Feeling elegiac about the lost world conjured up by Van Vechten’s words, I tried them out on my family, to see if Wally’s other former acolytes found them any more familiar than I did. (If any readers wish to grill themselves, the meanings of the words not defined during the course of this essay can be found on page 19.) Warming to the task, I was about to subject my friends to the killer quiz when my editor, who had no desire to become a victim himself, said gently, “Hold your horses, Anne. Not everyone loves tests as much as you do.”
He had a point. When I was growing up, not only did my family walk around spouting sesquipedalians, but we viewed all forms of intellectual competition as a sacrament, a kind of holy water, as it were, to be slathered on at every opportunity with the largest possible aspergill. When I saw the movie Quiz Show, I squirmed in my seat because the literary-hothouse atmosphere of the Van Doren menage was all too familiar. Like the young Van Dorens, the Fadiman children were ritually asked to identify literary quotations. While my mother negotiated a honking traffic jam on a Los Angeles freeway en route to a restaurant, my father would mutter, “‘We are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight.’ Source?” And Kim and I would squeal in chorus, “‘Dover Beach’!”
Our competitive fervor reached its apogee every Sunday afternoon, when we gathered around the television set for our weekly round of G.E. College Bowl. As you may remember if you are of a certain age and disposition, this was a quiz show—an honest, unrigged one—in which two teams of four students, each representing a different college, competed for scholarship money. Our family also constituted a team of four, which—I am admitting this in public for the very first time—we called Fadiman U. It was an article of faith in our home that Fadiman U. could beat any other U., and indeed, in five or six years of competition, we lost only to Brandeis and Colorado College. My father knew the answers to all the history and literature questions. My mother knew politics and sports. My brother knew science. I rarely knew anything that another member of Fadiman U. didn’t know as well, but I had quicker reflexes than my parents, so sometimes I managed to bang the arm of my chair (our home-team version of pressing the College Bowl buzzer) first. Fadiman U. always yelled out the answer before Robert Earle, the M.C., could even finish asking the question. “Wing Biddlebaum is an unfortunate ex-schoolteacher. Dr. Percival is—” WHOMP! “Winesburg, Ohio!” “After being poisoned and shot several times—” WHOMP! “Rasputin!”
Having spent my childhood struggling to one-up my family, I found it quite liberating to present the rest of the Fadiman camorra with a vocabulary test that I myself had resoundingly flunked—pre-flunked, before their hands could even get close to their chair arms. My mother knew one word, sepoy. My brother, in a humbling sibling shutout, knew nine: mephitic, monophysite, diapason, sepoy, subadar , alcalde, aspergill, agathodemon, and kakodemon. My father knew twelve: all the ones Kim knew (with the exception of aspergill), plus retromingent, paludal, camorra, and opopanax. WHOMP!
My husband, even though he views the Fadiman U. ethos as a dangerous psychosis, cheerfully submitted to my catechism as well. He knew diapason. I think he was quite pleased to beat me. Ignoring my editor’s warning, I then proceeded to poll a random sampling of my friends: a movie critic, a freelance writer, three editors, a playwright, an English professor, a classics professor, a lawyer, a law student, a stand-up comic, and the director of operations for the New York City bus system. Some of them tried to wriggle out of the competition by treating the quiz as a game of Dictionary, with trumped-up definitions (paludal: “a German pastry made from a lapdog”; subadar: “a Turkish spittoon”; grimoire: “where Bluebeard stored his bathrobe”). The final results: five zeros, three 1s, one 2, three 7s, and one 9.
Although I cannot claim that my poll was statistically significant, it did strike me that, glossologically speaking, my respondents were either on the bus or off the bus: they knew hardly any words, or they knew a lot. What set the Wallys apart? My father, of course—the champion to date—is Wally, and therefore occupies a class by himself, though I would also venture that he was aided by being ninety years old, and thus an intellectual product of the same era that shaped Carl Van Vechten. My lawyer friend, who knew seven words, restricts his reading almost entirely to works published before World War I. He is forty-one, but he might as well be ninety. The classics professor (9) and one of the editors (7) know Greek and Latin. My brother has the unparalleled advantage of owning no television set. Every one of the high scorers considered these twenty-two words—especially the ones they didn’t know —not a prickly obstacle but a precious trove. “When you found them, you must have felt like stout Cortez!” exclaimed the English professor (7). (“Source?” I thought automatically. “‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.’”)
All the Wallys could remember exactly where they had encountered the words they knew. The English professor said, “Mephitic! That must mean foul-smelling. I’ve seen it in Paradise Lost, describing the smell of hell.” My brother, a mountain guide and natural history teacher who lives in Wyoming, said, “Mephitic, hmm, yes. The scientific name for the striped skunk is Mephitis mephitis, which means Stinky stinky.” The lawyer, who, incredibly, had bumped into mephitic just the previous week in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, possessed particularly vigorous powers of memory. When I asked him to define monophysite, he said, “That’s a heretic, of course, who believes there is a single nature in the person of Christ. I first encountered it in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, of which I read an abridged version in a green Dell Laurel edition with a picture of Roman ruins on the cover that I bought with my allowance for seventy-five cents when I was in grade school, at the bookstore at the corner of Mill Road and Peninsula Boulevard in Valley Stream, New York. I read it while walking home. It was springtime, and all the trees on Mill Road were in bud.” No man ever remembered the face, dress, and perfume of an old lover with fonder precision than Jon remembered that glorious day when he and monophysite first met.
I asked my pollees whether they thought we know more words or fewer than we would have in 1920. They split right down the middle. “I bet we know at least as many,” said the comic (0). “The new vocabulary of the Internet alone has easily made up for everything we’ve lost from nineteenth-century literature.” I found this idea positively mephitic. The playwright (1) said sadly, “We know fewer words, and the ones we know are less beautiful. Just listen to the words on your list! The words we’ve lost tend to be connotative, and the ones we’ve gained tend to be denotative. I’ve never seen modem used in a poem.” I share the playwright’s views. I can bid farewell to cupellation (the act of assaying gold or silver from lead in a small, flat vessel called a cupel) without tears, but I regret that I have spent my life until now without knowing that a grimoire is a book of magic spells, or that an adytum is the inner sanctum of a temple. Wally’s dictionary and Carl Van Vechten’s cat book are grimoires. I feel their spells working on me at this very moment.
These twenty-two words, which two months ago were utter strangers, have now penetrated deeply into my own psychological adytum. Shortly after my daughter’s fifth birthday party, I dreamed that instead of playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, Susannah (who is now an aficionada of Wally the Wordworm herself) and her friends had played with my words, which had assumed shimmering three-dimensional shapes. Their favorite was opopanax. The children batted their new playthings delightedly back and forth, for the words were bright and pretty. But like balloons, they were excessively buoyant, and if you weren’t careful, they floated away.
MY ODD SHELF
It has long been my belief that everyone’s library contains an Odd Shelf. On this shelf rests a small, mysterious corpus of volumes whose subject matter is completely unrelated to the rest of the library, yet which, upon closer inspection, reveals a good deal about its owner. George Orwell’s Odd Shelf held a collection of bound sets of ladies’ magazines from the 1860s, which he liked to read in his bathtu
b. Philip Larkin had an especially capacious Odd Shelf crammed with pornography, with an emphasis on spanking. Vice Admiral James Stockdale, having heard that Frederick the Great had never embarked on a campaign without his copy of The Encheiridion, brought to Vietnam the complete works of Epictetus, whose Stoic philosophy was to sustain him through eight years as a prisoner of war.
My own Odd Shelf holds sixty-four books about polar exploration: expedition narratives, journals, collections of photographs, works of natural history, and naval manuals (“Do not touch cold metal with moist bare hands. If you should inadvertently stick a hand to cold metal, urinate on the metal to warm it and save some inches of skin. If you stick both hands, you’d better have a friend along”). These books are so charged with sentiment that they might as well be smudged with seal blubber and soaked with spray from the Weddell Sea. My interest is a lonely one. I cannot trot it out at cocktail parties. I feel sometimes as if I have spent a large part of my life learning a dead language that no one I know can speak. Reading in bed, I will say to George, “Did you know that on Scott’s first Antarctic expedition, Edward Wilson got up at one and five every morning to premasticate seal meat and stuff it down the throat of the pet emperor penguin chick he had captured on the Great Ice Barrier?” George will grunt. He is a rainforest man himself. He likes to dream of sitting under a giant tropical tree, his shoulders festooned with decaying lianas and sprouting bromeliads, with five hundred species of multicolored slugs dropping on his head. I consider his ideal landscape messy and hyperbolic—too much. He considers my ideal landscape, a white-on-white monochrome of seracs and crevasses with a single polar bear in the distance, chilly and parsimonious—not enough. I have tried to explain to him that the polar ethos has the same appeal as the body of Katharine Hepburn (something I know he holds in high esteem), which Spencer Tracy, in Pat and Mike, characterized thus: “Not much meat on ’er, but what there is is cherce.”
My ardor for the choice minimalism of extreme latitudes began so early that it would take years on an analyst’s couch to exhume its roots. I cannot remember a time when I did not prefer winter to summer, The Snow Queen to Cinderella, Norse myths to Greek. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I read C. S. Lewis’s recollection of the central epiphany of his childhood, the moment he stumbled across a Norse-influenced poem by Longfellow that began with the lines
I heard a voice, that cried,
“Balder the Beautiful
Is dead, is dead!”
“I knew nothing about Balder,” wrote Lewis, “but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, [and] I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale and remote).” When I read that passage, I shivered with a combination of sympathetic hypothermia and passionate recognition.
As I grew up, my yearning for what Lewis called Northernness (the Arctic) begat an antipodal yearning for Southernness (the Antarctic). Neither ultima Thule was easily accessible, so for a time I worked as a mountaineering instructor, on the theory that high altitudes were a reasonable substitute for high latitudes. A few years later, I managed to persuade a softhearted editor to send me twice to the Arctic, once to write about polar bears and once about musk oxen. Each time I feared that my protracted pre-imaginings would poison the reality; each time the reality went one better. And each time, as soon as I returned home, I ran to my Odd Shelf, which instantly uplifted me back into Lewis’s huge regions of northern sky. It was in this way that, over time, my crush on Balder the Beautiful was converted into a crush on Ross, Franklin, Nares, Shackleton, Oates, and Scott.
I should mention that all of the above explorers were unqualified failures. Not coincidentally, they were also all British. Americans admire success. Englishmen admire heroic failure. Given a choice—at least in my reading—I’m un-American enough to take quixotry over efficiency any day. I have always found the twilight-of-an-empire aspect of the Victorian age inexpressibly poignant, and no one could be more Victorian than the brave, earnest, optimistic, self-sacrificing, patriotic, honorable, high-minded, and utterly inept men who left their names all over the maps of the Arctic and Antarctic, yet failed to navigate the Northwest Passage and lost the races to both Poles. Who but an Englishman, Lieutenant William Edward Parry, would have decided, on reaching western Greenland, to wave a flag painted with an olive branch in order to ensure a peaceful first encounter with the polar Eskimos, who not only had never seen an olive branch but had never seen a tree? Who but an Englishman, the legendary Sir John Franklin, could have managed to die of starvation and scurvy along with all 129 of his men in a region of the Canadian Arctic whose game had supported an Eskimo colony for centuries? When the corpses of some of Franklin’s officers and crew were later discovered, miles from their ships, the men were found to have left behind their guns but to have lugged such essentials as monogrammed silver cutlery, a backgammon board, a cigar case, a clothes brush, a tin of button polish, and a copy of The Vicar of Wakefield. These men may have been incompetent bunglers, but, by God, they were gentlemen.
The successful explorers—Roald Amundsen, for example, the ultrapragmatic Norwegian who sledged 830 miles to the South Pole, killed and ate his sled dogs on a strict schedule, and sledged miles back again without the slightest touch of frostbite, scurvy, or snow blindness, though one of his four companions did get a toothache—don’t hold much interest for me. “Of course they don’t,” said George. “You’re a romantic. What’s romantic about a guy wanting to go somewhere and getting there?”
In the pantheon of British polar failures, no one could be more romantic than the man Amundsen beat, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, for whom I have long harbored especially tender feelings. One of the many reasons I own a dozen books about him is that he and his party were bookish sorts themselves. One tends to picture polar explorers as unwashed fellows slogging wordlessly through the snow on half-rations of pemmican hoosh, and so they often were. But before many of those slogs began, the men had to overwinter at surprisingly civilized base camps, of which Cape Evans, the cozy little Antarctic hut where Scott and his twenty-four men spent the winter of 1911, was far and away the most highbrow. Three nights a week after dinner—which on special occasions included seal consommé and stewed penguin breast—Scott convened sessions of what he called the Universitas Antarctica. Topics for discussion included the future of aviation, the art of Japan, and the parasitology of fish. On non-Universitas evenings, the men listened to Caruso on their gramophone, wrote poetry, painted watercolors, or read books from the Odd Shelves some of them had imported 14,000 miles. Scott himself brought a selection of Russian and Polish novels. Captain Lawrence Edward Grace Oates, an Old Etonian who was described by one of the seamen as “a gentleman, quite a gentleman, and always a gentleman,” brought all five volumes of Charles James Napier’s Peninsular War, an epic study of the Napoleonic campaigns in Iberia. Edward Wilson, the chief of the scientific staff—the man who had raised the penguin chick on Scott’s previous expedition to Antarctica—brought the works of Tennyson. After reading “In Memoriam,” he wrote in his diary that he had “been realising what a perfect piece of faith and hope and religion it is, [and it] makes me feel that if the end comes to me here or hereabout … all will be as it is meant to be.”
Wilson’s diary entry could not have been more prescient. As any English schoolboy can tell you, Scott, Oates, Wilson, Lieutenant Henry Bowers, and Petty Officer Edgar Evans—slowed by bad weather, inadequate rations, inferior clothing, second-rate tents, and, because they were animal lovers, a masochistic insistence on man-hauling their sledge for most of the journey rather than using dogs—reached the South Pole on January 17, 1912, only to find that Amundsen had planted the Norwegian flag there thirtyfour days earlier. On February 17, a month into their return trip, Evans died after a fall. On March 17, Oates, realizing that his frostbitten and gangrenous feet were handicapping the rest of the party, uttered the most famous and gallant words in the history of polar
exploration: “I am just going outside and may be some time.” Then he stumbled out of the tent into a blizzard, never to be seen again. It was his thirty-second birthday. Balder the Beautiful is dead, is dead
On March 21, with two days’ rations left, Scott, Wilson, and Bowers, all of them faint with hunger and ravaged by scurvy, pitched their tent as a raging gale approached. They had walked 740 miles from the Pole. Their base camp was 140 miles away, and One Ton Depot, where an ample supply of food and fuel was cached, was only eleven miles away.
Seven months later, a search party from Cape Evans found the small green canvas tent. Three frozen corpses lay inside, tucked in their reindeer-hide sleeping bags. Next to Scott’s body was a sheaf of letters he had written to his wife and to the wives and mothers of his companions, as well as his journal, which, although he wrote it wearing mittens, is legible, if increasingly wavery, right down to the final entry. “We are weak,” he noted, “writing is difficult, but for my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past.”