True Stories

by Francis Spufford

  We live in snowy times at the moment. Perhaps the first flake that fell in the culture was David Attenborough’s Life in the Freezer series, or maybe it was Peter Hoeg’s Miss Smilla, and novels rather than natural history, that started the passion for cold places and gave us all a feeling for snow. At any rate, a full blizzard is now blowing, of novels, travel books, children’s books, thrillers, science books, memoirs, picture books, drama and poetry, all set at the ends of the earth. ‘Novels set in the Arctic and Antarctic will receive a development grant’, ordained Julian Barnes mockingly in 1984 in Flaubert’s Parrot. By now his grant (if it existed) would have been claimed over and over again. And the official bodies that govern access to Antarctica are helping the process along. Seeing the level of public enthusiasm, they have begun to give writers passage to places where only scientists were allowed before. The British Antarctic Survey welcomed Sara Wheeler to their bases and field camps when she was writing her bestselling Terra Incognita. The US National Science Foundation made Kim Stanley Robinson an Artist in Residence on Ross Island, so that he could write Antarctica, a kind of extra volume to his Mars trilogy, about the place on this planet that most resembles the cold deserts of Valles Marineris and Chryse Planitia.

  Amid all this there’s been renewed interest in the legendary figures of polar exploration from the beginning of the twentieth century. So it comes as no great surprise to hear that there may soon be a big-budget screen version of Shackleton’s boat journey. The story is intensely dramatic, whether you read it in Worsley’s journal, or Shackleton’s own South, or Alfred Lansing’s classic retelling Endurance. It’s structured like early Spielberg: continuous action punctuated by very short pauses, for, once the James Caird reached South Georgia, the next little problem was to make the first ever crossing of the glaciers and precipices down the centre of the island, without a map or mountaineering equipment. So the men drove 2-inch carpentry screws through the soles of their boots, took 90 feet of ship’s rope, and set off. Courage was rewarded with a happy ending: Shackleton reached Stromness whaling station and was able to rescue all of the stranded explorers on Elephant Island. He is the only expedition leader of the heroic age never to lose a single man. Film may be able to convey the grace of the boat journey better than words. Like the performance of a great athlete, it may be better seen than described.

  But the choice of hero is telling. You couldn’t imagine a Hollywood movie about Captain Scott, Shackleton’s great rival. For many decades, Scott was the polar Brit most celebrated, famous for his heroic death on the way back from the South Pole in 1912; but Scott’s virtues, and the whole idea of a nobility best displayed by not surviving the Antarctic, belong to a lost world of emotion now, which is harder and harder to enter on its original terms. Shackleton is much more our contemporary. Flamboyant where Scott was buttoned-up, phlegmatic where Scott was nervy, he had a charisma we recognise immediately. When Scott’s leadership was challenged, he clung to the hierarchy of the Edwardian navy; Shackleton, bred in the less rigid Merchant Marine, knew how to make his will felt. There’s a story about a merchant seaman who refused to accept an order on Scott’s first expedition, when Shackleton was his subordinate. Scott was dumbfounded by the man’s appeal to his contract of employment. Shackleton asked Scott to leave the room; then he hit the sailor repeatedly till he obeyed.

  Ugly though that manifestation of it may have been, it was this same personal authority that on the boat journey made Shackleton endlessly comforting and solicitous towards his companions, doling out the dryest socks in an almost motherly way, subtly bolstering up their pride in themselves. ‘So great was his care of his people’, remembered Worsley, ‘that, to rough men, it seemed at times to have a touch of woman about it, even to the verge of fussiness.’ Sure of himself, he could acknowledge his dependence on the skills of the others. At the beginning of the boat journey, as he and Worsley sat at the tiller during the night watch with their arms round each other for warmth, Shackleton said, ‘Do you know I know nothing about boat sailing?’ and laughed. ‘All right, Boss, I do’, replied Worsley. ‘I’m telling you that I don’t’, repeated Shackleton, ‘slightly ruffled’. He meant: I need you. It’s a sure thing that if the movie is a hit, someone will swiftly publish a self-help paperback called Management Secrets of Ernest Shackleton. Emotionally fluent, sanely focused on survival, he speaks directly to the sensibilities of the present. He felt, of course, those codes of behaviour which are mysterious to us now, but the sense of his story does not depend on them as the story of Scott’s death does. In a Hollywood in which a British accent is still usually shorthand for a cold heart, Shackleton is the one hero in the British pantheon who can embody the present-day urge to daydream ourselves into the titan-scaled landscapes of the poles. And to daydream ourselves in the other sense, too: to imagine versions of us, clever as albatrosses or just heroically stubborn, who are titan-sized too.

  (2001)

  READ MY TOES

  Seventeenth-century books of Arctic travels contained occasional reports of a kingdom in the far north of the Americas called Estoty: just out of reach over the icy horizon, of course, with its wealth, its monarch, its city of copper-roofed houses. Eventually the chimera-collecting eye of Vladimir Nabokov fell upon Estoty. The horribly spry cast of Ada live in a Russo-American arcadia of the same name, which maybe represents a suitable metamorphosis of one kind of impossibility into another. But the report also testifies to an aspect of European disappointment with the New World. Alongside the rapacious reasons for wanting to discover lost cities of gold, there ran a perpetual, self-defeating desire for encounters with a special sort of other, impossibly defined and therefore never met. These strangers had to be sufficiently like Europeans (in terms of monarchy, streetplans, polite society) to command respect; and tough enough, too, to withstand the meeting, as the Incas and the Mexicans had not been; yet at the same time so completely different in their ordering of human experience that the European sense of wonder would be aroused by the mere report of the way they lifted a cup. It was a paradoxical appetite for similar difference, different sameness. With its a priori stipulations it did not make travellers especially good at noticing the real wonders to hand, at least until a couple of generations after they had vanished. Ufology probably inherits this sense of the insufficient wonderfulness of things as they are, though unexpected shreds of it linger even now in the Euro-American response to the world TV delivers. A touch of El Dorado clings to the discovery that modern Iranian diplomats, alone in all the globe, wear a completely different kind of formal shirt. And if so basic a thing as a shirt is different, then perhaps the houses of Tehran might be copper-roofed, and . . . no.

  There was no Estoty. There was, however, Tikigaq, a 20-mile spit of gravel dunes extending into the Bering Strait from the north-west coast of Alaska. Continuously inhabited for 2,000 years, it served as the ritual metropolis for the westernmost Inuit. Little was visible above ground except a forest of whale-ivory stakes and tripods, rising, amid a clicking rubble of human and animal bones, from a cluster of hummocks. On a clear winter’s night at the right vantage point you could see the lit skylights beneath which perhaps 800 people were living. (The same number again were distributed around the Tikigaq hinterland, and thought of themselves as Tikigaqmiut, Tikigaq people.) Complicated entrance tunnels lined with whale ribs joined the earth iglus of families related by blood or clan or ritual affiliation. Each part of the subterranean architecture had symbolic implications, from the passageway to the round entry hole to the skylight to the inevitable oil lamp, and besides the ordinary dwellings there were six qalgi, larger ritual lodges lined with benching where the men kept sacred puppets, masks and pictures. Tikigaq was the centre of the world, an exceptional zone that was neither quite sea nor quite land. When the sun reappeared in spring its disc was propped against Imnat cliffs 50 miles to the south. But Tikigaq knowledge extended much farther through trade contacts and hunters’ memory. Tobacco reached Tikigaq in the eighteenth centu
ry, not from the lands to the south, but from European Russia, via the Cossacks and the Siberian tribes ‘over there’, ‘on the far side’ of the Strait. Tikigaqmiut could draw accurate freehand maps of the opposing coast. Tikigaq shamans flew over there sometimes to engage in aerial dogfights with their Siberian counterparts. (Indeed, Tikigaq’s very last shaman claimed in 1953 that he had assassinated Stalin while hovering over the Kremlin.) Like practically every mat­­erial aspect of the surroundings – a cold desert to outsiders, an overflowing plenitude to those who lived there – the Siberian shore was allotted a symbolic significance. ‘Over there’ counterbalanced ‘over here’ just as land and sea, male and female, sun and moon went together, in a series of tensed, productive couplings. So thickly inscribed with secondary meanings were the ordinary presences of the Tikigaq world that daily life amounted to an almost continuous ritual performance. ‘Do you realise you are fingering the levers that control eternity?’ asks Auden’s The Orators. Tikigaq did. In addition its people took pride in playing faster and looser with taboo than other Inuit dared. Elsewhere in the Arctic land-foods and sea-foods were kept apart as strenuously as meat and milk in a kosher kitchen; Tikigaq kebabbed them together on set occasions for extra symbolic leverage, in accordance with the town’s confident assessment of itself. Inupiaq, the term both for the regional language and the ethnic branch who spoke it, came from Inuk, ‘person’ (Inuit already meant ‘the people’), and piaq, meaning ‘true’ or ‘genuine’. They, the Tikigaqmiut would have you know, were the real people. The uncompromising demands their ecological niche placed on them had cemented a mixed corpus of knowledge, historical and practical, religious and technical. What it was necessary to know shaded over into what it was worth knowing. The anthropologist and poet Tom Lowenstein, who arrived in the 1970s, calls the Tikigaqmiut ‘nationalistic’. Despite the absence in Tikigaq of every structure and institution that composed a nation in the European sense, it seems the right word for historic Tikigaq’s intense approving awareness of itself.

  Though intrusion from the West came later to the settlement than to almost any other point along the circumpolar band of Inuit cultures, collapse was assured from the 1850s when American ships began to work the lucrative waters of the Strait, destroying along with the whale stocks the vigour of the intricate Tikigaq whale hunt. The population slumped, and a vicious local strongman named Atannauraq used shamanism and a monopoly trading position to impose a reign of terror. After Atannauraq’s murder, a Christian medical mission helped retrieve the situation, but at the cost of separating the modern Tikigaqmiut from their forebears. For two generations a barrier of retrospective shame lay athwart their history. The Tikigaq Lowenstein saw, a.k.a. ‘Point Hope’, was an underpopulated village of wooden houses, with a school and an incinerator. But, remarkably, he was in time to act as auditor to Asatchaq, a peremptory, formidable old man who had systematically memorised all he could glean of Tikigaq’s traditional learning. He wanted his talk to be recorded, hoping rather sadly that some powerful outside agency could arrange for the lost pattern of things to return; seeing it also as a way of circumventing the ear-stopping fear he inspired, for as Lowenstein explains, ‘to know the shamanistic order was partly to contain it’. Tikigaqmiut twenty and thirty and forty years younger than Asatchaq (b. 1891) felt mingled awe and alarm: the modern Inuit youth of Alaska, often monoglot English speakers, appreciated the pre-contact past as a legendary golden age, but were all the less connected to the specifics of the culture. Against this Lowenstein could offer an outsider’s poetic and anthropological attentiveness. He also had an outsider’s humility in the face of a history not his own. ‘I got on well with Asatchaq – indeed, we grew to love each other – partly because it was in my interest that he should maintain his preeminence, and whether it involved recording his memories or emptying his wastepot, I did what he told me.’

  The old man’s stories, translated and edited by Lowenstein in the collection The Things That Were Said of Them,1 reveal a people fascinated by blubber, shit and toes. Whale-fat, Tikigaq’s constant fuel and food source, is an understandable obsession. At the beginning of the world the first grandmother made Raven Man from blubber-lamp sediment. Unctuous or crispy, raw or cooked, eaten or ignited, blubber stuck to Tikigaq ever after: a primal material. Excrement’s special place could be predicted too, as the body’s outflow, food’s final form, though Tikigaq’s rules for dealing with it are definitely angled away from the familiar ones. Hunters took a ritual bath in urine once a year, and people could be called Anaq (‘Shit’) without it striking anyone as funny or insulting. A famous shaman passed a magical test by smearing a whalebone wedge with excrement before striking it. The comic tales of Kinnaq, mythic klutz and failed seducer, show woman after woman escaping from his kayak with the unanswerable cry of ‘I want to have a shit!’ It wasn’t offensive in itself. On the other hand, Raven Man forced himself on an uiluaqtaq (‘woman who won’t get married’) at the dawn of creation by slipping a defrosted turd into her sleeping bag, and threatening her with social exposure when she woke up sticky. This is Tikigaq’s equivalent of Genesis; and in the other of the two paired origin stories a sister raped by her brother presents him with her breasts chopped up small in a grue of blood and shit, a potful of ultimate reproach. The role of toes in Tikigaq civilisation is harder to fathom. The wedge-smiting shaman drove off two ghosts by toe-menace. ‘What do your toes eat?’ ask the spirits, eyeing them nervously as they wiggle through the holes in Ukunniq’s boots. ‘People’, he replies darkly; ‘they eat people.’ Perhaps toes’ magic power has something to do with the ‘joint-spirits’, little supernumerary souls inhabiting human elbows and knees who might be expected to cluster in the delicate complexity of the metatarsal bones; but here no footnote wiggles helpfully.

  Menace is commoner than solace in Asatchaq’s myths and histories. Tikigaq’s hunting economy depended on continuous kills: Tikigaq’s culture accepted blood feuds, gang rapes and invasions into its weave. You would have to be very blindly attached to a Rousseau-esque vision of ‘Eskimo’ life to think of Tikigaq as a peaceable kingdom, serene amid the snows. Yet wonder is omnipresent in Asatchaq’s narrations. They span the whole of Tikigaq’s existence without breaking their tempo, from the ur-time ‘when people were animals and animals were people’ through to the events of his own life, and they are bewildering in their dense familiarity with the mysterious. You read them always conscious of the absent daily life in the iglus and qalgis that they are designed to reinforce. They are total; and they suppose the coherence of the overflowing world they deal with in passing, suns and moons and marmots, caribou and shamanic flights, snow buntings and blood and toes.

  The Things That Were Said of Them is an academic work of record. Lowenstein’s notes and commentaries tease out the stories ethnologically, and supplementary contributions from other informants (and previous anthropologists) are slotted into the structure. But two projects, not one, were launched by Lowenstein’s sessions with Asatchaq. Widely overlapping with the first book where materials are concerned, Ancient Land, Sacred Whale 2 has a quite different intention and impact. It is a dazzling work of mimesis; it aims to enact the coherence of Tikigaq by tracing one annual cycle in the pre-contact life of the settlement. Seen beside the meticulously governed translations of the first book, the high risks of the strategy are obvious. The practical ones, for a start. Even with a surgical selection of those myths and practices most directly concerned with the whale hunt, Lowenstein still has an enormous volume of mat­­erial to marshal; to tamp into place in the reader’s mind so that, as autumn succeeds summer and the drumming begins in the qalgis, what you need to know lies ready exactly when needed. Then the book is a vision, an interpretation of the irrecoverable, necessarily sacrificing anthropological caution, and the question of Lowenstein’s poetic aptness to the Tikigaq-ish task arises. Asatchaq’s opening narratives in The Things That Were Said are set by Lowenstein in ‘lines which roughly follow units of meaning and rhythm’
to distinguish them from the following ancestor stories; he warns there that though they ‘look like poetry, they are poems only in the sense that their originals belong to the world of shamanistic imagination’. Much of Ancient Land is narrative poetry proper: does this make Lowenstein, the shaper of the year, a shaman himself? The book alternates explanations in exact, economic prose with short-lined ‘storytelling’ by two fictive Tikigaq narrators, musing at some distance, and with longer-paced cantos of direct action. It isn’t clear that Western poetics provide the appropriate ground on which to reconcile this necessary diversity of voices. In particular there looms the danger of a modernist appropriation of a remote culture, of the kind which tells you far more about a literary programme than about the faraway object of scrutiny. Pound pounced on ideograms and Charles Olson seized Mayan glyphs as wished-for evidences of concrete, unalienated writing: language apparently conducted so that the sign itself for flint was rocky, and comb sprouted visual teeth. One up on onomatapoiea, any road. Both men can be counted as ancestral influences in Lowenstein’s own poetry. There could be, so to speak, a contest of ancestors in Ancient Land: between modernist sages urging Lowenstein to choose Tikigaq for a distant mirror, and the shamanic ghosts for whom Tikigaq cannot be picked out as a mere potential subject, because it is/was the world. In fact the local imperatives have won hands down. Knowingly inter­mediate in the sensibility he brings to bear on Tikigaq, Lowenstein conducts his language with a wonderfully tenacious deference to Tikigaq’s own rules.