Читать книгу The Ice Balloon - Alec Wilkinson - Страница 16

By the time Andrée announced his plan to leave for the pole he was “altogether of Herculean frame,” one writer wrote. Another described him as “rather stout in appearance,” and as “one of the handsomer men in Sweden.” He was six feet tall, with a large nose, “which people in Sweden regard as an augury of success, and a piercing blue-grey eye,” which made him seem “cut out for command.” A German explorer, Dr. Georg Wegener, met Andrée in London in 1895 and wrote, “The Swedish researcher is a personality cut out of a wood with which world history forms its great men, at the same time daring and balanced, with this strange assurance about progress, with this belief based on the captivating ability to convince, which with all explorers has played the main role, and where the original type is the great, splendid fanatic Columbus.” A French geographer especially interested in glaciers, whose name was Charles Rabot, described Andrée as someone who “created sympathy at first sight. I was attracted towards him, at once I felt confidence in him; at our first meeting he gave me the impression of a strong personality.” Andrée and Rabot spent an afternoon looking for fossils while Andrée asked about the balloons that had carried the mail during the siege of Paris in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War. “Everything that I could recollect of these ascensions interested him,” Rabot said. “That evening we parted as old friends.”

Much of what was written about how Andrée looked and what he was like was written after he had disappeared. He is recalled mostly in tributes, that is, and so he becomes reduced to abstractions and admirable qualities and blurs a little around the edges. He was said to have had few close friends, but among them he was regarded as sociable and devoted. He liked pranks and playing games with children. He had a talent for maxims and penetrating judgments: “Be careful of health, but not of life,” he said. Liberals tended to be tranquil because they believed that a moral force lay behind their positions and so were content to see them unfold, whereas conservatives, he wrote, were combative because they regarded themselves as always under attack.

He practiced a precautionary discipline he called self-hypnosis. Someone whose will was strong, he believed, was always liable to coming under its thrall, and “it is therefore essential to direct one’s will through daily training towards that which one, through judgment and experience, has found to be sensible and therefore beneficial.

“One masters oneself in the same way one masters others:” he wrote, “by cultivating a keen conception of how one should and should not act.” His “cold blooded calmness and realism,” wrote a friend, “were not based on a cold temperament, but on his incessant exercise of self-control.”

He had no ear for music or writing, or any eye for art. In the portrait of him published in The Andrée Diaries, the 1930 account of the voyage and the discovery of the remains, this indifference is described as amounting nearly to “a defect in his character.” Friends who persuaded him to go to the opera or an art exhibition “had every reason to repent of their success, for he always managed to spoil their own pleasure by his remarks and criticisms.” The writer doesn’t mention what those criticisms were, but they were apparently uninformed. When the novelist Selma Lagerlöf was given a prize, Andrée was invited to a dinner in her honor where he was asked if he had read her book, and he said, “No, but I have read Baron Münchhausen”—the German fabulist who had said that he had been to the moon—“and I suppose that it is all the same.” An oaf in cultured company is what he sounds like sometimes, but perhaps he was only trying to deflate manners he regarded as pretentious. As for nature, “he displayed a highly developed sense of beauty, and during his many balloon journeys he greatly enjoyed the magnificent scenery.”

He seemed to have a kind of intelligence that saw patterns in forms that other people found chaotic, and to be able to hold complicated structures and solutions in his head. He cared deeply about how things went together and how they worked and whether their design was efficient. According to The Andrée Diaries, once he decided on an end he did everything he could to attain it. Even so, “no one could weigh every consequence more ruthlessly, more critically than he. He never acted spontaneously, and there was wanting in him the spirit of fresh, impulsive action, but this was compensated for by the sense of security which is conveyed by the actions of an assured, discriminating man. He embodied, in every respect, the ancient phrase: ‘To speak once and stand by one’s word is better than to speak a hundred times.’”

Andrée appears to have been one of those people whose attitudes and habits of mind are literal and firmly formed, so that moving among disciplines is not a matter of broadening oneself by means of new terms so much as applying one’s customary judgments to new circumstances. Such a temperament seeks to encounter the familiar and to assess it or deplore its absence, rather than be influenced and possibly enlarged by what it doesn’t recognize. It is a commanding, not a humble, state of mind, restless rather than engaged, and capacious more than penetrating. An advantage of it is the capacity to interest oneself in a mulitiplicity of subjects and to arrive quickly at personally satisfying determinations. Andrée’s interests were wide-ranging. According to the portrait, he made notes for papers on the influence of new inventions on “every branch of human activity,” from “the general development of mankind” to “language, architecture, military science, the home, marriage, education, etc.” He wrote about scientific topics, in papers such as “Conductivity of Heat in Construction Material” and “Electricity of the Air and Terrestrial Magnetism.” He wrote about social phenomena in others such as “The Education of Girls,” and “Bad Times and Their Causes,” and about miscellaneous topics such as “The Importance of Inventions and Industry for the Development of Language,” and “Directives and Advice for Inventors.” He appeared to feel that nothing that interested him was beyond his ability to have an opinion about it.