A Gift of Wings

In a way, I know Garnett even better than his own wife knows him, for she can never quite understand why he wants to throw hours away in that noisy, windswept contraption that sprays oil all over one’s face. I do understand why.

But probably the most curious thing about knowing David Garnett is that though we’ve done a lot of flying together and though I know him very well, I have no idea what the man looks like, or even if he is still alive. For David Garnett is not only an airplane pilot, he is a writer, and to one way of thinking, the talks we’ve had and the places we’ve flown have all been between the battered covers of his book, A Rabbit in the Air, published in London in 1932.

The way to know any writer, of course, is not to meet him in person but to read what he writes. Only in print is he most clear, most true, most honest. No matter what he might say in polite society, catering to convention, it is in his writing that we find the real man.

David Garnett, for instance, writes that after flying those twenty-eight hours of dual instruction, after flying those thirty-six lessons, all he did after his first flight alone in the Moth was to step out of the cockpit and smile and sign up for some more flying time. And that is all we would have seen, had we stood and watched him that Wednesday afternoon in the end of July, 1931, at Marshall’s Aerodrome.

But was he really so unmoved by his first solo? We have to leave the aerodrome to find out.

“Half way home, I asked myself alone in the supercilious voice which has so often been used to me, ‘Have you gone solo yet?’

“ ‘Yes.’

“ ‘Have you gone solo?’

“ ‘Yes!’

“ ‘Have you gone solo?’

“ ‘YES!’ ”

Does that sound familiar? Remember when you were learning to fly, driving home after each lesson, that condescending pity you felt for all the other drivers, bound tightly as they were to their little cars and their little highways? “How many of you have been flying just now? How many of you have just looked away out across the horizon, have ten minutes ago won a battle with a fierce crosswind across a narrow runway? None of you, you say? You poor people … I HAVE,” and pulling back the steering wheel of your automobile, you could almost feel her going light on her wheels.

If you remember that time, you have a friend in David Garnett, and to meet him costs a dollar or so in a secondhand bookstore.

Thousands of volumes have been written about aviation, but we do not automatically have thousands of true and special friends in their authors. That rare writer who comes alive on a page does it by giving of himself, by writing of meanings, and not just of fact or of things that have happened to him. The writers of flight who have done this are usually found together in a special section on private bookshelves.

There are rafts of flying books left from World War II, but nearly every one of them is absorbed in fact and exciting adventure, and the author shies away from the meaning of the fact, and of what the adventure stands for. Perhaps he is afraid to be thought egotistic, perhaps he has forgotten that each one of us, in the moment that one reaches toward a worthwhile goal, becomes a symbol of all mankind striving. In that moment, the word “I” doesn’t mean a personal, egocentric David Garnett, it means all of us who have loved and wished and struggled to learn, and who have soloed our Moth at last.

There is something about a blend of fact and meaning and pure honesty that gives a book presence, that puts us in that cockpit, for better or worse, heading out to meet our destiny. And when you walk the same path toward destiny with a man, that man is likely to become your friend.

Out of World War II, for instance, we meet a pilot named Bert Stiles, in a book he called Serenade to the Big Bird. The Big Bird is a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, running combat missions out of England in France and Germany.

Flying with Bert Stiles turns us weary to death of war, and of eight hours a day in the right seat, sitting and wrestling with the airplane or sitting and doing nothing while the aircraft commander wrestles with it. The oxygen goes stale in our mask, the flak comes up all black and yellow and silent, the black-cross Messerschmitts a

nd Focke-Wulfs come rolling through us in head-on attacks, yellow fire sparkling from their nose cannon and thuds and splinters through the plane and bombs away and the whole complete entire High Squadron is shot out of the air and a hard thud and orange flame from the right wing and pull the fire handle and feather Four and the Channel at last the beautiful Channel and straight in to land home on the ground and chow without taste and sack without sleep and right away Lieutenant Porada snapping on the light to say Come on breakfast at two-thirty briefing at three-thirty and start engines and takeoff and sitting there in that right seat while the oxygen goes stale in our mask, the flak comes up all black and yellow and silent, the black-cross Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs come rolling through us in head-on attacks, yellow fire sparkling from their nose cannon …

Flying with Stiles, there is no glory, and a bomb run is not even flying. It is a dirty terrible job that’s got to be done.

“It will be a long time before I have made up my mind about this war. I am an American. I was lucky enough to be born below the mountains of Colorado. But someday I would like to be able to say I live in the world and let it go at that.

“If I live through this, I will have to get on the ball and learn something about economics and people and things … In the end it is only people that count, all the people in the whole world. Any land is beautiful to someone, any land is worth fighting for to someone. So it isn’t the land. It is the people. That is what the war is about, I think. Beyond that I can’t go very far.”

After his combat tour in bombers, Stiles volunteered to fly combat in P-51s. On November 21, 1944, he was shot down on an escort mission to Hanover. He was killed at age twenty-three.

But Bert Stiles did not die before he had a chance to arrange some patterns of ink on two hundred pieces of paper, and in that arranging he has become a voice inside our head and sight inside our eyes to see and to wonder and to talk honestly about his own life and therefore about ours.

The only important part of Bert Stiles was set to paper near an Eighth Air Force runway those thirty years ago, and that same paper is here for us to touch and know and see within, this minute. That important part is what makes any man what he is and what he means.

To talk in person with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, for instance, we would have had to peer through a constant cloud of cigarette smoke about his head. We would have had to listen to him worry over imaginary diseases. We would have had to stand at the airport and wonder … would he remember to lower the landing gear today?

But as soon as Saint-Exupéry ran out of excuses not to write (and these were many), as soon as he found his inkwell amid the clutter of his room and when at last his pen touched paper, he set free some of the most moving and beautiful ideas about flight and man that have ever been written. Few are the pilots, reading his thought, who cannot nod and say, “That’s true,” who cannot call him friend.

“ ‘Careful of that brook (said Guillamet), it breaks up the whole field. Mark it on your map.’ Ah, I was to remember that serpent in the grass near Mortril! Stretching its length along the grasses in the paradise of that emergency landing field, it lay in wait for me a thousand miles from where I sat. Given the chance, it would transform me into a flaming candelabra. And those thirty valorous sheep ready to charge me on the slope of a hill.

“ ‘You think the meadow empty, and suddenly bang! there are thirty sheep in your wheels.’ An astounded smile was all I could summon in the face of so cruel a threat …”

In the very best among the writers of flight, we might expect to find some very lofty and difficult thought set to paper. But not so. In fact, the higher the quality of the writer, and the better a friend he becomes to us, the more simple and clear is the message that he brings. And strangely, it is a message that we do not learn as much as remember, something we find that we have always known.