The Last Englishmen Page 10
Seeing Bill emerge from his studio in the back garden, Nancy would go into a rage, raining blows on his head while he stood there looking like a corpse. And when Errol, her former fiancé, reappeared one summer day, for a brief moment she imagined she might return to that point in her youth when life held other possibilities.
But it was hopeless. As soon as she had become dependent on Bill, she became a bore and a deadweight. With her frantic need for affection, she had squeezed the life out of him. Just as it hadn’t occurred to Bill that he might not be the genius he took himself for, it was inconceivable to Nancy that she was not the mistress of her fate, the star of her own story. That there might be a larger canvas, one on which she was no more than a crafty painter’s trick to direct the eye elsewhere, was unthinkable.
Where they had once considered Communists childishly peevish, during the slump the Boys began to rethink their political stance. The notion that abstract art was the last gasp of bourgeois decadence was the hardest to swallow. They weren’t ready to abandon Picasso. Couldn’t surrealism mark the final expression of bourgeois decadence? Yet how did dialectical materialism translate into painting, they wondered, once again eyeing Bill for answers.
But in February 1935 Bill had taken a job editing documentaries at the Film Unit of the General Post Office. Now he was rushing out of the house at half past nine each morning, having expensive lunches in town, and coming home in a taxi at 1:00 a.m. Bill told the Boys it was naive to believe the masses would embrace a high art celebrating the triumph of the proletariat. Cinema would satisfy the popular appetite. Cinema was more accessible. Purely representative art was not reactionary but superfluous. Socialism would put an end to society portraits as well. It was only logical. The Boys were newly impressed.
Now it was the job Nancy envied. While Bill was out and about having a damn good time, she complained to anyone who would listen, the farthest she got from the flat was Regent’s Park. One Whitsun, one of the Boys ended up staying the night after seeing a Fritz Lang film. The guest bed, he noted, smelled strongly of the family bull terrier. After Bill left for work he lingered on, fending off the enormous dog’s huffy snout while the char washed nappies in the bathtub. While Nancy talked, bouncing Juliet up and down on her knee, he smoked and fidgeted.
“I am trying to persuade Bill to have more children,” Nancy said, “but he doesn’t want to.” As a child, she explained, she would go out of her way to see a baby bathed.
“Yet you needn’t have one just yet, need you?” Despite Bill’s job money was tight and Nancy was something of a spendthrift. She was always extremely fashionable.
“Yes, I suppose so,” she said. “Still it would be bad for Juliet to be an only.” Cadging a shilling from him for the gas meter and inviting him to accompany her to the shops, Nancy gathered up her drawing pads, pencils, and books and loaded them all into the pram until there was scarcely room for the baby.
“We’ll just leave Juliet in the pram and the char can look out of the window every now and then and see that she’s all right,” she said.
The Coldstreams’ ground-floor maisonette suited Bill’s new colleague at the Film Unit perfectly. A “veteran enemy of compulsory hygiene,” Wystan Auden never thought to task Nancy over her housekeeping. As with the Carritt family of Boars Hill, he liked the messy bosom of domesticity and had long hungered for a cozy nest of his own. When Nancy went to the shops, he would play with Juliet or lift the infant Miranda into his bed to root at his breast. He and Nancy were soon thick as thieves.
Wystan had arrived at Upper Park Road with a sturdy wooden crate of books from his father’s library. These tomes treated the homosexual feelings between boys as a way station on the road to manhood. In Berlin Wystan had convinced himself that through intimate congress with the heterosexual brawn of a “truly strong man,” he might imbibe the required “he-man” qualities. Much like taking Bovril, he thought. Here a sailor from Hamburg proved to be an instructive but expensive mistake. Wystan hadn’t mentioned that misadventure to John, but his brother’s stay in Berlin had opened yet another sluice for his thoughts on the mysterious workings of the male libido. In his own way, Wystan was a formidable explorer himself. As was his wont, his explorations took a psychoanalytic turn.
How could two brothers raised by the same woman have such different responses to the opposite sex? he asked himself. His buggery and John’s compulsive whoring implied a direct criticism and rejection of Mother’s values. Having received more motherly love than John had, it was perhaps easier for him to beg off women altogether, whereas John, who’d received a more punitive and castigating form of Constance Rosalie’s love, must always want more and more.
Wystan also kept turning over John’s dramatic account of a frontier skirmish, reading into it an analysis of his own struggle over his attraction to men. After a grievously wounded Indian Army officer had valiantly secured a critical border post, the officer discovered that the hill tribe he had just decimated was made up of the same tribals as his regiment. Was the violent suppression of homosexual desires as heroic and foolish as the Indian Army’s violent repression of rebel insurgencies? And if so, Wystan asked himself, had he been heroic and foolish to deny himself the love of men? Wystan had yet to find a satisfying answer to this “problem” and, after settling into the ground-floor maisonette, began to hope that perhaps Nancy might unlock the heroic he-man inside him.
When Wystan wrote her a neat little note in blank verse, Nancy was pleased to discover Bill was jealous. If Bill was unable to be faithful, Wystan had told her, it was only reasonable that she, too, should have affairs. She was interested. One afternoon Wystan began turning off the lights and closing the curtains. Their experiment, alas, was brought to an early end by the sound of Bill’s key in the lock.
Yet when Wystan told Nancy she reminded him of a D. H. Lawrence heroine, she’d been flustered and embarrassed. Though she hadn’t yet read Lady Chatterley’s Lover she knew perfectly well what it was about. To cover her confusion she affected outrage because it was an obvious insult for Wystan to imagine her desperation was such that she’d sleep with a gamekeeper.
Wystan was puzzled. He said he didn’t think she’d mind. He wouldn’t have.
PART II
The Impersonal Eye
… perfect monsters—remember Dracula—
Are bred on crags in castles; those unsmiling parties,
Clumping off at dawn in the gear of their mystery
For points up, are a bit alarming;
They have balance, nerve
And habit of the Spiritual, but what God
Does their Order serve?
W. H. AUDEN, “MOUNTAINS”
Let me pretend that I’m the impersonal eye of the camera
Sent out by God to shoot on location
W. H. AUDEN, “LETTER TO WILLIAM COLDSTREAM, ESQ.”
CHAPTER 7
Perfect Monsters
Border of the Kingdom of Nepal and Indian Province of Bihar,
Sunday, January 15, 1934, 2:13 p.m.
A curious anomaly sets the Himalaya apart from mountains elsewhere. Scientists have known since the nineteenth century that the temperature of the rocks that make up the earth’s crust increases with their proximity to the earth’s mantle. The rocks at the greatest depths are subjected to higher temperatures and greater pressures than rocks nearer the surface. In the Alps, the Appalachians, and the Welsh hills early geologists noted that the rocks of the highest elevations were those least exposed to the heat and compression of the deep crust. In the Himalaya the reverse was true. The rocks at the highest elevations came from the greatest depths. Every time John Auden traveled to the High Himalaya he confirmed it.
How did he know this? A brittle or flaky rock near the earth’s surface becomes denser and more malleable in the high heat of the deep crust. The deeper the rocks are buried, the older they are and the higher the grade of metamorphism. Marine limestone becomes marble. Mudstone first becomes shale then slat
e and schist. At the greatest depths rocks melt and form magma. Magma squeezed from partly melted rocks pools and solidifies into large granite blocks or boulders. Ascending to what is now called the Main Himalayan Range, John was also, in part, climbing down through the earth’s crust. What forces propelled the older hot rocks to the surface, burying the younger, cooler ones? It was a mystery.
The Himalaya are the indirect result of the breakup of an itinerant supercontinent known as Gondwanaland. Thirty million years after Gondwanaland separated from Madagascar, a piece of this continent, the Indian Plate, collided ever so slowly with the more cumbersome Eurasian Plate. Pivoting on that first point of contact, in what is now Ladakh, the Indian Plate turned counterclockwise and, like a pair of mismatched gears, the crusts of the two continents engaged. This lifted some of the floor of the Tethys Sea to the top of the southern Tibetan plateau. The rest of the seafloor was sunk deep beneath the earth’s crust and thrust into the mantle. As the Indian Plate slipped under the Eurasian Plate, its upper crust was slowly scraped off, doubling the thickness of the crust and raising both the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau. The rock at the top of Everest is marine limestone, but sediments from Tibet can also be found there.
Thirty million years after the plates first collided, the pressure arising from crustal thickening and rising mountains created a thrust plane or fault, oriented east west. Over time, this thrust fault enabled the deeper, more malleable rocks first to stretch in response to the tectonic shifts of the plate and then to work their way up, smeared by the stupendous weight of the mountains. For the next fifteen million years, massive blocks of stone thrust themselves into the sky, restless as a city sending skyscrapers up during a long boom. These layers of crust all tilted north, pushing southward the cooler rocks beneath them, while erosion stripped the rocks that had once lain at the bottom of the Tethys Sea off their backs. Eventually, these highly crystalline rocks arranged themselves like the uneven rows of shark’s teeth into the highest chain of mountains in the world. Among them was the peak known as Chomolungma to those who lived in view of it, and Mount Everest to the Survey of India men who named it. Then the fault went quiet.
During the untold millions of years that followed, the two plates continued to butt each other like rutting bharals. Eventually, a new fault zone arose, this one to the south of the Lesser Himalaya, or Mahabharat Lekh. Shallower layers of sedimentary rocks that had been pushed aside by the earlier thrust were now heaved up. To ascend these slopes, then, is not only to travel down through the upper layers of the earth’s crust but also to travel back in time, again and again, as enormous blocks of sedimentary crust pile up, one on top of another like rock sandwiches, representing discrete and vast wedges of time. This fault, too, eventually went quiet and the thrusting shifted south again, into the alluvial plain.
Few scientists of John Auden’s time accepted Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift, which first appeared in English in 1922. John was no exception. Indeed, there was a great suspicion of grand overarching theories, particularly German ones. Wegener had provided insufficient evidence, it was said, and no explanation of the mechanism by which continents moved. He wasn’t even a geologist. And so without the notion of continental drift, without the means to measure the thickening of the earth’s crust and to detect the persistent northward creep of India, John Auden could not explain the tectonic forces that conspired to raise mountains and create the kinds of chaotic arrangements of rocks he’d noted in the Krol Belt. What he could do was train his eye on the composition and arrangement of rocks as he traveled through jungles, across rivers, and up and down mountainsides. From his observations he wrote papers and drew intricate maps. This was the principal undertaking of exploration: to collect and to classify and to fill in blanks on maps. But as to explaining what was happening deep within the earth’s crust, few dared speculate.
Then, on Sunday, January 15, 1934, an earthquake struck the border of the Kingdom of Nepal and the Indian province of Bihar. It began with a sudden, sweeping wind. The temperature dropped sharply in its wake, as if the season had changed in a moment. From the west came a rumbling. A few seconds later, the main shock hit. Lasting between two and half and five minutes, the shaking of the earth increased in intensity until the rumbling rose to a roar. Later estimates put the area of shock transmission at over three million square miles, the greatest ever recorded in the region.
In those minutes the Gangetic Plain undulated in surface waves, as if the earth had turned into water. In places of shallow alluvial soil, hundreds upon hundreds of geysers bubbled up. Fountains of hot water and fine sand spurted six feet in the air. When they subsided they left behind curious conical formations, like tiny volcanoes. Wells overflowed with sand; winter harvests were destroyed. In rockier regions, crevices thousands of feet long, thirty feet wide, and fifty feet deep opened in the earth’s crust and from them poured more water, blindly furious to make sense of the new geography. People and animals became trapped in the cracks only to have the earth shift again, the clefts reopen, and eject them in a burst of water like indigestible scraps.
In Calcutta the rumbling was drowned out by the noise of vehicles colliding and the shouts and panic of people in the streets. The bell tower and steeple of St. Paul’s Cathedral crashed with a clang. Bishop Foss Wescott had only enough time to rush out of his bungalow before it collapsed behind him in a tumbled mass of masonry and timber. In Kathmandu the prime minister’s palace shuddered and fell thunderously into rubble before disappearing in a rising cloud of dust that shut out the sun and rendered the air unbreathable. By the time the earth stopped moving, a four-thousand-square-mile region had been devastated. Ten thousand people died in the span of five minutes; countless more were injured and made homeless.
What did those in the quiet rhododendron forests of the Himalayan foothills understand of this? Had Mara, Lord of Death, defeated once again by the Buddha, started those avalanches in a fit of rage? Was Mahasu, avatar of Shiva, chasing his rival Chasrala through the mountains and valleys? Sadhus and saints were called upon to explain what forces had brought down such a calamity. Gandhi ascribed it to the stain of untouchability; Nehru, touring the devastation, was staggered but kept his thoughts to himself. Incense and butter lamps were lit, prayers and supplications poured forth. The sounds of mourning went on through the night.
For over a century Europeans had been barred from the Kingdom of Nepal. In the course of the 1814–16 Anglo-Gurkha War, the East India Company had seized Nepal’s Garhwal and Kumaon territories in the west and the Kingdom of Sikkim in the east. Since then the high ranges of the Nepal Himalaya had been more inaccessible to Europeans than Tibet. The three Everest expeditions of the 1920s were obliged to approach the mountain from the north, requiring a monthlong trek across Tibet from Sikkim. After the disappearance of Mallory and Irvine, even this access was cut.
During the 1934 earthquake, the king of Nepal, Maharaja Juddha Shumsher Jung Bahadur, lost two daughters and their maidservants in the collapse of his palace. His request that the Geological Survey of India investigate the quake was a measure of Nepal’s distress. John Auden was invited to lead a team of geologists, traversing the devastated border region from west to east on royal elephants. Comparing the seismograph recordings from Kew and Bombay, where the quake had registered 8.4 on the Richter scale, Auden had estimated the epicenter to be in eastern Nepal. On reaching it he read the landscape as a detective might reconstruct a violent crime by studying the overturned furniture. Thrust faults were not always hidden deep beneath the earth; they could also be written in the surface, as they were in the Krol Belt. He decided the epicenter was farther south, beneath the Gangetic Plain, an area not known for seismicity.
Everywhere Auden went he felt the hot winds and breathed the choking dust that emerged from newly opened vents in the crust. His mouth filled with sores. His observations, however, were confined to what the quake unearthed rather than the harrowed faces surrounding him, as if human life was
of no consequence when set against the colossal power of the earth itself.
Indeed, why climb Everest if not to assert the power of an Englishman over the power of nature to raise a mountain beyond his reach? Why climb the Himalaya if not for the view it afforded across time? Perhaps a man, like the rocks beneath his boots, might also be strengthened and purified of his weaker elements by such an undertaking. John Auden seemed to believe that the higher one climbed, the purer grade of man one became. Mallory, a veteran of trench warfare, was often portrayed as a near-ethereal being, a beautiful boy with his head in the clouds who, as Churchill had eulogized his friend and fellow martyr Rupert Brooke, “advanced towards the brink in perfect serenity.” The fact that Mallory’s body was never recovered only added to the air of legend surrounding him.
During the years Everest was off limits, attention had turned toward more accessible summits. With a limited number of mountains over eight thousand meters to go around, the race to plant national flags on the loftiest peaks began. Ten of the fourteen mountains over this height were in the Himalaya; the remaining four were in its sister range to the west, the Karakoram. Sensitive to the charge of imperial preference, the Government of India was obliged to consider permit petitions from rival nations, foremost among them France and Germany. During the 1930s permission was granted for German attempts on Kanchenjunga near Darjeeling in the eastern end of the Himalaya and Nanga Parbat in the far west. The French secured Masherbrum 1 in the Karakoram, across the Indus from Nanga Parbat. The United States also wanted in. While the three Everest expeditions of the 1920s were pitched as scientific undertakings and included botanists and geologists, those of the 1930s largely limited themselves to mountaineers and soldiers.