by Maria Mutch
Stop struggling. Two years of waking to reach a phrase that seems absurdly insufficient. There is only its quiet construction: sibilant, abrupt. It calls to mind the Chinese finger puzzle that strangles the fingers more when they struggle apart.
But here is the problem, of course: how to stop an attachment to what is familiar. The struggle is interesting and vivid enough that it has become its own entity, as though it’s grown a vascular system and a brain. The struggle is ruggedly handsome, and I can be myself in its arms. It doesn’t expect me to be dolled up or remotely presentable. It expects my sniveling, weakened self. Yes, it’s possible to say, the struggle loves me. And it’s possible to be attached to its place in the hierarchy because a struggle confers importance. Sisyphus, before his rock, was the king of Corinth, after all. I have been attached to his, and Gabriel’s, cycles, the close, dark space. His reliability and maybe what I perceive to be his nobility, a kind of power. He wouldn’t have pissed off the gods if he weren’t important to them. He stole their secrets, so says Camus. I think of Gabriel this way, as someone who holds secrets, but I don’t think he stole them; he was born with them. At any rate, the mountain, the rock, the eternity, all of it a kind of power. Sisyphus accepts his fate, he stops struggling, and Camus calls him happy.
I probably don’t need to tell you that when the moment comes, it’s almost midnight, that time of transformations, the culmination of spells. Byrd sets off a flare and a can of gasoline, and when they finish burning, he sees the tractor with his men, stopping about a hundred yards away. He can’t move toward them, so he just stands and watches them, the three men in furs coming for him. They come for him. He remembers shaking hands; it is Waite who will say later that Byrd invited them to come inside and eat soup.
The truth is that I could find no words to transport outward what was really in my heart. It is also said that I collapsed at the foot of the ladder. I have only a muddled impression of that and a slightly clearer one of trying to hide my weakness. Nevertheless, I do remember sitting on the bunk, watching Poulter and Demas and Waite gulp down the soup and the biscuits; and I do remember what their voices were like, even if I am not sure of what they said. And I do remember thinking that much of what they said was as meaningless as if it were spoken in an unfamiliar tongue; for they had been together a long time, occupied with common experiences, and in their talk they could take a good deal for granted. I was the stranger.
Words again on the Barrier, but they can’t be reclaimed. They’re only words, after all, and soon enough Byrd becomes himself again, takes his place with other people. Poulter, Demas, and Waite nurse him back to health, and two months later, he is flown back to Little America. He slowly resumes command of his men and finishes the expedition, eventually pouring the whole circus into the Bear and the Ruppert, and setting sail in early February 1935, for Washington Naval Yard. (The reintroduction to the usual world happens in stages but nevertheless happens and, once on the Ruppert, he is entranced by a fly that he finds in his cabin.) The Depression is in its prime and so there isn’t a tickertape parade to greet him, but there is a crowd and President Roosevelt. By this time, Byrd is so much a part of the world again that when one of his young daughters rushes to hug the father she hasn’t seen in three years, he tells her, Not here, dear. Later, when we’re alone.
Later, when we’re alone. He has already forgotten. Rescue, after all, isn’t perfect. Rescue comes only to find that you are different, and entirely the same. Maybe you are weaker, or maybe you are better. You no longer believe that rescue is for maidens and stray animals. You thought, didn’t you, that a person shouldn’t need rescuing, that someone in a fix should find the fix, should find the way off the Barrier, or out of the night, or away from the ledge.
Morning is coming. The light. The shapes in the dark begin to make sense. We’ll play some jazz and find a spot where we fit easily, without effort. Gabriel hasn’t decided against one form of jazz or another; he doesn’t discount Dixieland or swing. He makes no arguments about the supremacy of bebop to cool, modal to chords, quintets to sextets, blues to fusion. He takes it all. Every story told is a story to him, and if it’s told in jazz or one of its iterations, he can find his way in. I think that that is what I wish most for him, the item I would place at the top of the list of provisions. Effortlessness. Easiness.
Ease.
Tomorrow night we’ll do this all over again, at least for a while. But it won’t always be this way. Shift and change are positive mechanisms, too—eventually Gabriel will begin to sleep again. He’ll stop shrieking. Time and wonderful teachers will be the antidotes. He’ll grow older. He’ll grow.
Tomorrow when midnight comes again, and night opens, there’ll be Byrd and Monk and all the others, and silence, too. Possibly, there is gratitude, also, for the small hours when we are all of us alive.
Begin again.
Go back to when Gabriel was born, that hot day in June. The big clocks on the walls, and the zeppelins. He arrived lit as lightning. There was the doctor, already planning an escape, and there was me, hoping for one. There were the nurses, readying themselves, about to race, but not just yet. Gabriel, with his eyes squeezed shut, lay on my chest. Every surface was sharp.
Perhaps you didn’t know this was a love story. (I think I said that Gabriel’s birth was philosophically complex. Perhaps, after all, it wasn’t.)
R, joyful, stood at the side of the hospital bed and clasped his hands together. Oh, he’s wonderful, he said. He’s so wonderful.
And I know Gabriel heard him.
The following is a list of items contained in the single sleeping berth of one of Byrd’s men back at Little America and was published in the expedition’s newspaper called The Barrier Bull. This list appeared in issue #4, 1934 (the bunk’s owner is unnamed):
ALL IN ONE BUNK
2 pairs scissors, 2 pairs wristers, 3 pairs gloves, 1 steel clamp, 9 wet electric cells, 1 roll lamp wick, 1 glass of grease, 1 bottle Mistol, 1 bottle Worcestershire sauce, 1 box machine screws, 2 boxes Meta, 6 packs cards,
73 boxes matches, 1 oil can full of canvas mukluks, 6 pairs miscellaneous boots, 1 bag sennegrass, 3 rolls cotton cloth, 1 snowshoe, 8 flashlight batteries, 1 chisel, 1 pair crampons, 2 rolls plaster,
2 large jars cold cream, 3 spools thread, 1 box gum, 1 foreign soap box, 4 B batteries, 1 tube carron oil, 1 box kodak plates, 1 magneto, 1 box deodorant powder, 2 lenses, 1 large spool safety wire, 8 copies Physical Culture, 5 library books,
63 pictures of women posted on wall, 1 large box BAE I pictures, 1 package Telephone Bond, 21 rubber bands, 1 roll old photo film, 1 sheet brass 6×12, 1 electric booster,
15 feet strung wire, 3 blankets, 2 flashlights, 8 pairs holey socks, 1 pair fur liners, 8 feet Ford duraluminum, 1 tube ski wax, 1 electric magnetic light, 1 pair pliers, 1 bottle mouth wash, 2 envelopes 18×27 inches, 1 pair stocking boards, 1 piece bread and butter,
3 tubes toothpaste, 2 blotter pads, 1 book Suspicious Characters, 750 sheets typewriter paper, 1 oily rag, 1 spark plug, 1 set picket wrenches, 2 carburetor valves,
1 large Stillson wrench, 1 electric plug, 1 Yale key, 1 carpenter’s square, 1 pce Gerlock packing, 2 electric switches, 1 sneaker.
Byrd’s other
Byrd had a ghostwriter, Charles Murphy, who was the CBS correspondent on the Ice with him and who helped him produce Alone along with his other books. When I first read Alone, I was not only interested in what Byrd was doing in the Antarctic but in the way the account was written. I eventually came across a Boston Globe article from 1987 that mentioned Murphy’s presence as ghostwriter. I was momentarily disappointed, as some of my attachment to Byrd centred around his ability, when not using Morse code, to communicate. However, I’ve come to think that, considering the loneliness that is at the heart of the book, it’s possibly appropriate that he wasn’t alone in having to put his experience on paper. Eventually I was lucky enough to go to the Byrd Polar Research Center in Columbus, Ohio, and get a look at some of the corresponde
nce between Murphy and Byrd about Alone. Some of it was written in a tone not so different from any other close partnership that has endured many years and hit some rough spots along the way. When Byrd was still in his hut and Murphy had been trying to convince the other men of the need to rescue him, he said I don’t pretend to know the man (they had known each other for years). In one of his letters to Byrd (June 30, 1938), however, he wrote, … I think I can describe certain aspects of your experience better than you can, and feel them almost as keenly. With what you give me, I can get inside your mind …, and this latter statement is probably not so far from the truth. Certainly, I think that Murphy is responsible for making Alone what it is, and doubtless many of my favourite lines in it are attributable to him.
Notes on Quoted Material
1. There is no sun without shadow: The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus (First Vintage International Edition, 1991).
2. The silence of this place: Exploring with Byrd, Richard E. Byrd (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1937).
3. provisions: The lists of provisions appearing here and between subsequent chapters are courtesy of the Byrd Polar Research Center Archival Program at Ohio State University.
4. You know what’s the loudest noise: Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, Robin D. G. Kelley (Free Press, 2009).
5. What I touch, what resists me: The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus (First Vintage International Edition, 1991).
6. The body’s judgment: Ibid.
7. Pannonica de Koenigswarter: Three Wishes: An Intimate Look at Jazz Greats, Pannonica de Koenigswarter (Abrams Image, 2008).
8. Radiant beams: The Music and Life of Beethoven, Lewis Lockwood (W. W. Norton and Company, 2003).
9. huge expanses of white that surround Byrd: The South Pole: A Historical Reader, edited by Anthony Brandt (National Geographic Adventure Classics, 2004).
10. I think of Byrd, and also Monk: Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men Who Made It, Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff (Dover, 1955); and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, Robin D. G. Kelley (Free Press, 2009).
11. He had had a son with Down syndrome: Honouring Christian Pueschel’s Legacy, Siegfried Pueschel, MD (Down Syndrome News, The Newsletter of the National Down Syndrome Congress, Vol. 23, No.7).
12. the sturdy Endurance: Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, Alfred Lansing (Basic Books, 2007).
13. I cannot write about it: Ibid.
Credits and Acknowledgements
Writing this book led me on an odyssey of reading about exploration, jazz, silence, and night. In particular, the stories and photographs from people who have explored Antarctica enabled me to visit that sacred place, if only figuratively. After reading Byrd’s Alone, I moved on to his other books, Exploring with Byrd and Discovery; and to Lisle Rose’s Explorer: The Life of Richard E. Byrd, Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World, Roland Huntford’s The Last Place on Earth, Alfred Lansing’s Endurance, and Stephen J. Pyne’s The Ice (Pyne’s book was especially helpful in pinning down Antarctica’s existential nature), and many more that were extremely helpful. Other vital references were Robin D. G. Kelley’s The Life and Times of Thelonious Monk: An American Original, Ted Gioia’s The History of Jazz, Barry Cooper’s Beethoven, and Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith’s Van Gogh: The Life.
Thank you to Laura Kissel, curator of the Archival Program at the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University, who was so enormously helpful and provided access to Byrd’s letters, notebooks, and photographs.
Unending thanks go to my agent, Nathaniel Jacks, for being Know the Night’s champion and the kind of astute reader and friend that writers dream of finding. I have many editorial staff to thank: Louise Dennys and Leah Miller, who gave an enormous amount of feedback and strength to the book; Amanda Betts, Millicent Bennett, and Sarah Nalle. Thank you to Anne Collins. Other responders and encouragers along the way: Mary Cappello, Patricia Magosse, Matthew Shaer.
Small sections of Know the Night have appeared, in different form, in the following journals: Ocean State Review, Bayou Magazine, and Literary Mama. Thank you to them for their support.
Thank you also: Hope Penny, Sharon Schubert, Jean Leich and family, Denise Braum, and Jill Lieberman; the Mutch and Wilson families; and the many teachers, aides, and therapists who have helped Gabriel and his family so spectacularly for so many years, especially the staff of Stony Lane Elementary, where he enjoyed the many benefits of full inclusion; Davisville Middle School; and the Pathways Program at the Trudeau Center, all in Rhode Island.
Gratitude to the jazz musicians who made our nights hop and jump: Doug Woolverton, John Monllos, Art Manchester, Barry Lieberman, Jesse-Ray Leich, Frank Bronchicine, the Dan Hartman Quintet, and so many others.
Most especially, to my husband, Robin, and my sons, Gabriel and Samuel, the absolute lights and loves of my life:
You must imagine a gratitude more profound than thank you can convey.
MARIA MUTCH was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from York University in Toronto. Her writing has appeared in literary journals across Canada and the United States. Mutch lives in Rhode Island with her husband and two sons. Know the Night is her first book. www.mariamutch.com
