By the end I was almost acclimatized, I could walk through the winds as they blasted snow in my eyes, and in England for a while I was never cold.
The crisp coldness of the air made me think quickly; I wrote letters to everyone I knew, generating reams of paper which I stacked in a pile and tried not to use as firelighters. I read Knut Hamsun, the Norwegian Nobel laureate, who had loved the Nordland summer’s endless day, the long light evenings, the rustling of the leaves in the forest, the darting of the light across the fjord. The skies of pale fire, the drift of the season into winter. Hamsun had started out in the 1890s as a crazy brilliant modernist, writing out the madness of the city and the desperation of the starving writer, in the reeling prose of Hunger. He had come from a small town north of Trondheim; he was from a poor family, and no one encouraged him to write; he passed his twenties as a mendicant, struggling to survive, emigrating to the States in search of something else, declining into a dozen piecemeal jobs. Hunger was the product of a raging and desperate frustration, his ravenous urge to succeed. Success began to ruin Hamsun; he became obsessed with his own rise from obscurity, his novels started to talk of nothing else. He became nostalgic and impatient; he lurched away from the city, writing nothing but rustic romances laced with sentimentality, tales of robust hunting men of few words, clumsy in elegant company, chasing the daughters of local merchants through the vibrant forests. They lived in huts like mine, they wore big boots, they knew nothing of manners and conventions; they were tormented brutes, aware that society judged them. They were good at whittling wood, and occasionally sheer frustration at their failure to ensnare a local beauty led them to a melodramatic act. One of the rustic hut-dwellers shot himself in the foot one morning because the beautiful daughter of the local businessman wouldn’t talk to him.
I had sat in the hut, the snow stacked up outside the door, reading Hamsun’s odes to rustic simplicity.
When the ship slips past the Arctic Circle, there is no fanfare, no signal from the shore. There is a terse announcement from the bridge at 7 A.M. The landscape stays the same; the same stark crags and tree-coated rocks lounging low in the fjord. Streaks of ice and snow glint on the tops of the mountains. There’s an island ahead, coated in red firs. In the small Arctic town of Ørnes, the sound of the ship’s horn echoes around the mountains. We have reached another defiant, isolated place: a few elegant old buildings by the quayside, smaller houses stretching up the hillside. A sand beach slides down to the ocean; it is deserted, though the sun shines across it. Anywhere here, I imagine Nansen muttering to himself, as he saw these sun-drenched rocks. Pytheas might have arrived anywhere around here, and called it Thule. Here, where a lone crag casts a long shadow over the water, or here, on this barren islet, a thin coating of moss clinging to the rock. Thule as Nansen saw it is a place of wooden houses, in red, yellow and green, topped with slanted roofs. Lines of rorbuer—fishermen’s huts—along the water’s edge. The crushed peaks of the mountains, severe slices of granite colliding into irregular shapes, perverse dodecahedrons, drawn by a hyperactive hand. Then there are places where the mountains lurk like squat rock beasts, behind the long flat islands. It’s a staggering land, constantly inventive and showy, producing new wonders of scenery. It’s a place where the people are silenced by the immensity of the rocks, left staring quietly at the sea. Purple mountains rise in the distance, and the only sounds are the cries of gulls, twirling in the boat’s wake, and the relentless sluicing of water under the hull. The fjord absorbs the colours of the sky; the sun casts a low haze across the mountains; the mountains reflect their shapes across the fjord.
It’s a hot afternoon; the sun is shining onto the waves. The ship stops at Bodø, a small Arctic outpost. The mountains are beautiful. The sea is serene and glitters in the sun. The town is a collapsed street, diggers slamming into the cracked concrete, military aircraft screaming across the skies. There’s a shopping centre in a state of destruction, with wire fences everywhere. The area was ruined at the end of the Second World War, when the Germans retreated from the Russian forces moving from the east. Bodø is a town of concrete blocks, interspersed with neat wooden buildings, rebuilt when the inhabitants returned home after the war. A memorial stands outside Bodø Cathedral: ‘To the Memory of those from Bodø who gave their lives for Norway during the War and the Occupation 1940-45.’ Cast adrift in Nansen’s Thule, startled by the sun, I dive into the regional museum, and find a sketchy collection of junk and fishing tackle, distributed randomly across a couple of rooms. There’s a large photograph of the town in 1939, before the destruction—rows of wooden houses, quaint and nondescript. And there’s a shot of the town after the war—piled-up ash and debris, silence and thick smoke.
We passed slowly through a stretching shambles of islets and inlets, with the sun spreading across the sky. The light was gleaming across the pastel mountains, turning them purple. The sun shone like fire on the rock pillars. Small villages emerged out of the rock desert, and receded again, as the boat moved onwards into further miles of slab rocks lurking above the sea. There was the constant background hum of the engines and the gentle slap of water swirling around the bows. I sat on the deck watching the deckhands coil the ropes, and then I dozed for a few hours, curled in a sleeping bag, under the shelter of the ship’s bridge.
After Thule, as Nansen defined it, the stark crags of the Lofoten Islands emerged ahead—an archipelago of barren crinkled rocks, emerging violently from the sea. Lashed by storms in winter, serene and mist-scaped in summer. An immense wall of rocks loomed ahead, a line of mountains in the ocean. Rocks in the gathering dusk, looking like a vast island. Before the sun set, the boat made a detour into Trollfjord—the gathering shadows playing across the blackened crags, snow glinting like mist in patches on the rocks. I was woken by the shuddering of the boat as it turned around at the end of the fjord. The enormous sheer sides had been crushed close together, leaving a gap barely wide enough for the ship between them. In the half-light, it seemed to me that the rock formations of Trollfjord resembled nothing so much as anguished faces, encased in stone: great simian ridges, deep sockets, gaping mouths, severe and strange.
In his Arctic history In Northern Mists, Nansen had written about a mythical ancient tribe of the far north, the Hyperboreans. The Hyperboreans were a people who knew neither war nor injustice, neither age nor disease; they supped with divinities, they invited Apollo over for a dance and dinner, they entertained heroes, Perseus among them. Only the divine and semi-divine knew where the Hyperboreans lived; the poet Pindar gave elusive descriptions: ‘travelling neither by ships nor on foot could you find/ the way to the assembly of the Hyperboreans.’ They were an immortal race, living beyond the fierce north wind, in farthest northern Ocean, where the tired stars sank to rest, where the moon was so near that it was possible to see the imperfections on its surface. Some sources said there was a marvellous temple, shaped like a sphere, which floated freely in the air, borne by the winds. There were three giant brothers there, twelve feet high, who performed the service of priests to the sanctuary. When they offered the sacrifice and sang hymns to the sound of the cithara, whole clouds of swans surrounded the temple and settled upon it.
Though they lived in the northern zone, their land seemed to be quiet and perfect, a place free of the harshness of the north wind, of the sleet and snow, the driving rain. They were the only race living in the north-east who did not encroach continually on their neighbours, unlike the Scythians, Issedones and Arimaspians, who were cramped together in the north, and oppressed constantly by griffins and other bizarre creatures. The Hyperboreans were a musical tribe, passing the days playing the lyre and the pipes, listening to choirs. They had escaped Nemesis, and when they grew tired of life—of this song-filled, flower-strewn life—they threw themselves, with wreaths in their hair, from a cliff into the sea.
The myth of the Hyperboreans was gradually entwined with Thule, so the poets sometimes wrote about the Hyperborean waves crashing on the shores of
Thule, or the Hyperborean peoples of Thule. They seemed the right sort of inhabitants for a mystery isle; their origins as uncertain as those of the land of Thule, any lurking truth clouded by anecdote and poetry. Nansen was a scholar of precision; he dismissed suggestions that the Hyperboreans might actually have been an early Germanic tribe. But when Nansen named Norway as Thule he knew the Hyperboreans were part of the mythical package. It flattered the people, the notion that their nation might have been visited by Pytheas, that it might have been the source of the idea of Thule. And it also flattered the people to link them imaginatively with the Hyperboreans, the grand old immortals of the north. It was a useful piece of national symbolism, for a nation finding its feet, struggling to emerge from centuries under the overall control of its neighbours, Denmark and Sweden. Nansen had a strong sense of ancestral pride; the Viking exploration of the far north received extensive coverage in In Northern Mists. His Thule bound the Norwegians up with the discovery of the far north, making them an ancient nation of Arctic people: first the local population welcoming the explorer Pytheas, and later the explorers themselves, pushing towards the North and South Poles.
Nansen’s patriotism was of a robust sort; he had been a key negotiator during the Norwegian independence talks with Sweden, a key representative of Norway abroad, a key candidate for president. Yet Nansen was never blindly partisan; he was never obsessed with his own country, to the exclusion of all others. He ceded the Arctic quest to Amundsen, a relentless, obsessively driven explorer, who cared less about international geopolitics and more about simple adventure. Nansen turned to the epic disaster of Russia in the post-Revolution era. During the 1920s, he became involved with the League of Nations, working as high commissioner for the repatriation of prisoners of war, helping to return Russian prisoners held in Germany and German prisoners held in Russia. He worked to alleviate the famine that hit Russia in 1921; when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922 he used the money to establish farms in the Volga region and the Ukraine. The Nobel Prize particularly recognized his part in devising the Nansen passport, which supplied stateless refugees with identity and travel papers; beneficiaries included Vladimir Nabokov’s family. He was accused of naivety, by his peers and by later writers, of being manipulated equally by the Americans and the Russians. He might have been aware of the tactics around him, but was too fixed on his goal to care.
And in the 1920s, as Norse mythology was bound into nationalism in the northern countries, Nansen was linked to a folksy domestic party called the Fatherland League. The Fatherland League wanted a strong Norway, a nation that could protect itself from the creeping threat of Communism, as they saw it. Nansen lent his powerful jowls, his sonorous charisma-drenched presence, to its calls for the Norwegians to fulfil their potential. Even in this, he couldn’t stay with empty phrases, with rhetoric stripped away from action. He was increasingly a reluctant figurehead, too diverse for the shriller forms of nationalism. It was a fortunate reluctance, prescient in the circumstances: after Nansen’s death, the Fatherland League was drawn towards extremism, hijacked by Nazi sympathizers.
The boat passed crags to starboard, with tree-coated rocks low in the fjord, and I thought of Nansen’s house outside Oslo, which I had visited on the way to Bergen. I had arrived on a bus out of Oslo, which had stopped on a major road. Nansen’s house lay up a narrow lane; when he lived there it had stood beyond the limits of the city. Most of the house was being used as a research institute, but the director of the institute took me up to an unheated room, at the top of the house. The room was usually kept locked, and the researchers stayed away, but the director had a key; his office, he told me, was just opposite, and a sense of the past must have permeated his days, as he walked past the locked door. He twisted the key and we entered a neat study, with a view of rust-coloured ivy clambering on the walls outside. On the desk there were hundreds of handwritten sheets of paper in neat piles. There were shelves stacked with leather-bound books, and cloying pre-Raphaelite paintings on the walls. More austere were the black-and-white photographs, scattered around, of an explorer, diplomat, statesman and his family. As I stood by the desk, my hand on the chair Nansen had sat in, I felt the sense of a gap. The trappings remained, preserved in their places, but the unifying consciousness had vanished. A few Nansen flasks were stacked in a corner, for taking samples from the ocean, just one of Nansen’s inventions, which had included the tailored runners of his Nansen sledge, and his own recipe for pemmican. There were files of correspondence from Russians, stacks of fountain pens, knives to sharpen pencils. Nansen had laboured in the room, struggling to solve the problems of another nation, writing letters, preparing his notes, petitioning governments and the League of Nations. Nansen had overworked in the small cluttered study throughout the 1920s. He saw the carnage of the First World War, and he kept thinking that hard work might solve it. Yet he couldn’t gather all the parts together.
Had he lived into the 1930s, Nansen would have been surprised at what happened to his former assistant Vidkun Quisling. Nansen had met Quisling through Russia, where Quisling had worked as a military attaché in St. Petersburg. Nansen employed Quisling throughout the 1920s in famine-relief enterprises and in the attempted repatriation of Armenians from Turkey. When Nansen wrote Russia & Peace during 1923, Quisling helped him. Nansen found Quisling a competent administrator, and recommended him for a series of jobs in Russia, the Balkans, and the Ukraine. Asked once to recommend someone to speak about Russia, Nansen recommended Quisling. After Nansen and Quisling stopped working together, they exchanged letters; Nansen sent Quisling New Year’s greetings shortly before his death. They were hardly friends; Quisling was much younger, much less senior, and Nansen by the end was a regal and fixated man, concerned more with causes than with individuals. Like any other budding opportunist, Quisling struggled to link himself with Nansen; after Nansen’s death, Quisling supplied commentary and reaction in the press, trying to bind himself to Nansen’s reputation. It was a game he was still playing at his trial for treason, after the end of the Second World War, when he claimed Nansen had been like a protector and a father to him. But Nansen had been like a protector and father to Norway, in the popular imagination; it was a feeling many shared.
During the 1930s, after Nansen’s death, Quisling began to work on his ‘philosophical’ ideas. Quisling developed a fantasy about the north: he thought Norway was the homeland of the Nordic race, and believed the nation should play a leading part in the Greater Nordic Peace Union. The Nordic race, he believed, was a force for global civilization, and by working together, Quisling believed, the Nordic or Nordic-friendly countries would create world unity. He wanted the Scandinavian countries and Germany and Britain to form a ‘Nordic League.’ Quisling maintained that materialist creeds would collapse, and be superseded by a return to spiritualism.
I imagined, as the boat moved along the coast, that Nansen would have dismissed Quisling’s world-changing scheme as utopian adolescence. Nansen’s enthusiasms and passions were undercut by a brooding sense of melancholy, bordering on despair. It was a state of sensitive paralysis that had come to him during the Arctic night, even as he marvelled at the beauties of the ice floes. It was a form of humility, a reluctant acceptance of the insignificance of human desires and doctrines in the face of the vast emptiness of the northern regions. A writer of vivid imagination, a myth collator of eclectic tastes, Nansen was also precise and realistic, qualities fashioned by the trial of theory during Arctic travel. When Quisling began to entwine his variety of nationalism with the schemes of the German National Socialists, Nansen would have despised the presumption and barbarism of the Nazis, their belief that world orders could be created through violence and destruction. As he had recoiled from the totalitarian force of the Communist state, Nansen would have been repulsed by the curtailing of individual freedoms inherent to the Nazi order.
Quisling was a minor political figure, in a small country, but he craved political power and philosophical influence.
He had a brief stint as a cabinet minister in the early 1930s for the Agrarian Party. His strangeness, his introversion, his extremism combined to make him unpopular. There was a bizarre moment during his time as a minister when he was apparently attacked in his office at knife-point. Instead of sounding the alarm, Quisling sneaked out of the building and went home, and only called the police later. It made everyone uneasy; something was unclear about the story, and it contributed to a sense that Quisling was bizarre and untrustworthy. The gulf between desire and attainment fell like a shadow across Quisling’s career, as he struggled to emerge from insignificance. He founded a group called the Nordic Folk Uprising, based on the ‘fact’ that ‘Norwegians along with other Scandinavian peoples form the core of the large folk family which represents the most valuable racial contribution to humanity, the great Nordic race,’ said Quisling. During the 1930s, Quisling became increasingly concerned with racial ‘purity’ and anti-Semitism. He talked about ‘blood consciousness, ’ marching his men through working-class districts, trying to gain support from the disaffected. Quisling wanted the regeneration of the Nordic race as much as the Nazis—he hoped the Norwegian population would swell to 10 million by the year 2000. He would have been disappointed: Norway’s population in 2000 was less than half this number. In 1933 he founded the National Union, but his party failed to attract popular support. In elections leading up to the war, it was always scrabbling around at 2 or 3 per cent of the overall vote. By slavish imitation of the Nazis, Quisling hoped for a similar coup: he dressed his militia in brown shirts; he insisted on being addressed as the Fører, the leader. He was in contact with the German fascists during the 1930s; he sent off a telegram to Hitler thanking him for all his work for the ‘Germanic and Nordic Brüdervolk.’ He went to visit Hitler and Rosenberg in Berlin in the winter of 1939; he tried to negotiate for the leadership of the new Nazi Norway during 1940.
The Ice Museum Page 18