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Philip French Mamoulian lost in Hollywood George. Steiner Great dialogues of philosophy Donald W. Nichol The first Jockey Club? Patricia Craig Irish women's fiction

JULY 26 2013 No 5756 • www.the-tls.co.uk THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT UK £3 USA $5.75

Mind mountains Adam Thorpe SOCIAL STUDIES 3 .MountWi 1 The men and women who made mountains into cultural peaks in fascinating formations

n August 8, 1786, two men ADAM THORPE modem one of overcrowding, although inex­ sion, they are necessary to the whole. It is reached the highest point in perience is also an issue. with some relief that we come to a political Europe, which to them was the Peter H. Hansen We are a far cry here from lohann agitator like Micheli du Crest, taking trigono­ top of the world: both hailed from Scheuchzer's Itinera Alpina (1708), which metric readings off a rain gutter from his O THE SUMMITS OF MODERN MAN Chamonix, a clockless rusticity of roofs in the not only catalogued the dragons of the Swiss prison in the Swiss fortress of Aarburg: he not valley below. Michel-Gabriel Paccard was its Mountaineering after the Enlightenment Alps, but was perhaps the earliest example of orily created the first panorama of the Alps up-to-date doctor; Jacques Balmat a peasant 380pp. Harvard University Press. £25.95 (US $35). the sublime aesthetic, gazing on the mountains but, in a letter of 1754, suggested a full ascent farmer and chamois hunter with a sideline in 9780674047990 with awe and terror. Scheuchzer was much of Mont Blanc for cartographic purposes. crystals. For decades the mountain in ques­ more interested in specimen collection than in Likewise, Saussure, Marc-Theodore Bourrit tion, some three miles high, had been cele­ Paccard, Balmat and others are part of a what Hansen repeatedly terms "the summit and Jean-Andre Deluc (who felt "suspended brated for its glaciers, not its snow-capped alti­ dynamic, a continuum in which the begin­ position" - which was only for God and, as in the air" on the Buet glacier) were all early tude; Chamonix had very few visitors before nings so cherished by modernity enter a far the natural historian put it, "disagreeable" to Climbers whose "aspirations for individual the 1770s. Only hunters ever dared to go high broader flow than individual achievement and reach. Hansen carefully teases out the shifts in sovereignty ... made it possible to envision in these colossal mountains, the peaks sensi­ lonely heroism. thought that altered this reserve. The heights the summit position". Saussure's Voyage bly given up to dragons and ghosts - the This is not to (feny the extraordinary cour­ of emotion in Rousseau' s best-selling Alpine dans les Alpes (1779) never intended to mind's old poetry of health and safety. age and drive of these two men and their novel Julie (1761) matched the transparently replace God with the author in its celebrated WilIiam Windham, a young Englishman on successors, a drive that was soon to spread divine glory of the mountains: but it was panoramic circular drawing from the summit his grand tour, had led a mock caravan to to anywhere in the globe that is sufficiently politics, according to this presenf account, that of the Buet: this revolutionary God's-eye Savoy's glaciers in 1741 and published a pam­ vertical. Even now, Mont Blanc (originally pushed men to the liminal top, from where view was again a response, in Hansen's per­ phlet with a fellow traveller, Pierre Martel, in the mont maudit, the cursed mountain) claims "the panoramic prospect . . . from a single suasive argument, to urgent political ques­ which the name "Mont Blanc" appears as the its fatal share each year of the 20,000 visitors viewpoint" matched the contemporary strug­ tions "in this corner of provincial Europe". supposed highest point. Thus the mountain who struggle up its flanks: in 2012 a single gle for popular sovereignty in Geneva. These early ascents into the unknown were was first "discovered" - one of the plethora of avalanche near the peak swept twenty-one While the book's passages on Savoy poli­ "cultural counterparts" to enfranchisement. assumptions that Peter Hansen gleefully dis­ experienced climbers away, nine of whom tics make for a stiff climb, not helped by the They also meant changes for the locals, mantles in this learned and complex analysis died. The problem these days is the very author's rigorous denial of picturesque digres- hitherto dismissed, with their impenetrable of "multiple modernities" as seen through the dialect, as backward. Hunters turned guides, prism of mountaineering. the valleys' young men provided the model Two essential elements of modernity are for the later Himalayan sherpa, intrepid but the foundation myth and the assertion bf the never servile. A "tall and robust" Chamonix solitary will: both illustrated by Petrarch's guide told Saussure that all he needed was a ascent of Mont Ventoux in 1336. Interrupting parasol and a bottle of smelling salts; presuma­ his admiration of the view by opening St bly the Alpenstock and small axe used for Augustine's Confessions at random, Petrarch centuries by shepherds over snowfield and fell on a stem admonition: "And men go to glacier were taken as read. Unsurprisingly, admire the high mountains ... and pass them­ Paccard almost died on one of his numerous selves by". He hurried back down in silence, attempts in 1784; when Bourrit, the most convinced of the vaster landscape of contem­ widely read author on Alpine climbing, "dis­ plation. Five hundred years later, lacob Burck­ covered" a better route via the same Bionnas­ hardt identified this moment in Provence as say glacier, he was encouraged to undertake the arrival of the inward-looking "modem a major expedition in 1785 with Saussure. man", the beginning of the modem age. Although the latter stood outside his tent one This need for firsts is, of course, in itself night and felt that "I alone had survived in the modem; and, as Hansen points out, the assign­ universe", they were defeated by fresh snow. ing of Petrarch's ascent as a boundary Hansen makes it clear that the "competitive moment coincided with the rise of modem masculinities" still at the core of most moun­ mountaineering. Peaks are, as he claims early taineering narratives have their roots in that on in The Summits of Modem Man, "a van­ indigenous toughness and the admiration it tage point from which to observe the braiding provoked from cerebral naturalists like Saus­ together of self, state and mountain in histori­ sure. It is likely that Paccard picked out Bal­ cal knots of time". Hansen owes the concept mat after the young man returned alive from a of time knots, or multiple temporalities held night alone on the snow (another first) with within a single moment, to the Bengali histo­ news of a new route up. Concurrently with the rian Dipesh Chakrabarty, whose Provincializ­ 23.07.2013 Boston, MA end of Chamonix's feudal obligations in the ing Europe: Postcolonial thought and histori­ summer of 1786, the proto-lacobin doctor cal difference (2000) is perhaps not suffi­ The thirteen-year-old Ernest Heming­ pages are taken up with programmes and the peasant Balmat reached the summit, ciently acknowledged here. Provincializing, way is here shown in apologetic mood, from services and concerts (in which but only after Paccard had taken his readings however, is Hansen's main emphasis, as he in a note preserved by his mother, Ernest's sisters feature more promi­ with barometer and thermometer. They raced transposes the romantic generalities of moun­ Grace, in one of six volumes of scrap­ nently), with only occasional glimpses of each other to the highest point. taineering's history into the particular, the books documenting her elder son's life the young fisherman and his catch, or For some two centuries, there were furious contingent and the local. The simple act of to the age of eighteen. Hemingway's of Ernest's own watercolours of quarrels as to who was first: Balmat's role defying death by climbing Mont Blanc (the childhood in Oak Park, llIinois, seems, bird life. This note refers, in familiar was initially downplayed, but the waspish celebrated geologist Horace-Benedict de Saus­ if his mother's archiving is anything to style, to a Protestant missionary exposi­ Bourrit claimed in a published letter that sure offered a reward while deeming such a go by, to have been dominated by the tion at the Chicago Coliseum. The scrap­ Balmat, after attaining the summit, had gone feat impossible) becomes entangled in local activities of the Congregational Church, books have been newly digitized by the back to assist an exhausted Paccard (we do histories, and most particularly in those of to which the family belonged. Many JFK Library (jfklibrary.org). know he suffered severe sunburn and snow . regional sovereignty and enfranchisement. blindness). Balmat reached the summit again

TLS JULY 26 2013 + 4 SOCIAL STUDIES a year later, and the two men came to blows in courage and sheer will were obscured by sex­ Chamonix, Paccard striking the other to' the ist and suggestive commentary on her return, ground with what must have been a sturdy but she claimed (predictably by now) to be umbrella. Both men were eclipsed by the the first woman who made the ascent, Marie already celebrated Saussure in the same year, Paradis admitting to having been "dragged, mainly because his successful ascent had all pulled, carried, etc" in a dialogue noted down the latest scientific gadgets. by - Henriette d' Angeville. She occupies a Modernity was also revealing itself in the prominent place in her straw hat, ballooning respectful partnership between savant and skirts and long scarf. in the refurbished paysan; Hansen draws a parallel with W ords­ museum in Chamonix. worth and his eye-opening em;ounter with a Yet hypermasculinity was now the order "peasant" on the Simplon Pass. He adds, how­ of the day: Edward Whymper's portrait of ever, that Kant, in his positing of a transcen­ the Alpine Club exhibits the "muscular ethos" dental aesthetics in The Critique of Judge­ (in Hansen's words) of mountaineering'S ment, distinguished Saussure from both the "golden age". This dated from Alfred Wills' s sceptical indigenes and the crampon-sporting ascent of the Matterhorn in 1854 and was hobbyists by his desire to edify, which opened firmly British: clipped to the Empire, its sun him to elevating sentiments during the ascent only set in the 1950s. Its chauvinism was dra­ and made him, for Kant, "the first mortal to matically illustrated by the "Matterhorn catas­ climb to the summit of Mont Blanc". trophe" of 1865. Whymper beat an Italian The unassuming Paccard - who would take party to the summit and gleefully dislodged a to wandering the mountains alone with a dash "torrent of stones" on the foreign heads; a of opium - began to be left behind in the narra­ clumsy companion slipped on the descent and tive because, as Hansen puts it, he "did not fit dragged everyone but Whymper and two Zer­ the model": neither peasant guide nor (being matt guides (father and son) to their deaths. from Chamonix) a travelling adventurer. Chamonix, Mont Blanc, by John Ruskin Although Dickens perceptively called it "a A statue of him sitting alone was finally waste of human life - a gift too holy to be unveiled in the now chic town on the ascent's and Catholic Jacques Balmat are not ment after spending much of the summer biv­ played with like a toy .. . by bragging vanity" bicentenary (a full ninety-nine years after the recorded during all this, but when he dragged ouacked in snow on the highest slopes. The (he would no doubt have much to say about monument to Balmat and Saussure): its a local woman to the summit and made of effect of Bourrit's temple was more radical, contemporary mountaineering), Whymper trendy materials had serious issues with the Marie Paradis another first, Hansen suggests if not unsimilar: to turn the entire mountain made the disaster the "manly" (Ruskin's first winter, and it was redone in bronze. The that it was to show up Paccard (even a into a hymn to nature - an entanglement of approving term) climax of his Scrambles Summits of Modem Man proclaims both Pac­ woman can do it) and perhaps reclaim the religious and the secular that Hansen's Amongst the Alps of 1871; if its martiallan­ card and Balmat as "first" on the summit in Bastille Day for the Virgin. Paradis, on recov­ nimble fingers do much to clarify. guage has been replaced these days by tech­ the sense that they occupied such distinct posi­ ering from her ordeal, suggested to her neigh­ The mountains' romantic allure had sub­ speak and mordant slang ("screamer" for a tions: "the ascent did not embody one repre­ bours in Chamonix that they make the voy­ sided to ' a commodity of leisure time" by very long fall, "chilled off' for killed), its sentation of enlightenment, modernity, mascu­ age themselves as there was too much for her the mid-nineteenth century: Albert Smith's laconic tone is still with us. The three were linity, or individuality, but entangled compet­ to recount - thus mocking "the transcendent Ascent of Mont Blanc used slides, music and saved, surprisingly, by the feebleness of their ing and mutually constitutive contemporary individualism" of more literary construc­ ambling St Bernards to allow the masses a inferior rope, and Whymper makes much of a visions of each". I am not sure that statement tions. Even the iron summit cross Balmat vicarious taste of the mountain's fearful vision of two spectral crosses in the ky a would have done much to persuade them to erected on his ascent in 1811 with other thrills without leaving Piccadilly. Ifthis feels they descended to afety. It is urprising that agree, although a fascinating later chapter guides has "layers of meaning and signifi­ uncomfortably familiar, the account of Bal­ Hansen omits to mention the inquiry uspi­ shows how Sherpa Tenzing, at least, was say­ cance"; it was ordered by the Napoleonic mat's death in the 1830s is even more so. A cion that the older guide, Peter Taugwalder ing something similar during the Everest quar­ state as a trigonometric signal. legendary figure in his seventies, he had long had chosen an old rope or had actually cut it; rels, with all their nationalist and imperial There is an equally intriguing section on fallen into debt supporting an extended he subsequently went mad. overtones, following the "conquest" of 1953. the Shelleys. While the poet signed the visi­ family, and his hunt for crystals had devel­ The first ascents of Mont Blanc are cultural With the French Revolution's incursion into tor's book "atheists one and all" - despising oped into a search for gold on the cliffs of peaks around which subsequent hmes anu D.1S­ Savoy, which became the Departement du the locals as "leeches" - and denied Mont Mont Ruan, where he fell into a crevasse. His tories swirl in fascinating formations: we are Mont Blanc, the Jacobin Dr Paccard rose to be Blanc anything more than a "still and solemn companion, Louis Pache, kept silent and was shown monuments, novels, poems and films the canton's officer of health, and flame-burn­ power" in his eponymous poem, his wife jailed on suspicion of murder, released only endlessly re-envisioning what appears to be ing models of Mont Blanc declared the peak a dreamed up Frankenstein. This particular when his wife committed suicide. The Balmat a simple story of men triumphing over a symbol of the new liberty. The ultra-radical genre-busting work shows a similarly "entan­ family was reduced to penury; four of mass of rock - the most original being Blaise Montagnards demurred: verticality being anti­ gled" ambivalence in its critique of rational­ Balmat's grandchildren died of an epidemic Cendrars's "Dictaphone" narrative of 1929 democratic, pace their name, they sQon set ism, the Revolution, and science' s mastering within the month. Twenty years later, the spun around Balmat's summit burial of three about destroying all the departement's "preten­ masculinity in the character of Dr Franken­ government official in Sixt confessed that he prune stones. Each period (including that of tious" church steeples. The mountain equably stein, alongside a discreet sympathy for a had known through witnesses that Balmat's the Nazis) casts its own giant shadow on the served as a symbol ofliberty for the other side, maternal Christianity: Alan Liu' s comment death was accidental, but had ordered Pache swirl, not least when, as Hansen shows in his particularly for the crowds of refugees fleeing on the whiteness of Mont Blanc is usefully to keep silent for fear of a gold rush and the penultimate chapter, Everest (aka nature) was into Piedmont along the Chamonix valley; quoted: "[it] is the space in which history can subsequent devastation of the valleys. Hansen conquered and the first ascent of Mont Blanc when the royal troops briefly invaded in ghost into the present; not no meaning but a rightly claims these fears to b,e legitimate, was rewritten: Hillary as the modest Paccard, 1793, Paccard's house was burned down. This panic of too much possible meaning". pointing to later mining discoveries and their Tenzing as Balmat - the exotic "other" appro­ symbolic role continues into the twenty-first While Hansen locates this panic in the consequences, but is typically cautious of priated by the postcolonial moment. century: despite the endless accidents and the mountain's oscillation between secular and anachronistic parallels: "Consider them alter­ The complex time knot thus created makes environmental damage caused by far too sacred at the behest of either revolutionaries native modernities". this one of the most revealing accounts of the many visitors, it is deemed unthinkable to or royalists, the truth may have been untidier. For Balmat and many others, "gold" repre­ Everest expedition that I have . read. But curtail free access by restricting numbers. The academic's tendency to lapse into theory sented a variety of widely shared hopes and Hansen provokingly leaves us, after a cQm­ Chateaubriand famously derided the revo­ briefly overcomes a discussion of the "Tem­ desires, and a form of subjectivity distinct in n'lentary on the way climate change has taken lutionary mountain in his Voyage au Mont ple of Nature" erected by Bourrit at Montan­ many respects from the dreams of individual the zip out of our species' sovereignty, with Blanc, while Words worth found its summit vert in 1795, on the very edge of the Mer de sovereignty envisioned by the fin ancially the Riickenfigur of Otzi, the Neolithic individ" "a soulless image on the eye": for Hansen, Glace - the frozen sea that may (or may not) secure social climbers whom he. and other ual revealed by melting ice on the Austrian­ however, these are critiques of revolutionary represent "the limit of normal theoretical ter­ guides led to the summit. Italian frontier. Another time knot, he politics in the region. Intriguingly, visiting rain" where discourse becomes "non-verbal Paccard had died, a heavy drinker, in 1827, suggests, on the long belay that connects us to writers would have been influenced by practice". The building was also a refuge for eleven years before Henriette d' Angeville Otzi and to everyone else, clinging to the verti­ encounters with locals acting like modem climbers, the first of many, of which the latest reached the summit aged forty-two, having cality that represents "the continuum of past estate agents: "by the 1790s, guides of Cha­ has just opened: a huge solar-powered silver claimed Mont Blanc to be her "frozen lover" and present and future"; although, as he monix had a reputation for leading clients carbuncle just below the summit (invisible on in a "monomania of the imagination", and reminds us, our present summit position is over routes that used surprise to heighten sen­ normal approach) aimed at challenging wild anticipating "the delicious hour during which "ephemeral and evanescent ... we can never timent". The thoughts of the ultra-royalist campers who leave their rubbish and excre- I will rest on his summit". Her extraordinary step on the same mountain twice".

TLS JULY 26 2013