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Simon Brett on Ian Smith, Slightly Foxed Issue 32

The Man Who Climbed the Matterhorn

I have known three mountaineers, but I feel funny standing on a chair to wind the clock if I have nothing to hold on to. Given my fear of heights, it may seem surprising that, as a teenager, I read mountaineering books. But we read, not least in youth, partly to find out who we are and who we are not. I read about what terrified me – Hunt on Everest, Herzog on Annapurna and, most memorably, bridging the gap from childhood, James Ramsey Ullman. Ullman was an adventure-story writer with an eye for film rights who for several decades was the objective but inspirational voice, in history and in fiction, of mountaineering literature, a field dominated by first-person memoirs. His Banner in the Sky (1954) told the Matterhorn story for children, while The White Tower (1950), a fine Second World War mountaineering novel, wonderfully evokes the space, the weather and the neck-craning heights.

Of course, I would never be a mountaineer. I left mountaineering books and became a wood-engraver, than which there is no more sedentary or desk-bound occupation. The image of mountains and fluttering, broken rope had been in my mind since childhood but I thought I’d left them behind.

However, as I learned the history of my trade, I discovered that Whymper the celebrated nineteenth-century wood-engraver and Whymper the mountaineer, the man who climbed the Matterhorn, were one and the same. The family wood-engraving firm made enough money for this young English artisan to finance trips to the Alps, and later to Greenland and Ecuador. Indeed, it was because he went on a sketching trip to Switzerland that he discovered mountains and thought of climbing them in the first place. His book Scrambles amongst the Alps in the Years 1860–69 (1871) became the most famous mountaineering book of all time; it was also ground-breaking as a piece of book-production in its integration of word and image; and it has hardly been out of print since.

The techno

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I have known three mountaineers, but I feel funny standing on a chair to wind the clock if I have nothing to hold on to. Given my fear of heights, it may seem surprising that, as a teenager, I read mountaineering books. But we read, not least in youth, partly to find out who we are and who we are not. I read about what terrified me – Hunt on Everest, Herzog on Annapurna and, most memorably, bridging the gap from childhood, James Ramsey Ullman. Ullman was an adventure-story writer with an eye for film rights who for several decades was the objective but inspirational voice, in history and in fiction, of mountaineering literature, a field dominated by first-person memoirs. His Banner in the Sky (1954) told the Matterhorn story for children, while The White Tower (1950), a fine Second World War mountaineering novel, wonderfully evokes the space, the weather and the neck-craning heights.

Of course, I would never be a mountaineer. I left mountaineering books and became a wood-engraver, than which there is no more sedentary or desk-bound occupation. The image of mountains and fluttering, broken rope had been in my mind since childhood but I thought I’d left them behind. However, as I learned the history of my trade, I discovered that Whymper the celebrated nineteenth-century wood-engraver and Whymper the mountaineer, the man who climbed the Matterhorn, were one and the same. The family wood-engraving firm made enough money for this young English artisan to finance trips to the Alps, and later to Greenland and Ecuador. Indeed, it was because he went on a sketching trip to Switzerland that he discovered mountains and thought of climbing them in the first place. His book Scrambles amongst the Alps in the Years 1860–69 (1871) became the most famous mountaineering book of all time; it was also ground-breaking as a piece of book-production in its integration of word and image; and it has hardly been out of print since. The technology Whymper commanded as an engraver allowed the easy distribution of pictures to a wide audience. For the first time, the British public could see what the outside world looked like. Whymper went to the Alps to draw views. Though a good draughts-man, he would have seen himself as a mere information-gatherer. On returning to England, his studies would have been passed o ‘professional’ artist-illustrators who worked them up into detailed pencil or pen-and-wash drawings, sometimes directly on to the woodblocks. The blocks were then returned to Whympers for engraving and were finally used to print the books and magazines of the day. As a wood-engraver now, I create a picture by the process of engraving it, often on the basis of only the slightest of sketches or none at all. In Whymper’s day, the drawing of an image and the engraving of it were separate parts of a team effort in several stages. A surviving work-book shows one of Whymper’s men specializing in skies, another doing the foliage, a third who was good at figures. Any given block might be passed among them. The illustrations in Scrambles amongst the Alps were drawn by a number of artists but all were engraved by Whympers if not by Edward Whymper himself who, unusually, had actually been there and had briefed the artists in the first place. Several years ago I saw some of these blocks at the Scott Polar Institute in Cambridge, where Whymper’s papers are kept. Among them is a wooden box that probably contains all that is left of the firm: a miscellany of blocks; Whymper’s tools; the work-book, just mentioned, containing annotated proofs of engravings in progress; and so on. I was there, with fellow-engraver John Lawrence, to explain to Whymper’s biographer Ian Smith what these things might be and how they had been used. Ian’s perfectly paced life of Whymper, Shadow of the Matterhorn (2011), would, you’d think, be a bestseller for a mainstream publisher as another example of Victorian extraordinariness. Now available, in the centenary of Whymper’s death, only from a small, specialist mountaineering publisher, the story it tells may suggest why Whymper cannot be so easily marketed. His claims upon history pull in such opposite directions. He made his living in the world of trade, ‘completing tasks’; his teenage diaries are those of an apprentice artisan; but he was also involved in the production of some of the most spectacular and important books of the day, from Livingstone’s travels to Schliemann’s excavations of Troy. He then made himself one of the great mountaineers. Beyond that, he made himself part of that greater Victorian world of exploration and of the discoveries in geology, botany and cartography that the books documented. His exploration went wider than his mountaineering and on it he built a third persona as a writer and lecturer. To a lad from Lambeth, being friends in the Alpine Club with a scholar such as Leslie Stephen meant a lot. The day around which Whymper’s life was to revolve was 14 July 1865. Since he first visited Switzerland in 1860, he had discovered his skills as a climber, scaled many peaks and made seven attempts on the Matterhorn. Now, choosing a new, untried route, he and his companions achieved the summit with ‘almost ridiculous ease’ in a day and a half ’s climbing. Though the ascent demanded all their expertise they were blessed by luck and fine weather. They spent an hour rejoicing on the top. Shortly after leaving, however, the least experienced climber of the party slipped, knocking and pulling three others with him. They fell 4,000 feet on to the glacier below. The rope by which the remaining climbers might have held them had broken. The tragedy made Whymper turn away from Alpine mountaineering, though not from the Alps for ever (he died in Chamonix in 1911). It propelled him from being ‘just’ the most famous mountaineer in history to alternative explorations. (Some of the peaks he climbed, in Ecuador, in appalling conditions, were not climbed again till the 1950s and ’60s.) Famously, Mallory went up Everest ‘because it’s there’. Whymper climbed the Matterhorn partly at least because he wanted to do a wood-engraving from the top. Had he not lingered to complete his drawing as the others began the descent, he might have stopped them choosing the weaker rope and history might have been different. He was there but, significantly, he not only did it, he wrote about it; and in bringing the first dramatic climbing accident to widespread public attention in his book, he established, Smith says, the ‘iconography of climbing’. The first element of this iconography is the image of the rope. It touches climbers’ deepest fears and the faith that binds them together. A second element emerged as Whymper’s story was taken into fiction, by Alphonse Daudet initially, and developed, between fiction and documentary, books and films and books again, over the decades: the climb as a race. Whymper had wanted to climb with the Swiss guide Jean-Antoine Carrel but, finding Carrel contracted to a rival Italian team, he became determined to beat him to the summit, which he did, by about twenty minutes. He then shouted at him from the top. The third strand in the iconography is the climb as tribute. In most of the mountaineering books I read in my teens, one of the protagonists seeks to conquer the mountain where a father, comrade or brother died. In real life, only this year, Neal Beidleman returned to Everest in honour of eight climbers lost there in 1996. The theme occurs in all Ullman’s novels and associated films. It may or may not have been Ullman who formulated it but it must post-date Whymper because Whymper’s tragedy was the first, the defining one; yet Whymper is responsible for it too, in choosing to depict mountaineering and his role in it in tragic terms. Whymper is the mountaineer for ever, equal in myth to Mallory. He also set the templates for the subject. Ullman wrote about him with romantic awe. Ian Smith’s narrative is spare; he rarely obtrudes his own experience or feelings or compares modern climbing techniques with those of the past, though it’s invaluable when he does; but, by the end of Shadow of the Matterhorn, we know a truer Whymper. His teenage diaries show him walking 45 miles from Kennington to Haslemere and monitoring his stamina. He walked 500 miles through the Canadian Rockies in his sixties. By the end, trapped by his own legend, marooned out of his time and with his formidable strengths turning into eccentricity, he was a poignant figure. He was hugely energetic, dogged, relentless, ambitious, chivalrous, irritating, unwise, quite far from the idolized climber of Ullman’s accounts, but no less remarkable. As an artist, he was a master of those almost abstract qualities that the interpretive arts must command (because, remember, he was almost always rendering someone else’s design, as an orchestral musician is playing someone else’s music). People sometimes ask me why I do wood-engraving. Well, I keep falling for its finesse and its drama, sometimes at the hands of Edward Whymper. A glimpse of the silvery heights of achievement such as his, and I have to try it myself. Yes, of course: ‘because it’s there’.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 32 © Simon Brett 2011


About the contributor

Simon Brett is currently illustrating Byron. Though he has lived at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo mountains in New Mexico, he has never seen the Alps.

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