turbines should have changed the face of factory production, transport and weaponry forever, within five years. The Great War should never have happened, thus removing the necessity of Georges Turner’s moral idiocy and Nasenberg’s incompetent treason in the fictional universe of the 1917 supplement, and the necessity of World War II in a host of other fictional universes, so that not only could Rozal and Nelly have lived happily—if not ever after, at least long into the twentieth century—but so could everybody else.

  That, after all, is what authentic science fiction really ought to be about, although it is fully entitled to use the entire range of rhetorical strategies in so doing, sometimes forcing its readers to construct utopias in opposition to the poignant images on the page rather than merely raising up untrustworthy signposts.

  None of it could have happened in the real world, of course, because the kind of gas turbine that Rozal supposedly invented wouldn’t actually work—but the direct response to that awareness ought not to be to shrug one’s shoulders and declare, ruefully, that nature always strikes back, or that authors are inveterate moral cowards, but to go back to the drawing-board with the seed of the dream in mind, and to ask: if that won’t work, what will?

  Notes

  1 Translated as the title story of the Black Coat Press collection The Givreuse Enigma, ISBN 978-1-935558-39-2.

  2 Translated as “The Master of the Three States” in the Black Coat Press collection The Age of Lead, ISBN 978-1-935558-42-2.

  3 Translated as The Blue Peril in a Black Coat Press edition, ISBN 978-1-935558-17-0.

  4 Translated as the title story of the Black Coat Press collection The Mysterious Force, ISBN 978-1-935558-37-8.

  5 Both translated—as “The Second Sun” and “Mimer’s Head” respectively—in the Black Coat Press anthology The World Above the World ISBN 978-1-61227-002-9.

  6 Translated as “The Zippelius Secret” in the Black Coat Press collection The Secret of Zippelius, ISBN 978-1-935558-88-0.

  7 i.e. crystals with three unequal axes intersecting at oblique angles.

  8 I have reproduced this title in the form that it is rendered in the original, although it probably refers to a song set to the music of Carl Maria von Weber’s piano-piece known in English as “Last Thought.”

  9 The word I have translated, pusillanimously, as “delightful” is babahissante, which is an idiosyncratic improvisation by the author. I resisted the temptation to translate it as “babelicious,” because that coinage is far too recent, although it is probably the nearest American equivalent.

  10 Bergheim is making a play on the consolatory words allegedly spoken to Louis XV by Madame de Pompadour when he heard news of his troops’ defeat in the battle of Rossbach (1757).

  11 I have not been able to ascertain whether there actually was a popular song with this couplet in its chorus, although gratte-moi—or gratt’moi, as Champsaur renders it—[scratch me] does crop up in various suggestive refrains. “Coco” was a name commonly attributed to pet monkeys.

  12 The Lias was a geological designation roughly equivalent to the early Jurassic era.

  13 Bergheim’s forename was Charles in the first line of the story; if the substitution is not deliberate, it is odd that it remained uncorrected, given that this version is from a reprint whose proofs the author presumably checked.

  14 The claims of the Wright brothers, Wilbur (1867-1912) and Orville (1871-1948), were widely doubted in France until Wilbur carried out a series of highly successful demonstrations there in August 1908, by which time Henri Farman (1874-1958), Louis Blériot (1872-1936) and Léon Delagrange (1873-1910) had all become famous.

  15 Louis Mouillard (1834-1897) was the great popularizer of the possibility of mechanical flight in France; the English translation of his book, L’Empire de l’Air (1881), published in 1893, inspired the Wright brothers. Octave Chanute (1832-1910) was a railroad engineer who lent the Wright brothers practical assistance. Otto Lilienthal (1848-1896) was the great pioneer of gliders whose work helped perfect early rigid wings and demonstrated their ability to provide lift. The Voisin brothers, Gabriel (1880-1973) and Charles (1882-1912) opened the first airplane factory in 1905, supplying Farman and many other French pioneers; Charles became one of the new technology’s many casualties. Jules Gastambide (d. 1922), the co-producer of the Gastambide-Mengin monoplane, was one of their earliest rivals.

  16 The Brazilian-born sportsman Alberto Santos-Dumont (1873-1932) became one of the most significant aircraft designers in France after 1906.

  17 Along with Delagrange, Hubert Latham (1883-1912) and Louis Paulhan (1883-1963) became avid competitors in air races and the various competitions sponsored by individuals and organizations, which became highly fashionable in Europe and America between 1908 and 1914.

  18 Louis Védrines (1881-1919) and Roland Garros (1888-1918) were both casualties of the early development of aviation, the latter being shot down while serving as a fighter pilot in the Great War.

  19 Henri Bataille (1872-1922) was a prolific poet and playwright whose work was deeply nostalgic and critical of contemporary mores.

  20 The Barsac to whom Nelly is referring is Claude Barsac, the unscrupulous con man, thief and murderer featured in Champsaur’s novel L’Arriviste. This reference, and one other, were probably inserted into the primal text before its belated publication in order to accommodate the use of the character in the 1917 supplement.

  21 The noun serre [hothouse] can also mean “claw,” by derivation from the verb serrer [to grip or to clutch].

  22 Champsaur appears to have forgotten that the Duc’s forename was Jean a few chapters ago and renders it as Robert here, but he reverts to Jean later so I have corrected the error.

  23 The individual cited in this slightly mischievous reference was actually named François de Bonne, Duc de Lesdiguières (1543-1626), but he was born in Saint-Bonnet-en-Champsaur, so it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that he numbered among the author’s remote ancestors.

  24 The last two lines of the chapter cannot be accurately translated. The elle in the penultimate line, which I have rendered as “her,” could equally well be “it,” with reference to the feminine noun veine, which I have rendered as “windfall,” rather than to Nelly—hence the ambiguity to which attention is called in the final line. More importantly, however, the verb repartir, featured in the remark J’y repartirai avec elle, which I have rendered as “I shall make a new start with her,” can also mean to answer, reply, rejoin or simply to leave for a second time, so Henri’s remark could also mean that he intends to “go back [into the sky] with her” or “answer [for the obligation] with her.” All three meanings are of some relevance to subsequently-unfolding events.

  25 I have added the word “swan,” which is not in the text, on the assumption that its omission is accidental; w
hen Lohengrin make his entrance in Wagner’s opera (1850) he is dressed in shining armor; it is the swan that he is riding that is white. Other echoes of the opera can be found in the text, tacitly likening the conquest of the air to a grail quest, Lohengrin being the Knight of the Grail. This scene corresponds, albeit loosely, to the one featuring the famous Bridal Chorus, nowadays irredeemably cheapened by the banal words of “Here Comes the Bride.”

  26 The reference is to “Green,” one of Verlaine’s perversely titled Romances sans paroles (1872), which became a popular ballad when set to music.

  27 Adolphe Pégoud (1889-1915) was the first Frenchman to perform a loop, in September 1913 (it turned out that he had been anticipated by a Russian pilot, but no one in France knew that at the time).

  28 The words of the popular song in question, “Connais-tu le pays,” were adapted by Jules Barbier from a poem in J. W. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahr (1795-6).

  29 Voleurs, here translated as “thieves,” as in the title of the chapter, also means “flyers;” the pun is untranslatable.

  30 Camille Blanc (1847-1927) was the founding mayor of Beausoleil, a town adjacent to Monte Carlo, in the first decade of the century, and was involved in the administration of the Casino.