Ramon Guthrie’s 1928 novel Parachute is a story about PTSD. The term post-traumatic stress disorder hadn’t been invented then, and the fact that the novel is full of pilots, airplanes, and people jumping out of them led its publishers to sell it as a story about aviation. Coming out a year after Charles Lindbergh’s record-breaking solo flight across the Atlantic, Parachute seemed guaranteed to hit a bullseye with the reading public.
The fact that its author was credited with downing four German aircraft (as an observer/gunner, mind, not a pilot) and awarded the Silver Star for his exploits didn’t hurt. But the actual fact was that Ramon Guthrie was by then, almost ten years after the war, anything but a stereotype of the heroic military aviator. He wrote the book, his second novel, while living in France, having returned in late 1921 to rejoin Marguerite Maurey, the woman with whom he’d fallen in love just before being repatriated to the United States as a casualty in early 1919. He’d taken a degree at the university in Tours and become interested in poetry, publishing several collections with expat publishers and writing a first novel, Marcabrun, about a 12th century troubadour.
The wounds for which Guthrie was brought home weren’t physical. He’d survived several crashes while serving with the U.S. Army Signal Corps’s Aviation Section on the Western front. Worst that those, however, was the ill-conceived raid in which a flight of 10 DH-4 “Liberty” bombers took off on 18 September 1918 to attack Mars-la-Tour, a town just seven miles inside the German lines. Three planes dropped out due to mechanical problems. The Liberties were plagued with mechanical problems. A fourth turned back when the formation encountered clouds. The pilots, mostly inexperienced, had little experience flying and trying to navigating in clouds.
About half an hour into their mission, the remaining six planes were attacked by German fighters. Three were quickly shot down, killing all six pilots and observers. Two others were damaged and force into crash landings. Only Guthrie and his pilot, Vincent Oatis, made it back safely, Guthrie managing to shoot down one of the German Fokkers. Guthrie later recalled the experience in the poem “Death with Pants On” in his last book Maximum Security War (1970):
I think of others
Chapin, Sayre, Comygies, Nick Carter
whom I last saw spinning down in flames
toward La Chaussee. Their first fight —
if you can call it that. Unmatched for unreality:
as we straggled out of clouds into a well
of open sky, the red-nosed hornets swooped.
Most of us
never found a chance to fire a shot.
There were others. I forget their names.
A few days after that raid, Guthrie’s helmet and goggles came off while they were flying at a relatively high altitude and he suffered burns to his face and eyes from the freezing air until Oatis got the plane down. Guthrie continued to fly, usually with Oatis, until less than a week before the Armistice.
Guthrie had been in France since the end of 1916, when he arrived in a contingent of the American Field Service ambulance corps, a now legendary unit that included such future writers as John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and E. E. Cummings. Guthrie’s section of the service operated with the French Army in both France and the Balkans. When American entered the war in 1917, Guthrie enlisted as an aviation observer, thinking it would take too long for him to qualify as a pilot.
Even before the war ended, however, Guthrie already began to suffer psychological effects from his combat experiences. He had bouts of amnesia and his behavior off duty began to concern his fellow flyers. As in World War Two, air combat in the First quickly gained a romantic mystique that covered up the ugly reality that war was even more of a meat grinder in the air than it was on the ground. Doughboys in the trenches had better chances of survival than the airmen they envied for their “luxurious” billets behind the lines. Life at a typical aerodrome was certainly more comfortable than it was in a front line trench, but you had to avoid being killed, wounded, or captured to enjoy it.
Even though psychiatry was still in its early days and looked on with some suspicion by other medical practitioners, the U.S. Army had begun to recognize that not all wounds were physical, and it sought to provide suitable rehabilitation for at least some of its returning veterans. For flyers like Guthrie, however, it was sheer luck that Stephen Carlton Clark, a wealthy philanthropist who later founded the Baseball Hall of Fame, had decided to offer the services of a brand-new hospital he was building on part of his estate in Cooperstown, New York. Clark had some snobbish stipulations, though. He preferred to limit the patients to aviators and even then only to those not requiring surgery or physical therapy. The hospital would specialize in “nervous shock” cases.
The hospital opened just in time to receive the first airmen arriving back in the U.S. in early 1919. In Parachute, the fictional town of Berkenmeer takes the place of Cooperstown and an only-partly-philanthropist named Alfred Banning takes the place of Clark. Among the hundred or so flyers assigned to the hospital are Tony Rickey, an ace and crack fighter pilot, and Harvey Sayles, who served entirely behind the lines as a ferry pilot.
Of the two, it’s Harvey who is the more damaged, however. He’s had three planes crack up on him, and after the third crash, he went AWOL for weeks before being caught by the military police. Unwilling to go through the trouble of organizing a court-martial, though, his commanding officer persuades the medical officer to diagnose Harvey with dementia praecox — or schizophrenia as it’s usually termed today.
Tony and Harvey find themselves outsiders at the hospital. From an Italian family in Peoria, Tony is considered lowbrow by the other pilots, most of them Ivy Leaguers from “better” families. Harvey, on the other hand, is seen as the only patient in the place truly in need of its care. “I’m plagued the by insanity label,” he complains. The rest of the men are just enjoying a few months of rest and recreation at the Army’s expense.
Tony isn’t bothered by the insanity label — or rather, it helps him accept Harvey’s idiosyncracies:
Tony didn’t mind listening to Sayles, because he knew that Sayles was crazy and couldn’t help talking that way; and occasionally as he listened he would become aware of a deep current of sense running through the babble. Once his ear had distinguished it, it was like singling out the notes of one instrument in an orchestra until it dominated everything else. Sometimes Tony would even wonder why more people didn’t talk that way, and if it wouldn’t be a good idea for more people to be insane.
Tony soon meets and begins an affair with Natalie, Alfred Banning’s beautiful young Russian wife. Managing to deceive the older man, he also persuades Banning to support a hare-brained scheme he concocts of establishing an airline based in Berkenmeer. Boston – Berkenmeer – Chicago, he fantasizes. Tony revs up the Chamber of Commerce and soon raises enough money to buy an old Curtiss Jenny and turn a local field into a runway.
His entrerpeneurial dreams get mixed up with his passion for Natalie, and soon the two have run off as Tony scrapes by with barnstorming jobs and joy-rides at county fairs. Meanwhile, Harvey decides it’s time to return to civilian life and travels to New York City in search of work. Instead, he encounters scenes more hellish than anything he’d seen during the war:
Miles of sidewalks and people flickering by, young men, old men, women, girls, and all with dead, distorted faces, horribly obscene, like gargoyles worn by the rain, the same faces that make the ghastly fresco of the Subway, blotchy, bloated, idiot faces with evil squints and apathetic leers. Subway Faces. Subway Faces crawling out into the air. He forced his pace to pass them more quickly and, as he met them, turned his eyes away with sickened dread.
While in New York, however, he witnesses a demonstration of parachuting and gets the idea to buy one and join Tony on his barnstorming travels. In addition to the stunts and rides, Harvey will do parachute jumps, giving most of the people on the ground their first sight of a falling from a plane in flight and surviving.
Guthrie understands that both Tony and Harvey are avoiding their inevitable return to the routines and small dramas of peacetime life. Flying, adultery, and skydiving are attempts to recreate the intensity of wartime experiences without recognizing their psychological costs. Harvey begins to worry that his trip to New York was proof that he was, indeed, insane — incapable of fitting back into normal life. As winter approaches, bringing an end to the barnstorming season, Harvey thinks that winter will also “terminate his life with Tony.” Harvey’s response is suicidal; Tony’s is merely rash and reckless. In the end, neither manages to put the war behind him.
Guthrie’s choice of title is ironic: neither Tony nor Harvey finds a way to break their fall from the heightened experience of war. Guthrie himself fared better, perhaps with the help of his wife, perhaps because of his return to France, or perhaps because of a simple resilience of spirit. He and Marguerite left France in 1929, driven out by the failing economy, and Guthrie landed a job at Dartmouth. He stayed there for over thirty years, writing little and concentrating on teaching and translation. He served briefly with the Office of Special Services, the forerunner of the CIA, to help coordinate between Allied forces and the French Resistance, earning the Legion d’Honneur, then returned to Dartmouth.
He was diagnosed with bladder cancer in the mid-1960s and had to curtail his teaching activities. His fight with the disease seemed to reinvigorate his creative energies, however, and he began writing poetry again. He was unwilling to condone further military operations, though, and he mailed his Silver Star to President Johnson in 1965 to protest the American involvement in Vietnam. He also began work on his best-known book Maximum Security Ward, which was published in 1970. By the time the book was published, however, the disease had seriously debilitated him and he spent his last years in pain, much of the time hospitalized. He managed to arrange his release in late November 1973 and took his life with an overdose of phenobarbital soon after returning home.