People are talking about Amelia Earhart again, and it’s not because anyone has matched a molar to her dental records. She is the heroine of two new novels, Alison Anderson’s Hidden Latitudes and Jane Mendelsohn’s I Was Amelia Earhart, in both of which she survives on a tropical island and falls in love with Fred Noonan, the navigator she previously disliked.
Which is not to say it can’t be done well. Robert Graves, for one, did a nice job with the real-life movers and shakers of ancient Rome in I, Claudius. Writers from William Shakespeare to Norman Mailer (The Executioner’s Song) have dabbled in the genre; others steal historical characters for bit parts: In Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven-Percent Solution, Sigmund Freud joins forces with Sherlock Holmes, and in Libra Don DeLillo imagines, rather than examines, Lee Harvey Oswald’s involvement in John F. Kennedy’s assassination. But doesn’t this ice strike anybody else as kind of thin? When did it stop mattering whether something actually happened or merely could have?
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Adding to the confusion in the larger world is technology that seems only too happy to blur the real and the possible. With digital imaging, elements in a still photograph can be added, subtracted, and rearranged to such an extent that a finished print is no longer proof of anything except its own existence. Disgruntled ex-spouses can be removed from family photos and replaced by new ones with loving looks on their faces–much as Mendelsohn and Anderson have exchanged Earhart’s matter-of-fact visage for a dreamier one. Black verification borders on photos used to signify, reliably, that the photo had not been cropped; these days, anyone with a good graphics program can add a border at will. The typographic equivalent is quotation marks, which used to mean somebody actually said something; these days, they mean she might have.
But carefully chosen words are one thing; what happens to them in our own dim memories is quite another. Will readers of the Earhart books remember even a decade later that they got their information from a novel (or from the movie for which I Was Amelia Earhart has been optioned)? Will the mistaken impression that Earhart’s prose style was massively lyrical (“I want to drink from the rain that rains beyond the sun”) linger as the details of her real life languish in the encyclopedia? Memories tend to endure in our brains in unattributed snippets, and the internal crediting of ideas gets less rigorous as the years pass.
Both books posit a pretty solution to the mystery of Earhart’s disappearance. The gaps in what we know of her fate, after all, are as intriguing as what we know. But much is known. Biographies in print include Mary Lovell’s The Sound of Wings and Doris L. Rich’s Amelia Earhart: a Biography, to which Anderson and Mendelsohn referred in preparation for their novels. There are Earhart’s own writings, The Fun of It and the posthumously published Last Flight. Many other books and articles examine the mystery and weigh evidence supporting one theory or another.
A current print ad for United Airlines–“Go Hollywood to Hollywood”–features a black-and-white photo of a blond starlet, her shiny pageboy waving softly away from her flawless face, tipped upward to catch the photographer’s light. There’s the barest glimpse of a glittery evening gown. One hand holds an uniced drink; the other is held aloft, positioned to show off her flawless period manicure.
It’s eye-catching to drop Amelia Earhart’s name into the title of a book, but nothing more. These books are neither true nor original. Nothing got invented, just rearranged. Lost in the process is the absolutely crucial fact that Earhart was a real person, and compared to Anderson and Mendelsohn, she did all the work: living her life, developing a personality, thinking her thoughts, flying planes, finding a way to look and act, dying mysteriously.
