Coming in from the cold
| My dear friends Hello! Remember me? I’ve been diligently honouring my promise not to spam and pester you with mails, and frankly I’ve been doing a pretty sound job of it, but now the time has come to knock again on your door with my hair freshly combed and my shoes newly shined, like a traveling sewing-machine salesman, or a Mormon on his mission. You see, something happened last year that made me miserable, but even while I was miserable, I was aware of being happier than I have ever been: I wrote a book. I have started several books since my previous book – one was commissioned, took shape and even had a cover. There were various reasons that I never finished any of them: I lost faith in the book I was writing, I lost faith in the act of writing, in readers, in myself – but once I started this book I didn’t pause and didn’t really do anything else until it was finished. Twenty-three years ago I met a Chinese fortune-teller in the saloon car of the Orient Express, traveling down the jungled peninsula between Bangkok and Singapore, who told me, among other things: “You will be successful when you learn to do one thing at a time.” That was twenty-three years ago, and only now, writing this book, have I had my first glimpse of what he was talking about, and I start to understand what he might have meant by “successful”. In March last year Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance was discovered at the bottom of the Antarctic ocean, 107 years after it sank. I have been an Endurance fanatic, a Shacklehead, since I was young, ever since my father first told me that he had sailed south with Shackleton, and the discovery thrilled and shook me and opened up a deep joy and also a deep yearning that I didn’t quite understand. In April last year I started my research – I read books and combed archives, I called up experts, I spent time on a polar icebreaker. I am shy and avoid interviewing people but I interviewed people – ice-pilots and helicopter mechanics and poets and Captain Knowledge Bengu of the SA Agulhas 2. I read journals and diaries, published and unpublished. I submerged myself in cold water and pondered whether I’m an optimist or a pessimist or whether I’m possibly at some vanishing distant focal point where the two things become the same thing. I wanted to write about Ernest Shackleton, who set out on the eve of World War One to walk across the Antarctic continent, whose ship was seized by the ice of the Weddell Sea and crushed, and how – castaway on the thin frozen skin of the sea over the abyss, he set out to bring his men home. I also wanted to write about my dad, and what “home” means and the meaning of success and of failure, and about human beings, the human race, and how in the face of catastrophe we can all carry on, and how there is joy in endurance, and endurance in joy. I started writing in Cape Town and took myself to Barrydale for a month to keep writing. I wrote in Paris and while walking with friends through the Dordogne valley and in a seaside village on the coast of Turkey, stuffing paper napkins in my ears to block out the music on the rooftop of my pension. I wrote in Athens and in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego and on three Greek islands – Sifnos and Hydra and Poros – in small hotel rooms with broken air-conditioning and on sunloungers under pine trees and battered wooden tables with flaking blue paint, lost in a world of ice, outside in the summer heat. Leonard Cohen, in his preface to a Chinese reprint of his novel, Beautiful Losers, remembered that he wrote it sitting in the sun in the back garden of his house on Hydra: “It was a blazing hot summer. I never covered my head. What you have in your hands is more of a sunstroke than a book.” My experience of writing wasn’t as Leonard Cohen as that – I was somewhat uncoolly traveling with my mother-in-law and her friend, showing them the Saronic Gulf on the most poorly timed summer holiday ever conceived – and I did cover my head while sitting outside, but as I wrote it I did feel sunstroked. It seemed at first that there was no way to make it all cohere – Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance, and Knowledge Bengu from KwaMashu who found her, and Peter Pan and Captain Scott and the Ancient Mariner, and my father and mother and my divorce and the meaning of home, and man-eating seals and Ursula le Guin and fish with white blood and Homer’s Odyssey and the world ending and the world not ending. Each word that I wrote, I trudged blindly forward into a kind of white blizzard, hauling through snow to my sodden knees, with no expectation of arriving where I was trying to go. “What saves you is to take a step,” wrote Antoine Saint-Exupery, and he might have written about survival in the ice, or about writing a book, or about how to leave home and start again, “And then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it.” I suppose, in various ways, the book is ultimately a book about faith. I finished writing it in a wretched flat in Arctic Street, in Kentish Town in London. I was a week overdue, and I had to finish that day because my publishers were throwing a party in Covent Garden that night and not even I am so shameless as to drink my publishers’ free cocktails without submitting. I hovered over the “send” button. I wasn’t ready to part with it. The previous months had been a tyranny, a torture; I had worried and doubted, I had never before confronted with quite such force how very small and inadequate I am. It was the worst; I didn’t want it to end. Somewhere in the latter half of the writing, as I started to sense the voices of the book talking to each other, a silence came over me as I was reading, similar to the silence that comes when I step into the cool dark of one of the Orthodox churches in Athens and see the candlelight on the golden tesserae of the mosaics and when I light a thin yellow candle and think with satisfaction that now there is another small flame in the world, even if not for very long. I have since lost that silence but it was there once so I know I can find it again. I didn’t want to press send because then it would all be over – I would have carried the manuscript back from the white pitiless vastness at the edge of the world, into the civilization of publishers and marketers and readers and judgment. Back to the dirtier and more dispiriting markers of failure and success. I wanted to hold onto it and to stay lost in the terrifying adventure, but I also wanted to go to that party, so I pressed send. I sat back, dazed. I wondered if I should buy a new shirt for my swanky London social debut. Then I received a text from my publishers. London exists only to break a man’s heart: there was a rail strike, so the party was cancelled. I wondered if I could somehow get the manuscript back. It would be a lie to say I don’t mind how the book is received, or how many it sells. I think the book is good and I’m proud of it, and I want to sell enough to repay my publisher’s faith and their advance, and so that I can write another book, and another one, and another until I die, each one different to the one before it, a trail of footsteps in the snow leading to safety. But outcomes aside, writing this book is the first time in my life that I knew without question that I was doing what I should be doing. That was a gift that I have waited a long time to receive; it was a glimpse of something as precious as light. Finding Endurance was published in the UK and Ireland and the USA in April, on my birthday, and I have been quietly delighted with the response from bookstores and readers. The audiobook was somewhat bewildering and disorienting – who is this starnge English man speaking my words?! What are these odd stops and rhythms? Is that how everyone hears my words in their heads?! – but it was well received, and now the physical books have finally arrived in South Africa, and will be in the stores from the end of this week. There will be launches, of course. In Cape Town I will be at the Constantia Exclusive Books on 12 July in conversation with Tom Eaton, trying not to be self-conscious about how much taller than me he is. In Johannesburg on 17 July I’ll be in conversation with Michele Magwood at Love Books. Michele has always been the most thoughtful and sensitive of readers, and the book wouldn’t have happened without her. But there will also be a party that isn’t a discussion or a launch, that is just a party. On 14 July at the Spin Street Gallery, an early Friday evening, my publishers are throwing a cocktail party. You’ll have to endure a ten-minute talk from me, but then there will be drinks and chatting and it’ll be fun. There’s a guest-list, because that makes it look fancier and more like a London party, and so the publishers can invite their fancy friends, but I have reserved a bloc of the guest-list for my pals. I would love you to be there, so if you would like to be on the guest list, please drop me an email. I do hope I’ll see some of you – all of you – somewhere along the way over the next few weeks. I have missed you. With much love Darrel Poros, June, 2023 |
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