Yesterday's Burdens

This novel, published in 1933, is a rambling account of the life of Henderson, a New York character with several autobiographical features, including his date of birth. It's narrated by a writer who is trying to compose a novel about Henderson “in between bouts of book reviewing”. Through this device, the author describes his actual situation (a writer who has recently retreated from the city to the countryside) and his alter ego (the man he might have become were he to have stayed in New York). As Malcolm Cowley puts it in an afterword, “Coates is abolishing part of himself while hoping... to be reborn into a different future.”

The author, Robert Coates (born 6 April 1897), grew up in New Haven, Connecticut and attended Yale. His studies were interrupted in 1918 by training in naval aviation but he did not serve overseas. Graduating in 1919, he moved to Paris in 1921 and spent five years there. There he associated with writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. On his return to America, his first novel was published. He wrote for many years as an art critic for The New Yorker.

One of the autobiographical elements of this novel is the central character Henderson’s military service —
“He was a student in naval aviation, during the war.” Coates describes aspects of Henderson’s training at the naval air station at Bay Shore on Long Island (the same place that Coates trained):
“Then there had been the marching here and there to various classes in gunnery, radio, navigation (with always the throb of motors in the dome of the sky and high overhead those wings glinting in the sun. There had been a day or two of sitting waiting in the shade beside the squadron hut on the beach — the shade hot from the sand-glow and the air stinging with the smell of salt and grease and gasoline — while one by one his companions had their turn in the air.” Henderson’s own turn in the cockpit almost ends in disaster:
“It was not till they had landed that Henderson learned what his error had been. In turning the control wheel as one would that of an automobile, he had canted the plane's wings down toward the left but he had failed to kick his rudder bar over at the same time and thus complete the proper manoeuvre for a left turn. More, like most beginners, he had pulled back the wheel as he turned it, thus elevating the nose of the plane and forcing it into a stall. The result had been that it had fallen off to the left and into a tailspin, from which Ensign Weil, by the most expert management, had rescued it only just in time.”
Whether Coates himself experienced such a terrifying introduction to flight is unclear but it seems likely that this was an actual incident when he was at Bay Shore. It reminds me of the high rate of training casualties described in Warbirds, which I read last year.