Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (4 page)

My ardor for the choice minimalism of extreme latitudes began so early that it would take years on an analyst’s couch to exhume its roots. I cannot remember a time when I did not prefer winter to summer,
The Snow Queen
to
Cinderella
, Norse myths to Greek. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I read C. S. Lewis’s recollection of the central epiphany of his childhood, the moment he stumbled across a Norse-influenced poem by Longfellow that began with the lines

I heard a voice, that cried,
“Balder the Beautiful
Is dead, is dead!”

“I knew nothing about Balder,” wrote Lewis, “but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, [and] I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale and remote).” When I read that passage, I shivered with a combination of sympathetic hypothermia and passionate recognition.

As I grew up, my yearning for what Lewis called Northernness (the Arctic) begat an antipodal yearning for Southernness (the Antarctic). Neither ultima Thule was easily accessible, so for a time I worked as a mountaineering instructor, on the theory that high altitudes were a reasonable substitute for high latitudes. A few years later, I managed to persuade a softhearted editor to send me twice to the Arctic, once to write about polar bears and once about musk oxen. Each time I feared that my protracted pre-imaginings would poison the reality; each time the reality went one better. And each time, as soon as I returned home, I ran to my Odd Shelf, which instantly uplifted me back into Lewis’s huge regions of northern sky. It was in this way that, over time, my crush on Balder the Beautiful was converted into a crush on Ross, Franklin, Nares, Shackleton, Gates, and Scott.

I should mention that all of the above explorers were unqualified failures. Not coincidentally, they were also all British. Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure. Given a choice—at least in my reading—I’m un-American enough to take quixotry over efficiency any day. I have always found the twilight-of-an-empire aspect of the Victorian age inexpressibly poignant, and no one could be more Victorian than the brave, earnest, optimistic, self-sacrificing, patriotic, honorable, high-minded, and utterly inept men who left their names all over the maps of the Arctic and Antarctic, yet failed to navigate the Northwest Passage and lost the races to both Poles. Who but an Englishman, Lieutenant William Edward Parry, would have decided, on reaching western Greenland, to wave a flag painted with an olive branch in order to ensure a peaceful first encounter with the polar Eskimos, who not only had never seen an olive branch but had never seen a
tree
? Who but an Englishman, the legendary Sir John Franklin, could have managed to die of starvation and scurvy along with all 129 of his men in a region of the Canadian Arctic whose game had supported an Eskimo colony for centuries? When the corpses of some of Franklin’s officers and crew were later discovered, miles from their ships, the men were found to have left behind their guns but to have lugged such essentials as monogrammed silver cutlery, a backgammon board, a cigar case, a clothes brush, a tin of button polish, and a copy of
The Vicar of Wakefield
. These men may have been incompetent bunglers, but, by God, they were gentlemen.

T
he successful explorers—Roald Amundsen, for example, the ultrapragmatic Norwegian who sledged 830 miles to the South Pole, killed and ate his sled dogs on a strict schedule, and sledged miles back again without the slightest touch of frostbite, scurvy, or snow blindness, though one of his four companions did get a toothache—don’t hold much interest for me. “Of course they don’t,” said George. “You’re a romantic. What’s romantic about a guy wanting to go somewhere and
getting
there?”

In the pantheon of British polar failures, no one could be more romantic than the man Amundsen beat, Sir Robert Falcon Scott, for whom I have long harbored especially tender feelings. One of the many reasons I own a dozen books about him is that he and his party were bookish sorts themselves. One tends to picture polar explorers as unwashed fellows slogging wordlessly through the snow on half-rations of pemmican hoosh, and so they often were. But before many of those slogs began, the men had to overwinter at surprisingly civilized base camps, of which Cape Evans, the cozy little Antarctic hut where Scott and his twenty-four men spent the winter of 1911, was far and away the most highbrow. Three nights a week after dinner—which on special occasions included seal consommé and stewed penguin breast—Scott convened sessions of what he called the Universitas Antarctica. Topics for discussion included the future of aviation, the art of Japan, and the parasitology of fish. On non-Universitas evenings, the men listened to Caruso on their gramophone, wrote poetry, painted watercolors, or read books from the Odd Shelves some of them had imported 14,000 miles. Scott himself brought a selection of Russian and Polish novels. Captain Lawrence Edward Grace Oates, an Old Etonian who was described by one of the seamen as “a gentleman, quite a gentleman, and always a gentleman,” brought all five volumes of Charles James Napier’s
Peninsular War
, an epic study of the Napoleonic campaigns in Iberia. Edward Wilson, the chief of the scientific staff—the man who had raised the penguin chick on Scott’s previous expedition to Antarctica—brought the works of Tennyson. After reading “In Memoriam,” he wrote in his diary that he had “been realising what a perfect piece of faith and hope and religion it is, [and it] makes me feel that if the end comes to me here or hereabout … all will be as it is meant to be.”

Wilson’s diary entry could not have been more prescient. As any English schoolboy can tell you, Scott, Oates, Wilson, Lieutenant Henry Bowers, and Petty Officer Edgar Evans—slowed by bad weather, inadequate rations, inferior clothing, second-rate tents, and, because they were animal lovers, a masochistic insistence on man-hauling their sledge for most of the journey rather than using dogs—reached the South Pole on January 17, 1912, only to find that Amundsen had planted the Norwegian flag there thirty-four days earlier. On February 17, a month into their return trip, Evans died after a fall. On March 17, Oates, realizing that his frostbitten and gangrenous feet were handicapping the rest of the party, uttered the most famous and gallant words in the history of polar exploration: “I am just going outside and may be some time.” Then he stumbled out of the tent into a blizzard, never to be seen again. It was his thirty-second birthday.
Balder the Beautiful is dead, is dead
.

On March 21, with two days’ rations left, Scott, Wilson, and Bowers, all of them faint with hunger and ravaged by scurvy, pitched their tent as a raging gale approached. They had walked 740 miles from the Pole. Their base camp was 140 miles away, and One Ton Depot, where an ample supply of food and fuel was cached, was only eleven miles away.

Seven months later, a search party from Cape Evans found the small green canvas tent. Three frozen corpses lay inside, tucked in their reindeer-hide sleeping bags. Next to Scott’s body was a sheaf of letters he had written to his wife and to the wives and mothers of his companions, as well as his journal, which, although he wrote it wearing mittens, is legible, if increasingly wavery, right down to the final entry. “We are weak,” he noted, “writing is difficult, but for my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past.”

Scott’s last journal is indescribably sad. But for reasons I cannot fully explain, I find myself even more affected whenever I read an account of what the search party found on his sledge: thirty-five pounds of rocks containing late-Paleozoic fossil leaves and stems of the genus
Glossopteris
, which the men had dragged 400 miles from the Beardmore Glacier. Scott had been so eager to travel light that he had weighed his party’s food rations to the last fraction of an ounce, but he didn’t dump the rocks. If he had, he and his men might have been able to walk the last eleven miles.

If I had to name the dearest part of my Odd Shelf, I think it would be the pages that describe those geological specimens. The annals of polar exploration contain many moments of triumph, and even more of farce, but they are also filled with death. The lesson these books have taught me is that if you are going to be a martyr, you had better choose your animus with care. When I think of the causes for which people more commonly give up their lives—nationalism, religion, ethnicity—it seems to me that a thirty-five-pound bag of rocks, and the lost world it represents, is not such a bad thing to die for.

 S
C O R N
 N
O T   T H E
 S
O N N E T
 

I
recently read that William Kunstler, the radical defense attorney, has written sonnets for more than fifty years. A divine afflatus apparently descended on him after the arrest of O. J. Simpson, provoking a verse called “When the Cheering Stopped.” This work consists of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, incorporating allusions to the Heisman Trophy and Hertz Rent-a-Car, and ends with the prosodically unimpeachable couplet “He’s learned the cruelest lesson of them all—/ Celebrity does not prevent a fall.” Kunstler seems untroubled by his tin ear. In re O.J., he asserts, “Of one thing I am certain, this will not be my last sonnet about the matter.”

I felt a warm rush of fellow feeling for Mr. Kunstler, because I too have been a writer of bad sonnets. Cleaning out my file cabinets a few weeks ago, I came upon the following example, titled “Interview with a Soldier”:

Oh sure! I guess I’ll cheer like all the res

When this is through and we can all go back
—

Sometimes I think this stuff is like a test

Of nerves, and one more sleepless night, you’ll crack.

It’s funny
—
little kids all want to fight
,

But later, when you get your card, it’s
—
well
—

It’s different, not so great. And now, at night,

You tell the world, shut up or go to hell.

A hero’s death is fine
—
I’d hate to crawl

Away to die. You’re nuts to think you go

To Hell … This Catholic
—
he prayed and all
—

Blown up
—
I think they found a finger, though

But Christ! It came damn near me
—
I’m okay

Though, Nothing happened bad at all that day.

“Interview with a Soldier” was dated May 21, 1967. I was thirteen. I wrote it for Miss Farrar’s ninth-grade English class at the Marlborough School for Girls in Los Angeles. At the time, I knew as much about being a soldier in Vietnam as I knew about sex or politics, two of my other favorite poetic themes, but that didn’t stop me. I thought my sonnet was as brutal and sophisticated as anything ever written, a trenchant cross between Siegfried Sassoon and J. D. Salinger, but deserving of extra points for cramming all that nihilism into a mere fourteen lines.

I happened to leave my yellowed copy of “Interview with a Soldier” on the bedside table, where it was spotted by my husband. George and I have few secrets, but during our ten years together I had never shown him any of my poems. This may have something to do with the fact that when George was in his twenties, he was a
real
poet, who published in places like
Ploughshares
and
The Southern Poetry Review
.

“Hmmm,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “It scans well.”

Sometimes I think that my tombstone will read, “She scanned well.” For, alas, George had summed up my essential character in three words. Beneath my sonnet’s hard-boiled exterior—it was no mean feat to work in “Hell,” “Christ,”
and
“damn”—cowered the soul of an unregenerate goody-goody, a priggish little pedant who would no more have permitted a rogue trochee to sneak among her perfect iambs than show up in Miss Farrar’s class with a smudge on her monogrammed school uniform.