Combat
Brigadier General
- Joined
- Jun 10, 2005
- Messages
- 10,106
Sounds like a good one for WWI enthusiasts: (from NY Times)
PRINCETON, N.J. — In his upstairs study, on a quiet side street here, Samuel Hynes has hung three black-and-white photographs that succinctly illustrate his life. On top is the poet W. H. Auden, wearing academic robes. On the bottom is an autographed photo of an aged Thomas Hardy. And in between, faded and a little out of focus, is a group picture of Marine Torpedo Bombing Squadron 232.
Mr. Hynes, whose new book, “The Unsubstantial Air: American Fliers in the First World War,” comes out on Tuesday, is now 90 and a retired college professor. An Auden scholar and an expert in Edwardian literature, he taught for years at Swarthmore and then at Princeton, where he was one of those English profs who make an indelible, lifelong impression on their students.
But before he was a teacher and a scholar, Mr. Hynes was a pilot. He enlisted in the Marines at 18 and flew 78 combat missions during World War II, an experience that remained so vivid that decades later, in 1988, he published “Flights of Passage,” a memoir about what it was like. Flying, Mr. Hynes once said, “is a life, like a sex life, that no normal guy would give up if he didn’t absolutely have to.”
Mr. Hynes’s new book, whose title comes from “King Lear,” is a prequel of sorts. He got the idea for it, he said, one day back in the 1980s, when he was visiting his daughter and son-in-law in England and flew them in a rented single-engine Cessna over the Western Front.
“Seeing the Western Front as a pilot would have seen it — that was part of it,” he said. “And also that those guys who flew in World War I were my ancestors. I was curious about what it was like to have been them.”
There are times when “The Unsubstantial Air” feels as if it were answering a more urgent, slightly different question: What is it like to be a World War I pilot? The book, both thrilling and poignant, often employs a graceful present tense, and incorporates numerous first-person accounts, many of them newly discovered by Mr. Hynes’s assistant on the project, Suzanne McNatt (a retired Princeton librarian to whom the book is dedicated). And from its pilot’s-eye view it presents a somewhat different World War I from the muddy, poison-gassed charnel house described in so many of the books published to commemorate the war’s 100th anniversary.
To begin with, most of the American fliers in that war were patricians, Ivy Leaguers and prep school grads (including Quentin Roosevelt, son of Teddy) who joined the fledgling air force in hope of glamour and adventure. Especially in the beginning, before the casualties began to mount up, their accounts are often larksome, recounting joy rides, swimming parties, trips to Paris, where the girls were not as puritanical as those back home.
“To these guys, being a pilot was what I suppose becoming a cavalry officer had been,” Mr. Hynes said. “They even dressed like cavalry officers. In the book, I have a picture of a guy wearing spurs.”
Talking about Billy Mitchell, the famously combative World War I ace, he said: “Even that tough old guy said flying was the only part of war that had any romance in it. It changed as they got out there, and some of them felt fear, and also, as they found, it wasn’t always one guy dueling another, like medieval knights. They saw their friends die, or rather, they didn’t see them exactly. That’s one of the things about wartime aviation. People go out and they don’t come back, and there’s an empty cot in your tent.”
Mr. Hynes, who grew up in Minneapolis, Depression poor, still speaks with a trace of a Midwestern accent. He’s cleareyed, straight-backed and so youthful-seeming as to suggest that a lot of hours spent aloft may slow the passage of time. Maria DiBattista, a professor of English and comparative literature at Princeton and a former colleague of Mr. Hynes’s, said of him in an email:
“Sam is such a rarity, even among a remarkable generation of literary scholars and critics who had gone through the Depression and fought in the war and so wrote out of a deep sense of what the world is and could do to you.” She added that he has “an unpretentious, yet unmistakable moral authority, a moral clarity and a humanity that admits of fun as much as hardship.”
Mr. Hynes said that when he got back from his war, in 1946, and enrolled in college, he almost majored in business until his wife shamed him out of it, reminding him of his love of reading. At that point, the only great endeavor in his life had been flying. He grew up watching World War I movies like “The Dawn Patrol,” he explained — with Richard Barthelmess, his long white scarf billowing out behind him as he climbs into the cockpit — and, on Saturday afternoons, would bicycle with his friends out to Wold-Chamberlain Field in Minneapolis and watch the planes come in.
You could look up and see the oil stains on the fuselage and watch the wheels come down,” he said. “It was romantic just to lie there.”
In his own war, he pointed out, he met only one Ivy League pilot, a Yalie with a very neat haircut who, in his spare time, translated French poetry. “By then, there were lot of guys like me,” he said. “Aviation was huge in the Second World War, and so were the casualties. They couldn’t afford to be snobbish.”
Shaking his head, he added: “There’s never been a year when there hasn’t been a war somewhere. People fly but they don’t write about it anymore. They don’t seem to come away with any stories or with the will to tell stories. But that’s what it was back then — the romance. Or maybe the romance was in the flying, not the fighting. Maybe that’s it.”
PRINCETON, N.J. — In his upstairs study, on a quiet side street here, Samuel Hynes has hung three black-and-white photographs that succinctly illustrate his life. On top is the poet W. H. Auden, wearing academic robes. On the bottom is an autographed photo of an aged Thomas Hardy. And in between, faded and a little out of focus, is a group picture of Marine Torpedo Bombing Squadron 232.
Mr. Hynes, whose new book, “The Unsubstantial Air: American Fliers in the First World War,” comes out on Tuesday, is now 90 and a retired college professor. An Auden scholar and an expert in Edwardian literature, he taught for years at Swarthmore and then at Princeton, where he was one of those English profs who make an indelible, lifelong impression on their students.
But before he was a teacher and a scholar, Mr. Hynes was a pilot. He enlisted in the Marines at 18 and flew 78 combat missions during World War II, an experience that remained so vivid that decades later, in 1988, he published “Flights of Passage,” a memoir about what it was like. Flying, Mr. Hynes once said, “is a life, like a sex life, that no normal guy would give up if he didn’t absolutely have to.”
Mr. Hynes’s new book, whose title comes from “King Lear,” is a prequel of sorts. He got the idea for it, he said, one day back in the 1980s, when he was visiting his daughter and son-in-law in England and flew them in a rented single-engine Cessna over the Western Front.
“Seeing the Western Front as a pilot would have seen it — that was part of it,” he said. “And also that those guys who flew in World War I were my ancestors. I was curious about what it was like to have been them.”
There are times when “The Unsubstantial Air” feels as if it were answering a more urgent, slightly different question: What is it like to be a World War I pilot? The book, both thrilling and poignant, often employs a graceful present tense, and incorporates numerous first-person accounts, many of them newly discovered by Mr. Hynes’s assistant on the project, Suzanne McNatt (a retired Princeton librarian to whom the book is dedicated). And from its pilot’s-eye view it presents a somewhat different World War I from the muddy, poison-gassed charnel house described in so many of the books published to commemorate the war’s 100th anniversary.
To begin with, most of the American fliers in that war were patricians, Ivy Leaguers and prep school grads (including Quentin Roosevelt, son of Teddy) who joined the fledgling air force in hope of glamour and adventure. Especially in the beginning, before the casualties began to mount up, their accounts are often larksome, recounting joy rides, swimming parties, trips to Paris, where the girls were not as puritanical as those back home.
“To these guys, being a pilot was what I suppose becoming a cavalry officer had been,” Mr. Hynes said. “They even dressed like cavalry officers. In the book, I have a picture of a guy wearing spurs.”
Talking about Billy Mitchell, the famously combative World War I ace, he said: “Even that tough old guy said flying was the only part of war that had any romance in it. It changed as they got out there, and some of them felt fear, and also, as they found, it wasn’t always one guy dueling another, like medieval knights. They saw their friends die, or rather, they didn’t see them exactly. That’s one of the things about wartime aviation. People go out and they don’t come back, and there’s an empty cot in your tent.”
Mr. Hynes, who grew up in Minneapolis, Depression poor, still speaks with a trace of a Midwestern accent. He’s cleareyed, straight-backed and so youthful-seeming as to suggest that a lot of hours spent aloft may slow the passage of time. Maria DiBattista, a professor of English and comparative literature at Princeton and a former colleague of Mr. Hynes’s, said of him in an email:
“Sam is such a rarity, even among a remarkable generation of literary scholars and critics who had gone through the Depression and fought in the war and so wrote out of a deep sense of what the world is and could do to you.” She added that he has “an unpretentious, yet unmistakable moral authority, a moral clarity and a humanity that admits of fun as much as hardship.”
Mr. Hynes said that when he got back from his war, in 1946, and enrolled in college, he almost majored in business until his wife shamed him out of it, reminding him of his love of reading. At that point, the only great endeavor in his life had been flying. He grew up watching World War I movies like “The Dawn Patrol,” he explained — with Richard Barthelmess, his long white scarf billowing out behind him as he climbs into the cockpit — and, on Saturday afternoons, would bicycle with his friends out to Wold-Chamberlain Field in Minneapolis and watch the planes come in.
You could look up and see the oil stains on the fuselage and watch the wheels come down,” he said. “It was romantic just to lie there.”
In his own war, he pointed out, he met only one Ivy League pilot, a Yalie with a very neat haircut who, in his spare time, translated French poetry. “By then, there were lot of guys like me,” he said. “Aviation was huge in the Second World War, and so were the casualties. They couldn’t afford to be snobbish.”
Shaking his head, he added: “There’s never been a year when there hasn’t been a war somewhere. People fly but they don’t write about it anymore. They don’t seem to come away with any stories or with the will to tell stories. But that’s what it was back then — the romance. Or maybe the romance was in the flying, not the fighting. Maybe that’s it.”
