Francis Spufford, "I May be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination"

I May Be Some Time (1996) is remarkably, even weirdly, better than a book of this type has any right to be. It begins as a work of literary scholarship, tracing Britain's long-running obsession with polar exploration through careful reading of fiction. But it is somehow much more, turning this rather narrow viewpoint into a magnificent tool for understanding nineteenth-century Britain and, beyond that, certain deep truths about modern civilization.

The first amazing thing about I May Be Some Time is how full it is of interesting things I did not know. A sample: the word fitness, in the sense of exercising for health, was first used in the 1870s as a direct borrowing from Darwinian biology, with the implication that working out made one more fit to survive, compete, and reproduce. I have read a lot about the history of archaeology, but I did not know that the Franklin Expedition was instructed to find out exactly how the Innuit used certain tools, with the aim of better understanding the artifacts dug up in Ice Age caves. When Tennyson learned that explorers had named a polar cape for him, he wrote a crowing letter to his brother with the tone of "now I know I have really made it."

Even the strictly literary chapters are fascinating. Frankenstein, of course, begins with a strange scene on the polar ice, but did you recall that Jane Eyre also has a polar theme? I didn't. Spufford finds ice everywhere, from Romantic poetry to Edwardian drama, in writers from Carlyle to Poe to George Elliot to Conrad. Polar ice became the metaphor for emotional bleakness, and the struggle of explorers to survive in Arctic conditions was a constant comparison for any difficult endeavor. Other writers focused on the way shifting light brought glittering colors to the white ice, or the uncanny sensations induced by beholding a world so bleak and alien. As Spufford shows, less literary writers also went whole hog on polar themes, leaving us thousands of boys' stories about bravery in the Arctic and volumes of sappy poems about women waiting for their explorer husbands to come home. The press filled its columns with accounts of every voyage north (or, later, south), and the second, fatal Franklin expedition (1845-1848) became a complete media frenzy. For several years Charles Dickens produced and starred in amateur plays every Christmas, which were very popular in his social circle. One of them concerned a voyage in search of the Northwest Passage in which one man, who had actually gone along hoping for an opportunity to murder the expedition's commander, is transformed by the manly camaraderie of risking death in the cold and saves his enemy's life instead.

One of Spufford's themes is how the polar obsession spread through the whole society, from top to bottom. Here he muses on how people of the upper crust were drawn in:

Doors opened for them into new social worlds: London society, the literary scene, the kind of clubs to which a hero might be admitted where a simple Navy man would not. . .  The social success of the explorers contributed to the imaginative visibility of exploration. People from the world of the arts who had not particularly noticed the polar coverage in the journals, or paid much attention to the increasing presence of polar books, might find themselves sharing a mantelpiece with an explorer at a party; and the Arctic made a social entrance into their minds. Questions could be asked: What is an iceberg like, sir? It is true that some are a most beautiful blue? . . . One might go over oneself. One might permit oneself to be thrilled. I understand you ate your boots, Captain: how remarkable. (53)

Another fascinating chapter concerns the relationship of explorers to the natives, whom they always called Eskimos. Wits had been observing since the 1700s that while Englishmen seemed to have trouble surviving in the Arctic, Innuit did not. To those wits this fact punctured all pretensions to European surpeiority, and indeed it was a hard charge to answer. There was across the whole century a dialogue over when explorers should copy native ways and when their own civilization was simply better. The final race to the South Pole brought this argument to its climax, as Admudsen with his Innuit-style dogsleds and store of seal blubber beat out Scott with his steam tractors and elaborate system of supply dumps.

But to get to the heart of nineteenth-century exploration you have to start by understanding that it was completely pointless. What was to be gained by reaching the South Pole or finding the source of the Nile? Nothing. So what was it all about? 

It is here that I May be Some Time digs most deeply into the nineteenth-century mind. By 1845 the places where Europeans could live or do business had all long been found and either conquered or coerced into joining the global trading system. Everyone understood that even should the Northwest Passage somehow be found, it was too dangerous to be of any commercial use. Exploration went on, not because there was anything to be gained, but as an end in itself. This is a theme that I think is underplayed in our anti-colonial era; many Europeans left the continent, not to dominate anyone or to get rich, but just to go.

Part of the reason they left was the changes taking place within Europe. Over the course of the nineteenth century Europe achieved, internally, a remarkable degree of order and good manners. Violent crime in Britain and some other countries fell to levels as low as any ever observed among humans. Many of the "barbarities" that delighted earlier generations, such as bear-baiting and exhibiting mental patients in cages, were banned or phased out. The culture of the tea party and the reception in the parlor achieved remarkable refinement even among many of the working class, and everyone strove to maintain a high standard of respectability. Many people see this, and saw it at the time, as the feminization of society, a vast remaking of the world into a place more to the taste of women and especially middle class women.

Many men hated it. Even some who thought it was on the whole a good thing sometimes chafed against the restrictions of polite society, and this drove many of them to leave the continent for someplace rougher and less refined. Europeans knew two poles of existence, their increasingly ordered homes and the more brutal world of the colonies:

Ship me somewheres east of Suez,
where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren't no Ten Commandments
an' a man can raise a thirst. . . .

Spufford finds much of this rebellion against drawing-room life in the biographies of the polar explorers. Here is Spufford on Titus Oates, who gave the book his title when he said "I may be some time" before he wandered off into the dark of Antarctic winter, hoping by his sacrifice to leave enough food for the rest of Scott's expedition to survive.

The formal suit Oates wears in the photograph seems to be the substance of his problem with women, as well as its symbol. He chiefly associates them with social constraint; they represent, for him, every obligation to be polite, to make small talk, to translate enjoyable bodily activity (riding, hunting, sailing) into acceptable words. When he was eleven, his sister Lilian hit him over the head with a cricket bat so hard he spent two days in bed with a concussion, but outside the family he has found that females refuse to go in for this sort of commendalbe directness, and the world of women is a domain of protocol. "The visitors and women are a great nuisance as we can't get really dirty." (291)

I have a strong sense that the opposing poles of good order and vigorous struggle pull constantly at the human soul. Amidst choas and poverty we long for peace and order, but whenever we achieve those things we, or some of us anyway, rebel against them. Many men and some women find politeness in the end intolerable and will embrace rebellion or war if that will set them free. I have been saying for years that the best film for understanding our political moment is Fight Club, because it captures the sense that an ordered middle class existence is a prison from which real men must somehow escape.

In Spufford's reading, even the high noon of Victorian good manners around 1870 was shadowed by a darker world of masculine excess: rampant prostitution, colonial warfare, bare-knuckes boxing. This shadow only darkened as the century wore on. Russian novelists, anarchist terrorists, violent labor strife, the Boer War with its "concentration camps," all pointed toward the collapse of good manners in the face of untamed brutality. World War I, in this telling, was not the surprising fall of a thriving society but the inevitable result of failing to integrate the two poles of human need. If there is anything good about polar exploration, looking backward, it is exactly here, that it sought a field where men could escape from office life and parlor society into brutal struggle, but without having to kill and destroy, their only enemies the cold, the terrain, and their own fears. Where the more timid among us can get a taste of that wildness by reading books like this.

*     *     *

Spufford's wonderful passage on Ernest Shackleton learning about the Great War in 1916 is here. Scott Siskind has a very interesting review of one of Spufford's other books, Red Plenty.