What price Charles? Does anyone really care that he paralysed the French government in 1938? Or re-set the date for the Second World War?
I’d already started mapping out Flying Over Ruins when I stumbled upon testimony outlining the full extent of Charles Lindbergh’s role in the international Crisis of autumn 1938.
I was, to put it mildly, ecstatic. What a gift this was. What a signal from the writerly gods. The cherry on the icing of an already scrumptious cake.
And then, as I worked towards completion of a first draft, I began to realise just what a curse this actually was.
For some historians, Charles Lindbergh’s role in the events leading up to what would become known as the Munich Crisis is a very big deal indeed. In fact, there are those in the counter-factual community who argue that, but for his intervention there would have been no Second World War.
Bit of a stretch, I know. Easier to argue, though, is the notion that he delayed its outbreak for a year. That he effectively set its date.
Which I think is utterly fascinating. But, sadly, outside of a small coterie of people who really know their stuff, it’s hard to find those who agree. Even the general historians who know a little about about this episode tend to downplay its significance or relegate it to a sort of footnote.
The problem is that Charles wasn’t acting as an official agent of US foreign policy.
There are no State Department sources for this. It’s hard even to link his actions to the US’s senior diplomat in Europe at the time, JFK’s dad Joseph Kennedy.
And the relevant French Government documents have been destroyed.
Lindbergh was operating semi-officially through back-channels, working with a small group of diplomats and military intelligence analysts, a group of people determined at all costs to stop France and Germany ever going to war again.
They astutely recognised that in the pursuit of this goal they could profitably harness Lindbergh’s celebrity status and the notion that he was the world’s pre-eminent expert on aviation matters. And Charles was easily co-opted. Their views chimed absolutely with his.
It didn’t much matter that they were trading in counterfeit currency. Yes, he was an aviation superhero, a true pioneer. But he was blessed with no great intellect; and his credentials as a political or strategic analyst were flimsy to say the least.
He it was, though, who wrote and presented the world’s first weapons-of-mass-destruction Dodgy Dossier.
In September 1938, as France was preparing to reiterate its commitment to help defend Czechoslovakia against German aggression, Lindbergh flew in to Paris to present his Bombardment Armageddon thesis.
He told the Elysee cabinet that within hours of France declaring war on Germany, Paris, beloved Paris, glorious Paris, the omphalos of the civilised world, would be laid flat. Razed to the ground. The whole city. Rubble and ashes. Millions dead. Germany, he told them in no uncertain terms, now had that capability.
He had data. Charts. Photographs. The whole shooting match.
And we can sort of understand the impact this narrative had. Because of course the Bombardment Armageddon scenario is deeply embedded in the collective consciousness of us all in the post Hiroshima age. So you’re sort of resorting to a feeble sort of casuistry if you point out that in 1938 this was, obviously, as yet, pure fiction.
But Lindbergh was irrefutably Lindbergh, so the French bought into it. In short, the Dodgy Dossier turned the French Government inside out. Within hours they were signalling to Hitler that he could fill his boots in the Sudetenland.
So… yes, here’s the problem. Anne’s growing dismay at her husband’s political intriguing is central to the plot of Flying Over Ruins. (And after all, while we’re at it, the very title hopefully evokes the ruins of a bombed Second World War city as well as more ancient ruins. The Armageddon angle resonates.)
But how much detail does the reader need? Or want? And how much of this Elysee cabinet episode do I need to show rather than tell?
The only feedback I’ve had on this (from a US literary agent) is that anyone who knows anything about Charles Lindbergh knows first and foremost that he was a bad lot. You’d hardly need to labour this point. And Flying Over Ruins is, after all, Anne's story. Isn't it?
Maybe she (the agent) was and is right.
But then she sort-of undermined this simplistic analysis by adding that hardly anyone knows anything at all about Charles Lindbergh these days… despite the fact that he was monstered briefly by the American Left during the 2016 Presidential Election, when they fixated on the notion that he was a prime mover in an early iteration of the America First movement.
My own limited focus-group research would tend to chime with this. The general reader doesn’t really have much of a take on Charles Lindbergh.
And that, I suppose, might be said to undermine the viability of the whole project.
But let’s just say for argument’s sake that we can stimulate curiosity in a wide-enough readership to make Flying Over Ruins worthwhile publishing. (Or pitching to a TV production company.)
We return again to the original question.
How dry and academic is the Elysee strand? How much intricate historical detail can Flying Over Ruins bear before the weight of this cargo unbalances the whole vessel, threatening to capsize it? Or actually, to reach for a metaphor from a more appropriate mode, pitches an otherwise airworthy kite into a tailspin.
I think, having dismantled and reassembled several noteworthy works of historical fiction, including the most acclaimed of Hilary Mantel’s efforts, that I know the answer, at least in theory.
But obviously I’d dearly love to get even the tiniest of inklings that I’m right.
Do I dare hope that I can put this to an intelligent and sensitive reader? Sadly, it didn't quite happen at the Faber Academy.
Meanwhile, to give this a tiny bit more context, here are some WordPress witterings I posted following an email exchange with a published historian around the time (as is obvious right up front) of the premiere of Munich, starring Jeremy Irons.
I do keep buggering on, don’t I?
