It's a Bird! It's a Dream! It's Supergull!

(4 of 10)

Seagull?" "No," he replies gravely. "I'm still way back down there flapping away like crazy toward freedom." Bach is 36. He has six children. He has been an Air Force jet-fighter pilot and a member of the Air National Guard. He has been an editor, a mailman, and a worldly failure—never holding the same civilian job for more than eleven months. He is also a refreshing throwback to a romantic passion for airplanes that most of us thought had vanished with the advent of the jet age. Since he was 17, Bach has almost literally lived to fly. Flight, in fact, is his secular religion, as well as the metaphor by which he studies the terms of life. He came to write about it partly to keep his family alive. But his three previous books as well as scores of articles bear rich witness to the peculiar joys and wisdom of flying. Jonathan Seagull's hot pursuit of aerial excellence at all costs and all his pronouncements about the search for perfection are made in abstract terms. But Bach, flapping down there below, has been set about with very nonabstract car repossessions and unpaid bills and children and boxes of wilted cornflakes—in brief, with all those grubby commitments and contingencies and divided loyalties that make exhortations about mind over matter and doing it all for your private freedom seem like sheer twaddle. "Jonathan Seagull," says one of Bach's flying friends from Iowa, "is Richard Bach with all bad parts left out." He has it backward. Richard Bach is Jonathan Seagull, but with all the really interesting parts left in.

Like Mario Puzo, who all but starved writing two thoughtful novels until he was commercially canonized for The Godfather, Bach has made it big with what in many ways is his worst book. Of course Bach feels that he did not really write the book, and his attitude toward the mysterious voice that revealed Jonathan to him is far more complex than any secular skeptic could at first imagine. "That voice," sighs Don Gold, Bach's ex-literary agent. He shrugs a helpless, worldly New York shrug. Then he says, "But when Dick tells me about it, I gotta believe him."

Bach believes in the voice totally. Almost everybody who has ever heard him tell about it has gone away impressed. Clearly one element in Bach's affection for the story parallels the comment of Tertullian, an early father of the church, who said of the Christian faith, "It is to be believed because it is absurd." In an airplane, Bach believes that every molecule, every rivet, every propeller or magneto or even a 9/16-in. end wrench is throbbing with some kind of life. He customarily pats an airplane, or a faithful piece of equipment, and thanks them out loud for stalwart service. He can even convince you that if a pilot begins to distrust his airplane, it will actually become untrustworthy. But just as we are all subject to the vagaries that come from collaborating with crotchety planes and wrenches, so in this day and age any voice that wants to pay your rent and maybe even do the country some good by laying a feathered parable on you might naturally go about it in all sorts of corny ways. "Lots of my life," Bach admits, "sounds like a very bad movie."

As Bach tells it, the year is 1959. He is married to his high school sweetheart Bette Franks, and at age 24 has