Vol. 20 No. 9 · 7 May 1998
pages 8-11 | 5422 words
The Vulgarity of Success
Murray Sayle
- Eric Shipton: Everest and Beyond by Peter Steele
Constable, 290 pp, £18.99, March 1998, ISBN 0 09 478300 4
The one line that everybody knows about why people climb mountains was spoken on a wet night in New York, 17 March 1923. The tall, lean and theatrically handsome George Mallory, clergyman’s son, Winchester and Magdalen College, Oxford, artillery officer on the Western Front, faultless husband and devoted father of three, was on a lecture tour, trying to raise money for the forthcoming all-British attempt (his third) on Mount Everest. Mallory had given his lecture many times. At its end, regularly as snow falls on the Himalaya, someone would get up and ask: ‘But Mr Mallory, why are you trying to climb Mount Everest?’ Mallory had an answer as clean-cut as himself at the ready: ‘We hope to show that the spirit that built the British Empire is not yet dead, coupled with the name of the Joint Himalayan Committee of the Alpine Club and Royal Geographical Society.’ This usually brought polite applause and sometimes a few extra dollars. Like the British, Americans have tended to think of Everest as in some way British, although its summit ridge is the border between Nepal and Tibet, and neither was ever part of the British Empire. Perhaps the name ‘Everest’, suggesting eternal slumber, seems both British and appropriate. Neither the mountain’s Tibetan name, Chomolungma (‘goddess mother of the snows’), nor the Nepali Sagarmatha, preferred by Sir George Everest, Surveyor-General of India 1830-43, has caught on. At least we have been spared the name of Sir George’s successor, Andrew Waugh, who calculated that Everest, at 29,028 feet and still putting on an inch or so a year, is by a good margin the world’s highest mountain.
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Letters
Vol. 20 No. 10 · 21 May 1998
From Neil Forster
I was pleased to find out, from reading Murray Sayle’s sympathetic essay about Eric Shipton (LRB, 7 May), that that silly ‘because it’s there’ line, still quoted so infuriatingly often, and à propos other supposedly barmy aspirations than that of climbing to the top of Mount Everest, was originally a put-down, an English gentleman’s uncharacteristically ratty squelching of a tiresome questioner.
How odd and how misleading that it should more or less ever since have been taken as the ideal expression of a certain kind of laconic amateurishness, one made the more compelling, sadly to say, by George Mallory’s subsequent death on the mountain. Even we plain-dwellers, happy enough to spend our lives and leisure at sea-level, can understand other people wanting to go up mountains and why, if you do that, and are good at it, you would want to go up the highest mountain there is. On the other hand, it’s not so easy to understand why so many people have continued to want to do that, now that it’s become such a hackneyed ascent that – I read – a party of mountaineers is currently on Everest solely for the purpose of ridding its long since deflowered slopes and cwms of the tons of garbage left behind by so many expeditions. Were these public-spirited Himalaya cleaners to be asked why they were risking life and limb to dispose of this rubbish, they at least could politely and reasonably say: ‘because it’s there.’
Neil Forster
London N1
Vol. 20 No. 11 · 4 June 1998
From Jeremy Bernstein
I greatly enjoyed Murray Sayle’s piece about Eric Shipton (LRB, 7 May). Some years ago I spent an evening with Shipton, who told me that on one of his Everest expeditions of the Thirties he stood at much the same spot where, as Sayle recounts, Noel Odell thought he saw Mallory and Irvine before they disappeared. Shipton saw what appeared to be two figures above him but clearly they were rocks. He felt that this must have been what Odell saw and told me he thought Mallory and Irvine had fallen on the slanted slabs – like ice-covered roofs – characteristic of the classical Tibetan route. He also confirmed something that I had read about his relationship with his great climbing partner H.W. Tilman. After some years of expeditionary climbing together Shipton asked if, given everything, they might call each other Bill and Eric instead of Mr Shipton and Mr Tilman. Tilman said that he was willing, except that it sounded ‘so damn silly’.
Jeremy Bernstein
New York
