Dead Letter Department #17
(did you miss dead letter department #16? catch up here!)
weather report
I’ve been cutting my hair: first trimming, then correcting the undercut, & finally actually giving myself a cut of sorts. It looks exactly the way you’d think a haircut would look when applied by someone with zero (0) skills and a pair of kitchen shears while listening to Laura Jane Grace’s new album, At War With the Silverfish. I’m kind of into it, & it is also freeing to feel like it doesn’t matter too much if I fuck up my appearance. There are a lot of weird voices in my head about how I should look, as I think there are for most of us, & there’s something kind of satisfying in ignoring the well-meaning words of absolutely all of them & doing something extremely ill-advised. You can’t stop me, person who insisted I should wear jewel tones! Screw you, everyone who’s told me what would be ‘flattering!’ Can’t stop me now, I’ve already got the scissors out.
reading room
“Polar exploration is at once the cleanest & most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised. It is the only form of adventure in which you put on your clothes at Michaelmas & keep them on until Christmas, &, save for a layer of the natural grease of the body, find them as clean as though they were new. It is more lonely than London, more secluded than any monastery, & the post comes but once a year…A member of Campbell’s party tells me that the trenches at Ypres were a comparative picnic…Take it all in all, I do not believe anybody on earth has a worse time than an Emperor penguin.”
Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World is almost too many things: a cheerful travelogue of the journey south to explore the South Pole, a scientist’s notebook of observation, a portrait of pre-World War English manhood, and, finally, a frantic, obsessively detailed defense of the circumstances that led to the deaths of Scott, Wilson & Bowers only eleven miles from the depot that held enough food and oil to bring them all the way back to camp. They had gained their goal but were beaten out by a month by the Norweigan party, reaching the Pole only to find another flag already planted at the summit. Evans died on the journey down, having sustained injuries in his many falls on the ice. Lawrence Oates followed, frost-bitten and ill, once he realized he would never make it back to camp. Knowing the other men risked their chance at return by keeping to his pace or trying to ferry him along, he walked out into the raging blizzard alone, saying “I am just going out and may be some time.”
This is, of course, the line and the figure that got me interested in The Worst Journey when I first heard of it, and 500 pages later I can hear him saying it, I can see him stepping out into the whirling snow. Oates walked to his death in the hopes of saving the others, but it was already too late: supplies were running low, and, as Cherry-Garrard discovered through painstaking research in future years, the life-saving cooking oil they had so carefully cached for the party was gradually evaporating into the freezing air.
Cherry-Garrard wrote The Worst Journey ten years after the events & seems to know even when writing it that the book will be misunderstood and the party will be misrepresented. He has had, after all, to live with the strange fame that accompanies a famous tragedy, and the book seems to sometimes be an effort to persuade himself onward, hoping to find a way to live with the memories. He tells us that he still dreams sometimes of the close-wound camp:
“With all its troubles it is a good life. We came back from the Barrier, telling one another we loathed the place & nothing on earth should make us return. But now the Barrier comes back to us, with its clean open life, & the smell of the cooker, & its soft sound sleep. So much of the trouble of this world is caused by memories, for we only remember half.”
This is the Dead Letter Department, so I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the book is also, of course, a love letter to Cherry-Garrard’s lost companions: Scott, with his nerves of wire, and Edward Wilson, but above all Henry ‘Birdie’ Bowers. Of Bowers, “one of the two or three greatest friends of [his] life," he writes:
“To those accustomed to judge men by the standards of their fashionable & corseted drawing-rooms Bowers appeared crude. ‘You couldn’t kill that man if you took a pole-axe to him,’ was the comment of a New Zealander at a dance at Christchurch. Such men may be at a discount in conventional life; but give me a snowy ice-floe waving about on the top of a black swell, a ship thrown aback, a sledge-party almost shattered, or one that has just upset their supper on to the floorcloth of the tent (which is much the same thing), and I will lie down and cry for Bowers to come and lead me to food & safety.”
Most Reading Room books I heartily recommend, & would probably offer you a small sum to read as long as you promised to discuss it with me in detail. This one I’m not sure on, especially as we sink deeper into winter. The depictions of the journeys are visceral, brutal. The building losses are agonizing, and there’s something about the particular, inescapable sadness of knowing you have seen the last of something that is increasingly hard to bear. Still, if you do read it, if you have read it, tell me if those last passages, Cherry-Garrard’s impassioned defense of the expedition, actually persuaded him or not. They persuaded me, but I’m not sure, in the end, if he managed to convince himself.
other senses
I’ve been not exactly nostalgic but trying to remember some past versions of myself with a certain amount of compassion: unusual for me, because most often all I see looking back is a hot mess. In honor of that person I’ve been wearing the first perfume I bought: Dolce & Gabbana’s Light Blue. I’ve heard this described as one of the most basic bitch perfumes, to which I say are we not all basic, in the end? Are we not all bitches? Anyway, it’s a cheerful scent for these darkening days: Sicilian lemon & apple, cedar & bellflower.
one good thing
Dune is really fucking good. It completely swept me out to sea. I’ve thought about Oscar Isaac’s Duke Leto literally every day since then. It’s so rare these days that I get to have a completely immersive experience & Dune was it: I think my mouth was slightly ajar for large portions of it. Sometimes you’re just sitting, watching a thing, & sometimes you believe. I believed it, implicitly, because the world of the movie is huge and old and very real. I was so happy to be out of ours for a minute. It’s been a long time since I read the book but I remember it as being pretty bad in terms of both misogyny & racism. The movie’s not perfect but it does strike me as an improvement.
write back
If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend. I hope to see you back here at the Dead Letter Department again soon & in the meantime if you find yourself on an ice-floe at the top of a black swell, I hope there is a Birdie Bowers at hand to lead you home again.