Jenny D. has been posting about her research for the sequel to The Explosionist and this bit last week really got me thinking:
My main purpose was to visit Niels Bohr's Institute for Theoretical Physics, where the very wonderful archivist took me around the place and told me a number of stories that lodged securely in my imagination. Many of the opening scenes of The Snow Queen (the sequel's title) are set in my alternate universe's version of the Institute, and there are all sorts of things it is difficult to glean from books...
(Me: "Would the scientists have eaten lunch in, say, a cafeteria?" Wonderful Archivist [humorously shocked]: "Oh, no! Denmark is a nation of box lunches!")
The story she told me that utterly captivated me, though, involved the escape of a number of cats from the basement. They were the subjects in an experiment concerning radio-isotopes, and the Institute backs onto a rather lovely park: the afternoon was spent frantically rushing around with a Geiger counter to try and distinguish the cats in the experiment from the ordinary feral cats that lived in the park and retrieve them so that all was not lost!
The alchemy of fiction: I wanted the story of the cats, but I did not want them to come to the sorry end that one knows, really, cats setting off Geiger counters undoubtedly must have come to...
Having set aside Map of My Dead Pilots for my agent's reading and selling and having the flying novel mostly done (I really must return to it but can't begin to tell you how I don't want to think about a BIG Alaska project right now, even one that is 90% complete) I have been working on a short story about the death of a famous Alaskan bush pilot (in 1943) and because of some books on polar exploration I have for review I've also been thinking about lesser known explorers - and the stories they have to tell.
There is one truly wonderful (and so elegantly written) Antarctica book I just reviewed for Booklist that was purposely written to look into many of the smaller, overlooked stories in southern polar exploration. I can go more into specifics about it after my review comes out in September but it was the references to Frank Worsley that really got me thinking. Worsley was the captain of the Endurance, Shackleton's ship that was famously trapped in the ice and abandoned in 1915. Worsley is credited with the amazing feat of navigation that led Shackleton and four others in the 22.5 foot lifeboat James Caird over 800 miles to a whaling station in South Georgia. The fate of the rest of the Endurance crew, who were left behind on the ice, as well as the men in the James Caird, was in Worsley's hands and he did it. He supremely rose to the occasion in a manner that few of us are ever challenged to do and yet when one thinks of the expedition it is almost only Shackleton's name that comes to mind. Worsley wrote a book about it but he never exhibited any sour grapes about not being famous. He did what he was supposed to do and that seemed to be enough for him. But I can't help but believe that there had to be more to it than that.
Can you really go through an experience like that - through all of that stress, all of that pressure to literally save the lives of dozens of men - and then just go home and be who you always were? Wouldn't you change? How could you not?
I pulled Andrea Barrett's collection Servants of the Map and read the title story after reading about Worsley. In that case a husband and wife exchange letters while the husband is in the Himalayas surveying for the British government. He does change dramatically and in the end decides to stay away from home for another year longer than planned to pursue his new interest in botany. In this case it is the dramatic location change that spurs a fundamental reassessment of who the main character is and who he wants to be. Worsley had both geography and a near death experience. I think about him, and his return trips to the ocean and what he might have been looking for in the years after the South Georgia trip. Maybe once you are that essential you crave it again and again; maybe once you prove yourself to be a hero the heroics become something you need.
And what does your family think about all of this?
It's an interesting question but one that can only be answered in small degrees. Worsley did not, I think, leave enough behind to reveal his feelings and motivations but really my interest extends beyond him anyway. Apsley Cherry-Garrard was changed dramatically by his experiences in Antarctica with Scott (and we know this from his autobiographical account and other writings he left behind) so Worsley is just one man of many who found himself in unexpected situations while exploring. I'm intrigued by the thought of what being in the Pole did to men who didn't have acclaim to balance their personal changes - men who weren't famous when they came home but were still changed by the experience. Jenny D. also wrote something else recently that appealed to me very strongly:
I have been thinking a great deal this summer about how I am not, really, when it comes down to it, a novelist. It happens that I love novels more than pretty much anything else in the world; I have always wanted to write them, I wrote my first (unpublished) one when I was about ten years old and I am sure I will continue writing them throughout my life. But I am much more strongly, though the words are pretentious to apply to oneself, a thinker and a historian and an analyzer than I am a storyteller. I tell stories in order to figure out what I think about things...
A dead pilot, a heroic navigator, I wonder about them; I wonder a lot and I want to know more. Sometimes the best way to know is to write it yourself - fictional answers, but still answers nonetheless.
[Post pic of Frank Worsley.]
