True Stories
Page 7
Without Huntford’s polemical drive, he might never have tuned in Oates’s exasperated journal entries for us from out of the static and noise of time, or made the remorseless calculations required to show just how unready Scott was to face the polar environment. But Scott and Amundsen revealed a Huntford who slipped rather too easily from bloodhound to Rottweiler, who worked in what you might call the attack-dog mode of biography. Among the cries of pain as Huntford crunched cherished pieces of Establishment nonsense came protests as he bit down, with equal fervour, on things that were probably true; or at least were genuinely matters of interpretation. He did not know where to stop. Famously, the index listed twenty-three characteristics of Scott of which only ‘literary gifts’ and perhaps ‘agnosticism’ were positive. ‘Command, unsuitability for’ was followed by ‘insight, lack of’ and ‘judgement, defective’ in dire, and finally hilarious, sequence. Huntford made the gratuitous suggestion, completely unsupported by evidence, that at the last Scott had glared balefully at Oates ‘in unspoken expectation of the supreme sacrifice’ until he got the message, and then concocted Oates’s heroic exit line. (Sue Limb and Patrick Cordingley point out in their biography of Oates that any quietus scripted by Scott would’ve been much lusher.) He insisted – a statement he repeats in this book – that because Kathleen Scott agreed to meet Nansen in a Berlin hotel while her husband was in the Antarctic, their romantic friendship must have been sexual. Until an attested piece of paper turns up written by either of them saying Hot stuff with Fridtjof/Kathleen on the sofa this afternoon, this remains a speculation, and one at odds with her known preference for flirtation minus libido.
What these readings of circumstance had in common was a refusal or inability on Huntford’s part to enter, except destructively, into the mental climate of Scott’s England: its codes, its probabilities, its rituals and romances. Consequently he was not good at distinguishing between individual characteristics and collective or cultural ones. In my view he blamed Scott as a single man for the defects of a complex tradition shaping British behaviour at the Poles. To think this is not to let Scott off the hook: it is not necessarily a matter of diminishing culpability, but of assessing meaning. If Scott was Romantic in his perception of the polar landscape to the detriment of sensible planning, he remains responsible for the specific errors which did for him and his companions; but if he inherited and enlarged that Romantic response rather than inventing it from scratch, the life in the world and the death in the snow make a rather different pattern. It might, for example, matter more that he was acquiescent (which he was) than that he was arrogant (perfectly true).
In history books the task of separating the individual and the cultural rests on the historian’s sensitivity to convention. In biography, perversely, it is the biographer’s skill at imagining personality that become the point at issue, as the means by which figure detaches from background. Huntford’s imaginative, as opposed to forensic, record is not completely reassuring; and the effect is curious in a work like the present one, where the subject is somebody Huntford admires.
Nansen took his favourite self-image from Goethe’s Faust, who promised to surrender his soul if he ever found himself content; and Huntford in turn takes up this sad wager on perpetual motion as the central motif of the book, and the main key to Nansen’s identity. It is a good biographical move. Nansen’s thoughts ran in Faustian channels, it seems, on most occasions as the possible rewards of his world were paraded before him one by one, from the favours of the Duchess of Sutherland to the presidency of a Norwegian republic. (He declined both.) His wife Eva, a successful mezzo-soprano, performed the Schubert setting of Gretchen’s lament from Faust while he was away on the Fram. Wo ich ihn nicht hab, / Ist mir das Grab: ‘Him gone, my room / Is like a tomb . . .’ But here the sense arrives of Huntford reaching the limit of his biographical skill. Faust is used as a catch-all explanation, a device that registers the presence of an inner life rather than a door through which it can be explored further. Huntford integrates narratives beautifully: not characters. Where contradictory impressions of Nansen are concerned that do not fit the single Faustian diagnosis, Huntford tends merely to amass the data, without weighting it by importance; without it being clear, even, to what extent he endorses this or that ripple in the flow.
In particular, there seems more to be said about the bad feeling that Nansen generated aboard the Fram. Every expedition produces the pressures that lead to evil-tempered journal entries; people stuck at close quarters get fed up. The bitterness comes, and then it goes again as pressures recede. Such is the normal pattern, the background to any one polar personality clash. To take the prime example from the 1910–13 British Antarctic Expedition, even Oates, up whose nose Scott had got so far that practically only his feet projected, warmed a little to his leader again once he no longer had to worry about the expedition’s ponies. Huntford’s way is to present the ebb and flow of the inevitably malign comment on Nansen as if it were, at each point in time, straightforwardly revealing. The result is a Nansen who just is by turns whatever his pissed-off shipmates call him: tyrannical, unthoughtful, conceited, rude, obnoxious. ‘He thinks he knows everything and his word is law.’ So much friendlier is Huntford to the Fram’s captain Otto Sverdrup – given the same rhetorical role as the quietly more effective man in relation to Nansen that Huntford gave Oates vis-à-vis Scott – that it is sometimes necessary to remind yourself that Huntford approves of Nansen. It is as if the habit of dislike has grown on him as a biographer and now infiltrates even his complimentary portraits. The Fram insults cannot be simple truths. On the other hand, Huntford might have pursued what they do indicate about Nansen’s persistently difficult relations with other men.
Nansen never relaxed into the affinities he had elected to have with men by choosing months and years isolated with them in the Arctic. A quick ’n’ dirty psychoanalysis is possible. (It may be that a rather more authoritative one exists. Nansen’s book Farthest North, with its sidelights on his thinking, reached Vienna, Huntford tells us. If you are writing a biography and it happens that Freud has analysed your subject’s dreams, surely, surely you should do more than refer to the fact in passing?) Weak father, mother emotionally absent, then dead when Fridtjof was fifteen, leaving the Oedipal process of separation blatantly unconcluded. Women thereafter the object of a huge, hungry investment of feeling by Nansen, which was never satisfied because the lost maternal warmth remained the goal and could never be recaptured – while men kept their first, stereotypical significance to the Oedipal infant as intruders, threats to bliss, rivals just because they existed. Therefore the adult Nansen was forever trying to resolve the unease at these frontiers of himself by acts of embarrassing dominance, or over-interventionist bossiness: the ‘endless preaching’ his shipmates could testify to.
This is crass, but something of the sort needs to be ventured, since, from another angle, this same defect in Nansen, however it is defined, was perhaps the cause for his wish to be anything as flamboyant as a polar explorer. Many great achievements fall to those to whom it occurs to perform them, and a certain lack of balance, a certain literal-mindedness, obscured in Nansen’s case by his great technical brilliance as an explorer, probably helps in the task of acting out what others are content to keep as fantasies.
(1998)
THE USES OF ANTARCTICA
Recently, the American novelist Douglas Coupland wrote this:
I like to think of the subconscious as being very much like Antarctica. It was only really approached and explored in the late 19th century. It’s very difficult and expensive to visit, and even then we’re unsure of its long-term value or if it was worth the visit. It only seems to create worry and trouble: ozone holes; Oedipus complexes.
Needless to say I don’t agree that Antarctica ‘only creates worry and trouble’, and ‘creates’ doesn’t seem quite the right word, either, for the complicated relationship between perceived and perceiver, when the perceived is an uninhabited co
ntinent 97 per cent covered in ice up to a depth, in some places, of 3 miles; and the perceiver is – what? We’ll come to that. If we take Coupland’s joke, though, in an appropriately psychoanalytical spirit, we see that – of course – it discloses more truth than the teller meant it to, and truth of a different kind.
Because even though Antarctica, perhaps like the subconscious, has been there for a very long time, it really did only come to persistent human attention, with a similar uncertainty about whether it was being discovered or invented, at the end of the nineteenth century. What Ross and his crews first touched in the 1840s, and what the whalers and the sealers were seeing in the distance from the 1830s on, only came substantially into the domain of human awareness from the 1890s on. Geologically speaking, Antarctica is part of Gondwanaland, carried southwards by the drifting of the plates 160 million years ago. Imaginatively speaking, it is a product of the twentieth century, contemporary with jazz, or the internal combustion engine, or, yes, the Freudian unconscious. Twentieth-century science has defined it; twentieth-century cultural preoccupations have played out in the perception of it; twentieth-century social changes have worked through in the ways that human presence in it has been manifested. It may well be that what happens to Antarctica in the twenty-first century ends up determining its influence on human history far more definitively than anything that has already happened. It may be that the twentieth century ends up looking like nothing but a prelude, with ominous mood music and the grim interest of camcorder tsunami footage, where all the figures in the foreground are busily concentrating on their own concerns as the wave looms up behind them. But the ice sheets haven’t melted yet, and eight years in, it’s a little too soon to say what this century is doing to our Antarctic perceptions.
I want to think, today, about the twentieth-century-ness of Antarctica, and about the way that its particular perceptual properties have joined up with, have found a fit with, various of the twentieth century’s changing human desires. These of course include twentieth-century senses of history; senses, made in the particular decades of the twentieth century, of what the near past and far past were saying. The Edwardian British explorers of Scott’s Terra Nova expedition, for example, brought multiple histories to bear on their present-tense experiences in 1910–13: the deep-frozen and reheated microculture of naval exploration in the Arctic, the inheritance of the sublime and of Romanticism, the Victorian tendency to moralise the polar landscape – all of these things, not as they were constituted in their own originating historical moments, but as they were received, as they were delivered reflexively or fragmentarily or in passing, much later, as constituent parts of the self-consciousness of another time. It would be just as true to talk about the understandings of the past folded into the experience of all succeeding visitors to Antarctica up to the present day. Twentieth-century cultures, twentieth-century consciousnesses, were always, among other things, founded upon selections of a relevant past; were always constituted by their present possession of particular pieces of memory, myth, knowledge, feeling, idea, from the fading memories carried along by Soviet scientists on the expeditions of the International Geophysical Year of 1957–8 of their compulsory encounter with Engels’ Dialectics of Nature, to the back-stories of Alpinism and American sports culture and hippy reverence for ‘authenticity’ coded into awareness of those, from the 1990s on, who paid to ski to the Pole from the private camp at Patriot Hills.
So we could, for instance, in the same spirit trace through the different phases of the twentieth-century encounter with Antarctica one of the very strongest imaginative themes in the response to it, the sense of the southern continent as a repository of lost time; and watch the response change and develop as different expanses of lost time become germane. As Louis Bernacchi describes it in 1901, coming ashore at Cape Adare with the Borchgrevink expedition, the just-encountered landscape oscillates between different types of mythological ancientness. The mountains appearing through cloud look ‘like the tiers of an amphitheatre or the Great Pyramid of Cheops’ – monuments from ancient human culture. Then the mixture of igneous rock and stranded bergs, of ice and fire, strikes him as they draw inshore as belonging to ‘some unknown land of punishment’ – to a Dantesque purgatory, located like Dante’s in the antipodes, which would implicitly have existed since creation. And then, when they’ve landed the boat and smelled the penguins and climbed the ridgeline of the cape and looked around, he moves the antiquity of the scene back before the creation story, and his mythology gets all Miltonic. He’s looking at dark materials. ‘It was like a mental image of our globe in its primitive state – a spectacle of Chaos.’ But Bernacchi was the Southern Cross’s geologist, and so far he was only playing. He was letting imagination frolic about without science, which was going to be the twentieth century’s most influential source of Antarctic perception. He was going to go to work now, replacing mythology with the chronology of vulcanism and stratification; replacing fanciful lost time with an era in geological history for Antarctica to contain, as geological history was understood before plate tectonics came along to shove the continents into motion. And indeed, the past that was found in Antarctica by the scientists of the heroic age was the far geological past, both displayed and hidden. Displayed, because the rocky bones of the planet were revealed here without the flesh of soil and the skin of vegetation; hidden, because only in coastal outcrops, in rare dry valleys, in the peaks of almost vanished mountains, were the rocks themselves visible beneath the continental sheath of ice, which did not yet itself seem to have a significant relationship to history. There was a kind of analogy to the early geological vision of Antarctica in the hope that ancient biology might be preserved there. If ontogeny had recapitulated phylogeny, then the emperor penguin egg collected from Cape Crozier in 1911 might have had a baby dinosaur inside it, miraculously contemporary with the fossilised leaves the Scott expedition dug out of the rock face beside the Beardmore.
The next kind of lost time to be perceived, though, was very recent. It was the human activity of the heroic age itself, once the First World War had ended the world in which it had been humanly and politically and financially and philosophically possible; made it as irretrievable as the Cambrian. The temps perdu we are à la recherche of, in The Worst Journey in the World, 1922, is ‘an age in geological time, so many hundred years ago, when we were artistic Christians, doing our jobs as well as we were able . . .’ Cherry-Garrard remembered his pre-war Antarctic time with a particular intensity, a particular desperate anxiety and appetite not shared by other veterans. Yet this almost hysterical sense that, because we cannot now reach it, because it is not being supplemented and overlaid by other experiences, our past might almost be thought of as still going on down there, at the end of the world – it is this sense which metamorphoses into a permanent element in the perception of time in Antarctica, once people are going back and encountering, not of course the heroics of the past, but the buildings of that past, the architectural containers of the heroic age. Primed perhaps by memories of Alpine folklore, of the stories about young men who die in glaciers and have their frozen bodies spat out decades later onto the terminal moraine, unchanged at the feet of the old woman who was once their sweetheart, people have been willing to see Antarctic huts as eerily unchanging, as domains where past fragments of the twentieth century still remain, iced into stasis, virtually ever since Byrd’s return to Antarctica in the 1920s. When human presence in Antarctica stepped up by an order of magnitude in the 1950s, the huts of the heroic age became explicitly treasured as time capsules, as uncanny vaults of Edwardian existence persisting alongside contemporary endeavour as past time does not do in the warmer world. Tourism’s arrival only strengthened the impression of the past being uncannily visitable, in Antarctica. I’ve made the pilgrimage myself to admire the continuing redness of the Edwardian ketchup at Cape Evans, and to feel the strange sensation of stepping into the frame of Herbert Ponting’s photograph of the Terra Nova’s Midwinter Day
party, and though I didn’t feel the room was exempt from time exactly, it certainly seemed to have flowed there with a kind of withering slowness.
The desire to believe that the recent, human past persists frozen in Antarctica is very strong; strong enough to make people oblivious to the real conservation problems of the huts, a report has complained recently. And it isn’t only the buildings of the heroic age this applies to. There is a thrill of anachronism, of small-scale time travel, to be had now in visits to the bases the Soviet Antarctic Programme had to mothball in the early 1990s. The tiny trickle of travellers to Leningradskaya Station, on its clifftop in Victoria Land, or to Molodyozhnaya, enter spaces where posters of Lenin still preside over the dining tables. They’re going to the last, gelified outposts of the lost civilisation of twentieth-century communism. One happy camper compares Leningradskaya to ‘a villain’s HQ in James Bond’ on his blog, which suggests he had a very satisfying encounter with historical evil there. Finally, and this is a bit more contentious, it’s even possible to perceive an operating Russian base, with real live Russian scientists inside it, as somehow belonging to the past, if you’re willing to interpret difference – non-American dentistry, non-American nutrition, budgets, décor – as signs of a different position on a unitary timeline of human progress. This is the essayist and travel writer Jason Anthony, visiting Vostok:
January 26, 2000: The impossible murmurs of bearded Russians followed me into the small empty dining room. Spare and plain, the room reeked so much of old culture and simple food that it seemed a survivor of ice ages and continental drift. Years of tobacco smoke and grease had browned the high pale-yellow ceiling. Much of the paint on the ceiling, and on the yellow walls, had long ago flaked off: above, dark rust bloomed, while below an older icyblue spread like frost, as if the snow outside the windows had seeped through. Small colourful paintings, mostly homemade rural and tropical scenes, gave a tilted hope to the hard-worn room. A mound of boiled eggs glistened in a large bowl like dabs of white paint. Withered window box plants stood silhouetted against the snow. In the dusty light, scuffed dark tables held slabs of black bread, a brick of yellow butter, and a plate of sliced pink salami. On the sideboard, a massive cutting board and heavy cleaver wore the deep scars of years: the labor, hunger, anger, and celebrations of men living difficult, cloistered lives. I’d walked into a Russian still-life that seemed to breathe in its dark frame.6