The Ice-Shirt by William T. Vollmann

The question of who was going to put on what shirt had not been decided; indeed, it remained to answer the more elementary question of which shirts, once put on, could come off; and, more elementary still, of which shirts there were to make.  So the dressmakers were busy drawing and cutting.  Many were measured for bear-shirts; a few, like Freydis Eiriksdaughter, chose the Ice-Shirt and became coldly great.  In Norway, Gunhild's successor King Olaf made many black shirts with crosses on them.  As for the Skraelings, they continued to wear the shirts of beasts, fishes, and stars.

William T. Vollmann's novel The Ice-Shirt is the third of his Seven Dreams series, about the interactions between European colonists and Native Americans, that I have read, and the third book I took with me to Newfoundland.  It's a little bit more tangential to that island than The Bird Artist and The Shipping News: Up at Newfoundland's northernmost tip lies L'Anse aux Meadows, North America's only confirmed site of Viking settlement.  Going there is like confronting a history on a scale that is rare on this continent, going back a thousand years--although that's only true, as Vollmann surely knows, if you ignore Native American sites that are both plentiful and older.  Researchers believe that Newfoundland and points further south, perhaps reaching even into the Carolinas along the Atlantic coast, represent the area that Norse texts like The Saga of the Greenlanders and The Saga of Erik the Red identify as Vinland, a utopia-like land full of wild grapes and no frost.  The Ice-Shirt is Vollmann's account of how, exactly, utopia came to be not so utopian.

The book's first half retools several of the legends that appear in those sagas, as well as the Icelandic Eddas.  They're about Eirik the Red and his son Leif, but also legendary kings going back to the second century B.C.E.  In Vollmann's account, the ancient Norse kings used to have the power of transformation, changing themselves in to bears to ravage their enemies, usually with the assistance of bear-shirts.  (In Norse, this word is familiar: berserk, as in to go berserk.)  But at the time of Leif's adventure in North America, this ability has largely been lost, hidden by kings wary of their own offspring, and symbolically replaced a Christianized Norway and King Olaf's missionary zeal.  The exploration and settling of North America becomes a substitute for the transformation of the bear-shirts; the Norse can no longer transform themselves but they can work a kind of magic transformation on this land.  Like in his other novels, Vollmann employs a chameleonic prose that imitates his source material; here it's the winding sentences of Norse legend with their characteristic "kennings": compound metaphors, like "swan-field" for the sea or "corpse-snake" for a sword.

Vollmann pairs the Viking legends with those of native Inuit and Mi'kmaq peoples, often about transformation themselves, including the story of Younger Brother and Elder Brother who are transformed into woman and man, and then the sun and the moon.  The Vikings call the natives Skraelings, and though their interactions between natives and explorers are fewer here than in Argall or The Rifles, reading The Ice-Shirt is a comparatively interesting experience because the narrative distance between us and the Vikings is not so different from the distance between us and the Skraelings.  The identification between Vollmann and the doomed English captain John Franklin in The Rifles is so strong that their identities begin to bleed together.  In Argall, it's difficult not to feel identification, and accompanying guilt, with the English explorers who brutalize Pocahontas.  But in The Ice-Shirt, the Vikings and Skraelings seen more similar to each other than either does to us.  That distance removes a layer of complexity for the modern Anglo reader, I think, and allows us to see the interactions between natives and Europeans with relative disinterestedness.

On the other hand, the novel gives a frightening and brutal representation of colonialism in the character of Freydis Eiriksdottir.  Freydis, Erik the Red's bastard daughter, appears in the sagas as a courageous woman who helps defeat the Skraelings.  Here, she is something much more sinister and fascinating: a greedy woman who pledges her loyalty to Blue-Shirt, the evil spirit embodied in the ice-sheet that covers Greenland.  "Blue-shirt," like the bear-shirts and various other shirts throughout the novel, is a symbol of transformation, and Freydis' quest is two-fold: to drain Vinland of whatever resources it has to enrich herself, and to bring frost to the frostless land.  Freydis acts out of greed, but her greed is self-replicating, and becomes a kind of pointless malevolence that demonstrates the viciousness and waste of the colonialist.  This exchange, between Freydis and the Mi'kmaq god Kluskap, shows how that works:

He said, "what do you really want?"

"I want to be rich," Freydis said.

"Well, here you are in My country.  Everyone who comes here is rich.  Some of my people say you Jenuaq are rich already.  They don't mind it, but they know what you're doing here.  Your ship is full of timber and grape-vines.  Your men have all the game they want, because they leave good buck-deer rotting for Skofte Carrion-Crow.  I've seen that.  We don't do that here.  Your husband is happy trading milk for skins -- that was a good idea of yours, Freydis Eiriksdaughter! -- and Gudrid and Karslefni have found a place to live, where the berries are as many as stars, and the fish are as many as hairs on your head.  Of course my People are angry about the man you killed, but I can smooth that out with them if you pay compensation.  What more do you want?"

Sullenly, Freydis dug her heel into the sand.  "I want everything," she said.

Wanting to the point of destruction: destruction of land, destruction of strangers, destruction of self.  That's the mindset of the European colonialist, at least at its most extreme, in miniature.  It's certainly recognizable in the rapaciousness of the title governor in Argall.  Freydis gives Vollmann the opportunity to write about this impulse in the language of myth, a vernacular that we have in many ways lost.  The stories of the berserkers are interesting, but it's not until the novel focuses in on Freydis that it really becomes powerful, or engaging.

Like those other novels, Vollmann intersperses the historical-mythological narrative with flashes of the present day.  He's deeply concerned with the way that the colonizing interactions of the past remain present in the culture and landscape of the present.  Here, that means brief narratives of Vollmann's travels to Greenland's capital Nuuk, as well as Newfoundland and Nova Scotia.  I didn't think these parts were as effective as in The Rifles, where Vollmann seems to collapse the border between the past and present by literally becoming Captain Franklin.  In a way, The Ice-Shirt seems to be groping around for the method he invents for that later novel.

I didn't get to start The Ice-Shirt until I got back from Newfoundland, but it was an interesting way or reflecting on the trip.  Vollmann, playing fast and loose with geography, uses Nova Scotia and the coast further south to represent the Vinland-that-was, while Newfoundland--naturally colder and less forested--represents the corrupted Vinland of the present.  That didn't exactly square with my impression of the island's beauty or wonder, but I get it.  I did enjoy seeing a recognizable set of sea arches become an enormous human skull:

Then, walking south across the point, she came to a beach where boulders formed themselves into double arches, like the eye-sockets of a skull, through which the milk-grey sea gazed mildly, while the forehead was flat and green-grown, and though the skull had no mouth the teeth were scattered thickly about: -- smooth pebbles, black, orange, red and white.  Because this was a prodigy, Freydis considered that Blue-Shirt had heard her prayer.  She bowed again, and a cloud-shadow came to the edge of the ocean.  (In those days, as I have said, the shape-changers were dying out, but it was still possible to do quite a bit with prayer.) -- The place is still there today; it is called "The Arches."

See the skull?  No?  Well, look harder, maybe.  As Vollmann would tell you, the past is always present.

Argall by William T. Vollmann

Powhatan now gestures at the girl-child who's saved him.  Sweet John peers at her for the .1.st time.  Shaveheaded in front, she sports long black tresses plaited near about as tightly as chains of beads.  Nobly confident (which perhaps beseems her blood), she gazes into his face.  He can't accompt her now.  His heart's not yet sure it's allowed to beat.  How could he discover her face, let alone remember it?

She is wearing winter skin-clothes with the hair on them.  At her throat she wears a stone bead with a round carven face which gazes upon him with deep-sunk eyes.  He fears it, & her.  (She herself hath glistering eyes.)  What if she proves tigress?

She smiles upon him.  Now he fears her not.

The story of Pocahontas is pretty nuts.  John Smith, early Virginian colonialist, claimed in his memoirs that she saved him at the last moment from being executed by her father, the Native American king Powhatan.  That might not be true--or it might have been an elaborate ritual designed to indicate Smith's rebirth as a Powhatan.  We know that story from the Disney film.  But Disney leaves a lot out: Pocahontas was no more than twelve when she saved John Smith, and later on life she's captured by English settlers, who marry her to one of their own as a way of forcing the Powhatans into peace.

In his novelization of the Pocahontas story, Argall, William T. Vollmann leaves nothing out.  And I mean nothing: every detail of Smith's life, no matter how irrelevant, is included here.  Vollmann takes no artistic license, except perhaps for the quasi-Elizabethan pidgin English he employs (which is reminiscent of novels like Nothing Like the Sun and The Wake).  Reviews seem to have objected to the overly digressive nature of Argall, which pushes 700 pages and seems to think every minor historical character needs thirty pages of background, and I understand that.  But I wonder if there isn't something noble, given the amount of artistic license taken with Pocahontas, and with Native American history in general, in the way Vollmann desires to lay the entire historical record out.

And besides, the story as it is, and as Vollmann tells is, is incredibly powerful.  He describes a Jamestown that is perpetually on the brink of starvation, ruled by petty men disappointed in their expectations of gold, and who rely on the surrounding Natives to provide them with enough food to survive.  The relationship between the English and the Powhatans is alternately friendly and inimical, vacillating between free, though uneasy, exchange and horrible, bloody raids on both sides.  (But mostly, tbh, by the settlers--Vollmann goes out of his way to show there's no equivalency.)  Many of these raids are run by Smith himself, who idolizes Machiavelli and puts Machiavellian precepts into practice in his brief ascendancy at Jamestown.  But the relationship between Smith and Pocahontas, still just a child, is the one relationship between Natives and whites built on genuine affection, and it offers the slightest hope for reconciliation, even love, between the two groups.

I read the section of Argall that details Pocahontas' captivity with the English right after seeing Room, and that amplified, for me, its tragic sadness.  Her conversion to Christianity and marriage to John Rolfe seems like Stockholm Syndrome, or perhaps just the brokenness of a woman stolen from her family and home.  "I am nothing," she tells her cousin.  Later, in England, she meets John Smith after more than a decade--the English told her he had died--and she can do more than turn her face away.  Vollmann takes that from the historical record, and it is deeply sad, as sad as the historical record itself.  Speaking later, Smith begs her to tell him her real name, the secret Powhatan name which she betrayed her father by confessing to the English, and she scorns him with the pet name she gave Smith as a child:

As she whispered to him that same word that she had uttered long ago:  Mufkauiwh, which signifies A Flower of a fine thing.  But this time she whispered it in bitterness.  And he never learned whether her father had called her this, or whether she meant it to apply to him as in the olden days.  After that she withdrew & would not come out.  When Maister Rolfe (having seen their guest to the door) peeped in to visit her, he found her weeping so wild as to be almost beyond the bounds of submission.

In the end, the story of Pocahontas and John Smith is deeply sad, and yet familiar: here are two people who loved each other, but whose love could not survive circumstance.  When, we wonder, might it not have been too late?  We might as well ask the same question about the native peoples of Virginia, whose wholesale subjugation and eradication was so complete as to be perhaps beyond all remedy.  Vollmann, who is in the midst of a planned seven-book series about the relationship between Europeans and Native Americans, wants to reveal to us how we all are inheritors of this great evil, which we abide in and cannot escape.  He closes the novel with a series of road signs in "Virginia"--that swath of land from New England to Florida--that, while gimmicky, underscores this very point:

Even the title is telling--not Pocahontas or John Smith, who are losers (in the Trump sense), but Argall, the name of the scheming, amoral captain responsible for Pocahontas' capture.  Sometimes the novel hits this note too hard, and seems didactic or screed-like.  But mostly it succeeds in giving the tragedy of history a human face.