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| Biggles, Marie, and Erich from Biggles Looks Back. Image from biggles-online.com |
For those of us already acquainted with
Captain James Bigglesworth, it’s doubly hard to see him go through “Affair de
Coeur” (Biggles, Pioneer Air Fighter),
which reads like a bad high school romance, or, to be more accurate, like
watching a fast-moving train getting ready to crash into the side of a
mountain.
The first meeting of Biggles and Marie
(Janis) is simply too fantastic for words. He discovers his magneto has shorted
and lands practically on her doorstep. The first person he sees is a “vision of
blonde loveliness, wrapped up in blue silk”, and his first words are, “Mademoiselle,
I have been looking for you all my life.”
Oh, Biggles, Biggles, Biggles.
From there, the rest can only go downhill,
each line worse than the last. Biggles is, at first, his normal flippant self,
but as he takes off (with newly a repaired mag) he actually attempts to be
poetic by referring to his new friend as the “Spirit of the Air”!
A week later, he’s back in Marie’s
courtyard, enjoying the sort of whirlwind romance popular in wartime. Seated on
a stone bench in the moonlight (mushy chap, our W.E. Johns), he offers to drop
a letter to Marie’s father, who is, unfortunately, stuck on the wrong side of
the lines. The conversation consists of pathetic one-liners that no one finds
particularly original, and are quite unworthy of the usually level-headed
Biggles.
“All right, say ‘Please, Biggles’, and I’ll tell you.”
“My own mag was nearly shorting then.”
Seriously! Has Biggles been reading romance
novels in his spare time?
Having delivered Marie’s letter without
mishaps, Biggles then returns for another episode with the stone bench, only to
have his dreams and hopes shattered by British Intelligence, who calmly explain
that his girlfriend is a spy working for the Germans.
Yes, Biggles, there’s your spirit of the
air. Should have known it was too good to be true.
Biggles returns to 266 a broken man, his
last communication (for the next fifty years, anyway) with his beloved a letter
she sends him, which ends sentimentally with: “We shall meet again, if not in this world, then
in the next, so I will not say goodbye.”
Great. Now instead of thinking about her as
“the girl who almost killed me and my best friends”, he goes through the rest
of his life thinking of her as “the girl who might have been”. Just great.
Word is that W.E Johns himself had a similar
experience when he was fighting in the Great War (only he didn't meet his girl
again, and his girl wasn't a spy). One can only hope that his own romance wasn't quite so soppy!
I first read this story when I was about 12 or 13, and it did seem strange to me then, because I was used to reading stories about Biggles in WW2 and later, and the idea that he might get "soppy" over a girl had not been thought of. When I read it again several years later, I had quite a different reaction. Then, and now, I find it believable and moving.
ReplyDeleteBiggles is 18 at the time of the story; he enlisted as a 16-year old schoolboy, and spent the next 18 months or so watching his friends being shot down, shooting and being shot at himself. A time of life in which we went to parties and films, played sports, and had teenage crushes - a "normal" life, simply did not exist for Biggles.
What Johns was writing about was the emotional upheaval he himself had been through. Not about a love affair of his own, but about the huge impact of meeting a lovely girl to whom he was attracted, just before he was shot down, his observer killed, himself captured and threatened with a firing squad. Climbing out a crashed aeroplane and looking down at the dead body of your friend and comrade is no light experience. Johns was so affected by this combination of events that he wrote several versions of it: Affair de Coeur is one version. I believe that had it not been for these subsequent events, his memory of meeting the girl would probably have faded with time; instead, the flood of emotions that followed it fixed it in his mind so that he went back to it again and again, writing it as both fact and fiction.
It is generally agreed that there is a lot of Johns in Biggles. I think Johns was a romantic himself. When he came to write a story in which his hero would have a love affair, he drew upon the emotion that had rocked him as a WW1 flyer.
By the way, your wording makes it sound like that last sentence ("We shall meet again, if not in this world, then in the next") was written by Biggles; I think you should make it clear it was Marie who wrote that letter.
I wonder if you will have a different view of this story in 10 years time; have to wait and see!
It's not so much the romance that irks me. I wouldn't mind if Biggles fell in love with a girl who wasn't a spy (and keeps the one-liners to himself).
ReplyDeleteImagine how Biggles would react if anyone he considered a friend tried to kill him and his other friends, and then sent him a letter going, "Oh, by the way, I'm going to kill all your friends. I'm a spy. Come with me and we'll escape."
He would throw said person out out their ear, and quite rightly too!
I just want to see Biggles show the same amount of sense in his relationships as he shows in his Camel.
(PS. I've edited the last bit you mentioned. Thanks!)
I agree with Shirley totally on this one, and I was going to say much the same thing - only Shirley has said it better - you have said it really well Shirley.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing I was going to say is that when you wince at some of the phrases/sentences, you have to remember that you are reading Johns words at a very different time in the history of literature. Johns wrote this in the 1930s when the way people spoke and wrote was very different from how people write and speak now.
A lot of writing in those days was very romantic, and those sort of phrases were not unusual. It contrasts rather abruptly with the way people wrote at the end of the 20th century and now in the 21st century.
In a similar way, the phrases, the style of speaking and the exclamations that Johns uses, particularly in the WWI stories and the 1930s stories, are very much of the time, pre-WWII. You can see a similar style in other fictional writing of the 1930s.
It's an interesting subject, and is, I think, another aspect of comments on Johns' writing made in the second half of the 20th century, some of which were very critical.
I don't know if it was just the dated phrasing. I don't remember being this annoyed when Algy and Ginger say things to girls they like.
ReplyDeleteI should have added that I just cannot like Marie. I know I'm a huge Algy fan, but when I read this story the only thing I want to do is put an arm round Biggles and tell him to find some other nice girl to be his girlfriend.