Simon and Schuster, £20, pp769

Placing the first human foot on the lunar surface, Neil Armstrong delivered his famous line, “That’s one small step . . . ” etc. Immediately afterwards, he said, “Good luck, Mr Gorsky.” The meaning of this latter remark remained a mystery until 1995 when Armstrong explained that, as a child in Ohio, he had heard their next-door neighbour, Mrs Gorsky, shouting to her husband, “Oral sex! You want oral sex? You’ll get oral sex when the kid next door walks on the moon!” None of which, sadly, is true. On page 633 of this huge book, James R Hansen finally lays the story to rest as an urban myth. It seems to have been invented by the comedian Buddy Hackett for NBC’s Tonight Show and, subsequently, to have been sustained as geek lore on the net.

This is a pity, partly because the story is better if true, but mainly because it would have been one of the only really funny things that ever happened to or was said by Armstrong. The man was a fine engineer, a good pilot — although there is some dispute about that — patriotic, cool, courageous and hard-working, just the sort of guy you want next to you when the chips are down. When the chips are up, however, you will probably be looking for more stimulating company. This is not a criticism of Armstrong: he became what he had to be and with considerable dignity. But it does raise questions about this book. His stern virtues aside, there was nothing odd, remarkable or resonant about Armstrong. He is certainly interesting as an aspect of a much bigger story, but that story is hardly told here. The story that is related is quite fantastically, meticulously dull.

Try this for a show-stopping line: “Sightseeing in and around Tokyo, Armstrong took many pictures that he later developed into slides.” Go, Neil. Or how about this for a footnote: “Buzz Aldrin’s birthplace has frequently been given to be Montclair, New Jersey. In fact, he was born in the Glen Ridge wing of a hospital whose central body rested in Montclair.” Gee, Buzz, I had you all wrong and that’s a really interesting grammatical error in the first sentence.

Also on the subject of Aldrin, one of the few genuine human conflicts described by Hansen concerns who should be the first to step on the moon. Aldrin thought he had a case, but Armstrong won. If Aldrin had prevailed, presumably Hansen would have written his life. Since that life was replete with depression, angst and religiosity, a much more interesting book has, like much else, been denied the world by Nasa bureaucracy.

But, okay, having established that this book is a big pot of paint and it took me a week to watch it dry, let me try and pick out its more positive, more revelatory aspects. First, it is a very official biography and so some score-settling is inevitably involved. One big score is Chuck Yeager, the pilot-hero who formed the central mythology of Tom Wolfe’s book about the early space programme, The Right Stuff, and of Philip Kaufman’s subsequent film.

Yeager didn’t think much of Armstrong as a pilot, perhaps with some justification or perhaps because he saw him as an academic type, an engineer, whereas pilots should be just plain, goddamn balls-out flyers. The heroism glamorised by Wolfe and Kaufman was of the balls-out variety. Hansen, however, is on the side of Armstrong and spends quite a few pages taking apart the Wolfe version. Notably, he says the Starfighter crash with which the film gloriously ends was not an equipment failure but Yeager’s pilot error. This, for me, breaks the cardinal rule of the journalism of the American West as laid down in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance — “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” But Armstrong and Hansen have got it in for Yeager and so we must be told.

Hansen also takes on Norman Mailer’s account of the moon landing, Of a Fire on the Moon. The criticism here is that Mailer knew next to nothing about the men of whom he wrote. “Yet Mailer did not really care about Armstrong, the man,” writes Hansen, “on a personal level, only as a vessel into which the author could pour his own mental energy and profundity.”

Unfortunately, Hansen quotes a largeish chunk of Mailer prose that leaps off the page, more true, real and exciting than anything else in this book. This, to say the least, disperses the effect of the criticism.

But what of the psychology of Armstrong? This is, perhaps, to be glimpsed in spite of Hansen’s best efforts. After the moon landing, Armstrong drifted. Indeed, he drifted so much that his wife could stand it no longer and left. He remarried, apparently successfully. Hansen tells us next to nothing about all of this, and little about the children except that having such a famous father caused them some problems.

Reading between these lines, Armstrong appears to me to be a puzzled man. His taciturnity is famous (one rare press conference he gave produced the headline, “A giant leap for the press . . .”) and is generally said to be an aspect of his supremely focused professionalism. Maybe so, but when he stepped outside the confines of engineering and piloting, the inarticulacy looks more like confusion. He never really seems to understand the world and its demands. He had lost the faith of his parents (though Hansen is unclear about this, it seems to be the case) and he had gained only the art of flying, an art that, for him, came to an end with the moon landing. It was a heck of a lot but it wasn’t enough.

This book hints at the possibility of a more interesting study of Armstrong that places him more firmly in context and takes on the strange matter of the man’s quiet discontent, even when his striving was so flamboyantly successful. For now, Hansen has provided all the detail you could possibly want and much more than you could conceivably need. But give me Wolfe, Mailer, Yeager and, especially, poor Mr Gorsky, any time.

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