Books that generate other books, books that are first in the line, interest me.  Despite little interest in mountaineering, I read Annapurna: First Conquest of an 8000-meter Peak (1951, tr. Nea Morin and Janet Adam Smith) by Maurice Herzog, the subject of the book well summarized in the title, a book that led to many other books. Annapurna was a big hit, and soon after there were books by other members of the expedition, and a parody novel, The Ascent of Rum Doodle (William Ernest Bowman, 1956) and a feminist response.  That response was to climb Annapurna, but also to write a book, Annapurna: A Woman’s Place (Arlene Blum, 1980).  The book inspired a great deal of mountaineering, Himalayan and otherwise.  The last line, “There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men” (311), apparently became famously inspirational  among crazy people, by which I mean mountain climbers, but I am more interested in what inspired people to write books. The story of the 1950 French and Swiss expedition in Nepal to climb whichever 8,000-meter peak was easiest, using state-of-the-art techniques, is a terrific adventure story, “terrific” in the current sense (entertaining) but also in the old sense (terrifying, these climbers are out of their minds), and it is the latter that really surprised me.  Annapurna is study in the variety of human taste for risk, or to put it in Wuthering Expectations terms* the taste for the sublime. “Sublime” has softened into an inelegant variation for “very beautiful,” but I again mean the old aesthetic sense of beauty that is frightening, beauty that is trying to kill you, like the view from the top of an 8,000-meter Himalayan peak.  This was quite different [from the Alps].  An enormous gulf was between me and the world.  This was a different universe – withered, desert, lifeless; a fantastic universe where the presence of man was not foreseen, perhaps not desired.  We were braving an interdict, overstepping a boundary, and yet we had no fear as we continued upward.  I thought of the famous ladder of St. Theresa of Avila.  Something clutched at my heart.  (207) Herzog does not normally write like this.  He is typically a model of clarity.  But atop Annapurna he goes on for three pages like this, while his companion keeps insisting they head back before the bad weather hits them. Some additional fragments: How wonderful life would now become! (208) Never had I felt happiness like this – so intense and yet so pure. (209)  Before disappearing into the couloir I gave one last look at the summit which would henceforth be all our joy and all our consolation. (210) The latter is well into the descent which at that point has become terrible and will get much worse.  But Herzog remains captured by his sublime experience, wavering between the struggle to descend and an obliterating acceptance of imminent death. Given the practicalities of the earlier part of the book, the organization of camps and supplies, the turn towards St. Theresa was fascinating.  It’s those camps and supplies, along with the team doctor, that save Herzog.  If you happen to have strong feelings about needles I recommend that you skip chapter 16, “The Retreat,” which is full of horrors (frostbite treatments).  Perhaps skim the next couple of chapters as well, although the worst is over. The whole of this book has been dictated at the American Hospital at Neuilly where I am still having rather a difficult time.  (11) I suppose another reason for the rise of the mountaineering book in the is that explorers had used up other parts of the world.  The Arctic and Antarctic had been exhausted as subjects for books.  I will note that while Roald Amundsen insisted on the scientific value of his pointless feats, Herzog and his team have no illusion that climbing a Himalayan mountain has any value beyond the adventure.  The legendary Alpine guide Lionel Terray, one of the members of the team who got Herzog down off Annapurna, titled his 1961 memoir Conquistadors of the Useless.  Useless except for generating books. Page numbers are from the first edition, which has a helpful fold-out map in the back.   * See this old post about Little House on the Prairie for more on the sublime.

As a boy I was often told I spoke too loudly. It makes sense, as I came from a family of yellers. It’s an annoying habit, usually inappropriate, one I associate with self-centeredness. I made a conscious effort to lower the volume, a rare instance of successfully stifling an obnoxious personal habit. As a reporter I learned the value of modulating speech -- when to keep it soft and intimate, when to speak louder and more forcefully, depending on your audience. The latter usually applied to people holding public office. I tried to follow Teddy Roosevelt’s advice.  I’ve heard from several readers about the dearth of good, intelligent conversation in their lives. One woman complains of “every conversation turning into a scolding or shouting match.” I’ve seen the same thing, of course. I’ve always associated hollering and hair-trigger anger with what used to be called “poor breeding.” That is, people without elders to teach them basic etiquette. I’m not sure that’s the case any longer.      Back in 2011, Commentary asked forty-one people this question: “Are you optimistic or pessimistic about America’s future?” Among the respondents was one of my favorite poets and critics, Eric Ormsby. He chooses an appropriate passage from Whitman’s Democratic Vistas, and writes:   “But it isn’t the obvious dangers that America faces—terrorist attack, fiscal collapse—that most get me down but something humbler, less catastrophic, and yet more insidious. I think of it as the death of discourse. Nowadays, even among friends, a dissenting opinion is met not with rebuttal or debate but with stony silence or Whitman’s ‘melodramatic screamings.’ The purpose of conversation on any serious topic is no longer a ‘mass of badinage’ but an occasion for sniffing out ‘deviant’ views and affixing labels.”   Ormsby recounts that even when his family agued, “we were reconciled in mutual affection.” Wise words. A person is not his or her opinions. You don’t have to respect a stupid or offensive opinion but you do have to respect the person speaking it – at least for a little while. Good conversation is one of life's supreme pleasures. Boswell recounts Dr. Johnson saying: “The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered but a general effect of pleasing impression.”

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In his critical works, Samuel Johnson respected tradition if not reputation or even physical appearance. He could be eloquently brutish and write of Jonathan Swift:  “The person of Swift had not many recommendations. He had a kind of muddy complexion, which, though he washed himself with Oriental scrupulosity, did not look clear. He had a countenance sour and severe, which he seldom softened by any appearance of gaiety. He stubbornly resisted any tendency to laughter.”   Today we would frown on mocking a writer’s looks. It would be judged “insensitive.” I associate Johnson’s description of Swift with one of the late John Simon’s more amusing assaults on Barbra Streisand: “Miss Streisand looks like a cross between an aardvark and an albino rat surmounted by a platinum-coated horse bun. Though she has good eyes and a nice complexion, the rest of her is a veritable anthology of disaster areas. Her speaking voice seems to have graduated with top honors from the Brooklyn Conservatory of Yentaism.” That Streisand is a mediocre singer/actress endowed with a surfeit of self-esteem eases potential offense. The difference between Johson’s judgment and Simon’s being that the former mingles admiration with distaste:   “It was from the time when [Swift] first began to patronise the Irish, that they may date their riches and prosperity. He taught them first to know their own interest, their weight, and their strength, and gave them spirit to assert that equality with their fellow-subjects to which they have ever since been making vigorous advances, and to claim those rights which they have at last established.”   R.L. Barth has translated Martial’s epigram XI.99. As a satirist, Martial was no respecter of persons:   “Whenever you stand up, I see your gown Treat you indecently, flat let you down. You pluck it with your left hand then your right— You’re positively groaning!—it’s held tight In the Cyanean straits of your huge butt. What’s my advice? Don’t sit. Don’t stand. That’s what.”   Bob wrote to me on his approach to translation: “Translation can be a vexing problem if you let it be--or even if you don’t. For me, all that matters is that the translated poem makes a good English poem (or why bother) and that it stays as close to the original as this or that translator is able to keep it. However, I'm willing to vary, add, substitute, if it works for the poem and doesn’t violate the spirit of the original. I may not be as good a poet as Martial, but I’m pretty much his equal as a smart-ass, which helps my translations.”

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