Forty years later, the Apollo Moon landing still exerts an incalculable pull
on the imagination. The immensity of it — its sheer, mind-boggling
improbability — draws us back to this story like no other in the history of
exploration. A man on the Moon, for heaven’s sake!
And who better to ask about it than an astronaut? And, at the same time, who
worse to ask about it than an astronaut? “Reflecting metaphysically was
contrary to our mission,” Buzz Aldrin, the Apollo 11 astronaut,
writes. “We weren’t trained to smell the roses or utter life-changing
aphorisms.” He adds, perhaps slightly unnecessarily: “Emoting or
spontaneously offering profundities was not part of my psychological make-up
anyhow.”
Yet the pressure from a rapt world to account for the experience (to explain
the feelings it had awakened, unpack its meaning, somehow solve it for us)
turned out to be a significant part of the post-Apollo afterlife for all 12
of the moonwalkers, and a significant factor in the breakdowns of several of
them, including Aldrin, who was allegedly found weeping and shaking in a
corridor after another public failure to satisfactorily answer the perpetual
question, “What was it like?” In the end, of course, Apollo 11
was a scientific assignment and not some kind of weightless creative writing
course. Perhaps it should have been emblazoned on a patch and stitched to
the crew’s suits: “We came in peace for all mankind”, yes, but also,
“Reflecting metaphysically was contrary to our mission”.
Would it have made a difference if the Moon had offered more to describe, if
it had turned out to be a lush terrain of purple waterfalls and exotic
fruits? Had it even been made of cheese, as rumoured, would it have helped
the homecoming astronaut with a contractually obliged Nasa-promoting lecture
tour and sea after sea of eager, receptive faces ahead of him?
But the Moon was grey rock and dust. It smelt, according to various accounts,
of ashes, wet gunpowder, spent fireworks. A lot of the time the astronauts
were left grappling to evoke a great nothingness. And, oddly enough, it was
Aldrin who, for all his principled refusals to admit to the presence of
poetry in his soul, improvised from the lunar surface the most lasting
description of its almighty barrenness — the superb contradiction,
“magnificent desolation”.
The phrase serves Aldrin as the title for a new autobiography, his second. He
published Return to Earth in 1973, when, as it turned out, his
problems were just beginning. It was a work of some daring at the time,
admitting to personal flaws and human weaknesses when the official,
unimpeachable legend of the Apollo heroes was still freshly painted and
widely cherished. Similarly, the key to this new volume is the subtitle — The
Long Journey Home from the Moon — but the book is sent out, this time,
into a world more comfortable with the idea of a hero in rehab. Aldrin
dispatches the well-thumbed but still shiver-inducing tale of the Apollo
11 moon landing (a seat-of-the-pants operation if ever there was one) in
the first 58 pages and devotes the remaining 256 pages to his life since,
during which he has struggled with a post-Apollo legacy of depression and
alcoholism, re-encountering a magnificent desolation, but this time at home,
on the sofa.
It’s a story about the effect of celebrity, as much as anything else, and all
the Apollo astronauts have their own version. The set text in this area is
Andrew Smith’s peerless Moondust, an encounter with the nine
surviving moonwalkers, and an immensely thoughtful summary of the tricky
aftermath. Some withdrew from public life. Some found God. Many found
themselves abruptly prey to a pensive streak that was no part of their
make-up as test-pilots. Several became hard to live with. As Smith writes,
“the post-flight divorce rate was, in more than one sense, astronomical”.
Yet Aldrin seemed built to survive. On the launch pad, during the final phase
of the countdown, with a 36-storey rocket gurgling away beneath him, the
former fighter pilot (two kills in Korea to his credit) had the lowest
monitored pulse rate of any of the Apollo astronauts. Here, surely, was an
expert in worrying about the things he could change and forgetting the rest.
Yet he returned to a life seemingly purged of challenges. He wore out two
marriages (later discovering contentment in a third). He struggled in jobs
that didn’t fit him. He drew up seemingly kooky plans for manned voyages to
Mars and grew angry when he met puzzled indifference. He grew a beard. At
one stage he took work as a salesman on a Cadillac lot. He was obliged to
reflect that he had gone, in fairly short order, from walking on the Moon to
endorsing a lawn mower. You’d need a sense of humour. Or, failing that, a
bottle of bourbon. And, for a large portion of the 1970s and 1980s, Aldrin,
we can fairly infer, found the latter easier to come by than the former.
And, of course, in Aldrin’s case, the classic moonwalker’s descent had its own
twist. Aldrin was the second man on the moon, required to join Neil
Armstrong on the surface 15 minutes later — missing the big slot in history
by a quarter of an hour. It seems clear now that Aldrin lobbied hard behind
the scenes to be first man out. Michael Collins, the third member of the Apollo
11 crew, wrote: “I think he resents not being the first man on the Moon
more than he appreciates being the second.”
Still, you can’t accuse Aldrin of failing to see the funny side. During his
guest appearance on The Simpsons, recounted in the book, he is
introduced as “the second man on the Moon” and, after a difficult silence,
replies, just a little too brightly: “But remember, second comes right after
first.” Aldrin is also one of few to emerge with enhanced dignity from a
hijack by Ali G. “I know this is a sensitive question, but what was it like
not being the first man on the Moon?” Sacha Baron Cohen’s alter ego asked
him. “Was you ever jealous of Louis Armstrong?” Of this historic encounter,
Aldrin writes: “I caught on rather quickly and had a great time with him,
playing it straight.” (The joke at the expense of Armstrong might have
helped Aldrin to enjoy it.) There are indications, too, that being a former
moonwalker had its upsides. The book contains the following fantastic
sentence: “Later that afternoon, I called the sultry Italian actress Gina
Lollobrigida and told her I was in town.” (Of the encounter that followed,
Aldrin is euphemistic. “Gina greeted me warmly and we spent a marvellous few
hours getting reacquainted.” Magnificent evasion.) Aldrin isn’t joking when
he says he isn’t the man for an easy phrase. Even with ghostly assistance,
his prose is stiff-backed and weirdly formal, strapped into its seat,
clenching the controls with whitened knuckles. Yet his book finds him
fighting arguably the biggest Apollo-born aphorism of them all — bristling
at the idea that “failure is not an option” (a Nasa mantra). “Everything
about space travel is subject to failure,” Aldrin writes. If you remove the
possibility that it might have all ended in disaster, you lose the grandeur.
As Aldrin’s tale illustrates, there is no heroism to it without the frailty.
Nowadays it is traditional to affect a weary disenchantment and say that
Apollo itself failed. What did it amount to? A group of volunteers, having
survived extensive and brutal auditions, was packed into a confined space
where, under guidance from remote voices and monitored by television
cameras, they performed a series of scripted tasks over a period of several
days, before emerging, blinking and waving, into the bright glare of public
interest. It’s hard, from the lowered horizon of our own times, not to
sense, in this set-up, a proposal for the greatest reality television series
yet, albeit one that, in Apollo’s case, needed 5 per cent of the annual
federal budget.
It yielded what, exactly? The top three answers tend to be: 1. Teflon; 2. the
greatest album of holiday photographs yet taken (revisit them in the
commemorative album Apollo Through The Eyes of The Astronauts,
Abrams, £12.99; £11.69; 132pp); and 3. a clinching statement of US
imperialism that put the winner of the Cold War beyond doubt (although the
endgame would take a further 30 years to play out). We didn’t, after all,
end up decamping to the Moon. We stopped going. It came to nothing.
But isn’t that beside the point? We didn’t go and live on Everest, but no one
uses that as a stick with which to beat Sir Edmund Hillary. With Apollo it
was the journey, and it has given us 40 years of wonderment — 40 years to
ask, in amazement: “What must that have been like?” and “How can that have
been?” We’re still wondering.
Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon by Buzz Aldrin
with Ken Abraham Bloomsbury, £16.99; Buy
this book; 336pp
