This chapter considers the associations between animality and aviation in the 1930s. It begins by explaining how Garnett’s reading of the Russian entomologist Boris Uvarov was crucial to his completion of his novel The Grasshoppers Come (1931), which contains such convincing depictions of insects that Uvarov suspected Garnett had viewed them first-hand (the letters Uvarov wrote to Garnett are here reproduced for the first time). Reading this novel alongside his diary-record of learning to fly, A Rabbit in the Air (1932), the first half of the chapter goes on to analyse how Garnett’s texts present an aesthetics of flight that hinges on connections and dissonances between human, animal and machine. The second part illustrates how Garnett’s aeronautical writing extended to the context of war and the publication of War in the Air (1941), which he wrote for the Air Ministry. By avoiding associations that had by the Second World War become bound up in nationalist bombast, Garnett subverts the increasingly masculinist and militarist approach to technology and animality found in other writings as the decade progressed.

Pairing David Garnett’s A Man in the Zoo (1924) with Franz Kafka’s ‘A Report to an Academy’ (1917), this chapter demonstrates how both writers troubled species boundaries by drawing on historical shifts in the public display of human and nonhuman beings. The first part explores how Garnett’s story of a man who volunteers to be caged between a chimpanzee and an orang-utan offers an ironic transformation structured around abrupt plot turns and taxonomic confusion. Here Garnett exposes hierarchies of both gender and species and offers glimpses of more ethical creaturely relations. The second half of the chapter brings Kafka’s story of an ape who learns to behave like a human into a critique of animal capture and zoological trade, in particular concerning Carl Hagenbeck’s business. Hagenbeck is subtly alluded to in Garnett’s novella, where the historical phenomenon of animal spectatorship informs his satirical depiction of London’s zoo, even as his treatment of race and human exhibition remains ambivalent. The section brings to light material from Hagenbeck’s own writings and newspaper coverage, alongside literary connections to Samuel Butler, John Collier and Louis MacNeice.