Penguins on Parade: Sagittarius Rising!

Some Penguin Classics don’t seem right until you actually see them in the traditional black and white. Last year’s Penguin Classic of Christy Mathewson’s Pitching in a Pinch was a fine example; it was lively, goofy relic of a book, ghostwritten to a fare-thee-well and then forgotten for decades except by the baseball faithful, but then Penguin dusted it off, gave it a new Introduction by baseball-novel millionaire Chad Harbach, and served it up as one of the oddest entrants in the ranks of what are, after all, still called “the finest books ever written.”

Pitching in a Pinch most certainly isn’t a great book. It isn’t even a good one, although it’s sure as hell an entertaining one. It has no literary value, not if we understand “literary value” as something possessed by folks like Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. And its oddity status isn’t singular – at least, not anymore: the latest offering from Penguin Classics is Cecil Leiws’s Sagittarius Rising, his rousing memoir of being a fighter pilot during the First World War. Lewis joined the Royal Flying Corps in 1915 at the age of 17, and over the course of the war he had dozens of brightly-colored adventures, both in the air (surveying battlefields and engaging in the dawn of aerial warfare) and on the ground, on leave (carousing it up with the blotted-out abandon that only people living on the edge of life and death can summon). This pretty new Penguin edition of his book sports an eye-catching cover illustration by Matthew Taylor and a wonderful Introduction by aviation historian Samuel Hynes, who’s full of sympathy for his subject:

Nostalgia for that bright lost time and those heroic virtues colors Lewis’s book. That’s not a fault: memory is not a clear glass pane but a stained-glass window, through which we see our pasts more vividly. It’s inevitable that a pilot, when his flying days are over, should look back with nostalgia to the time when he and flying were young, and the world was a better place. Lewis’s ability to do so, and at the same time to reflect on both the bright past and the darkening world after, gives his book a binocular vision that makes it the profound and moving experience that it is.

Hynes is especially good at pointing out how effectively Lewis conveys the wonder of being a pioneer of the air; it’s in these passages that Lewis, looking back, most effectively captures the inquisitive amazement he felt as one of the youngest people ever to look down on the face of the Earth from such heights:

At five thousand over the aerodome I turned north. The flat country stretched to the four horizons. To say it looked like a map was a cliche. There was a resemblance, of course, as between sitter and portrait; but the real thing had a bewildering amount of extra detail, a wealth of soft colour, of light and shade, that made it, at first, difficult to reconcile with its printed counterpart. Main roads, so importantly marked in red, turned out to be grey, unobtrusive, and hard to distinguish from other roads. Railways were not clear black lines, but winding threads, even less well defined than the roads. Woods were not patches of green, except in high summer; they were dark browns and blacks, merging, sometimes imperceptibly, into the ploughed fields which surrounded them.

The rough-shod nature of beginning aeronautics is a recurring theme throughout Sagittarius Rising, and that’s made this book a samizdat favorite among flyers (alongside titles like Ernest Gann’s Fate is the Hunter, a book whose debts to Lewis are obvious and affectionate). In the normal course of things, a reader might think that’s right where the book would stay, just as with Pitching in a Pinch: as a clubhouse favorite, a small-’c’ classic appreciated only by its own devotees. Even today, one hundred years after the start of WWI, any small-craft flyer will smile at Lewis’s many goofball anecdotes about making a machine go through the air:

But what in heaven had happened to this cloud-bank? It wasn’t level. It was tilted as steeply as the side of a house. The machine was all right – airspeed constant, bubble central – and yet here were the clouds defying all natural laws! I suppose it took me a second to realize that I was tilted, bubble or no bubble, that I had been flying for the best part of fifteen minutes at an angle of thirty degrees to the horizon – and had never noticed it! If I had tried to fly this way on purpose, it would have seemed impossible, at the best most unpleasant. The machine would have shuddered and slipped. I should have been in a dither after half a minute. If you’d told me any one could fly like it quite happily for ten minutes, I should have laughed. It shows what a little ignorance can do.

There’s surprisingly little ignorance in Sagittarius Rising, and there are generous helpings of the kind of phlegmy sidelong wisdom old warhorses can sometimes produce while reminiscing by the fire. We’re celebrating – if that’s the right word – the hundred-year anniversary of the opening of the First World War in 2014, and although the war spurred thousands of memoirs, it’s true that very few of them are as honest or entertaining as this one. That’s not justification enough to induct it into the ranks of the Penguin Classics to stand beside Flaubert and Trollope, but even so, it’s mighty good fun to spend time in airman Lewis’s company.