The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Edited by Michael Martone

August 31, 2020
Martone (The Moon over Wapakoneta) offers a high-flying faux biography of Art Smith (1890–1926), the so-called Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, Ind., an early stunt pilot and pioneer in the field of skywriting. In 39 vignettes, each accompanied by a grainy photograph of Smith’s varied inscriptions on the “transparent medium of the sky,” Martone tracks Smith’s progress from crafting crude advertisements to eccentric works of art and cryptic messages of his own devising (including arcane designs and palindromes). In a Zelig-like odyssey, Smith appears at the opening of the Panama Canal, inspires the Great Straw Hat Day Riot of 1922, visits Japan, meets Gertrude Stein in Paris, and inspires a rare smile in Franz Kafka. Sidelined from serving as a combat pilot during WWI, Smith nevertheless ushers in the age of the aeroplane, frequently crashing but managing to cheat death right up to his fatal final flight in 1926 while carrying mail over the Midwest (but not before completing a final airborne inscription reading “good night”). Though the assortment of encounters with early-20th-century luminaries can grow exhausting, Martone succeeds at crafting brilliant images in his descriptions of Smith’s stunt work. The result makes the reader appreciate the descriptions and photographs of Smith’s aeronautics as its own kind of poetry.