A Polar Affair

by Lloyd Spencer Davis

  Brenda Ueland, a New York–based writer, seems to epitomize that. By her own count, she will have “three husbands and a hundred lovers.” It is 1929, when she, then thirty-seven, meets the sixty-seven-year-old Fridtjof Nansen and he becomes another notch in her belt.

  Nansen’s behavior too might have been lifted straight from the pages of Eros Denied. His wife, Eva, had died of pneumonia at the end of 1907. On January 17, 1919, Nansen married the wife of a neighbor, Sigrun Munthe, with whom he had an affair fourteen years earlier while Eva was still alive. The new relationship was not a happy one. Sigrun was despised by Nansen’s children, and by the time Kathleen remarried he was said to be unbearably miserable, despite being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in the same year for his work on behalf of refugees from the war. Which may explain, in part, Nansen’s continued dalliance with young ladies.

  However, the big, blond Norwegian with the rakish mustache and piercing blue eyes is particularly taken with Brenda Ueland. He sends her naked photos of himself reclining on a chaise lounge and he sends her love letters.

  Here from my window in my tower, I see the maidenly birches in their bridal veils against the dark pine wood—there is nothing like the birch in the spring. I do not exactly know why, but it is like you, to me you have the same maidenliness—and the sun is laughing, and the fjord out there is glittering, and existence is beauty!

  I am standing in Nansen’s tower in his house at Polhøgda, looking out at those birches and the sun glittering on the blue waters of the fjord. Nansen’s home is now an institute, but the redbrick tower that stands, somewhat incongruously, on one corner of the house is off limits. A narrow wooden staircase leads to Nansen’s office, which has been kept exactly as he left it. When I walked through the door, it had been just like going into Shackleton’s hut at Cape Royds.

  The room is no less than a shrine to Nansen. It is dominated by a large wooden desk that looks out through arched windows to the birches and the fjord beyond. On the floor is a big polar bear skin and the back wall is lined by shelves of books, mostly about the Arctic. But it is the top of his desk that fascinates me most. There is the ancient typewriter, the ancient microscope, and the ancient inkwells. Its top is covered with ink stains and the knickknacks from a lifetime spent exploring. I sit in his chair and look out at the birches. This is where he had written to Brenda. My eyes are drawn to the wooden basket of papers and letters that sits at the back of his desk. Leaning against it is a small photo stuck to a piece of cardboard. It is a portrait of a beautiful young woman, her thick dark hair parted down the middle, eyes fixed straight at the camera. It is Eva.

  It is hard not to dwell on the contradiction of Nansen writing to his lover with his dead first wife, whom he had betrayed so many times, staring at him.

  A year after his affair with Brenda, Nansen, like Shackleton, dies of a heart attack. It is May 13, 1930. He is sixty-eight. King Haakon VII himself comes to see Nansen on his sickbed.

  And it strikes me as odd that irrespective of what men like Nansen and Shackleton do in their private lives, they are still revered; still held up as heroes, if not gods, by everyone from paupers to kings. Whereas those like Levick, who take a more moral and righteous path, seem to get no credit for that and not nearly enough credit for what they do achieve either. Both Nansen and Shackleton had a great lust for life. Theirs was a romantic view of the world, where Browning or birches assumed as much importance as reaching any goddamned pole.

  Is that what my Levick lacked? A lust for life that was worthy of his penguins?

  Amundsen never really recovers from deceiving his childhood hero, Nansen. As a way to make amends, he becomes obsessed with his goal of reaching the North Pole. The south is, evidently, not enough. At first, he tries to reinvent Nansen’s technique of becoming frozen in the ice and drifting across the Arctic. As he cannot take the Fram this time, he commissions another ship, the Maud. In July 1918, near the end of the Great War, the Maud leaves Kristiania and travels up the Siberian coast. However, the ice freezes early and extensively that year, and the ship is too far away to catch the currents that it needs to drift close to the pole. After a frustrating three winters, Amundsen leaves the expedition to others. By now, he is convinced that the best way to get to the North Pole is to fly there.

  Trygvve Gran is of a similar mind. Just five days before Britain declared war on Germany, he had become the first person to fly from Great Britain to Norway. During the war, he stuck with the British who had embraced him in Antarctica—despite Norway declaring itself to be neutral during the war—and flew fighter planes for the Royal Flying Corps, earning the military cross. He is now in Spitsbergen, organizing his own attempt to fly to the North Pole.

  But Amundsen is determined not to lose this race to Gran’s team either.

  It is May 21, 1925. Amundsen and five other men take off from Svalbard in Norway’s far north to fly to the North Pole. They are flying two large Dornier Wal aircraft that lumber slowly down the ice before, reluctantly it seems, lumbering slowly into the air. They have twin engines fixed fore and aft to the top of the wing, which is itself held on struts above the cockpit and fuselage. The planes are as awkward to fly as they look. They are named N24 and N25.

  Early the next morning they need to set down on the pack ice to top up their fuel tanks from the supplies they are transporting with them, which is when everything goes wrong. N24 is incapacitated and there is no way for N25 to take off: the ice they are on is covered in three feet of snow. It is freezing and the men do not have much food. With shades of Frederick Cook ordering the men of the Belgica to construct a channel in the ice to free it, Amundsen orders his men to construct a runway. It takes them over three weeks to shift five hundred tons of snow in order to make the 1,500-foot runway. On June 15, 1925, N25 struggles into the air—the great polar explorer having managed to get out of a hole.

  He gets out of another hole too. Kiss, after a decade of demurring, has finally said that she will leave her husband and come to Uranienborg. Just before leaving in N24 and N25, Amundsen writes to Kiss:

  Let me first fly to the Pole and back, and then we shall see. One thing gives me peace and makes everything else unimportant; You are well! Little Kiss, you know I love you with all my heart and you know I am working for one thing only, to get you.

  Except that he has deceived her as surely as he deceived Nansen: Kiss cannot be said truthfully to occupy all his heart. Amundsen has already encountered his next mate and the switch is soon to take place. Her name is Bess Magids. She is a stunningly beautiful Canadian, five foot four inches tall, with dark hair and dark eyes. She is younger, again, than Kiss, being twenty-six years Amundsen’s junior. Significantly, she is also married. Amundsen clears Kiss out of the way as surely as the snow that had blocked the path of N25. His runway is ready for Bess.

  It is May 12, 1926. Amundsen and fifteen others fly an airship, the Norge, low over the North Pole and drop the Norwegian, Italian, and American flags on the very spot that Frederick Cook and Robert Peary had claimed to reach. And, just as Peary did to Cook, the American aviator Richard Byrd claims to have flown his aircraft over the North Pole three days before Amundsen. However, examination of his records shows that he falsified them and though it will take more than half a century to determine that Peary did likewise, their false claims mean that Roald Amundsen is not only the first man to have reached the South Pole, he is the first to have reached the North Pole too!

  Unlike Sigrid and Kiss before her, Bess does not demur. She is ready to dump her husband and live with Amundsen by the water at Uranienborg.

  It is June 17, 1928. The Italian pilot Umberto Nobile, who had been commissioned by Amundsen to fly the airship Norge to the North Pole, has crashed on the pack ice when flying another airship, the Italia, back from the North Pole. Amundsen joins the rescue effort and boards a seaplane in Tromsø to fly to Svalbard. At 6:00 P.M. a radio message is received from the plane, and after that: silence.

  Trygvve Gran leads the
search for Amundsen, but neither the plane nor Amundsen is ever seen again.

  Time has finally run out for Roald Amundsen, who, truth be told, probably tried to win more by “seizing” than he ever did by “playing the mandolin.” He is fifty-five years old.

  It is April 21, 1934. Amundsen’s childhood playmate, Carsten Borchgrevink, dies in Oslo. After returning from Cape Adare at the turn of the 20th century, having led the first party of men to winter over on the Antarctic continent, Borchgrevink had more or less retired from the limelight. He had been pilloried by Sir Clements Markham’s men in the Royal Geographical Society, the champions of Scott, for the unscientific nature of much of his reports.

  Nevertheless, Amundsen had remained faithful to his old friend, and when he arrived back on the Fram from his successful trip to the South Pole, he was quick to pay tribute to Borchgrevink’s pioneering work.

  We must acknowledge that in ascending the Barrier, Borchgrevink opened the way to the south and threw aside the greatest obstacle to the expeditions that followed.

  In 1930, the Royal Geographical Society finally acknowledged Borchgrevink’s contribution to polar exploration and awarded him its Patron’s Medal.

  And there it is, again. Within six years of each other, the three Norwegians, who had played such a big role in Murray Levick ending up at Cape Adare and becoming the world’s first penguin biologist, are dead.

  After the birth of Rodney, Levick continues his work on electrical therapy at St Thomas’s Hospital in London, where he is medical officer in charge of their electrotherapeutic department, and at the Shepherd’s Bush Orthopedic Hospital, where he holds a similar position. In 1923, he is appointed medical director of the Heritage Craft School for Crippled Children in North Chailey, Surrey, about forty miles due south of London.

  It is an area of uninspiring redbrick houses and buildings, but Levick finds his work at the school is very inspiring, where he deals with pupils with a complex combination of physical and cognitive issues. He continues his focus on rehabilitation, trying out different therapies to help children afflicted by the likes of tuberculosis. He will remain its director until 1950.

  In the meantime, he continues to work elsewhere too, including the Victoria Hospital for Children in Chelsea, where he helps pioneer the use of light therapy. He is as committed now to the value of exercise as he ever was before he went to the Antarctic, and he is instrumental in promoting the use of exercise for rehabilitation. Something that endears him to more people, perhaps, than anything else is that he champions and trains blind people to be used for massage and physiotherapy—which have become important means of treating the traumas caused by war—despite the prejudices against doing so at the time.

  Unlike Levick’s life before going to Antarctica, I discover a number of archives full of material from his life afterward. Much of it stems from his medical work, especially at Chailey, and Audrey’s work for the New Zealand Hospital in Weybridge.

  Having survived the unthinkable during the winter in the snow cave on Inexpressible Island, I had supposed that there would be a bond between the six of them—Abbott, Browning, Campbell, Dickason, Levick, and Priestley—that forever more would make them, if not as thick as thieves, then inclined for the odd reunion. But that does not seem to be the case. Sure, Levick’s address book reveals that he has the contacts of some of those from the Terra Nova, but there is little hint that he actively sought them out—or to be honest, they him.

  Campbell does keep up a correspondence with Kathleen Scott. Yet of all the Terra Nova souls, it seems like Apsley Cherry-Garrard is the one who makes the most effort. Perhaps he clings to the rest of them out of guilt? He continues to be tortured by depression and psychosomatic illnesses that will plague him until his death in 1959; by the thought that he had not done enough for Scott and not nearly enough for Bill and Birdie. To honor Bill, he writes his scientific record of the expedition, much like Levick had, but along the way, it morphs into The Worst Journey in the World, the wonderfully moving account of the Terra Nova Expedition that will inspire my childhood dreams and probably those of thousands of others.

  He is instrumental in supporting the efforts of Douglas Mawson after the war to have Macquarie Island declared a reserve, and the barbaric business of boiling penguins for their oil, which is still being operated by the New Zealander Joseph Hatch, brought to a stop. Even Baron Walter Rothschild steps into the fray, backing Mawson and Cherry-Garrard. By 1920, Hatch is out of business and the penguins are able to resume their own business of breeding without fear. Mawson thereafter, concentrates on his own business as a geologist—although he does make one further trip to Antarctica—living until October 14, 1958, six months shy of Cherry-Garrard: the survivors of unquestionably two of the worst journeys in the world, cheating death with equal alacrity.

  When he isn’t being depressed, Cherry, as his friends call him, can be wonderfully entertaining. He is independently wealthy and forever holding parties at his house. Kathleen Scott and her son Peter often stay with him to attend. And there are a succession of beautiful girls that accompany him, though Cherry-Garrard always gives the impression of being a male Adelie penguin that is not quite sure if he wants to step out of the nest and let the female lie down in it.

  I am especially struck by one photo I come across. It is 1926. Cherry-Garrard and his then lady friend are visiting the Levicks. The photo is of the four of them on a garden bench. It is also one of the few photos I find that includes the enigma that is Rodney. Levick and Cherry-Garrard are occupying the bench with little Rodney, wearing a singlet, sitting between them. The two ladies are in summer dresses and sitting on the arms of the garden seat. Audrey has opened her mouth and let her teeth escape in a big toothy smile. She looks genuinely happy. Levick has his arms around Rodney in what is the only display of intimacy I have ever seen from him in any photos, either with Rodney or anyone else. He is smiling too. My initial impression is of a wonderfully happy family. But when I look closer I realize that, like many six-year-olds, Rodney is not sitting still: his feet are blurred from swinging his legs and, I see then, from the way Levick’s hands are clamped onto Rodney’s shoulders, that what he is really doing is trying to restrain Rodney, more muzzle than manifestation of affection.

  Cherry-Garrard is not smiling at all. He is snappily dressed and is supremely handsome, but he is looking quizzically to the side, barely amused, while his partner is looking at Rodney, as if she sees what is going on.

  I see it too. There is something in the photo, in the empathy it evokes in me for Rodney, that makes me realize that I am getting close to my goal, close to the real Murray Levick.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE POLE AT LAST

  It is 1932. Levick establishes the Public Schools Exploring Society, whose mission it is to take boys from public schools—that is to say, in the weird way that the British name things, private schools—to remote wilderness areas to teach them survival skills and physical fitness. Many of the initial trips are led by Levick and are to the wild parts of Newfoundland.

  The society still exists today, with a slightly altered and more inclusive name, as the British Exploring Society. They no longer need participants to be boys, no longer need them to be from public schools, and, indeed, no longer need them to be going to school at all. But the mission remains the same: take young people to places where they endure hardship and from this “snow cave” experience of their own, they will become better people for it.

  The Society’s offices are based with those of the Royal Geographical Society, on the corner of Kensington Gore and Exhibition Road, overlooking the beautiful, green Hyde Park in London. But as I approach, I am most taken with what is overlooking me. Set into a white alcove in the side of the redbrick building is a life size statue of Shackleton all decked out in his Antarctic gear, complete with balaclava and big fur over-mittens hanging by straps from over his shoulders. He hadn’t gotten to the South Pole, but he had gotten most of the glory it seemed. Perha
ps Johansen had cause for feeling hard done by; and maybe Scott too?

  The insides of the building, at least the parts with the British Exploring Society, are less impressive. There are several people jammed at desks in a narrow room that is cluttered with cardboard boxes. The walls are lined with lots of blue notice boards to which are pinned lists, maps, schedules, and whatever else is needed to coordinate expeditions to some of the remotest parts of the planet. The archivist is a lovely man with thinning gray hair and a body shape that suggests to me that it has been a while since he took part in any of the expeditions. Indeed, it has: he was one of Levick’s schoolboys and he is the first person I have met who has actually met the real, living, breathing Murray Levick.

  Though not as agile as he used to be, metaphorically at least, he bends over backward to provide me with access to their archives. I am particularly interested in the expeditions that the society ran to Newfoundland. I want to know if Levick kept in contact with Campbell and most particularly, if he and Campbell ever made that trip through Canada. And something else. Call it a detective’s hunch, a gut feeling, but somehow, I suspect this could be connected with Rodney.

  The archivist goes and fetches me Levick’s notebooks, the ones he kept on all his expeditions. As I open the first, from the 1934 expedition to Newfoundland, I sit upright with a jolt: it is as if Levick’s ghost has just walked into the room. There before me is the same familiar writing, with its tight small letters joined by flowing strokes, along with Levick’s almost complete refusal to use apostrophes. Written in pencil, it reminds me very much of the sledging diaries he wrote when in the snow cave. But there is nary a mention of Rodney in the notebook even though I know from the publicly available British passenger lists—and the archivist confirms this—that Rodney and Audrey had accompanied Levick on the ship to and from Newfoundland.