Alone

[Putnam, $2.50]

ON Admiral Byrd’s second trip to the Antarctic in 1934, he had stored away in the hold of his ship a portable and most ingenious hut. It was his intention to plant this Advance Base far beyond the reach of Little America, and to have it manned by one or three picked observers who would make scientific record of the weather that breeds near the pole. I think myself that Byrd always intended to occupy this exposed dugout. When physical obstacles made it impossible to transport three men and their gear to the Advance Base, the Admiral manned it alone. For live months he endured perpetual night and the coldest cold. The world wondered why. and the gossips wagged their tongues. Now in his new book. Alone, Richard E. Byrd tells the story of his solitude, how it almost cost his life, and of the courage and philosophy that kept him going.

There are two narrators in this book of self-discovery: first, the man of action as he appears in that revelatory diary which was written on the spot; and peering over his shoulder, as it were, a second figure, the explorer turned philosopher, a narrator who has amplified and analyzed that nightmare of four years ago.

Naturally the man of action is the more absorbing of the two. To fortify his five months of solitude he took with

him a carefully selected shelf of books, a portable victrola with records he wished to know, a radio to keep him in touch with Little America, eight busy instruments (whose slave he was) to report the weather, and a pack of cards. It was Byrd’s purpose to dig a philosophy out of his own mind. But this. I think, he only half accomplished: the business of survival broke into his tranquillity, the fumes from the stove poisoned his thinking, and before he knew it he was fighting desperately for his life. That fight is the book: heroism against disintegration, and the end uncertain.

You see him thawing out a turkey with a blowtorch for the last feast before the men leave him; you see his initial serenity disturbed only by the ominous discovery that he can be frozen into his tiny cellar; you see him watching the ice form inside the hut, being locked out in a blizzard, narrowly missing a fatal fall through a crevasse. You see his pitiable collapse of strength, see his radio break down, and feel the almost hypnotic influence of Charlie Murphy, whose voice from Little America kept calling him back to his senses. Remarkable heroism, remarkably told. I must not fail to salute Murphy for his dependability and his cheery ability to say the right thing.

I do not mean to be finicky when I add that the book raises questions for which I have no answer. Is this heroism for heroism’s sake, and was Admiral Byrd influenced more than he knew by the imperishable legend of his hero. Captain Scott? Again, what of the scientific records which more than anything else should justify such prodigious effort? As a layman, I wonder what they signify. The words of Dustin, one of the men on the expedition, come back to me: ‘My God, that’s going to a lot of trouble to find out what my feet keep telling me: that it’s a damn cold place.’

EDWARD WEEKS