1
The Original Accident
Faulkner attempted to launch a homemade aeroplane in 1909, six years postâKitty Hawk when he was twelve years old. He found the design in the spring issue of The American Boy magazine and supervised the craftâs construction in an exciting neighborhood project. His little brothers Murry (Jack) and John (Johncy) and his cousin Sallie Murry were given key roles as builders and consultants but they let him take the maiden flight alone. Joseph Blotner tells what happened next, in two overlapping versions:
âLet go!â shouted Billy from inside, and the crew gave a powerful heave. Airborne for an instant, the plane pitched as the tail rose. Then it swung through an arc in a half- revolution so that Billy was for a moment suspended upside down. Then the pilot and craft thumped down into the bottom of the ditch in a flutter of paper and bean poles. Billy silently picked his way out of the shattered fuselage as his crew looked on, dumb with disappointment. Finally they turned and walked back to the house for supper. (B 136)
With a last lunge they launched it. It pitched as the tail rose and then swung through an arc and thumped upside down into the bottom of the ditch in a flutter of paper and beanpoles. Billy silently picked his way out of the shattered fuselage as Jack, Johncy, and Sallie Murry looked on, dumb with disappointment. (Blotner, Faulkner, one-vol. ed., 35)
Faulknerâs brother John, however, tells us there were other participants too, offering another important angle on an event that frequent retellings kept alive in the Faulkner family lore:
In unison the two Negroes heaved the machine out over the ditch. It went up for several feet and did the first part of a loop, minus the wing tips Mallory and Dooley had used for handholds, which remained in their hands. We saw Bill against the skyline, upside down, and then the ship began to come to pieces in the air. Stiff tatters of paper fluttered loose. The bean stickers began coming apart. And Bill fell in a shower of torn paper and scraps of kindling wood and landed on the back of his head in a pile of sand at the bottom of the ditch. (John Faulkner 100)
I will comment on Mallory and Dooley below, but for now, this collective memory contains all the major elements to be explored in Faulknerâs aviation fiction: the passionate desire to fly, the brave testing of limits, the inevitable failure of the machine, the humiliating loss of control, the dumb gaze of the witnesses, the division of labor between pilot and ground crew. All this, for example, is at the heart of Pylon (1935), a novel about the mass spectacle of airplane racing in the modern technological age, a novel that tells âthe furious, still, and legendary tale of what man has come to call his conquering of the infinite and impervious airâ (PY 799).1 The tone of Pylonâs formulation, blending popular fascination, withering irony, and a deep identification with Icarus, is typical of Faulknerâs overall aeronautical sensibility. In Faulknerâs fictions, flying an aeroplane is always a daring exhibition, a scene performed before an astonished audience with âgaped and upturned facesâ (PY 933). Sometimes the people on the ground chase after the airplane while shouting and gesticulating, as if the pilot has committed some terrible transgression. Sometimes a solitary watcher âfeels her breath going out faster than she could draw it in againâ (FL 597) as the pilot attempts to subdue an airship that seems animated by an uncanny will of its own. Sometimes the spectators watch as the pilot flies too high and then crashes to the ground. The dead are mourned as flowers are dropped from circling aeroplanes. Sometimes the pilot falls free from his machine, drops through the clouds, and vanishes into air, or water. A simple white panel, gravestone, or newspaper obituary commemorates him.2
Faulknerâs pilots are âearlyâ aviators in this sense, risking death with every flight, solo types that Dean C. Smith describes in his classic memoir By the Seat of My Pants (1961). Smith was an Army Air Service instructor at seventeen years old, an airmail pilot, a test pilot, and an Antarctic aviation pioneer. He reflects that, in the early days of aviation, âthe only way one learned anything more advanced than a gentle turn was by trial and error.â In this way one
gradually discovered things that could and could not be done. Many were killed by getting into stalls and spins they had not learned how to control. If they survived, they would pass on their knowledge to others. The early art of flying developed not by our modern method of measured and controlled laboratory experiments calculated by results of earlier data, but by reckless enthusiasts, keen to know and to do, trying everything until they found something. (16)
As RAF historian Alan Sullivan noted in 1919: âit has been remarked that at the outset âhe [the cadet-pilot in training] has many opportunities for error and usually discovers them allââ (SU 103). The pilot learns by doing, struggling not only with the peculiarities of his flying machine but with his own instincts, reflexes, and impulses as they contend with aerodynamic forces that are never properly understood. Taking off on his first solo flight, many an embryonic military aviator immediately forgot what he thought he had mastered in the classroom, flying his aeroplane in âthe blackest ignorance even of first principlesâ (D. V. Dodds, Directorate of Air Force History, Royal Canadian Air Force, qtd. in Weber 6). The early progress of aviation was soundly epistemological in this sense, for trainers and trainees alike. In Kenneth Weberâs summary of âCanadaâs First Air Training Plan,â âCanadian training philosophy had changed from a system picturing man as a member of a completely mechanistic universe where he was at the mercy of the whims of fate to a more optimistic system placing man in control of a universe in which he, through his intelligence and proficiency, could accomplish his desiresâ (Weber 7). The passage from fear and passivity to a more resolute aeronautical knowledge and confidence unfolds as a test of will and character.
Characterâthat subtle union of temperament and disposition, the increasing air sense, the delicacy of control, the spontaneous response, the nameless faculty by which the pupil becomes, as it were, welded to the machine which in turn replies to the subconscious movement of hand and foot. (SU 212)
In Faulknerâs aviation narratives, the relationship between the pilot and the machine is rarely as classical and composed, balanced or harmonious, as Sullivan ideally describes it. Faulknerian flight and character, rather, are realms of turbulence and contestation in which the pilot is invariably threatened with elemental terrorsâââloss of head,â âbrain fatigueâ âŠ. the stage in which the pilot has neither the power to reason, decide or actâ (SU 226). The new field of aviation psychology responds by analyzing the pilotâs mentality under the stresses of speed, altitude, disorienting motion, and fearâfear of injury, death, failure, humiliation. Sullivan appears to grasp the matter sympathetically:
Under âloss of head,â for instance, it is pointed out that the pupil in his new occupation of flying, especially for the first time, has every mental faculty on the alert at extremely high tension, and that the sense of danger, although not asserting itself, is also subconsciously present. It follows, therefore, that under the strain of an emergency the power of synchronized decision and act may lapseâthis lapse resulting in what is known as âloss of head.â ⊠Then supervenes a state of mental inertia due to the swiftly repeated stream of impulses received in rapid succession by his brain. He begins to feel alone, and unable to assume control. Errors occur, and he becomes overwhelmed with the enormousness of the whole thing. Follows a state of brain fatigue and stupor, during which he awaits events and takes little part in the control of his machine. After such an accident, the pupil has generally no recollection of what has happened. His memory seems to be partially stunned. Under these circumstances, it seldom occurs that he resumes flyingâhis temperament as a general thing proving to be unsuitable. (SU 226â30)
First World War RAF pilot Captain Alan Bott observes in his memoir of 1917 that âif he gives way to unconsciousness the machine, freed from reasoned control, will perform circus tricks and twist itself into a spinning nose-diveâ (Bott 243â4). The archetypal aviation scene in Faulkner is thus an essential site of what Thomas Mann, in 1938, called âthe alpha and omega of all psychoanalytical knowledgeâ: âthe mysterious unity of ego and actuality, destiny and character, doing and happening ⊠the mystery of reality as an operation of the psycheâ (Mann 412). The aviatorâs psyche in Faulkner is never completely conscious and coordinated. It is always haunted by fear, susceptible to paralysis, and impelled by blind forces.
Such are the conditions, however, that make piloting an aeroplane (if one survives long enough) an opportunity for profound self-analysis, a chance, as one First World War pilot put it, âto find out the truth about myselfâ (qtd. in H 45). Eddie Rickenbacker, a hero for Faulkner and many others, recalls his feeling upon landing after his first solo flight over enemy lines:
I forgot entirely my recent fear and terror. Only a deep feeling of satisfaction and gratitude remained that warmed me and delighted me, for not until that moment had I dared to hope that I possessed all the requisite characteristics for a successful war pilot. Though I had feared no enemy, yet I had feared that I myself might be lacking. (Rickenbacker 7)
Faulknerâs pilots seldom get over this kind of fear that they âmight be lackingâ in some basic sense.
Flying in Faulkner is hard enough, an essentially oneiric and unreal form of machine-propelled movement generally âfreed from reasoned control.â This state of affairs is made exponentially worse when the aeroplane is a Sopwith Camel. The case of Johnny Sartoris in Flags in the Dust, âAll the Dead Pilots,â and âWith Caution and Dispatchâ is the central one. As Robert Harrison explains in âA Note on the Sopwith Camel,â the Camel was âhigh-strung, skittish, easily âspooked,â it called for a masterâs hand on the reins âŠ. In level flight the torque of the 130-hp Clerget would roll the machine on its back unless the pilot kept both hand and mind constantly on the controlsâ (Harrison 43). These same dynamic and unstable characteristics, however, were also the machineâs essential strengths in war:
A Camel ⊠had to be consciously held in steady flight, and came out of it in a flash. The very instability that made it a death trap for the mediocre pilot made it a darting, slewing, skittering gadfly in combat âŠ. no attacker in fact could remain on its tail when it was turning to the right âŠ.. it could outmanoeuvre any aeroplane ever built. (Harrison 44)
The richest and most realistic description of Camel flying, probably anywhere, appears in the novel Faulkner singled out for special praise, V. M. Yeatesâ Winged Victory (1934). As the main voice of the novel explains, focalizing the narrative through the being and consciousness of British RAF pilot Tom Cundall, âA Camel hated an inexperienced hand, and flopped into a frantic spin at the least opportunityâ (Y 25). âIt would not fly straight for more than a second at a timeâ (Y 27). âA Camel might be going sideways or flat-spinning, or going in any direction except straight backwards. A Camel in danger would do the most queer things, you never knew what next, especially if the pilot was Tom Cundallâ (Y 29). âBut a Camel had to be flown carefully round with exactly the right amount of left rudder, or else it would rear and buck and hang upside down and flop and spinâ (Y 30). âThat was the worst of being in the flying service: you were always in the front line, even in Englandâ (Y 31).
Yeatesâ signature is all over Faulknerâs âWith Caution and Dispatch.â Flying through a rainstorm over the English Channel, Johnny Sartoris puts âhis head well down in the office, one eye on his watch and the other watching the water between his left shoulder and the cockpit rim to hold his altitude and his course by the direction in which the chop was movingâ (650). Suddenly he sees
the side of a ship which looked as long as a city block and rose taller than any cliff. Iâve already crashed, he thought. He did three things as one: he slapped the throttle full on and snatched the stick back and shut his eyes; the Camel went up the side of the ship like a hawk, a gull up a cliff-face. (650)
In Winged Victory, Tom Cundallâs commander, Mac, a flying virtuoso based on the Canadian Ace and master pilot Donald Roderick MacLaren (DSO, MC and Bar, DFC), does intentionally and with great skill what Sartoris only lucks into doing after he âshut his eyesâ: âMac dived down past the cloud like a gull down the face of a cliffâ (Y 320). Meanwhile Cundall, who is closer to Sartoris on the scale of proficiency, also flies through the rain with his head down. âThe mist grew darker. He put his head in the office and flew by instrumentsâ (Y 34). This habit nearly kills him on more than one occasion.
He had to go all the way home through rain-mist just over house tops, and he opened full out to a hundred and ten miles an hour, keeping his head well in the office. A mountain suddenly looked up in front of him. The Camel shot up the side of it and staggered over the top. Christ, a slag heap. He felt shaky after the menacing instant. If he hadnât been going all out heâd never have zoomed it. The things he got away with. (Y 414)
The Camelâs flying characteristics made a deep impression on Faulknerâs understanding of the basic relationship between the pilot and his machine.3 In fact it is hard to find a smooth landing by any aeroplane in Faulknerâs world, or an aeroplane moving through Faulknerian airspace in the way the Wright brothers were first to achieve above Kill Devil Hills on December 17, 1903: âin sustained, powered, piloted, and controlled flightâ (A 42).
âUncle Willyâ
The flight of the airplane in Faulkner is rarely straight or long sustained. Usually it follows an antic and absurd path, as in this scene from Faulknerâs short story âUncle Willyâ (first published in The American Mercury in 1935):
and we saw the airplane start, with Secretary still running after it, and jump into the air and duck down and then jump up again and then it looked like it had stopped high in the air above the trees where we thought Secretary was fixing to land that first day before it ducked down beyond them and went out of sight [ âŠ.] (246)4
In this short story, too, the memory of âthe two Negroes,â âMallory and Dooley,â who do the heavy lifting in John Faulknerâs account of the original childhood crash, seems to survive. One of the negro boys, this time, finds himself sitting in the cockpit of the toylike âlittle airplane with a two-cylinder engine. It was Secretary, in another new checked cap and goggles like Uncle Willyâsâ (241). Perhaps the other turns up as old Job, Uncle Willyâs lifelong servant. This plane crashes too but not before it gets to fly around quite a bit, the young Black pilotâs cap and goggles âsynonymous with open-cockpit flyingâ (C 6) and that more romantic and individualistic era of a...