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Outside Magazine April 2002

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Dispatches: Books
Hard Living

CHERRY
A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard
BY SARA WHEELER
(Random House, $27)
APSLEY CHERRY-GARRARD'S 1922 account of Robert Falcon Scott's doomed South Pole expedition, The Worst Journey in the World, is one of the most haunting adventure tales of all time, but it's hardly the whole story. In this first biography of Cherry (as his friends called him), Sara Wheeler—author of Terra Incognita, a brilliant exposition of her British countrymen's infatuation with the cold continent—takes us through the expedition and beyond in this study of survivor guilt. Born into the landed gentry, 24-year-old Cherry sailed south on the Terra Nova in 1910, a paying volunteer accepted at the last minute despite his terrible eyesight. Nicknamed "Cheery Blackguard," he remained sweetly optimistic in the face of privations and discomforts, writing in his diary, "I have never thought of anything as good as this life. The novelty, interest, colour, animal life and good fellowship go to make up an almost ideal picnic." But the "worst journey"—the near-fatal trip in July 1911 that Cherry, Bill Wilson, and Birdie Bowers undertook to collect emperor-penguin eggs—damaged his health, and his discovery the next year of the bodies of Wilson and Bowers, his best friends, next to Scott's, after their bid for the Pole, was a terrible blow, especially when he realized he'd been just a few miles away as they lay dying. Wheeler's retelling of their famous ordeal is psychologically astute and deeply felt: "In Cherry's bursting heart," she writes describing him building his comrades' burial cairn, "something died." She teases apart the British sanctification of Scott, and the press hysteria that encouraged Cherry to blame himself, however irrationally, for his friends' deaths. Considering the breakdowns he suffered upon his return, Cherry's perseverance in producing his wry masterpiece of British understatement becomes an act of heroic determination. And in Wheeler's hands, Cherry himself becomes, as she says of The Worst Journey, "a kind of parable," reflecting "something universal: the eclipse of youth, and the realm of abandoned dreams and narrowing choices that is the future."
—CAROLINE FRASER



	Poets on the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Phillip Whalen and Jack Kerouac in the Cascades, by Jon Suiter (Counterpoint Press, $40) illuminates these beats' little-documented time tending fire lookouts in the north Cascades—summer pockets of productive solitude whose resulting works inspired vision quests for countless others. Pictured above, Desolation Lookout, where Kerouac penned The Dharma Bums in 1956.

GOULD'S BOOK OF FISH
A Novel in 12 Fish
BY RICHARD FLANAGAN
(Grove Press, $28)
HAVING GROWN UP in the literary poorhouse of Tasmania, novelist Richard Flanagan attempts an audacious bit of historical bootstrapping here—a sprawling, made-up classic of early Tazzy that, were it true, might have been the cornerstone of Australian letters. His imaginary author, William Buelow Gould, is an English convict sent to the notorious Sarah Island penal colony. There, his talent as a painter is noticed by the prison surgeon, who commissions him to record, in "scientifick" detail, the island's exotic fish. Using a shark bone as a quill and specimens from a local fisherman as models, Gould becomes enchanted with the crested weedfish and sawtooth sharks he paints: "A fish is a slippery & three-dimensional monster that exists in all manner of curves, whose colouring & surfaces & translucent fins suggest the very reason & riddle of life." Meanwhile he's busily recording the Felliniesque details of life Down Under circa 1830, from the parson's randy wife ("Ravish me!") to the sadistic prison commandant. Although his fondness for literary tricks is too clever by half, Gould, er, Flanagan carries the book off with surefooted elan. Gould's Book of Fish reads like an untamed relation of Tom Jones, set where the land was wild and its immigrants wilder.
—BRUCE BARCOTT

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