The modern world of technology takes its toll sometimes in unexpected ways; Steven Marcus finds in Sir John Hunt’s account of The Conquest of Everest (Dutton, 320 pp., $6.00) evidence of an unhappy decline in the British tradition of exploration and adventure in the moment of one of its greatest triumphs.
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He who ascends to mountain-toys, shall find
The loftiest peaks most wrapt in clouds and
snow;
He who surpasses or subdues mankind,
Must look down on the hate of those below.
Though high above the sun of glory glow,
And far beneath the earth and ocean
spread,
Round him are the icy rocks, and loudly
blow
Contending tempests on his naked head,
And thus reward the toils which to those
summits led.—“Childe Harold”
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In the nature of the case, the climbing of Mt. Everest was an extraordinary event. And the vague sentiment of cultural uplift that such achievements always evoke was augmented by the fact that the news came just in time for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. Not only had a mountain been climbed; England had reasserted her glory. The film, The Conquest of Everest, reinforced one’s feeling that somehow a larger significance did inhere in the triumphant climb; one came away from the film half-prepared to contribute to the Alpine Club’s next outing, for never before had anyone been able to demonstrate what an extremely difficult and complex thing it is to climb a mountain. It comes then as something of a shock to read Sir John Hunt’s book, The Conquest of Everest. In every way it so little fulfills our expectations— whether these expectations are founded on experience of the literature of travel and exploration, on the despatches published in the Times, or on the film itself—that one begins to feel that something has happened both to the fact and to the idea of exploration, and in particular to the English tradition of exploration, whose unexpected climax this book may well be.
I suppose there has never been an expedition more prosperously fated than this one; nothing went wrong. Appendix III of The Conquest of Everest—“Memorandum, ‘Basis for Planning’ which was drawn up in London before the expedition’s departure”—offers some indication of the completeness of the expedition’s success: the differences between what actually happened in the Himalayas and what was foreseen in the Memorandum of London are negligible.
Perhaps Hunt’s most significant remark is that “on Everest the problems of organization assume the proportions of a military campaign.” And if one should ask whose military campaign, the answer, after reading the book, is, inevitably, General Eisenhower’s. For the surprising truth about this most recent expedition to Everest is how much it was “Americanized.” It is true that the attempt to climb Everest had taken on the shape of a military battle for earlier mountaineers too—even for George Mallory who disappeared into the mists with a volume of romantic poetry in his pocket—but it was an older kind of battle, the kind, for instance, that began with the recitation of Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” at the foot of the Plains of Abraham. Hunt’s expedition seems to have prided itself especially on those qualities of social or industrial organization, cooperation, and “teamwork” which, in their most refined forms, have come to be appreciated as singularly American.
Hunt himself is obviously a genius at planning and logistics, and The Conquest of Everest is more an engineer’s report than a book about climbing a mountain. Almost the entire text is given to detailed accounts of how so many tons of supplies were moved from one camp to another in so many hours at the expense of so many foot-pounds of energy. “It was a routine which became increasingly monotonous by its constant repetition. . . . The scheduled ferries ran to an almost clockwork time-table.” This is like reading a report of one of those famous Productivity Teams the English are always sending here to discover why American industry is so efficient—except that this time it is the English who have established the production figures, and they are bursting with pride at having beaten us at our game. But they have done so at the expense of depersonalizing the activity of exploration. What else can one conclude about an account of an expedition in which almost no notice is taken of how its members behaved, or how they talked, or what they read (or at least took along to read)?
The appendices are more interesting than the text; only there does one find a little of what one particularly looks for in books about travel and exploration: detailed description of some of the equipment and how it works, the report that men’s appetites and tastes go wild at great altitudes (in 1952 on Cho Oyu, Hillary had a terrible craving for pineapple cubes), or that the Sherpa cooks invented a pressure cooker out of a “biscuit can with the lid forced on and a small hole stoppered with a stick acting as a safety valve.” There, too, one discovers with delight that the sausages for the trip were provided by the Société d’Alimentation de Provence, that the Indian army presented the expedition with—of all things—a magnificent gift of rum, and that razors were considered as part of the oxygen equipment, since an oxygen mask will not operate efficiently over a heavy beard. These things, relegated to ostensibly “technical” appendices, are in fact the least technical data in the book. To assume, as this book does, that “getting the job done” was the only important feature of the expedition, is to lose sight of what is truly human and to set up in its place what has always been thought to be the special golden calf of America: success.
Of course, the British are not entirely innocent of technology. But the truth is, as John Kouwenhoven has shown in his book Made in America, that Americans have been adapting and improving British inventions since the middle of the last century. And we need hardly appeal to Kouwenhoven; an inspection of the household utensils and furnishings produced in England today will convince the most skeptical that “ironmongery” is not yet a lost art. So, in a culture where standardization has never been seen as a virtue, the lengths to which the Everest group went to insure absolute interchange-ability of parts in their equipment—the British oxygen company, Normalair, even sent a man to the German firm, Dräger of Lübeck, to arrange for the production of adaptors for some of the oxygen bottles left on Everest by the Swiss in 1951—testify, surely, to a new spirit of professional efficiency in what used to be a characteristic domain of the British amateur.
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One is troubled also, in Sir John’s book, by a surprising, recurrent uneasiness of tone. For instance, the Sherpas called the white men “Sahib,” and Hunt feels called upon to account for such a “curious” appellation: “This Hindi word, denoting superior status, was used by us on the expedition, when necessary, simply to distinguish between members of the party and the Sherpas.” This, one recalls, is written by a colonel in the British Army who spent years of service in India before the last war—it is enough to make the mind boggle. But perhaps there is a technological cause for explanations as false and gratuitous as this. Who can tell the difference between a white man and a Sherpa when both are wearing bulky down suits, balaclavas, and oxygen masks? The famous snapshot of Tenzing on the summit could have been a picture of almost anyone. But not merely has the apparel of mountaineers been transformed (the early climbers of Everest were clad in “tweeds, felt hats, and ordinary Alpine boots”); the idea of climbing itself has been superseded by the general idea of “teamwork.” There is a “team” with a “job to be done,” and while the jot) may require leaders or administrators, it cannot tolerate “Sahibs.” Unlike the French mountaineer Maurice Herzog, Hunt still climbs an actual mountain and not a metaphysical idea, but the mountain is in a way too actual, coming often perilously close to being merely a problem in the tactics of engineering and supply.
Never entirely, of course. The “team” did have its human components, unwilling to yield entirely to the logic of the “job.” But if humanity did insist on asserting itself, the assertion was in many ways on a pretty low level. The Nepalese in Darjeeling and Katmandu kicked up a sordid, comic row, circulating a heroic story about Tenzing dragging a helpless, anoxic Hillary up to the peak. The British, when it came to the point, awarded a knighthood to the “Sahibs” Hillary and Hunt, but could not find it in their hearts to do as much for Tenzing, basing their reluctance on a ludicrous wrangle over Tenzing’s citizenship. When Tenzing was invited to a dinner at the Explorers Club in New York, India’s touchy foreign relations somehow got involved, and the chair reserved for Tenzing remained empty. And when Sir John, fresh from his apologetics about being a “Sahib,” remarked, in what must be even for the British Army a moment of unexampled stupidity, that Tenzing was a good climber “within the limits of his experience,” the atmosphere of social uncertainty and embarrassed liberalism, consorting with the cheapest political exploitation and the remnants of imperial insularity, reached its full expression.
Perhaps the unkindest comment on the expedition was provided by the exploit of the correspondent from the Daily Mail who had been ordered to “get the story” despite the carefully guarded agreement to give the Times exclusive coverage. The Daily Mail reporter, who had never climbed anything steeper than a flight of stairs, walked off in the direction of Everest—accompanied by five natives and equipped with such odds and ends as two pairs of sneakers, an old pup tent, an umbrella, and a few pots, but no map or compass—and simply turned up on the mountain one day, 19,000 feet up, not only to the embarrassment of the party in general, who were ordered to give him no information, but to the particular embarrassment of the expedition’s doctor, who seems to have thought it an affront to science that the man was even alive. This, one feels, is something like it; the unorganized and merely human does survive, even if it must find its last refuge in journalism.
All this, of course, does not alter the fact that the expedition did get to the top of Everest, a “job” which presumably had to be carried out sometime. If the success of the expedition demanded a subversion of some of the older values of exploring, it is pointless to repine. What is troubling is the pretense that this subversion in itself represents the fulfillment of the older tradition; one does not like to see a great nation forced in its decline to insist upon the empty symbols of greatness—as the British have done, not only in their slightly spurious excitement over the climbing of Everest and, more recently, the four-minute mile, but most distressingly in the coronation itself, that elaborate inauguration of a “new Elizabethan Age” which only emphasized more painfully the fact that the old Elizabethan Age can never return.
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I think we can get a clearer idea of what has been lost by comparing Hunt’s account with another account of a large British effort in exploration. A little more than forty years ago, the British sent out an expedition that was assumed to be as prepared, as modern, and was as loudly heralded, as this recent one: Scott’s last attempt to reach the South Pole. From this expedition came what is probably the finest work about exploring of our century, Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World, a book which has received practically no recognition in this country.
If Hunt’s expedition was a flawless success, Scott’s was virtually a total failure. Everything went wrong, all the misfortunes and mistakes culminating in the death from starvation of the five men of the Polar party, locked in their tent in a blizzard, only eleven miles from the next depot of food—this after having been beaten by Amundsen, who had had the bad taste to turn the whole business into a race and reached the Pole thirty days ahead of Scott, getting there and back without the loss of a man or even any serious hardships. Scott himself seems to have been as unreliable and inept a leader as Hunt is a steady and knowledgeable one. He was prone to neurotic anxiety (Cherry-Garrard says he wept more easily than any man he had ever met), and had no trust in his own decisions, often reversing them at inopportune moments—at the very last minute he chose to take five men to the Pole, when all along plans had been made for only four; this in the long run brought about the shortage of food and supplies which proved fatal to the returning party. He chose his equipment shortsightedly, bringing expensive and almost untried motor tractors to the Antarctic, none of which performed at all well, and he didn’t take along nearly enough dogs. What his men went through with the equipment—their sleeping bags were perpetually frozen, their boots gave them almost no protection, their food was hopelessly deficient, they hauled their supplies thousands of miles harnessed like dogs to their sledges—is excruciating to read.
In almost every way, Scott’s men were unfit to be explorers, and this radical unfitness constitutes one of the reasons why their story remains so moving. They were picked men, but one feels that they had been picked for their personal qualities more than for their usefulness to the “team.” Cherry-Garrard himself, for example, spent two years in the Antarctic virtually unable to see his hand in front of his face; he was extremely nearsighted, and the cold made it impossible to wear glasses. But this serious disability did not prevent Scott from taking him along; it was assumed that the extra risk belonged to him alone. Indeed, half the time the Polar explorers seem to have been not quite aware of what they were doing, though they had worked out what seemed to them a very substantial idea of why they were there: it was for Science. Three of them—Cherry-Garrard, Wilson, and Bowers—took a six weeks’ journey through the midwinter darkness to get some eggs of the Emperor penguin. The temperature was frequently at 70 below zero; the surface of the snow at such temperatures made hauling so difficult that they often progressed no more than three miles in a day; their bodies were continuously covered with a thin layer of ice next to the skin, from frozen perspiration; it took an hour each night to get into the frozen sleeping bags; several times they were nearly killed (Wilson and Bowers later died with Scott on the Polar trip); Cherry-Garrard’s teeth all cracked and fell out. They returned, finally, with three eggs.
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Cherry-Garrard reprints in his book—as evidence that it had all been worthwhile—a dry little paper on the embryology of the Emperor penguin written by a scientist to whom the eggs were eventually delivered for study. He also tells us of the day when, as sole survivor of the three men who made the winter journey, he brought the precious eggs to the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. His reception at the museum was so offensively indifferent that he is forced to relate the story in parody. Apparently he was taken for some kind of messenger—though by that time, presumably, he must have been already equipped with a set of false teeth—and responded by demanding a receipt for the eggs, which he obtained only after several hours of cooling his heels in an anteroom. He did not even meet the director of the museum. The point of this display of British bad manners is that if Cherry-Garrard wanted to risk his life and sacrifice his teeth for three penguin eggs, that was strictly his own business; nobody at that time mistook the eggs for a symbol of the greatness of England. In 1910, reaching the South Pole, or climbing a great mountain, or even discovering the source of the Nile, was still conceived as one of the appanages of national greatness, rather than as the fact of that greatness itself. It probably seemed natural for the men of a nation that had subdued one-quarter of the world’s surface and population to attempt these strenuous, heroically absurd things, but it was rarely suggested that the actuality of national greatness rested on such performances. That greatness, everyone knew, was perpetuated in the shops and the factories and the trading posts, and the achievements of individual endurance and courage were only the panoply, the decoration, just as a coronation at that time was too. It has come to pass, however, that such events as the ascent of Everest or a coronation have devolved into the principal facts of the national sentiment of greatness. Now, when an Englishman flies faster than anyone else in the world, there is a genuine, excessive national jubilation—even though it might be two years since the plane he flew went into “super-priority production” for the Royal Air Force, and not one yet delivered.
This alteration in the terms of national self-esteem is what compelled the kind of expedition—the grimness, the fierce engineering, the dehumanizing “teamwork”—that Hunt led. Scott’s men went to the Antarctic for their own sakes, not for the nation and not even for adventure (though the idea of adventure was certainly not absent), but primarily, as Cherry-Garrard indicates, with the idea that to have gone with Scott would advance their careers as scientists or journalists or soldiers. Certainly they were very much aware of themselves as Englishmen; indeed, the qualities of national distinctness, or at least an awareness of the ratifying importance of nationality to exploration, attenuated in Hunt’s book, are constantly present in Cherry-Garrard’s; the men on Scott’s voyage could have walked right off the cricket field onto the Polar Ice Barrier, and they possessed and sometimes flaunted all the virtues and shortcomings of the education and way of life which rested on the culture of the cricket field.4 But it was their own safety and success that hung in the balance, not England’s. For this reason their failure holds a meaning that Hunt’s success cannot. The deaths and disappointments of this journey remained personal, and it was the failure of the expedition, the collective effort, that was eclipsed. Hunt and his men climbed Everest “for England,” and if their success is taken as a testimony to England’s greatness, the inference is inescapable that her greatness would have been less had Everest remained unclimbed, or had some Amundsen climbed it first. The Nepalese, in their ungentlemanly attempt to claim that Tenzing and not Hillary was the hero of the climb, showed that they had got the point all too clearly.
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Despite all their pride in manufacture and industry, the Englishmen who traveled with Scott in 1910 were fundamentally not technologists but entrepreneurs who retained that fierce trust in the unalterable grace of their individuality and whatever that individuality might compel them to do which distinguishes the entrepreneur from the technologist. A visit to the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge verifies this impression, for there one is able to examine the ridiculous equipment with which, only forty years ago, these men expected to reach the South Pole, and with which, in fact, five of them did reach it; if there were any ideas about rational technology then, they took appallingly little cognizance of them.
Of course, they also paid the price of individualism. One cannot conceive of any museum official today treating one of Hunt’s men as Cherry-Garrard was treated when he brought his penguin eggs to South Kensington. And today Cherry-Garrard could count on getting the finest set of false teeth the National Health Service could provide. When Scott lay dying in his tent in the Antarctic, he thought of his family and the families of his companions and made a final poignant entry in his diary: “For God’s sake, look after our people!” The plea was necessary, and the old procession of images passes before one again: the children in the mines, the Indian mills, the general strike. . . . Had disaster fallen on any of the men with Hunt, no such plea as Scott’s would have had to be made. But one must return to the fact that the Polar expedition had for Scott and his crew a personal significance that was different from the significance which the Everest expedition seems to have had for Hunt and his men. The decreased possibility of this older kind of significance is associated with the passing of an extraordinary imperial temperament which, now that it is defunct, even the Socialists elegiacally, if surreptitiously, consent to celebrate. They celebrate it because they can hardly escape assenting to what an elderly Englishman, unconsciously echoing Talleyrand, recently said to me—“You will never know how fine life can be, if you haven’t lived in England before 1914”—any more than I could escape assenting to it in spite of my having Scott’s last words fresh in my mind and in spite of my disinclination to mourn anything as complex and mythologized as the English idea of the English past. The irretrievable “fineness” of that life accompanied its prodigality and indifference, and all three were contained in the reality of England’s great wealth and power.
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Nevertheless, we do injustice to Hunt’s trip if we do not see that it was a distinguished achievement. That is not difficult if one has seen the film; from it one knows that George Lowe’s eleven days on the Lhotse Face and Bourdillon and Evans’s first assault were very remarkable performances, and having watched Hunt’s embrace of Tenzing one can never doubt the full humanity of the triumph. Ironically, however, it is a characteristically American technique that permits us this knowledge; only through a movie camera are we allowed to glimpse what really happened, and beside it the supreme English gift, the articulate-ness of the written word, seems inadequate to its task. The neutral camera has preserved the personalness of what happened; it is the explorers who have lost the ability to apprehend and communicate their experience in human terms.
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1 Cherry-Garrard writes: “The truth was that Amundsen was an explorer of the markedly intellectual type, rather Jewish than Scandinavian, who had proved his sagacity by discovering solid footing for the winter by pure judgment. . . .” Amundsen, that is, was a better explorer than Scott, extremely shrewd, and had the confidence of his intuitions. Scott’s crew were unashamedly furious at Amundsen for racing against them, turning south at the last moment when everyone had been led to believe that he was going to the Arctic: this was not playing the game. On the other hand, although Everest was regarded as a “British mountain,” Hunt studiously avoids accusing the Swiss or the French of poaching on English preserves; the manners of the explorer seem in some ways to have improved as an international political style has deteriorated. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Hunt is not sure that his objecting to such encroachment would carry the kind of weight that the men on Scott’s expedition felt their censure of Amundsen carried.
