One last book for Norwegian November, Roald Amundsen’s My Life as an Explorer (1927), a memoir covering the polar explorer’s entire career. It’s a good book, full of adventure.
To the explorer, however, adventure is merely an unwelcome interruption of his serious labours. He is looking, not for thrills, but for facts about the unknown. Often his search is a race with time against starvation. To him, an adventure is merely a bit of bad planning, brought to light by the test of trial. (237)
To the reader, however, adventure, the times Amundsen is
almost killed but for some reason is not, is much of what makes the book
good. To this reader. I know that many readers are searching for
characters like themselves. I read books
about exploration to meet people utterly unlike me. I mean, these folks are nuts.
Amundsen had written an earlier (1912) book about his expedition
to the South Pole, so there is less of that in My Life as an Explorer
than I had expected. He had become more
interested in polar aviation, so there is a lot of that, including perhaps too
much detail and score-settling about his recent dirigible flight over the North
Pole in the company of Umberto Nobile, an incompetent blowhard Italian
pilot. Nobile is a hilarious character, as
if from an Evelyn Waugh novel, although I understand how Amundsen has trouble
seeing him that way. The scenes where
the characters are trapped in Nome, Alaska, arguing by telegram with the Aĕro Club of Norway about
the wording of contracts is almost comedy, even in Amundsen’s exasperated
account.
Still, the book, beginning with Amundsen’s teenage
inspiration to explore the poles, is mostly about expeditions: preparation and
skills (skiing, navigation), multiple brushes with death (“adventure”), then survival
and celebrity.
Richard Halliburton called his first two books The Royal
Road to Romance (1925) and The Glorious Adventure (1927) – I have read
the former but not the latter.
Twenty-eight years younger than Amundsen, he had no interest in
exploring and went straight for the adventure.
Perhaps he just had no interest in science. But I think he understood that the celebrity
explorers like Amundsen, with clear accomplishments – first expedition to the South
Pole, first flight over the North Pole – had prepared the way – created the
market – for the celebrity adventurer. The
two men’s books look like evidence in the cultural shift form glory to celebrity.
Amundsen’s memoir is the real Norwegian literature, the
place to find something essential about Norwegianness. I got this sense visiting the extraordinary campus
of ship museums in Oslo, one holding a Viking ship, on the Kon-Tiki, and
the largest containing the Fram, the ship Fridtjof Nansen built for
Arctic exploration that Amundsen later took to the Antarctic. The ship is itself a celebrity, for a time holding
both the “farthest north” and “farthest south” records. You buy a ticket and they let you walk around
on it, with no risk of freezing to death or starving. There’s an ice cream stand right outside.
Nansen’s book, Farthest North (1897) is, I should say, better than Amundsen’s. Maybe next year I will read Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki Expedition (1948). Norwegians love madmen at sea.
I assume the book was written in Norwegian and translated by
someone, but there is no information in the 1927 edition. Maybe Amundsen wrote in English, what do I
know. The photo of the Fram is borrowed
from the Fram Museum website.
