by Adam Gopnik
Why, then, do we admire them? Why do they continue to haunt our imagination? Part of the answer, as I said, is that, even in their extremity, we recognize them as like ourselves. They are our civilization, or ours as it was: greedy, wordy, racist, sentimental. But a deeper answer, I think, is a simpler one, summed up in three blunt monosyllables: they were brave. They did less good, created less comfort, clothed fewer naked, and fed fewer hungry than countless others. But they were brave. Brave in ways that are hard for us to imagine, brave in ways that still in some sense overwhelm our imagination.
We read about Shackleton dividing his boatless party into two camps: one had to stay on desolate Elephant Island waiting for friends who might never return, for a rescue that would likely never come, while the other group had to share the tiny lifeboat that would make the trip to South Georgia Island, searching for help. And we ask ourselves, Which would have been harder, which would have been worse, to stay behind or to go across the Antarctic Ocean in a tiny boat? And we recognize that either choice would be heart-wrenching, and either choice would demand all the courage we possess.
We care because they were courageous, and as C. S. Lewis once said, anticipated by Dr. Johnson, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue.” And though we know that moral courage is not the same as physical courage — many people who have great physical courage have no moral courage at all — we also know that those two things, moral courage and physical courage, are not as different as those of us who have little enough of either might desire them to be. That the courage to endure physical hardship is linked in deep and mysterious ways to the courage to be bold, to take risks, to act nobly, to act properly, is a thing we know from all of history and biography. We don’t know what the exact path is between the two, but we know it exists. It’s why we watch war movies and follow winter sports and, sometimes, admire even brutal and dim-witted boxers or the enforcers on hockey teams.
And in a society like ours that increasingly reduces obvious displays of physical courage to stylized entertainment, an expedition in which courage is not merely the product but the whole point — not just what you need to get there but the reason why you go, the raison d’être — that kind of expedition is bound to hold us rapt. Never, I think, in the long history of human adventure has there been courage so pure, so distilled down — courage like vodka, courage as absolute, hundred-proof liquor, pure and clear and cold — as we find in the polar expeditions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
And this leads us to an irony. The bourgeois-comfort society they so eerily, at times so cartoonishly, exemplified often made men act more bravely than the aristocratic society it replaced, with its occasional, buffoonish displays of courage and prudent withdrawals from giving battle. Bourgeois-comfort societies turn out to fight the bitterest wars and take the most daunting routes — whether in the American Civil War or the British First World War, on trips to the South Pole or to the dark side of the moon. The question we ask of the explorer — What made you go there? — is like the question we ask of the soldier: What made you stay there? And we know some of the answer: the good opinion of their fellows — they fought and died and fled for each other — and the unspoken principles of their lives. Ours is a society capable of much greater acts of mad bravery than one might imagine, and at the same time, and for the same reasons, curiously unresistant to organized stupidity — to the Scotts or, much worse, the Frenches and Haigs of the world, the Great War generals who sent millions needlessly to their certain deaths. The regimentation and industrialization of life seem to have produced, as emotional self-defence, new rites of courage — and, of course, suicidal impulses of self-destruction. The same desire to submit that makes us face front in Grade One, and accept other unnatural acts of self-denial, made Titus Oates go out into the storm. God knows it’s dumb, but God knows there’s grace in doing it.
The story of radical winter, of eternal winter, and the search for the poles began at the start of the nineteenth century in literary fantasies with either paradisiacal or Promethean flavour. Its real rationale was to create exempla virtutis, virtuous instances, to impress and inspire. You didn’t have to report what had happened if you went to darkest Africa (though many did), because you had the scars or jewels to show for it. But being able to say what it was like in the permanent winter of the Far North or South was the reason you went there. You took the path to tell the tale.
But writing has a way, like the ice pack, of taking its own course and crushing our best intentions. Scott’s polar diaries, which are discovered by Cherry-Garrard, the man who finds Scott and his polar party dead, are taken back to England in the midst of the First World War and published. Scott’s life had long been intertwined with the imagination of J. M. Barrie, the great Scottish playwright — and, ironically, fable-maker of “Englishness” — the author of Peter Pan, as essential a myth of Scott’s era as “The Snow Queen” had been for an earlier one. At least one of Barrie’s biographers has insisted that it was Barrie’s influence alone that had first turned Scott from a nervous military man into one “possessed of a sense of the significance of the explorer as the custodian of British heroic vision.” And it is in Scott’s last letter from the hut, written to Barrie, that the myth of Scott as heroic stoic, the man who suffered and transcended without succumbing to anything as vulgar as mere expertise, gets fixed. Barrie, in turn, wrote the myth-making introduction to the first collection of the explorer’s diaries, Scott’s Last Expedition, and, rumour long has it, was among those who did some neat, bowdlerizing editorial work on Scott’s last journals as well. (It has often also been rumoured, probably falsely, that Oates, who disliked Scott, far from wanting to “go outside,” was more or less pushed.) So in that sense Scott’s last diaries are an ongoing collaboration of a kind between Barrie’s touching schoolboy heroic imagination and Scott’s actual experience.
A little later on, the other great final record of this story, of the 1913 polar expedition, Cherry-Garrard’s book, The Worst Journey in the World, is written at the behest — and I think quite possibly with the active help — of his close friend, the Irish playwright and wit George Bernard Shaw, who is quoted throughout the book and supplies an epigraph for one of its chapters and, if you like, its attitude. And so, as much as Shelley and Poe are present at the birth of the polar adventure, Barrie and Shaw are present at its burial. Barrie’s version of Scott presents Scott and his men as a missing troop of Peter Pan’s tribe: boys who never grew up, boys who continue to have the essential adolescent masculine virtues of comradeship and courage and pluck in the face of danger — taken to the ultimate and final extreme. Through Barrie’s presentation and, indeed, through his prior influence on Scott himself, Scott became the last of the Lost Boys.
Cherry-Garrard and Shaw have a very different story to tell. Instead of locating the heroism in the final voyage, they locate it in the return to London, when Cherry-Garrard takes to the British Museum the emperor penguin egg that he suffered so much to obtain. He waits patiently for a bureaucrat in the museum to come and take it, and is simply given a receipt to show that it’s been entered into the collection. It’s that — the piece of paper, the bureaucrat’s slip — that becomes the seal not so much of the expedition’s success as of its existence, of its having accomplished anything at all. The receipt does come at last, but too late for comfort. No one will stamp the penguin egg’s passport.
So the deepest Shavian irony, which Cherry-Garrard understands and represents, is that the whole brave journey was, in the new world of mass war and mass casualties, pointless. Against the overwhelming force of the modern state, the little match-light of individual courage is meaningless. There is no point in being Peter Pan in a world of machine guns and the Western Front. Scott had sought a “good death,” but there is no good death in a world where everybody dies. The grim Shavian joke is that the journey really ends not with the discovery of Scott’s last resting
place but with the saga of the penguin’s egg. This journey — the journey of heroic man to meet the indifferent official — really is the worst journey in the world. And as much as the words of Poe and Shelley anticipate the adventures of the nineteenth century, Cherry-Garrard’s egg moment anticipates the Kafkaesque tragedies of the twentieth century: the doomed search for the one right stamp on your visa that would shape the tragic arc of life for so many in the decades to follow.
And so we have two highly self-conscious, artificially constructed literary ways to understand the story: as the last efflorescence of the true courage of Victorian and Edwardian England and as a final demonstration of the falsity and hypocrisy of the civilization that sent those men south. The other side of bravery is absurdity; the other side of courage is the extreme complacency that shuts down the imagination long enough to let you be courageous. It is an ambiguity so deep that we perceive it to this day. Should we see Scott’s expedition and its extraordinary display of both incompetence and courage as a premonition of what would happen to Britain in the First World War, when countless lives would be lost for no good reason? Or should we see it as another premonition, of Britain in the Second World War, when men and women would hold on in the face of extreme odds just as Scott and his men tried to do, through sheer will and heart and last-ditch morale? Was it the act of bravery that marked that English resistance or the act of foolhardy self-destruction posing as amateurism that marked the first war? Both at once, of course, which is why the voyages are both exasperating and admirable, maddeningly inept and shimmeringly courageous as we remember them.
I asked you at the start to think of Harry Somers’ beautiful Canadian music about the pure Romantic call of the North. The voices, the fugal voices that I’d like you to imagine now, behind my own, are from the great Glenn Gould’s The Idea of North, the aural collage of many voices that he made in the 1960s, of people telling stories of the North, one laid on top of another in a kind of Bach-like fugue.
What Gould was after was that the idea of the North, however seductive it might seem to us in Somers’ clarion call to the world beyond, is in fact finally this overlay of voices, this tapestry, this fabric of different experience — that the true sound of the North is not the sound of one courageous individual but the sound of all these many stories coming together, laid out one on top of the other. Gould, apart from one quick trip, never went north, but he always went back to Bach for wisdom, and to Bach’s sense that the best human sound is one theme laid on top of others. There’s a humane truth in this, in its invocation of the made-up and contradictory North — the North of many stories told together — as the real North.
It is fashionable now in historical writing about the Arctic to mock and scorn Scott and Shackleton and Ross and all the others as men who were turned into icons by a cynical nineteenth-century myth-making machinery. But surely this perpetuates, unwittingly, exactly the note of smug condescension towards the Other — those with values and traditions unlike our own — that the worst of those nineteenth-century people exhibited in their day, only in this case the Other being patronized and sneered at are the inhabitants of that uncomfortable and exotic place, our own past. To imagine Franklin and Scott as mere pitiful puppets dancing on the end of a myth-making apparatus, moved by some impersonal force of history, is to cheat them of their suffering and of their bravery — and for all our absurdities, we suffer and are brave too, from time to time, and surely will not want anyone to cheat us of ours. The tone of insufferable bored condescension to all those who walked the past — the filmmaker Robert Flaherty, who saved the forms of Inuit culture in his documentary Nanook of the North, was a lecher; the explorers were really colonizers; the Inuit themselves were greedy and far from noble — is unearned not because such behaviour was often not so, but because it was always so. We all share our time’s absurdities, we are ourselves enumerated in that always; if we knew what our descendants would think of us, there’d been no living.
Adventures always become absurdities when we look back at them, and that is why there is always a close relationship between courage and comedy. There is something ridiculous in the polar tales, something implicitly comic in all that self-regarding display of bravery. Indeed, the possibility of radical winter, the winter of the Far North, as the natural setting for burlesque and comedy of the absurd, has been seen and seized on by great comic imaginations again and again. In Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 The Gold Rush, for instance, Chaplin builds up, in effect, a little encyclopedia of all the risks and horrors of radical winter, of the extreme North of the previous century. But he puts humour in place of heroism. The tramp doesn’t endure misfortune and cold and hunger passively or stoically; he acts against it. Unintoxicated by the romance of endurance, he recognizes its unreason. And the only way he can act, given his circumstances (trapped in a cabin with a large and hungry companion; ignored by the dance-hall girls), is by constructing a kind of parallel imaginative world in which he chooses to live, rejecting the blizzards and insults of the cold outdoors. He’s never going outside; he’s living inside. The greatest of eating scenes in movies — the tramp eating his own shoe — comes right out of the reality of polar exploration. Franklin was already famous in the 1830s for having eaten his own shoe and having reported on it after one of his polar expeditions. Chaplin saw an opportunity for comedy in the tales of the Yukon because he saw in the northern world what comedy demands: a big, white straight man on a massive scale. The only way to oppose the existential trap of the Far North — nature’s noose around your neck — was by eating your shoelaces as elegantly as you could.
The burlesque of the idea of North, as much as its epic realization — the idea of an entrepreneurial comic North marked by energy and mischief and the triumph of the trickster over the virtuous gentleman — still resonates today, in Mordecai Richler’s Solomon Gursky Was Here, as close to a Great Canadian Novel as we have, whose essential theme is basically that only Jews and Inuit are worthy of the Far North, have the ingenuity and wit to survive and flourish while the Brits die nobly and the French shiver wearily. The cunning trickster lives and triumphs while the noble explorer dies. The trickster triumphs just by living, even if he lives on only shoe leather and imagination.
Yet if the poles offered a theatre of the absurd — and they did — what the theatre of the absurd always insists on, and Chaplin is as wise about this as Beckett, is that existence itself is courage enough: simply living demands all the courage that we have. Every nation, as I said in the beginning, needs a nothing, and every nothing, perhaps, needs a nation. When the two collide, what we get is the usual mongrel of real life, exactly because there is in fact no nothing on earth.
We seem to have travelled a long way from the Romantic exquisitism of Debussy and Monet, which brought to a climax the nineteenth-century story of the Romantic vision of winter in art. And yet we circle around, I think, to the same themes of inside and outside, and their intermingling — the bourgeois civilization that the polar men try to counter always comes back to haunt them. We can expel nature with a pitchfork, the antique poet says, but she will always return. We can flee civilization on snowshoes but she will always entrap us in the end. Search the Romantic winter you see for meaning and you will find your soul in a snowflake. Jump out of the window into the winter you search for and the last thing you will find at the end of the earth is another kind of window, showing your own reflection. The doctor and his monster race each other across the ice in the everlasting snows, but Mary Shelley’s point is that whoever wins, there’s no real difference: the man’s the monster, the monster’s the man. What we end up with when we journey to absolute winter is nothing absolute at all, just the usual mixed-up muddle, half brave and half batty, that persists in the world as it is. It’s a moving métissage that, over history, stretches from the African equator in both directions, and finally towards the extremes of the two poles. Because that line is the track, the ever larger web spun by the endle
ss flight of man, who goes out in search of meaning to find . . . only more man. The Bellman’s blank map has one line upon it, and it’s ours.
THREE
RECUPERATIVE WINTER
The Season in Spirit
In 1869 an expedition to the North Pole, this one German, was wintering over in the Arctic. Their ship had sunk and been crushed by the ice and the explorers had been forced to live in tiny shelters on the moving ice floes, which brooded and growled and broke apart with terrifying regularity as icebergs higher than any tower yet built by man glided close by.
One late December night, this little expedition opened a leaden box that they had carefully salvaged from their sunken ship. As the wind blew, in their absolute desolation, the men broke it open and to their joy saw that the box contained (as they had hoped it would) mouth harps and bright crackers, toys and tiny playthings. The German explorers had brought the toys along so they would be sure to celebrate Christmas in the Arctic — and that they did, even now.
If that first Romantic winter of the eye made what had been a mere blank season into a subtly differentiated field of meaning, if the radical winter of enterprise found in that blank a theatre of the heroic (and the absurd), could another winter become the setting for our hopes for recuperation and rebirth? It seemed that way on that winter morning on the ice. A winter celebration had become central not just to the idea of the holy but also to their idea of home.
The making of the modern Christmas — winter’s holiday — is this chapter’s subject, so let’s begin with a Christmas carol. It’s called “In the Bleak Midwinter” and, though evergreen, it bears a date. It comes from the middle of the nineteenth century, first as a poem by Christina Rossetti and then, while there are a couple of different musical settings, the most famous (sung beautifully by the great Loreena McKennitt) is by no less a composer than Gustav Holst — the Planets man, a fact I hadn’t known until I went to find out (I had always assumed it was a folk, or handmade, melody).
