At Large and at Small: Familiar Essays

by Anne Fadiman

  It is important to understand that these pieces of advice are offered in a spirit not of grit-teethed stoicism—I may be facing death, but, by God, at least I know enough not to rub decayed caribou brains on my clothes—but of casual bonhomie, as if the author and the reader were in perfect agreement that this stuff is fun. Stefansson wasn’t a survivor; he was a voluptuary. Why would anyone wish to wear wool when “nothing feels so good against the skin—not even silk—as underwear of the skin of a young caribou”? Why live in a house when an igloo, lit with a single candle, resembles “a hemisphere of diamonds”? Why employ Inuit or Indians to do one’s hunting when one could have the satisfaction of doing it oneself? “I would as soon think of engaging a valet to play my golf,” he observed, “or of going to the theatre by proxy.”

  Stefansson admitted that his hunting had not always been fruitful. In lean times he had eaten snowshoe lashings, sealskins intended for boot soles, and the remains of a bowhead whale that had been beached for four years. (It tasted like felt.) But when the Arctic chose to show its friendly aspect, its cuisine practically made him swoon. Frozen raw polar bear meat had the consistency of raw oysters; half frozen, it was more like ice cream. The soft, sweet ends of mammal, bird, and fish bones were scrumptious. Seal-blood soup, an especial favorite, warranted a recipe that might have intrigued Brillat-Savarin:

  When the meat has been sufficiently cooked it is removed from the pot which is still hanging over the fire. Blood is then poured slowly into the boiling broth with brisk stirring the while. In winter small chunks of frozen blood dropped in one after the other take the place of the liquid blood poured in summer.… The consistency of the prepared dish should be about that of “English pea soup.”

  The ne plus ultra of arctic fare was caribou flesh: in ascending order of “gustatory delight,” the brisket, ribs, and vertebrae; the tongue; the head, especially the fat behind the eyes; the little lump of fat near the patella of the hind leg; and the marrow of the bones near the hoof, which was customarily rolled into little balls and eaten raw. Stefansson maintained that a high-fat, all-meat diet not only pleased the palate but also cured depression, prevented scurvy, reduced tooth decay, and relieved constipation. (When he was in his late forties and living in New York City, he undertook to prove his nutritional theories by spending a year, under the supervision of Bellevue Hospital, on an exclusively carnivorous diet. Not only did he remain healthy, but he was proud to report that X-rays revealed an “unusual… absence of gas from the intestinal tract during the meat-eating period.”)

  Given the abundance of northern pleasures, it is not surprising that Stefansson envisioned a time when the Arctic would be viewed not as the end of the earth but as a vital crossroads. Musk oxen and reindeer would be domesticated for world consumption, “not for the exclusive delectation of wolves, wolverines, foxes and ravens.” The skies would be filled with airplanes traveling the shortest routes between New York, London, Moscow, and Peking; the seas would be filled with submarines. In his book The Northward Course of Empire, he reproduced a graph conceived by an American sociologist named S. Columb GilFillan. The horizontal axis was chronological, from 3400 b.c. to 2200 a.d. The vertical axis was meteorological. The great world centers were arrayed along this graph, with Upper Egypt (mean annual temperature 77°) succeeded by Athens (63°), Rome (59°), Constantinople (57°), London (50°), and Moscow (39°), among others. The implication was clear: if the trend continued, in a few hundred years the Arctic would be the nexus of civilization.

  My Stefansson shelf grew over the years, augmented by birthday contributions from my husband. The books had been out of print for decades and had tissue-thin maps tucked in pockets at the back. They were all by Stefansson. It was only when I started work on this essay that I bought a half-dozen books about Stefansson. And that is where the probs began.

  I learned that not everyone liked my explorer as much as I did. After Stefansson visited Australia on a lecture tour in 1925, a Sydney Bulletin reporter observed delicately that “our late visitor… is a many sided man. I would call him nothing less than an Hexagon, and he may even be an irregular crystal.” Controversial during his lifetime (his peers thought him a publicity hound, his bosses thought him a troublesome maverick), the irregular crystal has attracted a new round of criticism in recent years—the same period of polar revisionism during which Peary was accused of fraud and Scott was exposed as a dangerous bumbler. The two most serious charges are that Stefansson abandoned his Inuit family and that, on his third expedition, he was responsible for the deaths of eleven men.

  For two decades I had read Stefansson’s laconic references to Fannie Pannigabluk, the widowed seamstress who accompanied him and his friend Natkusiak on his second expedition. It had never occurred to me that she was Stefansson’s mistress; after all, he noted several times that every expedition required an Inuit seamstress to make and repair caribou-hide and sealskin clothing. Gísli Pálsson, an Icelandic anthropologist who has interviewed four of Stefansson’s Inuit grandchildren, writes, “Pannigabluk was presented as primarily a domestic worker, with no formal recognition of her role as either spouse, partner, or key informant.” Stefansson never publicly acknowledged the relationship or the son it produced; nor, apparently, did he provide financial support. It is true that Robert Peary and Matthew Henson also had sons by Inuit women and that both of them jettisoned their families in similar fashion. Peary went a step further and published a nude photograph of his mistress. But Stefansson? The man who wrote of the Inuit, “I cannot see how anyone who knows them can wish more for anything than that he was rich and could repay their kindness fully”?

  The accusations that swirl around Stefansson’s third expedition allege an even more serious abandonment. In July of 1913, the HMCS Karluk steamed out of Port Clarence, Alaska, en route to the Beaufort Sea, with Stefansson and half the members of the Canadian Arctic Expedition on board. (The rest were on two other ships, bound for scientific work in the Northwest Territories.) By mid-August, the Karluk was icebound. In mid-September, Stefansson, accompanied by three men from his scientific staff and two Inuit, left on a ten-day hunting trip to provision the ship with meat for the winter. Two days later, the sixty-mile-an-hour winds of the season’s first blizzard dislodged the Karluk’s ice floe, and the ship drifted hundreds of miles to the west, far out of Stefansson’s reach. The Karluk was eventually crushed in the ice, and most of its men made their way to Wrangel Island, north of Siberia. They suffered severe hardships there—starvation, snow blindness, frostbite, gangrene, and, in one case, the amputation of a toe with a pair of tin-cutting shears. Eleven died. Many years later, one of the survivors wrote: “Not all the horrors of the Western Front, not the rubble of Arras, nor the hell of Ypres, nor all the mud of Flanders leading to Passchendaele, could blot out the memories of that year in the Arctic.”

  It is indisputable that Stefansson left the ship. The question is whether he intended to return. In The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk, Jennifer Niven argues that he did not: caribou were scarce in the area; he left his best hunters on board the Karluk; and— the most damning evidence—the ship’s meteorologist believed that Stefansson, who, two days before he departed, had been observed reading the diaries from De Long’s catastrophic 1879 expedition, left the ship “for fear of losing his life.”

  The Canadian historian Richard J. Diubaldo disagrees. In his scrupulously fair-minded biography Stefansson and the Canadian Arctic, he argues that “there is strong evidence to suggest that he wished he had never left.” I share his view. If Stefansson had no intention of returning, why did he leave his chronometer and thirteen hundred dollars on board? Why did he leave detailed instructions on the flags and beacons that were to guide his return over the ice? Why didn’t he take the best sledges? After the blizzard, why did he hasten west along the coast to Cape Smythe, if not to catch up with the Karluk?

  I think Stefansson took off for ten days because he couldn’t bear to be on board a ship that wasn�
�t moving, couldn’t bear to sit around playing bridge or listening to his men give concerts on the mandolin and harmonica. Stasis was poison to him. But whether or not he abandoned ship, I am now convinced that he is responsible for the deaths of his men. He assembled the expedition hastily, recruiting an inexperienced crew that included a drug addict who carried his hypodermic needles in a pocket-sized case. He insisted on using a ship that had been declared unsound by his captain. And though he was one of the greatest solo operators in history, he was a terrible leader. He had no idea how to organize large groups of men or large amounts of cargo, and he had so little regard for his staff and crew that, instead of welcoming them as soon as he arrived at the naval yard from which the Karluk was to embark, he kept them waiting while he held a five-hour press conference.

  Worst of all was his cavalier attitude toward the men he lost. His journal entry from August 11, 1915, when he heard the news, disposes of their fate in two sentences far less laden with emotion than the entry, four years earlier, in which he mourned the death of his favorite sled dog. He blamed his men for being less competent than he would have been in their situation—in effect, for being so foolish as to succumb to the myth of the Frozen North. Did he fail to realize that The Friendly Arctic might not be the most tasteful title for a book about an expedition on which eleven people died?

  The frontispiece of The Friendly Arctic is a black-and-white photograph of Stefansson dragging a seal across the ice. He is wearing mukluks and a caribou-skin parka. Under his right arm he carries a rifle; under his left, a harpoon. His head is bare, and he is alone.

  He selected the picture while he was living at the Harvard Club in New York City, beginning a career of lecturing and writing that made him, in the words of one biographer, “the equivalent of a senior officer who has become too valuable to go out on combat patrols, and must sit at his headquarters surrounded by his staff.” He shelved his plan to camp on an ice floe with one or two companions, moving with the polar drift for a couple of years. Instead, from his desk, he organized abortive schemes to colonize Wrangel Island and breed reindeer on Baffin Island. He lived for forty-four years after he returned from his third expedition, and—because of illness, because his reputation in Canada had lost its luster, because he had traded his caribou-skin parka for a double-breasted suit—he never traveled in the Arctic again.

  It is not as great a tragedy as the abandonment of one’s family, not as great as the loss of eleven lives, but it is nonetheless a tragedy that when The Friendly Arctic appeared, the Macmillan Company could not include the same note it had inserted before the title page of My Life with the Eskimo in 1913:

  NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION

  The publishers regret that owing to Mr. Stefansson’s departure on his new expedition to the far North he was unable to read the final proofs of this volume.

  COFFEE

  hen I was a sophomore in college, I drank coffee nearly every evening with my friends Peter and Alex. Even though the coffee was canned; even though the milk was stolen from the dining hall and refrigerated on the windowsill of my friends’ dormitory room, where it was diluted by snow and adulterated by soot; even though Alex’s scuzzy one-burner hot plate looked as if it might electrocute us at any moment; and even though we washed our batterie de cuisine in the bathroom sink and let it air-dry on a pile of paper towels next to the toilet—even though Dunster F-13 was, in short, not exactly Escoffier’s kitchen, we considered our nightly coffee ritual the very acme and pitch of elegance. And I think that in many ways we were right.

  Alex came from Cambridge, but Peter was alluringly international. He had a Serbian father, an American mother, and a French coffeemaker. At my home in Los Angeles, the coffee-making process had taken about three seconds: you plunked a spoonful of Taster’s Choice freeze-dried crystals in a cup, added hot water, and stirred. With Peter’s cafetière à piston, you could easily squander a couple of hours on the business of assembling, heating, brewing, pouring, drinking, disassembling, and cleaning (not to mention talking), all the while telling yourself that you weren’t really procrastinating, because as soon as you were fully caffeinated you would be able to study like a fiend. The cafetière had seven parts: a cylindrical glass beaker; a four-footed metal frame; a chrome lid impaled through its center by a plunger rod topped with a spherical black knob; and three metal filtration discs that screwed onto the tip of the plunger in a sequence for whose mastery our high SAT scores had somehow failed to equip us. After all the pieces were in place, you dolloped some ground coffee into the beaker, poured in boiling water, and waited precisely four minutes. (In the title sequence of The Ipcress File, special agent Harry Palmer unaccountably fails to carry out this crucial step. As an eagle-eyed critic for The Guardian once observed, Palmer grinds his beans and pops them into his cafetière, but fails to let the grounds steep before he depresses the plunger. How could any self-respecting spy face his daily docket of murder and mayhem fueled by such an anemic brew?) Only then did you apply the heel of your hand to the plunger knob and ram the grounds to the bottom of the beaker, though the potable portion always retained a subtle trace of Turkish sludge. What a satisfying operation! The plunger fit exactly into its glass tunnel, presenting a sensuous resistance when you urged it downward; if you pressed too fast, hot water and grounds would gush out the top. The whole process involved a good deal of screwing and unscrewing and trying not to make too much of a mess. Truth to tell, it was a lot like sex (another mystery into which I was initiated that year, though not by Peter or Alex), and as soon as you’d done it once, you wanted to do it again and again and again.

  Disdaining the dining hall’s white polystyrene cups, most of which had gone a little gray around the rim, each of us had procured our own china mug. Mine had a picture of a polka-dotted pig on it, an allusion to the frequency with which it was refilled. I stirred its contents with a silver demitasse spoon whose bowl was engraved with the name of my hometown. “Firenze” or “Cap d’Antibes” would have been preferable to “Los Angeles,” but I did like the feel of the calligraphy against my tongue. Although the whole point of coffee-drinking was to be grown up—no Pepsi-Cola for bohemian intellectuals like us!—the amount of milk and sugar with which we undermined our sophisticated brew suggested that we needed to regress as much as we yearned to evolve. The end product resembled melted coffee ice cream.

  It was the last time in my life that coffee slowed the hours rather than speeding them up. Those long, lazy nights—snow falling outside on Cowperthwaite Street, the three of us huddled inside in a warm, bright room, talking of literature and politics until the rest of Dunster House was asleep—were an essential part of my college curriculum. After all, wasn’t education a matter of infusing one’s life with flavorful essences, pressing out the impurities, and leaving only a little sludge at the bottom?

  It is said that around the seventh century, somewhere near the Red Sea—whether it was Ethiopia or Yemen is a subject of debate—a herd of goats ate the magenta berries of a local shrub and began to act strangely. In a classic 1935 study called Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity, the German journalist Heinrich Eduard Jacob described their behavior thus:

  All night, for five nights in succession—nay, for seven or eight—they clambered over rocks, cutting capers, chasing one another, bleating fantastically. They turned their bearded heads hither and thither; with reddened eyes they gambolled convulsively when they caught sight of the goatherds, and then they darted off swift as arrows speeding from the bow.

  Having observed the frisky goats, the imam of a nearby monastery—a sort of medieval Carlos Castaneda—roasted the berries in a chafing dish, crushed them in a mortar, mixed them with boiling water, and drank the brew. When he lay down, he couldn’t sleep. His heartbeat quickened, his limbs felt light, his mood became cheerful and alert. “He was not merely thinking,” wrote Jacob. “His thoughts had become concretely visible. He watched them from the right side and from the left, from above and from below. They raced like a t
eam of horses.” The imam found that he could juggle a dozen ideas in the time it normally took to consider a single one. His visual acuity increased; in the glow of his oil lamp, the parchment on his table looked unusually lustrous and the robe that hung on a nearby peg seemed to swell with life. He felt strengthened, as Jacob put it, “by heavenly food brought to him by the angels of Paradise.”

  Whoa! Little did the hopped-up imam know that while he and the goats were happily tripping, 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine (otherwise known as caffeine) was coursing through their veins, stimulating brain activity by blocking the uptake of adenosine, a neurotransmitter that, if left to its own devices, makes people (and goats) sleepy and depressed. Just enough of the stuff and you feel you’ve been fed by the angels of Paradise; too much, and Mr. Coffee Nerves (a diabolical cartoon character with a twirly mustache who graced Postum ads in the 1930s) gets you in his grip.