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Books: The Two Lives of Nevil Shute

5 minute read
TIME

“After two wars I have been in danger too often to bother very much about being killed,” Novelist Nevil Shute once wrote, “and when it comes, I would prefer that it should happen in an aeroplane, since aeroplanes have been the best part of my life.” Death did not oblige 60-year-old Nevil Shute last week, for it came prosaically in a Melbourne hospital bed, after a stroke. It was an ending the hero of any of Shute’s 21 novels would have understood, for each of them faced up dutifully to the enormity of life’s commonplaces.

Their creator was far from commonplace. Though he was acclaimed as the top bestseller of all contemporary British authors, and his annual royalties topped the $175,000 mark, Shute insisted that he wrote novels “for fun.” Aviation was his ruling passion, and he pursued it as a flyer, aeronautical engineer, and founder of his own manufacturing firm, Airspeed Ltd. Out of his craft and his passion, Shute fashioned an exciting double life.

A Hook for Soloists. Born Nevil Shute Norway in the London suburb of Baling on Jan. 17, 1899, the future novelist was the second son of a postal official who turned vacations on the Continent into competent travel books. Like another famed storyteller, Somerset Maugham, the boy suffered from an agonizing stammer. Sensitive Nevil played hooky, haunting the London Science Museum with its glass-encased models of the pioneering planes of Blériot and the Wright brothers. At the end of World War I, he entered Oxford as an engineering major. Young Norway was an indifferent student but a line engineer; in 1923 the fledgling aircraft firm of de Havilland signed him on as a junior designer at £5 a week. The same year he soloed. At the Stag Lane Aerodrome, a crash wagon stood by with an 18-ft. hook, to show the inexperienced pilot “that his friends had it ready to assist him in any difficulty that might arise.” Pilot Norway did not crash, then or ever.

Bloody Ruddy. Writing as an off-duty relaxation, Engineer Norway shelved two novels and then soloed fictionally with Marazan in 1926. All he recalled of the novel later was a brief interchange with the publisher (“The House of Cassell does not print the word ‘bloody’ “). The author, whose collected works probably do not contain a four-letter word, changed ‘”bloody” to “ruddy” and dropped his last name for fear his bosses would regard an off-hours fictioneer as “not a serious person.” The peak of Shute’s engineering career was his work on the airship R. 100, in which he made a triumphant transatlantic crossing to Canada and back in 1930. Short weeks later, an ill-fated sister ship, the R. 101, crashed and burned. Shute chalked the tragedy up to bureaucratic bungling, for which he conceived a lifelong, livid distaste. Engaged to be married, he found himself jobless. Shute corralled a few like-minded airmen and venture capitalists, rented half of a bus garage in York, and Airspeed Ltd. was born. By the time Shute resigned, with a generous settlement, in 1938, the firm had a payroll of more than 1,000 men and more than £1,000,000 in orders.

Evil Is Inefficient. A fulltime novelist from then on, Shute clung to his methodical engineering habits. From 9:30 a.m. to noon, he typed at his manuscript, seated at a secondhand rolltop desk that his father had given him. A year was par for a novel. As critics and readers quickly learned, his characters behaved with a realistic mixture of human strength and frailty. Storyteller Shute was peculiarly immune to the lilt and color of prose, but he fashioned his sentences with pane-of-glass clarity.

If he settled too often for the topical, at least the topics were compelling: racial prejudice (The Chequer Board); war’s massacre of the innocents (Pied Piper)] the apocalypse of nuclear global suicide (On the Beach). At times Shute was notably prescient. In Ordeal (March 1939) he conjured up the spectacle of a bomb-battered England. Long before the Comet crashes, he visualized aircraft exploding from metal fatigue (No Highway). In an age of equivocal values, Shute took an authoritative, old-fashioned moral stance. His men were manly. His women were womanly and virtuous. Sex was linked to marriage; evil, when it existed at all, was apt to be just inefficiency.

In World War II, Nevil Shute, with the rank of lieutenant commander in the British Admiralty, worked on secret weapons. In 1950, fed up with confiscatory taxes and a feeling of decline in welfare-state Britain, he moved to Australia. A series of heart attacks grounded the old flyer and curbed his boating and sports-car racing. He settled into the life of a country squire at his pig and dairy farm at Langwarrin, Victoria.

At his death Shute left a novel, Trustee from the Toolroom, April Book-of-the-Month; like his other books, it will probably be a rattling good story and no literary masterpiece. No mound of Ph.D. theses on symbols and significance is likely to be stacked over Shute’s books. Yet later years may find them a remarkably reliable portrait of mid-20th century man and his concerns. Shute himself read little, but in Henry James’s words, he qualified as “one of the people on whom nothing is lost.”

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