The Aerodrome: A Love Story (21 page)

The End

Introduction

ANGUS WILSON

"WHAT A RECORD of confusion, deception, rankling hatred, low aims, indecision. One is stained by any contact with such people." So the Air Vice-Marshal speaks of traditional English society in his final appeal to Roy, the hero of The Aerodrome, to abandon his mother and join the New Society represented by the Air Force. I can think of no more concise and apt phrases to describe what those of us who were young in the nineteen twenties and thirties felt about the social order which found its leaders in Baldwin, MacDonald and Neville Chamberlain. To our disgust and scorn for the muddle and complacency of our elders the last sentences of the Air Vice-Marshal's speech had the strongest siren appeal - "I urge you to escape from all this, to escape from time and its bondage, to construct around you in your brief existence something that is guided by your own will, not forced upon you by past accidents, something of clarity, independence and beauty." By 1941 some inkling of the death of the spirit that lay behind this siren song of a clean, aesthetic society, unencumbered by muddled human emotion, had reached all but the most blind of us. We had seen, as Roy saw almost too late in this novel, that he "had secured ease... discipline and satisfaction... had abolished inefficiency, hypocrisy and the fortunes of the irresolute or the remorseful mind; but... had destroyed also the spirit of adventure, inquiry, the sweet and terrifying sympathy of love that can acknowledge mystery, danger and dependence". There was no inhuman short cut to human bliss. On the other hand, the revelation of what totalitarian utopianism (of all kinds) meant in terms of human deformity, of the cutting off of all sources of human warmth, did not reconcile us to the cruelties caused by the evasions, incompetences and callous hypocrisies of English society between the wars. We were poised ready to jump forward both from our crumbling heritage and from our fallen false gods. It is this strange, frightening, liberating moment of 1940 that Rex Warner catches exactly in the ending of his allegory The Aerodrome. This exciting, simply and beautifully told adventure story is the history of every socially, morally conscious liberal-minded man in those decades between the wars. And for most of them, as for Roy, the escape from the nightmare illusions of totalitarianism came from the superior force of human love. The ordered Utopias crashed to the ground because, as Roy realizes at a vital moment in The Aerodrome, they were not consistent with "the infinite implications of all love". This, of course, is only to explain why The Aerodrome was the best and most exciting adventure story for all who, like me, were young when the last war started. Like all good allegories it has poetry and inventiveness, speed of narrative and great simplicity of language; like very few allegories it also has in its small cast of characters at least six or seven memorable, living people. The author in his conventional disclaimer of sources for characters remarks how unnecessary such a statement is, for "I do not even aim at realism". Yet realism of a very frightening kind is exactly what he achieves. We live in his living world and, even now over twenty years later, I do not find it easy to lay down this haunting book and dismiss that world by looking out at "reality". The reality I see in an East Anglian landscape of aerodromes and peaceful countryside is horribly like the one where the Rector is "potted" by mischance at the Agricultural Show and the Squire's sister is shot dead in church. For the younger generation, for whom D. H. Lawrence is a touchstone of truth, Mr Warner's concern for love (physical love that transcends lust) will give The Aerodrome a metaphysical strength that was perhaps subordinate in the admiration of my political generation. But I do not think that the political symbolism of The Aerodrome will be any the less powerful for those who have squatted at rocket sites (that is if their squatting has been a thoughtful decision and not merely a hysterical reflex action). In any case it is high time that this thrilling story should be widely enjoyed again.

Books by Rex Warner

NOVELS

The Wild Goose Chase

The Professor

Why Was I Killed?

Men of Stones

The Young Caesar

Imperial Caesar

Pericles the Athenian

The Aerodrome

MYTHOLOGY

Men and Gods

Greeks and Trojans

The Vengeance of the Gods

POETRY

Poems and Contradictions

ESSAYS

The Cult of Power

TRAVEL

Views of Attica