Report on 14th International Festival of Mountaineering Literature (Nov 2000) appearing in Climber February 2001.
By Stephen
Goodwin.
"O
Canada!" was the title and intended theme of the 14th International
Festival of Mountaineering Literature. Impresario Terry Gifford, as
a true child of the sixties, must think we all go around cooing Joni
Mitchell songs and would make the connection straightaway. Not quite.
And of course the title can be read with less flattering emphases.
Long before Chic Scott took the stage with his 'Remember these?' gallery
of Brits who emigrated decades ago to climb Canada's frozen waterfalls
(and mostly we did not remember them) the festival itself had focused
on the deeper topic of climbers' inner lives.
"Inner lives" was poet Kathleen Jamie's phrase, by which she meant our non-climbing side - responsibility to family and society, doubts, fears and connections with the real world. Jamie chaired the judging panel for the 2000 Boardman Tasker award where the thread of 'climber as human being' emerged from several of the better entries.
Tony Smythe did not disguise the pain his father Frank Smythe caused when he put climbing before his wife and young family. The scars were still plain as Tony showed faded slides, but in the process of helping Ken Wilson produce a 900-page omnibus of six of Smythe snr's best books, he seems to have mellowed towards his errant Dad.
This latest Bâton Wicks omnibus could lead to a re-evaluation of Smythe, who died in 1949 aged only 49. Though he pioneered impressive routes in the Alps and Himalayas in the 1930s and '40s, Smythe's reputation suffered from a good deal of over-flowery prose and that familiar prejudice against mountaineers who manage to make a living from the game.
Smythe, though, will never be rehabilitated as a warm, family man - unlike George Mallory. The over-exposed "Gallahad" of Everest was revealed in a much more subtle light in Peter and Leni Gillman's biography The Wildest Dream…, winner of the BT prize and subject of arguably the best set at Bretton Hall.
The Gillman's were interviewed on stage by Graham Hoyland, great nephew of Howard Somervell and instigator of the expedition that found Mallory's body. It was illuminating stuff, underlining the Gillman's skills and good fortune in unearthing Mallory letters confirming he had a sexual affair with James Strachey at Cambridge. We were also treated to the homo-erotic sales pitch being used for the book in the United States where the cover is that nude photograph of gorgeous George taken by Duncan Grant. Contrast the British cover of sepia-tinted blokes in breeches.
The interview format worked well and should perhaps be used more, in longer sessions, to draw the audience into discussions. Gifford spends much of the year chewing over the line-up and balance of the festival and for 2001 is thinking of less emphasis on new books, fewer slides, and instead a lacing of specially commissioned, polemical writing to try and stir us up.
Poet
and critic Al Alvarez, turning Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in
the World, into virtually a comic turn, and Jamie, with a touch of
climber-deflating ginger in her BT judgement, introduced a breath of
air from outside mountaineering. So too did novelist Rosie Thomas,
author of the BT short-listed White, love and death on Everest. Sounds
corny, but Thomas's take on egos and the strains (on loved ones again)
of expeditioning is sharp and unsettling.
Thanks
Terry.