Fresh Air Fiend (58 page)

The exiles are grotesque. And because of the tone of the novel, its relentless irony frequently coarsening into sarcasm, nearly all of the English characters tend toward caricature: the charlady Mrs. Neale, Sir Ethelred, and Toodles, his assistant. But in the lady patroness Conrad has produced someone both familiar and beautifully realized, a plutocrat, "above the play of economic conditions," isolated from society and yet taking her pleasure in toying with it, being social, condescending, making promises, arranging introductions, a temptress, more a meddler than a fixer. It is she who makes Conrad's London so believable and who gives the book structure and a sense of order. Her guests are "Royal Highnesses, artists, men of science, young statesmen, and charlatans of all ages and conditions." Many of the important characters in the novel are known to her; they have met in her drawing room, and all would be welcome there. There is not a character who is not accessible to her. The lady patroness gives an English uniqueness to the book—her drawing room is not a foreign land—and makes much of the drama possible. After all, the Assistant Commissioner met Vladimir at her house, and he knows the slob Michaelis (squat, 252 pounds) to be a special friend. Lady Mabel secured a contract with an English publisher for Michaelis to write his memoirs for an advance of £500. This was not a random number, but rather one of Conrad's bitter details (ten times more than what he was paid for
Outcast of the Islands
in 1896).

The lady patroness's drawing room gives the London of the book the sense of a small world where chance meetings are possible, and it makes the coincidental encounters outside seem less contrived, as when Chief Inspector Heat bumps into the Professor—cop meeting criminal again—or when Ossipon meets Winnie just as she has decided to kill herself. Anyone who has lived in London for any length of time recognizes this cozy quality. It is a vast city but a horizontal one, with relatively few great thoroughfares and meeting places: Soho, Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, Hyde Park, the theaters, the large railway stations. It might have been said in Conrad's time, as it is said now, that if you linger in Oxford Street long enough you will meet most of your London friends. In
The Secret Agent,
London seems less like the largest city in the world (which it was) than a very small, dark village inhabited by folks who know one another.

Repeated in the novel is the idea that these people, no matter how different they appear, resemble each other deep down, and in some cases are interchangeable. What is taken to be yet another irony in a novel packed with ironies seems plainly cynical, but it is explicitly insisted upon. Is it true, or is Conrad being provocative?

"The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket," says the Professor. In another context, Chief Inspector Heat says something similar: "The mind and instincts of a burglar are of the same kind as the mind and instincts of a police officer." As Conrad describes the respectable Assistant Commissioner awaiting Verloc's return, he lingers "as though he were a member of the criminal classes." And for Verloc, "Anarchists or diplomats were all one to him." Just as the Assistant Commissioner physically resembles a foreigner—as though he is surrealistically blending in with the rest of the exiles—Verloc and Stevie, unrelated by blood, are "like father and son."

To passersby, Winnie looks exactly like Stevie. This is not odd, since they are brother and sister. What is unusual, since Stevie has a pathological horror of violence, is that Winnie becomes most like her brother when she is about to plunge a knife into her husband's heart: "As if the homeless soul of Stevie had flown for shelter straight to the breast of his sister ... the resemblance of her face with that of her brother grew at every step, even to the droop of the lower lip, even to the slight divergence of the eyes."

These likenesses, this blended sense of a small world—coincidences and common ground—convey an ambiguous aura of moral lassitude but at the same time give the novel a family atmosphere, that of "domestic drama." In this respect it is the simple tale of Conrad's subtitle. Not an English family, but a nest of exiles, fatalistic and unhappy, but dangerous only to themselves. Speaking of likenesses, surely the great but unintentional irony of this ironic masterpiece is the way in which the Verlocs are so like the Korzeniowskis.

T
HE HEROIC SOUL
who wrote
The Worst Journey in the World
was physically rather frail and had terrible eyesight, and everything happened to him while he was still in his twenties. It was as if in having survived the near-death experiences of Antarctic exploration and the First World War, he had incurred a huge debt, which he spent the rest of his life repaying. He was broken mentally and physically. He once wrote, "It falls to few men to do something which no one else has ever done. To have done so before the age of thirty is astonishing; the combination of opportunity, ability and motive power is extremely rare."

Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the youngest member of Captain Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated 1910–13 expedition to Antarctica, made that observation about Lawrence of Arabia, whom he knew. He might have been writing about himself. The essay is included in a little-known collection of reminiscences, called
T. E. Lawrence by His Friends.
This piece is the only other example of Cherry-Garrard's writing I have ever found. There are no published letters or diaries, no reminiscences; there is no biography. He volunteered first for the polar risk and then volunteered for the First World War. He suffered and wrote about his experiences at the Pole. He did not write about the war, though he said that for bravery and ideals, no soldier he had seen in combat could compare with the Antarctic explorers he had known.

In that same T. E. Lawrence essay he wrote, "To go through a terrible time of mental and physical stress and to write it down as honestly as possible is a good way of getting some of it off your nerves. I write from personal experience."

It seems that
The Worst Journey in the World,
brilliant as it is, did not get enough of the stress off Cherry-Garrard's nerves. While writing his book and afterward, he endured a number of nervous breakdowns. Yet everywhere in his writing his voice is clear, articulate, humane, and sometimes startling. "Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised," he wrote. It is an unexpected and oblique observation, but characteristic of this neglected polar explorer.

He had the older English gifts of understatement and stoicism, a dignified refusal to fuss or exaggerate, yet his experience was so horrific he wrote, "This journey had beggared our language; no words could express its horror."

The experience he speaks of was his five-week trek to Cape Crozier, in the polar winter (June—July) of 1911, to study the emperor penguins. Cherry-Garrard's epic (and successful) trip, which became known as the Winter Journey, was overshadowed by the tragedy of the later polar party, which he accompanied only part of the way. Scott spent more than two and a half months battling to the Pole through blizzards only to discover that Roald Amundsen had reached it a month earlier. Scott arrived to find the Norwegian flag flapping over the Pole. "Great God this is an awful place," he confided to his diary. He still faced a return trip to his base of eight hundred miles. On the way back, he and his team of four men were stranded by storms only eleven miles from shelter. In dying of cold and hunger, the Scott team became national heroes and a lasting example of British fortitude. The British needed just such a symbol, for the First World War began very soon afterward. Cherry-Garrard went home from Antarctica and enlisted in the army. It was not until the war was over that he was able to begin his book.
The Worst Journey in the World
was first published in 1922 and reissued with additional material in 1951. It goes in and out of print, but it is indestructible, because it is a masterpiece.

 

When people ask me (and they often do), "What is your favorite travel book?" I nearly always name this one. It is about courage, misery, starvation, heroism, exploration, discovery, and friendship. It vividly illustrates the demands of science and the rigors of travel. It is a record of the coldest, darkest days that can be found on our planet. It is written beautifully but not obviously, with a subtle artistry. It recounts a diabolical ordeal. It was composed by a man who was very kind and not particularly strong. He was one of the bravest men on the expedition.

Recently graduated from Oxford, where he had read classics and modern history, Cherry-Garrard was the youngest man, just twenty-four, when he set sail on Scott's expedition ship
Terra Nova.
His classical education stood him in good stead, providing comparisons for the almost mythic horrors he was to encounter. One night at a remote camp in Antarctica, Cherry-Garrard's Fahrenheit thermometer read minus 77.5. "The day lives in my memory as that on which I found out that records are not worth making." And he goes on to say, "I will not pretend that it did not convince me that Dante was right when he placed the circles of ice below the circles of fire."

After the Winter Journey he wrote, "Such extremity of suffering cannot be measured. Madness or death may give relief. But this I know: we on this journey were already beginning to think of death as a friend. As we groped our way back that night, sleepless, icy, and dog-tired in the dark and the wind and the drift, [death in] a crevasse seemed almost a friendly gift."

The title of the book is slightly misleading. Although this is a thorough account of Scott's effort to reach the South Pole, the Worst Journey was that Winter Journey, on which Cherry-Garrard and two other men, Edward Wilson and Henry "Birdie" Bowers, searched for the remote nesting place of the emperor penguin. No human being had ever ventured in the winter to Cape Crozier, the site of the penguins' rookery. It was suspected that the male penguins tended the eggs, but how? And when did the eggs hatch? No scientist had ever retrieved, much less dissected, the egg of the emperor penguin.

There was a very good reason for this. Until then, no one had seen the penguins' eggs in situ. For the several months that the birds nested at Cape Crozier, they were in complete darkness, obscured by the sunless Antarctic winter. The winds were gale force for much of the time. The temperatures were the lowest in the world. Deep and deadly crevasses cut across the route along the ice shelf. Scott preferred ponies to dogs (that preference was another reason his expedition failed), but neither dogs nor ponies would have been much use over the sixty-three miles of broken ice and cliffs that separated the scientists from the penguins. Accordingly, the men had to split their 790 pounds of food and gear among three sledges, which they manhandled. This they did, in appalling conditions, for the three-week journey out. They endured frostbite, nightmares, near starvation, and exhaustion. "And then we heard the Emperors calling."

The birds were "trumpeting with their curious metallic voices" in the darkness—hundreds of them. Cherry-Garrard and his two companions gathered scientific information, noting the strong protective instinct of the males: how they balanced the egg on the upper part of their feet to keep it off the ice, and warmed it further by plumping it under a tuck of their belly. With three eggs safely stowed in the sledges (two other eggs had broken), the men set off on the return journey, near death on many occasions. This eighty-page chapter is the most harrowing I have ever read in a travel book, and it easily vies with Poe's
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
for menacing weather and mounting terror.

The close attention to detail, to mood, to pace, and to the very shape of the sentences that make Cherry-Garrard's Winter Journey chapter so powerful a piece of writing also characterizes the rest of the book. It is rare to find a person who is at once such a great traveler, recounting an overwhelming experience, and such an accomplished writer. (This is one of the reasons we are still ignorant of what space travel or lunar exploration is like: no astronaut has shown any ability to convey the experience in writing.) The book is an almost unparalleled account of courage. Even if it were clumsily written, as many histories are, the book would be worth reading for its story alone. But Cherry-Garrard gives aesthetic pleasure as well, and his prose style is so efficient and even-tempered—never depending for effect on the quick-to-fade colors of hyperbole—that when he uses a word like "horror" or the expression "death as a friend," he means just that. Each word he writes is deliberately chosen.

Here is his account—he was on the search party—of finding Scott's last camp six months after the men died: "That scene can never leave my memory. We with the dogs had seen Wright turn away from the course by himself and the mule party swerve right-handed ahead of us. He had seen what he thought was a cairn, and then something looking black by its side. A vague kind of wonder gave way to real alarm. We came up to them all halted. Wright came across to us. 'It is the tent.' I do not know how he knew. Just a waste of snow."

It was not a sense of misplaced masculinity that fueled Scott's expedition and drove it onward, Cherry-Garrard said. It was the desire for knowledge. Amundsen's expedition was a classic of national competitiveness; Scott maintained disingenuously that his was essentially a scientific endeavor. The Antarctic represented the unknown, and so it had to be investigated thoroughly in spite of the risks, because, as Cherry-Garrard wrote, "Exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion."

This clear-sightedness, which reflects truthfulness, modesty, and a capacity for portraiture, is well illustrated in his subtle sketch of Captain Scott in the book. It begins, "England knows Scott as a hero; she has little idea of him as a man." Cherry-Garrard first makes the point that Scott could be charming when he wanted to be, then says of this complex man that he was both domineering and much more reserved than anyone could possibly guess. "Add to this that he was sensitive, femininely sensitive, to a degree which might be considered a fault, and it will be clear that leadership to such a man may be almost a martyrdom." Cherry-Garrard enumerates Scott's other limitations: he had continual indigestion, an unstable temperament, and "moods and depressions which might last for weeks." That last is a frightening statement when you consider what weeks of depression might mean to the other members of an Antarctic expedition. In a last crushing judgment, Cherry-Garrard says, "He cried more easily than any man I have ever known."