I Was Amelia Earhart
By Jane Mendelsohn
Knopf, 146 pages, $18
Hidden Latitudes
By Alison Anderson
Scribner, 221 pages, $21
Last Flight
By Amelia Earhart
Crown, 135 pages, $12 paper
Three weeks shy of her 40th birthday, on July 2, 1937, America’s most famous female aviator, Amelia Earhart, running low on gas, lost her bearings somewhere over the South Pacific and disappeared in her twin-engine Lockheed Electra with her navigator, Fred Noonan. The trip around the world was to have been her last “stunt flight,” as she put it in “Last Flight,” a posthumously published account of her attempt to be the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe. Once it was over, she planned to settle down with her husband, promoter and publisher George Palmer Putnam, to a quiet life of lecturing and putting the finishing touches on a new house in Hollywood. After the crash, Putnam spent much time trying to quash rumors that his wife had been on a spy mission for the U.S. when she went down. Though many theories have come and gone over the years, none has fully answered the question: How could Earhart have simply vanished?
“When I go, I would like to go on my plane. Quickly,” Earhart once said. In “Last Flight,” she also expressed the desire for more time to explore the exotic terrain glimpsed from the confines of her cockpit as she hopped from place to place. Shortly before taking off from New Guinea with Noonan on the grueling, 23-hour flight that ended in their disappearance, she wrote, “Like desert or sea, wild jungle has a strange fascination. I wish we could stay here peacefully for a time and see something of this strange land.”
Nearly 60 years later, in fictional explorations of Earhart’s last flight and its aftermath, two first-time novelists grant Earhart’s wish. In “I Was Amelia Earhart,” by Jane Mendelsohn, and “Hidden Latitudes,” by Alison Anderson, the Electra crashes, but its passengers emerge from the wreckage alive. Both novelists explore what might have happened had Earhart and Noonan ended up spending the rest of their lives on a tropical island. The Earhart that their imaginations reveal is by turns impatient, angry, grieving, flirtatious and, when sexually awakened, an insatiable, passionate lover. (Early praise on Don Imus’ radio show–his wife loved it–helped “I Was Amelia Earhart” to a second printing, a movie option and a slot on The New York Times best-seller list.)
The elliptical tone of Earhart’s dispatches and journal entries in “Last Flight” has a dashed-off, hurried quality that suggests an energetic woman with neither the patience nor the inclination for self-reflection. Though she possessed detailed knowledge of the inner workings of airplane engines and was deeply involved in the technical aspects of flight preparation, Earhart once said that in planning her flights, “I don’t bother to go into all the possible accidents that might happen. I just don’t think about crackups.” Creating a narrative voice for the memories and reflections of a famous yet private woman poses a challenge akin to detective work for a fiction writer. One must be sensitive to the voice of the real Earhart, yet still be alert for clues to dramatic possibilities hidden beneath the surface of her writings.
The real Earhart may not have thought about crackups, but the fictional one must do so to survive the ordeal of her last flight. In “I Was Amelia Earhart,” Mendelsohn begins with a soaring prose meditation on the words, “The sky is flesh.” Earhart, born again out of the sky’s “great blue belly,” is free at last to ponder the meaning of life: “Whether life is more real than death, I don’t know. What I know is that the life I’ve lived since (the crash) feels more real to me than the one I lived before.” In a voice that skillfully crosses and mingles first and third person, Mendelsohn reimagines the crash of the Electra, its fictional aftermath and the ordeal of setting up a new life on the island with Noonan.
“Infatuated with the men who made the rules,” yet at the same time tantalized by the lure of fame, Mendelsohn’s Earhart surrenders her bold independence to the hucksters with a smile and a swish of her signature white silk scarf.
Indeed, ducking breezily in and out of planes on stunt flights carefully orchestrated by Putnam had its rewards. By taking a back seat on a trans-Atlantic flight piloted by two men in 1928, Earhart became, in the words of the flight’s wily promoters, “The first woman to fly over the Atlantic.” This stunt led to others, which enabled Earhart to buy her first plane. “Here I am,” she later wrote to a friend, “jumping through hoops just like the little white horse in the circus.”
A tropical island is about as far from a three-ring circus as a person can get, and both novels make full use of its dramatic potential to push Earhart and Noonan to the edges of their sanity. The island is lushly evoked as a heavily perfumed, steaming jungle with the requisite swaying palms. There is even a shark-infested lagoon where Earhart, stripped of her fame and her plane, finds herself ripe for sexual awakening. In Mendelsohn’s dream-like version of what might have been, Earhart learns patience, falls in love and abandons her former self in a Zen-like free fall that allows her, finally, the peaceful solitude she craved in her life before the crash. The impressionistic characterizations and quick pacing of this short novel, along with its consistently haunting tone, are its most impressive achievements.
By contrast, the Earhart of “Hidden Latitudes” has miles to go after her intoxicating interlude with Noonan. In a wordless moonlight ceremony (“We did not speak; we exchanged rings woven from coconut fiber, then kissed. The stars fading moon-blinded at the horizon were our only witnesses.”) she “marries” Noonan. Then, in dizzying succession, she gets pregnant, nurses Noonan through a mysterious illness that causes him, delirious, to flee the island in a life raft, has a miscarriage and proceeds to live well into her 90s. “Thus I have learned,” she concludes sagely, “how to shut off my mind when it becomes impatient or demanding. I sit with the serenity of lions in the bush, paws outstretched, observant and calm.”
As the novel opens, the elderly, nearly blind Earhart is watching from behind bushes as Robin and Lucy, a bickering married couple, wash up on the island after quitting their humdrum teaching jobs for adventure on the high seas. Anderson’s strategy (more a concept, really) of having Earhart serve as a kind of voyeur, alternately spying on a failing marriage and flashing back on her life with Noonan after their crash, is interesting. But the momentum of the narrative is slowed by shifts in point of view to the endlessly self-absorbed Lucy. Nearly 200 heavily plotted pages later, Lucy is still struggling to give voice to her feelings, competing with Earhart for the center of the story.
Eudora Welty, commenting on her short story “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” written overnight after the Medgar Evers assassination in 1963, said: “If you write about an actual event you can’t shape it the way you can an imaginary one. In `The Voice’ I was writing about the real thing and at the point of its happening I was like a real-life detective trying to discover who did it. I don’t mean the name of the murderer but his nature.” Of these two admirable attempts to elucidate the true nature of Earhart the person, as opposed to Earhart the record-breaking pilot, Mendelsohn’s seems the more vividly imagined and complex. Perhaps this is because the shape of her narrative is more felt by the reader than seen. Voice takes priority over plot, revealing an Earhart who, knowing so well how to be in pictures, kept her true self hidden. Both reimaginations of Earhart have a special resonance for women today who live in conflict between independence and surrender, flight and home, and who, like Earhart, live on by remaining unknowable.
