Flight to Arras – The philosophical view of the fighter pilot Saint-Exupéry

Flight to Arras (Pilote de guerre) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was first published in early 1942. It was promptly banned by the Vichy government, which won’t surprise the informed reader the least little bit.

There are first hand accounts of war that slide effortlessly into the territory of action and suspense. Those are interesting in their own specific way. And then there are these kinds of narratives, the ones that bypass all the blood and honour and go straight for the more philosophical heart of the matter. Saint-Exupéry does that.

In 1940 Saint-Exupéry and his crew are sent on a reconnaissance mission over Nazi-occupied France from Orly to Arras. It is very clear that they are not expected to survive. Somehow, the aircraft managed to slip through, though, evading ground to air fire and being chased by enemy planes and being shot at by his own. Saint-Exupéry gives this deeply passionate and philosophical account of the action, but more than that, it is a meditation on the nature of morality and duty, the human condition and the conditions of war.

He tells of his childhood in France, of a thousand connecting thoughts, the meditation on his plane, his circumstance, the reasons why and it isn’t an action hero’s telling. It is however something like a glimpse into the inner workings of the mind of a man who has basically been sent on a suicide-mission that is utterly futile. How does one handle that? How do you justify following orders in those circumstance? And what does that mean?

“I have gone to war to preserve the quality of a glowing light, even more than to save the food of our bodies. I have gone to war for the distinctive radiance into which bread is transfigured in the homes of my countrymen. What moves me above all as I gaze at this discreet child is the insubstantial cortex around her. The ineffable structure within the features of her face. The poem read upon the page, and not the page itself.” (Saint-Exupéry, p. 106)

It seems incongruous that a soldier can write about his experience of war like this, but there is something so deeply and tangibly human about it that much of what Saint-Exupéry writes becomes meditations on humanity, and the human condition, rather than just our warlike qualities.

He never forgets that no matter how war tries to lump all individuals together into faceless crowds and masses, at the heart of it all is each individual and each individual’s choice of action. In that respect this is a good example of a subtle dissertation on the illusion of free will.

All that not withstanding, you have to be in the right mood for a book like this, no matter how short it is. If it catches you on an off day it’s easily too dense and textured to seduce you into wanting to take that road, the inland overland philosophical and half-in-the-clouds road. The author has a deep mortality salience that permeates every line.

“I understand the meaning of humility. It is not self-denigration. It is the very principle of action. If, intending to absolve myself, I use fate as an excuse for my misfortunes, I subject myself to fate. If I excuse them by treason, I subject myself to treason. But if I accept responsibility for the offence, I affirm my power as a man. I can act to influence that of which I am a part. I am a constitutional element of the community of mankind.” (Saint-Exupéry, 113)

What a curious way to talk about war. And that is why this book is so utterly fascinating.

MULE

No Country for Old Men – Cormac McCarthy at his terse best

No Country for Old Men (2005) by Cormac McCarthy stars off in medias res.

When Llwewllyn Moss is out hunting antelope near the Rio Grande he stumbles into the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. There is one man still barely alive who asks Moss for water. Moss does not have any. He searches the vehicles at the scene and finds heroin in one of them and a whole armoury’s worth of weapons. Off on a hill a little way away there is one more man, dead now, sitting there with a case full of money. Moss takes the money and goes back to his wife Carla Jean. During the night he suddenly gets an attack of conscience and thinks of the dying man’s request for water. He goes back to the site of the drug deal. That’s where things start going pear-shaped.

There are three main players in this novel. Llewellyn Moss, a Vietnam veteran, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, also a veteran, but from a different war (World War II) and Anton Chigurh, a hitman.

Each of these men represent a different philosophical standpoint and a different set of values. Moss is a practical tactician, a man who has served in Vietnam as a sniper and he is opportunistic enough to take the drug money when he finds it, knowing all the while that it might end up being a very bad decision. Ed Tom, the Sheriff, has the perspective of a man that lived through the second world war and did reprehensible things during combat that still haunt him. He has seen the direction of the development of society and he finds it increasingly difficult to reconcile what he remembers from his youth with the reality he finds himself living in. His saving grace seems to be the undying love between him and his wife, that is where he finds his redemption and balm. Chigurh is a consummate sociopath, which means he has a deeply philosophical streak that does not stop him in the least from deciding a man’s fate (or a woman’s, for that matter) with a coin toss. There is no sense that he has a conscience in a conventional sense, but he has a code of conduct in a manner of speaking. Once he has accepted an assignment, there is nothing he won’t do to finish the job.

There are also levels of language in this triptych that reflect and enhance what goes on in the chain of events. The passages concerning Moss and Chigurh are mostly coolly descriptive and given in the third person. Dialogue is spare and very focused. McCarthy has an ear for the dialect of the Texas-region and shows a blatant disregard for punctuation and typical dialogue format that gives a heightened feeling of immediacy. The way the action is described makes this bare bones approach unrelenting and somehow makes the bloody violence of it worse.

I’ll give an example. This is the description of Moss trying to outrun pursuers in the desert.

“It was a long trek and he was still some two hundred yards from the river when he heard the truck. A raw gray light was breaking over the hills. When he looked back he could see the dust against the new skyline. Still the better part of a mile away. In the dawn quiet the sound of it no more sinister than a boat on a lake. Then he heard it downshift. He pulled the .45 from his belt so that he wouldn’t lose it and set out at a dead run. When he looked back again it had closed a good part of the distance.” (McCarthy, p. 31).

Chigurh brings all those horror movie Terminator machine killers to mind in his focus. He just keeps coming, no matter how his victims plead or fight back.

Sheriff Bell is given a reflective, almost poetic first person voice that talks calmly to the reader about his experiences and impressions.
This is what Bell’s voice sounds like;

“My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how an tell the truth. He said there was nothing to set a man’s mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not having to decide who you were. And if you done something wrong just stand up and say you done it and say you’re sorry and get on with it. Dont haul stuff around with you. I guess that all sounds pretty simple today. Even to me. All the more reason to think about it. He didn’t say a lot so I tend to remember what he did say.” (McCarthy, p. 249).

These literary techniques are dovetailed into each other seamlessly and with spare grace.

I reflected on quality of relentlessness in McCarthy’s novels The Road and Blood Meridian as well, the way lean, descriptive prose creates a forward momentum within the text itself as well as for me as a reader. It is probably a matter of me being unusually susceptible to this particular style, but for some reason the very sparseness makes the violence more gruesome for me personally, letting me use my imagination to fill in all that has not been said. I can look at what McCarthy does and take a step back and wonder how it is even possible that the effect can be as devastating as it is. It is a clear case of less being more.

The title for this novel is borrowed from William Butler Yeats poem ”Sailing to Byzanthium”, and there is some kind of weird gegenshein effect between the poem in lines like old men being like “a tattered coat upon a stick” in relation to the description of the old man Sheriff Bell visits and tells of his exploits in WWII.

Lean and terse though the prose might be, that does not mean it is in any way simple, or simplistic. There is no real nostalgia, no moral high ground, no easy solutions. I like the fact that something this terse can pack such a considerable punch and it really does something spectacular for those of us who can stand it.

Mule

Wind, Sand and Stars by Saint-Exupéry

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944) is perhaps best known to readers for his novella Le Petit Prince a children’s’ story which has been very widely translated.

He was also an aviator, flying for the pioneering airline Latécoère which later became Aéropostale. They flew mail across the Sahara and the Andes. Terre des hommes or Wind, Sand and Stars is his memoir of these flights, and above all the crash he experienced in the Libyan Sahara desert.

Saint-Exupéry begins by talking of himself as a young and ambitious man wanting to be just like the veteran aviators who regularly survived their mail runs. This was not a given at the time, the survival part. Planes were unreliable, to put things mildly, the odds were certainly not favourable and the territory they flew across was (and still is) very harsh and dangerous.

Saint-Exupéry’s language is wildly romantic and poetic, transforming the simple act of flying into a parable of life itself. It is obvious to the reader how much he loves what he does, how much it is a vocation. I give a short example of the style here:

The monotonous landscape that wearies the passenger is different from the start for the crew, for whom the massing cloud on the horizon is not a backdrop: it will affect their physical being, it will challenge them with problems. They are aware of it already, measuring it, forming a bond of language with it. There is a peak ahead, still distant: what kind of face will it show? In the moonlight it will be a useful landmark. But if the pilot is flying blind, having trouble in correcting his drift and unsure of his position, that peak will change into a bomb and fill the entire night with its menace, just as a single submerged mine, drifting at the will of the current, vitiates the whole ocean. (Saint-Exupéry, p.17)

It is easy to see that flying is a lifestyle, a series of choices, a moral parable, as well as work.

You sort of have to allow the poetic quality of the language to wash over you and carry you with it, this is prose poetry when wrought, hammered and beaten until its reached the master craftsman’s level of perfection. It’s a very different kind of first hand account of pioneering and flying, heavily mixed with philosophy and thoughts about life in general.

This slim little volume was first published in 1939 and you might think that there would be a greater sense of the passage of time, what with the primitive state of the aircrafts and the huge leaps technology has taken since. But the thing is, when an author finds the parallels that deal more with the human condition than with just some random piece of technology, the text itself survives the passage of time.

When you read a passage like the following one you can easily see how this applies to the internet, or modern communication technology in general:

Everything has changed so rapidly around us: human relationships, working conditions, social customs. Our very psychology has been rocked on its most intimate foundations. The words denoting separation, absence, distance and return remain the same, but the ideas reflect a different reality. To grasp the world of today we are using a language made for the world of yesterday. (Saint-Exupéry p. 30)

In a way there is a sense of “the more things change, the more they stay the same”, and still there is a slightly nostalgic tint to the text, a naiveté in the description of the customs of the nomadic tribes of the desert, which the author refers to as “Moors”, but there is understanding and a deep respect there as well, for a people who can survive the harshest conditions of life.

I could quote endlessly from this text, which is a really good sign. I don’t get that feeling a lot. This is very much and anti-war text – and a spectacularly good one, from someone who has been in the thick of it and not just watching from the sidelines.

I’ll indulge in one more quote to show you what I mean.

All of us, in ways more or less obscure, feel the need to be born. But there are deceptive solutions. You can certainly bring men to life by putting them in uniform. They will sing their war psalms and break bread together as comrades. They will have found what they are seeking, a taste of universality. But of the bread they are given they will die. (Saint-Exupéry p. 113)

This is not a book to be rushed through. You could finish it off in no time, but the words have density and substance and sink like stones dropped in a lake, thoughts forming like rings on the surface, and you should let them.

Mule

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy – Violence to the cold extreme

Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian first published in 1985 is probably one of the most violent books I’ve ever read – and that’s saying something. Violence is sort of the theme here, and not in any way that makes you feel easy about the subject. This is not a moral parable that will give you easy outs by defining the areas of right and wrong through the use of dialectic morality. This is more the kind of tale that lays bare the most sordid aspects of human nature without giving you any handles and you’ll just have to make up your own mind about it.

See, now, the warlike nature of man – that is what we’re dealing with here and no matter how much we as a species propound that we want peace, we just never seem to get there, do we? That’s what this is all about.

It’s set along the borderland between the US and Mexico in 1849-1850 and we’re riding with the Glanton gang who are taking scalps and massacring Indians. This is not Manifest Destiny in any pretty Laura Ingalls kind of way. This is dirty and bloody and unnecessarily cruel in every single manner you can imagine. What makes it worse is the cool and detached way the author goes about his business.

The main protagonist is The Kid, a young man who leaves his home in Tennessee and gets signed up by Captain White to ride with the gang. He takes the bloodiness of the business in stride as far as we as readers can tell, and only ever runs contrary to expectations when his own physical safety is in question.

Set against all this is the Judge, a huge towering giant of a man with intellectual capital and a strain of mysticism and otherworldliness about him, not only in appearance, but in reasoning as well.

Here’s the logic of the thing, given the form of dialogue between The Judge and a man called Brown.

“What is my trade?
War. War is your trade. Is it not?
And it ain’t yours?
Mine too. Very much so.
What about all them notebooks and bones and stuff?
All other trades are contained in that of war.
Is that why war endures?
No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.
That’s your notion.
The judge smiled.” (Blood Meridian, p. 249)

This novel has something in common with Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. Actually, it probably has a lot in common with it. The Judge is like Kurtz, The Kid like Marlowe. And there is much, much more to it than that.

The language of it is beautiful and uses so many archaisms and rare words that you find yourself reading slowly to catch it all.

It also has the cool inexorable quality that I recognize from McCarthy’s The Road. It never lets up, not even for a second. Nothing comes to any good and even the end leaves you with a sickening reeling feeling in your stomach, being open enough that you can use your own imagination on the horror of it.

It gives violence in relentless and impartial detail and shows us everything we don’t want to see. It never judges, or offers a moral high ground. It also describes the landscape in a way unlike anything I’ve seen before. It’s just fascinating and deeply unsettling, every aspect of it – and like all the best books it makes you work hard for any understanding.

Mule

Michael Herr “Dispatches” – The Vietnam War

Michael Herr’s Dispatches was first published in 1977 and is a non-fictional book.

There are all kinds of first hand accounts of war. I’ve read quite a few, probably more than I should have at an age when most people were still trying to work through the dolled up teenage literature so heavily prevalent. I went straight to Eric Maria Remarque, Sven Hassel and suchlike.
The Vietnam war has seeped down deep into the mythology of America that it is subjected to a little cross cultural bleeding. But the thing is, there haven’t been many books like Michael Herr’s Dispatches to say anything about the experience itself.
I do the movie thing too, so it’s easier for me to find references in that arena. But there’s a lot of tricky territory to navigate and it’s easy for it to disintegrate into a moral tale like Oliver Stone’s Platoon, or a convenient backdrop the way it’s used in a great many bland American action movies.
There is a brilliant jewel of a parallel here in a totally different style, though, and that’s Bao Ninh’s novel The Sorrow of War (1994). But that’s a story for a different time.
Herr’s perspective is that of the perpetual outsider, because he is a journalist. That being said he is in it with the soldiers because he is a battle field journalist. He’s there in the mud and jungle and in the strange highlands alongside the soldiers seeing what they see, but one step removed from them, because he isn’t actually fighting. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t get shot at, though.
But he is trained at observing and that makes this book more immediate. He has an uncanny ability to keep the bigger picture in mind, what’s being said by the generals and press officers as well as what’s going on in the field. He offers a million observations of minutiae like the gunner in a helicopter that asks him to cover up the corpses they’re riding with when the tarp comes loose, or random comments and little throw-away things, like the patter of the soldiers trying to distance themselves or the things they’ve written on their helmets and flak jackets. “A sucking chest wound is natures way of telling you you’ve been in a fire fight”, that kind of thing.
It takes a while to figure it out, because the tone is seductive, but this is actually literature. It might as well be fictional, it is written with that kind of sensibility. It doesn’t pretend to be a truthful account of what happened while Herr was “in country”. It records the experience and gives the reader a good sense of what it was like, of how these event actually felt for someone who was there.
The movie reference isn’t idle on my part, Herr does that himself too, saying those that were there knew what movie they were in. It’s this kind of awareness of cultural pattern that’s laid down over all of it as a template that makes this book so much a warrior poet retelling on par with Sassoon or Remarque. It doesn’t matter if Herr is describing the way Saigon feels or the jungle or the highlands, or his fellow journalists or the grunts.

The telescoping eye of the author gives you glimpses and catches and explanations as well as just remembrances that enhance and enrich the descriptions. There’s very little glory in it all, but there is a kind of beauty none the less, and that makes it all the more compelling and horrific. Which is just the way you want this kind of narrative to be really, at least to my mind.

Mule

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier – Civil War Odysseus

Charles Frazier 1997 novel tells the story of Ada Monroe and Inman during the American Civil War. This is a massively well researched novel. Not only does Frazier work around the American Civil War (1861-65) like he knows the terrain, he also includes the every day tools, implements and attitudes of the period into every line of prose.

I quite often find that period pieces have a tendency to be so much in love with their own project that they forget to tell a story, rather focusing on the detail. I don’t have that kind of interest in history, sadly. I guess I should, but to coin a phrase it all seems like a seedy succession of robber baron scumbags to me.

Now, that being said, when it is as well done as it is here it just deepens and textures the story imbuing it with so much life and blood that it becomes a geniune delight to read.

Taking up the tradition of alternating chapters we follow Inman on his journey home from a war hospital to Cold Mountain and Ada’s development from a lady of leisure to a hard working farm owner.

Inman has had enough of killing and after taking a wound to the neck he finally just deserts intending to go back home and propose to Ada, the minister’s daughter. On his journey he meets good people and bad and generally has a hard time of it. Every person he meets gets to tell their story, or involve him in their lives in some way and it is easy to make the parallell with Odysseus and Penelope. Inman, to my mind, displays every characteristic of battle fatigue. He is sick of killing and wants to be left to lead a simpler life, hoping against all hope that he can be put back together.

Ada, on the other hand, has a different challenge to contend with. Her father dies, leaving her alone and basically penniless. He had taken up residense in Black Cove at a farm being given the recommendation from a doctor that it sould be good for his lungs. The farm has never been intended as a working farm. He has a deep fascination with Emerson and that naturally leads to some more idyllic and scenic notions of what a farm should be. Once the money runs out and Ada is basically facing starvation she is lucky enough to have a young girl named Ruby come and work with her. Ruby’s story is also told and it is an equally fascinating one. She has grown up fending for herself in the woods since her father is a useless layabout and drinker named Stobrod.

The richly layered text is not only descriptive and beautifully crafted, it takes its metaphores and imagery from the context. Inman at one point fights off three men intending to beat him down with a scythe. He reflects on how good it feel to hold a scythe again and working with it, moving at the mens’ legs. When it breaks he beats at them with just the snath. A little thing like that is just indicative of how deep inside this world, this character’s head we get to go as readers.

It is all together too simple and just plain wrong to think this is just a love story, even if Ada is the motor that gets Inman moving. There is so much more to draw out of this text, like an understanding of how hard life actually is when working on a farm where every aspect of life is gruelling work. Ada is so inept she does not even know how to cook for herself, make butter or kill a chicken. Ruby teaches her by example how to lean in to the burdon.

Each character has an arch and when Ada and Inman finally do meet up they are two very different people from what they were when they parted. And there is no story book ending to this kind of tale. Which is to say that Fazier does not take the easy way out. Their meeting is brought about by violence, Ada has her gun cocked at Inman not recognising him and it is certainly not the home coming he was hoping for. Once they do recognise each other at least the gun gets lowered, but it is still a stark contrast to the dreams they’ve both had. And I like that. I like the fact that this could have been a big Hollywood moment with a sweaping violin score in the background, but instead it is a case of two wounded animals circling each other cautiously.

There really is a bit of everything in this novel. Sex, blood, violence, war, coming of age stories, home guard and fiddle music. Philosophy and religion figure too, just like the intertextual nods to everything from Emerson to The Odyssey to the Bible to the lyrics of Wayfaring Stranger. Above and beyond it all we have the basic notion that you can never step into the same river twice, or go back home. I like the tone and texture of the novel. I like the scope and the richness. I like it so much I can actually read it more than once, and that doesn’t happen that often.

I think it has something to do with the fact that it operates on at least two levels at the same time. We have the big, sweaping tale of a homecoming and the minute details of every moment in between.

MULE

Michael Ondaatje – The English Patient – Deserts

The English Patient (1992) is probably the best known of Ondaatje’s novels, largely due to Anthony Mingella’s movie of the same title made in -96. There are always varying opinions about books made into film, ususally on the theme “the book is not like the film, is not enough like the film, is too much like the film” and I personally think this has to do with the idea that the movie and the book can be the same thing, which is of course physically impossible. Not only is the movie a collective effort, it is also a completely different medium – seems obvious when you set it in writing, doesn’t it? So why do people argue the point?

I believe it is because we hold the filmmaker up to our own imaginings and try to see how well they’ve managed to translate the cinematography of the thearte of our minds onto the big screen.  But I digress.

The English Patient is one of those novels that offer a variety of different interpretations depending on what you focus on. You can say that about most novels, true, but normally you have to work harder for it. In this case the question of identity comes to the fore right from the first page. Identity and nationality.

The patient, count Almásy, is actually Hungarian by birth but has during his work in the desert come to the conclusion that nationality does not really matter in the select company of desert explorers he keeps before the war. He falls in love with Catherine Clifton, the wife of Geoffrey Clifton, both of them British. Almásy finally winds up in an Italian villa with a Canadian thief by the name of Caravaggio, a nurse named Hana, also Canadian, and a Sikh sapper working for the British by the name of Kip (or actually – Kirpahl Singh).

The action travels from Cairo to Italy via the Desert and mentions the places alive in peoples memories, such as English gardens and the Canadian lakes. Kip talks of India, and late in the action mentions Hiroshima and Nagasaki, claiming the wise old fathers would not have done such a thing to the brown races of the world. Activate Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism here if you like.

Another aspect is the interpersonal relationships and all their inherent politics. Almáshy and Catherine have an extra marital affair that has devastating consequences, and not only for them personally. In the end it results in Almáshy helping Rommel across the desert. When Clifton tries for a murder/suicide to punish his wife and Almáshy for their betrayal Catherine is hurt badly and when Almáshy tries to go for help he is rejected by the British who regard any foreign national as a threat at this time. Almáshy gets help from the Germans instead on the condition that he guides them through the desert. Catherine is waiting for him in the Gelf Kebir, but she is long dead by the time he gets there. It is when he tries to fly out of the desert in an old plane that has laid buried in the sand for a long time that he catches fire and falls burning from the sky. Rescued and kept alive by a desert tribe he is finally brought in to hospital, claiming to no longer know his name. He becomes The English Patient, and the irony is not lost on him.

The other crucial realtionship in this novel is that between Hana and Kip – the Canadian nurse caring for Almáshy and the Indian Sikh solider trying to clear the area in Italy where the Villa San Girolamo is situated of mines. Hana falls in love with the Sikh and seems fascinated in part with his otherness, the colour of his skin, the sing-song of his dialect, his long dark hair and so on. Hana has been a nurse all through the war and is described as having suffered shell-shock, not so much from the action as from the death of her father. She and Kip negotiate a complicated territory between them. She is scarred by the war and her own personal tragedies, Kip seems to distance himself from personal realtionships from the sheer need of distance. He is a sapper, after all. Death is just a step away for him at all times.

If you go at this book as a parable of love and indentity there are many interesting observations to make. Relationships are messy at best and fail, but for very different reasons. The landscape Almáshy has chosen to live in is the desert. His deep fascination with it seems to rub off on his charater. Catherine misses her green English gardens and never seems at home in the harsh dryness. Kip brings with him the fecundity of India and Hana speaks of the snow and lakes of Canada. It is more than just description of where the characters were born. It speaks instead of everyhting they are, to themselves and others.

On the level of language Ondaatje never disappoints. He delivers one magical image after another, replete with a deep afterthought on what these images will conjure up. One of my favourites is the description of the sand dunes as the corrugated surface of the roof of a dog’s mouth. And the idea that the desert explorer who is reported to have written this sentence was liked by his peers for having the kind of inquisitive curiosity that would stick his hand in the maw of a dog. Double and tripple meanings to everything. Beautiful, caustic at times, opulent at times.

Caravaggio, who has worked as a spy for the allies during the war has been caught and tortured by Nazi soliders who cut off his thumbs. He has since then been addicted to morphine and at one point he is described as wearing the false limbs that morphia promises. A beautiful summation of how damaged he is, and how addicted and scarred.

Ondaatje has done his homework and managed to write intelligently about WWII without falling into the typical genre traps and clichées. He takes hold of his subject and pours everything into it until the text is so rich and layered you can read and re-read his novel and still find more substance to it. The way he treats stories and timelines and subject matter always offers more than any paltry review can do justice to. This is not just another period piece love story. It has far more to offer.

MULE