Name: Stephen Morris
ISBN: 9780307474216

Nevil Shute

These two related novellas, Stephen Morris and Pilotage, were Nevil Shute’s first works of fiction and drew on his own youthful experiences. Both concern young men obsessed with the early world of aviation. Stephen Morris has just called off his engagement to the girl he loves because he is a penniless graduate with no prospects—but for his dream of building airplanes. Pilotage continues the story, focusing on Stephen's ambitious navigator Peter Dennison, as he tests a daring idea for a new cross-Atlantic airmail service.

Stephen Morris

Tim Pendry

These connected novels could easily be overlooked as early unpublished drafts from a man who wrote many later bestsellers - no publisher took them on at the time and they are available now only because Shute's success made them profitable long after the event (1961). Born in 1899, Shute wrote these novels around 1921/1922 and 1923/1924 respectively and they have many virtues. Of course, they are not 'high literature', the romance element is conventional and there is not a great deal of subtlety in the characterisation but all that is not the point. Shute is doing what all aspiring novelists are told to write about - what they have actually experienced. What we have here is an unusual insight into a short period of history in which post war heroes were trying to serve their empire by being successful at business. I say 'heroes' but the wartime experience is worn lightly as just something men did. Now new things have to be done. Both novels are also variations on a single theme - that men must prove themselves worthy of their loyal (misunderstood or misunderstanding) women by making a living. Men are (in this world) creatures of creative purpose and the books offer us a 'stiff upper lip' version of Freud's belief that mental health resides in having a healthy relationship to love (sex) and work. There is so much to unpack here, I hardly know where to begin. We might start with the 'stiff upper lip'. Very little of the stories (and not the most credible parts) is related to romance but what is follows a clear pattern of men navigating the necessity for stability through matrimony where they inadequately understand 'how women think'. This is very much of its period. Sexual differentiation is clear but there is no sense of inferiority or superiority, just difference between the genders. Women want some things, men need some things and the squaring of needs and wants is managed through social convention. There is telling moment when a brother in whom a depressed sister is confiding and who he clearly loves in the most sincere way is so touched by her plight that he comments to himself that he felt like doing something he had not done since they were four - kiss her hair. Of course, he does not. In another passage, one of the leading women advises another woman that a woman who deprives a man of his 'toys' (in effect, some sense of endeavour, work or freedom, even if it is only 'the club') is going to lose him (not to another woman but as a soul companion). There is a lot of homespun inter-gender period wisdom in the book as male and female characters carefully reinforce the rules of upper middle class British imperial life through very short laconic speeches that still manage to show a fundamental love or kindness. Shute conveys brilliantly the melancholy of what happens when, because the rules do not admit much free expression of inner life, misunderstandings take place. In this world, men can open up a little to men and women to women but only a crisis permits men and women to communicate. In this regard, the book is so good at its expression of the almost Japanese codification of social mores in the interwar false peak of empire that I could see it as the basis for an essay on that subject alone ... but let us move on. If this is a young author negotiating the codes that lead to matrimony through his young male heroes, it is also a book about male purpose and, in writing about male purpose, Shute gives us a fascinating insight into British upper middle class male experience in the 1920s. The two books complement each other perfectly. The hero of the first is a character in the second, his wife becomes mentor to the future wife of the second, university and county set relationships overlap and the businessman Rawdon plays an avuncular role in both. The real hero of the book is more abstract than Morris or Dennison - it is aviation engineering as both business and the basis of imperial prosperity. It is the struggle to 'achieve' these ends against foreign competition and the failure to understand its importance amongst bureaucrats. Again, an essay could be written on this theme but let us restrict ourselves to an outline of the story without spoilers. In 'Stephen Morris', our young hero Morris (everyone speaks to each other as surnames) is struggling to find a living that will support a wife in the post-WWI depression. A job in the empire fails to materialise and he is reduced to learning the aviation trade as a pilot, based on wartime skills (he is, as happened after the Second World War, a late military graduate of Oxford). He tries to leverage his abstract mathematical skills into aeronautical design. His attempts to do so and all the business dealings in the book are wholly unsentimental. Contract is everything and personal advantage accepted as something you are always entitled to seek. Some passages are minor primers in negotiation. Shute likes a bit of incomprehensible technical detail, whether about aircraft design or yachting in a pattern used by thriller writers ever since, but he does not overdo it by any means. The Avro that Morris flies may well be one like that in the Science Museum if you want to get a real feel for it. His first job is simply a summer trade of taking middle class tourists into the skies for half hour round trips of the Solent (a bit of a comedown after the war) and it is a business in terminal decline under a Government interested only in 'austerity' (a familiar tale indeed). The two partners in the business are not university men and are mavericks, one from the upper middle strata. The two novels show the slow process by which the elite recognises the value of the industry and begins to take it over which also has resonance today. Eventually, Government, seeing some strategic value in air power, changes its tune but not during the course of this first novel in which the disappointments and business risks are described without sentiment. We sympathise, we empathise but the upper lip remain stiff. One incident (which we won't reveal), a tragedy, captures the key elements - men risking all for a higher purpose (profit for the sake of the empire) and the melancholy of life unfulfilled by those who miss their chance by only adventuring and not adventuring for a family or at least a wife. Indeed, one of the charms of the books is its carefully delineated upper middle class world in which the country gentry are attempting to build the nation and their private wealth on commercially viable technical innovation. Profit is not a dirty word because it builds. This highly conservative vision has no role for the lower classes who are scarcely present except as bit part players while women play no role in 'business' but it has to be said that these men are prepared to take considerable risks with their own lives and with their money to achieve something. In this respect, the post WWI British aviation industry might be seen both as having a similar commercial trajectory to the advanced technologies of today with similar cycles of development and as something based on the culture of war and of the high empire that preceded it. The second book switches the balance of the characters around in order to deal with the romance aspects in a different way within the same framework and does something similar to the business and adventure story that 'genders' the tale as masculine. In this case, we have moved on two or three years and the situation has improved. The British Government is now subsidising aircraft development and buying aircraft. The story shifts to the design of a vehicle that has both air power and sea-going aspects for commercial purposes. We are no longer dealing with small time businessmen and clubs of enthusiastic angel investors but serious City money taking a punt on the technology and with an eye to carefully assessed commercial opportunities centred on the needs of the City and government contracts. No more detail on that for spoiler reasons but we can say that it gives Shute the opportunity in the first third of 'Pilotage' to show off his knowledge of sailing and coastal navigation so that the reader feels, without being bored, educated about more than aviation. Indeed, Shute is a pleasure to read precisely because he is an engineer. He can actually write. If we get lost on this or that word, we do not get lost on sense and there is always Wikipedia if you insist on understanding biplane aerodynamics. There is no boredom in this book. It runs along nicely. One ['one' is often used in its neutral upper class English way] roots for these upper middle class people, their highly calculated risk-taking and mix of private and public motive even if one's politics may be very different today. This is an elite troubled by its condition after a bruising war but resilient, adaptive, intelligent, under-resourced and ultimately confident if it puts in the work. There is no 'condition of the people' at stake here, only a 'condition of the nation', the nation of their imagination. Interestingly, both books may have happy endings in terms of the romantic aspects but neither has an ending that is conclusive in regard to these issues of nation and profit. That work is presented as ongoing and the implication is that matrimony exists to give stability to heroes. As to the heroism, it is not obvious and effusive. It is very matter of fact. If the leading figures are to get from A to B under conditions of great personal risk, then it is either that or nothing gets achieved (and, obviously, wealth is the reward of the risk, death perhaps of failure). This is the mentality that has created the English upper middle classes since the days of the wool traders and the mercant adventurers and it remains the fundamental psychology of today's upper middle class Tory voters and the entrepreneurial wing of it that supported Brexit. I say 'created' but that class is sadly mostly rather degenerate today and that is not something that can be blamed on 'socialism'. It probably lost its higher purpose when the empire died with Suez in 1956 and its social codes only exist now in the old military and country wing of Tory England. Tory England still exists in its traditional form and the right-wing form of Brexit may be its last stand - traditional values and codes of behaviour, familial kindness, avoidance of 'scenes', loyalty to retainers, ruthless in negotiation and with outsiders, greedy and High Anglican. Shute's community of entrepreneurs, traders, innovators and capitalists is not contrasted with the masses (although socialism and communism would become an important alternative community in due course) but with the non-producing 'humanities' and the bureaucrats of their own class. The treatment of these rivals is not unambiguous. Although Stephen Morris wants to get away from Oxford and do something practical (the natural engineer) and is a little dismissive of the 'humanities', Shute creates an interesting soft, rather effete poet (Anthony) in the second novel. This poet is not a foil of the engineers. On the contrary, he is presented as someone who can interpret his own gender to the 'other gender', women, and, in doing so, we get a whiff of why even men of business and engineers could see the social value of the 'soft' (not gay) male. The implication is that poetry was an emotional highly coded safety valve that smoothes the path of human relations that are fundamentally based on non-communication. Highly coded cultures - British imperial, Japanese, Arabic - prize poetry as social communication. Part of the current 'degeneracy' of this class may (speculatively) lie in the loss of the poetic expressed as classical literary example and poetry that rhymes and can be understood in favour of 'modernism' - highly sensitive poetics that only the poetic can understand. As to the bureaucrats, the impression one gets is of them as an irritating necessity, slow-moving with their own interests but ultimately working to the same purpose once their slower minds get round to it. The innovator has to hang on in there and wait until they see sense. Once they see sense, the two sides of the same coin can make things happen. This curious mix of free enterprise and corporatism based on class still remains the core of British economic management today, despite Thatcher's attempt to give primacy to the innovators. But all our close analysis of these two youthful novels as providers of insights into an era and a class should not blind us to the fact that, while by no means perfect, these are highly readable novels that give a great deal of enjoyment. Why were they not published at the time? I suspect the combination of romance and business was before its time. It was not good enough to be Galsworthy and not conventional enough to compete with Bulldog Drummond or John Buchan. At the end of the day, these are not chases across grouse moors, tales that start and end in London clubs or tales involving stolen heirlooms, dastardly foreign spies and stolen plans. The adventure, ahead of its time, is closer to that of Saint-Exupery.

Stephen Morris

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