Friday from the Archives: “Son of a Gun, Sky-high: Clyde Edgerton on Flying” an interview by Tonita S. Branan in NCLR 2003
NC Writers’ Conference is honoring Clyde Edgerton at their annual gathering this month. We are grateful to have published work by and about Edgerton many times over the years. This interview in our 2003 issue “Commemorating the 100 years since the First Flight” with the former Air Force pilot and author of The Floatplane Notebooks and In Memory of Junior explored where and when Edgerton became enamored with flying and also how he worked it into his writing.
TB: I had wondered whether you were assigned to a piloting track or requested it, but military flying was obviously the reason you were even in college, in the first place.
I don’t know if I would have wanted to be in the military or not–without the flying. That’s the time in my life when different things were happening, in terms of beginning to understand that there’s a future. My sophomore year in college I read A Farewell to Arms and decided I wanted to be a teacher of literature–I wanted to teach stories. According to my journal, by the time I was twenty-two I had apparently dreamed of being a writer, but I never talked about it or considered it seriously –I didn’t think that would be possible. What would be possible for me to do was fly airplanes for five years (it was a five-year commitment), get out of the Air Force, and begin to teach literature–stories. I was beginning to like Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and some of those people, and wanting to teach high school English.
TB: You had a phrase when you were describing learning to fly this aircraft–you said you felt like you were “playing with a snake.” The airplane crash at the end of In Memory of Junior, where you’ve got the four snakes in the cage in the back.
There’s a good story to go with that.
TB: Well, I wondered how in the world you came up with that, and if those snakes were somehow a physical manifestation of the danger that is always present, anytime anybody goes up?
No, the way that story came up was when I owned this airplane [the PA-12], Tim McLaurin asked me to take him flying down to Wilmington to get four rattlesnakes.
TB: Did you do it?
No, I didn’t. I never did say no to him; I was too proud to say no. I just kind of waited until he drove down and got them himself, and then I said, “You still want me to take you to get those rattlesnakes?” [laughing] As soon as I thought about having four rattlesnakes in the cockpit of that aircraft, you know, my imagination got the best of me, and I thought, what if we were in a situation, upside down, fuel leaking, a spark somewhere, and the snakes are loose in the ceiling of the aircraft?
Reminder: we are still accepting scholarly writing and interviews with current and former military affiliated authors! Read the call for submissions, which ends August 31.
Read the entire essay on Gale Cengage and pick up a 2003 issue today!
