Turns out it is a Book-of-the-Month Club selection from 1941, a true story, a kind of travel narrative, about a Frenchman who goes to live with Canadian Eskimos for a year.
Even in the most sophisticated of us there is a deposit of human naivete that is ineradicable. “To think,” a man will say to himself as he lies on a sub-tropical beach in February, “to think that three days ago I was fighting my way against a snowstorm at home!” My own reflections were often of this simpleminded order, but with a higher degree of intensity. I, a child of civilization, had wandered in the course of a few weeks into the stone age. This was I who squatted beside a stone vessel in which seal-oil burned and gave off its warmth and light. I who had so lately been surrounded by Paris, by all that Paris means, sat here clad in the skins and furs of animals in a shelter built of snow, in a land and season where a temperature of forty degrees below zero was the normal thing -- and I was relaxed, content, happy. I was at peace with myself; and surely of all things in the world the rarest is a civilized man at peace with himself. Grant that it was simple. Say it was as simple as getting from Boston to Nassau, or from London to Cannes, in February (which it was not). Still, it was no less strange for that. If this was I, where was that other I that belonged to France, loved ease and warmth, read and argued and was the prey of intellectual restlessness? And if that other was I, who was this that sat chatting and laughing with the Eskimos in the igloo?
For him, for de Poncins, this travel takes place not only in physical space, but, as reflected in this passage from his foreword, in mind and spirit as well. And that is what makes Kabloona such an interesting read, as through his adventures we see some small fraction of the universal truths that our narrator must have experienced, must have been both surprised by but, then, slowly, been able to grow comfortable and equanimous with.
A good part of this book, therefore, becomes of itself the story of the encounter of two mentalities, and of the gradual substitution of the Eskimo mentality for the European mentality within myself.
And through these reflections, it is a delight to find such philosophical and observational wonders as:
I had not even made plans, for I had long ago discovered -- in India, in China, in the South Seas -- that Life abhors our plans and knows better ones than we can imagine.
And this, about the lonely radio operator that lived at the last outpost before the snowy wastes of the Arctic:
Sturrock had accomplished marvels with his toy, feats proper to rouse the jealousy of a power station. For the ether is like a woman: it is not enough to have instruments of price and power: you must amuse it, cajole it, invoke it in your dreams. Anyone who has seen an amateur radio-operator retire to a corner of a room and dream for hours with that shy preoccupied air they all have, knows how true this is. Living in the solitude of the Post, Sturrock had prayed to the goddess of the radio tenderly and with respect, and she had come to him and stayed with him. Elsewhere she had come and fled, or had not come at all; but she had never deserted Sturrock. Thus the young man had grown famous in the Arctic, and it was to him that the whole of the North had sent forth its appeals. With his sensitive hands -- there are hands in the world that confer grace, and he had them -- Sturrock would rescue messages that were dying in the air; he would revive them and relay them to their destination.
It was such a delight to find these rhetorical gems, hidden from my eyes for eighty years or more between the covers of this forgotten book!
The contrast between the Eskimo mentality and the European mentality is a primary focus of de Poncins’s writing.
Everything about the Eskimo astonishes the white man, and everything about the white man is a subject of bewilderment for the Eskimo. Our least gesture seems to him pure madness, and our most casual and insignificant act may have incalculable results for him. Let but a Post Manager say to an Eskimo, “Here is a package of needles for your wife,” and he will have started in that obscure consciousness which I hesitate to call a mind, a train of questions and ruminations that may lead anywhere. The free gift is unknown among the Eskimos: better yet, it is incomprehensible to them. Had the white man said, “Lend me your wife in exchange,” the Eskimo would have understood. An exchange is normal; a gift passes his understanding. It sets his thoughts going. It is amoral. He will not thank the white man. He will go back to his igloo and ruminate. “Since the white man has given me these needles,” he will in effect say to himself, “it must be that he does not want them; and if he does not want his treasures, why should not I have them?” From that day forth, this Eskimo will be a different man. He will begin by despising the white man, and soon he will plan cunningly to exploit him. Since the white man has proved himself a fool, why not? So the Eskimo becomes a liar and a cheat. A single generous impulse on the part of the white man has started the moral disintegration of a native.
This strikes me very much as the prompt for a possible story -- a kind of morality play -- in which the unintended actions of one corrupts the mind of another and causes ruin for both.
But more to the point for Kabloona -- which is the name the Eskimos give de Poncins, meaning “white man” in their language -- as we hear more and more stories about the Eskimos, as we meet them as individuals through de Poncins’s expert pen, we come to understand that they, like us, come in all the fabrics that make of the temperamental tapestry of man, replete with quirks, sure, but always imbued with universal drives and universal stories.
To wit:
One day, for example, Utak brought another Eskimo into the Post, a slack and shiftless ne’er-do-well, a man perpetually destitute. He had arrived from ten days off to trade -- a single fox. We were in mid-December and the man had not yet got round to mudding his rudders, so that his wretched sled was next to useless. One mile out from the Post he had dropped a caribou-skin, had not missed it (proving he could not count up to four); and when, later, I told him that I had picked it up, he forgot to come to my quarters to fetch it. Each year this man and his wife had a child; and as his wretched wife had no milk, each year without fail the child died. But they, the man and his wife, did not die. There was always an Eskimo to lend them a snow-knife, another to repair their sled for them on the trail, a third to house them because the man could not build a possible igloo. And never -- it was this that was so admirable -- never would you have heard a single impatient or angry word spoken about these two. Of course they were teased a bit at night in the igloo, and great tales were told of the man’s comical futility; but they were unfailingly taken care of. The others would say, “He couldn’t get here because of his sled”: they would never say, “The man doesn’t know how to get over a trail.” When tools were lent to him and he broke them, nobody complained. He spent a couple of days at the Post and was about to start out again when, at the last minute, Utak arrived running. Could the Post Manager “lend” Utak a snow-knife? The ne’er-do-well had just broken the one Utak had let him have. And this was said without bitterness, indeed with a laugh that showed all Utak’s teeth. It was too bad! Of course he hadn’t done it on purpose, so no one could hold it against him.
Stories like these are building to something -- both intentionally in the pacing of the author and unintentionally in the mind of the reader. As the narrative progresses, de Poncins not only finds himself slipping more and more into the Eskimo mindset with regard to comforts and material expectations:
It wants very little to return to the primitive. Already I had ceased to feel the need of the appurtenances of our civilization; and yet I had been reared in a fair degree of comfort, I was rather more than less sensitive than the average, and I was even, in a manner of speaking, an “intellectual.” After a brief few weeks, all this had dropped away from me. I do not mean that I had stopped yearning for telephones and motor cars, things I should always be able to live without. I mean that the thought of a daily change of linen was gone from my mind; that a joint of beef would not have made my mouth water, and I loved the tastes of frozen fish, particularly if it had frozen instantaneously and retained its pristine savour all through the winter. As a matter of fact, I do not remember being served anything in France as much to my taste.
And also with regard to the simple, universal delights of home and hearth, mediated in an almost Melvillian way through the life-giving seal and its oil:
Evening came. Three of Ittimangnerk’s seals were still whole, standing against the wall like gods about to be overthrown, but gods still, blood-covered and fantastic. The ice glittered in the light of the lamp, and heat and cold dwelt here together in their familiar contrast. I shall never cease to chant the beauty of the seal-oil lamp; and here again I asked myself, How can a length of cotton wick, fashioned into a saw-toothed strip and floating on melted blubber, spread such an astonishing measure of friendliness and companionship? From this glow there emanates the warmth and the security that constitute the true and inner meaning of the word home. Here among these shadows, in these mysterious recesses, the almost incomprehensible Eskimos eat and laugh, live a material existence of inconceivable brutality and at the same time a spiritual life of infinite subtlety, full of shades and gradations, of things senses and unexpressed.
But also with regard to the sense of necessary community on which Eskimo society -- and, indeed human society -- is essentially based:
Poor L. was lost. He was a landlubber on a ship, a dead weight, in everybody’s way. Not only was he no help, he was a hindrance because he had no notion what to do and would have done better to do nothing. In a space so small, every false move creates trouble for some one else. But, like the Ma-i-ke of last autumn, there was another thing wrong, and that was that he thought only of himself. Watching him I discovered once again that Eskimo life strips a man of egoism. L. was a white man, therefore an egoist. “My tea … my tin … my sleep.” But no, Mr. L.! Our tea, our tin, our sleep. Human life in the Arctic would vanish without this solidarity among men. It is the community that remains alive here, not the men; it is the community that has had a poor hunting season or a good one, that is hungry or well-fed, that has reason to rejoice or to despair.
It is this, I think, that really transforms de Poncins, and which has a chance of transforming the reader, as well. The Eskimos teach him something profound -- often, not by speaking, but by being silent.
Together we spend hours like this, reading in the great Book of Silence. He learnt its lessons in childhood; I have come from afar to spell them out with extreme difficulty. They have taught me, above all, to discard things -- haste, worry, rebelliousness, selfishness. It has taken me a year to learn these lessons, and I see suddenly that my year in the north has not been, as I thought it, a year of conquest of the elements, but of conquest of myself. And because of the peculiarity of my conquest, the Arctic is for me no longer a source of suffering but of joy. It is the crucible in which, slowly and patiently, the dross in my nature has to some extent been melted away. In this Arctic have I found my peace, the peace I was never able to find Outside. Except one were a monk, or such extraordinary circumstances as war and danger intervened, there was no way in which one could find this peace Outside, this sense of the brotherhood of man. Yet this sense, the Arctic had given me simply and directly. That which, elsewhere, would demand a sublime degree of abnegation, had been effected here by simple necessity. How was I going to say this sort of thing to the men of my soft world, who sat in offices during the day and played bridge at night?
Like all the best travel narratives, Kabloona is not just about a journey across distances, but also across perceptions and the very sense of knowing that makes us all human.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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