For winter reading: three classics, frozen in time

As a bone-chilling front brings winter 2017-18 to America in earnest and the President trolls climate change on Twitter, Henry’s bundling up next to the fire with two classics of the grand era of imperial polar exploration a century and more ago:

Robert F. Peary, The North Pole, Frederick A. Stokes Co, 1910. Published September 1910. Quarto., 373 pp., hardcover, no dust jacket. Navy cloth boards, gold-embossed cover and spine titling. Wear and fraying to top and bottom and corners of covers. Ex-library copy; call numbers have been nearly removed from spine but back endpaper bears discoloration from return-date slip formerly pasted in. One hand-colored photo at frontispiece with tissue with eight full-page ones in the text; 100 b&w photos; one color map by National Geographic editor Gilbert Grosvenor at the rear end pages. Foreword by former President Theodore Roosevelt. Good condition. HBB price: $50 or best offer.

A career US Navy engineer, Peary (1856-1920) got the polar bug in 1886, when, on a mission to Greenland, he tried to cross it without success. He returned with a better-funded expedition in 1891 that included his wife (having spent only three of the first twenty years of their marriage together, he signed her up as dietitian despite an utter lack of qualifications) and a doctor, Frederick Cook. He succeeded in proving Greenland an island and set a “farthest north” north record at the icy land’s tip. 

Expeditions in 1905-06 and 1908-09 brought him closer and closer to the North Pole, which he claimed to have reached in 1909. Cook, having gotten the bug, too, denied Peary’s claim in favor of his own to be the first to reach the Pole's goal. After several court actions and remarkable string-pulling by the better-connected Peary, Cook’s claim was rejected at a 1908 trial. 

Peary did a quick victory lap, hoovering up exploration medals and a rear admiral’s flag from Congress, and retired to dine out on his fame for his last decade. His claim was disputed by others, but Peary’s and his patrons'- notably, the National Geographic Society- refusal to submit his records for peer review left things in the air until the late 1980s, when it was generally accepted that Cook got there first, while Peary fell sixty or so miles short. In the meantime, another decidedly unromantic character, Roald Amundsen (about whom see more below), reached the North Pole in 1926 beyond any but the crankiest crank's cavils.

Offsetting his failure, in more recent times, has been a new appreciation of Peary’s collaboration with Matthew Henson, an African-American store clerk he hired as his valet in 1887, and who worked with Peary until the explorer died. While Peary got a 50th anniversary, Cold War proxy postage stamp in 1959, both were commemorated together in a 1986 issue.

Today both would be execrated over their relationships- and paternity of children with- Inuit girls; Peary’s mistress was fourteen and bore him two children. 

From the other end of the world, Henry Bemis offers:

Robert F. Scott, Tragedy and Triumph: The Journals of Captain R.F. Scott’s Last Polar Expedition (Konecky & Konecky, 1998). ISBN 1-56852-1871. Facsimile reprint of the 1913 edition of the record of Scott’s fatal attempt to reach the South Pole in 1912. Octavo, 521 pp., hardcover, unclipped dust jacket. Navy boards, silver-lettered spine titling. Two sets of expedition photos. Very good condition. HBB price: $40 or best offer.

A Royal Navy career officer, Scott (1868-1912) volunteered to lead a civilian Antarctic expedition in 1899, hoping to revive his stalled career and make some money after his father’s business failed. His 1901-04 South Pole expedition only whetted his yearning to plant the Union Jack at the bottom of the earth; on his return trip in 1911-12 made his goal only to find the Norwegian flag and a note from explorer Roald Amundsen, left after he reached the spot five weeks earlier. Beset by weather, low supplies, and illness, Scott’s party died in their tent at the end of March 1912. A rescue party was unable to reach them until November.

Scott became a British Empire martyr/icon, his lamp assiduously polished by his socialite widow, and remained so into the 1970s when Roland Huntsford published a savage biography painting Scott as a dilettante and a gloryhound. Since then the pendulum has swung back a good distance in Scott’s favor as the accumulation of scholarship- and a deeper appreciation of the odds of failure and death that dogged every polar expedition has brought the last age of the hero-explorer into sharper relief.

They also served who stayed below the Arctic Circle, however, and that area has generated its own literature, too:

Service, Robert, Bar-Room Ballads: A Book of Verse (Dodd, Mead & Co, 1st ed., 3rd printing 1946). “The Bard of the Yukon,” Robert Service (1874-1958) won fame and fortune for his poems and stories enshrining life in the mining camps and gold rush towns of the Klondike era in western Canada. “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee” are his most popular works. Hardcover, no dust jacket, good condition. HBB price: $25.

Robert William Service (1874-1958) was born in Lancashire, England, the first of the ten children of a Scottish banker. At five he was farmed out to live with his paternal grandfather and three maiden aunts; he wrote his first verse at six.

Out of school, Service clerked for what is now the Royal Bank of Scotland. At 21 he chucked it over and moved to Vancouver Island, Canada, arriving with a Buffalo Bill outfit and dreams to be a cowboy. He bummed his way up and down the North American west coast, "starving in Mexico, residing in a California bordello, farming on Vancouver Island and pursuing unrequited love in Vancouver." 

In 1898 he was a store clerk and happened to mention to the editor of the daily paper in the provincial capital, Victoria, that he penned verses in his spare time. Over the next two years, the paper ran six poems on the Boer War; Service got his information from a brother who was captured, alongside Winston S. Churchill, by the rebels.

He met a woman at a dance and wooed her by mail. She wanted an educated husband who’d keep her up. He took college courses. She said no anyway. 

Hard up financially, he used his RBS connections to get a post with a British Columbia bank. Over the years 1903-12 he worked in Kamloops, Whitehorse, and Dawson City, reveling in the boom and bust frontier life of the goldfields and began publishing his poetry to ever-wider audiences and popular acclaim.

Restless, Service got hired by a Toronto paper to cover the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, then moved to Paris and set up as an artist. He married the daughter of a wealthy distiller; they kept a flat in Paris and a house in Brittany. 

The Great War broke out and Service- then 41- was turned down by the British Army. He spent the early months of the conflict as a war correspondent again until he was arrested and nearly executed in a Dunkirk spy panic.

Service volunteered as a stretcher bearer and ambulance driver for the American Red Cross until his health gave way; he retreated to Brittany to recover. Once the war was over, he returned to Paris, living as a flaneur- spats, monocle and all- by day and a roughly-dressed bohemian on the street by night, gathering material for his next book of poems. In it, he lived out his fantasy of being a Parisian painter living in sidewalk cafes and absinthe bars.

Backstopped by his wife’s money, Service made his own, hand over fist. He was “the Bard of the Yukon,” and his 1907 poem, “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” earned him over half a million dollars- about $13 million in today’s coin. His works sold over three million copies, he published a thousand poems in 45 collections, and his books were still selling well when he died.

The Services took to spending winters on the Riviera in the 1920’s, mingling with the wealthy of the English and American artist/author colony. He took up writing thriller novels and traveling as his fancy took him. After a 1930 visit to check of the socialist paradise of the USSR, he was unimpressed, but his “Ballad of Lenin’s Tomb” so irritated the Communists his works were banned from translation and he was excluded from Soviet encyclopedias despite being one of the most popular writers on earth.

Service was in the USSR again when the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was announced in August 1939. He high-tailed it back to Nice, only to see the Germans invade France and come looking for the poet who’d insulted Hitler in the French papers.

The Services managed to get out of France and spent World War II in California, where he did readings of his work for USO shows. In 1942 he played himself in the fourth film version of a Klondike Gold Rush novel, The Spoilers, as Randolph Scott and John Wayne vied for Marlene Dietrich’s eye.

Returning to France, Service rebuilt his destroyed home in Brittany, wintering in Monte Carlo before taking residence there, a tax exile, for the last decade of his life. His wife and daughter toured the Yukon scenes where he had launched his career, then almost ghost towns, in 1946. Service remained in France, preferring to remember it all in his head. 

In May 1958, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation arrived to film a documentary interview with Service; he handed the reporter a script he had always worked out. From the days of his bohemian artist alter ego in Paris, he enjoyed blurring the lines between fact and fiction (his two volumes of memoirs have been labeled “a triumph of obfuscation”). He died, three months later, at 84.

Critics dismissed Service’s work as doggerel, though Northrop Frye appraised it as pretty much the best Canadian literature had to offer in its frontier days. Service himself did not call his work poetry. "Verse, not poetry, is what I was after ... something the man in the street would take notice of and the sweet old lady would paste in her album; something the schoolboy would spout and the fellow in the pub would quote. Yet I never wrote to please anyone but myself; it just happened. I belonged to the simple folks whom I liked to please."

Like Kipling’s verse, Service’s poetry has a rolling, rhythmic gait, easy to remember and vivid in its imagery. His was a man's man’s verse. President Ronald Reagan adored Service and committed most of his early work to heart. He maintained that when he couldn’t sleep, he recited “Sam McGrew” to himself until he dozed off; if that didn't work, he switched to “The Cremation of Sam McGee”, and that, Regan said, “usually did it”. 

At a Canadian State Dinner hosted by Pierre Trudeau, the Prime Minister’s request that Reagan recite the latter brought the house down as a duet with Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, seated next to him. During his six-year imprisonment in North Vietnam, Senator John McCain said he learned the poem- all 701 words of it- from an unknown prisoner in an adjoining cell, who tapped it through the wall to him in Morse Code.

Service retains his status as a giant in Canadian arts; in the 1960s the nation rose to chastise the upstart American state of Alaska for claiming him as its poet laureate. His wife, Germaine, died in 1989 at the age of 102.