Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain

Michael McCluskey, Luke Seaber, Michael McCluskey, Luke Seaber

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030605551
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain looks at the impact of aviation in Britain and beyond through the 1920s and 1930s. This book considers how in this period flying went from a weapon of war to an extensive industry that included civilian air travel, air mail delivery, flying shows and campaigns to create 'airmindedness'. Essays look at these developments through the work of writers, filmmakers and flyers and examines the airminded modernism that marked this radical period. Its fourteen chapters include studies of texts by Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Elizabeth Bowen, W.H. Auden, T.H. White and John Masefield; accounts of the annual RAF Display at Hendon and the Schneider Trophy; and the achievements of celebrity flyers such as Amy Johnson. This collection provides a fresh perspective on the interwar period by bringing analysis of aviation and airmindedness to the study of British literature, history, modernism, mobilities and the history of technology and transportation.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

M. McCluskey, L. Seaber (eds.)Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar BritainStudies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60555-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Airminded Modernism

Michael McCluskey¹

(1)

Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

Michael McCluskey

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

In 1932 the London department store Selfridge’s opened an aerodrome on its roof. It was not a functioning aerodrome with planes taking off and landing, but, rather, a publicity stunt that hoped to draw potential customers. Selfridge’s had made a name for itself staging such attention-grabbing displays, and this ‘little aerodrome’ above busy Oxford Street capitalized on one of the biggest national obsessions throughout the 1920s and ’30s: aviation. As an article announcing the event declared, ‘Flying is the spear-head of modern progress, and it is good for us even in a remote and limited way to be in touch with it’ (‘An Aeroplane on Our Roof’ 10). To put the public somewhat in touch with modern progress, the store installed a small aeroplane in which visitors could get ‘the feel of’ flying. But the display did more than promote air travel; it hoped to encourage in the public the attitude towards modern progress captured in the period buzzword ‘airmindedness’. ‘All of us are the better for being a little airminded’ (‘An Aeroplane on Our Roof’ 10), Selfridge’s announced—a position that matched the message of many other corporations and government agencies at this time.

To be airminded was to be modern, aware and accepting of the changes necessary to make Britain an active participant in international networks. It sprang from the interest in aviation that emerged as civilian air travel and entertaining air shows became increasingly popular in the years following the First World War. It also intertwined with the broader campaigns to modernize Britain in the interwar period—campaigns organized by the government and large corporations such as Shell Oil that aimed at preparing the public ‘to play our part in the new world order’ (Tallents 18). This new world order was being stitched together by the spread of international systems of transportation and communication. Aviation—once primarily a war weapon for countries to attack each other—was now being promoted as an important network for bringing nations together and circulating people, products and information among them.

The successful operation of a British aviation system depended not only on the construction of infrastructure and its attendant industries but also on an airminded public that accepted aeroplanes and aerodromes as signs of progress and not threats to the stability of the nation and their local area. Aeroplanes were not just seen as signs of a spreading international infrastructure and transportation and trade network, however. They offered inspiration, entertainment, and a new way of looking at the nation. Amateur pilots took to the skies and formed local clubs for aviation enthusiasts while pilots such as Amy Johnson and Charles Lindbergh made record-breaking long-distance flights and became major celebrities. Air shows offered spectacles for large crowds and showed off daredevil stunts such as the loop-the-loop. Aeroplanes and air travel featured in novels, poems and paintings, and film-makers and photographers recorded aerial views that offered unfamiliar perspectives on cities, suburbs, historic sites, factories and the roads and railways that connected them. Interwar aviation included the expansion of transportation networks, the spread of associated industries such as airlines and airports, the promotion of an airminded attitude that embraced modernization and an international outlook and striking images for writers and artists. Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain brings together these intertwining activities to consider the impact of aviation in Britain and the cultivation of ‘airmindedness’ as modernist ideology. It argues that aviation is a potent source for studies of the 1920s and ’30s as the aviation industry involved so many interconnected systems including transportation, communications, tourism, information, engineering and architecture. This book looks into these systems and proposes airmindedness as a crucial yet unexplored critical lens into the cultural production, economics and politics of the period. Indeed, one of the book’s main contentions is that, while aviation turned Britons’ attention to the skies, it also brought awareness to changes on the ground and offered new perspectives on the state of the nation. Airmindedness meant groundmindedness, and this book brings these new perspectives to its study of the changes that disrupted all Britons during this radical period.

Aviation history has been the subject of several studies that focus on technological developments and the economics and logistics of the flying industry. Many of these look at the development of aviation in specific nations and connect the flying industry with conceptions and expressions of national identity. David Edgerton’s England and the Aeroplane: Militarism, Modernity and Machines (1991) presents a thorough account of the technological and industrial developments of British aviation and challenges ‘the picture of the English elite as anti-scientific and anti-industrial, of English business as congenitally short-sighted, or of the English people trapped in an idiotic longing for all things rural’ (Edgerton xvi). In A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination (1992) Peter Fritzsche demonstrates how ‘the histories of modern nationalism and modern technology are inexorably intertwined’ (Fritzsche 3) and uses aviation as a means of articulating the ‘modernist visions’ (Fritzsche 3) of the German state in the early twentieth century. Jennifer Van Vleck looks at American aviation in Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy (2013). Through a study primarily of Pan American airlines, she argues that the aeroplane was a ‘conduit of power—military, economic, political’ (Van Vleck 3) whose ‘aerial perspective’ (Van Vleck 4) provided ‘an optic through which Americans came to envision their nation as a global power’ (Van Vleck 4).

While these studies examine what Van Vleck describes as the ‘rich and pervasive culture of aviation’ (Van Vleck 8), other studies look at the influence of aviation on culture more broadly. In A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination 1908–1918 (1994) Robert Wohl presents aviation as ‘an aesthetic event’ (Wohl 1) and considers responses to and representations of flying in works by the writers H. G. Wells, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Filippo Marinetti and Vladimir Mayakovsky as well as the painters Kazimir Malevich and Robert Delaunay. Wohl captures ‘the popular passion for aviation’ (Wohl 255), which, in the period he covers, was directed at the adventurous aviator and ‘the unending triumphs of technology’ (Wohl 256) rather than, in the interwar period, the increased opportunities for transportation and trade and the cultivation of an airminded, modern attitude. In Taking Flight: Inventing the Aerial Age from Antiquity through the First World War (2003) Richard Hallion puts the emergence of the aeroplane in the early twentieth century into the wider context of flying and the human imagination from across centuries and cultures and includes accounts of ‘some of the best minds in the history of technology, as well as a host of unknown would-be inventors and occasional cranks’ (Hallion xx).

Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain contributes to the technological and cultural history of aviation and examines the period interest in crossing borders, connecting to other nations and industries and expanding British influence through aerodromes, air travel and the people and products they circulated. The circulations and spaces that aviation enabled have been the focus of recent work on ‘aeromobilities’. Aeromobilities include the ‘embodied, emotional and practised geographies’ (Adey et al. 774) of air travel as well as the ‘making of new social practices, formations and spaces’ (Adey et al. 775) that stem from the aviation industry. In ‘Aeromobilities: Geographies, Subjects and Vision’ (2008), Peter Adey asks for a deeper and wider ‘consideration of the social, cultural and political inflections of aeromobilities’ (1319), and this book contributes to his call by considering the cultural, social and political aspects of aviation in the 1920s and ’30s— the nascent period of British aeromobility.

With its focus on ‘the distinctive spaces, networks, systems and environments’ (Cwerner 3) of interwar aeromobility, Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain extends recent work in modernist studies that feature industrial and technological developments, their impact on literature and culture, and the new connections they created. Mark Goble’s Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (2010) considers the impact of the development of different communications technologies and their forms of ‘connectibility’ (Goble 20) but does not include transportation such as air travel.¹ In Underground Writing: The London Tube from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf (2010), David Welsh looks at literature from the 1880s to the 1930s to consider the ‘knowable community’ (Welsh 14) that the London Underground helped to construct as well as ‘the broader technological, architectural, and cultural changes’ (Welsh 12) that came with it. David Trotter sees new forms of ‘connectivity’ (8) emerging in the interwar period because of new technologies and analyses them through the literature of the 1920s and ’30s in Literature in the First Media Age: Britain between the Wars (2013). His chapter on ‘Transit Writing’ only touches briefly on air travel but presents ‘transport as telecommunication medium’ (218), an idea that Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain explores in much more detail: transportation as a form of communication. James Purdon looks at developments in information technology in Modernist Informatics: Literature, Information, and the State (2015) and helps to construct a genealogy of ‘global connectivity’ (20) by looking at writers that engaged with the information systems that developed in the first half of the twentieth century. In Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (2015) Paul Saint-Amour argues that interwar Britons were connected by a ‘collective psychosis’ (5) caused by the ‘pre-traumatic stress’ (7) of total war and offers a brief explanation of what he calls the ‘Interwar Air Power Theory’ (61) that contributed to this condition: a useful, sharply focused look at one particular military figure’s ideas for the use of aeroplanes in wartime.

Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain pursues the common interest in ‘connectivity’, ‘connectibility’ and ‘collective’ action that these studies share and considers the movements of machines, people, products and data that made these connections possible. It examines not only the diverse ‘mobility-systems’ (Urry 10) that the flying business entailed ...