Diary of an Unknown Aviator

Elliott White Springs (born 31 July 1896) was an American pilot in the Royal Air Force during the First World War. Unlike many men who were too traumatised to want to remember the details of the war, he wrote extensively about his experiences. In 1926 he brought to publication a book based on the diary entries of his pilot colleague and friend, John Mc Gavock Grider (born 18 May 1892), who had been killed in June 1918. Another pilot colleague, Clayton Knight, provided illustrations for the book. In the first edition there was no mention of Grider's diary and readers might have construed that this was a device of Spring's autobiographical musings. In the second edition, however, Springs referred to the existence of the diary but did not name Grider. His other books included Nocturne Militaire (1927), Above the Bright Blue Sky (1928), Leave Me with a Smile (1928), In the Cool of the Evening (1929), Romance of the Air (1930), War Birds and Lady Birds (1931), The Rise and Fall of Carol Banks (1931), Pent up on a Penthouse (1931) and Clothes Make the Man (1948), several of which concerned aviation.

Grider and Springs enjoyed sparring as aspiring writers. In one entry, Grider wrote admiringly about his colleague's command of language: “If Springs isn't hung first, he'll be a great writer some day.” He also records in its entirety a mock epic poem written by Springs about an affair that one of the boys was having with a young lady. Another anecdote is of Springs getting into a heated literary argument with the novelist Arnold Bennett, who was said to be “out here getting some local colour for a book”. Of Knight he wrote: “He showed me some sketches he had made of planes and flights. They were very good. That boy will be an artist some days if he lives thru it.”

Grider, from Arkansas, writes with typical Southern frankness about his own experience and that of the men around him: “About ten of the boys have given it up and just quit flying. No nerve. They never should have enlisted if they didn't intend to see it thru after they found it was dangerous. Jeff Dwyer gets them jobs at Headquarters or puts them in charge of mechanics. But yellow is yellow whether you call it nerves or not. I'm just as scared sometimes as any of them.”

Another colleague landed “after he'd been out alone and his plane had about fifty holes in it...He was as limp as a rag and had to be assisted to his quarters.” Grider added: “The wing doctor came over to see him and sent him to hospital thos there's nothing wrong with him except he's badly frightened. That's the last of his illustrious career. He'll go home and write a book on the war now.”

The final entry begins:
“War is a horrible thing, a grotesque comedy. And it is so useless. This war won't prove anything. All we'll do when we win is to substitute one sort of dictator for another. In the meantime we have destroyed our best resources. Human life, the most precious thing in the world, has become the cheapest.”

Early Autumn

Louis Bromfield (born on 27 December 1896) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1927 for Early Autumn.

The novel documents a period in American society where tradition and change collide. The setting is the seaside Massachusetts home of the Pentlands, a family with a proud early New England ancestry and an extensive display of portraits to prove it. The middle-aged Anson Pentland is obsessed with the family tradition and spends much of his time researching a book on the family’s genealogy. Everything that is not of the New England tradition is viewed with suspicion or contempt: the Polish immigrant workers, the Portuguese woman who married into the family, the Irish (several of whom are employed by the family) and those family members that have been living in France. These people are the agents of change. They transform their own situations, particularly Michael O'Hara who has risen from a working-class background to being a major landowner and an aspiring politician. They encourage others to behave differently, such as when Higgins eggs on Anson’s unhappy wife, Olivia, in considering an affair with O'Hara: “Well, you can't do better, Ma'am. I hope it brings you happiness. You ought to have a man like that.” The family members who have lived in France, including débutante Sybil who has returned home from her schooling in France, have little sympathy for the conservative attitude of Anson and the older generation at Pentlands and show little desire to remain there.

Bromfield served in the First World War with the American Field Service and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. He was enamoured with France during his service there and returned there in 1925 (the intention was a family vacation but they remained there for years). The writing of Early Autumn was begun in America and completed in France. The relationship between Sybil and a young Franco-American, Jean, had begun “when all Paris was celebrating the anniversary of the Armistice, and in the morning Sybil had gone with Thérése and Sabine [her cousin and her aunt] to lay a wreath beside the flame at the Arc de Triomphe (for the war was one of the unaccountable things about which Sabine chose to make a display of sentiment).”
Sybil is enraptured: “something in the sight of the uniform, or perhaps in the feel of the air, the sound of the military music, the echoes of the Marseillaise and the Sambre et Meuse, the sight of the soldiers in the street and the great Arc with the flame burning there... something in the feel of Paris, something which she loved passionately, had taken possession of her. It was something, which, gathering in that moment, had settled upon the strange young man who regarded her with such admiring eyes.” Jean, French by upbringing, though of New England ancestry, views America as a pioneer might. He contemplates “the plans he had for adjusting himself in this vigorous country. To discover it now, at the age of 25, was an exciting experience. He was beginning to understand those young Americans he had encountered occasionally in Europe (like his cousin Fergus Tolliver, who died in the war), who seemed so alive, so filled with a reckless sense of adventure... young men irresistible in such an old, tired world, because Nature itself was on their side.”

The Informer

Liam O'Flaherty served with the Irish Guards on the Western Front and was seriously wounded at Langemarck in 1917. Following the war, he travelled widely and became involved in the Communist movement while in the United States. When he returned to Ireland in 1921, he participated in Marxist revolutionary activity and his 1925 novel The Informer focuses more on Marxist militancy than on separatism.

The two central characters, Gypo Nolan and Frankie Mc Phillip, former members of the Revolutionary Organisation. The leadership of the organisation investigate the death of Mc Phillip in a police raid and seek to prove that Nolan was the informer. Nolan fluctuates between drunken stupor and paranoia.

There is little reference to the First World War in the novel. In one scene, an old woman speaks of her admiration for Gypo: "I wish I had a son like ye. Me own Jimmy, Lord have Mercy on him, was killed in the big war. He was the boy that could bate the polis!" She clung to a memory of her son’s courage, not so much in warfare but in resisting authority: "I seen him wan night an' it took six o' them to pull him off a coal-cart an' he holdin' on to the horse's reins all the time with wan hand while he was fightin' them with th' other."

Whereas the prevailing attitude among the working-class people of Dublin was that violence was necessary, Mary, Frankie’s sister, has come to a different perspective: "Before, when I used to read in the papers about a man being shot [in a punishment killing], I used to think it was right but it's a different thing when a man you know does a thing like that. Frankie killed a man too, Lord Have Mercy on him. Oh God, have pity on us all. Why can't we have peace? Why must we be killing one another? Why?"

This Side of Paradise

I have spent the first week of the project reading This Side of Paradise, the debut novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was published in 1920 and it is remarkable to think of such a young man (he was born on 24 September 1896) writing such an impressive and successful novel.

Fitzgerald effectively dropped out of university in November 1917 to take up a commission as a second lieutenant in the infantry. He never got to serve in Europe but mentions in this largely autobiographical novel two men who did see active service and never returned: Kerry Holiday, who left university to enlist as a pilot in the Lafayette Escadrille in France, and Jesse Ferrenby. No doubt several of Fitzgerald’s friends were killed in the war. Some might well have become great writers!

The first mention of the war in this novel places the beginning of the conflict in the summer following the freshman year of the central character, Amory Blaine. It "failed to thrill or interest him", though "he hoped it would be long and bloody".






Later in the war, Amory was envious and admiring of his friend Kerry Holiday's decision to leave college and sail for France to join the international contingent of the French air force. He tells one of his mentors, Monsignor Thayer Darcy, that Kerry wanted him to join him in the adventure.Darcy advises him: "You wouldn't like to go... Well, you'd have to be very much more tired of life than I think you are." Amory admits "It just seemed an easy way out of everything — when I think of another useless, draggy year."

In the interlude chapter between Book One and Book Two, a letter from Darcy to Amory of January 1918 reflects on the impact the war is having on young men like Amory, who is stationed with the 171st Infantry at a port of embarkation. "This is the end of one thing: for better or worse you will never again be quite the Amory Blaine that I knew... your generation is growing hard, much harder than mine ever grew..." Perhaps this was the legacy of the war for young Americans: a hard resistance. In the concluding chapter, Amory argues passionately for the panacea of Socialism with a man who turns out to be the bereaved father of his friend, Jesse Ferrenby. "I'm restless. My whole generation is restless.... I'm in love with change."