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.
I can’t bear people who always take for granted that one’s main object is to save up one’s health and strength, eyesight and what not, for when one is sixty. How on earth can they tell whether one is going to reach thirty? I think it’s better to wear a thing while it’s good and new, patching the odd corners as they wear out, instead of putting it away carefully year after year till at last the moths get in, and you find it’s no good when at last you think you will wear it.
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.
I knew Wilson intimately, both at Cambridge and at St George’s, and of all the men I have known he stands out by reason of the beauty of his character and the highness of his aims. As an undergraduate he lived a life of ascetic purity, but he was quick to make friends and saw the good in the wildest undergraduate, for his purity was of the quality of flame which need fear no contamination. With even the lighter-minded undergraduates he was immensely popular, for he possessed that certain passport to the College’s heart – a vein of delightful humour. No one could meet him without being the better for it, and it falls to few men’s lot to be so deeply loved by his friends …
A biographer, George Seaver, summed him up:
Sufficient to say that he held with an unalterable conviction that there is no situation in human life, however apparently uncongenial, that cannot be made, if God be in the heart, into a thing of perfect joy. That in order to attain this ultimate perfection one must live through every experience and learn to love all persons; that the love particular should lead up to the love universal; that the worth of life is not to be measured by its results in achievement or success, but solely by the motive of heart and effort of will; that the value of experience depends not so much upon its variety or duration as upon its intensity; and that by one single whole-hearted concentrated effort a brief life might attain a level that ages of ordinary development would fall short of, so that a man who lives his life thus ‘having become perfect in a little while fulfils long years’.
‘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.
Here we have no abiding-place – and I feel it more as I grow older and the days for service and for doing and for making often seem so few ahead and so few behind too. It is amazing and most puzzling when one tries to think wha
t is the object of our short life on earth – a mere visit – and how desperately this must represent our effect on the little part of the world with which we come into contact. I get such a feeling of the absolute necessity to be at something always, and at every hour, day and night, before the end may come or I have done a decent portion of what I was expected to do; each minute is of value, though we so often waste hours and hours, not because we want rest, nor because as sometimes it is a duty, but out of sheer want of application … The more one does the more one gets to do …
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.
Everyone is too much afraid or too selfish to be ‘quixotic’ even in little things. Everyone lives by a rule of thumb – by the laws of Society, or the laws of the land, or the laws of the Church, or what not; whereas no one is bound by anything but the law of his own conscience.
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.
Certainly no living man could have taken Scott’s place effectively as leader of our Expedition – there was none other like him. He was the Heart, Brain and Master.
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.
About the Author
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.
By the Same Author
NOVELS
The Grass is Singing
The Golden Notebook
Briefing for a Descent into Hell
The Summer Before the Dark
Memoirs of a Survivor
Diary of a Good Neighbour
If the Old Could …
The Good Terrorist
The Fifth Child
Playing the Game (illustrated by Charlie Adlard)
Love, Again
Mara and Dann
The Fifth Child
Ben, in the World
The Sweetest Dream
The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog
The Cleft
‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’ series
Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five
The Sirian Experiments
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire
‘Children of Violence’ novel-sequence
Martha Quest
A Proper Marriage
A Ripple from the Storm
Landlocked
The Four-Gated City
OPERAS
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (Music by Philip Glass)
The Making of the representative for Planet 8 (Music by Philip Glass)
SHORT STORIES
Five
The Habit of Loving
A Man and Two Women
The Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories
Winter in July
The Black Madonna
This Was the Old Chief’s Country (Collected African Stories. Vol. 1)
The Sun Between Their Feet (Collected African Stories. Vol. 2)
To Room Nineteen (Collected Stories. Vol. 1)
The Temptation of Jack Orkney (Collected Stories. Vol. 2)
London Observed
The Old Age of El Magnifico
Particularly Cats
Rufus the Survivor
On Cats
The Grandmothers
POETRY
Fourteen Poems
DRAMA
Each His Own Wilderness
Play with a Tiger
The Singing Door
NON-FICTION
In Pursuit of the English
Going Home
A Small Personal Voice
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
The Wind Blows Away Our Words
African Laughter
Time Bites
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Under My Skin: Volume I
Walking in the Shade: Volume 2
Read on
Have You Read?
A selection of other books by Doris Lessing
The Grass is Singing
The Golden Notebook
The Good Terrorist
Love, Again
The Fifth Child
The Grass is Singing:
Chapter 1
MURDER MYSTERY
By Special Correspondent
Mary Turner, wife of Richard Turner, a farmer at Ngesi, was found murdered on the front verandah of their homestead yesterday morning. The houseboy, who has been arrested, has confessed to the crime. No motive has been discovered.
It is thought he was in search of valuables.
The newspaper did not say much. People all over the country must have glanced at the paragraph with its sensational heading and felt a little spurt of anger mingled with what was almost satisfaction, as if some belief had been confirmed, as if something had happened which could only have been expected. When natives steal, murder or rape, that is the feeling white people have.
And then they turned the page to something else.
But the people in ‘the district’ who knew the Turners, either by sight, or from gossiping about them for so many years, did not turn the page so quickly. Many must have snipped out the paragraph, put it among old letters, or between the pages of a book, keeping it perhaps as an omen or a warning, glancing at the yellowing piec
e of paper with closed, secretive faces. For they did not discuss the murder; that was the most extraordinary thing about it. It was as if they had a sixth sense which told them everything there was to be known, although the three people in a position to explain the facts said nothing. The murder was simply not discussed. ‘A bad business,’ someone would remark; and the faces of the people round about would put on that reserved and guarded look. ‘A very bad business,’ came the reply – and that was the end of it. There was, it seemed, a tacit agreement that the Turner case should not be given undue publicity by gossip. Yet it was a farming district, where those isolated white families met only very occasionally, hungry for contact with their own kind, to talk and discuss and pull to pieces, all speaking at once, making the most of an hour or so’s companionship before returning to their farms where they saw only their own faces and the faces of their black servants for weeks on end. Normally that murder would have been discussed for months; people would have been positively grateful for something to talk about.
To an outsider it would seem perhaps as if the energetic Charlie Slatter had travelled from farm to farm over the district telling people to keep quiet; but that was something that would have never have occurred to him. The steps he took (and he made not one mistake) were taken apparently instinctively and without conscious planning. The most interesting thing about the whole affair was this silent, unconscious agreement. Everyone behaved like a flock of birds who communicate – or so it seems – by means of a kind of telepathy.
Long before the murder marked them out, people spoke of the Turners in the hard, careless voices reserved for misfits, outlaws and the self-exiled. The Turners were disliked, though few of their neighbours had ever met them, or even seen them in the distance. Yet what was there to dislike? They simply ‘kept themselves to themselves’; that was all. They were never seen at district dances, or fêtes, or gymkhanas. They must have had something to be ashamed of; that was the feeling. It was not right to seclude themselves like that; it was a slap in the face of everyone else; what had they got to be so stuck-up about? What, indeed! Living the way they did! That little box of a house – it was forgivable as a temporary dwelling, but not to live in permanently. Why, some natives (though not many, thank heavens) had houses as good; and it would give them a bad impression to see white people living in such a way.