THE stiff upper lip is a legendary symptom of English heroism. Does anyone really want sang froid? Who does not prefer it warm? I feel sure the average Englishman, like any other man, really prefers lips that are soft, including his own. However, the legend dies hard, so here is an originally imaginative, thoroughly researched, well written, yet, perhaps inevitably, rather turgid book about it.
Where could upper labial stiffness be more surely achieved than in a polar snowdrift, with the temperature at, say, 50 below? At the summit of Mount Everest, you suggest? But that would bring in the vertigo factor and demand a more athletic sort of heroics. Francis Spufford, who writes for the Guardian and has edited anthologies, has taken on quite enough in this, the first book of his own, a study of English attitudes to hardship and stoicism in the ice at sea level.
As he points out, armchair travellers, reading of men voluntarily exposing themselves to appalling conditions on unprofitable expeditions to remote places, ask why. "It may be that no answer is really expected," Spufford writes, "that the question does all it is intended to do by registering astonishment, and signalling the difference between sensible us and mad them."
The whereabouts of the North Pole and the South Pole were certainly known before men set out, with or without ponies and dogs, to get there.
Even success, arduously gained, could only mean arrival at a point on a map, 90 degrees north or south, where there would be no reward except fame and the satisfaction of having done something very difficult. Of course, there were nationalistic opportunities to plant flags, as, more recently, American astronauts left the Stars and Stripes on the Moon. Many men have died for much less.
"The histories of Antarctic exploration by the British in `the heroic age,'" in Spufford's opinion, "might as well be myths. Although it is easy to list and date the major expeditions - Scott's Discovery expedition, 1901-4; Shackleton in Nimrod, 1907-9; Scott in Terra Nova, 1910-13; Shackleton in Endurance 1914-16 - they can seem to shed their identifying marks of period as we read about them." They are still Edwardians, but they transcend their era and inhabit "a world of myth, of legend of moral tales".
Spufford gallantly refrains from making fun of Scott and the others, although their amateurishness, admired at the time, was risible. "Most of them knew nothing about polar exploration when they set out to do it. The English were uniquely unprepared for the job," except that they were Navy and Cavalry men of Bulldog Drummond determination. It almost seems that Norway's Roald Amundsen was cheating when he took plenty of dogs and superior, equipment and provisions and became the first man to reach the South Pole. Damned fellow obviously wasn't a gentleman.
Spufford's book is, above all, literary. In his acknowledgments, he give thanks for "advice, assistance, encouragement and conversation" from A. S. Byatt, among others. He has collected some marvellously verbose 19th and early 20th century commentaries on the frigid regions of the world, and he is generous with quotations.
Thomas Bewick, in is classic History of British Birds, described the Arctic as "this immense icy protuberance of the globe, this gathering together, this board of congealed waters". His embroidered prose moved a fictional reader, Jane Eyre, to write in turn of "those firm fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters . . . (which) surround the pole, and concentre the multiplied rigours of extreme cold."
In one of many thoughtful attempts to explain the fascination of the sufferings of polar travellers, Spufford refers to Chinese philosophy: "How pleasant it is, Confucius is supposed to have said, to see an old friend fall from a roof top." Dickens, reading an account of the loss of Sir John Franklin while seeking a North West Passage through the Canadian Arctic, confessed that he felt "filled with a sort of sacred joy". Sacred?
"Polar exploration was a special kind of male travel," Spufford writes. The women left behind also performed feats of endurance, just waiting and wondering, before the days of commercial sponsorship, radio and air sea rescue. Lady Franklin's indomitable loyalty inspired her to keep pressing the Admiralty to search for her husband and his companions long after it was reasonable to assume they had perished. In public esteem, wives languishing at home were surrogates for absent, brave explorers.
The explorers had much to learn from the Arctic natives whom Canadian Indians called Eskimos, meaning "raw flesh eaters" - in extremis, each other's flesh. They are now supposed to be called Inuits, their own proper name. It was with the aid of four native hunters that Robert Peary reached the North Pole in 1909.
Forty three years later, by the way; I visited the sole survivor of Peary's guides, living alone in a hut in Thule, a small coastal village in North West Greenland, one of the northernmost habitations in the world. His name was Odaq, which, according to an interpreter, means "Seal Lying on the lee", and maybe it does. However, Odaq, with a pension of a few hundred dollars a year from the Danish Government and the Explorers Club of New York, was rich enough to maintain the fishy, ammoniacal air of his hut at a temperature of about 80 degrees.
How Scott and company, dying of starvation, frostbite and gangrene in their frozen tent in the Antarctic, would have envied Odaq his furs and his oil stove! It's possible that Captain Lawrence Edward (Titus) Oates was glad to utter the immortal, stiff upper lip valediction which gives Spufford's book its title: "I'm just going outside an I may be some time."