Display your enthusiasm
As climbers, we learn early in our pursuit of alpine sports that the rest of the world cares little for what goes on above the snowline – excepting, of course, the media storms that obscure our view of the mountains whenever tragedy or national tub-thumping are involved.
But many (if not most) climbers, I'm guessing, would extend that disinterest to the prospect of idling away hours and days in the damp, thick ferns and mosses and rotting logs that cover the boulder-choked valleys of Westland's mountain gorges; or trudging across the undulating expanses of ice, covered in a thin, deceiving layer of sliding shale, that make up the glacier moraines of Canterbury.
Not John Pascoe. One of the delights of Chris Maclean's biography lies in discovering just how deeply held was Pascoe's affection for New Zealand's mountains, in all their aspects. He loved the Southern Alps, and with a magnificent display of enthusiasm that, as Maclean shows, lasted until the day he died, he never tired of the effort to share his feelings.
Consider this. In 1958, when Pascoe was secretary of the Historic Places Trust he was sent three autographed photographs of sculptures by the British artist Henry Moore; naturally, when he wrote to thank Moore, Pascoe suggested that 'the most inaccessible moraines of New Zealand could be the ideal setting for your work. But think of the disadvantages of the sites! The rain would be nearly 200 inches annually; the barrier gorges and icefalls would prohibit all but a few fanatics like myself from visiting them; the moraines themselves move as the glacier moves; one year your bronzes might be erect; another year they might be prostrate, as though drunk with beneficent solitude.'
Seeking out beneficent solitude might serve as an apt maxim for Pascoe's reasons for climbing, in its conflation of generosity of spirit with a need to retire from time to time, away from what he called 'the turmoil of living'.
Pascoe had a particular facility for a well-chosen phrase. The one that has stayed with me, since I discovered it as a young teenager, flicking through my father's collection of books on New Zealand mountain exploration, lurks on the last page of his 1971 book Exploration New Zealand. There, Pascoe writes that he knows of some remaining uncrossed cols, unclimbed ridges, even virgin peaks. But nothing, he says, to compare with the substance of his joy when he could walk up a valley in Canterbury in the 1930s knowing that no one knew, exactly, what was on the other side.
The substance of my joy. The words came back to me later, when the sunlight briefly slanted through snow-laden clouds and lit up the head of the Perth valley; and I fumbled, sodden, over and under and through the scrub that fills Adverse Creek underneath The Great Unknown (itself named by Pascoe's party during their exploration of the Garden of Eden ice plateau in 1934).
It is an acute observation of the pleasure to be found in the mountains: taking special care to locate the emotion solidly and physically amidst the rock and the snow.
Perhaps it was that substantial, even sculpted quality, that lifted Pascoe's prose above the ordinary. It could be that the same quality doomed his attempts at poetry. Maclean appears to endorse the view that Pascoe was not a successful poet; rightly so in my opinion. But he does this slyly, allowing Pascoe's friends and reviewers to pass judgment. Only when discussing the free verse in Of Unknown New Zealand will Maclean drily venture that: 'At times the subject matter suited verse, but at others it might have been better in prose.'
As a reviewer, you feel obliged to look for the things in a book that should have been there, or should have been handled better. Believe me when I say that you would have to stare very hard indeed to get past this book's manifold strengths and attractions. If there were one thing I could have wished for, it would have been for Maclean to make a closer analysis of Pascoe's writing and photography. But this book is not, primarily, about either of those things. It is about John Pascoe: his life and times. So it is fair that where Pascoe's work is commented on – and it is, at length – it is by Pascoe himself and his contemporaries.
I mentioned one of the delights of this book earlier. There are many more. Students of mountaineering history will enjoy scanning the new views this book opens up. One example is the relationship between Pascoe and Arthur Harper, founder of the NZAC. Pascoe's father was a partner in the Harper family law firm with George Harper, uncle of that other grand old man of the New Zealand mountains. Arthur had left Christchurch in the 1890s, after his father was alleged to have embezzled money. He crossed paths with Pascoe only much later, during a war of words over alpine achievements that pretty much dwarfs most later controversies to have embroiled the egos of 'mountain men'.
Maclean is a fine historian; his unpretentious prose allows the events he writes about the space to flourish in the reader's imagination. The marvelous array of source material he had available while researching and writing is displayed by designer Geoff Norman to great effect. And every well-conceived page of this book demonstrates production values that should make all involved feel proud.
Writing for an audience of climbers, I have naturally focused on Pascoe the mountaineer. There was much more than that, and Maclean does full justice to the breadth of Pascoe's interests and enthusiasms: war photographer, book designer, historian, archivist and administrator, with a soft spot for Tom Wolfe and listening to the Beatles - loud!
It seems the small, skinny man who was rejected by the army in World War Two ('I had not suspected,' wrote Eric McCormick, 'the debilitating effects of sunbathing and mountain climbing') has grown into one of those giants who straddle our past. Not quite a hero, perhaps, but a man whose humanity, good humour and lust for life suffuse his biography. At the end of Exploration New Zealand he wrote: 'The succour of my predecessors and their spirit, have lived on in the alpine and forest wilderness. May future generations of New Zealanders find for themselves the inspiration of the explorers.'
Just as he dreamt of Charlie Douglas and Thomas Brunner, those of us who never met John Pascoe could hardly wish for a better companion, whether deep in the 'malignant vapours' of a Westland gorge, making our way across a merciless Canterbury moraine, or stepping out on the Golden Road, hoping to reach the summit of Mt Evans.
John Pascoe by Chris Maclean
https://tepuna.on.worldcat.org/oclc/60411709
This review appeared in the Climber Spring 2003