Falling Upwards

Book Review: 'Falling Upwards' by Richard Holmes

 Of balloons as inventions, balloons as machines of war and balloons as fantastical creations of the Romantic mind.

 

By Simon Winchester  in the Wall Street Journal

For one brief and macabre moment while reading this fascinating and eccentric book, I was seized with a feeling of unsettling puzzlement.

It stole up on me quietly, while I was deep into a chapter telling of the employment of balloons in wartime. I was happily learning about such curious topics as their use by the French Corps d'Aérostiers at the Battle of Liège in 1794; the Union army's spy balloons at such clashes as the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861; and the courageous men who escaped in wicker gondolas from the 1871 Prussian siege of Paris (and took the outbound mail along for good measure). It was some time after I read about H.G. Wells—who had argued, in his "The War in the Air," that squadrons of fighting-balloons, silently swooping down on an enemy, could wreak terrible damage from the skies—that I turned hastily to the author's bio on the book's jacket, because all of a sudden I wasn't entirely sure which Richard Holmes was writing.

For there are—or rather, until quite recently, there were—two equally esteemed British historians named Richard Holmes. Both were born in the 1940s, and both have been honored with the rakes of letters that Britons like to put behind their names. Richard Holmes, CBE, TD, JP, was a military historian of supreme distinction, known for his studies of Wellington and Marlborough and of wars in India and Libya and on the Western Front. Richard Holmes, OBE, FRSL, FBA, on the other hand, is known as a follower of gentler and more literary pursuits—famed in Britain as a biographer of Shelley and Coleridge.

Surely, I said to myself, it must be the military man who is writing so eloquently about balloons at war—about, for instance, those gas-filled confections of silk rising high above the Rappahannock River and of their gallant crews sending signals down to the Union guns about just where to aim to hit the Rebels squirreled away below. This was, after all, the soldier-writer's field, his calling, his métier.

But it turned out not to be so. Not only had Brigadier Richard Holmes—for such had been his rank—died in 2011, but it turned out that the other, still-very-extant Richard Holmes, fascinated since his schoolboy years with the simple notion of ballooning, is quite as able to cope with the intricacies of balloons as machines of war as he is with balloons as fantastical creations of the Romantic mind. In "Falling Upwards" he does both, and in truth much more, presenting us with a book as delightful as it is unexpected, one that is a testament to the sheer pleasures of writing about what you know, about what excites you and what gives you joy.

And what more joyous a topic than the hilarious insanities of "Falling Upwards"! A whole new raft of human experience was launched in the late 18th century with the simple realization that hydrogen, or coal-gas, or even hot air, is lighter than our atmosphere and that once such gossamer gases are corralled into a fabric container, they can lift us up and break those infamously surly bonds of earth.

With this discovery a central vision of gravity-bound humankind suddenly shifted, in a manner both literal and highly spiritual. For from the moment that the Montgolfier brothers untied their anchor ropes and floated serenely into the skies, we achieved a new perspective on our planet-home, and whole worlds of unimagined possibilities swam into the collective human mind. "Beautiful invention, mounting heavenward," wrote Thomas Carlyle in 1837, "so beautifully, so unguidably! Emblem of our Age, of Hope itself."

This is a history of a little more than two centuries of airborne rapture. Between the Montgolfiers, with the sheep, the cockerel and the duck they launched from Versailles in 1783, and the Wrights brothers' brief bumping winged and heavier-than-air flight along the North Carolina sands in 1903, there are a multitude of stories and adventures and heart-stopping sagas born of this new experience of soaring and drifting. There are tales of brave airborne heroes and brave and beautiful airborne heroines, of crashes and losses, of poems and plays and books (Babar!), of cartoons and monuments and events heroic and tragic played out on all corners of a fascinated planet—on Arctic ice floes, on craggy mountain fastnesses and in deserts hot and frigid too. Mr. Holmes relates them all with aplomb and verve.

He tells, as an example, of heroines like Sophie Blanchard, who flew in a silk balloon "lifting her on a tiny, decorative silver gondola" designed so that "when she stood up . . . it was virtually like standing in a flying champagne bucket." Miss Blanchard appeared above adoring multitudes in scores of heavenly tableaux played out across the capitals of Europe. But then one hot summer's night above Paris in 1819 a sudden hydrogen fire, and then the pitiless pull of gravity, did for her, and she struck a rooftop near the Gare Saint-Lazare. "Sophie was not severely burnt, but she was tangled in the balloon rigging. She slid down the roof and caught onto the parapet above the street. Here she hung for a moment, according to eye-witnesses, calmly calling out 'A moi, à moi!' Then she fell onto the stone cobbles beneath."

Balloons are still much in use today, of course—for meteorology, for advertising, for record-settings both vertical (Felix Baumgartner stepping out from a balloon-hoisted platform 128,000 feet up last year) and horizontal (the Breitling Orbiter 3 and its two-man crew bobbed clear around the world in 1999). A tethered balloon filled with cameras sways above the Mexican border in south Texas, watching for illegalities human and pharmaceutical. U.S. Air Force drone balloons pepper the Afghan skies, doing goodness knows what. Playful and moneyed types gather yearly in such places as Albuquerque and Connemara, Ireland, and Velikiye Luki in Russia, for balloon fiestas, with ever-more-fanciful gas-filled behemoths soaring heavenward. And the newspapers still offer us a steady diet of tales of ballooning accidents, of multicolored monsters colliding with power lines, or mountains, or drifting off uncontrollably into the sea.

But Richard Holmes, while acknowledging this formidable legacy, deals almost wholly with the ballooning pioneers of two centuries before. Their amazed delight at being hoisted upward into the air is clearly his amazed delight too, which is in part why this book is such a thrill to read. For it presents an image of Mr. Holmes's own intellectual passions—as well a multilayered portrait of human yearning in the days before heavier-than-air flight was achieved, before flying became a routine and came to so dismally dominate all our present traveling lives.

Some might suggest that this is a slighter book than most of Mr. Holmes's earlier works. I see it instead as the natural extension of "The Age of Wonder" (2009), in which he neatly and most originally argued the connections between the literature and scientific advances of the Romantic Age. For this is a book about connections too—between ambition and dreams, between fortitude and astonishment, between heaven and earth in equipoise.

There are so many stories told in these pages that one is tempted to make lists and nominate favorites. I have two: I first love the thought of the Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont tethering his balloon to his best-loved restaurant on the Champs-Elysées while he dined, as if he were a visiting rancher from the heavens, his steed some kind of Pegasus. But most of all I love the vision of the fat and gouty old Benjamin Franklin in his wheelchair, imagining how he might be made instantly weightless by a small hydrogen balloon shackled to him, and led about effortlessly by a servant pulling him along by a string.

This image alone seems to me well worth the modest price of admission to Richard Holmes's extraordinary cabinet of drifting aerial wonderment, a book that will linger and last, as it floats ever upward in the mind.

—Mr. Winchester's latest book is
"The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible."