The Balloonist Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE BALLOONIST

  “This is a real tour de force, a stylish and brilliant conjuration of a 19th century inventor’s world. Memorable characters against a vividly realised background. This one is masterly.”

  —Mary Renault

  “There can no longer be any question whatever that MacDonald Harris is one of our major novelists.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “The author’s unruffled direction-finding in the cross-currents that he loosed, his command of language (languages, too: French, German, and Swedish, plus some confident echoes of Greek and Latin) and his avoidance, perhaps excision, of the obvious made me follow his tragedy (yes) happily and without pity or terror.”

  —Richard Usborne, Times Literary Supplement

  “Metaphysics, science, sex, the romance of ballooning, turn of the century charm, all combine in a lyrical, deliciously comic and moving novel. Wonderful entertainment in the very best Jules Verne tradition.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Chilling and comic…carefully fashioned…an unusual mixture of Arctic Adventure and Parisian love story…told with fin de siecle elegance…ingenious…as highly polished as an antique machine on view in a glass case.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “The Balloonist just took me over. I loved it. It’s wisely, wittily and sensitively written. It evoked childhood memories of Jules Verne and more recent memories of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. It is an immensely entertaining book that is, at the same time, much more, interweaving the scientific, the sensual, and the philosophic. I couldn’t put it down. I was sorry when it ended. I’m sure I won’t be alone.”

  —Martin Myers

  “Harris’s range is, in fact, immense. Genuinely cosmopolitan, yet without the pretensions, he deeply knows and loves the many foreign languages, landscapes and mythologies that figure in his books.…Harris is an erudite writer, well versed not only in the history and arts of the past but in science and technology as well.”

  —Michael Malone, Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Mr Harris is an elegant and fastidious writer, and thinking man’s novelist, with a penchant for international situations and polyglot dialogue.”

  —James Mellow, The New York Times Book Review

  “Not only nature but the human world is searchingly portrayed. Particularly in his self-analysis, the author is relentless.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “It is his oddball, icily narcissistic way of telling things that lifts The Balloonist above the level of old-fashioned adventure yarn to that of ruminative elegance.”

  —Robert Nye, The New York Times Book Review

  “A gifted craftsman, a meticulous writer whose powers as a story teller are as compelling as the sexual tensions he imagines.”

  —Chicago Tribune Book World

  Copyright

  This editon published in paperback in the United States in 2012 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales please contact [email protected]

  First published in the UK 1977

  This edition © 2011 The Estate of Donald Heiney

  Foreword © 2011 Philip Pullman

  Cover illustration is from Joseph Lecornu’s 1903 book La Navigation Aerienne

  With thanks to the Heiney family

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-46830-373-5

  Contents

  Praise for the Balloonist

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Other Fiction By Macdonald Harris

  Introduction by Philip Pullman

  12 July 1897

  13 July 1897

  14 July 1897

  16 July 1897

  18 July 1897

  22 July 1897

  Donald Heiney (MacDonald Harris was a pseudonym) was born September 7th 1921 and died July 24th 1993.

  He wrote 16 novels, a non fiction book on sailing, and a large number of scholarly books on Comparative Literature. In 1982 he received the Award in Literature of the American Academy and Institute for Arts and Sciences for the sum of his work, and in 1985 he received a Special Achievement Award from PEN Los Angeles Center.

  His interests included sailing, arctic exploration and music.

  OTHER FICTION BY MACDONALD HARRIS

  Private Demons

  Mortal Leap

  Trepleff

  Bull Fire

  Yukiko

  Pandora’s Galley

  The Treasure of Sainte Foy

  Herma

  Screenplay

  Tenth

  The Little People

  Glowstone

  Hemingway’s Suitcase

  Glad Rags

  A Portrait of My Desire

  The Cathay Stories and Other Fictions

  Introduction by Philip Pullman

  MacDonald Harris (1921-1993) was the author of sixteen strikingly intelligent, interesting, and original novels, of which The Balloonist was probably the most successful. What amazes me, and has done since I read this book when it came out in 1978, is that he’s not far better known.

  I can think of two reasons why this might be so. In the first place, the public loves a writer who produces the same book year after year. They know where they are with an author like that; they can buy their new books with confidence, secure in the knowledge that nothing surprising will disturb the placid tenor of their habit. The parties to this unwritten contract value consistency above every other quality. Every one of Harris’s novels, however, is quite different from those that came before it. To his publishers, it must have seemed as if he was trying to start a fresh career with each new book.

  If the first reason for his comparative neglect is that each of his books is different, the second might be a particular quality they all have in common. A writer can’t help a certain continuity of something, even if the subject matter and the setting of his novels varies as much as Harris’s: from late eighteenth-century Venice to wartime Japan, from the early days of the film industry to terrorism in modern France. And what is continuous in his novels is a curious sort of stance towards the world, a quite un-American stance, if I can put it like that: the position of an intelligent adult confronting the tragi-comic absurdity of existence. There is little that’s heroic about Harris’s protagonists, but a great deal that’s ironic and witty and sympathetic, with an acute sense of the ridiculousness of things. And while this is very agreeable to a certain kind of taste, as it certainly is to mine, it’s not a popular taste.

  But all his novels are extraordinarily interesting. And gripping, too: he knew how to arrest the attention and keep it, how to time the events of a narrative so that we can’t help turning just one more page.

  And another quality that remains constant in his work is a superbly flexible, elegant and witty prose. It’s the work of someone who attends to every aspect of the words they’re using, not least their weight, their rhythm and their colour. Once I open any of his novels at any point I find it almost impossible not to turn and read on, so delightful is the sensation of a sharp intelligence at work.

  In The Balloonist, we see all of his qualities at their best. Typically, he sets the story in a part of the world h
e hasn’t written about before, and equally typically he evokes it with a marvellous feeling for the whiteness of white, the coldness of cold. We’re in the Arctic, towards the end of the nineteenth century, and our narrator, the Swedish Major Gustav Crispin, is setting out with two companions to fly to the North Pole. The Prinzess, their balloon, sponsored by a German brewery, is fitted with all the latest gear and the finest instruments, including a rudimentary radio with which Major Crispin is very pleased. Since no-one has invented broadcasting, though, he has nothing to listen to but the hissing and crackling of the atmosphere itself, which tells him, he believes, the direction from which a storm can be expected.

  The Major is a delightful character, a little pompous, a little impatient, but impulsive and passionate too, and, like other Harris heroes, utterly helpless when it comes to love. Harris is quite superb at love, especially love between difficult, prickly, unlikely people. The love affair in The Balloonist is richly comic and sexy and ultimately very moving, and he never invented a lovelier heroine than the beguiling and exasperating Luisa.

  The technical background of this book is immaculate – which is to say, it feels solid when the characters pass in front of it, and it convinces me that it’s all real. That does matter: we want to feel that the world we’re reading about does exist, or could exist, or did exist, and technicalities and details of clothing and behaviour and speech as well as of machinery are all part of what makes it seem real. There’s a danger in research, which is that the writer is likely to be so pleased with what he or she has discovered that they can’t bear to leave it out, and it’s a fine judgement to make, whether you’re deepening the perspectives and pointing up the chiaroscuro or just overloading the story with more information than it can carry. A research principle I’ve found useful is to read enough to enable me to make up convincingly anything I don’t know. MacDonald Harris convinces me in The Balloonist that if he’s made any of the background up, I can’t tell. It’s all fascinating. And what’s more there’s just the right amount of it, and it comes to us convincingly in the voice of our narrator, who is fascinated by mechanical devices and the problems of mathematics, and it’s all there to serve the story.

  The character-drawing in this book is particularly skilful. One encounter with Luisa’s timid mother, perpetually grazing on pastries (“Do you know Mifeuya?”) and I never forgot it. And the admirable Waldemer, his “American and pragmatic head screwed squarely on his shoulders” – who could wish for a better companion on a dangerous expedition? By the end of the story, Waldemer still has not realised what we more acute companions of the Major in the little gondola below the vast and gaudy swell of the Prinzess twigged some time ago. But his bravery, his cheerfulness, his way with a kerosene stove! The ingenuity with which Waldemer boils their coffee without setting fire to the hydrogen in the balloon is delightful.

  And one small technical point: much of the story is told in the present tense. I’ve complained many times about the present-tense habit, which has now become almost the default setting for any narrative with aspirations towards the literary. In the hands of most novelists it’s a pointless affectation. But if there was ever a novel in which its use is justified, in fact necessary, it’s this one.

  I hope that in this second voyage of publication The Balloonist finds as many admirers as it deserves, and that we shall see some more of this singular, elegant and witty novelist’s work restored to print. MacDonald Harris is too good to be neglected.

  12 July 1897

  At four o’clock Alvarez comes to tell me everything is ready. I immediately arise and go to the door of the shed. The air is clear and tepid, the sun hangs motionless in the east. The wind is still blowing gently from the south. It is not as much wind as I had hoped, but perhaps it is enough. Turning my back to it, I pause for a reflective moment to look northward in the direction of our hopes. Before me a beach of brown gravel stretches away a few hundred metres to the sea, a flat and endless grey surface wrinkled only slightly by the wind. At the edge of the water, bound to earth with a complicated system of ropes, is the Prinzess on which all our schemes and efforts have concentrated for so many months. Beyond her, only a mile or so across the strait, the shape of Amsterdam Island is clearly outlined in this crystalline morning light, and along to the right is the larger mass of Vasa Peninsula. The temperature, I note, is five degrees centigrade.

  Alvarez is standing at my elbow, and without turning to look at him I know he is watching me with an expression I have come to recognize not only in him but in the other members of the supporting party, from the doctor to the last cook and carpenter in these final days as our preparations have drawn to a climax. They look at us as though we were dead, or more precisely, in the way one might look at men who are to perish in some bizarre and complicated way previously unknown to human experience, men who are to be executed perhaps by some new and intricate apparatus whose effects are unknown and might involve some unexpected and unimaginable ecstasy before the final annihilation. It is not exactly a sympathy. The experience that lies before us is so unprecedented that they, the men who observe us, have no sense of participation in our fate, knowing it is one reserved exclusively for us and not, like death from an ordinary illness, something that they themselves may be eventually destined to experience. And so their glance is one of curiosity rather than sympathy or envy, and is quite distant and detached in its regard; it is a speculation as to what we might be experiencing in our thoughts and sensations in this thing that is already beginning to happen to us and will soon separate us inexorably from all the other men of the earth. It is the look one might give to men who were about to voyage to the moon, or be mated to goddesses or wraiths. Perhaps we are, although I am not quite sure which I mean, or what I mean by that. I would do better to avoid fanciful metaphors and concentrate on the task at hand.

  Alvarez, the crew chief, is an Argentine and knows neither English nor Swedish. Since I know no Spanish we communicate in the French which is the working language of the base camp. In any case Alvarez is not loquacious; he works with his hands and his brain and speaks only when necessary for the job at hand. After a while, still watching me out of his tanned face without expression, he merely inquires, “Ça va?”

  He means the wind. I tell him it is adequate, perhaps. “And there are disturbances to the southeast. In a little while there may be more wind than we can use or need.”

  “Then we should start preparing the Prinzess?”

  “Of course. Immediately. Remove what is necessary. Leave only the three ground ropes if you like.”

  “D’accord, Commandant.”

  With barely a nod to me, his face still expressionless, he disappears in the direction of the workshed. After only a moment I can hear his sharp voice through the walls of the shed. “Allons les gars—a l’éveillée! Tout est rassemblé—où sont les couteaux? On part!”

  Most of the preparations have been completed for several days and what remains to be done is a matter of twenty minutes or so: removal of the lashing ropes, checking of instruments, loading of the final equipment. Out of habit, although I know almost precisely what it will say, I glance at my watch: a little less than ten minutes after four. Then, after a last appraisal of the wind, I go back into the sleeping shed to wake the others. Waldemer is already up, busying himself seriously and a little sleepily with the personal possessions he plans to take with him. When I touch Theodor’s shoulder he says nothing, only looks at me with eyes that from the moment they open fix me steadily without so much as a glance at the other objects in the shed. Then he comprehends and pulls himself out of his sleeping sack without a word. The sleeping sacks are of reindeer leather with the fur inside, warm, but I can predict that the hairs they shed will be an annoyance. Theodor efficiently rolls up his sack; he seems as wide awake as if he had never been asleep, although he is still not very talkative. So much the better! We have not come to this place to talk. We should emulate Alvarez.

  I quickly dress and collect
the few instruments I have not embarked the night before: field glasses, the level sextant, the two pocket chronometers. (I speak of night only from habit since at the latitude of Spitsbergen the summer sun is always skulking around the horizon like a kind of friendly and stupid animal.) With Waldemer I walk down to the edge of the water and verify for myself that the instruments are carefully installed in the gondola. Waldemer stows his photographic apparatus, which except for the folding tripod fits neatly into a kind of leather portmanteau with a handle at the top. We have time for a final check of the chronometers Kullberg 5566 and Kullberg 5587. Still two minutes and thirteen seconds apart; the rates are constant. Then we go back to the sleeping shed where Theodor is lacing up his boots, his mouth set in a little crease of seriousness on one side. The doctor, alerted by Alvarez, has come ashore from the Nordkapp anchored in the bay and is waiting to examine us one last time. Except for Theodor and me he is the only one who knows—as inevitably he must know—the oddness that rests at the centre of this trio of us. A bear of a man with unkempt grey hair and whiskers, he applies a stethoscope to our chests in a rather perfunctory way. We have no fevers, palpitations, or visible fungi that would prevent us from carrying out our folly, as he regards it.

  “Do you have dreams, Major?” he asks me unexpectedly.

  “Dreams? What kind?”

  “Of flying, for instance. Or climbing mountain peaks. Odd dreams, as they seem to you.”

  I might have told him that even my waking existence seems rather odd to me, but we have no time for a pleasant conversation on epistemology. “Do you ask in the interests of science, or merely to verify my health?”

  “Both, I suppose.”

  “I’m perfectly healthy. I’d be glad to engage you in Indian wrestling if you like, but some other time. Are you done with us?”

  “I am speaking to you now not as a physician but as a man. It would be too much to say that I am fond of you. I am not. But I am concerned over what you are doing to yourself, and to others, as I would be for any human being.”