The Discovery Of Slowness (27 page)

At first the Indians refused to enter the hut because corpses were lying there. They said whoever does not bury the dead is dead himself and needed no help.

Franklin alone could still grasp the situation. It took him an hour and a half to drag the two corpses through the door and cover them outside with a little snow. Then he collapsed and lost consciousness.

The survivors were given pemmican and drink. The doctor
forbade them to eat too much too hastily, but he was unable to stick to his own prescription. Terrible stomach pains set in; only Franklin was spared them because after his great exertion he had become so weak that he had to be fed, and that was done more cautiously. The Indians stayed with the rescued men for ten days, until they could start the journey to Fort Providence together.

Eleven men were dead. In addition to the four British, only Benoît, Solomon Bélanger, Saint-Germain, Adam and Augustus remained alive, the latter having reappeared after all. But John knew he could not have kept anyone else from dying, perhaps not even himself. Back and the Indians were the rescuers of the survivors.

‘After such a journey,' Richardson speculated, ‘the rest of life will go by quickly toward its end.' John Franklin now had another worry. He thought it possible that he would never be given an Arctic or any other command again. He had neither found the North-West Passage nor reached Parry's ship by land. They had not even been able to establish relations with the Eskimos. For long nights John pondered what the errors had been that had led to the deaths of so many people. It had been wrong to rely on Wentzel, but that couldn't have been all of it. Should they have turned back immediately after their first failure in making contact with the Eskimos? No. They might have had better luck with other tribes. Should he have threatened any person with instant death who lost or destroyed supplies – anyone who stole or embezzled something? No. His system, ‘Faith for Confidence', would have been compromised even more rapidly, and for any other system their physical power would have been inadequate. Should he have brought along better hunters from England, people who also knew more about survival in this cold desert? But who would that have been?

He said to Richardson, ‘The system was right, only we should have learned more in time. I'm the one who made the mistakes. You can be lucky in spite of them, but I wasn't. The system works. Next time I want to make a better show of how well it works.'

‘It's quite similar to my system,' answered Richardson with a
thoughtful nod. He meant it without mockery, lovingly. ‘In any case, I won't again have the idea of comparing you with the captain of the
Blossom
.'

John Franklin thought some more. ‘The admirals won't discern the slightest success. They'll believe that I'm the wrong man. And they'll be right.' He was silent. ‘But when one looks at it all from a different angle, then I am the right man – and they couldn't get a better one. I'll just have to help the admirals to see it that way.'

Franklin took heart again. In any case, he had remained sure of himself, even during the worst moments. Neither fear nor despair had crippled him. He was stronger than ever before in his life.

The North-West Passage, the open polar sea, the North Pole. With or without the Admiralty, he would reach these three objectives on his future voyages. But in no case would anyone under his command ever starve again. That was as certain as the Crown of England.

T
he clock faces in London were white these days. And many clocks now had second hands; only ships' chronometers had used them before. Clocks and people had become more precise. John would have welcomed this if the result had been greater calm and deliberation, but instead he observed everywhere only the pressure of time and haste.

Or was it that nobody wanted to sacrifice time to him, to John, any more? No, it had to be a general fashion. Reaching for one's watch-chain had become a more frequent move than reaching for one's hat. One hardly heard curses any more; the exclamation ‘No time!' had taken their place.

John felt estranged. Added to this was the fact that he had too much time on his hands himself: a new command was not in sight.

He had been received with scorn and blame. Dr Brown was monosyllabic; Sir John Barrow, blustering and ungracious. Davies Gilbert, the new head of the Royal Society after the death of Sir Joseph, was icily friendly. Only Peter Mark Roget now and then sought out John in his home to chat about optics, electricity, slowness and fresh ideas for the construction of the picture rotor. He avoided the topic of magnetism, presumably because of the magnetic North Pole. So much tact was almost unbearable. Most of the time John sat ruminating behind his window at 60 Frith Street in Soho, thinking about the possible course of the North-West Passage and how he could make it all good again and go on with his life in the necessary consistent order. In the house opposite, an old woman polished her window several times a day, sometimes even at night. It was as though before she
died she wanted to accomplish one single thing no one could find fault with.

Often it helped to walk the streets – to go on deck, as John called it. He wandered through London and set himself objectives in order to forget, however briefly, snow, ice, hunger and dead
voyageurs
. He looked at the new houses: they had fewer windows now because of the window tax. He studied iron bridges: the carriages made a racket when they drove over them and that was annoying. Then he took up women's clothes: bodices had moved farther down, to the middle of the body, and seemed more tightly laced; skirts and sleeves were puffed up, as though in the future women would claim more space for themselves than ever before.

John was also abroad at night, because he often had trouble falling asleep. A few times he got involved with wild women who wanted to make him buy them gin by the bottle. Robbers didn't dare come near him. His body had become as heavy and strong as it had been before the journey.

One early Sunday morning he watched two gentlemen duelling with pistols in Hyde Park. They were miserable shots, perhaps intentionally so: after a slight wound, they let it be. In the afternoon he observed three drunken oarsmen who couldn't manage the current under London Bridge. The boat crashed against the pier; all of them drowned. Suddenly people had time to gawk. Time's pressure was nothing but fashion; here was the proof.

At a street stall, for the fee of a penny, he could read newspapers standing up: the Greeks were rebelling against the Turks; China had prohibited the opium trade. The first steamship in the navy. That was laughable! All they had to do was to shoot at one of those paddle-wheels and the thing would go in circles and offer the best target. On top of that, parliamentary reform. Many words for it, many against. It was all a matter of timing: Push through reform quickly before it's too late. Choke off reform quickly before it's too late.

Twice he went to the Griffins' house, but beautiful Jane was, so they said, on educational tours somewhere in Europe most of the year.

What to do? Where to turn?

He also sat in coffee houses. There he could get pen, ink and paper whenever anything important occurred to him. Actually, nothing occurred to John, but he ordered writing-materials just the same, stared at the white sheet of paper, and thought, if I have something important in mind, I'll just write it down. Well, perhaps it also worked the other way round: if I have something to write on, perhaps something important will come to me. And so it happened: suddenly the Idea appeared. It seemed foolhardy to John, but that spoke more for the Idea than against it, especially since the project was in some respects similar to a long journey. The Idea: writing. John conceived of writing a book to justify himself, a fat book in which he would seek to convert all sceptics and convince them of his system. And since he knew what a footloose fellow the human will was, he committed himself in writing then and there. He wrote on the white sheet: ‘
NARRATIVE OF A JOURNEY TO THE SHORES OF THE POLAR SEA
– not under 100,000 words.' That rescued the plan at the last minute, for the head had already begun to whisper its objections. For example, John Franklin, if there is anything you cannot do, it's writing books.

The first words were surely the hardest:

‘On Sunday, 23 May 1819, all our people embarked …' ‘Our people'? But they went on board themselves, not just some other people who belonged to them. So he'd better say, ‘travelling-party.' No, ‘the men under my command'. But that was also wrong, since the phrase didn't include him, and he had installed himself on the
Prince of Wales
at the same time. ‘I and the men' pleased him as little as ‘the men and I'. ‘We embarked in full number' was inaccurate; the ‘entire party including my own person' discouraged reading. ‘On Sunday, 23 May 1819, our entire party led by me embarked …' Well, now what?

The head said, Throw it away, John Franklin, you'll lose your mind over this. The will quacked in a monotone, Keep going. And John himself said, ‘Almost a dozen words already as good as set.'

The old woman polished her window, and John wrote his book, day after day. Soon he had written more than fifty thousand words and had reached the first encounter with Akaitcho and the Copper Indians. Writing was as arduous as a sea voyage; it generated the energies and hopes it needed while also providing enough for the rest of one's life. No one who had to write a book could be desperate for ever. And despair over proper formulations could be conquered with sufficient industry. In the beginning, John especially had to fight repetition. All his life he had refused to use several words for the same thing. He therefore had to distinguish between basic and superfluous words and keep his stock as limited as possible. Now, however, it happened that the same words occurred ten times on one page; for example, the phrase ‘to be found in', as in an enumeration of Arctic plants. John would even wake up in the middle of the night with a start, searching for repetition as one would search for some obstinate vermin preying on one's sleep.

Still another thing disturbed him at first: the more zealously he described the actual episodes, the more they seemed to retreat. The mere act of formulating it in language turned what he knew by experience into something even he himself saw only as a picture. The air of familiarity was gone; in its place he had retrieved the lure of strangeness. At some point John began to think of this as an advantage rather than a disadvantage, although in the light of his aim to describe something familiar it was actually a disappointment.

‘The chief came up the hill and with a measured and dignified step, looking neither to the right nor to the left.' John let this passage stand, although he knew it conveyed but little of the feelings he had had at the time he viewed this scene, of the unclear, uneasy situation and the strange hope the chief had instilled in him from the first moment. Still, it was a useful sentence, because it allowed, and indeed compelled, everyone to project his own feelings into it.

So in the end something good came of the disappointments of writing: a new work that John could accomplish, because in it
he wanted to achieve what was possible and to omit what was impossible. By the time he had got to the fifty-thousandth word, his aims were within reach.

If it was to exonerate the author, the book had to be well written. That was a matter of time, nothing else.

It had to be simple, so that as many people as possible could understand how good it was.

It had to be more than three hundred pages long, so that all who owned it could be proud to be seen with it.

The old woman died. For four days the window was still noticeably cleaner than the others. John was sad, because he would have liked to have given her the finished book as a gift. Dejected, he sat and thought suddenly that his story might bore readers. He decided to visit Eleanor the poet. He wanted to ask how one managed it so that a book didn't bore anybody.

‘How much have you written, then?' she asked. ‘Eighty-two thousand five hundred words,' he answered. At that she laughed and hopped. John instinctively encircled her waist with his arm and held her tight. He shouldn't have done that, for she obliged him on the instant to take part in her literary Sunday circle. He tried to get out of it, pointing to his work, even pretending religious reasons which strictly forbade attendance at literary events on Sundays. Nothing helped; she didn't believe a word.

Eleanor's circle was called Attic Chest. Its atmosphere was very Greek. The tapestry on the wall featured temple ruins, an amphitheatre and olive trees. Meandering patterns twirled around the cushions, and the chessboard reposed on a Corinthian column. There was also no lack of marble heads with laurel wreaths. Several members of the assembly had thoughts of dying in the near future, preferably in Hellas, if necessary in Rome. John understood this at once, because it was repeated to him several times.

Eleanor read a poem: then a man named Elliott, and finally a bald man named Sharp who gave explanations before and after. Probably for this reason they called him also Talk Sharp.
When the reading was over, somebody said something full of feeling and all the silent listeners appeared to agree with it, or at least to search for objections without success. John imitated them and fared well. Poems, like conversation, were after all about feeling and basic elements. They were talking about the electric basis of sympathy and about the particles of fire that inhere in all matter, giving all things their specific temperaments. According to a theory developed in Breslau, a diamond was really a pebble which had found its true identity. One Sunday was not quite enough to absorb these intimations and insights, not to speak of entering into their discussions. John was very glad that nobody asked him anything. He remained silent and watched the others with growing wonder, because he had not succeeded in discovering the source of their great animation.

At last he had it: it had to be a game. They all played the same game, each one in his own way. There were people like Eleanor who talked about themselves loudly and enthusiastically. That gave them a momentum which made it difficult for people to interrupt. Others used ‘and' at the end of every sentence. But they were powerless against those who were able to inject themselves into the slightest pause before the ‘and' to make their remarks. Obviously, the main rule of the game was to seize the chance to speak and hold on to it as long as possible.

When he listened, Mr Elliott so tilted his head that he resembled a close-hauled sailing-ship in a strong breeze. After a while he would nod his agreement, and continue to do so more and more vigorously until the speaker stopped to obtain his agreement in words. What would follow, however, was criticism. Or Miss Tuttle. She began her listening with her head held high, then gradually lowered her chin until it finally reached her lace collar. At that point at the latest she began to talk, unstoppable now, whether the other person was finished or not. As a result, every speaker found himself in a race with Miss Tuttle's chin, and nervous people tried anxiously to be brief.

Since John didn't want to speak, he remained outside the game and could observe it with detachment. But that was over soon, because Mr Sharp asked him about the journey – for the second
time. Others called this to John's attention as well. All at once everyone stopped talking; they were waiting for John's words. Now he had to stumble into the echoing silence with his poor sentences full of repetitions. The more embarrassed he became, the more benevolent they all looked. They had, of course, heard of his fiasco in the Arctic but didn't want to show it, and so they acted as if they were very curious and surprised. He made it as brief as possible. Luckily, the conversation soon turned to something else: to the moment and to the capacity of art to freeze it – they were talking about pictures on Greek vases. John found this interesting because he could imagine what could become of it: how movement could be depicted from several frozen moments. He wanted to tell this to the poets, but now he had no chance to speak. He took a deep breath, trying to find his good phrases, but no one paid any attention. Even when he made himself look as if he were about to burst with knowledge, nobody took pity on him. So he gave it all up again and looked only at Eleanor's beautiful light-brown eyes and at the way the hair on her neck curled gently; that was enough for him. He, too, could freeze moments, perhaps better than those who talked about it.

When the last guests had gone, John stayed behind for a while. ‘They find you interesting because you can navigate a ship,' Eleanor suggested. ‘Also, all artists take to a man who should by all rights be dead. Just think of a scar in the middle of the forehead …'

‘Do you know the painter William Westall?' asked John.

‘I've seen one picture by him,' answered Eleanor. ‘
The Coming
of the Monsoon
. He's quite gifted.'

All at once John knew that she had the same difficulty he had with finding the right word. Only in her something different was at work. ‘Gifted' – what a dreary word for a man or a picture. They all failed to find the right words, but they were quick and so handled this defect in ways quite different from his.