Bunch of Amateurs Read Free Page B

such as Harvard’s Samuel Eliot Morison sniffed at him, regarding his theories as crackpot stuff. As if it weren’t enough that the guy had been known to wander Mexico looking for a “lost tribe,” his claim to the Viking landing in America relied entirely on his reading of the Norse sagas.
    He had studied specifically the texts of
Graenlendinga Saga
and
Eirik’s Saga
. If scholars thought that these were fanciful poems full of invented imagery, Ingstad disagreed. He believed that buried in the heroic verse was a core story of journalistic truth and factual exploration. He insisted that the place called “Vinland” and the ferocious savages known as the “skraelings” were not metaphors but were North America and the Indians.
    Using the vague geography in the stories, he began triangulating the possible landfall sites along the northwestern Atlantic shore and spent years devising ways to visit harbors and inlets to examine the land for clues. In 1960 he was visiting a small village in Newfoundland on an unrelated medical mission. He happened to ask a local named George Decker if the village had any prehistoric sites.
    Decker said it did, and after nearly eight years of digging, Newfoundland finally yielded physical evidence: foundational remains of three long houses, a bronze ring-head pin, some nails smelted from abog iron, and a spindle whorl for spinning wool—all of Norse provenance. As a result, the Viking presence in the New World in the year 1000 is now accepted as absolute fact. Canada has made the place a park. And even the Ivy League establishment has recast the story ever so slightly to make it fit the model of a properly credentialed expert whisk-brooming away dust from the Truth. In later editions of his books, Harvard’s Samuel Eliot Morison worked in a tiny tweak of stately revisionism. He referred to the Norse voyage, stiffly, as confirmed by “archaeologist Dr. Helge Ingstad.”

    If amateurs always seems to be fading away, it’s because that’s what most of them do. Most are failures, and that is a dead-end path to immortality. Those amateurs simply disappear. And if they succeed, then they spend a great deal of time trying to erase their amateur past. They collect piles of honorary degrees or massive stock options, either of which makes it very easy to look like a pro. And it makes it easier to write that memoir that explains how it was all inevitable anyway and airbrush out all that stumbling amateur striving. The first of these was, of course,
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
, an amazing piece of revisionist history. It’s what helped set up the image of the wise old jolly Puritan inventor at the expense of the naïve screwup, the liar, the rutting boy-satyr, the atheist, the self-promoter. The amateur’s redemptive memoir is practically its own genre in this country; evidence of them can be found on every year’s bestseller list. You can find the same structure in the summoning of the log cabin in William Henry Harrison’s presidential biography—all true, but part of the narrative of unpolished origins that begins so many of these stories. Patti Smith’s
Just Kids
opens on her birth in a roominghouse and with an evocation of a humble family learning how to pray. What awaits is a lovely tale of pluck and inevitability. It doesn’t matter who’s telling it: Jack Welch of GE or Helen Keller. We love these stories. It’s a world where we sweep away a lot of the details and make the path to glory seem inevitable. It can be a treacherous task, which is why this bookshelf is afflicted with so many scandals (
A Million Little Pieces
,
Three Cups of Tea
…).
    The cover-up is a key element in the amateur story and the main reason why the whole narrative feels like a hidden history of our country. We’re ashamed of our amateur status, so Americans love awards that deliver us from our low origins and elevate us in some way. Think of the famous prizes given out each year by the