REVIEW OF BOOKS

Spring books

John Hunt on the human face of a 'man of action'

The autobiographies of most explorers, unlike those of great men whose progress towards fame is a more pedestrian one, may be seen as a succession of peaks of achievement; each summit adds its lustre to the flame; each is marketable on its own merits. So it is with Hillary's latest book, for several of his expeditions have been recounted in his earlier writings and are here brought together under one cover, with a good deal of new material. Nothing Venture, Nothing Win* brings up to date — I would hesitate to suggest that it rounds off — the remarkable record of this man of action.

For someone who has not read those other books, here are adventures galore, told with an understatement which serves to enhance the excitement; they are guaranteed to keep any vicarious explorer riveted to his armchair for several evenings. Those who have already followed Hillary's exploits may find, as I have, that something of the early spontaneity has been lost in the re-telling. Time blurs the emotions, though not the memory of events, and the need to compress the story has also tended to reduce the tensions and dim the glow of our relationships on Everest. As one who shared his greatest triumph with him, I found the use of an intermittent diary record of that event less evocative, less revealing of himself and his companions than the fresh and vivid writing in his first book High Adventure. Anoxia is unconducive to a flowing pen.

But there was much else to command my rapt attention. The scene is an ever changing one and I, having developed an allergy for stories of great deeds upon the mountains, was especially gripped by Hillary's hair-raising escapades on the water, an element which I hold in fear but in which he appears to revel. There was a war-time escape involving a long swim ashore, badly scorched, from a blazing speedboat off the Solomon Islands; a near-disaster when a raft disintegrated in a Fijian river in full spate; and for those who have witnessed the awesome power of a great Himalayan river, there was the well-nigh incredible feat of climbing the countless rapids of the Sun Kosi over a distance of five hundred miles, in a jet boat.

For me, the best chapters are those devoted to Hillary's polar travels; especially his account of his difficult and controversial part in the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1957-58. The chapters 'Southern Continent,' 'Winter on the Ice' and 'Race for the Pole' hold the reader's attention, not only on account of the hazards and hardships of polar travel, though even in these days of aircraft and 'snow cats' these can be considerable — a tractor up-ended in the jaws of a huge and hungry crevasse makes the blood run cold in a well-heated room. There is something evoca tive, even in 1958, of Ponting's The Great White South, which stirred my childhood memories of Scott's heroic tragedy as Hillary's party repeated Wilson's winter journey to Cape Crozier, and later fought their mechanised way up the grim glaciers to the polar plateau.

But the essence of the story is the drama which was blazened as headlines across the world seventeen years ago that Fuchs and Hillary were engaged in a race for the Pole from opposite shores of the frozen continent — and worst of all — that Hillary had won hands down.

Much criticism was focussed on Hillary, whose task had been to establish depots along the return route which Fuchs would take on his way North after crossing the South Pole with his group. Now we have Hillary's side of the story told for the first time; through it emerge the strongly contrasting personalities of himself and Fuchs, despite the restrained writing. There are other interesting contrasts: the different types, traditions, techniques and equipment of Himalayan and polar travellers. There was the remote control of operations by committees thousands of miles away; deriving, I suspect, from the Admiralty connection of Scott's day.

As a mountaineer, I found my sympathies drawn towards Hillary's viewpoint; but I can also understand the sense of impropriety which Fuchs may have felt for the breezy disregard of the world-famous climber for polar lore, for what Hillary dubbed as "an almost masochistic belief in the virtues of discomfort." It must have been galling to note the success of Hillary's makeshift transport, the Fergusson tractors "scruffy, pathetic, the most inadequate snow vehicles that had ever been thought up," with which Hillary brought it off. As he said, "if you were enthusiastic enough and had good mechanics, you could get a farm tractor to the South Pole." But I reckon it needed a Hillary to do it.

It was, in fact, entirely predictable by anyone who knew him that, once headed towards the Pole and despite the limited objectives he had been given by the controlling committee, Ed would proceed to go the whole distance. "I would have despised myself if I hadn't continued; it was as simple as that." But he is silent about his arrival; it brought him little satisfaction: "there was a significant lack of thrill." The return journey, relegated to the back of one of Fuchs' "snowcats," must have been bitter indeed for the man who had been acclaimed as a hero for the past five years.

What made this man of action and what have his achievements done for him? Such questions provide the spice for any autobiography. I who know him would guess that Hillary, an extrovert not given to soul-searching self-analysis, has left the reader he does not know with a good deal of searching between the lines for their answers. However this may be, some of the best writing in his very readable narrative is to be found when Hillary is describing the spells

between expeditions, consorting with ordinary mortals. We see the lanky boy Edmund, a somewhat solitary soul, searching for an identity in the shadow of a stern, disciplinary. father. In his early escapades in the New Zealand bush and mountains, he appears to have been driven partly by a desire to prove himself, to throw off a sense of inadequacy. It is a relief to learn that he was by no means fearless, only anxious to overcome his fears. Strong emotions and an unashamedness of tears, a vast enthusiasm and lust for life bubble to the surface early on and remain with him throughout his career.

With each success and with a growing physical strength came greater assurance; mountains became his metaphor and his métier. After playing a particularly rough game of rugby in which he aroused hostility among the crowd, he was glad to find in the mountains another kind of adversary where "at least I could thrash around and do nobody any harm." Much later on, after descending from the peak of Everest, he expressed a similar sentiment to George Lowe who came out of our tents on the South Col to greet him: "Well, we've knocked the bastard off." Yes, I trace some of the making of this man to his relationship with his father and those beatings in the woodshed on the family bee farm. Fame and glory have happily not unmade other traits, discernible from his early days and his relationship with his few special friends.. There is a warmth in his nature which may well have been his mother's gift; she "gave me the affection and encouragement I needed"; there is a readiness to laugh at life and a willingness to acknowledge his weaknesses and errors; Hillary has always been prone to act first and think — on occasion to regret — afterwards. There is nothing petty or vindictive about the man. After receiving the abuse of a spectator in the aforesaid rugby game: "I had to agree that there was some truth in it."

And years later, on an expedition in 1956, he was taken to task by Dr Griffith Pugh, our physiologist in 1953, a red-headed Welshman, who gave him a "tongue-lashing." Hillary, expedition leader "realised that Griff had some basis for his dissatisfaction . . . I determined to give more consideration to his• wishes and feelings."

It required a reluctant mental leap to make the transition to 'Sir Edmund': "I was appalled." But I fancy he grew to enjoy this accolade and other fruits of fame,

But life after Everest, the South Pole ancl other great exploits was not easy for HillarY. Among the most interesting chapters are those relating the problems he had to face when living in the ambit of civilisation. He spent a year touring and lecturing in the United States (to say nothing of meeting c‘alls on his time all the world over); he acquired a growing sense of vocation in helping the Sherpa community in Nepal, building schools, bridges, a hospital; and an airstrip to bring in the building materials and equipment and, incidentally, to get in the tourists. All this was "to become a new way of life for me." In this work and elsewhere, HillarY reveals a strong social conscience. Some of the most moving passages are those relating to Louise his wife, his family and special friends. With his family, he has shared some of his less exacting adventures, in Nepal and the central Australian desert; to say nothing of the rigours of being a public hero in America, which his wife has described delightfully in another book, Keep Cairn If You Can. In his concluding remarks we readthe "for me most rewarding moments have not been the great moments — for what can surpass a tear on your departure, joy on your return and a trusting hand in yours?" Ed Hillary, 'Action_ Ms a y Man' for etliopnssoofnhis fans, reveals himse a lf Lord Hunt was leader of the British Expedition to Mount Everest, 1952-53, and has written The Ascent of Everest