A New Winged Victory
Angel Island, by Inez Haynes Gillmore. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]
Angel Island is several rare things: original, profound, flaming. It leaves you with a gasping sense of having been swept through the skies; and also with that feeling of new life which comes with a plunge into cold, deep seas. Angel Island is a new kind of Winged Victory!
Innumerable books have been written about the conflict of the sexes, about the emergence of the new woman. Most of them are dull books. But Mrs. Gillmore’s is beautiful and exciting. I kept thinking as I read it: here is something absolutely new, absolutely authentic; something so full of vision and truth that it’s like getting to the top of a mountain for the sunrise. Its freshness and its clearness are like cool morning mists that the sun has shot through.
But to discard vague phrases and get to the story—for it is not a tract, but a novel—or rather a poetic allegory—that that Mrs. Gillmore has written. Five men of representative modern types—a professor, a libertine, a soldier of fortune, a “mere mutt-man,” and an artist—are shipwrecked on a tropical island. After a few days their attention is caught by what appears to be huge birds flying through the heavens. The birds come nearer and prove to be winged women! Then comes the story of their wooing, their capture, their ultimate evolution into what modern women have decided they want to be: humanists.
However, this is going too fast. The only way to appreciate Angel Island is to be conscious of the art of it as you read. Beginning with the shipwreck, Mrs. Gillmore creates a series of brilliant pictures that culminate in the flying orgies of the bird-women.
... All this was intensified by the anarchy of sea and sky, by the incessant explosion of the waves, by the wind which seemed to sweep from end to end of a liquefying universe, by a downpour which threatened to beat their sodden bodies to pulp, by all the connotation of terror that lay in the darkness and in their unguarded condition on a barbarous, semi-tropical coast....
The storm, which had seemed to worry the whole universe in its grip, had died finally but it had died hard. On a quieted earth, the sea alone showed signs of revolution. The waves, monstrous, towering, swollen, were still marching on to the beach with a machine-like regularity that was swift and ponderous at the same time.... Beyond the wave-line, under a cover of foam, the jaded sea lay feebly palpitant like an old man asleep....
They had watched the sun come up over the trees at their back. And it was as if they had seen a sunrise for the first time in their lives. To them it was neither beautiful nor familiar; it was sinister and strange. A chill, that was not of the dawn but of death itself, lay over everything. The morning wind was the breath of the tomb, the smells that came to them from the island bore the taint of mortality, the very sun seemed icy. They suffered—the five survivors of the night’s tragedy—with a scarifying sense of disillusion with Nature....
The sun was racing up a sky smooth and clear as gray glass. It dropped on the torn green sea a shimmer that was almost dazzling; but there was something incongruous about that—as though Nature had covered her victim with a spangled scarf. It brought out millions of sparkles in the white sand; and there seemed something calculating about that—as though she were bribing them with jewels to forget....
Dozens of waves flashed and crashed their way up the beach; but now they trailed an iridescent network of foam over the lilac-gray sand. The sun raced high; but now it poured a flood of light on the green-gray water. The air grew bright and brighter. The earth grew warm and warmer. Blue came into the sky, deepened—and the sea reflected it. Suddenly the world was one huge glittering bubble, half of which was the brilliant azure sky and half the burnished azure sea.
All this is gorgeous enough—this clear, vivid painting of nature. But when Mrs. Gillmore turns her hand to the supernatural, she is simply ravishing. For instance:
The semi-tropical moon was at its full. Huge, white, embossed, cut out, it did not shine—it glared from the sky. It made a melted moonstone of the atmosphere. It faded the few clouds to a sapphire-gray, just touched here and there with the chalky dot of a star. It slashed a silver trail across a sea jet-black except where the waves rimmed it with snow. Up in the white enchantment, but not far above them, the strange air-creatures were flying. They were not birds; they were winged women!
Darting, diving, glancing, curving, wheeling, they interwove in what seemed the premeditated figures of an aerial dance.... Their wings, like enormous scimitars, caught the moonlight, flashed it back. For an interval, they played close in a group inextricably intertwined, a revolving ball of vivid color. Then, as if seized by a common impulse, they stretched, hand in hand, in a line across the sky—drifted. The moonlight flooded them full, caught glitter and gleam from wing-sockets, shot shimmer and sheen from wing-tips, sent cataracts of iridescent color pulsing between. Snow-silver one, brilliant green and gold another, dazzling blue the next, luminous orange a fourth, flaming flamingo scarlet the last, their colors seemed half liquid, half light. One moment the whole figure would flare into a splendid blaze, as if an inner mechanism had suddenly turned on all the electricity; the next, the blaze died down to the fairy glisten given by the moonlight.
As if by one impulse, they began finally to fly upward. Higher and higher they rose, still hand in hand.... One instant, relaxed, they seemed tiny galleons, all sails set, that floated lazily, the sport of an aerial sea; another, supple and sinuous, they seemed monstrous fish whose fins triumphantly clove the air, monarchs of that aerial sea.
A little of this and there came another impulse. The great wings furled close like blades leaping back to scabbard; the flying-girls dropped sheer in a dizzying fall. Half-way to the ground, they stopped simultaneously as if caught by some invisible air plateau. The great feathery fans opened—and this time the men got the whipping whirr of them—spread high, palpitated with color. From this lower level, the girls began to fall again, but gently, like dropping clouds.... They paused an instant and fluttered like a swarm of butterflies undecided where to go.... Then they turned out to sea, streaming through the air in line still, but one behind the other. And for the first time, sound came from them; they threw off peals of girl-laughter that fell like handfuls of diamonds. Their mirth ended in a long, eerie cry.
To me, that is wonderful work—one jeweled word after another. And it’s sustained through the whole book. But of course, after this first sense of ravishment with her pictures, you touch upon the deeper wonder of Mrs. Gillmore—her ideas. There are enough ideas in Angel Island to equip the women who are fighting for selfhood with armour that is absolutely hole proof.
The winged women differ in type as widely as the men; and each man chooses very quickly the type that appeals to him most. The libertine wants the big blond one, whom they’ve named “Peachy”; the professor likes Chiquita, the very feminine, unintellectual one; Billy, the mere man, falls violently and reverently in love with the radiant Julia, the leader of the group and the one your interest centers in immediately. Julia has a personality: she appears to be “pushed on by some intellectual or artistic impulse, to express by the symbols of her complicated flight some theory, some philosophy of life.” She seems always to shine. She is a creator. In short, Julia thinks.
The men plan capture and finally accomplish it by a time-honored method: that of arousing the women’s curiosity. Then follows a tragic episode when they cut the captives’ wings, making flight impossible. Of course, marriage is the next step, and later, children are born on Angel Island—little girl children with wings, and boys without them. But all this time Julia has refused to marry Billy, though she’s in love with him. Her only reason is that something tells her to wait.
Inevitably the women mourn the loss of their wings; and just as they become reconciled to a second-hand joy in their daughters’ flights, Peachy’s husband informs her that flying is unwomanly—that woman’s place is in the home, not in the air (!)—and that their daughter must be shorn of her wings as soon as she’s eighteen.
What next? Rebellion, with Julia shining gloriously as leader. She had been waiting for this. And in ten pages of profound, simple, magnificent talk—if only every woman in the world would read it!—she explains to the others that they must learn to walk. Peachy objects, because she dislikes the earth. “There are stars in the air,” she argues. “But we never reached them,” answers Julia. The earth is a good place, and they must learn to live in it. Besides, their children will fly better for learning to walk, and walk better for knowing how to fly; and she prophesies that then will be born to one of them a boy child with wings.
The women hide and master the art of walking. While they’re doing this their poor wings have a chance to grow a little, and by the time the men are ready to capture and subdue them a second time they have achieved a combination of walking and flying that puts them beyond reach. Then the men submit ... and Julia asks Billy to marry her.
That’s all, except one short chapter about Julia. She has a son with wings! And then she dies—radiant, white, goddess-woman, whose life had been so fine a thing. The beauty of it all simply overwhelmed me.
All of which points to several important conclusions. First, that Mrs. Gillmore is a poet and prophet of golden values. Second, that prejudice is the most foolish thing in the world. A general prejudice against that obvious form of comedy called farce might cause you to miss The Legend of Leonore. And a stubborn caution in regard to allegories—which, I concede, generally are unsubtle—might keep you from Angel Island.