South

Merlin Coverley

Oldcastle Books, £12.99

Review by Nick Major

On 17 January 1912 Robert Falcon Scott sat down to write his journal. Around him lay the desolate icy tundra of Antarctica. "Good god, this is an awful place!" is the famous line retold down the years. His mood was further dampened by the knowledge that the Norwegian Roald Amundsen had reached the South Pole before him. Apsley Cherry-Garrard was a member of Scott’s tragic Terra Nova expedition of 1910-13. He would later write an account called The Worst Journey in the World. This is what he said about the extreme south: “the Antarctic is to the rest of the earth as the Abode of the Gods was to the ancient Chaldees, a precipitous and mammoth land lying far beyond the seas which encircled man’s habitation, and nothing is more striking about the exploration of the Southern polar regions than its absence, for when King Alfred reigned in England the Vikings were navigating the ice-fields of the North; yet when Wellington fought the battle of Waterloo there was still an undiscovered continent in the South.”

Merlin Coverley quotes this passage in his new book, South, about how the idea of this particular direction has shaped the artistic imagination. As Cherry-Garrard suggests, Antarctica has long been tabula rasa. Humans have tramped all over the globe, but the south pole was an unknowable place until the early 20th century. Even after the Heroic Age of Exploration had unearthed some geological truths, the enigmatic quality of this landmass persuaded many writers of fiction to fill the hole in reality. Edgar Allen Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, ends with the protagonist and his compatriot heading south in search of a ‘milder climate’. Upon reaching the pole they are enveloped by a white blindness and “…there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very large in its proportions than any dweller among men”.

It is an ambiguous ending, but apposite. When you are disoriented, there’s not much point carrying on. The lack of a coherent direction is something that blights Coverley’s book. He admits as much in his introduction: "The parameters of one’s own north and south have far less to do with any cartographical convention than with one’s own sensibility." South, then, is a matter of perspective. So South could be called East, West or even North, depending on where one is standing on the globe. Coverley is a wanderer in mind and body – he has previously published an introduction to psychogeography and a book on writers who have walked in order to write – and South takes in an impressive array of artists, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Jorge Luis Borges. He comes up with some astute readings of great literature, and has a perceptive eye for how tourism has shaped our understanding of place. But whilst reading one forgets this is a book about the concept of south, and not some other concept: otherness, post-colonialism, or utopianism, for instance.

Despite his book’s shaky premise, Coverley identifies a strange development in European thought from classical antiquity, namely the divide between a culture of the north and the south. Many northern writers have harboured a disdain for southern ways. For WH Auden, north was “the ‘good’ direction, the way towards heroic adventures, South the way to ignoble ease and decadence."

Northerness means industrialisation, progress, and a hard work ethic. The south represents Catholicism and an effete culture that embraces instinct and sensuality. Put simply, in southern Europe the people sip wine; in the north, they guzzle beer.

Auden, in his own words, was a "cold weather man". Robert Louis Stevenson, however, was told by his doctor to leave his home for warmer climes. He penned an essay on the matter in 1874 called Ordered South, in which he describes the feeling of moving from one atmosphere to another, writing of the invalid waking up to “the southern sunshine peeping through the persiennes” and realising that this pleasures will leave him “wider awake than it found him”. Stevenson, of course, died in the sun, on the island of Samoa.

Coverley dedicates a whole chapter to how the Pacific islands have been represented by artists such as Herman Melville and Paul Gauguin. For years, and still now – by the tourism industry – places like this have been imagined as utopias, peopled by noble savages. How odd that when ‘civilisation’ discovered them it should bring with it disease, racism, and violent persecution, all those dystopian characteristics of humanity. Stevenson wrote The Beach of Falesa, one of his South Sea Tales, as a realistic representation of this region, noting to his friend Sidney Colvin that he was writing against the "kind of sugar candy sham epic" that his peers indulged in.

Stevenson left Scotland looking for better weather; the climate, unlike direction, has shaped many a writer’s life and work. At the beginning of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, for example, the protagonist sits on the balcony of the Elite Cafe in the rain, waiting for the sun. Stevenson’s work has bright moments, but it also contains within it the old, dark dualities of Scotland. This country has an unfortunate history of artists leaving for London, but this has less to do with the weather and more to do with economics. Their direction of travel was merely coincidence. But if someone wanted to, they could write a long book about it. Here’s a working title: The Idea of South in the Scottish Imagination.

Nick Major