Flights of Passage: Reflections of a World War II Aviator (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 339 Samuel Hynes, Flights of Passage: Reflections of a World War II Aviator. Frederic C. Beil and Naval Institute Press. 270 pp. $16.95. There can't be many marine bomber pilots who go on to become eminent literary scholars. Having distinguished himself in both his military and his literary careers, Samuel Hynes has written a memoir of World War II that shows how slight literature 's influence has been compared to the impact of war. I met Hynes at the height of the Vietnam War when I was a graduate student at Northwestern University and he was a professor of modern British literature. In the explosive antiwar atmosphere on campus at that time, rumors that Hynes had been a bomber pilot had an unexpected effect: they made him glamorous. He looked too young to have been in our fathers' war, so we wrongly guessed that he had been in the Korean War. He never mentioned his wartime experiences. In Flights of Passage: Reflections of a World War II Aviator Hynes records what he would not dissipate in casual conversation. In contrast to the antiwar stance of most highbrow literature since World War I, this book endorses the values of popular culture modernism opposed. His story may be a "life," but it is not confessional; it is almost impersonal. Despite his willingness to deal with subjects like sexual initiation, decorum confines his frankness to what others also experienced. The result, despite personal data, is a collective autobiography. Only the form of the narrative reflects the sensibility of his postwar years; his memories are entirely of their time. Whether a narrative purports to be fiction or nonfiction , the speaker's credibility is a function of rhetoric. Hynes establishes his character through a tone that is modest, generous, and scrupulous in its precision. He triangulates his memories in terms of what he expected to feel, what he actually felt, and what he knows now. Passages of introspection where he discriminates fear from daring, expectation from experience, develop a falling cadence from a series of phrases that refine his point. He wonders, "What would it be like, flying from a Pacific island, diving on a real target, being shot at, shooting back? It wasn't exactly fear that I felt, not fear of any specific thing, not death or wounds or even being a coward; it was vaguer than that, an emptiness at the center, a void, a drawn breath in a dark room." Hynes uses the theme of the "Test" to shape his story. Enlisting in the Marines at nineteen, after only a year at college, he really expected the marines to make him a man. The Test was reduced to tests—becoming a flyer, getting married, going overseas , seeing combat: "I couldn't conceive how it would feel to be at fifteen thousand feet, above a ship or an island, and then to dive through the antiaircraft fire toward the target, and drop and pull away. But I knew it would be a great thing, and that it would make me different." Lyric passages evoking the sensations of learning to fly will persuade readers that becoming a pilot did make him different. An Auden scholar, Hynes knows that the airman of World War I was the hero boys coming of age in the 1930s venerated. The airman is Auden's truly strong man, the man who has passed the Test. For Hynes too, becoming a pilot meant passing the tests of proficiency, courage, sexual performance, and survival that constitute the bildungsroman . But while Auden and most serious writers of the period between the wars were skeptical about the validity of such tests, Hynes continues to respect them. He portrays wartime missions as the culmination of his expectations. The mature man remembering the twenty-year-old still views his return from war as a descent to "mortality ." 340 biography Vol. 12, No. 4 Although literary models shape Hynes's narrative, formative myths of popular culture are stronger than adult habits of literary discrimination. Believing his flight instructors "had passed the Test," he writes, "All the excitement that I had gotten from movies and stories hung about these men, and made the...