Mary Lee Settle's Memoir of WWII and Becoming a Writer: "Learning to Fly"

Born in 1918 in Charleston, West Virginia, Mary Lee Settle was the author of the Beulah Quintet (historical fiction set in the American South from the 1640s to 1980s), The Killing Ground, which won the Kafka Prize in 1983, and Blood Tie, a novel about expatriates in Bodrum, Turkey, which won the National Book Award in 1978. I came to her writing by way of Turkey, first Blood Ties, then Turkish Reflections, a 1991 book about her return visit in 1989. She died in 2005, still less famous and less read than she deserved.

Two years earlier, at the age of 85, she began a memoir of her coming of age and becoming a writer. An earlier memoir, titled Adie, was more about her grandmother and other forbearers than about the future writer. Learning to Fly begins when Settle was twenty, disillusioned with the toney Sweet Briar College where what would now be called "date rape" had been ignored. Her mother, whom she wrote was the most frightening woman she ever meant, sent her off to an internship at the Barter Theatre in Virginia to preserve the tranquility that a daughter disturbed. In retrospect Settle realized that "my first lesson in professional acting and the unwritten rules that went with it -- concentration, quick study, empathy without identity, which ensures control of the character, a whole-body awareness, a sensate memory, all of which I look back on now as some of the most valuable lessons as a writer I have ever had."

Settle went on to New York-for a second level of screen testing for the lead in "Gone with the Wind" (a casting process of thousands), stayed on to work as a model, a bit player in some plays, and more substantial radio roles. She "lived in the last truly elegant season that would ever be in New York -- a season of the World's Fair, the St. Regis Roof, the Stork Club, the 21 Club... and thousands of Europeans." And many Brits. As soon as she turned 21, she married one with the sonorous name of Rodney Douglas De Vaughan Weathersbee.

War broke out in Europe and with a newborn son, she followed her husband to Toronto. After depositing Christoper back with her parents in West Virginia, she enlisted in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. Although the book is not about learning to fly airplanes, she did literally learn to fly, but was kept on the ground as a signal operator, relaying messages-not infrequently of pilots in lethal peril. After thirteen months she had the occupation hazard of "signals shock from the enemy jamming," and went to London, working for the American Office of War Information. At the start, she took visiting American VIPs to the BBC for interviews, then as a writer (with composer Marc Blitzstein), work at the "broadcasting studios for 'black radio,' beamed at the Resistance in Europe." From nearly six decades further on, Settle was certain "that that three-year stint was the central event of my life."

After she received the first picture her parents deigned to send of her son, she sought a transfer stateside. The journey by air (!) took eight days. After the war, she returned with Christopher to England and a second marriage to poet and critic Douglas "Den" Newton. From him she learned that talent was not enough and worked very hard at writing, doing some freelance journalism to support novel (and play-) writing. (She recalls that at age 27, reflecting that Charlotte Bronte was dead at the age of 30, she needed to get serious.)

The linear narrative of the memoir does not quite break off there. She recalls her relief at the good reviews her first novel The Love Eaters (1954) received on both sides of the Atlantic, and doing research in the British Library on the western parts of 18^th-century colonial Virginia. The book also includes memoirs she wrote of meeting T. S. Eliot and W. Somerset Maugham. "London, 1944" also appeared in print before being incorporated in the narrative of Learning to Fly, though I did not notice any rough seams. The two memoirs of elders were not integrated before Settle's final illness, one that precluded the book she had proposed to write about the young Thomas Jefferson (she had done a novel about the formative years of Roger Williams in which he did not reach Rhode Island before the last 60 pages). That proposal is included as an appendix.

I'd think that there must be materials from interviews that could have been added to inform readers about her life as a published writer, though her focus in her memoir as in the fictional ones of Jefferson and Williams was on formation rather than later accomplishment.

I wish that she had been able to go farther with her memoir, but as far as it goes, she had worked on the text (unlike the dictations by Carson McCullers that were nowhere near ready to be published or the 1938 dream journal of Elsa Morante).

Though she wrote nothing about music, I was struck by the number of gay Anglophone composers she seems to have known well during her London years. In addition to Marc Blitzstein, these included Michael Tippett, and John Cage (with Merce Cunningham).

And I was struck (as I have no doubt she intended readers to be) by reading of the revocation of her US citizenship because she threw herself into the war before the US government declared war. ""Under American law, I had lost my citizenship when I joined a foreign army. And so, one morning, along with five members of the Eagle Squadron -- Americans who had joined the RAF as pilots -- I stood before the U.S. consul and forswore 'allegiance to foreign potentates or princes.' I was officially American again. All of us were classed as 'premature anti-fascists,' a description in which I still take pride."

Wartime London was a major subject for two of my other favorite writers, Muriel Spark and Penelope Fitzgerald. Settle invokes her own war that was much closer to actual combat, as well as the immediate prewar Manhattan, and Toronto as volunteers and Englishmen abroad were being sorted out. The book seems to me to have much of interest not only for admirers of Settle's writing but as social/cultural history of the 1940s in England (and the last prewar seasons in Manhattan).

BTW, Settle started the PEN/Faulkner Award, and had a happy third marriage with William Tazewell (who died in 1998).