In the face of certain death, does being civilized matter?

All the narrators of Beryl Bainbridge’s 1991 historical novel The Birthday Boys die. And still, knowing their deaths loom, they carry on with birthdays, religious practices, and virtues like loyalty and courage.

Heavily based on real life diaries and letters, this novel is a hybrid between fiction and nonfiction, retelling Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed 1910–1913 Antarctic expedition. The novel is told from five points of view, the five members of the expedition who, historically, passed away from hypothermia and starvation during the return journey from the pole.

In the novel and in real life, Scott’s team was beaten to the pole by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. The men thus gave their lives for second place, for even though the expedition was officially a scientific one, Scott and others believed that their national pride was at stake in the race to be the first group of explorers ever to reach the South Pole.

Labors for nothing—that is how the men reflected on their actions. Bainbridge situates her explorers in a moment of historical change; they are victims of the passing away of the old world and its ideals of manhood. Running from a world in which they no longer fit, they are beaten in a boyish contest to the South Pole, and pay for it with their lives. Unmoored from civilization and facing terrible odds, they cling to their sense of who they are through a near-obsession with birthdays and other fragments, ceremonies, and artifacts of the civilized world they’ve left behind.

By analogy, they hold onto artifacts of manhood from the Old World, the “civilized world,” including stoicism, courage, a stiff-upper lip, endurance, and loyalty. The world is about to fall from civilization, to lose itself to the barbarity of World War I, as bleak as any polar landscape, and this band of explorers retains something of the old Edwardian sense of manner, integrity, and decorum.

But to what end? The errand they risk their lives for seems hardly worthy of it: to stand around in the middle of a winter wasteland. They have courage and nothing to use it for. Like their adherence to the traditions of British culture in a brutal, otherworldly environment, they hold on to their humanity, masculinity, and their courage in a society that values such things less and less.

One piece of “civilization” that they hang on to in their journey is a focus on birthday celebrations (as indicated in the novel’s title). The birthday references carry through to the very end of the novel, when Captain Scott, Dr. Edward Wilson, Henry “Birdie” Bowers, Lawrence “Titus” Oates, and Edgar “Taff” Evans are facing their deaths on the journey back from the pole. Only a day away from walking out into the snow and ice to die, Oates relates, “I think it’s my birthday tomorrow.” Of course the corollary to one’s birthday is one’s death-day, and the two find near identification in Oates’s realization.

An examination of Dr. Wilson’s actual diaries from the expedition reveals that the explorer’s preoccupation with birthdays, celebrations, and other cultural activities in the novel is historically accurate. Wilson also kept detailed track of the liturgical calendar, and the crew of the expedition held Church services every Sunday up until the smaller party departed for the final trek to the South Pole. Wilson’s diary reveals that the crew prepared elaborate celebrations of such events as Midwinter Day. These birthdays and other celebrations connected the men with their homes and their prior lives, their sense of identity in a place where identity had been stripped away and individualities reduced to their human core in the face of death-dealing environmental conditions.

Historian Carolyn Strange has examined the ways in which the explorers brought their cultural heritage with them into the bleakness to help make Antarctica feel like home:

A man could turn to a game of backgammon, draughts or chess after supper (the crewmen played euchre), or he could retreat to his bunk to read one of the books he had brought with him, or borrow another’s from the library. … Self-mastery and displays of masculine fortitude allowed these explorers to survive their ordeal but endurance was not the expedition’s emotional key signature: a positive outlook, combined with the emotional intimacy of home-making, was.

The men’s sense of connection to home, to civilization, and to their identity as gentlemen was thus in some ways essential to their endurance.

Their celebration of birthdays and other ceremonies of civilization mirrors the way in which the men hold onto old, civilized ways of being a man, which socially and existentially were beginning to make them feel “not at home.” Bainbridge puts this realization into the mouth of Dr. Wilson. The passage is worth quoting at length since it encapsulates one of the novel’s central themes of displacement and change:

It often strikes me that Con and myself, Birdie and Oates, even Peter Pan Evans … are the misfits, victims of a changing world. It’s difficult for a man to know where he fits in any more. All the things we were taught to believe in, love of country, of Empire, of devotion to duty, are being held up to ridicule. The validity of the class system, the motives of respectable, educated men are now as much under the scrutiny of the magnifying glass as the parasites feeding off the Scottish grouse. Such a dissection of purpose is unsettling and has possibly led me to hide my ambition behind a shield of puritanism.

Petty Officer Evans, of a lower social status than Wilson, offers his own type of lament about the changing world and his place in it: “The time can’t be far off when the strength of a man’s arm, his knowledge of tides, of winds, will count for nothing, and I, for one, am glad I’ll be beached by then.”

This lament of change finds another expression in Birdie’s voice, when he says,

The world is changing, and soon the machine will be of more importance than the body, and it’s tremendous luck to have been born into the last few seconds of an epoch in which a man is still required to stand up and be counted.

Birdie is all too correct in characterizing his time as “the last few seconds of an epoch,” for the specter of World War I looms close.

Whatever the men’s individual motives, it is undeniable that they embody some of the ideals of this old order in their endurance, determination, and courage. The signature of Scott’s party was a combination of courageous determination and the maintenance of identity and morality through an adhesion to civilized behavior, including good manners.

But here, perhaps, we move beyond mere courtesy to something more fundamental, to something that touches on the best of human nature itself, and it is this “something” that Bainbridge has Birdie point toward just after Wilson has offered his speech about misfits in a changing world. This is what he says: “All I know is, nothing matters a damn except that we should help one another.” And later, at the very end of his section of the narrative, Birdie reiterates:

It may be that the purpose of the worst journey in the world had been to collect eggs which might prove a scientific theory, but we’d unraveled a far greater mystery on the way—the missing link between God and man is brotherly love.

This conviction is really the only thing to vindicate and redeem the expedition, for the men demonstrate great courage and charity in helping one another suffer through the ordeal, and that has value in itself. In the men’s spirit of charity, resignation, and self-sacrifice, which is not essentially tied to one gender or one epoch, Scott’s explorers achieved an enduring legacy, even a kind of immortality.

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