a fantastic universe where the presence of man was not foreseen - Maurice Herzog's Annapurna: First Conquest of an 8000-meter Peak

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.

A readalong of Christopher Marlowe and friends - I fear they know we sent the poison'd broth

Please join me this fall in reading the plays of Christopher Marlowe and some of his contemporaries, if that sounds enjoyable to you.  The more I have thought about it, the more enjoyable it sounds to me.  I have many questions.

Below is an attempt at a schedule, with a play every two weeks, slower than when we read all of the Greek plays.  In September, though, I will blow through some early plays the precede the commercial London theater.  They are a bit shorter and frankly I doubt that anyone else will want to read them, so let’s get on to Marlowe, right?  Marlowe is outstanding.

I hope to put up a post every Monday (the dates below), with the alternating posts about some related topic: another play, perhaps even one by Shakespeare, or poetry, or criticism, or even in theory a performance although that does not seem likely.

I think of these works more as poems than as plays; this will mostly be an exercise in poetics and literary history.  But there is no reason anyone else has to read along for that.

Early Precursors
Sep. 1	1552	Ralph Roister Doister	Nicholas Udall
Sep. 8	1553	Gammer Gurton's Needle	authorship much disputed
Sep. 15	1561	Gorbuduc	Thomas Norton & Thomas Sackville
Marlowe & Co.
Sep. 29	1587	Dido, Queen of Carthage	Christopher Marlowe
Oct. 6	1587	Tamburlaine, Parts I & II	Christopher Marlowe
Oct. 20	1587	The Spanish Tragedy	Thomas Kyd
Nov. 3	1589	The Jew of Malta	Christopher Marlowe
Nov. 17	1591	Arden of Faversham	???
Dec. 1	1592	Doctor Faustus	Christopher Marlowe
Dec. 15	1592	Edward the Second	Christopher Marlowe
Dec. 29	1593	The Massacre at Paris	Christopher Marlowe

The years are all from the chronological table in the back of The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, 1990, eds. A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway.  Most of these years are marked with an asterisk meaning “best guess” so please use them skeptically.  The year of The Spanish Tragedy is especially convenient – plausible but convenient – because paired up with Tamburlaine it creates a handy Year When Everything Changed, a concentrated explosion of theatrical innovation.  But maybe it did not happen.

The first London commercial theater (The Theatre) opened in 1576, the next few in 1577.  One of my puzzles is what happened in the ten years before the Tamburlaine / Spanish Tragedy revolution.  Barely more than a dozen plays survive from that period, a number of them closet dramas, not written for performance.  What the heck was on those stages?

Some of what else was going on:

1580s	Astrophel and Stella	Philip Sidney
	An Apology for Poetry	Philip Sidney
	Caelica	Fulke Greville
1590	Henry VI, parts 1 to 3	William Shakespeare, et. al.
	The Two Gentlemen of Verona	William Shakespeare
	The Faerie Queene I-III	Edmund Spenser
1591	The Taming of the Shrew	William Shakespeare
	The Comedy of Errors	William Shakespeare
	Richard III	William Shakespeare
	Titus Andronicus	William Shakespeare
	Complaints	Edmund Spenser
	Summer's Last Will and Testament	Thomas Nashe
1592	Delia and the Complaint of Roasmund	Sanuel Daniel
	Pierce Penniless	Thomas Nashe
1593	Idea: The Shepherd's Garland	Michael Drayton
	Venus and Adonis	William Shakespeare
	Hero and Leander	Christopher Marlowe
	The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia	Philip Sidney

 

The sonnet craze – Sidney, Greville, Daniel, Drayton – is at its peak.  Lots of great poetry of all types, really, but oh so many sonnets.  Then there is the upstart, catching up with Marlowe fast.  I remind myself that Shakespeare was two months younger than Marlowe.  The theaters are closed because of the plague in 1592, which is why Shakespeare and possibly Marlowe switched from plays to best-selling narrative poems (although Hero and Leander was not published until 1598).

Please feel free to offer corrections, major or minor omissions, or really any comment at all.  I have read a lot of this stuff before but have no other expertise.

In December I will think about what happens next.  But in the meantime let’s have some laughs with the hilarious comedies of Marlowe and pals.  The title quotation is from, where else, The Jew of Malta, Act 4, Scene 1.

What I Read in July 2025 - books are quiet and unobtrusive, and do not try to hustle the reader

In general, however, he [Louis XVI] preferred writing down his thoughts instead of uttering them by word of mouth; and he was fond of reading, for books are quiet and unobtrusive, and do not try to hustle the reader. (Stefan Zweig, Marie Antoinette, 1932, p. 77 of the 1933 American edition, tr. Eden and Cedar Paul)

 

Soon I will put up a schedule of my autumn Not Shakespeare reading, just in case anyone wants to join in.  In effect it will be a lot of Christopher Marlowe with a few contemporaries.  Marlowe is a lot of fun.

FICTION

Love, Death, and the Ladies' Drill Team (1955), Jessamyn West – Reading Salinger’s Nine Stories (1953) I wondered what else the New Yorker readers of the time were reading along with “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”  One answer is Jessamyn West.  These stories seemed good to me.  “The Mysteries of Life in an Orderly Manner” (1948) is easy to recommend as a sample, for one thing because it is only six pages.

The Holy Innocents (1981), Miguel Delibes – A famous Spanish novel, just translated, that uses its post-Franco freedom to indulge in a little revenge on the powerful.  Modernist and unconventionally punctuated, but I do not want to say it was too surprising.  New to English – what took so long?

That They May Face the Rising Sun (2003), John McGahern – I am not sure what a quiet novel is but this is likely one of those.  Irish people lives their lives.  Seasons pass.  There is agriculture.  I have not read McGahern before; my understanding is that the novels that made his names are not so quiet.  But Ireland in 2003 had quieted down a lot, which I think is one of the ideas behind the novel.  Quite good.  The American version was for some reason given the accurate but dull title By the Lake.

The Director (2023), Daniel Kehlmann – Discussed over here.

 

NON-FICTION

Brazilian Adventure (1933), Peter Fleming – A jolly, self-conscious romp written in, or let’s say approaching, the style of Evelyn Waugh.  Young Fleming’s river trip in the Amazon is more dangerous and a bit more substantive than Waugh’s Mediterranean tourism in Labels (1930), but still, useless, except for the pleasures of the resulting book.

Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue (2003), Yoko Tawada – Tawada publishes fiction in both Japanese and German.  This book is an extended essay about the creative relationship between the two languages, based on Tawada’s education, travel, and writing.  It is perhaps especially fresh because English plays so little part in the book.

How the Classics Made Shakespeare (2019), Jonathan Bate – Outstanding preparation for my upcoming reading.  The title describes the book exactly.

Marie Antoinette (1932), Stefan Zweig – Just the first 80 or 90 pages.  I have wondered what Zweig’s biographies, still much read in France, were like, and now I know a little better.  Not for me.  Badly sourced and rhetorically dubious.  Obtrusive!  At times trying to hustle me!

 

POETRY

Selected Poems (1952-68), Vasko Popa

Helen of Troy, 1993 (2025), Maria Zoccola – This Helen lives in Sparta, Tennessee.  The up-to-date formal poems are interesting: American sonnets, and golden shovels, a form invented in 2010, incorporating lines from Robert Fagle’s Iliad.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

La rage de l'expression (1952), Francis Ponge – More thing poems.

Literatura Portuguesa (1971), Jorge de Sena – Long encyclopedia entries on Portuguese and Brazilian literature now published as a little book.  So useful.

A Bicicleta Que Tinha Bigodes (The Bicycle that Has a Moustache, 2011), Ondjaki – An Angolan boy wants to win a bicycle by borrowing a story from his famous fiction-writing uncle.  Specifically by borrowing the letters that he combs from his moustache.  That’s not how it works, kid.

A Biblioteca: Uma segunda casa (The Library: A Second Home, 2024), Manuel Carvalho Coutinho – I have now read all the books I brought home from Portugal last year.  This one is literally a series of four-page profiles of Portuguese municipal libraries.  Why did I buy it (aside from loving libraries)?  It is at times as dull as it sounds, but sometimes, caused by the authors skilled or desperate attempt to write a less dull book, shimmered with the possibility of another book, a Calvino-like book, Invisible Libraries.  Visit the library full of obsolete technology, the library with books no one wants, the library for tourists, the library, most unlikely of all, where everyone goes to read books.