Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
climbers in Britain. My friends and I listened in awe to the tales of Joe Brown, a plumb-
er from Manchester, and Don Whillans, also a plumber and a high school dropout
from a grimy town in the north of England, who might at the moment be the nervi-
est climbers in the world. Brown was the first man to have solved the fierce and peril-
ous short crack called Cenotaph Corner, in north Wales; but he had dismissed his own
first ascent of Kanchenjunga, the world's third-highest mountain (where he was paired
with those Oxbridge throwbacks), as “a long slog.”
One day in my late twenties I discovered the writing of Tom Patey, a Scottish ice
climber and crony of Brown and Whillans, who had perfected a satiric take on our pas-
time that on first reading won me over utterly. That initial Patey essay, which I came
across in 1969, was his quarrel with Rébuffat, titled “Apes or Ballerinas?” published in
the splendidly counterculture British journal Mountain.
In the piece, Patey launches boldly into an attack on what he called the “stylist”
climber.
The French, as might be expected, are the supreme stylists. If you don't know what I mean,
have a look at the illustrations in Rébuffat's book, On Snow and Rock. Every picture shows
the author examining himself in some graceful and quite unbelievable posture. . . . Even the
captions carry a note of smug satisfaction: “Climbing means the pleasure of communicating
with the mountain as a craftsman communicates with the wood or the stone or the iron
upon which he is working” (portrait of Rébuffat, standing on air, studiously regarding his
left forearm, hands caressing smooth granite).
Patey then imagines the climber trying to learn from Rébuffat's injunctions to
graceful, effortless movement:
Stage Two: the left boot is aligned with the right boot by stepping up smoothly and deliber-
ately. Any effort is imperceptible. . . .
Strange! You're lying flat on the ground with a squashed nose. Another attempt; another
failure. Time passes, along with your faith in Rébuffat.
Eventually, in Patey's piece, the climber gets up the cliff by ignoring the ballerina of
Rébuffat's “stylist” and reverting to the primal ape.
Heave, clutch, thrutch, grunt! Up you go, defying gravity with your own impetus. So what,
if it looks ungraceful? Joe Brown doesn't look much like a ballet dancer.
Patey's delicious burlesque swept away what was left of my former adulation. At
the time, I was too sociologically naive to realize that there yawned between French
and British climbers an unbridgeable gulf of mutual contempt, that on the crags above
Search WWH ::




Custom Search