Faulkner, Aviation, and Modern War by Michael Zeitlin (review)

Reviewed by: Faulkner, Aviation, and Modern War by Michael Zeitlin Donald M. Kartiganer Review of Faulkner, Aviation, and Modern War by Michael Zeitlin For many Faulkner critics, including some of his earliest and most admiring, the story of Faulkner’s service in World War I as an RAF cadet in training, then a combat fighter-pilot seriously wounded in two plane crashes in France, was initially accepted as fact. Months of training in Canada followed by nearly fatal combat abroad was hardly unique in a war in which the deaths and injuries suffered by fighter-pilots were not only notoriously high, but often reported in bold-faced headlines in the news media. However, as more information gradually surfaced (much of it after his death), it became clear that Faulkner’s tales of combat were pure fabrication. What once had been regarded as an entertaining, even humorous, and, since he had managed to survive, a resourceful, even oddly heroic war history—improbable but not impossible—became a puzzling, if not appalling, act of willful deception. Especially disturbing was that Faulkner continued to imply, if not firmly claim, the veracity of that history well after he had become recognized as a major writer, especially by other writers in the United States and abroad. Nevertheless, with the exception of a couple of quite private admissions to individuals, he never made public the fact that the whole story was completely untrue.1 Michael Zeitlin’s extraordinary study is an attempt to get at the multilayered meaning of Faulkner and flight as it evolved during the First World War and the decades following. He lays out in elaborate detail Faulkner’s [End Page 95] service as a twenty-one-year-old cadet, the roughly seven months of enlistment, training, and demobilization from the RAF, far more fully than all earlier attempts. He quotes liberally from Faulkner’s letters home to his parents during this period, marked by an almost boyish enthusiasm for the technical training and patient acceptance of what Zeitlin describes as RAF “daily routine”: “physical conditioning, military drill, and menial work in the barracks.” Zeitlin’s focus, like Faulkner’s, is on the rigorous curriculum: “The work here is very interesting. I wish they allowed us to go into detail about it. We have all sorts of engines, map reading, wireless, artillery observation.” Daily classroom hours are spent, for example, sitting on benches looking down on projected maps “built to represent the earth at a height of 5000 feet, everything complete, with tiny electric bulbs to represent shell bursts. We pin point them and send the location . . . by wireless to the instructor, who replies by a series of white strips of cloth laid upon the floor. It is going to be very interesting, and if you find it interesting, you never have any trouble in passing it” (“passing” refers to the final exams, which will partially determine the cadets’ rank after completing training). Outside the classroom there are long days of marching—“We average ten miles per day . . . for the last six days, not counting 2 ½ drill in the morning”—observing planes in flight at Leaside Airport, and, on one occasion, coming into hands-on contact for the first time with an airplane: “we went out to flying camp yesterday afternoon,” Faulkner writes his parents September 25 (Faulkner’s twenty-first birthday), 1918, “and I learned how to crank an aero motor by swinging the propeller. I was rather surprised when I did it. It’s rather scary though, the thing goes off with such a roar. Saw lots of flying, as yesterday was very clear, a great flying day.” The most intriguing aspect of Zeitlin’s critical approach is his abundant quotation and his fascinating use of it as an account of Writing and Reading as a dynamic merging of seemingly distinctive acts of mind. Faulkner, Aviation, and Modern War comes to us as if it were born of quotation, over three-hundred citations from roughly two-hundred and thirty writers, ranging from generous paragraphs to two or three-word phrases. Our overall sense, despite the very different purposes and contexts at work in such an accumulation, is not so much...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.