by Paul Theroux
Casting a long shadow over the polar quest was the towering figure of Fridtjof Nansen, the greatest polar explorer, who was in fact bipolar—that is to say, manic-depressive. Nansen "demythologised polar exploration," and dismissed his own heroic first crossing of Greenland as "a ski tour."
It is worth looking at Nansen for a moment, to understand his importance in the race to the Poles. It hardly matters that he never actually managed to stand on either Pole. Without Nansen's pioneering use of skis and dogs, Amundsen would not have made it to the South Pole; and Nansen was Amundsen's inspiration in his airship crossing of the North Pole. (It is now pretty much agreed that Robert Peary was telling a whopper when he claimed that he and his African-American partner, Matthew Henson, were first at the North Pole.)
Nansen began as a pioneer neurologist, a scientist and researcher. The polar regions were not the only unknown places in the world in Nansen's time. The human body also had its mysterious terrain. The erroneous "nerve net" theory of the central nervous system had not yet been disproved. Nansen's descriptions of nerve mechanisms were revolutionary, and correct. "His role was that of the often underrated historical figure; the enunciator of principles. He was one of the great simplifiers," Huntford writes. But Nansen went further as an imaginative scientist, prophesying that the tangle of nerve fibers would be proven to be "the true seat of the psyche."
His own psyche was complex and disturbed. His father was a stern, remote, and difficult man, and Nansen grew up having to prove himself. He too was a stern and remote father, which is perhaps not surprising. But bringing his micromanaging and fussbudgetry to exploration changed the whole business entirely and made it much more successful. Nansen, a passionate skier, saw this as the way to conquer the Poles. He was unorthodox in expedition planning: he opted for lightness and speed. He invented a new sort of cookstove, a compact sleeping bag, warmer clothes; he even devised a different cuisine. He invented a small landing craft, and in designing the research vessel Fram, he came up with a brilliant solution to sailing in polar winters. As an oceanographer he accurately predicted how a team might float north on current-borne ice. He was undoubtedly the first polar explorer to see the kayak as the marvel it is, and to use it.
Like many priapic men, Nansen was essentially solitary, a fantasist, a loner, a non-sharer—though he slept with many women, from the Valkyries in his native land to the duchess of Sutherland and Kathleen Scott. He was romancing Mrs. Scott even as her husband was breathing his last on his homeward journey, writing a pathetic note to the faithless woman. Nansen was a fickle, exasperating lover. Marriage and love affairs could throw him—later in life he begged Mrs. Scott in vain to marry him—but he was dauntless in exploration.
The Age of Discovery ended with the attainment of the South Pole. The trouble with exploration firsts is that they are nearly always generated by the meanest and narrowest demands of nationalism. Norway, emerging from Sweden's shadow in the last decades of the nineteenth century, needed heroes. Nansen was willing and was well equipped. He was physically strong, a true athlete, an intellectual, a scientist. He was handsome, humane, and well read—loved Goethe, spoke English well. He was something of an Anglophile.
That he was a legend in his own time made him more attractive to the ladies and got him invited to Sandringham, where he hobnobbed at Christmastime with King Edward VII (and noted with hot eyes that Mrs. Keppel was in residence, as well as Queen Alexandra); he played bridge with the queen of Spain and his own Queen Maud and the duke of Alva; and he went further, paddling palms and pinching fingers with Queen Maud. "Now don't you go and fall in love with Queen Maud!" Nansen's wife wrote from Norway. The Nansens seldom traveled together. The marriage that produced five children was unhappy, and Eva Nansen's early death caused a guilty grief in Nansen that was like madness. Remarriage did not ease his spirit.
Seconded to serve as a diplomat, he dealt directly with Lenin, who instructed his cronies, "Be extremely polite to Nansen, extremely insolent to Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau." Nansen was never less than a hero. But as he grew more famous, he became ever more distracted and sadder. For his inventiveness, his energy, and his fearlessness, he is for me the greatest of the polar explorers.
Because of Nansen's many accomplishments, he has been described as the "Renaissance ideal of the universal man," which isn't pushing things at all. It is clear that Nansen succeeded, as so many people do, precisely because of the weaknesses in his character—not just his impatience and his questionable leadership qualities, but also his fear, for fear is a necessity that prevents the best explorers from being foolhardy. Nansen saw himself as Faustian, and his biographer describes him as a "driven and tormented man who, in spite of his triumphs, felt strangely unfulfilled."
The loan of Nansen's ship, the unsinkable, uncrackable Fram, was an immense benefit to Amundsen. Scott's creaky Terra Nova was no match for it, and indeed the Fram ultimately had the distinction of sailing both farthest north and farthest south. The Fram was crucial, for Amundsen needed a seaworthy and powerful expedition-tested ship—his mission was secret, he left home much later than Scott, and he had almost no patronage. Yet in almost every instance, Amundsen made the astute judgment and Scott the wrong, ill-informed one, which is why Huntford's book seems so valuable, for it is about myth making and heroism and self-deception, the ingredients of nationalism.
The Last Place on Earth was a sensation when it first appeared. Rereading it twenty years later, I still find it an engrossing and instructive narrative, with vivid characterization and a mass of useful detail. When you finish it, you know much more about human nature, for it is more than a book about the South Pole. It is a study in leadership, contrasting two leaders, two cultures, and the nature of exploration itself, which is a counterpart of the creative impulse, requiring mental toughness, imagination, courage, and a leap of faith.
PrairyErth
ANY NATION'S literary history is rich in phantom pregnancies. Many writers produce a first book, worthy in every respect, and while there is often a muttered mention or a breathless hush regarding a second book, the thing never appears—phantom pregnancy. Isn't there a celebrated scholar in New Haven, sounding as desperate as a woman in a paternity suit, who is always threatening to publish his masterpiece? But it's a common condition. And I think most people, reflecting on the silence since Blue Highways appeared in 1982, believed—and who could blame them?—that William Least Heat-Moon's excellent book would not have a successor.
Yet that had also struck me as peculiar, because there must have been any number of publishers cooing into telephones, urging the man to repeat the formula. "Why not try the blue highways of Russia or Brazil? Or what about the back roads of Italy, Bill?" you can almost hear them saying. "Listen, they got plenty of blue highways in Australia." In the simple act of writing a travel book about your peregrinating along back roads you sort of lay claim to every back road on earth, or so people think. In that same spirit, it is sometimes felt that the world's railroads, and all their splendors and miseries, belong to me and that anyone else who writes about them ought to be shot for poaching.
With the appearance of PrairyErth it is immediately obvious what Heat-Moon has been doing for the past almost ten years, and that is researching and writing this densely printed 624-page book. It is not on the face of it a travel book, any more than is Gilbert White's The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, a work it much resembles in form and intention. The subtitle, "a deep map," is not much help, being at once idiosyncratic and gnomic (I suppose he means the invasive procedures of writing about an alien landscape). But Blue Highways proved beyond any doubt that Heat-Moon is nothing if not gnomic. PrairyErth is travel in eccentric circles, but the word "eccentric," in the sense of off center, is also somewhat inappropriate, since the landscape of the book, Chase County, Kansas, is at the geographical center of our country. "I have traveled a good deal in Concord," Thoreau said, and in this book Heat-Moon has covered just about every inch in the 744 squ
are miles of Chase County, met most its people, noted most of its Burma Shave signs, and disproved the scribbled graffito "Living in Kansas is a contradiction."
It is a wonderful and welcome book and has the distinct virtue of being completely unexpected. It is as different from Blue Highways as any book is likely to be, but obviously written by the same man, who is thoroughly friendly and patient, rather self-conscious, slightly pedantic (he knows the words "forb" and "chert" and you don't), something of a loner, a trifle old-fashioned, a bit mystical, and just as much at home in the tallgrass prairie as on the far side of a cracker barrel. He is also something of a naturalist, though he is lacking in the misanthropy that characterizes that calling—nature lovers are so often people haters. Chase County has a total population of three thousand, and on Heat-Moon's reckoning there is not a bad egg among them. To his great credit, he is lavish in reporting the Kansas idiom: He's been around the sun bettern fifty times, and All I ever caught was a limb in the face, and the man who wasn't worth a bushel of damn hedgeballs, and in a more sinister vein: The other guy shot the colored boy in the back of the head and got off on self-defense—convinced the jury the guy used to wear his hat backwards.
"In a purely metaphysical sense I am a turnip," a Kansas clergyman once wrote—and you don't quite grasp his meaning until you learn his name, William Quayle, quite obviously a distant antecedent of our own political vegetable. Of the living heroes and just plain folks Heat-Moon finds, there is the cowboy "Slim" Pinkson, "a character shaped by the bovine nature of the animals he spends his days with"; Larry Wagner, crippled by polio, who is eloquent in his attempt to save the all-grass prairie; Linda Thurston, whose café went bust: "We never did get the farmers to eat alfalfa sprouts. They know silage when they see it. Maybe we should have tried it with gravy"; Fidel Ybarra, who remembers every spike he had driven and every railroad tie he had set; Lloyd Soyez, who perhaps saved de Gaulle from being assassinated by snipers in Paris; and a nameless but memorable diner in the Strong City Café who described his Kansas encounter with a history prof in Hush Puppies from back east: "Couldn't tell a sycamore from a cottonwood, hadn't the least idea of what kind of tree to cut a wagon axle out of. He wasn't exactly sure what an ox is. He didn't know how to make hominy, hadn't ever skinned a squirrel or milked a cow—and he got paid fifty thousand a year to tell college kids about the West."
This is rural Kansas, but a far cry from the grim lunacy of In Cold Blood, the fantasy of The Wizard of Oz, or from Ian Frazier's vivid but shapeless The Great Plains. It is all prairie, and mostly pleasure—nothing here that smacks of the prairie fear felt by such natives of it as Willa Cather, who had an absolute horror of grassland. If PrairyErth has a fault, it is that it is almost entirely a celebration, even when it does not mean to be. It is a good-hearted book about the heart of the country. Heat-Moon does not make much of the xenophobia he encounters, nor does he explore the racism—the anti-black and anti-Hispanic sentiments—he hears. He takes people as he finds them, and they put up with his note-taking. Nagged for drinking a beer with his lunch in a cemetery ("This isn't a tavern"), he just smiles. "You'll be tolerated even if they do think you're about a half bubble off plumb," a women tells the author, making him feel he has been complimented. I kept wondering why he apparently spent all his time in motels. If these people are the salt of the earth, why didn't they offer him a bed? And while I am quibbling, why was it that few showed much concern about the greater world beyond Kansas? I have recently been in the Solomon Islands, and I heard more intelligent political talk and global concern from one naked Melanesian than Heat-Moon heard from a whole county of Kansas farmers.
It is risky for any book to attempt to be exhaustive, and this is as true for Moby-Dick as it is for PrairyErth. The risk is that lengthy extracts can break the spell of reading, and such a book—as shuffling and potbellied with undigested stuff as the Kansans it describes—may quickly become nothing more than a database, something to sort and study. The catalogue, the long digression, the essay-within-the-text, the scrapbook, the potted history, the portrait gallery—all of this served up as narration—can blunt the sharp edge of prose.
Kansas is the way we were, and it is the way many people in this country still are. By concentrating his scrutiny on this small area of rural America, where families have been settled for generations, where folks are folks, and there is a strong sense of attachment to the land; by accumulating a vast mass of detail and querying whether the West was won in quite the way we felt it was, Heat-Moon has succeeded in recapturing a sense of the American grain that will give the book a permanent place in the literature of our country. I mean to say that in its doggedness, its thoroughness, and its ingenious design the book—in its intentional crankiness—has value both as a historical document and as personal testimony.
Looking for a Ship
WHEN IN Looking for a Ship John McPhee explains in his characteristically lucid way the difference between ullage and innage, the subtleties of the Plimsoll mark, the length of a Trident-class submarine, and the manner of a Fathometer tracing the contour of the sea bottom, it is hard not to think of him as "Doc," the plainspoken polymath, the voice of experience. Doc is methodical and thorough, even to the point of being a teeny bit ponderous. While the rest of us are generalizing like mad and cracking feeble jokes, Doc is simply nodding and taking notes. He has the sort of patience that makes people nervous, and an almost exasperating sanity.
In this voyage with a purpose, an account of the current decline of the U.S. merchant marine, Doc doesn't get rattled when pirates board at Guayaquil. He understands the anxiety of a seaman eager to be employed: "If his neurons seemed hyperactive, they had some reason to be"—and isn't it just like Doc to put it like that? When a storm blows the ship sideways, Doc doesn't say exactly how he felt but rather enumerates the things that fell onto the deck—the alarm clock and all the rest of his clobber. In Chile Doc reads Charles Darwin. En route he reads Bowditch and takes pulses. He knows the age of everyone on board. He is patient—no record here of his losing his temper; and he is restrained—only eight obscenities, all told, in this account of the merchant marine. (I find Doc's habit of enumerating to be infectious.) When the ship is moored in the steamy Colombian port of Buenaventura, another man might have gone boozing and roistering in the waterfront dives with the crew—I certainly would have seized the chance to watch this bunch of level-headed sailors lose their marbles—but Doc heads for the hills: "We wanted to see the jungle rising to the Cordillera Occidental." Typical!
Fair-minded, frugal, truthful, fluent, decent, and humane, John McPhee is Doc to his fingertips. In the past I have trusted him on tennis champs, on geology, physics, Alaska, camping, the construction of the birch-bark canoe, and a score of other subjects. In an interview in a recent issue of Sierra magazine, McPhee was reported as saying, "My next book could be about a ketchup manufacturer ... my next book could be about anything." As it happens, this, his next book, is about the sorry state of our merchant marine. Why shouldn't I trust him on that subject too? If John McPhee says the Peru—Chile trench is steep and the continental shelf is extremely narrow, I believe it. If he reports an exasperated man as saying, "Another day in the life of Walter Mitty. Heavens to Murgatroyd, we're stuck in the lock," I believe that McPhee reported it correctly. When a man says, unchallenged, "Five more years, there won't be no Merchant Marine. It's going down the guts," you have to take it more or less as written—this is the last gasp of the merchant marine. McPhee only allows himself to be fanciful now and then. Now is his reference to the fact that his Spanish is purely functional and his grammar "tartare"; then is a passage beside which I have marked "joke" in the margin of my copy—I found no others. The sentences read as follows: "The author Alex Haley is noted for riding on merchant ships as a way of isolating himself from distractions and forcing himself to write. He could write a book called 'Routes.'"
Surrendering to his subject while remaining somewhat obscure himself, a technique he has just
about perfected, McPhee follows the progress of a seaman named Andy Chase, who is looking for a ship. After quite a lot of hullabaloo, Andy lands himself a berth on the Stella Lykes, bound for the west coast of South America. McPhee also boards, but as a paying passenger, and he ranges over the ship reporting on the moods and experiences of the rest of the crew. It emerges that Andy is the great-great-great-grandson of Nathaniel Bowditch (of Salem), father of modern navigation and author of the basic texts. But even this cannot make Andy Chase colorful enough to occupy the center of the book, and Andy is nudged aside in favor of Captain Washburn, the Stella Lykes's skipper, who is both a superb captain and a self-made eccentric on a heroic scale. Formerly a poor student, a runaway, a circus performer (he walked on glass and did fakir tricks), and an amateur boxer, Captain Washburn earned his master's certificate the hard way, under the tutelage of such skippers as Dirty Shirt Price and Terrible Terry Harmon. Here is Terrible Terry in a storm: "Do you know how to pray?...Then try that. That's the only thing that's going to save us now." Washburn has a delightful gift for the non sequitur. He understands Columbus and is sympathetic: "[Columbus] did not produce, and that was the bottom line. He was a maverick, an adventurer; he was not a follower of the party line. Come to think of it—not to compare myself with Columbus—some of those adjectives kind of fit me." McPhee obviously agrees, and a few pages later quotes a nice Washburnism (the captain speaking from the bridge): "I would rather be here for the worst that could be here than over there [on land] for the worst that could be there."
