Ruined acquired spiritual as well as financial reverberations for Adrian Van Ness. As far as he could see, his father had almost ceased to exist. He was an adult version of a living dead man, haunting the house, the city. At dinner he seldom spoke about anything important. He talked about the weather—he could discourse on a late frost or an early snowfall for a full half hour—on who was marrying whom, or on who had just been admitted to the Union League Club or the Century. He seldom talked to Adrian; he seemed to think there was no hope of winning his respect or friendship.
Ruined became another reason why Adrian liked to read history books. The past made the dismal present easier to accept, if not to understand. History often made people unhappy. He imagined himself as the son of a baron who had supported King Richard II, or of a general who had fought for Napoleon. They too had been ruined by different kinds of catastrophes. What happened to their sons? The history books never mentioned the sons.
His mother pretended she was staying in England for his sake but Adrian suspected she was enjoying herself. She was much more cheerful in London than she was in New York. There she was always solemn. Her eyes had a dull, pained expression. It had to have something to do with his father. She was glad to stay away from him. Why?
Adrian lay in his icy bed thinking about these mysteries until the pain in his buttocks subsided. Should he get the butter and let the Rammer have him tomorrow? The boy in the bed next to him, Carlo Pontecorvo, whom everyone called Ponty, had obeyed the summons last week. He was the son of an Italian nobleman who was a passionate admirer of England. Ponty had cried all night and told Adrian there was blood in the toilet bowl when he shit. Maybe it was better to be one of the living dead. He would be like his father. Ruined.
The next night, Adrian came back from the dining hall without the butter. He was consigned to the living dead. On the way to dinner the following day, Ponty whispered he had done the right thing. Someone ratted and Ponty got fifty strokes of the paddle for speaking to a living dead man.
Day after day, Adrian went to class and ate in the dining hall and studied in study hall and went to bed without speaking to anyone. At first he did not mind. He felt close to his father. It was almost as good as getting a letter from him. His father never wrote to him. His mother wrote almost every day, telling him about the war between Turkey and Bulgaria and the wild protests of the suffragettes, women who wanted the right to vote and threatened to blow up Parliament if they did not get it. She kept him up to date on what their friends were doing. Peter Tillotson had graduated from Sandhurst, the British West Point and joined the newly formed Royal Flying Corps to become a pilot.
One day in the spring of 1912 Adrian was walking across the school’s inner quadrangle. Ponty strode toward him. Suddenly Adrian wanted to say hello to him. He wanted Ponty to answer him. Both lonely outsiders, they had naturally gravitated to each other. Ponty used to make Adrian laugh. He did funny imitations of their fat headmaster, Mr. Deakwell. When Ponty passed him without even letting his eyes flicker toward Adrian, it hurt in a new way deep inside. It was a pain worse than the paddle.
Even stranger things began happening inside Adrian as he continued walking across the quadrangle. Something almost as big as Louis Bleriot’s monoplane began doing loops inside him. He felt hot and cold at the same time. His heart pounded and he thought he was going to faint. When it did not stop he thought he was going to die.
When the looping finally stopped Adrian felt so tired he went to bed. He did not go to supper and he did not get up for class the next day. He lay in bed and listened to the rain falling outside. Ruined ruined ruined it said with every drop. It was so sad. He wept for himself and his father. Ruined filled the whole world with fog and drizzle and mist.
After a while Adrian lost track of time. He vaguely remembered being hot and thirsty and hungry and being carried from the dormitory through the rain to another part of the school. The next comprehensible thing he heard was a man’s hoarse voice.
“A living dead man? I don’t understand. Is it some sort of American expression?”
Adrian was in the infirmary. The headmaster, Augustine Deakwell, was standing on the right side of his bed. He was very fat and wore sideburns, big white puffs of hair on both cheeks.
“It’s a form of coventry, Mr. Deakwell. The senior boys invoke it for various reasons.
That was Mr. Goggins, the young master who was in charge of the third form. He was on the left side of Adrian’s bed. He had big teeth and a stiff brush mustache. He had brought Adrian to the infirmary when he found him lying in his dormitory bed, sobbing.
“Hah? What’s he done? Ratted on someone?” the headmaster asked.
“I think it’s a good deal more malicious, Mr. Deakwell.”
“If what Goggins tells me is true, Deakwell, you’ve got a first-class scandal on your hands.”
It was his mother’s friend, Geoffrey Tillotson. He loomed at the foot of Adrian’s bed, scowling at the headmaster. His cheeks seemed pinker than usual, his jowls more formidable. He was wearing a black suit and a gray vest and gray tie with a large pearl stickpin in the center of it. His black derby was perfectly straight on his large head.
“If my son Peter wasn’t a graduate, I’d have your head on a platter by next Monday, Deakwell. I leave it to you to straighten things swiftly—and mercilessly. In the meantime, I’ll take this lad to his mother.”
On the train, Tillotson bought Adrian a roast beef sandwich and a mug of cocoa. He told him he was proud of him for defying the sixth formers and becoming a living dead man. He said he was very sorry for what had happened and he hoped it would not make him dislike England. It was the fault of a few boys who misused their power as sixth formers. They forgot it was their responsibility to teach second and third formers the traditions of Anson, to make them proud of the famous men who had graduated from it.
“Every so often in all sorts of places, from schools to Parliament, rotters get into power,” Tillotson said. “Eventually some brave fellows stand up to them and put things right.”
“Like the Reform Acts,” Adrian said. He had read about this great struggle for democracy in Macaulay’s History of England.
“Exactly.”
For the rest of the trip Tillotson talked about airplanes. He said his son Peter was becoming a very good pilot. An Englishman named de Havilland was building planes that were better than the ones the French made. Even better than the ones made by the Wrights, the Americans who had invented the machine. He gave Adrian a book full of photographs of planes at an air show outside Paris.
After a week with his mother, Adrian returned to Anson with Geoffrey Tillotson. On the train Tillotson assured him matters had been “put right.” Remembering St. Edmund’s, Adrian was not so sure. He still felt very sad.
In the quadrangle, Adrian encountered Ponty, who gave him a broad smile and said: “’Allo, Van Ness. Glad you’ve come back.”
That night Mr. Goggins had Adrian and Ponty and a half-dozen other third formers to dinner in his rooms. He talked about things having “gone wrong” but would be “ripping” now, he was sure of it. He said he hoped they would all try to be more friendly to their American guest, who had proved himself a “brave fellow.”
“Bravissimo!” Ponty said. The other boys rapped their tea mugs on the table and said, “Hear, hear.”
The next day, something even more remarkable happened. A biplane zoomed low over the school and climbed high into the sky to do a series of spectacular dives and banks. The pilot landed on the north playing field and the entire student body rushed there for a close look at the machine. The pilot climbed out and everyone gasped. It was Peter Tillotson, who had graduated two years ago.
“Where’s my friend Van Ness?” Peter asked.
Adrian was shoved forward by wide-eyed third formers. “Get in,” Peter said in his rough way.
Adrian climbed into the front seat and Peter buckled a thick belt around his waist. He asked Mr. Goggins to spin the propel
ler. In a moment they were bouncing down the playing field toward a line of trees in the distance. “Hang on!” Peter shouted, and they cleared the trees by a foot.
Aloft, Adrian looked down on the school and marveled at the way it was dwindling, exactly the way Shakespeare had described the men and boats below the cliffs at Dover in the scene where Lear went mad. Everyone was mouse-size and the buildings looked more and more like toys. The sadness started to fall away from him. He began to feel proud and free and happy.
“How do you like it?” Peter shouted above the roaring motor.
“Ripping!” Adrian shouted.
“This is only the third time I’ve been up alone. Soloing, they call it. You can get killed with no warning but it’s worth it. Hang on, we’ll try a loop.”
He pointed the nose of the plane toward the sky and climbed straight up. Instead of flipping over, they hung there for a second, then fell off to the right in a screaming dive. “Afraid I’ve got to practice that,” Peter said, after they pulled out.
They made a rather bumpy landing. The entire student body swarmed around them again. “I’ve only got time for one more ride. Who will it be, Adrian?”
“Ponty,” Adrian said.
Peter took him up and this time completed a loop. Ponty said it was the most remarkable sensation of his life. He vowed to learn to fly as soon as possible.
From living dead man, Adrian soared to leader of the third form. No more was heard of Von Ness, son of the German spy. The next two months were the happiest of his life.
One afternoon in mid-May, as Adrian sat in the library reading about the Battle of Waterloo, Ponty tapped him on the shoulder. “The head wants you, Van.” He puffed his cheeks and stuck out his stomach and waddled away in a perfect imitation of Mr. Deakwell.
In the headmaster’s office, his mother sat alone. She looked unusually beautiful in a jet-black suit. Adrian often thought she resembled one of those tall, proud Gibson girls in magazine illustrations. “Oh, darling,” she said. “I’ve got some bad news. We have to go home.”
“Why?”
“Your father’s dead. He was killed in an accident. Foxhunting. He ran into a low-hanging limb and broke his neck.”
Adrian waited for her to weep, to let him weep. But she did nothing of the sort. She told him to go to his room and pack. They were catching the fastest ship home, the SS Lusitania. It was sailing from Southampton the next day.
Adrian trudged across the quadrangle, suddenly remembering everything. Von Ness the spy, the months as a living dead man, the sadness. He felt angry at his mother for having exposed him to these ordeals. Beneath that anger was a deeper, colder enmity for her refusal to weep for his ruined father. He found himself wishing he could get in a plane and fly thousands of miles away from his mother and never see her again.
HISTORY’S LASH
“You—you there, young fellow—is that an American accent I hear?”
Frank Buchanan paused in his effort to tune the motor of a de Havilland Scout, wiped grease from his hands and nodded. The man had the lean face, the spaded beard, the fiery eyes of Mephistopheles in his youth, when his hair was bright red. A flowing gray coat enveloped him almost to his shoetops. He gestured at Frank with an ebony cane. He was surrounded by a half dozen of the most elegant women Frank had ever seen.
“It sounds like I’m hearing one too,” Frank shouted as his helper got the motor to stop choking and sputtering and emit a racketing roar.
“Hailey, Idaho,” the man shouted, holding out his hand. “The name’s Pound. Ezra Pound.”
“The author of Canzoni?” Frank said.
“A mechanic who reads poetry!” Pound cried. “You see what I’ve been saying? Americans aren’t a lost cause. There’s hope—if we can get more of them to Europe.”
They were standing on the grassy airfield at Hendon, a suburb of London, on a sunny Saturday afternoon in May 1914. Every week some two hundred thousand people came out to see the latest planes race around the pyloned course. Britons of all classes had become fascinated by flight. A pilgrimage to Hendon was a must to those who hoped to have any claim to sophistication.
“Do you understand how these things work?” Pound said, leading Frank away from the snarling Rhone rotary engine. “Why one crashes, another stays in the air? The principle behind it?”
“I’ve learned a few things from Geoffrey de Havilland,” Frank said modestly. He could have said much more. He had spent a year in France working for Louis Paulhan, the pilot he had met at the Dominquez Hills air show. Paulhan and other designers were churning out planes in a dozen factories around Paris. He had even accompanied Paulhan to the wind tunnel constructed by Louis Eiffel, builder of the famous tower. In the tunnel French designers studied the effect of airflow on models of the planes they were building.
In England, a photograph of Rag Time had won him a job in de Havilland’s design department. The big blond Englishman had built one of Britain’s first flyable planes in 1910. He was now working for the Aircraft Manufacturing Company, which operated from an old bus garage in Hendon. Frank had come to England to learn more about the changes the British were making in the airplane’s basic design. De Havilland was working with scientists who had been studying aerodynamic problems in their laboratories. They recommended moving the wings of a plane back to the middle of the fuselage, closer to the center of gravity, enlarging the tail and the ailerons—all aimed at giving the aircraft as much stability in the air as a boat on the water.
A few minutes’ conversation convinced Pound that his American discovery was the perfect man to introduce his circle of poets and poetry lovers to the mysteries of flight. Pound saw the plane as a prime example of his artistic theories. Since he arrived in England in 1908, he had become a one-man cultural crusade, churning out poetry and critical essays proclaiming that the new century required an entirely new art. He called his theory Vorticism and he publicized it in the pages of a magazine called Blast.
Vorticists believed art could and should represent reality with the same precision as an equation in fluid dynamics or solid geometry. They wanted to make a poem or story work as precisely as a machine. At the heart of every work of art there was a vortex, a pulsing fist of forces that gave it energy and meaning. It was the critic or the editor’s task to find that vortex and help the writer exploit it to the utmost.
Within a week, Frank Buchanan found himself the center of attention in Pound’s small dark apartment in Kensington. A dozen guests, most of them women, listened wide-eyed as he proposed to demonstrate the central idea of flight. He took a piece of paper and curled one end of it over a pencil. Raising it to the level of his lips, he blew on it. The paper rose. “I have just produced lift,” he said. “You are now in the world of aerodynamics.”
Why does air traveling over a wing create lift? “The air on top of the wing moves faster than the air under the bottom. In the eighteenth century, a Swiss mathematician named Bernoulli experimented with water flowing through a pipe. He proved that the faster it flowed, the lower the pressure in the pipe. Later, an Italian scientist named Venturi proved the same thing was true for air. That’s why the higher pressure of the slower air under the wing creates lift.”
“Exactly how emotion works in a poem or story!” Pound cried.
“The other components of a plane are weight, drag, and thrust,” Frank continued. “These are easier to understand. Drag is created by the resistance the surface of the plane meets as it moves through the air. Weight is the force of gravity and thrust is the forward motion we get from the engine.”
“In a poem or story,” Pound said, “Drag corresponds to the writer’s ability, weight to the reader’s stupidity, and thrust to the publisher’s greed.”
So it went for the length of the lecture, Pound finding literary analogies for all Frank’s aeronautical terms. Pound was particularly fascinated by the way air flowing over the wings and down the fuselage of a plane formed negative vortexes that created a phenomenon known as
flutter, which could tear a wing or a tail apart.
“Precisely the way the wrong metaphor can wreck a stanza, the wrong rhythm can ruin a poem, the wrong character can mangle a story!” Pound said.
A blond young woman in the center of the semicircle asked: “What is the future of this marvelous machine?” She had the face of a Pre-Raphaelite angel—the pale cheeks, the wide blue eyes, seemingly vacant, waiting to be charged with emotion.
“Its future is as unlimited as the sky above our heads,” Frank said. “The plane can abolish distance, annihilate frontiers, unite peoples in Tennyson’s wonderful vision of a Parliament of Man!”
“Tennyson!” Pound exclaimed. “My dear fellow—that’s a name we don’t allow in this house. He’s a has-been.”
“He never will be, to me,” Frank said. His mother had read the great English poet aloud to him almost every night in his boyhood. “The Idylls of the King” was his favorite poem.
“The danger of teaching mechanics to read has now become visible,” Pound said. “They form their own opinions.”
“But Ezra,” said the blond young woman. “He also likes your Canzoni.”
“That only demonstrates, to use an aeronautical term, his instability,” Pound said.
The highlight of the evening was a midnight supper cooked by Pound, a delicious oyster stew, complemented by an Italian white wine that he served with an inimitable toast. “Come let us pity those who are better off than we are. Remember that the rich have butlers and no friends and we have friends and no butlers.”
The conversation swirled over art and politics, with the blond girl quizzically probing Frank’s opinions. Her name was Penelope Foster and she was unquestionably attracted to him. “Do you think we shall have peace or war, Mr. Buchanan?” she said in a liquid voice that sent shimmers of desire through Frank’s flesh.
“Oh, peace,” Frank said. “War would be a ridiculous waste of time and energy.”
“The British upper class can hardly wait to go to war with Germany. Proving, among other things, their imbecility,” Pound said.
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