The Discovery Of Slowness (28 page)

He said goodbye and went back to Frith Street and continued to write day and night. In order to endure, he tossed his will a new morsel: the concluding sentence. He had decided how his book would have to end: ‘And thus terminated our long, fatiguing and
disastrous travels in North America, having journeyed by water and by land five thousand five hundred and fifty miles.' This, and no other, had to be his concluding sentence.

When John became tired, he made his will test whether this sentence could be written yet. The simple-minded servant could only answer: ‘Not quite yet.'

The rest of the year 1823 brought three events no one had counted on.

In August, John Franklin and Eleanor Porden were married.

In September, the publisher John Murray brought out John's narrative of his travels. It was an expensive book, ten guineas per copy. Within three weeks, Murray couldn't keep up with the printing, because all the world wanted to buy it. With one blow, John Franklin came to be seen as a brave explorer and a great man. He had not even tried to justify himself; he had only described their misfortune exactly, had left out nothing, and had also admitted his own moments of helplessness. Englishmen liked that sort of thing. They agreed that one could shed this kind of helplessness only with one's humanity.

They wanted to see Franklin succeed or succumb just as he was. Any doubt about his wisdom and his ability seemed petty and shortsighted. He was honoured by admirals, scientists and lords, and everyone came to feel within a few days as though he had known him for years. He was invited to join the Royal Society that same month, and the Admiralty hurried to make him officially a captain at last.

The third event: Peter Mark Roget came to visit in order to congratulate him. And he informed Franklin on that occasion that he was not slow at all. He had never been slow, but was a totally normal man.

That's how it was. Suddenly he was normal and at the same time the greatest and the best. Now, like Richardson, he feared that the rest of his life would pass by too quickly.

Each day brought fresh congratulations, and the things they wrote in the newspapers! Everyone seemed to look him over
studiously, to see what manner of man he was and what he was like in real life.

‘I'm only good for the long haul,' he told Eleanor. ‘At moments of sudden confusion like this I have to take my time.' He retired to Spilsby, in Lincolnshire, to think it over thoroughly.

Eleanor was expecting a child. At least that was not in the papers yet.

Thinking about fame is not easy for a famous person; he stands in his own light. To be able to think, therefore, Franklin firmly dismissed the idea that fame had any connection with his real qualities. Rather, it was a matter of sensationalism. To Londoners he was ‘the man who ate his boots', and when they saw him each of them recalled a good joke about hunger and cold. Yes, that's what it was: they all remembered something in his story. And so he didn't need to talk appreciably more often than before.

Mr Elliott had said, ‘A hero, that's an ill-starred fellow with character. We need heroes more than ever to counteract machines.' Sharp had seized the paper-thin pause to toss in: ‘A rather remote explanation. Nearness to death is the point. A hero is a person who either dies young or gets away alive ten times and then risks his life for the eleventh time. And since lately everyone but me worships death––' Miss Tuttle, whose chin had just reached her collar, became impatient. ‘Good, let's have it remain unclear. People simply love him. If you tell me how love comes about, you know it all.' Franklin was less interested in its origin than in the best way to live happily with his new, excessive fame.

To Flora Reed he said, ‘Fame and ludicrousness are closely related. Neither one has anything to do with honour.'

Flora replied, ‘But I don't envy you at all. What are you going to do with the money?'

‘I'd most like to give it away,' mused John. ‘Of course, I'm a married man.'

‘Well I never!' said Flora.

‘And besides, if in spite of everything I don't get another command I'll have to equip my own ship.'

Flora excused herself. She had things to do.

The thought that he might not be slow by nature didn't suit John at all: he needed this quality more than ever. Roget had rebuilt the machine with which Dr Orme had once measured John's speed. ‘It has one fault,' he said. ‘The result of the measurement depends on the person being measured. If he wants to be slow, he can see a complete picture at the lowest number of rotations. If he wants to be fast, he won't be content with even the highest number. The time he says “now” is left up to him.'

‘My slowness has been observed by many people,' answered Franklin, ‘and I couldn't be quick even when I wanted to be. I was never able to catch a ball.'

‘I have no theory to explain why you couldn't do that, Captain. I won't presume to have one, either. I can only say what it was probably
not
. Do you find that disagreeable?'

‘No, it's irrelevant,' John replied. ‘I know I'm slow. Berlengas. The lighthouse in Berlengas furnished proof that I'm always one full turn behind.' This piqued Roget's curiosity, but he didn't find out more, for John ponderously changed the subject and simply wouldn't hear any attempt to return to it.

Even the picture rotor that so preoccupied Roget interested Franklin less than ever. Writing had lent him other points of view, but it took him a long time to deliberate before he could clarify them to Roget. ‘I'm a discoverer,' he said, ‘and discovering means observing directly what a thing looks like. I don't want to be given any illusions by the picture rotor.'

‘Then you also reject painting and literature?' Roget inquired.

Franklin asked him to wait a moment. He paced up and down in his room a few times. ‘No,' he answered when he was done. ‘Painting and literature do indeed describe what a thing looks like and by what rules it moves, but not
how quickly
it moves. If they somehow manage to do this after all, one may doubt them at once. That's what's important. For people have to see for themselves how long things last and how quickly they change.'

‘I don't understand,' answered Roget. ‘Isn't this a rather
bombastic objection to a harmless machine meant to produce entertaining illusions? I'd say you're right if one's own way of seeing things directly were replaced altogether by such an apparatus, but that will never be.'

Franklin stood at the window and tried to find an answer. He blinked, muttered, shook his head, and got ready to speak several times, only to reconsider once more. It seemed unfortunate that Roget was so tactful. ‘How long something lasts and how suddenly it can change,' said Franklin, ‘these are never fixed but rather depend on each person. I had a great deal of trouble accepting this: my own speed and the way the world moves
for
me
. Even one single illusion can be dangerous. For example––'

‘Yes, an example,' Roget exclaimed.

‘––the way a man is attacked and fights. How fast he's hit by a sabre and whether he has any chance at all to see and act in time. No mere statement about optics can be made which even pretends to be the truth. If my visual perception of movements is wrong, so will be my perception of myself, of everything.'

Now it was Roget who changed the subject. These arguments and musings were too abstruse for him. And they surprised him above all in John Franklin, who was usually no friend of hyperbole.

Father Franklin lay mortally ill and spoke of dying. Still, he understood that his son had made something of himself. ‘As I've always said,' he whispered, ‘a man is intelligent when he's made something of himself. But both are unimportant. We start as rich folk and end as beggars.'

Eleanor arrived from London. She alighted from the coach, wrapped in voluminous garments and looking ill and pale. Franklin drove with her at once to Old Bolingbroke, to Father. ‘A shame I can't see your wife any more,' his father said. ‘Main thing is she's healthy.'

John was in love with Eleanor, and, since that only increased his patience, he had won her heart for a time. She had revelled in his tenderness. He had decided he could endure her talk for days, happy to listen to her as long as he could always simply
watch her face and movements. The wedding had been a little painful. Franklin had tried to learn how to dance a quadrille. He liked to memorise everything except dance steps and degrees of relations – both were unavoidable at weddings. And what was actually played at his own wedding was mostly Viennese waltzes, a world inaccessible to him. But he tried it anyway out of love.

Then the new topic: children. She wanted to bear many children; she found this wonderfully archaic, and the helpless state in which every new life began so creative and somehow ‘religious'. John saw this more simply, but he wanted children too.

As Franklin's general popularity grew, Eleanor's affection began to cool. She had published a somewhat dull epic on Richard the Lionheart in several volumes, which sold only moderately, although the booksellers always added that the author was the ‘wife of the man who ate his boots'. In the long run, that was not good for the love of a poet. Eleanor began to be sickly, and to nag. She hopped no longer, and she didn't laugh.

But now they were not in London. Franklin had hoped to win her here for ever – for himself, for this quiet land, for the eccentric country folk of Spilsby and Horncastle. He wanted her to live with him here in Old Bolingbroke and to raise their many children here. But Eleanor found Lincolnshire too provincial, the dialect too broad, the landscape either too flat or too hilly, and the climate harmful. She liked only old Franklin: ‘What an adorable little old man!' But to live here was out of the question. She coughed until John Franklin agreed.

Once they quarrelled about love. When Franklin admitted that he was perhaps more interested in discoveries than in love, and in love mostly for the act of discovery, she became theatrical and personal at the same time, an unfortunate mixture. ‘I shouldn't have got so close to the great conquerer of hunger and ice. What looks like strength from a distance turns out to be logic and pedantry from close by.'

Franklin considered this. He didn't want to put any obstacles in her way, not in her talk or in her rage. But what if she wanted him to be very different from what he was? ‘I've got to be this
way. Without preparation and firm rules there's chaos in my head – more than in yours.'

‘That's not the point,' replied Eleanor. This sentence worried John, for since the time with Flora Reed he knew only too well that a quarrel in which one person told the other what it was all about left no room for a solution.

During the days before her return to London, Eleanor's cough became more severe; she read Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein
and, worse still, spoke very little.

Hardly was she gone when Father died. It seemed as though he had been waiting for the air to clear.

Life passed very quickly now. John Franklin suffered from this. ‘It deeply offends my sense of honour,' he wrote to Sir John Barrow, ‘that I should harvest fame for an enterprise that was neither successful nor brought to a conclusion. My profession is to produce good sea charts for the particular benefit of every person. But now no one has any benefit from me. I sit in London, grant newspaper interviews, and generally talk only to people with whom I have nothing in common except dates of appointments. I beg you in all humility, sir, give me a new command. I believe that I can find the North-West Passage.'

Eleanor got her child and John his command on the same day. This time a new overland journey was to take him down the Great River in northern Canada, to be continued in suitable boats from the estuary in both western and eastern directions. Franklin immediately met Dr Richardson to discuss crew and equipment. George Back had got wind of it and wanted to be included. The two men conferred and decided they owed Back a thing or two and didn't want to stand in the way of his career. ‘That he loves men has nothing to do with it; he must come.' Richardson then asked Franklin whether he could leave his ailing wife and his child at this time.

Franklin answered simply, ‘It can be done.' He thought it superfluous to tell Richardson his story or even complain. Friendship consisted of plans and actions; everything else only falsified it.

The child was a girl, christened Eleanor Anne. Friends came to visit. Franklin said, ‘This is Ella.' The baby kicked her legs and cried murderously. She clearly didn't want to be judged. Hepburn looked at the cradle and eventually dared to comment after all: ‘She looks like the Captain when observed from the wrong end of the telescope.' Franklin found this not very flattering to his daughter, but he kept silent. Soon thereafter they were busy with preparations for the journey.

Eleanor was gravely ill. The doctors came and went; the diagnoses contradicted each other; the cough remained. The illness didn't bring their love back, but it made John charitable towards Eleanor's little tricks, which were now of little use. Her efforts to dominate John by feeling wounded and reproaching him did not work. He sat at her bedside listening to her, kindly and guiltily, and thought intensely about pemmican, snowshoes, waterfalls and supplies of tea.

Shortly before his departure, Eleanor discovered herself as the devoted wife of a famous explorer who, through the intensity of her devotion, rose to be his equal. In no case, she said, must he stay behind on her account; under no circumstances must he sacrifice the North-West Passage on the altar of his marriage. With painstaking labour, lying flat in her sickbed, she sewed and embroidered a huge British flag, her hands raised high over the covers. Again and again the needle dropped in her face; it was not easy work. When she was done she enclosed John's hand in hers and said, ‘Ride on, Lionheart! Unfurl this flag at the proudest point of the journey.' ‘Gladly,' he murmured. ‘Very gladly.' And suddenly he thought he knew for certain that he would never understand either love or women. Women wanted something different in this world; one could only respect that.