The Last Englishmen: Love, War and the End of Empire
By Deborah Baker, Graywolf Press, 358 pages, $28
Imagine my surprise. More than half a century ago, I was taught geology at Oxford by a diminutive, pugnacious and leather-skinned Yorkshireman named Lawrence Rickard Wager, known to most (though perhaps not to us respectful undergraduates) as Bill. I knew that, famously for scientists, he had discovered a remarkable body of igneous rock in East Greenland (of which more later) and that, much more famously for the postwar climbing fraternity, he very nearly succeeded in reaching the summit of Mount Everest in 1933. (On the way down, he and his climbing partner found an abandoned ice axe from the ill-starred Mallory-and-Irvine expedition of a decade earlier, thereby adding a further measure of intrigue to that greatest of recent Himalayan mountaineering legends.)
All this I knew. What surprised me was that my teacher turns out to have been one of the select cadre who populate pre-independence India in Deborah Baker’s sprawling, difficult book, The Last Englishmen, and that he was, apparently, a bit of a cad. He was a fine climber, a courageous, no-nonsense man. But tellingly, in a grumbling letter about the failure of his 1933 expedition, Wager told his friend and fellow geologist John Auden that Auden had some kind of nervous tic but declined to say what it was, leaving Auden “beside himself with worry” as he fretted about it. “That,” Baker observes, “was Wager’s idea of fun.”
Eccentric, complicated, cruel, flawed, ambitious, mythically courageous, sexually uncertain but often misogynistic men take centre stage in this decidedly overwhelming book. They were men who smoked pipes and wore hobnail boots and climbing tweeds and (to judge from period photographs) seldom combed their hair. They particularly liked mountains because (to judge from Auden’s willfully indiscreet psychoanalyst) they felt safe when among the peaks, “isolated and unobserved.”
Wager was one such. John Auden, a highly capable pre-plate-tectonics geologist (and older brother of Wystan) another; as was Michael Spender, a long-forgotten photogrammetrist (and older brother of Stephen), together with such mountain-man legends as Eric Shipton, Hugh Ruttledge and Bill Tilman — the last better known back in England for equally isolated and unobserved sailing expeditions aboard his battered old Bristol Channel pilot cutter, Mischief.
They were men with an imperial mission: determined to conquer Mount Everest, the summit of the Himalayas, the pinnacle of India. Yet for these adventurers of the 1930s, Mount Everest was having none of it. Nor was India.
The portrait Baker seeks to paint turns out, perhaps, to be near-impossibly ambitious. She attempts to chronicle and assess the behaviour and achievement of a raft of these self-deludingly superior Englishmen and their kin, who lived and worked and, most emphatically explored, in an India that was at the time straining eagerly on the verge of its own independence. She marries this, in the later parts of her book, with the intellectually vibrant life of the old Calcutta adda — the almost endless coffeehouse discussions of the era’s poets and Communists and spies and flaneurs, whose lives happened to intersect, off and on, with some of the tweed-and-hobnail crowd from the high hills, with predictably trying consequences.
The social and political fault lines that were fast opening up in pre-war, wartime and then post-war India are every bit as complex and bewildering as the physical tears that sunder the immense Himalayan peaks. They then divided, as still they do today, Hindu from Muslim, Bengali from Punjabi, Indian left from British right, armies of die-hard imperialists from a small coterie of fair-minded realists. And they are faults that make for a reading experience some will think hugely colourful and minutely observed. Most, I fear, will find the labyrinthine narrative of The Last Englishmen just too rich, too stuffed with an “inside-cricket” chumminess (amplified with gratuitously inserted chummy slang: “knackered,” “the trots,” “nicked”) and its assumption that all will know their K2 (a real mountain) from their F6 (which W.H. Auden invented for a play, using Michael Spender as his muse).
Baker’s book is itself not unlike the Calcutta adda. One can imagine it being debated, phrase by well-turned phrase, over endless cups of Coorg kaphi, with the aromas of bidis and State Express 555s lacing the air, until another steamy dawn arrives over the Maidan and everyone stumbles out into the brief damp cool of morning, wondering what all that was really about, while the Hooghly River groans on like syrup to the bay.
The groundwork for John Hunt’s eventually successful 1953 Everest expedition was performed by many of the characters in this book, though none took part in that adventure. It was left to a New Zealand beekeeper named Edmund Hillary and his brave Nepali guide, Tenzing Norgay, to reach the summit, and none of the participants did so in imperial mood. By then, Britain had rightly left India, and any celebration was either for purely mountaineering reasons or for the young queen, who happened to have been crowned on the very day the success was announced to the world.
Bill Wager watched the news from Oxford, where he had recently been made professor of geology. His Everest exploits were by then only half-remembered: He was enjoying truly well-deserved fame for discovering what is known as the Skaergaard Intrusion in East Greenland, suspecting that this formidably important scientific find might also be full of gold and precious metals. Back then, the rock was covered with ice and snow, like the Himalayan summits. However, after global warming uncovered it, mining was started and on one daylit Arctic night the miners awoke to find their camp surrounded by angry polar bears. Imagine their surprise.
The Intrusion — the term seems particularly appropriate, given that the miners intruded, and then so did the bears, hurrah! — may be the 1930s Everest of the modern moment. But the modern moment is not an imperial one: that’s all gone, faded away like the briefly consequential mountain men of this book, and with the world, by general agreement, a better place in consequence.
–New York Times News Service
