Biplane

A PRELUDE TO BACH

DICK BACH couldn’t write a book about flying if he tried.

And that, son, is a compliment.

If by “flying” we mean a mere manual of technical plans and exercises, how to take off and land, repair a motor, or restring your 1917 piano-wire harp, it is obvious from the first page of this book on that that is not what we are going to get from the very young Mr. Bach.

If on the other hand we intend to ventilate our knowledge, go up with Icarus, come down with Montgolfier and re-ascend with the Wrights, thoroughly aerated and highly exhilarated, then of course we must put ourselves in Dick Bach’s farmboy Tom Swift hands. He does not “fly” just as his great-great-great grandfather Johann Sebastian Bach did not “write music”: he exhaled it.

I am an idea—not a descriptive—writer. But I cannot resist describing Dick Bach to you. He is tall and angular and kind of slopes himself through your door, like Gulliver entering the house of a Lilliputian. He might have just come in off the plowfield. That makes sense, for probably he just emergency-landed his biplane in your north quarter and on his way across to your friendly light he could be expected to have pitched in and helped with the harvest.

He is a great big lunk of an American boy, that same tinkerer and rowboat mechanic we have seen bean-sprouting up by the light of the Industrial Revolution in basements and attics across America since locomotives first dragon-scared the Red Indians and San Juan Teddy dug that Canal singlehanded.

Dick Bach is all the clichés you ever heard about fresh apple pie and the Lafayette Escadrille (lately he has grown a most unlikely blond fairly English mustache).

Look in any old war memorial and you will see his face gazing back at you with proud innocence out of a thousand faded photos. He is so common as to be uncommon. If pictures had been snapped two thousand years ago you would have seen that same fair-reckoning smile and slope-gawked attitude behind Caesar on his way into and out of Britain.

He was never Daedalus, nor was he Icarus: they were special in another way. But he was one of those who saw Daedalus try and Icarus fail, and decided to do it himself, no matter what. So his time-traveling doppelgänger has been leaping off aqueducts and startling Chinese mandarins with bamboo butterfly wings or falling off cowbarns with bumbershoots for something like thirty centuries. Some were runtier than our present Dick Bach of course, but all had that same noon-sunshine apple smile that looks at Doom and says I’ll Live Forever.

We despair of him, we weep for him, but finally we laugh with all the Richard Bachs down history who, like grand Stubb in Moby Dick knew that a laugh was the best answer to everything.

Here then is Dick Bach’s own dear book not about flying but soaring, a feat not of machines but imagination.

Great-great-great grandpa wrote the music. Now here’s an offspring to lift simple words.

Perhaps the boy does not fly as high as the old man. Perhaps. But, just look—he is up there.