The Last Englishmen: Love, War and the End of Empire
Deborah Baker
Vintage: 2019
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Why the sudden obsession with mountaineering in Europe of the nineteen-twenties and thirties? Filmmakers were very much into it, with the popular director Arnold Fanck and others turning out feature after feature about sturdy, self-reliant types valorously scaling dangerous crags, merely, to paraphrase the contemporary British climber George Mallory, because they were there. Fanck’s star actress, Leni Riefenstahl, of course went on to direct Triumph of the Will, the lavish documentary of Hitler’s 1934 rally at Nuremberg, by which time the business of summiting snowy peaks had itself begun to display markedly authoritarian symptoms. “Above one thousand meters,” as one Nazi newspaper put it, “there are only supporters of the Fuhrer.” The world’s most wayward topographies, it seemed, were out there waiting to be brought beneath the mastering jackboot of the superman.

Amid another authoritarian project, that of British India, a related mania had taken hold. “We ought not to treat the climbing of Everest as a domestic issue,” urged Captain George Finch, another mountaineer of the day, “it is a matter of National and Imperial importance.” Even as England’s potency softened, it was reasoned, if the colonisers could lay underfoot the world’s tallest mountain, would that not prove to all and sundry their continued viability as rulers?

The need to demonstrate virility, Deborah Baker thinks, was also behind the Everest-conquering ambitions of the two biographical subjects of The Last Englishmen: Love, War and the End of Empire. “Of course I would wish to be liked simply for myself,” one of them blurts to an amateur psychiatrist when questioned as to his motives, “but what exactly is this self if it is not connected with some action?” His name was John Auden, elder brother of W.H., and the fact that Baker’s other protagonist was the elder brother of another of the era’s leading poets, Stephen Spender, adds necessary star-power to Baker’s cast of characters.

• Tags: Deborah Baker, Issue 16, Rupert Arrowsmith