South
When I was 17 I had an experience that only now am I able to meet in the eye. One humid night in Hortensia, a village on the plains directly west of Buenos Aires, I was challenged to a knife fight. The face remains a blur, but I have a harder memory of the squat black hat associated with the gaucho, the leather belt studded with silver pesos, and the isosceles of flashing steel that the men I rode with called a facon.
Possibly he’d heard about the English cowhand working on the nearby estancia, and when he spied the gringo eating in the corner the injustice of the Falklands rose in his gorge. He shambled up to where I sat and, jerking his knife, drunkenly ordered me outside.
It wasn’t for another few months that I read for the first time “The South”, Borges’s celebrated story about a convalescent librarian from Buenos Aires who is travelling South to recuperate on his estancia when he finds himself in a similar predicament. Juan Dahlmann is tossed a naked dagger. On a sudden, the feeble librarian is overcome by a fatal nostalgia for his military ancestors and their impossibly romantic fate: “to die in a knife fight, under the open sky and going forward to the attack…” Firmly clutching the knife, which he perhaps would not know how to wield, Dahlmann steps onto the plain.
I did not pick up any knife. (In stark horror I stammered “No habla español, no habla español,” – until, as I recall it, the bar owner grabbed the man’s wrist and packed him through the tethered horses onto the mud street). But even today, across a distance of 30 years, I can summon the vertigo that I felt, and I begin to glimpse how this incident, not in a dramatic way but subtly, heightened my sense of the South as evocative, exciting, dangerous, fearful, unknown, and perhaps even bound me to it. I realise that ever since that Saturday night in Hortensia, I have, in one manner or another, continued to head South. As I write these words, on the south-east coast of Tasmania, there’s nothing between me and the ice. “You look out there,” says a neighbour, “and there ain’t a place to go. This is it. This is absolutely it.”
South. East. North. West. Is it too fanciful to suggest that we all have coded into us one of the four compass points? In Canada I’ve watched a river choked with hook-nosed salmon that had swum up in their thousands specifically to die, as if the magnetite in their nose cells acted as a built-in navigational system to direct them across oceans, back to the very patch of water where they’d been spawned. Some humans, like salmon, need to have their bones rest in their native soil; others resemble the arctic tern, flitting between two poles; while others, consciously refuting any atavistic impulse, long for their polar opposite. One of the dying Kafka’s three wishes was to go “to a foreign land in the south”.
Certain words contain within them the power to conjure whole worlds. Speaking for myself, I cannot explain why three of the four points on the compass sound to my ear like inert monosyllables. But say the word “south”….
As Faulkner writes in The South and the Fury: “‘The South,’ said Shreve. ‘The South. Jesus.’”
Some Southern memories:
- The first film I saw: “Sammy Goes South”
- The only time I was caned, I was caught walking up Southgate Street to a pub in Winchester.
- My first spirit: Southern Comfort.
- The house in London which for 30 years my peripatetic family have used as their base: 10 South End Row.
Wherever I go, I have what is almost a compulsion to seek out the southernmost places where humans lived. In Argentina, I twice made the pilgrimage to Monte Dinero, an estancia overlooking the Magellan Straits. I slept in a room constructed from the wrecks of ships that had foundered apart on this coast, and in the morning picked my way through penguins to a network of sandy hillocks – all that remained of the disastrous settlement of Nombre de Jesus. Here on the bleak tip of the continent, in 1584, Sarmiento de Gamboa landed 300 bewildered settlers to establish a base against Drake. Only one man survived, the remainder killed by disease, starvation, Tehuelches.
Or Essaouira. Time and again while living in Morocco, I found myself returning to the former port of Mogador. Essaouira was, for a period, the extreme point of the known world, beyond which lay the Green Sea of Darkness; plus magnetized mountains that sucked nails from the planks of passing ships – with the result that they disintegrated.
And one haunting hour in Tasmania, while rafting the Franklin, I crept beneath stalactites into Kuti Kina Cave, where Tasmanian Aborigines holed up during the last Ice Age. Kuti Kina, meaning “spirit”, proved more evocative even than the cavern of the giant sloth in Patagonia. This chamber with its electric green ferns was rediscovered only in 1976, but it marked the farthest south that humans reached 20,000 years ago.
Of course, how you perceive South depends on where you are.
In Australia, where you subvert the seasons, not to mention the colour of swans or the way that bathwater gurgles down the drain, it’s a question of: “Go North, young man.” The novelist Murray Bail says: “In Australia, we look North – if we look anywhere.” And because it’s such a vast distance, the journey can be disorienting, even within Australia.
Tasmanian architect Bill Howroyd designed the mining town of Shay Gap in the sweltering Pilbara. “When Australians go North, they get a hell of a shock,” he says. “The first thing they see is a bar, and everyone goes to the bar and drinks at the shock of the extraordinary climate. If married, the wives get hot and randy and the men lose their libido and go to sleep in front of the TV. It’s a total breakdown. At the end of six months, the wives are screaming to go home – while Dad’s still asleep in front of the TV. It’s pretty horrible.”
In the true North, in damp, congested Britain, we yearn for that heat and space, and cast our eyes covetously down: to the South of France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Africa. Even towards South America. Until 1914, for instance, the largest British community outside the Commonwealth existed in Argentina.
Borges, who thought of himself as a southerner, took much from Faulkner and Poe. Through a series of strange circumstances, I’d already met him before I went to work in Hortensia. He had lost his sight, and two or three times on my return to Buenos Aires I’d climb the stairs to his dimly lit flat in Avenida Maipu and read to him. One afternoon he requested his favourite Kipling poem, “The Harp Song of the Dane Women”, and I can still see the anticipation in his face as I prepared to recite his favourite line: “sicken again for the shouts and the slaughter”. The poem was about the Vikings, but Borges, I suspect, saw it as a commentary on his gaucho ancestors. Being blind, he had a huge appetite for violence.
Hands clasped on walking stick and leaning forward in his chair, he would ask about my time on the pampas, and I’d tell him of my experiences, including the experience prefigured in “The South”.
Like many of his fictions, this short story, which Borges judged his best, had been published first in the literary magazine Sur (South). The founder and editor was Victoria Ocampo, a formidable lady whom I met once; and after her death, as the first and last recipient of a Victoria Ocampo fellowship, I finished a novel in her clapboard house in Mar del Plata where she and Borges used to spend summer: a wooden structure prefabricated a hemisphere away, in Devon. I mention these facts because in “The South” the journey to the South is also a metaphorical journey that stands for the hazardous act of writing. Dahlmann, who boarded his train clutching a copy of the Arabian Nights, was leaving behind the urban North to regenerate himself in the rural South; but he was travelling as well into a perilous terra incognita of the imagination. (“It was as if the South had resolved that Dahlmann should accept the duel.”) In much the same way, the hero in Borges’ beloved Poe story, “MS. Found in a Bottle”, hurtles southward in a terrifying current after his vessel sinks a day or two south of Australia. All that sustains Poe’s hero on his headlong flight towards the southern pole is “a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions”. In desperation, he writes: “It is evident that we are hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge – some never-to-be imparted secret whose attainment is destruction.”
Others who travel too far South include Arthur Gordon Pym. And Robert Falcon Scott, of course.
At the time, I had no idea that Borges was a patron saint of “southernness”. Even so, I remember him rather wishing that Argentina had been colonised by the English. “Because then we’d be like Australia.”
In Euro-centred cartography, England, where I was born, is located near the top; Australia, near the bottom. Named from the Latin for Great South Land, Australia is a case of a continent being invented before being discovered, the Greeks believing that there should be a gigantic landmass to counterbalance the North. In consequence, says Murray Bail, “We’re interested in how people of the North think of us down here.”
For northerners, Down – as in Down Under – conjures Hell and heat; it’s where the minotaur lives, where less work gets done; a fun place, of carnivals. Up North, by contrast, is – spatially – the head. It’s cerebral, detached, cold. And it rains a lot.
On the world map, the North has an image that is urban, crowded, wealthy, technologically advanced. From the polar star everyone knows where they stand. And yet the irony is that the North Pole is tamer than its antipodean equivalent. Even in its coldness, it’s polite, holding back, allowing Prince Albert of Monaco to plant a flag there. It’s impossible to imagine Tasmania’s Princess Mary striking out to emulate this feat in Australia’s Antarctic.
“The South is misunderstood completely by the North.” After building Shay Gap, Bill Howroyd returned to Hobart, last port of call for Antarctic explorers, where he wrote an Antarctic Study for the Hawke government. Howroyd says: “The North is a flat, floating ice shelf. The South, on the other hand, is composed of gigantic mountains with katabatic winds. The air gets cold on top and descends at night in extraordinarily vicious gales.” Temperatures in the extreme South sink to minus fifty or lower; teeth snap off in the cold and clothing that may well be suitable for exploration of the extreme North – boots from Canada, jackets from Sweden – proves useless. “The temperature and environment are totally different.”
As indeed are the stars.
One still evening in March, the President of the Astronomical Society of Tasmania drove up to my beach house and unloaded a 10-inch telescope that he attached to his car battery. My grandfather’s generation steered by the stars, but my knowledge of them is abysmal. At least, I thought, I’m lucky enough to be looking properly at the night sky in practically the most advantageous place on earth – Tasmania’s pristine atmosphere being the reason why the late Grote Reber, inventor of the satellite dish and pioneer of radio-astronomy, a man incidentally who enabled us to chart a map of the universe, came to live here 50 years ago.
Under Phil Watkins’s enthusiastic tutelage, I could see the rings of Saturn quite clearly (“When people first see Saturn, they go ‘Shit a brick’”); stars that existed 1,600 light years away and craters on the moon five miles across. The furthest that Phil had seen on his telescope was the Somero galaxy, a distance of 50 million light years. “To put man on the moon, we’ve travelled 1.2 light seconds. Can we roar?”
And yet what struck me vividly about this evening of a million stars was the absence of a South celestial pole. Phil flashed his laser pointer out over Oyster Bay. The sky was a black void. “There’s absolutely nothing there at all.”
If the North is seen as over-populated, industrial, privileged, the common impression of the South is poor, agricultural, vacant. “A sterner and more ancient world,” wrote Borges, as if the South is situated outside time, in eternity. Our impulse to fill this vacancy with mystery is as ancient as we are. Down South, you have to use your imagination.
For poetry, few northern legends match the creation myth told by the Tasmanian Aborigine Woorrady: how the first man was formed with a kangaroo’s tail but without knee joints, so that he had to keep standing. Then the bright South star Droemerdeene – presumably part of the rotating Southern Cross – rose out of the sea and, taking pity on the sufferer, cut off his tail and made joints to the knees and with grease softened the wounds. I’m aware of no like story attaching itself to Polaris glittering brightly in the sky above my home in Wiltshire, where I spend half the year. “In the North,” Phil said, “you’d put the telescope on Polaris all night and it would still be there in the morning. It doesn’t move, because the earth rotates around it.”
A self-fulfilling metaphor, it seems to me, of the northern psyche. Aligned. Geometric. Clear-headed. Guided by the head and not the loins.
The more I travel, the more I glimmer that South is not just a compass point, a direction, but also an indication of temperament: an attitude and an affiliation.
The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould believed: “Something really happens to people who go into the north… they become, in effect, philosophers.” Looking at those who go South, I see loners, sensualists, adventurers, romantics, fugitives. Or people just plain hopeless, like Faulkner’s Quentin Compson: “a Southerner whose blood ran quick to cool... he had learnt there were three things and no more: breathing, pleasure, darkness.”
More Southern memories:
- The first woman to whom I was engaged was from the Deep South, from Mississippi, right next to Faulkner’s Oxford.
- The “Dane woman” I did marry was a polar opposite who hied from the north of Iceland.
In the end, it’s a matter of degree. Tasmania, where I finally came to semi-rest, was 160 million years ago part of the same continent as Patagonia; further back, it was situated in the North, roughly where Libya now is. And 1.6 billion years ago, it nudged the North Pole. For the moment, I’m content with its present position, facing a void that is filled on very exceptional occasions, as the other night, with an Aurora Australis.
We went out on deck and the horizon flared with a green and vaporous light as if a great black sheet of paper was being foxed at the bottom. To the west, over Swansea, the hills were haloed with a dull throbbing glow, while due south the Southern Lights rose vertically in straight rays, hoisting to the stars even the most jaded eye.
Faulkner again: “Jesus, the South is fine, isn’t it. It’s better than the theatre, isn’t it.”