True Stories

by Francis Spufford

  Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land . . . Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific, – not his Mother Earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or be buried in . . . What it is to be admitted to a museum, to see a myriad of particular things, compared with being shown some star’s surface, some hard matter in its home! I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me . . . What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! – Think of our life in nature, – daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, – rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?10

  I promised we’d come to the question of the self that does the perceiving of Antarctica, and so we have. This ecstatic piece of Thoreau, visible through the smooth varnish of Alone, is not only the prototype for a whole vein of twentieth-century environmental awe – for instance, for Aldo Leopold’s injunction to ‘think like a mountain’ – and with even more drastic force in proportion to the even more drastic bleakness of the southern continent, a prototype for awe at what in Antarctica exceeds our uses. It’s also a prototype for a reflexive move back from seen to seer.

  Who are we? Where are we? Richard Byrd was not worried by thermodynamics, but he was exceedingly anxious about the uncontrollability of his own mind. He resolves to ‘extirpat[e] all lugubrious ideas the instant they appeared’. ‘Only by ruthlessly exorcising the disillusioning and unpleasant thoughts can I maintain any feeling of real detachment, any sense of being wholly apart from selfish concerns.’ Not surprisingly: he appears to believe, unlike Thoreau, that only right, calm, undiscordant thoughts put you in harmony with the cosmos. Here the half-conservatism of the twentieth-century encounter with Antarctica comes in: the distance of many of its twentieth-century visitors, particularly its early visitors, from the urban mainstreams of ideas. Byrd would very much have preferred his emotions to abide by the rulings of his will. ‘A gentleman never gives in to his feelings.’ But Alone shows a man aware of the slippery ground beneath him. ‘Even in my most exalted moods I never quite lost the feeling of being poised over an undermined footing, like a man negotiating a precipice who pauses to admire the sunset.’ Once it is acknowledged that the world is not only what we want it or need it to be, it begins to follow that we are not only what we want to want or want to need. Wilderness without; wildness, of a certain kind, within. There really is a serious connection, just as Douglas Coupland jokingly promised, between Antarctica and the unconscious.

  (2008)

  Red

  I was interested in plenty in general, first, and only later in the colour-coded Soviet version I wrote about in 2010 in Red Plenty. The dot-com boom of the 1990s was where I began, with its promise of an apparently drop-dead-contemporary cornucopia. But the more I looked at Silicon Valley, and at the loud insistence just then that something absolutely unprecedented was happening, the more I saw a very ancient fantasy at work. Abundance has a mythology, and here it was again.

  And then when I started thinking about the unsuccessful Soviet cousin of the familiar twentieth-century abundance of the West, I found the explicit jostling in it between folktales and the hard problem of economic planning too beautiful to pass up. Beautiful, that is, for those who are gluttons for historical irony, and who like the shapes made when materialism doubles up with metaphor and with surreptitious magic, in communist history and, just as much, in the capitalist kind. The actual physical consequences of the Soviet experiment were often strikingly ugly, as I found when I took a research trip to Siberia. But I was also drawn to the hiddenness or buriedness of what I was investigating, in a picture of the Soviet past which, as the twenty-first century began, mostly eliminated altogether from memory the disconcerting time in the late 1950s and early 1960s when the USSR had looked like a confident technocracy, with a chance at achieving its authoritarian utopia.

  It was a vivid demonstration of the way that, at any point in history, a dominant story ripples backwards through our understanding of the past, reorganising it in retrospect, and smoothing away even very recent events that no longer fit the narrative – consigning them to unvisited annexes or lumber rooms of history, stuffed with discarded paradigms, anomalous expectations, obsolete futures. There were lost worlds everywhere. Lost worlds were normal.

  And this particular lost world was also the one that crystallised my discontent with my own practice, up to this point, of writing ever more novelistic non-fiction. It was in trying to re­animate – to demonstrate in motion – a pocket USSR, small enough to fit in a literary snowglobe, that I found myself moving into a dwelling of my own devising, right on the border between the documentary and fictional, with doors opening out one way into the verifiable, and the other, into the completely imagined.

  SIBERIAN JOURNAL

  On the flight from Moscow to Novosibirsk, two middle-aged men in the row in front of us are drinking surreptitiously from flasks, getting overemphatic and using the aisle for their conversation, but maintaining what Simmi (my translator) says is the ideal of Russian drunkenness, always a bit lit up but keeping your balance, breezing on, not wobbling, nowhere near (for example) throwing up. One’s in neat dark clothes, pepper and salt hair, face like an elderly little boy, and that high colour which happens to some Russian men in middle age and looks a bit Irish; the other’s bulkier, more bouffant, with assertive hands and an air of somehow stupid confidence, wearing cream clothes and cream slip-on shoes at the end of unexpectedly spindly legs. Makes me think of the actor who plays Grouty the prison kingpin in the 1970s British sitcom Porridge.

  Somehow Mr Cream Shoes has managed to annoy a young man from farther up the plane, who as we’re just coming in to land comes and stands in his face in the aisle and clearly threatens him; at which Mr Cream unhelpfully laughs. Altercation in aisle; steward separating them; sudden appearance from rear of plane of decisive moustached twenty-something bloke – flight marshal? soldier? somebody trained, anyway – who grips the young man’s arms in the air over his head from behind, bends him backwards, and frogmarches him swiftly away. It’s the same posture the Militsiya use when we see them hustling the boy off across the concrete after we land. Throughout, Mr Cream and Mr Naughty Boy continue to throw in provocative remarks, barracked in their turn by a remonstrating old lady one row farther forward. I suppose the whole thing is not much different from pissed English people disrupting a flight to Ibiza, only there’s something unfamiliar-feeling in the unrowdy boozing, the matter-of-fact force of the response to the situation, the sense of things being ordinarily a little out of control.

  We skirted Novosibirsk on a ring road. Wonderful moment early on, driving in dawn light across flat open land tilted slightly downward to a horizon spiked with metal radio towers rising straight out of the red glow of the rising sun. Industrial crown of thorns. Then lots of avenues with trams, factories, etc. – low-density sprawl going on and on, till we crossed the dam over the river Ob. Seagulls on the chain link fence. And then the industrial scatter continued – massive sluices, more factories, hillsides given to apartments – without stopping, to Akademgorodok, which clearly isn’t a separate oasis now, if it ever was. The trees got denser, that was all. And arriving at the hotel – eight storeys of raw yellow-grey brick, retrofitted with varnished Russian-ranchero woodwork – I was primarily disappointed. I felt as if I’d hoodwinked myself into enthusiasm over crud.

  But the eye adjusts. Went for a three-hour walk with Simmi, to stay awake in the face of jetlag, and saw a lot more low-grade messy architecture, but also first inklings of how this had been found a
beautiful place, a much-loved place, more than just an extension of the Novosibirsk sprawl.

  Trees have grown back in along the avenues, so the lines of apartment buildings on, for example, Morskoi Prospekt don’t declare themselves, don’t form a streetscape the way they did in the 1960s photographs of the new town. These blocks – I think at the top end of apartment quality in the housing caste system, and therefore for scientists who didn’t qualify for the rare cottages – are maroon and yellow now, with balconies that have been pretty much but not universally boxed-in with varnished wood planking to give a kind of overhanging semi-Arab look. Each balcony is now a little wooden greenhouse, or a storage space stuffed with cardboard boxes. They might glow very cosily in winter. Wide roads, with far more traffic now than in the past: the hurtling, bashed, spectacularly dirty little buses, underlying colour cream, but also a caste system of cars, with Ladas and old Gaz’es at the bottom, and then newer and more Western-looking models of Russian car, then at the top Toyotas and the occasional VW. Not the BMWs Simmi says crowd New-Russian Moscow. Footpaths, back from the roads, often losing their asphalt into potholes or a mosaic of cracked grey; but a resemblance, because of the proportions of the spaces, to a leafy American suburb. Houses/apartments under trees; paths; wide road; mirror image of the same on the other side. A version, strangely, of the same kind of civilisation; a similar outline with different content.

  We walked up Ilich Street – hotel, shops, cinema, post office – crossed Morskoi to the Dom Uchonykh [House of Scientists] – a concrete-pillared modernist cultural centre, its bare foyer with a wall of unused enamelled noticeboards for the French Club, Spanish Club, Philately Club, etc., and clubby ‘restaurant’ clearly intended more for occasions of toasting and dancing than for walk-in-off-the-street eating (but was anywhere for that? this is all ‘special distribution channels’, after all) and galleried two-storey space with greenery, fish tanks, internal woodwork, double-height windows, with meeting rooms opening off. Ugly-comfy Soviet sofas. Presumably here was the exhibition area that showed the avant-garde paintings that got people into trouble in the 1960s. Amateur park-railing pretty landscapes now, for sale. An oasis in winter, a Siberian vivarium, with scientific fauna and ferns.

  But I really started to be delighted when we walked up Zolotaya Dolina Street, that is, into the renamed ‘Golden Valley’ itself, a downward-sloping crease in this forested bluffland above the Ob; and the sun shone in a blue Siberian sky as we entered the privileged zone of the cottages, in their (usually) overgrown gardens. As buildings, they themselves were no better executed. In fact, when you looked closely, they were boxes made of the same concrete panels as the apartment buildings, with the same clumsy cement seams, only with wooden gables and roofs on top, and lean-to conservatories with French doors. But Siberian grasshoppers were whirring underfoot, and a very kindly version of Siberian nature enveloped you: a feathery knee-high or thigh-high mix of ferns and bracken and nettles and flowers down below, some like hollyhocks, some like foxgloves, some like long-stemmed dandelion bushes, some like dog roses, some as blue as cornflowers – and clover, and seeded grasses: a whole ungardened ground-level ecosystem, fresh and green and washed clean by the rain and warmed by the sun and with a mingled warm smell of earthy growth. And above, the other half of the invariable mix of Akademgorodok, trees always tall and slender, silver birches and pines with paper-white or ruddy-barked narrow trunks in dense groves of slender verticals, rising to a canopy of (sometimes) dark-green needles and (mostly) silver-green little leaves in profuse, delicate hanging tresses (think of the way willows hang). It was deeply peaceful walking up Voevodskii back around to the beginning of the line of Institutes on Tereshkova. Under the canopy you don’t have the fen-like sense of the sky’s enormity. It’s a sky of leaves you get, full of dappled light and swishing movement in breezes. Only from my room on the seventh floor of the hotel do I see above the canopy. Here I’m on a level with the treetops, and the sky is 180 degrees of the world again, and I can see that an ocean of trees all roughly equal in height fills this whole wide, wide valley of the Ob; a floor of leaves only broken by the big lumps of industry here and there on the horizon.

  This is the Russian wood, or a locally delicate and delightful Siberian version of it, which I saw nineteenth-century painters learning how to see and celebrate in place of pastiches of picturesque Italy in that very good exhibition of Russian landscape art at the National Gallery in London a couple of years ago. It seems to me that this is also the archetypal Russian wood of fairy tales, skazki. You can see this most strongly in the extraordinarily beautiful tract of untouched woodland between Science Prospekt and University Prospekt, where the path along which workers at umpteen Institutes could commute to the ‘living zone’ leads through groves so quiet, so removed from concrete panelling, that it’s hard to believe you’re in any kind of a town. It’s a kilometre or so of perfect beauty, lit slantingly by tender evening light when we walk along it with Professor F on Sunday. Not quite right, I think, to think of the woodland as making up for the roughness and clumsiness of the buildings. Necessary to think of them as forming a compound truth about the place, a compound experience: silver birches and glowing ferns, and the Presidium of the Siberian Division of the Academy of Sciences built from crumbly grey strata of flat little concrete rectangles, ridged for minimal decorative texture, somewhere between mud bricks and breeze blocks; the courses wandering appreciably, if you look at them close up. The path leading to work, and work happening (in the Computer Centre for instance) in bare prison-like corridors, dimly lit by walls of glass bricks at the ends, stone composite underfoot like polished flattened sandwiches of the bilious little chips of marble in graveyards, and phlegm-coloured paint up to head height, and bare wood office doors, and wiring looping along in bundles. Ad hoc ugliness: improvised click-together monumentally vast, humanly indifferent zero-craft termite-mound architecture. (Watch out, potentially a cheaply biological metaphor for collectivism there, but it isn’t the collectivism I’m trying to catch, it’s the sense of buildings generated without reference to human bodies.) And this, the combination of forest beauty and crap concrete, being the physical embodiment of Akademgorodok’s intellectual freedom. Its freedom by Soviet standards anyway.

  Morskoi Prospekt bends down in a convex curve over the bluff so there’s no actual distant prospect to be seen of the toy ocean the Ob dam has made, and there probably wasn’t a view forty years ago either when there were fewer trees. Over the two-lane highway to Berdsk, where a man is slumped over a little plastic table next to the kvass [soft drink made from fermented bread] wagon he’s staffing, and down a winding forest path to a wire-boxed footbridge over a railway which turns out to be the Turk–Sib line of 1930s agitprop fame, and down terraced and railed concrete steps with a bit of annunciatory seaside pizzazz to them. And out the pines at the foot of the stairs, there’s the beach; sudden sand with stones not shells in it, not surprising since all the sand came here by railroad car from some sandpit somewhere. Plus many bottle caps. Signpost offering Police, Administration, Café and Toilets. Beach occupies the innermost bit of the deep bay, bite-shaped, on this side of the Ob Sea. Dam’s out of sight beyond the point to the right, which is good for the illusion, and on the left the low green rim of the bluff stretches a few kilometres away to another point at about ten o’clock as you look out from the beach. With, inevitably, something heavy-industrial on the point sporting one of those very tall tapered chimneys coloured barber’s-shop red and white. All this industrial metastasis makes me wonder how directly the equation of heavy industry with progress can have affected people’s perceptions, whether it was really possible here in the 1960s to feel a satisfied sense that things were going well, going according to plan, going in the direction of happiness, because the green Siberian horizon was being broken in all quadrants by chimneys, because the pylons were on the march?

  But between ten o’clock and say two o’clock, a pretty convincing sea horizon, with the remote f
ar side out of sight, and a couple of sandbank islands where the trees stand like stiff haircuts. Battered white pleasure boats passing, and the odd fishing boat, and distant dinghy sails. Waves break on the shore leaving a line of shingle ejecta. They’re windblown waves of course, translucent organic green-grey in this greyish Sunday morning light, like a weak algae jelly. Not salty, naturally, and not too cold. This is another of the places, like the top of the hotel, where you get free of trees and see the big Siberian sky. Puffball clouds and grey sheets of down, visibly moving this way. Hardly anybody on the beach yet – a burly round guy sunbathing while his skinny son runs about, and an older woman in a red hat taking a dip. There are red cylindrical buoys about 50 metres out to show the end of the permissible bathing area. The sun comes out and the water warms to bluey-green glassiness. There are little shelters on legs for changing in. This is beautifully expressive of the ‘Promethean’ strand in Marxism that Kolakowski talks about: Man seizing godlike powers over Nature. Also geared beautifully to Soviet possibilities: we can’t offer any choice in the colour of your swimsuit, and it may not fit too well, but hey, we can run you up the ocean itself, no problem.

  (2006)

  THE SOVIET MOMENT

  1962. At the airport, Len Deighton’s spy Harry Palmer – not yet played by Michael Caine, not in fact even named in the original novel of The Ipcress File – stocks up on his reading. For the flight he buys the New Statesman and History Today. And then he adds a copy of the Daily Worker. Not just because our Harry is keeping up with the communist enemy, but also because Harry, unlike the uppercrust nitwits he works for in MI6, is classless and intelligent and up to the minute, and so in a menacing way at this moment in the twentieth century does communism seem to be, thanks to the public image of its homeland the USSR. For Harry, knowing about the Soviet Union is a way of keeping the sad old, creaky old, shabby-genteel world of England ironically in its place. He’s fighting it, but its existence is an asset to a grammar-school oik on the rise, like him. Out beyond the bedsits and the stale crumpets and the golf-club ties, there’s a giant waking, and it’s proof positive that the old order of things is shiftable, that there can be novelty under the sun. Two years later in Deighton’s sequel, an egg yolk-stained has-been explains pityingly to Harry that there’s no way a low-rent place like England is ever going to induce a Soviet scientist to defect. ‘Simitsa works with refrigerated ultra-centrifuges. They cost around £10,000 each. He has twelve of them.’ That same year, 1964, the classless and up-to-the-minute Harold Wilson makes it part of his pitch to the electorate that the sad old, creaky old British economy should be supercharged with some Soviet-style scientific efficiency. And the voters buy it, white heat, ‘National Plan’ and all.