Climbing in North America by Chris Jones (review)

74 Western American Literature to do, and a variety of observations The second, prepared under the ominous eye of Bixby, has this entry: “Birds II. — Hd towh br, — & 250 under hd of II — 9 ft. D.S. — faint circle fm pt to hd towh, S open on pt.” In the fourth, we find this one: “Coleman with his jumping frog — bet stranger $50 — stranger held no frog & C got him one — in the meantime stranger filled C’s frog full of shot &he couldn’t jump — the stranger won.” Notebook seven includes three notes later used in Roughing It. Some entries are bare reminders (one on “Baker’s Blue -Jay Yarn,” for example), and others vary from a laundry list to eleven pages of Biblical references. Number seven features a sea voyage, a good sustained narrative (pages 244-80) which suggests something about the relation between notetaking and the creative act; and number eleven includes “The Story of Mamie Grant, the Child-Missionary,” a fine and funny seven page story w'hich makes one think of True Grit. There is also a diary angle to the notebooks (Twain’s secret fears, especially of night, signs of a Swiftian bittterness) and bits of dialogue which catch up a tone and a character with striking immediacy and which must intrigue the student of the creative process. Modestly, the editors state that their work provides no startling new insights into Twain, in part because biographers have had access to the Berkeley library. Nevertheless, the Twain Papers are being made more available, relevant materials not in the Berkeley collection are included, the annotations represent an enormous amount of intelligent and helpful scholarship, and Mark Twain’s Notebooks and Journals are important and necessary books for libraries and for the Twain specialist. MAX WESTBROOK, University of Texas Climbing in North America. By Chris Jones. (Berkeley: University of California Press and American Alpine Club, 1976. 403 pages, $14.95.) For those who would make a scholarly study of the literature of moun­ tain climbing, this book will serve roughly the same function that the CHEL once did for English literature. It names the important figures, traces developments in technique and subject matter which they pioneered, gives a good chronology and bibliography, and imparts the necessary sense of place in which the development occurred. Chris Jones, a British climber and writer, handles geography and event commandingly. He makes coherent what might seem a random scattering of mountains and climbers by drawing lines of continuity and influence among groups based in Yosemite, the Shawangunks of New York, the Colorado Rockies, the Northwest, and the Canadian ranges, finally pulling all of these together to show the recent emergence of a climbing sub-culture of some continental homogeneity. Reviews 75 Climbing in North America undoubtedly lacks the literary brilliance of certain anthologies — for example, Galen Rowell’s The Vertical World of Yosemite — and the close-to-the-rock feeling of most climbing autobiog­ raphies. It is, after all, an historical survey and not a piece of climbing literature. But it does exhibit some of the interesting characteristics of the field — mainly, a spare style of pleasing directness, perhaps the result of working through situations of high danger, where discipline and precision are basic requirements. In the intense controversy of recent times over climbing “ethics” — that is, how much technical aid is too much — Jones takes a comprehensive and thus fair-minded position, while seeming to lean toward the traditional British feeling summed up in Frank Smythe’s words “It is knowing where to draw the line that counts in life. Does the sportsman take an automatic weapon to kill his tiger? He does not.” Climbers have confronted the ethical dimensions of technology much more directly than most other inhabitants of industrial culture, and their attempts to come to terms with “hardware” may be instructive. Climbing in North America will be a useful book; it is a map that has needed to be drawn. It is illustrated by 189 photographs, some of them of stunning beauty, and is only marred, unfortunately, by apparently cursory proofreading. THOMAS J. LYON, Utah State University Mountain Sheep and Man in the Northern Wilds. By Valerius Geist. (Ithaca: Cornell University...