Last night was awful, which is saying something. Today has not been good. I'm actually sick. I don't even think it's the kind I can get poems out of. I don't know how the hell the rest of this weekend or next week is going to work.

(I dreamed about Karl Johnson. But I knew, in my dream, he was playing a role; it seems my brain cannot imagine him as himself. Given what it has to work off, Ariel and Wittgenstein, this is probably fair.)

The First of the Few (1942) is not a masterpiece like Pimpernel Smith (1941), which I still consider the only film to challenge the Archers for wartime numinous and/or weird. It's a a straightforward, frame-storied, gently reverent propaganda-biopic elevated by the presence and direction of Leslie Howard, who may not have been much like the historical R.J. Mitchell (1895—1937), but he could read a phone number off a paper bag and get your attention. What's interesting about the film is again its positioning of a visionary at the heart of England, in this case an aeronautical engineer whose inspiration is the wheel and cry of Dover seagulls and who works himself into his grave because there is something he was put in this world to do and he must do it, come cancer or the Luftwaffe. Casual perusal of the internet indicates this is a complete mythologization of Mitchell, who was famously credited with the statement "Jeffrey, if anyone tries to tell you something about an aeroplane which is so damn complicated that you can't understand it, you can take it from me it's all balls." He kept working on the Spitfire despite terminal illness, that much is true; he was honored for it. I can't find any evidence that he viewed his creation as the calling of his lifetime or a line drawn against Germany's dark—he had other planes on the drawing board when he died.¹ Maybe he thought he'd be remembered for the Schneider Trophy. But there are few enough films about heroic engineers for me to kick this one out of bed for eating crackers, and otherwise unavailable footage of rare seaplanes is always good by me; and I like Leslie Howard. This is the oldest I've ever seen him, a year before his death at fifty. I think it may have been his last onscreen role. He always had a kind of cat-look; it sharpened as he got older, ascetic from willowy. I resent not being able to find out what else he aged into.

I'd also like a decent biography of R.J. Mitchell, but I feel somewhat less strongly about that.

1. Most notably the Supermarine B.12/36, which is much less famous than the Spitfire on account of irony: both prototypes and the plans were lost to enemy action early in the Blitz. It would have been a heavy bomber.