This post has been updated to include book reviews, from The New York Times Book Review, of The Navigator, by Guy Murchie (July 31, 1955) and Orville Prescott (August 10, 1955), respectively. Whereas the “initial” version of the post (from 2018!) included the reviews as scans, this revision includes the reviews in full text form. See below…
You disappeared, just like that.
For the whole evening the plane’s letter designation
and the name of the skipper remained on the bulletin board,
and those who had returned cast a sympathetic but relieved look at it.
Death was all very well for others.
Then the missing vanished.
The ground staff hastily packed up their belongings and arranged them,
carefully labeled, in the appropriate shed.
The names of those who had disappeared were mentioned for some time,
and then individual preoccupations took the upper hand and life went on.
Life?
No, only unthinking people could call it life.
Call it, rather,
forced labor under the threat of pitiless masters forever invisible
who struck down the offender or the laggard.
None of those already fallen into the molten fires returned,
and after all it was probably no more terrible than that.
As for the navigator, he never handled a weapon.
His war consisted in plotting courses,
measuring distances, degrees, and minutes
and taking bearings on stars while sitting over a charge of explosives
which might blow him sky-high at any moment.
During flights this thought sometimes made his heart miss a beat,
but then he would shrug his shoulders.
If he were not here, he would be somewhere just as bad.
If he refused to fight he would be shot.
Any attempt to escape the universal holocaust would mean
his being hunted and tortured wherever he went.
It was better to fight in a cause that still represented a certain freedom
and respect for the individual conscience.
Besides he had no choice.
He would never grow used to another country;
his own was enough for him.
This was how he solved the question – not very satisfactorily, he knew.
But how else could he solve it?
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Orville Prescott’s review…
Books of The Times
By ORVILLE PRESCOTT
The New York Times Book Review
August 10, 1955
WHEN lieutenant Ripault came to his senses be was lying on his face in a beet field. His parachute lay collapsed on the ground beside him. There was a bright light not far away and at first Ripault thought that it was probably the Ruhr city of Duisburg burning. Duisburg had been their target. But soon the French navigator serving with a Free French unit in the R.A.F. realized that he was not in Germany but in England, that the fire was not a burning city but a burning Halifax bomber. He remembered then that there had been a collision in midair, that he had jumped first as he was supposed to do and that as far as he knew he was the sole survivor of two planes. What happened to Lieut. Alfred Ripault during the next few days is the story told by Jules Roy in his odd little novel, “The Navigator.”
Jules Roy is French. In 1943 he enlisted in the R.A.F. He left the air force wish the rank of colonel ten years later. He is the author of several books about fliers and flying and of a play about Jet pilots, “Les Cyclones,” which has had a long and successful run in Paris with M. Roy in the leading role. “The Navigator” is his first noveL
Novel Acclaimed in France
This book has been highly praised in France, and Andre Maurois has said that Kipling would have liked it and that Conrad might have written it Neither of those speculations seems at all likely to me. Kipling, who loved an impressive array of technical data, would have flinched from M. Roy’s fuzzy and obscure approach to a navigator’s duties. Conrad, who valued moral courage above all virtues, would never have written a story with so equivocal an ending.
When Ripault so narrowly escaped the death he had prepared himself to meet he felt lost, out of contact with the world. The shock was great and he felt numbed. And then when his commander assigned him as navigator to a pilot with a reputation for incompetence, Ripault pleaded sickness and stayed in bed. The plane was shot down. His comrades in the squadron felt that Ripault was guilty of something close to murder. But had he refused to fly or was he truly unable to fly? Was he a victim of nervous shock or was he merely afraid? M. Roy does not tell us, and the reason he does not is that he makes no attempt to clothe his hero in the flesh and blood and personality of a specific human being.
The navigator of this story (and he is usually referred to as the navigator) is only a symbol of a man afflicted with problems. He longs for friendship and love. He does not want to be killed. He resents bitterly the unfavorable judgment of his fellows and of his commander, who puts him under arrest. But always, although his situation ought to be poignant and dramatic, it remains still, silent and remote.
Lonely Figure in an Intellectual Game
Ripault shambles like a robot through these carefully written pages, a lonely figure in silhouette who fails to command our sympathy because he seems as small and impersonal as a chessman. The knight or bishop in a game of chess has problems also and moves about from square to square in an effort to solve them; but one doesn’t care about them because they are only figures in an intellectual game, which is exactly what Ripault is.
“The Navigator” has some effective scenes describing the operations of a bombing squadron in wartime. It builds up to a climax that might have seemed dramatic if it were not so mechanically contrived. A pilot who reports that he is unable to see the ground lights is suspected of being afraid. He, too, is judged unfavorably, and Ripault longs to help his fellow in misfortune.
His recognition of common humanity, of human feeling, brings him back to life from the half-life in which he had been living for a few days. That seems reasonable enough. But, this affirmation of the value of life and of brotherhood is rejected a few hours and a few pages later – by the author, I think, rather than by Ripault. The navigator, who has just found his bearings, turns away from the very things he wants most and- chooses death instead of life.
What M. Roy is driving at is not clear. The best guess I can make is that under the stress of war and the constant threat of death some men choose defeat. Comradeship and even the possibility of love, both of which Ripault had, are not enough; they are not worth the fear and the repeated risk of death. Death itself faced too often becomes less terrifying, and men like Ripault welcome it. If this interpretation of M. Roy’s solemn and dismal little book is not accurate he has only himself to blame. “The Navigator” belongs to that increasingly numerous school of fiction that asks questions without answering them and makes of ambiguity a virtue.
THE NAVIGATOR. By Jules Roy. Translated by Mervyn Savill. 177 pages. Knopf. $3.
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…and Guy Murchie’s.
Hero From the Sky
THE NAVIGATOR.
By Jules Roy.
Translated from the French by Mervyn Savill.
177 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $3.
By GUY MURCHIE
The New York Times Book Review
July 31, 1955
THE intimate war lives of the French flying officers in the Royal Air Force have at last been brought fittingly into literature in this exciting first novel by one of them.
I Judge by the paucity of convincing reference to actual navigation that Jules Roy was not himself a navigator, but his restrained love story and engrossing picture of life on an R.A.F. base in England near the end of World War II seem real enough, as indeed his eighteen years of air force experience would lead one to expect. His hero, Lieutenant Ripault, usually referred to as “the navigator,” lands in a beet field by parachute on the first page almost on top of the house where “the girl” Rosica lives, quite conveniently alone and hospitable. From here the story flows rapidly forward, taking in the air base with its tense rivalries and thinly disguised struggles for survival, as much the psychological and spiritual ones as the more obvious material conflicts of flame and flak.
Although slightly amateurish in dialogue – something which Mervyn Savill’s translation could hardly have overcome – Colonel Roy’s story has a simple dignity and a sustained suspense that will easily hold the reader’s attention throughout its 177 small pages. Despite such distractions as “the enchantment of the night, of an unknown woman dragged from her sleep, whose dressing-gown invited one to remove it,” the navigator struggles to win his personal war, to prove by courage and compassion that he is a better man khan most – even if he does not-live to reap his earthly reward.
It matters little when “the airspeed indicator showed 220 m.p.h.” in his Halifax bomber, that he reached the startling deduction that “at this height that meant 222 m.p.h. ground-speed.” Or that “the projection of the sidereal angles on the Greenwich meridian gave two very approximate positions when it was a question of following a route fringed by hostile fighters and antiaircraft guns.” For the navigator was guided by “the radio navigation apparatus, whose flickering signals on a green screen enabled him-to calculate their position.”
His squadron was “now grouped in a gigantic gleaming tide, flowing toward the coast,” a mission from which he was destined never to return. Yet all unheeding his natural apprehension, “each pilot would fly by the phosphorescent needles of his instruments. The gunners would begin to revolve in their turrets, keeping a closer watch. Only the navigators could see clearly. They traced their routes without sharing the anxieties of the others, in a peace that isolated them from the world.”
Even in the last few moments before the squadron comes on target, this sense of isolation persists in the mind of the protagonist. “Ripault went back to the cockpit. He leaned against the side window. The plane, with all lights extinguished, was flying in complete darkness, except for pale sprays of pink and blue sparks from the exhausts. The earth below them seemed dead, but the stream of planes must have been deafening it with its terrible thunder * * * They might have been flying a practice flight over England, with the same budding tremor running through the machine.”
While undeniably there are subtleties of philosophy in the talk and thought of the intense characters in this moving tale, one cannot feel that their recurrent immaturity is entirely a product of the war, or that Lieutenant Ripault’s unprofessional technique in the air is a mere rhetorical vagary. Perhaps most significant of all, the final choice of the French navigator to die in his flaming plane rather than jump back into the war recalls the defeatist decisions of Jules Roy’s modern France which, however rationalized, have not entirety escaped the stigma of morbidity that the rest of the world is bound to ascribe to them.
A veteran flier, Mr. Murchie is the author of “The Song of the Sky.”