The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (19 page)

Not that my father was indifferent to Scott and the rest, for these were English achievements, and, as with my mother, to be English, it went without saying, was to be the best.

It is hard now to understand what
England
meant to my parents, who were of the same generation as those heroic explorers. A word can be a powerful drug for one generation, and as bland as milk for the next. It is not irrelevant to this theme either that foreign readers, and this includes for the moment Americans, will have little idea about Scott the explorer, any more than have most people in Britain under the age of let's say forty. Blank looks are what I get when I blow that old trumpet: ‘Scott of the Antarctic!' They say, ‘Scott? Didn't he discover the South Pole?' Yet, so short a time ago, Scott, the Antarctic, the names of the men who worked with him, made up one of those myths or pieties that every nation has to have as inspirational fuel. There was this band of dedicated demigods, gallant gentlemen one and all, and anyone who might dare to hint at the possibility of flaws would have been beaten up. As bad as suggesting, for instance, that there were ordinary human beings on The Long March … but supply your own national pieties, stick in this empty space the faces of your own heroes.

It was Bernard Shaw who said something like this: that heroes were never in short supply, that people always rushed forward to die for causes, good and bad, but that we could do with less heroism, and more hard thinking. On subjects of this sort Shaw can usually be found to have said it already.

Recently, in Britain, there is a different mood about Scott, suggesting that a reassessment of him as leader and of his management of the 1910–13 expedition is about to surface. There are signs that he is about to become something not far from a villain. It is possible he was less than always competent, and he made mistakes: this is not a question of his having made the kind of mistakes everyone does make, but the kind that no even ordinarily able leader should make. In short, we are in the process of swinging from one extreme to another, and I don't want to be part of that: I am interested in the way this kind of reassessment happens, and the timing of it. What lies behind facts like these: that so recently one could not have said Scott was not perfect without earning at least sorrowful disapproval; that a year after the Gang of Four were perfect, they were villains; that in the fifties in the United States a nothing-man called McCarthy was able to intimidate and terrorize sane and sensible people, but that in the sixties young people summoned before similar committees simply laughed. No, those young Americans should not have imagined that had
they
been summoned before the earlier committees they would have laughed, for they would not have: they were as good as their parents, but no better: something had happened in the meantime, the
atmosphere had changed
, as we say, using one of the phrases that is an excuse for not thinking. I could fill pages, volumes, with facts illustrating this theme, that the heresies of one year are the pieties of the next, and vice versa, and so can everyone past the age of indiscriminate enthusiasms – and so could anyone at all, if he wanted to. But for some reason we cannot apply the obvious lessons of history to ourselves.

Why?
Is it possible that we could learn not to impose on each other these sacred necessities, in the name of some dogma or other, with results that inevitably within a decade will be dismissed with:
We made mistakes.
It is only too easy to imagine The Spirit of History (we have had so much practice at it!), a blowzy but complacent female, wearing the mask of the relevant ruler or satrap: ‘Dearie me!' she smiles, ‘but I have made a mistake again!' And into the dustbin go holocausts, famines, wars, and the occupants of a million prisons and torture chambers.

I have lived through several of these dramatic changes; there are obviously, and very soon, more to come. Private and ironic thoughts on the subject are one of the consolations of growing old. What happens must be something like the slow adding of grain to grain on one side of a pair of scales, though you can't see this, only deduce it. And then a sudden reversal of the balance. Surely these are processes we can learn to study, particularly when they recur so often, and when they seem to be speeding up, like everything else?

For instance. I was one of the handful of people who in the early fifties tried to get journalists, members of parliament, politicians, to see that things were not well in southern Africa. To say we were talking about criminally oppressive tyrannies was then not possible; no, it had to be wrapped up. Even so we were treated with tolerant amusement … dismissed as wrong-headed … red … anti-British … crazy. Inside ten years the idea that what was going on in southern Africa – in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia – should at the very least be examined, was a respectable view. Was ‘received opinion'. Ten years later – but by then it was too late. Of course. I say ‘of course' as shorthand for my suspicion that this is a law at work. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to prevent that war, if common sense had had anything to do with it – but when does common sense have anything to do with it? If the whites had had the ability to look coolly for five minutes at analogous historical processes – but when, ever, has a ruling caste had this capacity?

No, this is not ‘We told you so!' This is for the braying adolescent. After ‘I told you so' comes the anger at the waste of it all, the stupidity, the preventability neglected … but what if it is always like this? Has to be like this? Is there a law at work? For then there is no point in all these emotions, they are a waste of time, the sick anger as well as
I told you so
: what we need is to think, and not emote. Politicians and rulers are not the makers of events, but their puppets: well, then, one should not expect anything else. But it seems that the repetitiveness of historical, of sociological processes is not even noticed. Now, as young people come into their inheritance, to choose one or other of the fifty-seven varieties of socialism, they all, without ado or effort, opine that there is a tyranny, white over black, down there at the bottom of Africa. But suppose their counterparts had known it in good time? And – but here is the point – while they are accepting, just as their predecessors did, ‘received opinion', what nascent ideas are they ignoring? Ideas which, when it is too late, will be easily adopted by their kind in twenty years – ideas which will then have lost their energy, will have become worn out?

I used to think that the sequence – futile and derided or punished warnings by the few, then these warnings slowly being accepted to form the basis of a new attitude, which by that time is already out of date – was peculiar to politics and to religious movements with a mass basis. But you can see the processes at work in every sphere from sport to literature.

And, for that matter, in yourself.

In the political sphere, the ruling strata of a country, a state, are identified with their own propaganda … no, they don't use it, for that to my mind is one of the formulas of Marxist rhetoric which are substitutes for thought; they are used by it, for they are identified with their own justifications for being in power, always self-deceiving ones. When has any ruler said ‘I am a wicked tyrant'? The Shah of Iran and Amin of Uganda thought well of themselves. It is inevitable that when faced with facts demonstrating that such and such a colonised country, or less favoured part of their own country, or town, or district is suffering hardship, lack of freedom, tyranny, then these people will always and invariably deny the facts. Nothing else can be expected. I remember that when I was going through the business of having a house compulsorily purchased by the Greater London Council, I was enabled to observe the bullying, the sharp-dealing, the sheer corruption of the council employees, when dealing with the unfortunate people not middle-class, not able to stand up for themselves. I went to various acquaintances who were town councillors or otherwise engaged in the processes of public management; but no, the familiar tolerant smile, the hidden impatience: such awfulness could not possibly be going on, not under
their
benevolent aegis.

One may formulate a rule, tentatively, thus: People in power, people at the top of an institution or department or ministry, never allow themselves to know what is being done by their subordinates, for that would mean losing their image of themselves as the only persons fit to be in charge, in power. (Let alone losing their jobs.) I simply cannot believe that the world has always been so stupidly mismanaged as it is now, that the poor have always been so helpless and so disregarded by the people at the top. There have been nations, states, communities, in the past when the rulers made it their business to know what went on in the lower reaches of their administrations. In certain kingdoms in our Middle Ages, in the Middle East, rulers appointed officials to go about incognito, or even went themselves, testing out this or that official's behaviour. But such is the degree of cynicism we have fallen into, it is hard to believe that if we tried out something of the sort ourselves, the investigators would not almost at once become the creatures of the officials whose behaviour they were testing.

But what interests me is that this idea has gone from among those we consider useful as means to good government. At what point did it lose its force … become a quaint relic … a symptom of personal despotism? When will it return again, and under what kind of regime? I think there must be definite lifespans for ideas or sets of related ideas. They are born (or reborn), come to maturity, decay, die, are replaced. If we do not at least ask ourselves if this is in fact a process, if we do not make the attempt to treat the mechanisms of ideas as something we may study, with impartiality, what hope have we of controlling them?

No, I have not digressed: this kind of speculation is what gets provoked by studying that extraordinary series of events, the exploration of the Antarctic, or – to use our imperial way of putting it – the discovery of the South Pole, a prize which brought the cry out of Scott: ‘Great God! This is an awful place!' So awful is it there are not even any animals: nothing was there before people, though a bird perhaps sometimes went past. And so the South Pole has at least the distinction of having been really discovered, unlike, let's say, the Victoria Falls or the Niagara Falls, known by Africans and by Indians for at least hundreds of years before being ‘discovered' by the whites. (This observation has of course a tired and banal flavour, but until quite recently was abrasive.)

In the decades before the First World War most of the European nations explored the Antarctic, the different teams competing, a display on a vast stage, illuminated as it were by that new toy, the popular newspapers; and it does rather seem now as if ‘the eyes of the world' were more on that drama than on the incidents that were building up towards the war. Which is a fact not without interest in itself. The two aspects of national rivalry, in full view; and to the Europeans, nothing could have seemed more normal. But this is how it all looked to quite a lot of people not European: there was little Europe, strutting and bossing up there in its little corner, like a pack of schoolboys fighting over a cake.

There are people who believe that when our successors look back at our time, nationalism will seem as lethally stupid as religious wars seem to most of us. And even in the ugly climate we live in, the International Geophysical Year 1958 was possible, which was partly the result of the best aspects of the rivalry and the aspirations of the explorers themselves. For, just as in the trenches the fighting soldiers kept decency and common sense about their opponents and it was the civilians who raved and hated, so, in this matter of polar exploration, the men actually doing the work left the worst envies and jealousies to the onlookers.

Right at the end, it was Norway and Britain who were left as rivals. The Norwegian team was headed by Roald Amundsen, and the British team by Scott.

Amundsen got to the South Pole first by about a month. And he got safely home again, without loss of life. The British team lost lives and suffered all kinds of mishaps. The reasons for one team doing so well, and the other not, have been analysed ever since. One was that Amundsen was supported by his government, and the British team shamefully neglected. This kind of niggardly short-sightedness seems for some reason a perennial characteristic of British government. At any rate Scott, a sensitive man, had to go running around cap in hand begging for money, and it wasn't good for him. They couldn't afford to buy and equip a proper ship, whereas Amundsen's was built for the ice. The British expedition was a scientific one, whereas the Norwegian had only one aim, to get to the Pole and back. The Norwegians had every kind of experience necessary, but the British did not know nearly so much about snow and ice and the handling of dogs. But these comparisons, which one could multiply, are perhaps off the point.

For what has to strike you, as soon as you start to read the diaries, the letters, the records, is a difference in tone, in atmosphere.

Amundsen's book describes in a sensible non-boastful way a sensible and efficient expedition. It is quiet in tone, and practical.

Now you turn to the records of the Scott expedition (1910–13), and at once you are in a different world.

Atmosphere, this word we use so easily, what is it? A journalist will ask, or a researcher: What happened then, or there? Who said that, and why? What is your version of what went on? … And you sit there, remembering all kinds of incidents, telling the truth as far as you can; and then you see it is all no use. For there is nothing you can do to convey an atmosphere, a
Zeitgeist.
You can offer incidents to illustrate that lost time (which may be a very short time ago indeed), but more often than not they seem bizarre and the people involved lunatic. You find yourself saying desperately: You see, the atmosphere has changed so much that …