228 T h e A l p i n e J o u r n A l 2 0 1 2 from the east to the west but it has to be portrayed within a view of at most 10 degrees. The laws of perspective don’t seem to work any more. It is a PENNY BRADSHAW struggle and a struggle that confronts every artist who attempts to paint a mountain ‘close up’ as I do. Try as I will, a sheet of A3 is far too small. Yet it is too big as well, for cloud gathers and vanishes, and the light constantly ‘Living at Our Full Compass’ changes before you are even started, let alone halfway finished. Even on the stillest of days, the mountain scene is not still for the sun never ceases to Michael Roberts and The Poetry of Mountaineering march across the sky, lighting what was in shadow and drawing new lines across the rock face as every newly lit spire casts its shadow below. Speed is of the essence. Inevitably you paint a picture of something that nobody has n a paper delivered to the Alpine Club in 1939 the poet, editor, and ever seen, of something that did not exist. Filling the paper with what you Imountaineer, Michael Roberts points to the enduring symbol of the see is impossible. The trick is to paint what you want to see. mountain in the human imagination, commenting that ‘From the earliest In the studio I am attempting to overcome another problem. It is a times the loneliness, immensity and permanence of mountains have made problem not just of physical perspective. There is a psychological aspect men think of a power beyond themselves’ (Roberts 1940, p.28). Within that has to be addressed as well. No mountaineer looks at a mountain the paper he goes on to celebrate important Romantic literary responses without looking at all of it in its entirety, from the glaciers and rocks that to mountains but crucially he also distinguishes between his own poetic cover its feet to its soaring ridges and sparkling summits. No mountaineer response and that of his Romantic predecessors, and begins to establish a looks at a mountain without considering how it can be climbed. The longer new mountain-inspired poetics appropriate to the period in which he was you look, the more you see and the more you feel, especially when close up writing. In so doing Roberts reminds us that cultural responses to natural where no camera can capture the scene. Perhaps a painter who has never phenomena such as mountains are variable rather than constant and are climbed might not recognize this problem, but to a climber who paints, the subject to historically specific economic, political and aesthetic pressures. mountain must be believable. In this essay I draw on Roberts’s poetry and criticism to consider the It is here in my studio that I am painting now. On my easel is a view literary treatment of mountains within the turbulent decade of the 1930s. of the ENE wall of Pizzo Badile. It dominates the room but (at 900mm x In his 1955 book, The Lakers: The Adventures of the First Tourists, Norman 1200mm portrait format) it feels too small already and I wish that I were Nicholson argues that the Industrial Revolution brought about a funda- working at twice that size. mental rupture in man’s relationship with the natural world and he suggests But once more I can feel the warmth of that summer day when Lizbet that in one way or another we have been trying to get back to nature ever and I, climbing from the Cappano Gianetti, stepped from the confines of since. Nicholson describes three post-industrial ‘cults of nature – the the crack that leads to the Colle del Cengalo. Suddenly the vast expanse of Picturesque, the Romantic and the Athletic’ which are all symptoms of our the ENE wall towered over us. Some 400m below the ice of the Vadrec dal society’s problematic separation from the natural environment (Nicholson Cengal butts against the foot of the north face. In the far distance, the peaks 1955, p.207). Of these ‘cults,’ the Romantic, which obviously lends itself of the Val Bregaglia close the view to the north. Nearly 40 years ago we to a contemplative and imaginative response to nature, continues to be had climbed the north ridge and from its lower sections, gazing across the prioritised in our understanding of poetic responses to certain key privi- face to the East, our present standpoint could be seen before it disappeared leged natural landscapes such as the Lakes and the Alps. The later Athletic behind the bulge of the eastern edge of the north face. Here, the tumble cult, which is predominantly a phenomenon of the inter-war period, has of rocks rise to the Punta Sertori and on the ENE wall you see a group of received comparatively little attention in these terms, since it is defined by climbs not that frequented by British climbers, including the English Route a primarily physical rather than imaginative engagement with the natural first climbed by Isherwood and Kosterlitz in 1972. world. Nicholson depicts the Athletic response to nature through a range Yet I know that no one else will view my painting the way in which I do. of physical pursuits such as swimming, climbing, cycling and hiking which Inevitably it will be hung at the wrong height. Inevitably it will be viewed allow the city-dweller to experience ‘at least for the week-end, a more from too far away. I wish that I could insist, ‘To look at this painting you heroic and adventurous relation with the world about him’ (Nicholson must stand there! Your eye must be exactly here!’ Only then would the 1955, p.207). However, as Michael Roberts suggests in his 1939 paper viewer be in just the correct position for the physical perspective to be and in his own poems, a post-Romantic and more athletic approach to the correct and the psychological perspective to work. It has always been so. natural world can also engender new imaginative and creative directions Will I see paradise? I doubt it but maybe, I hope, I might achieve nirvana for poetry. whilst I am painting. The predominant poets publishing during the interwar period, or the 229 230 T h e A l p i n e J o u r n A l 2 0 1 2 m i c h A e l r o b e r T s 231 ‘Auden generation,’ as they became widely known, are often seen to priori- the preface Roberts certainly does point to the importance of seeking new tise industrial and urban imagery above the pastoral and are defined in poetic forms and images to express new experiences. He writes: terms of their anti-Romantic aesthetics. However, during the period in which they were writing there is, as Nicholson indicates, a widespread ...we may appreciate the elegance of poetry written by men whose cultural resurgence of interest in our human relationship with the natural whole experience was different to ours; but we cannot accept it as world, an interest which can be traced in the fashionable rise of camping, a resolution of our own problems. It is not only that our response hiking, and other fresh-air leisure activities during the inter-war period; to certain words and rhythms has changed; new knowledge and four major British Everest expeditions took place during the 1930s and this new circumstances have compelled us to think and feel in ways not decade also witnessed the formation of the Youth Hostels Association and expressible in the old language at all... We have become too analyt- the Ramblers Association, as well as a rapid growth in the Scouting move- ical, too conscious of our own motives, to react in the old way to the ment. Not surprisingly, and despite an apparent intellectual prioritisation old symbols. (Roberts 1932, pp.7-9) of the civic and the industrial over the natural, this cultural influence filters through to the poetry and other literature of the period. He also claims at one point that ‘Rural poetry in recent years has been, in Roberts is a much underes- general, a cowardly escape into the past’ but he goes on to suggest that it is timated poet and writer who possible to produce a different kind of nature poetry, which does address the is little read or studied now values, concerns, rhythms and experiences of modern life, and he praises even within literary circles Julian Bell – whose poems are included in the anthology – for producing but he is an important figure poems which engage with natural landscapes in a non-sentimental way: within the thirties context. While W. H. Auden is often Julian Bell... write[s] of the English countryside in rhythms which viewed as the unofficial show that for him it means no weekend cottage or funkhole from leader of the thirties genera- the town: his clear-cut delineations of landscape express neither tion, Michael Roberts is in jingoism nor sentimental affection but a feeling for the land itself; a some sense its spokesman. He sentiment which, though local in origins, leads to sympathy with that is remembered primarily in same feeling in others, and to a love of the earth irrespective of place. terms of the role he played in (Roberts 1932, p.17) his editorial work in defining and shaping the poetic terrain Here and elsewhere in his work Roberts looks to nature to provide of the 1930s; as an editor and symbols of something permanent and enduring to set against his vision of reviewer Roberts put together a decaying and corrupt industrial society.