SMYTHE’S HIMALAYAN TRAILS

JOHN MILLAR

OCCASIONALLY I delve into the literary accounts of distinguished climbers and wanderers and have been looking again at the prolific writing of Frank Smythe, a renowned figure in 30s mountaineer-ing who somehow has slipped through the net of modern appraisal. For not one of his 26 books is in print (according to the current list on the computer-screen at my local bookshop): and those who are interested in him need to turn to second-hand bookshops to focus on his significant achievement both as a dedicated mountaineer and a fluent writer whose books had special appeal for a vast circle of general readers, as well as for the initiated.

Indeed it is mainly on these detailed accounts that I base this brief appraisal which is concerned more with the lure of the Himalaya on Smythe’s good adventuring, but I glance first at his formative stage that was so vital, at his having visionary impressions of the hills in his early years that were testimony to how ingrained was his emotional yearning towards them. Particularly important, it seems now, was his being taken from his Kentish home on a prolonged holiday to Switzerland as a 7-year-old. His frailty and sickly state caused his mother to do this, and the combination of his combined feeling of physical incapacity and the impression of physical perfection as fed to him by the pristine sight of alpine peaks, was deeply traumatic.

Similarly the bicycle ride he did as a 14-year-old, momentarily escaping from his public school in Hertfordshire (Berkhamsted), a boy with a ‘heart murmur’ who was banned from all school games and sports, and who was cycling to the edge of Snowdonia to gaze spellbound at a simple cluster of beloved hills. It can sound very simplistic and conventional to a modern mind, but there was an imaginative intensity with Smythe that was anything but conventional. It supplied a fundamental spur to his lifelong goal in mountaineering to attain to a wholeness of living he associated with high country, a physical naturalism allied to his imaginative feeling of non-artificial simplicity and contentment.

When in his 20s (and during the 20s decade), Smythe moved away from his English background and settled in Austria. I see it as significant that he did so, that he sought to be more practically close to the Alps and its natural atmosphere, and it fits in with his visionary pattern. Soon, as other careers lost their promise, he took the gamble to turn his mountaineering hobby into a suitably effective career, and the commitment and energy of his full-time drive to flourish as a climber became quite aggressive, in spite of its being cloaked by his mild manner.

Thus, later in the 20s, he applied himself to tackle currently demanding routes in the Alps, such as the southwest ridge of the Baltschieder Jagihorn, and a second ascent of the Aiguille du Plan’s east ridge, and he traversed the Aiguille Blanche de Peuterey in grim weather, and essayed the Innominata ridge of Mont Blanc. He joined with Graham Brown in their accomplishing a most impressive alpine venture then — their success in tackling two new routes up the Brenva face of Mont Blanc.

However Graham Brown was to fall out with Smythe, and it touched on the issue of their written descriptions of impressive climbs being given different inferences at certain points, though internal squabbles of this nature must seem petty in the light of what they achieved.

An earlier reference to Smythe’s seeking for wholeness in his endeavour, for a wider remit in the mountain scene, naturally brings up thoughts of the Himalaya. And curiously at the age of 22, before his career had begun in earnest, those preparing for the 1922 British expedition to Everest sought to assess Smythe as a young newcomer for their team. Walt Unsworth in his valuable encyclopaedic book Everest (1989) includes a quote about this assessment, and it makes sobering reading as a blistering rejection. It appears part of a leaked memo sent by Howard Somervell to the climbing establishment in London, and a clearly nervous Smythe showed himself totally at odds with the tight establishment group which, in a sense, he had escaped through his deciding to live on the Continent. The chilling verdict went:

A bad mountaineer always slipping and knocking stones down and an intolerable companion. Nobody in our party could stand him for more than a few days, owing to his irritating self-sufficiency. However he is a very good goer for his age (?23 or 24) and carries on well without getting tired himself, though his incessant conversation makes others tired.

So a bad day at Black Rock! Actually it whets the appetite for more leaks from locked-up papers that details the fallible comments of those who ruled the roost in pre-war Everest expeditions. You wonder over that despising of self-sufficiency, when a climber at altitude in the Himalaya, and facing a desperate battle for survival with ferocious storms and winds, may come through only if imbued with a will-to-live through self-sufficiency.

Also the fluctuations and ambiguities of the full story seem to lie out of sight. What are you to make of the unexpected sequel in 1923? For Smythe then decided to climb in the Dolomites, and he chanced to meet Somervell there, with the experience behind him of a valiant but inconclusive Everest attempt. You read that Somervell immediately invited Smythe to join his brother and himself on a climbing holiday to tackle several Dolomite routes. Whether the actual experience of Everest caused Smythe to be seen in a new light is speculative, but undoubtedly the Eastern world had induced a fundamental change in Somervell, and subsequently, in his medical work, he made a career-switch to India.

Meantime he wrote of their Dolomite climbing as a splendid affair in his book After Everest (1936). He praised the performance of Smythe and singled out his resourceful descent from their biggest climb, the traverse of Langkofel’s northeast face when, with his rope-soles disintegrated, Smythe promptly found his way in bare feet down precipitous rock and snow-gullies, and displayed stoic care and assurance. You read no word about irritating mannerisms, but solely of their cooperating in harmonious and pleasant spells of climbing.

Claire Engel in her book They Came to the Hills (1952) provides a continental perspective on the young Smythe, and of his rise to prominence. She regarded his main career as roughly dating from 1927, and noted his driving ambition in the Alps that resulted in much energetic meeting of current challenges, and also noted his penchant for solo ski-touring. And her general assessment was rather different — of a mountaineer gaining increased confidence as he went on with his individual quest and discovered himself more surely:

.....he was very quick uphill, was hardly ever out of breath, did not feel the cold and had plenty of self-assurance on the heights, whereas at sea-level he was either shy or overassertive.

In 1930, the Himalaya were beckoning for Smythe. The previous year had seen his first book appear, Climbs and Ski Runs, and it set forth the flowing openness of writing that was to cause him to become probably the best-known mountaineering author since Edward Whymper. However, this early book was more a collection of various scattered pieces of his taken from Blackwood’s Magazine or from The Cornhill Magazine, and along with other reprints. Its 1957 reissue had an impressive foreword by Geoffrey Winthrop Young in which he quoted from his book Mountains with a Difference (which came out after Smythe’s death).

In his paying tribute here, GWY gave unstinting acknowledgement to that aspect of Smythe that revealed an inward fire of resolution, of his indomitable fighting spirit and the way it glowed always the more fiercely the more hostile grew the circumstances of his climbs, or the colder blew the winds of adversity. He goes on to mention Smythe’s mystical feeling for mountains, and distinguishes his inner resolve blazing in adversity that has clear relevance as you note the extraordinary breakthrough marking Smythe’s first encounter with the Himalaya, for adversity became a running theme affecting this major venture.

Professor Dyhrenfurth had invited Smythe to join their prestige Himalayan project in 1930, being an international expedition to attempt Kangchenjunga. It was certainly very ambitious at the time, and a decade later in his book The Mountain Vision, Smythe refers to it as The only time I have experienced fear destructive of all pleasure... in his mountain venturing. (Kangchenjunga is officially the third highest peak after K2, though Smythe suggested there is a ‘dead heat’ for second place.)

There was much he disliked about the organising, such as the expedition size that resulted in approaching the mountain with an unwildy army of 400 porters. Also he fell foul of an over-rigid style of operation. One example: each climber was issued with a small replica of their national flag. The one given Smythe proved to be a red ensign (!) whose stripes were the wrong way round. And in the Himalaya, there came a moment when Smythe was out of handkerchiefs and he used what was nearest to hand — the ensign — and duly scandalised his companions. The expedition party approached Kangchenjunga from the northwest and it led them into the path of massive hanging-glaciers, and these were to loom above them from then on, a numbing threat that meant that camps 1 and 2 were in constant danger of being wiped out by avalanches.

To Smythe it was plainly an unjustifiable route. Yet they went on with this assault-plan because we feared as much for our flags as for ourselves and no one liked to be the first to give in. Eventually an avalanches swept down on the climbing party who were helplessly spread out on the ice slope. Smythe was scheduled to be in camp that day and he saw the full horror of it, and he rushed to the scene convinced that an appalling tragedy had occurred. But most of the party survived amid the debris. The one fatal casualty was Chettan, their first-rate climbing porter.

The incident stayed as a vivid memory as Smythe looked back at his Himalayan initiation in The Mountain Vision (which he wrote during the Second World War): and he told how the sound of a wartime bomb took him back to 1930 and to nights spent beneath the hanging glaciers of Kangchenjunga and all the dark menace of ‘noises off’.

Smythe’s sombre tone, and his accent on disillusioning features of this Kangchenjunga project (as portrayed in this reflective book written some 10 years later), go to suggest it pointed to his definitive view of the venture. Certainly the experience did bite deep within him, leading to his reviewing his priorities as a climber. In a letter to Claire Engel after World War 2, he looked back on this first encounter with the Himalaya as curing him of any tendency to tackle ever more desperate climbs, that it brought a sense of proportion. That of overriding importance was to form a sympathetic relation with mountains. Most of all would I see the Himalayan snows beyond the waves of foothills, he wrote in philosophic vein. There is peace there, music, poetry, everything worthwhile.

Yet in contrast exists the gutsy view of that traumatic expedition conveyed by Smythe, the one portrayed in his youthful book produced at breakneck speed in the same expedition year of 1930 — The Kangchenjunga Adventure. You are reminded of the observation of Smythe having the faculty of specially rising to the challenge in adversity, and in the case of this abortive and dangerous undertaking under Dyhrenfurth, there was no lack of adversity.

Yet The Kangchenjunga Adventure sweeps the reader along with quite astonishing verve in its marshalling of events, with an undercurrent of gratitude over a harsh yet ravishing first experience of the Himalaya. And the thought comes to you that the very pitfalls and torments may have acted as salutary pressures that helped to sharpen his literary expression. Whatever the explanation, The Kangchenjunga Adventure, written as if he is still on a high from the immediacy of intense struggles in the Himalaya, brings a changed viewpoint to the reader. But a Smythe reader is ready for slight adjustments of focus, for they can reflect subtle changes taking place in the lifetime of this very literate climber. Also there is the fact that one written version of a Himalayan expedition may differ in certain ways from another, and still be integral and grounded in truth.

Remarkable to me, in my copy of The Kangchenjunga Adventure, are the critical notices quoted in great profusion on the dust jacket, and it is hard to visualised reviews more ecstatic about an account of a failed Himalayan undertaking. To select a few: ...even Mark Twain might feel glad that men climbed mountains, so much of beauty and grandeur is revealed in this perilous sport ... (New Statesman), ... a week ago Kangchenjunga meant nothing to me ... Today ... Kangchenjunga to me stands for strange and wonderful adventures ... Thrills such as Edgar Wallace at his best could never conceive ... (The Bystander), ... Here is a book in the direct tradition of Whymper and Leslie Stephen. What luxury to take a holiday from Isms ... (Sunday Times), ... a prose epic ... The illustrations are magnificent ... (Saturday Review), ... Not even the records of the Everest Expeditions contain examples of more consummate mountaineering skill, of sterner determination and of more undaunted courage ... [Francis Younghusband, The Spectator].

Interesting to observe is that Smythe moulds the narration on his own terms. Popularising is a somewhat slippery term in this context; it is no reach-me-down dwelling on sensation in extremist action, but more a reflective man’s rapt exploring of the whole gamut of what his first time in the Himalaya means to him. There is almost a sense of reverence in his ardent reviewing of the probing ventures and discoveries of those going before - 35 pages are devoted to the history of Kangchenjunga, which is hardly the customary sort of foreshortening designed to slot in with populist instincts.

Where the book appeals most powerfully is partly in transferring the consciousness of so much surging detail of adventure to the reader, but especially in so richly capturing the impact felt by a visionary climber in the Himalaya. It is all at full throttle — of identifying with Smythe in his visual inspection of Kangchenjunga from Darjeeling but of first gazing with the naked eye, as if there is need to extol a wholeness of appreciation and be encouraged to join him in his total approach.

So the reader in 1930 has this passionate narration by an author elated by the scale of the outlets for adventure and visionary feeling. The challenge of climbing Kangchenjunga becomes the one to reckon with, and Smythe portrays it first as observed by any responsive visitor who looks out from Darjeeling to see the mountain 50 miles away over range upon range of lower ridges, split with deep gorge-like valleys, incredibly remote and icily aloof, lifting its glaciers like silver shields to the sky ...

There is a powerful telescope to look through, but before using it Smythe dwells on this natural impression of the distant goal, the poetry recognised by all. He notes the apparent smoothness of its sickle-like snow ridges, of its pale red granite precipices whose gleaming he likens to a sun-caressed Devonian sea-cliff when seen through a blue Atlantic haze. It is a moment when the mountaineer’s analytical mind becomes peacefully submerged in a quiet ocean of meditation.

Given, of course, that you write as a mountaineer who jettisons the spare blunt style of communicating experience in the Himalaya, and prefers something more oblique and open in revealing more of the way an enthusiast (like Smythe) is motivated by not underplaying emotion and vision. After allowing for ordinary contemplation, Smythe next turns to the telescope, and he sees the peak’s smooth ridges as broken and jagged, torn and hewn by wind and weather into edges, gaps and towers of fantastic and terrible beauty ...

Though in eyeing its savagery in practical climbing terms, he apparently misjudged the possibility of basing their attempt via the mountain’s Yalung face, for eventually (some 25 years later) the first ascent of Kangchenjunga was by means of that southern face that he had ruled out as too avalanche-prone. An impressive expedition led by Sir Charles Evens succeeded in climbing it by that route, as described in his book Kangchenjunga the Untrodden Peak (1956).

In 1930 came the consolation climbs, after they abandoned the northwest approach-route, the first ascent of neighbouring Jongsong Peak (24,344 feet and a current height record), and of Nepal Peak (23,560 feet) and Dodang Nyima (23,620 feet) and Ramthang (23,310 feet) and other lesser peaks. The expedition actually consisted of 5 Germans, 3 British, 2 Swiss and 1 Austrian — Professor and Mrs. Dyhrenfurth, Richter, Wieland, Hoerlin, Smythe, Wood-Johnson, Hannah, Kurz, Duvanel and Schneider.

Following this fraught introduction to a new horizon, Smythe set about writing a book on it in time to have it published the same year (1930), and in fact it came out only 4 months later in November (and my copy contains 450 pages!). I see it as very precarious and arduous that he adopted this gruelling pattern of regularly pursuing an adventure project and as regularly writing a book on it (which he continued to do until World War 2 brought its profound changes). Moreover, he managed this writing marathon while maintaining his unhurried, all-embracing literary style throughout, a vivid measured treatment more suggestive of a desk-bound author far from the pressures of time and physical exhaustion, and from an ongoing desire to get back to the Himalaya and other ranges. But what authentic appeal this formula had for the general reader!

Smythe now planned his own Himalayan expedition. In the Garhwal, in the Zaskar range, was Kamet, unclimbed and having the glitter of a potential height record of 25,447 feet. The peak attracted attention from early on, and there had been numerous attempts on it - in 1855 the Schlagintweit brothers had crossed the Mana pass and made a bid from the north, reaching 22,259 feet on Abi Gamin. Renowned climber-explorers like Bruce, Longstaff and Mumm reconnoitred its environs in 1907, and Meade explored in this region in 1910, and again in 1912 and 1913, as did Slingsby and Dr. Kellas and others.

Smythe went thoroughly into a mountain’s history, and would have particularly pored over technical questions met with during Meade’s resolute attempts, and specially his route along the East Kamet glacier to a point named Meade’s col where, at 23,000 feet, the early explorer was halted through the effects of altitude and bad snow conditions, even though it looked a way to the summit.

The rest of the planning was as carefully done, and they kept within a reasonable budget. The climbing party numbered 6, a judicious mixture of experience and youth. It included Raymond Greene as doctor/climber (a friend who went to the same school and had also gone in for much solitary climbing in Wales and the Lakes, as well as often pairing with Smythe. Incidentally, another of the Greene brothers was the famous novelist, Graham). The youngest at 23 was Eric Shipton, an inspired choice. Bernie, as transport officer had considerable experience of Himalayan organising and in negotiating with porters in their own language. The number of porters came to about 75 — much reduced as compared to the previous expedition.

The outcome of this 1931 expedition, a model of careful organisation, as Mason recorded in his celebrated reference work Abode of Snow (1955), saw Smythe, Shipton, Holdsworth, Lewa and Nima Dorje making for the summit from Camp 5 just below Meade’s col and reaching it in June ‘31 at 4.30 p. m. (apart from Nima Dorje who was too exhausted to complete the final stretch). Smythe wrote of that moment nearing the summit:

We seized hold of Lewa and shoved him in front of us. As I clutched hold of him I could hear the breath jerking from him in wheezy gasps. I do not think that he quite understood what we were doing. And so he was the first to tread the summit. It was the least compliment we could pay to those splendid men, our porters, to whom we owed the success of the expedition.

So a model, too, in showing an expedition’s regard for its porters.

The agreeable story is told in Smythe’s book Kamet Conquered, a curiously assertive title for him, and one making me wonder if the publisher pressed for it in seeking to remind readers that the mellow chronicling of a project that seemed almost to have an inevitability about its success, had an aggressive edge at its core. If so, my guess is that this hint of the triumphal must have caused Smythe some qualms.

As you peruse the book’s first section (some 40 pages long), it is like an information-pack that covers the Garhwal Himalaya, filled with factual data on its topography, geography, expedition history, snow-lore, weather research, and so on. Then with chapter IV comes a change of gear. You lock into Smythe’s generalised mode of adventure travel-writing:

Dawn came up over the great northern plain of India, the sun shining over the level horizon like a huge blood orange, then, topping the low horizon, burst into white, eye-searing flame. Somewhere beyond that level horizon were the Himalaya ... Languid after 2 days of travelling in appalling heat, Shipton and I stepped from the train at Kathgodam ...

In the wake of their success on Kamet (with a second party reaching the summit and comprising Greene, Bernie and Kesar Singh, a local porter), they explored the head glaciers of the Arwa valley along a route that Bruce, Longstaff and Mumm followed in 1907, and finally crossed into the Bhyundar valley (as the early explorers did): and they gazed, as Greene describes it in his book Moments of Being (1974), at a valley-floor that seemed covered with brightly covered handkerchiefs.

We waded ankle-deep in primulas, wine-red potentiallas, purple irises, forget-me-nots, borage, blue poppies, huge yellow lilies, orchids of all colours, green fritillaries, pansies, geraniums, more flowers than we could name. Every step crushed a dozen. In this garden we camped beside a brook. It was hard to leave the Valley of Flowers.

It had such effect on Smythe that even as early as this he was writing of it as a place of escape, for in the Kamet book he visualised how those wearied of modern civilisation could find the means of sustenance to live there and be absorbed in its contrast, that for half a year the lover of beauty and solitude could find peace there. No wonder he mounted his own private expedition to return to it years later, a symbol of sanity as the first signs of conflict and war clouds were evident in Europe.

But meantime there loomed Everest. In glancing back at Smythe’s involvement, it’s easy to spot the paradoxes he was facing in this ultimate of challenges. The challenge was again casting its shadow in 1933 as a new British attempt was confirmed. He had a major claim to lead it after the Kamet success. But the built-in tradition of it went against the grain of his style — of attempts associated with a single nationalist agenda, of the organising edging towards a military character in applying such lavish resources, of the operation being directed by a Committee that would naturally have made him wary. For still the ‘establishment’ were equivocal and regarded him with a certain unease and distrust, a careeristclimber who went his own way as a professional depending on his writing. He was chosen to join the 1933 bid, but not as leader. Instead the job was given to Hugh Ruttledge, a solid older hand who had Himalayan experience, but not in the same league as Smythe’s.

The story of the expeditions in ’33, ’36 and ’38 that set out on the long trek from Darjeeling, that kept clear of Nepal as a forbidden land as they wound up through to Kampa Dzong, and then through Tibet to arrive at the Rongbuk valley and Everest’s northern approaches, is one widely recorded and mulled over. There was an outside chance that one or other would succeed before the monsoon broke; but they met with too much persistent bad weather to struggle through at high-altitude, and World War 2 came and went before the famous breakthrough in 1953, which was some years after Smythe’s death.

How easy, though, to write with surface brashness about those lumbering pre-war ventures when my youthful recollection belongs in a different category. Shipton, Smythe and the others took on the mantle of heroes when the time came round to battle relentlessly on the north ridge with high-altitude exhaustion and vicious winds and violent storms. The fact of Everest staying unclimbed spun out the fascination, and it brought enhanced awareness and awe of the Himalaya. But in hindsight we took things rather easily at face value, assuming the non-use of oxygen was right (and indeed it was the battle with natural forces with minimum artificial — aids that had us so engrossed), and nor were we concerned over an expedition’s size.

Shipton and Smythe did have concern, however. Very noticeably in Shipton’s book Upon That Mountain (1943), his chapter-heading after he described his experience on Everest in ’33, is ‘Large Expeditions’, and he goes on to argue for much smaller expeditions. Regarding their optimum size, he once asked his friend Dr. Humphreys for his view, and had the reply that ‘3 constitutes a large expedition, a party of 1 may be considered a small expedition’.

And it could be said that both climbers sought this degree of contrast towards smallness, after their prominent struggle on Everest in league with hundreds of men, that Shipton linked up with Tilman and a few porters, and they accomplished in 1934 one of the exploring feats of the century, forcing a passage up the Rishi gorge to be the first to enter the Nanda Devi Basin; while Smythe — well he went alone to Switzerland in 1934, and traversed in the spontaneous way he loved across alpine regions ... ‘never in my life have I spend 6 such delightful weeks in the Alps’.

Smythe’s most significant contrast to struggles on Everest came in 1937 in the Himalaya.

It is here I should declare an interest, for the book he wrote The Valley of Flowers (1938), one that was to signify the same ultimate incentive for him as Everest, was one I specially hunted for after my being a serviceman in India in immediate post-war years, and having taken part in a shoestring venture led by Sladen to explore and climb in a Garhwal flower-valley extolled by ‘some mountaineer’. We had met with our quota of adventures, but most of all were to discover the unforgettable beauty of that corner of the Himalaya. So what kind of mountaineer was it who based himself in that valley?

I tracked down the book in London, and was frankly astonished. Frank Smythe, the Everester, had selected the Garhwal’s Bhyundar valley, which I’d just stayed in, and portrayed it plainly in colour photographs in the book, and with no other visual distraction. He’d produced an example of mountaineering literature that put the landscape in all its beauty first, and he’d excluded depicting personal impressions of the climber and his companions, or of the energetic climbs they did. Yet the text gave stunning detail of the spontaneous and quite ambitious climbs on various peaks and ridges in the region, of very spirited action in antithesis to the inaction of passive sojourns amid the valley flowers near an idyllic stream.

Much more could be written about this seminal undertaking by Smythe, such as his being joined by Wangdi Nuru, Pasang, Tewang and Nurbu, and their now-and-then participating in the climbing — an indication of his absorbed interest and respect for those who live in the high regions he so revered; but here I merely record that the enterprise represented a final expression of another pillar of his dreams and achievements in the Himalaya (if you allow for the abortive bid on Everest in ‘38 that he was part of). World War 2 saw Smythe still pursuing his writing in his publishing a biography of Whymper, and a ‘vision’ book, and a fictional thriller, and bringing out numerous fine photo-albums; and of applying his skills to training servicemen in mountain warfare, and then in early post-war years his taking up the thread of the brand of combining mountain-going and literary interpretation that he was famous for.

But there was a changed, more astringent atmosphere about, and his quietism and simplicities were not so easily blended to it. Yet his ambitious quest for true adventure in mountains led him to roam in Switzerland, and then in the Canadian Rockies, and fatefully, one more time, in the Himalaya. He made for Darjeeling in 1949, and he aimed to climb and roam on the ranges in simple fashion, being again joined by a few porters as companions. He looks to have had a really aspiring venture in mind, perhaps one stretching spontaneously over 6 months, seeking to create from it a really revelatory delivery in words of the crux of his pure adventurism in a Himalayan world whose real challenges were so much more than Everest.

But it was not to be. For once he had pushed his frail body too far. He became delirious and was flown back to England, but he died soon afterwards, aged 49. He would have been amazed how many were shocked and saddened over the sudden passing of — in my view — the most significant mountaineer of this century.

SUMMARY

A tribute to Frank Smythe’s travels and books.

 

⇑ Top