Writing Worth Reading
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Writing Worth Reading
What is your first choice about?
It is ostensibly the story of Captain Scott’s 1912 expedition to the Antarctic, but it’s really about all places in all times and is possibly the best book ever written. Cherry – as he was known – was on the expedition and the book has been in print since 1922. It started out as the official story of the expedition but became the unofficial story as he elevated it to the universal. The actual worst journey is a little side journey to collect the eggs of the emperor penguins, and he writes about the absence of people and the spiritual dimension of that, describing the endeavour as not just as his endeavour but as all endeavours, whether it is building a shed or a fence, going on any journey, putting down your last glass. For him, Scott didn’t really fail and I suppose he had to think that. He came back and three of his friends had died, the war had happened while he was away, the world had changed, for the worse, and his big act of redemption was writing this book.
None of the current books you read about journeys are about the journey being worth it in itself, any journey. It’s a masterpiece and definitely part of what inspired me to go to Antarctica. It is a deeply inspiring book in which he tries to redeem something from the journey. The last line is: “If you march your winter journeys you’ll have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin’s egg.”
And the Lopez book?
Barry Lopez is an American man and in Arctic Dreams he describes the clarity of the landscape that has such a profound effect on the human spirit. Everyone says it has a profound effect. He’s a proper nature writer and it’s a brilliant book. He wrote it 25 years ago, I think, and it’s very lyrical and uplifting.
What is the effect on the human spirit? I would have thought being so alone would make you depressed.
No, it doesn’t. It takes you outside your normal existence and sets you loose from your spiritual moorings. Everywhere in the Antarctic is like that and in the Arctic you feel it when you get away from the settlements. The Polar regions are very uplifting, a different place, a better place. They are very compelling too. That’s another thing about these places: that people keep going back once they’ve been. I spent seven months in Antarctica and I can’t really keep going back there because it’s so hard to get to, but I do go back to the Arctic.
Antarctica is easily definable, a continent, and it is not owned, which is important, of course. The Arctic is owned and fucked up and the people have been fucked over by successive regimes. Lopez goes to the very north of the Arctic in North America, that is Alaska and Canada, but he’s not a sledge-puller, not one of those. Cherry was a sledge-puller but he turns it into a metaphor. Lopez talks about the flora and fauna and then, when there aren’t any, about the quality of light and of the landscape, about people’s relationship to the landscape and about what we’ve lost by being so disconnected from nature.
An African In Greenland?
This is the most wonderful travel book. It’s the best book ever written on Greenland. I read it while I was there. It’s the story of a man from Togo who went to Greenland in the 1960s and he didn’t carry the white man’s burden and could therefore look at the people and the country more objectively.
The people, the Inuits, were then on the cusp of integration and acculturation and what he did was live with them. He learnt to dig an igloo burrow and drive dogs, and he integrated all right – he ended up in hospital with a suspected case of the clap!
He was a boy from the jungles of Togo really and part of the story is how he got there and what he was doing there, but he talks about his relationships and he sleeps with the women. They have just got their first cinema and the projectionist has to stop the film every ten minutes for someone to stand up and give the translation. He is a natural writer and is able to write in an objective way. He lives in Paris now.
And we’re in a different region of the world in The Reindeer People.
Russia has 5,000 miles of Arctic territory, more than any other country, and there are 20 different peoples living there, most of whom are reindeer people, clinging to the shreds of what they once were. Vitebsky lives with and studies the Eveny people. He is an anthropologist and he’s writing about acculturation, but it’s not full of the platitudes and clichés you normally read.
Sara Wheeler is a London-based writer who has written books on the Antarctic and the Arctic. She spent seven months in Antarctica as writer in residence with the US Polar Program.
