The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (21 page)

It was all like that. There was the business, for instance, of how Scott allowed, at the last minute on an impulse, ‘Birdie' Bowers to go along with the team of four men who had been chosen to go to the Pole, although they had skis and he had not. It is no business of leaders to make impulsive decisions of this kind, and Scott has been, is being, criticized for it; and indeed it all makes no sense, unless you put yourself, or try to, in that mood of passionate endeavour. ‘Birdie' Bowers was being given the coveted privilege of being one of those who would actually discover the Pole (which, when they got there, they would find had already been discovered by Amundsen). And when they all lay dying in their tent, I am sure the last thing any of them thought was that it might have been ill advised to allow this last man along, when he was ill equipped: or that it might later be considered a waste to risk an extraordinary man.

No, they lay in their tent dying, the gallant Captain Oates having staggered forth into the blizzards – though the suggestion is that he might very well have decided to do this before (yet what difference would it have made if he had?) – and they were all sustained by knowing that they had done their duty as well as they could, and that they might, had luck been with them, have made it back to base. Actually, it was later decided, they died of simple starvation, for knowledge about what men doing such very heavy work needed in the way of calories was lacking then.

It was not all their fault. Yet Amundsen did not suffer from semi-starvation. His team ate dogs all the way to the Pole and back. The Britishers thought ill of them for this, though they ate their horses when necessary.

These were all very intelligent men, some with experience on other expeditions, not all of them polar. Yet they did these stupid things. Yet, obviously, the word
stupid
cannot be used, not in this context of high holy endeavour.

When the news hit Britain, or England, that these five heroes had died, the nation went into mourning.

‘For God's sake look after our people,' Scott, dying in his sleeping bag, had written – as well he might, given the record. And the British government, thus publicly put on the spot, did so.

A few months afterwards began the First World War. Now most of us look back and marvel at the sheer stupidity and waste of it all. Not possible that, first of all, it could have been allowed to start; and then, that it was allowed to go on. Impossible that such slaughter could have happened at all. Impossible, impossible – they all must have been mad.

‘God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,' sang that young idealist, Rupert Brooke, while millions of young men were being murdered in conditions of criminal negligence.

This note of Brooke's, as of some other poets before the truth of that war came home, was exactly the note of the 1910–13 Scott expedition to the Antarctic. I wonder if the national intoxication over the death of Scott and the others contributed to the mood that made that war possible?

But it could have been no more than that: a small addition which helped to heighten the mood, for all of Europe was drunk with rivalry. So strong was the atmosphere that, for instance, socialists, meeting only a short time before the war began, pledged themselves not to be carried away by the propaganda, not to allow the workers of Europe to hate each other on nationalistic grounds, or to tolerate their being used as cannon fodder for competing empires. For these people were able to see their situation with clarity
before
the drums started beating. But they were not able to stand out against it all; they succumbed and were swept away with everyone else.

It will have been seen by now that the 1910–13 expedition to the Antarctic has for me the quality of extremes meeting, of violent inner conflict, of the high drama that results from such tensions. Sometimes the nature of a historical process, or event, or crisis, is summed up in one person, and I think the person here is not Scott, but Wilson. It seems he was the moral focus of both expeditions. The men came to him for advice, for comfort, for support. They revered and admired him. They respected him and they loved him. They spoke of him in the terms used for leaders and exemplars. Far from it, that he was in any kind of rivalry with Scott: the two men were the closest of friends.

I have to insist that this was an entirely admirable man, whose life was something of a marvel – and to go on insisting, because in the climate or mood we are in now, men like him make us uneasy. It is amazing enough I have to make this point: to my parents, for instance, it would have seemed impossible that such a man could ever have needed defending. But we look at Wilson from this side of two world wars and many ‘small' wars; revolutions major and minor, and the preparations for the Third World War. We have reason to be suspicious of nobility: noble thoughts can breed murders and murderers. We have learned that truth the hard way.

Edward Wilson was a noble man.

In the first place he was a Christian; a real one, I mean, whose religion underpinned his life, his every thought, from childhood. He came from a line of Quakers, and his parents had no doubt about how this son of theirs should be brought up: they knew what was good and what was bad in those innocent times.

He was perhaps first of all a naturalist: his love and understanding of birds and animals showed in him as a small child. His talents as an artist developed in the service of his studies in biology. He became a fine artist, though he was never trained in any way; the drawings and watercolours he did for the expeditions are not the work of an amateur. He was an outstanding medical student and then doctor, but ill health ended that career. He got tuberculosis, probably because of asking too much of himself. He ate very little, dressed just this side of raggedness, and worked, well, obviously, much too hard.

He was up every morning in time to do two hours' work on his own version of an exegesis of the Gospels: he was not the sort of person to be satisfied with other people's thoughts. He then walked from his modest lodgings across the park to St George's Hospital, did his stint there, walked back, helped at a boys' club – the boys were as poor as people could be then, bone-bare hungry poor. He worked half the night. He was the kindest of sons, the best of friends; he was … but where does one start with such a man? He struck everyone from early childhood as remarkable, and the biographical writings are more like collections of tributes.

A biographer, George Seaver, summed him up:

‘These are big words,' he goes on; and indeed they are. Yet words of this degree and kind were felt by so many people to be applicable to Edward Wilson.

Was this man not a saint? Surely he had all the qualities of saints, in or out of monasteries? What do saints possess in the way of strengths, love of God, self-tamings, love of their fellows, that Wilson did not possess?

Nor was this an effortlessly ‘good' man, for he had to work for his self-discipline; though it must have helped to have been brought up in a family where to be honourable and kind and self-controlled, and the rest, was considered desirable. On the contrary, it was hard for him. His childhood was afflicted by wicked tempers, perhaps because too much was being asked of him? He was intolerant and critical: school-friends feared his ‘looks of contempt' and his ‘scathing tongue'. Yet on the expeditions, in conditions where we all know irrational hatred and irritations can possess normal friendly people, situations where other people were stressed, morose, difficult, unreasonable, Dr Wilson remained ‘cheerful, helpful, balanced, always in possession of himself. He had learned not to condemn nor to criticize. And yet, quite apart from the demands the work of the expeditions made on him, he was engaged in secret efforts of his own – secret because he did not speak of his spiritual life to his colleagues; they did not know the source of the strength everyone felt in him, they had to find out about him later, in his letters and his diaries.

This man was the stuff fanatics and bigots are made of, in religion and in politics, and he was not one, he certainly was not, and yet … perhaps he was, just a little, mad?

There is that Winter Journey, which he insisted on against Scott's advice and went through with, and which so magnificently brought out all his qualities – and from which young Cherry-Garrard never recovered.

And yet he often did not allow himself to go off into extremes, when you would expect it: there was his attitude to
England
, for instance; but he wept at what England did, in the Boer War, and his attitude towards his beloved country was shared by as small a despised minority as the few who, a short time later, hated the Great War. I wonder what Wilson would have made of that war, with its stupidities, its beastliness? And no, it is not easy to decide, and that is what makes the fascination of the man.

This afternoon I went to a book fair organized by a charity that sends aid to the starving Third World, Oxfam, and there I picked up Admiral Edward Evans's book about the 1910–13 expedition:
South with Scott.
It is breezy and matter-of-fact. He does not say that the ship he had to command, the
Terra Nova
, was a disgrace, and unkind to men and beasts: not at all, he enjoyed the difficulties. He deals with the Winter Journey as an item among others, though he does allow that the ordeals undergone were perhaps untoward. He mentions that Campbell and his party had to hibernate in that ice pit.

Here is a man who has been taught not to criticize superiors.

Well, it was the spirit of the times.

Back from sociological speculation to this little book of mine. I can't say I enjoyed writing it, for the snow and ice and cold seemed to get into me and slow my thoughts and processes.

Or perhaps something else was going on. I finished writing it the day after the death of someone I had known a long time; though it did not occur to me to make connection until then. It took her a long cold time to die, and she was hungry too, for she was refusing to eat and drink, so as to hurry things along. She was ninety-two, and it seemed to her sensible.

It seems to me that we do not know nearly enough about ourselves; that we do not often enough wonder if our lives, or some events and times in our lives, may not be analogues or metaphors or echoes of evolvements and happenings going on in other people? – or animals? – even forests or oceans or rocks? – in this world of ours or, even, in worlds or dimensions elsewhere.

DORIS LESSING
, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007, is one of the most celebrated and distinguished writers of recent decades. A Companion of Honour and a Companion of Literature, she has been awarded the David Cohen Memorial Prize for British Literature, Spain's Prince of Asturias Prize, the International Catalunya Award and the S.T. Dupont Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature, as well as a host of other international awards. She lives in north London.