I’d been aware of Ernest Gann all my life when I visited the 1940 Air Terminal Museum here in Houston, but I’d never read him. The Museum had a copy of his book, Fate is the Hunter, and I picked it up. (You may’ve seen the so-so movie version of that one. It starred Glenn Ford and Suzanne Pleshette.)
Gann was born in 1910 and raised in my home town, St. Paul, Minnesota.) In fact, when he was a teenager, Gann knew my mother. Among his huge output of fine books are The High and the Mighty, Twilight for the Gods, Island in the Sky, The Aviator, and Soldier of Fortune -- all of which were made into major movies.
When I read Fate is the Hunter, it became clear why an Air Terminal Museum would feature it. Gann writes about his years as an airline pilot in the 1930s and early '40s. And he tells about his war years with the Air Transport Command.
What a terrifyingly dangerous business commercial flying was in the embryonic years of the airlines! Gann remembers one brush with death after another. He opens with a remarkable scene: He’s drifted fifty feet above his stipulated altitude of five thousand feet. That's within the margin of error. But then, only on an offhand whim, he corrects it -- drops back down fifty feet. Moments later an oncoming plane, far off its own course, passes just fifty feet over his head.
So Gann is alive, when another perfectly able pilot might be dead. The book follows down that rather fatalistic road. So many early airline pilots died -- many better than he. Fate, he believes, is the whimsical hunter who takes them down at random.
He writes with the rhythm of Herman Melville. We're drawn into the inner world of a pilot's cockpit -- a place that feels so removed and safe that peril always arrives unexpected. He provides a book-length explanation of Saint-Exupéry’s image of a pilot on a night flight falling "into the deeply meditative mood of flight, mellow with inexplicable hopes." This mood is not one were the mind strays, but where the mind achieves its full focus.
Still, something tells us this remarkable pilot made his own fate. A distinguished sailor, as well as a pilot, he was also a painter and photographer. And he began in theater. As a teenager, he meant to be a moviemaker. We have a family photo of Gann and four other students from 1925, when he was just learning one of his many skills. They’re making a movie of my mother reading to my three-year old older brother -- sitting in her lap.
Only later did Gann become, first a barnstormer, then a pioneer airline pilot. He built an incredible many-dimensioned life. He painted himself as fate's object, a heritor of better luck than his comrades. But I sense a dimension of modesty in that.
Early flight was dangerous beyond our comprehension and fate surely did hunt those flyers. Still, I doubt that we're such an easy prey. It was more than just luck that Gann lived to the age of 81 on San Juan Island in Puget Sound -- surrounded by the boats and paintings, technological and natural beauty, that he'd always loved.
Shute was an engineer who’d flown before he wrote. But Gann was a flyer first -- an adventurer who wrote. Shute remains analytical, Gann visceral. And in that, he reminds us of another early flier/writer, Beryl Markham.
Sources:
E. K. Gann, Fate is the Hunter. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986.
For more of Gann's books, see Amazon.com
For more on Gann, see: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Nook/2201/
I am most grateful to Gann's daughter, Polly Gann Wrench, of Houston, TX, and to James H. Lienhard of Portland, Oregon, for their counsel.
Polly Wrench has graciously provided several photos of Gann (including the one above) and one of his paintings. To see them, CLICK HERE. (This is a large file and may load slowly, but it's worth the wait.)