I DO NOT WISH TO BE GOOD – AN INTERVIEW WITH SHACKLETON MEDAL JUDGE, WRITER SARA WHEELER

“I do not wish to be good,” reads the quote on the back of Sara Wheeler’s most recent book, Glowing Still. “I wish to be hell on wheels, or dead.” So said Martha Gellhorn, the fearless female reporter who covered everything from Hitler’s rise to the US invasion of Panama in 1989, but it’s easy to see why Wheeler has appropriated her words. Her fiercely irreverent prose-style is a testament to her restless spirit. Over more than thirty years as a travel writer and biographer, her quest for new horizons has been matched by a meticulous mining of detail that glitters like diamonds on a Fabergé egg.

She first arrived in Antarctica in her early thirties with two travel books to her name. One was about the seahorse-shaped Greek island of Evia, where her experiences included attending a goatherd’s wedding and being harassed by Orthodox nuns, the other was about Chile, where she ate a llama sandwich and helped deliver a coffin. Both had been highly praised, but it was her account of her experiences in Antarctica  – Terra Incognita, published in 1996 – that would make her. “Until I was thirty, my relationship with Antarctica was confined to the biannual reinflation of the globe hanging above my desk, its air valve located in the middle of the mis-shapen white pancake at the bottom,” she wrote. But after arriving there on an “antediluvian Hercules belonging to the Chile Air Force,” she “felt less homeless there than I have anywhere”.

 

 

Antarctica may have represented some kind of spiritual home, but for much of the time Wheeler’s life is anchored in a characterful Hampstead house with bare wooden floors and walls colonised by paintings, photos and armies of bookshelves. Though the overall impression is hedonistic, as I have suspected beforehand from her whip-smart writing style, her books are rigorously organised. At one point she proudly shows me the study where she has just finished writing a biography of the travel writer and historian Jan Morris, with all Morris’s books lined up in chronological order. Morris famously broke the story of Edmund Hillary being the first to reach the top of Everest, but what’s almost unknown – Wheeler tells me with delight – is that Morris was also interested in travelling to Antarctica with Hillary on the Commonwealth Transantarctic Expedition.

“She didn’t go, but I’ve seen the letters,” she says, eyes flashing. “She was still a man at that point.” (Perhaps more famously than breaking the story of Hillary and Everest, Morris had gender reassignment surgery in 1972.) From Wheeler’s account of her own experiences, being a man would have been a considerable advantage – even in the Nineties she found it difficult to avoid collisions with misogynistic icebergs still working for the British Antarctic Survey. Though she refused to let it deter her, “My dad was a builder who had nude calendars hanging up,” she tells me briskly. “As a single woman in the Antarctic I just got on with it. I’d already dealt with being at an Oxford college where they’d only had women for about five minutes.”

 

 

Her journey to different scientific research stations – as the first foreigner to take part in the American National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists’ and Writers’ Program – would end up lasting for seven months. Her experiences included ice-fishing for prehistoric-looking fish named after explorers, visiting arid valleys used by NASA to test robotic probes, and watching seismologists detonate explosives to discover the geology beneath Antarctic ice. (Memorably she had an affair with one who she nicknamed Seismic Man.) There’s often slapstick hilarity in her accounts of the fraught loo arrangements, not least an episode in which a geologist is startled into skidding across camp with his trousers round his knees after a seal erupts through the ice hole where he’s weeing. Though there’s plenty of poetry too; as she approaches Lake Bonney with a snow and ice physicist, she writes how “In front of [the Taylor Glacier] shimmered the lake, sheets of cracked and rippled frosted blue, and ribboned crystals imprisoned in the lake glimmered like glowworms.”

Everyone who goes to the Antarctic walks in the footsteps of the explorers from the Heroic Age, and Wheeler provides her own equally vivid account of them in parallel with her own adventures. Shackleton loomed particularly large for her (though she would go on to write a biography of Apsley Cherry-Garrard). “He wasn’t perfect, as a man or as an expedition leader,” she declares in Terra Incognita. “He drank too much, smoked too much and had affairs with other people’s wives. That’s why so many people like him. He’s like the rest of us.”

 

 

Thirteen years after publishing Terra Incognita, Wheeler went to the other end of the world and released The Magnetic North, an account of travelling around the Arctic that was voted Book of the Year by Will Self and Michael Palin among others.  It’s a very different book – though still peppy and provocative, there’s a greater sense of reflectiveness, not least in response to problems that have amplified in the one and a half decades since she was there. “‘I was a young writer when I was at the Antarctic,” she says to me. “And the Antarctic was pristine, a perfect symbol of hope, which is what young writers ought to be thinking about. I was approaching 50 by the time I wrote about the Arctic, which was hugely polluted. Everybody was fighting over it and many people can't even define it. They're still arguing over where it begins and ends.”

In her book, she writes more ominously, “The Arctic has been the locus for Armageddon two generations in a row now. It was the front line of the Cold War, with both sides pouring money into long-range nuclear bomber installations and lone figures crouching on floes straining to hear enemy subs (or was that a ringed seal scratching its back?) Nuclear holocaust, then apocalyptic climate change: something about the region attracts millennial anxiety. I picked up a scent among the Lappish reindeer and pursued it through the journeys described here. What does the Arctic tell us about our past? What does it reveal of the future?”

Back in 2008 she witnessed more of the future than she realised when, during her stay in Chukotka (Russia’s northeasternmost region) President Medvedev came to visit, just after he’d announced to the Security Council that “Our biggest task is to turn the Arctic into Russia’s resource base for the twenty-first century”. Wheeler says to me, “He was a midget, like all famous men. They had one supermarket in all of Chukotka – the only supermarket in an area the size of France – and I was there with a crowd at the top of the steps watching as he emerged from his hotel. He was wearing a thigh-length leather jacket and when the crowd cheered he smiled and raised his arms. Then he drove off in a car with blacked-out windows.”

 

 

I put it to her that one of the things she conveys so powerfully about the Arctic is how often the magical and the morally fraught cohabit. “The issue of how native people could or should benefit from mineral extraction pursued me round the Arctic,” she writes. By contrast one of the unquestionably magical points of her time there was in Greenland (long before it was troubled by Trump’s ambitions) where she met Bella Bergeron, one of a team drilling ice cores to study climate change. (“She was about the size of my ten-year-old son – an elf,” she declares.) Back in 1993, cores taken from Greenland ice had revealed – through the composition of trapped air bubbles – the impact of humans on the composition of the atmosphere. It became clear, for instance, that there was a huge increase in sulphates (from the burning of fossil fuels) starting from around 1900 and in nitrates (from synthetic fertilisers and industrial processes) from the 1950s onwards.

“I was really impressed by the drillers,” Wheeler tells me. “The writer CP Snow gave a very famous lecture, the Two Cultures [in which he talked about the problem of sciences and the arts being split into two cultures that don’t talk to each other]. Listening to the scientists talking about the beauty of their ice cores and what they revealed about humanity made me realise that this was a bringing together of the two.” In her book she quotes Bergeron saying, “We carry on as if we live at the end of time, but, as cores graphically reveal, we actually exist in a continuum and are less important than we care to think”.

 

When I ask Wheeler which of the two regions she’d most like to return to, the Arctic or the Antarctic, she replies without hesitation “The Antarctic. I've been asked to go back many times, and it's hard for me to imagine my future without returning. The problem is that you really need to have something to go to the Antarctic for. But the Arctic never had the magic for me that the Antarctic did.”

At the end of our interview, I emerge from Wheeler’s house into unseasonally summery March sunshine. It’s almost certainly connected to more disturbing events happening at the poles, but the atmosphere of hedonism and the babble of people at outside cafes briefly eclipses such thoughts. Back home I re-read the end of Terra Incognita, where Wheeler visits Scott’s hut and sleeps in his bunk. It’s more than thirty years since she wrote it, but even then there was a sense of the forces that will one day drive her back to the Antarctic.

“I lay awake for many hours, my head on his pillow,” she writes, “as he, weighed down by his heavy responsibilities, must often have done. How very different the end had been for him…The distended shadows shifted among the old wooden walls as the sun wheeled across the sky…I had travelled thousands of miles, lost a lot of body heat, watched hundreds of beards ice up, realised how little I had seen or knew…But I still felt the same about Antarctica. It was the great thrill of my life – on top of the snowhill, on Scott’s bunk, in what was about to become my future. It had allowed me to believe in paradise, and that, surely, is a gift without price.’