[Content warning: Over the Mountain is a novel of its time, and includes elements that modern readers will find offensive. It contains graphic descriptions of physical injury, some of which I quote here in support of points that could not be made without illustrative quotations. Needless to say, I also think it’s a fascinating work of surrealist fantasy, and hope you’ll agree by the time you’ve finished reading!]
The writer-artist Mervyn Peake wrote his short poem, ‘O Heart-Beats’, in 1939, as he waited to be drafted into the army and sent to the front. The poem figures this time of anticipation and dread as a vertiginous cliff beside a silent ocean, at the edge of which the poet stands listening to his body’s internal workings with all the intensity of a compulsive gambler awaiting the outcome of a last throw of the dice:
O heart-beats – you are rattling dice –
My rattling dice
Proclaim the edge of precipice
At whose hid boulders stands a soundless sea –
These dice
Endanger me,
And spice
My days with hazards of futurity.[1]
Ruthven Todd’s novel Over the Mountain, published in the same year, is similarly preoccupied with precipices, precarity, and rocky edges, whose successful navigation is a matter of chance or ‘hazard’ rather than judgment. The narrative is dominated by the mountain of the title, the Pale Peak, whose presence ‘spices’ the existence of the inhabitants of the High Plain beneath. Their eyes are constantly turning towards its heights, their myths are woven around its contours – obscured as they are by snow and cloud – and from time to time their heroes seek to prove themselves by scaling its precipitous slopes (though none of them, at the time the story begins, has been known to reach the top). The vast range of which it forms part cuts off the known world of the protagonist from the world beyond; no one has any idea what lies on the other side. For Todd, as for Peake, cliffs mark the boundaries between known and unknown, past and future, freedom and tyranny, security and danger; and Over the Mountain reveals each pair of opposites to be connected in ways unacknowledged by simpler metaphors and fables.
September 1939, of course, saw the outbreak of the Second World War; but Todd’s novel suggests that war was in fact already endemic to the culture and nation he inhabited, and that the edge between war and peace on which Europe teetered had already been crossed. This was literally true: Civil War in Spain was only coming to an end in 1939, after a conflict which fired the political imagination of millions when it broke out in 1936; Germany had invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938 – the so-called ‘September Crisis’ – to which Britain and France responded by formally handing over part of the country in a futile bid to avoid a war; and Japan had invaded China back in 1931, long before full-scale war broke out between the nations following the Marco Polo Bridge incident of 1937. The edge had already been crossed, and in some senses might therefore be considered hardly to be an edge at all. Todd’s novel takes its title from a children’s song, ‘A Bear Went Over the Mountain’, in which the curious-minded animal in question traverses the promontory in question only to find more of the same: ‘The other side of the mountain – / That is all he saw!’, as Todd puts it in the version of the song that forms the novel’s epigraph.[2] Both sides of the mountain are made up of the same materials – rock, snow and ice – and the same could be said of ‘war’ and ‘peace’, or (more controversially) of the opposing nations and political movements that ranged themselves on either side of the various political and social divides in advance of the global conflict of 1939-1945.
This, at least, is how Todd represents the world in Over the Mountain. In it, a young man named Michael takes it into his head to cross the Pale Peak that overlooks his country; like the bear in the song he wishes to see what’s on the other side. In crossing it he loses his memory, his looks, his compass and his surname, and so explores the land he reaches in total ignorance of who he is and where he came from. He quickly discovers that the land is a totalitarian state, governed by a hereditary ruling class which protects its interests with the help of the army, the police force, the church, the education system, and a complicated network of secret police. By the time he reaches this new country, the reader already knows that the country he came from also has a secret police vested with formidable powers, and that its government is given to issuing arbitrary laws such as an interdiction on seeking to reach the summit of the Pale Peak with the use of mechanical contrivances – that is, aeroplanes – under pain of being charged with high treason and punished (presumably) with death. It comes, then, as only half a surprise when we learn at the end of the novel that the young man who went over the mountain like the bear has in fact merely climbed the mountain and come down again on the same side, and that he has been exploring the supposedly new country under the mistaken impression that he has never been there before, despite the fact that he was born within its borders. It’s a simple enough conceit, and some have found the final twist predictable, but it seems to me that this is exactly Todd’s point. The signs of authoritarianism are simple, its workings are simple, spotting it is simple, yet many of its citizens subsist in a state of passionate denial about the authoritarian practices of their own society and government. This makes them equivalent, intellectually speaking, to the young children who sing songs like ‘A Bear Went Over the Mountain’. It also makes them dangerous, since unlike children they have the means of imposing their restricted point of view with all the resources placed at the service of nations, from schools and churches to tanks and bombs. Childishness, for Todd, is a widespread condition among twentieth-century adult communities, and childishness can kill you.
Being childish, however, can also spur you to acts of reckless courage, which can work to combat authoritarianism as well as to uphold it. The young mountaineer who seeks to cross the mountain, Michael, takes on the feat in defiance of the interdictions of his government and with a disarmingly childish lack of preparation, convinced that the fact he has known the mountain since childhood will make climbing it quite simple. He equips himself with a second-hand ice-axe from a junk shop (p. 25), an old tweed jacket (p. 27), a woollen fisherman’s jersey, a leather motor-cyclist’s jacket and ‘a motorist’s leather helmet lined with fleece’ (p. 28), and sets out on his adventure without a map other than the one he carries in his head, inspired by the stories told him by his old nurse about the exploits of her mountaineer husband and the mythical beast that lurks at the summit. In doing so he inadvertently makes himself the figurehead of a resistance movement against a totalitarian state. Other young men have made similar attempts before him, some of whom died, some of whom lapsed into a premature second childhood as a result of their experiences. The nurse’s husband, for instance, planned for years to reach the summit, spurred on by something he was told as a child at school, that ‘Nothing is impossible’ (p. 9); he died acting as guide for a failed expedition. The pilot who tried to fly his plane over the mountain enjoyed risking his life in daring escapades ‘for the fun of doing them and the thrill that these actions gave him’ (p. 11) – in other words, like a boy – and returns from his flight in a state of second childhood, playing cat’s cradle and singing nursery rhymes in his cockpit. The secret police who meet him when he lands do not need to charge him with high treason for breaking the law that prohibits mechanical attempts to conquer the Peak; instead they place him in a madhouse, where he sings and plays cat’s cradle for the rest of his days, a living, breathing warning against pursuing infantile ambitions. The pilot never inspired a resistance movement, though he helped to inspire Michael’s effort to conquer the Peak. Another young man, however – Marlin – made the attempt with greater seriousness, and may even have reached the top before he died. As a result he became Michael’s idol, the older boy whose every exploit he sought to emulate, like a schoolboy with a lifelong crush. Throughout the book Marlin persists as Michael’s embodiment of the ideal, the man whose youthful exuberance and daring carried him from the base of the mountain to its summit, in defiance of convention, authority and prudence. Marlin’s ice-axe, which Michael discovers while he is climbing, becomes an emblem of resistance, a suitable metonym for Marlin’s and Michael’s own defiance of the government that sought to discourage them from risking their lives on a pointless adventure. A succession of boyish young men, in other words, lies behind Todd’s protagonist, martyrs to the dream of winning freedom from arbitrary and oppressive impositions. And Michael himself (it is implied) helps to ferment a revolution.
We encounter Marlin, Michael and the aviator at the beginning of the book, on this side of the mountain, so to speak. On the other side – or rather, on what Michael takes to be the other side – childishness has far more sinister connotations. The state secret police first introduce themselves to us when an agent shoots a man dead for making an anti-government intervention at a public gathering, and at this point they seem a decidedly adult menace, armed with guns and willing to use them. But soon afterwards we see them accepting sweets from a soldier, Colonel Roscoe; and later we learn that they have been recruited on the basis of their childlike qualities, which render them biddable, thoughtless, and easy to manipulate with the help of threats and candy:
It seemed that they were all mentally deficient children, who at school age were removed from their homes and parents and taken into the State barracks. There they were trained to obey orders implicitly, and their childlike minds learned to look upon their job as a vast, amusing game. They learned to shoot, and loved the noise of their revolvers firing and the sight of their victims being blown over backward by the force of the large-calibre bullets. One of the great difficulties, apparently, was to prevent their greeting their masters by firing at them, but this inconvenience was surmounted after a few fatalities by these masters always going in bullet-proof clothing, and heavily punishing any of the budding policemen who fired at them. (p. 132).
Here the childish delight in fun that drove the young pilot to make his attempt on the mountain acquires a disturbing usefulness to the very state authorities he defied. After being trained and organised in the service of policies no thinking adult would condone, the secret servicemen turn their quest for thrills on the population of their own country, shooting down fellow citizens for the sheer pleasure of seeing them ‘blown over backward’. And the state’s success in training them leads it to hope for further success in recruiting and training other youngsters. Michael’s own childishness, as a thrill-seeking adventurer, is taken by the authorities as a sign that he too will be easily led. Exhausted and ill after the rigours of his climb, he is taken in by the occupants of a vicarage on the other side – which we later learn is the very vicarage he grew up in, where he acquired his enduring obsession with the Pale Peak. Michael quickly finds himself infantilized by the parish’s new incumbent, a clergyman called Father Podmore – the word ‘Father’ endowing the priest, in the priest’s own mind, with the God-given right of a father to control his son. Father Podmore urges Michael to place himself in the hands of a paternalistic God, demanding from him the near total obedience to his elders demanded of a schoolboy in the 1930s. The head of the Secret Police, Colonel Roscoe, hopes to exploit Michael’s glamorous image as a mountaineer to attract actual schoolboys to the life of adventure offered by the state; Michael is invited to give a talk on his exploits to the pupils at a national military academy. Instead the young adventurer cleaves to the anarchism of boyhood, urging the boys to take a look at their well-fed masters and consider what they are doing to right the ‘obvious wrongs’ of poverty and inequality in the land they inhabit (p. 162). He ends his speech by running out of the school hall, evading every effort of the police and Colonel Roscoe to apprehend him or shoot him down; and in doing so provides the students with an idol of freedom as potent as his own idol, the young mountaineer Marlin, whose ice-axe he carries with him wherever he goes. From this point on Todd’s novel becomes a book well-suited to boys, like the thrillers written by his countryman, John Buchan; but unlike Buchan’s books – such as the anti-Bolshevik Huntingtower (1922) – Todd’s thriller pits its protagonist against the forces of authority, as represented by Colonel Roscoe and his clandestine apparatus of state control.
Roscoe himself embodies the two kinds of childishness Todd sets against each other in his book. In his youth he was an adventurer like Michael, and the two men warm to each other at once when they first meet on the basis of their shared delight in climbing mountains. When Michael flees from Father Podmore’s church after delivering an invective against the state religion, denying all Podmore’s claims that his assault on the Pale Peak was inspired by God and dismissing his account of the climb as a baseless fabrication, it is to Roscoe he instinctively turns for help. But the Colonel is no longer a youthful mountaineer. He has aged and made himself ‘clubbable’, a word defined by many dictionaries as meaning ‘sociable enough to warrant election to a members-only club’, but which carries connotations of exclusivity, class interest, and secret dealings among male members of the ruling elite. The club where Roscoe finds him is a bastion of the establishment, despite its apparent dedication to adventure: it is called the Explorers’ and United Services Club, tying in the lust for action and adventure to military service on behalf of the government. When they meet again after Michael’s anti-clerical speech, which made him a fugitive, Michael finds the Colonel ‘altogether too familiar with the plain-clothes men’ who are following him (p. 125); indeed his familiarity is almost familial, since he gives them sweets like an overindulgent parent, while they address him in terms such as an anxious child might use to a stern father: ‘kind, dear, lovely Colonel Roscoe’, ‘pet, sweet Colonel Roscoe’ and so on (p. 124). The old man is, in fact, the head of the secret police, the spymaster at the centre of the state’s surveillance system. Michael agrees to address the schoolboys at the Colonel’s suggestion, but uses the occasion to verbally attack the state authorities and makes himself a fugitive for a second time in the process. This time, however, he leaves himself no avenue of return. In fleeing from the hall of the military school he strikes Colonel Roscoe on the arm with Marlon’s ice-axe, and later learns that the Colonel had a heart attack and died soon afterwards. The ice-axe once belonged – and still belongs – to a free adventurer, actively opposed to the arbitrary imposition of governmental powers, and the ageing soldier, his days of free adventure far behind him, cannot abide its touch.
At the end of the novel, as Michael seeks to climb the Pale Peak for a second time to escape the government forces ranged against him, he encounters two versions of Roscoe in the form of ghosts or visions. One is the young climber ‘Captain Roscoe’ (p. 256) – a man he never met – who apologizes for the older version of himself who sought to enlist Michael as a government propagandist; the other is the elderly Head of the Secret Service. Both versions, Captain Roscoe confesses, were ‘puppets of a system’ (p. 256), the authoritarian system of government that gave them their military titles. Colonel Roscoe opted to spend his life as a chess piece in a complicated game of power, and thereby committed himself to being forever manipulated by others; Captain Roscoe wishes instead he could have been independent, ‘a man alone against the mountain’ (p. 255), like Michael or Marlin. Michael and Marlin remain faithful to their visionary boyhood personalities by resisting the blandishments of state power; Michael, for instance, tells us at one point that he has no idea how to inspect the ranks of schoolboys lined up in military uniforms for his approval before his speech at the academy, setting himself up as the polar opposite of the Colonel and the militaristic headmaster (p. 157). Michael’s indifference to this kind of knowledge – his naivety, as Colonel Roscoe sees it – sets him free from the weblike trammels of the governmental ‘spiders’ Colonel Roscoe wishes to become (p. 255), and by whom the spymaster himself has been effectively trapped through his obsession with spinning lies to trap others.[3]
Roscoe is a member of a ruling class which defines itself by its childish behaviour, enjoying toys and parties because it can afford to ignore the material costs of its activities. Father Podmore carries a little crucifix with which he is always ‘fiddling’ (p. 86), as purposelessly as a child might play at cat’s cradle – a habit Michael finds maddening (he calls it a ‘childish trick’ at one point, p. 93). The Colonel carries a good-luck mascot in the form of a pink crystal elephant, as functionless as a child’s toy (p. 154) – though invoking British imperialist interests in South Asia – and totally unlike the ice-axe mascot Michael carries, which can be used for self-defence as well as for climbing. A man called Lord Tamarisk, who lives next door to the Explorers’ and United Services Club, has ‘a mania for mechanical toys’ (p. 172, my emphasis) – though his empty house provides a practical hideout for Michael, since the police would not consider searching it. Sometimes this childishness among the ruling classes encourages them to defy the government authorities, or make a show of doing so. Sir Harry Bracesplit, who owns the only independent newspaper in the country, drives a hugely expensive automobile packed full of the latest gadgets or playthings and seems to have a party going on permanently in his house; yet for a time he protects the fugitive Michael from the police, and allows his paper to publish articles about him which contradict the government line. But like the younger version of Roscoe, he remains a pillar of the establishment; he promises the police that Michael will give himself up to them after a set period of time, in line with the rules of the childish game that governs the ruling class: ‘I give you my word,’ he tells the police captain, ‘that Michael will not attempt to leave [my house], either before nine o’clock to-morrow morning, or before he receives a letter stating that the prosecution [of him] will not take place’ (p. 193). Sir Harry has a ‘weak face’ (p. 179), and the word ‘split’ in his surname gestures towards his inability to stand firm on any issue. His wife Elsa is equally divided. She finds Michael sexually attractive, despite the ‘ugly’ face with which his passage over the mountain has left him; she calls him her ‘bear’, adopts him as a plaything, sleeps with him while her husband is busy playing the host, and claims to love him. But she also betrays him to the police, because she is a member of the secret police and ‘ha[s] to do it’ (p. 191). Michael encounters her again in a vision at the end of the novel, as he climbs the mountain for a second time, and on this occasion she is exalted into a fit companion for his hero, Marlon; she goes off with Marlon into the snows of the summit, promising Michael they will meet again soon, perhaps as lovers. But her real-life persona is that of the brash socialite, childishly refusing to take responsibility for her own actions – such as her potentially fatal decision to inform on the young mountaineer.
Set against these ruling-class children are the revolutionary working classes, who are the only grown-ups in the narrative. This is because they’re always aware of the material costs of their own and others’ actions, as Elsa, Father Roscoe, and even Colonel Roscoe are not. The first individual working-class voice we hear in the novel belongs to a man who shouts encouragement to Michael in church when he distances himself from Father Roscoe and the religious establishment he serves: ‘That’s the stuff to give ’em, mate!’ the man calls, ‘Keep it up, and don’t let them get away with their lies!’ (p. 108). He is promptly shot dead by a plain-clothes policeman, thereby becoming an example of the extreme risks run by working people who dare to set themselves against the state. Not long afterwards Michael is rescued by one of his friends, Jack Ford, who conceals Michael in the trunk of a bus and offers him the basic material needs of a human being: food, clothes and shelter. The food comes at a cost, which Jack makes clear: ‘How’re you off for money? I’ve not got too much, and if you’re hungry I’ll need to go and borrow a bit’ (p. 113); and Jack also knows that the gold and jewels Michael keeps in his money belt will need to be broken down into smaller units before they can be spent. He and his comrades ‘understand’ Michael’s actions (p. 113), despite the lies put out by the government about him, quickly adopting him as one of their own and lending him an old coat and cap (p. 114), the uniform of industrial labour, to conceal the expensive outfit Father Podmore lent him. Michael’s helpers keep the state infrastructure operating – they work on buses, drive lorries, run cafés for their fellow workers, serve as engineers – and remain largely invisible to the government and its operatives, which makes it easy for them to render Michael, too, invisible. Where the ruling classes inhabit a web of deceptions and self-deceptions, the working classes in the book see and hear everything thanks to the solidarity they have built between them; they know, for instance, about the secret state ‘concentration camps’ where political prisoners or ‘discontented workers’ are tortured and killed (p. 229-231). They also have a plan, unlike the government ministers, who work to keep things as they are. They are fomenting a revolution, and invite Michael to come back and join them ‘when we’ve put things right’ (p. 231).
From the moment he meets Jack Ford, Michael begins to absorb the lessons he has to offer. He seeks to pay for any help he receives, worries about the consequences his helpers might suffer, and notes the exorbitant cost both of ruling-class possessions (‘I wondered what the car had cost to build’, p. 182) and of the government’s attempt to kill him by carpet-bombing a wood (‘It must have cost a small fortune’, p. 217). He regularly changes into new sets of working-class clothes. He even adopts, for one night only, the life of a homeless person, and listens as his companion – also homeless – mimics the language of ruling-class luxury while supplying Michael with basic necessities: ‘some stale-looking bacon […] some heels of bread from his pockets’ and a ‘sort of shallow cave’ to sleep in (p. 211-2). This incident occurs towards the end of the book, just before Michael makes his second assault on the mountain, and it points up the radical change his adventures have wrought in him. His first assault on the mountain was a boyish exploit, of the kind favoured by young adventurers or the sporting rich. His second is born of urgent need; as a fugitive hunted by the police he has no choice but to make his way back to the seeming safety of his home. He does not succeed in either attempt to cross the summit – on both occasions he ends up on the same side of the mountain he started out from. But the book ends with him still aware that climbing the Peak will be necessary in future: ‘I know you must cross the Peak,’ his friend Robert Cobb tells him, ‘for it’s your only way out’ (p. 280). He has grown up, in that he has learned to do what he must, not what he playfully desires. And he knows that what he must do involves much more than satisfying his own idle curiosity.
It is the mountain that brings about this change, and it’s the mountain that dominates the second half of this blog post, as the site of the book’s most memorable passages and strangest images. A mountain may well have occurred naturally to Todd as a potent metaphor or symbol, since he was a Scotsman born in Edinburgh, a city with a mountain in the middle: Arthur’s Seat, whose name connects it to myth and legend. Like most Scots, Todd had spent some time in the mountainous Highlands, most notably when he worked for a year as a farm labourer on the Isle of Mull. Todd’s imagined mountain is part of a range which dwarfs the great ranges of Scotland, the Cuillins, the Cairngorms and the rest; and while it borders a land clearly coded as British, it marks that land as part of a continent, refuting the frequent British attempts to set themselves apart or ‘island’ themselves from their continental neighbours: for instance in their supposed imperviousness to fascism and communism, their hostility to artistic experiment, and their continuing adherence to a class system with its roots in medieval feudalism. The slopes of Todd’s range, apart from the Peak, are of glasslike smoothness, which both renders them unclimbable, like certain fairy-tale mountains, and gives them the properties of a burnished mirror. It is thought that the pilot who sought to fly over the range was driven mad by the reflection of his plane in these mirroring slopes, together with the motion of ‘continual spiral climbing’ and the thunderous noise of the engine amplified by mist (p. 13). The slopes certainly serve to reflect the culture of the lands below them, distorting them, no doubt, as Todd distorts British culture and politics to make his political point. But they also serve to change Michael’s perspective, forcing him to reflect on himself and the land he came from as he could never have done without their assistance.
The Pale Peak seems in fact actively to resist simplistic readings of its import. Its paleness invokes the biblical figure of Death, who rode a pale horse in St John’s Apocalypse, and it often brings death to those who climb it, while blocking off the land in which the story begins from the ‘undiscovered country’ on the other side. It’s also a mental barrier, as we’ve seen, driving the only man who succeeded in flying over it into a state of incurable madness. It’s a source of legend, like F6 in the celebrated mountaineering play by Auden and Isherwood, The Ascent of F6 (1937); a Beast or Demon is said to lurk at its summit, and Todd’s Michael shares his name with the play’s protagonist. It’s a physical challenge; the one climber who got close to the top before disappearing, Marlin, is revered by the people of the Plain as a tragic hero. And it’s disorienting; compasses fail on its slopes, and the cold, the physical strain and the lack of oxygen experienced by adventurers on the Peak plunge them into a whirl of hallucinations. The mountain is, above all, itself: a vast heap of stone, as inimical to trite allegories and grand narratives as it is to human attempts to scale its sides. As a result, it’s the perfect antidote to the empty narratives by which the powerful seek to organise lands and nations to their own advantage. That’s how Todd’s protagonist uses it, testing the narratives he encounters in his adventures with the sharp point of Marlon’s ice-axe, as the mountaineer tests the terrain he must negotiate. In the process, Todd tests the narratives that dominate his moment of history. Subjected to this test, the myths of unthinking religious faith, unthinking subservience to authority, unthinking loyalty to one’s class or race, and an unthinking quest for power and influence, fall to pieces, exposed as baseless fantasies whose only substance resides in the physical and mental violence used to enforce them.
The mountain itself subjects Michael to a series of bizarre transformations. It renders him childish, so that he sings ‘bawdy songs’ (p. 32), giggles inanely (p. 36), plays children’s games in the snow (p. 44), and at one point launches into a rendition of that music hall favourite ‘Excelsior’, about a boy ‘who bore mid snow and ice / A banner with a strange device’ as he ascends another mountain (p. 32). The loss of his memory renders him childish too, since it leaves him astonished and bewildered by everything he encounters, and contributes to the disorientation he feels when his compass stops working. The mountain subjects him to death, first when a watching shepherd assumes he is aiming to commit suicide by scaling its slopes, then when he imagines the people of the high plain marking his disappearance by burying a coffin full of snow, as is their custom when there is no body to inter. Later he stumbles across the frozen corpse of the mountaineer Marlin, and wonders for a moment whether they are both dead and consigned to hell for their transgressions of the nation’s edicts (pp. 45 and 83); and later still he meets the ghosts of long-dead friends and relatives from his childhood, which again reduces him to the condition of a child. The mountain dissolves the distinction between life and death, but also between surfaces and depths or interiors, transforming itself at one point into an ocean on whose surface Michael walks like a broken Jesus, while ‘the fish looked up at me as I walked above them, and I saw them darting into the hollow shapes of wrecked ships like prehistoric skeletons’ (p. 61). Meanwhile the mountain disintegrates and rearranges Michael’s body, blurring the boundaries between flesh, rock and ice:
I did not feel much emotion at all as I scooped up a mixture of snow and ice in my clumsy hands and rubbed it over my face until it began to tingle. It did not hurt when I took my hands down, and I was mildly surprised to notice that the whitened palms of my gloves had fragments of red-tinged skin spread on them, and I was scarcely more surprised when, fixing my helmet better, I chipped a small piece off one of my ears (p. 40).
Later he loses one of his gloves and watches as his fingers freeze to the rocks so that ‘the skin lifted off in great white opaque pieces when I pulled my hand away’ (p. 63). Soon afterwards he becomes convinced that his legs have fallen off and that ‘I was moving on bloody, jagged stumps that left red stains in the white, soft dust of the path’ (p. 65). But by this time the mountain and the real or imaginary objects on it are also moving: ‘Everything was moving now; the trees walked by themselves, and the flowers gathered in posies talking gossip. The ground where I was moved, and I was suddenly convinced that the world was, as some Eastern sage had declared it to be, after all built on the back of a giant tortoise’ (pp. 65-6). As his limbs and organs fall apart, so too do the philosophical, religious, political and national certainties he has always taken for granted, destabilised by Michael’s refusal to accept the stability of life at home.
Among these certainties are the conviction that his nation represents a superior form of civilization to any other, and that the rest of the world is made up of ‘savages’. Michael is already inclined to doubt this narrative before he sets out on his adventure. As a young boy he thinks of his attempt as an act of heroic imperialism, of the kind celebrated in endless magazine stories for British children: ‘I spent my holidays dreaming of myself as the explorer among the savages, for I had been assured that it was morally certain that the inhabitants [of the land on the other side] must be savages […] since they had made no attempts to cross the Peak’ (pp. 20-21). As he grows up he becomes aware of the fallacy of this view, since none of his own country’s attempts to climb the mountain ‘could possibly have been visible from their side of the range’ (p. 21), so that by the same logic his countrymen too must be savages. All the same he supplies himself with a collection of worthless ‘gewgaws’ from Woolworth’s to barter with any uncivilised people he happens to meet, and takes these trinkets with him in spite of his growing certainty that ‘the inhabitants of that other country would probably be just as intelligent and as highly civilised as we were ourselves’ (p. 22). In the end he uses the ‘gewgaws’ in an impromptu ritual to mark his own success in reaching the mountaintop, scattering ‘Woolworth beads and toys’ into the ‘rift which ran right across the summit, wide in some places and narrow in others’ (p. 50). The gesture represents his dismissal of nationalism and imperialism, as he replaces the usual planting of a national flag with a witty acknowledgment of the failings of his country’s logic. Far from being better and cleverer than their neighbours, he and his people are commemorated by these useless objects as a community that values trinkets more than the poorer citizens or foreign ‘savages’ who can afford to buy them; that is, as a community that devalues itself.
In fact, in the course of Michael’s adventures he learns to identify with the ‘others’ he was taught to despise. On reaching the summit, he inspects his ruined face using one of the Woolworth gewgaws – a cheap mirror – and is shocked to find that it resembles part of an animal; not the ‘bear’ of the rhyme but a monkey, and not the monkey’s face but its unusually colourful butt:
Surely this gnarled red and blue object like a mandrill’s bottom, crowned with a fringe of black and white speckled hair, was not the thing I saw in the mirror each morning when I shaved? Surely these deep-set, tired red eyes set in a frame of bruised bone were not mine? (p. 50).
This moment of startled recognition anticipates many similar moments in the work of J G Ballard, when the protagonist (always British) discovers that he no longer has anything in common with the being he once thought himself, someone constructed and sustained by the imperialist ‘civilization’ that has now disappeared for ever, swept away by the cataclysmic events Ballard’s novels record. These protagonists see their bodies rearranged like Michael’s, the changes described with the same merciless attention to detail Todd bestows on Michael’s ravaged features. Ballard’s books, however, arise from his childhood experiences in a Japanese internment camp in the Second World War. Michael’s instead anticipate experiences yet to come, when in the war years Britain found itself subjected to acts of violence it had itself visited on its colonies and opponents, such as concentration camps, ‘third degree’ interrogations and bombing raids.[4]
Michael himself becomes a ‘savage’ as well as a mandrill and a bear in the course of his climb. Three times he hallucinates a picnic or excursion attended by people who seem indifferent to the contradictions embedded in their al fresco revels. In the first hallucination he finds himself strolling along an avenue crowded with citizens in fancy dress, where ‘Silk breeches were brushed by satin skirts as these puppet figures moved in a minuet to the music of Mozart, played by a quartet of boys with long hair as gold as corn, and cheeks rouged to the colour of poppies’ (p. 42). Confronted by this ‘masquerade’ Michael feels both like a ghost and a living pauper, ‘sick at the thought of all these people having plenty while I was cold and hungry’ (p. 43). Later he imagines himself as a child at a picnic, painfully aware that the fancy food being consumed by the adults is a crude illusion: ‘only I knew the secret of the meal – that the pies were made of cardboard, cunningly shaped and tinted, and the fruits of toilet soap’ (p. 52). The hierarchical world occupied by grown-ups, in other words, is no less an act of make-believe than a child’s game – with just this difference, that grown-ups have no idea they are at play: ‘I had a premonition that they would never discover the deception’ (p. 52), Michael tells us. In the third hallucination, Michael occupies the place of yet another outsider. Instead of an animal, a pauper or a child, he sees himself as a hungry stranger whose needs are haughtily dismissed by racist members of the ruling classes. Encountering a group of well-dressed people carrying ‘picnic-baskets covered with clean white napkins […] and with bottles protruding from their hip and jacket pockets’ (p. 64), Michael drops to his knees and begs for food, but is dismissed at once by the wealthy walkers as an unscrupulous foreigner faking starvation:
One, red of face, bald, and with a white cavalry moustache, hit out at me with his cane […] saying to the woman in horsy tweeds who walked beside him, ‘You soon learn how to deal with these chaps out in the East. If you give one of them an anna all the dregs of the bazaar descend on you, claiming your charity as their right. The best way’s to treat ’em rough from the start, and they’ll respect you for it, as they won’t do if you’re polite to ’em and give ’em what they ask (p. 65).
Michael responds by spitting in the dust as they pass, and soon after this quotes with approval the idea of the ‘Eastern sage’ who thought of the world as a tortoise moving through space, confirming his own imaginative shift from British citizen to colonial subject of British imperialism. By this stage in his crossing of the mountain, the distinction between hallucinations brought on by suffering and the elaborate deceptions worked by colonialism, social class and inherited wealth has been exposed as the distinction between genuine mental illness and an active moral choice. The ruling classes make a conscious decision to despise all forms of difference, disenfranchise powerlessness and ignore or silence dissenting voices – a decision sustained by a web of elaborate fantasies that masquerade as the natural order of things. The claim that such fantasies are in any way ‘natural’ is exposed and shattered, like a frozen corpse struck by an ice-axe, by the conditions encountered by climbers on the Pale Peak.
Having become the other, so to speak – a beast, a poor man, a child, a colonised subject – Michael finds his view of the world transformed by the mirroring slopes of Todd’s mountain range; indeed, his sight undergoes a range of permutations as he climbs, first becoming blurred, then prone to visions, and finally rendered superhuman (‘Suddenly I seemed to become the owner of superhuman sight’, p. 71). His radically altered perspective is summed up in the two public speeches he delivers after descending from the mountain, each of them forced on him by members of the ruling classes: Father Podmore, who asks him to speak about crossing the mountain in the local parish church, and Colonel Roscoe, who invites him to address a school assembly on the same topic. The first of these speeches is very short, but in it Michael replaces the vicar’s version of his climb – as a deed inspired and enabled by God, so that Michael’s descent from the mountain resembles that of Moses from Mount Sinai – with a version that endorses something more like paganism, whereby Michael’s heroic predecessor Marlin replaces the vicar’s god as the guiding spirit of aspiring climbers: ‘If you desire a god for the Peak then let that god be the man who died at the summit. That man’s name was Marlin, and I swear by his ice-axe which I carry in my hands that no god helped me climb the Pale Peak, and I felt no god’s encouragement as I came down’ (p. 107). Here Michael’s proposal of a new god for his audience is undercut by the statement of atheism with which the speech concludes – that there was ‘no god’ involved in any element of his enterprise. This might seem to distance the mountaineer from the cultures of indigenous people with their complex belief systems; but in his second speech Michael brings himself as well as his listeners much closer to them.
Addressing the assembled schoolboys of the military academy, he urges his listeners to focus their minds on the colonised peoples they are being trained to subjugate, telling them that his own enterprise was driven by curiosity and urging them to indulge a similar curiosity concerning the people of regions beyond their own. As he speaks, however, curiosity about the other gradually mutates into curiosity about themselves, as Michael suggests that they and their countrymen are as much subjects of colonization as any community conquered by imperial armies:
Have any of you ever thought of what curiosity means? Do you want to know how other people live – pygmies in the Congo, and Tibetans in their monasteries? Have you ever looked at a North American totem-pole? To you it is just a rudely carved and painted bit of wood with quaint figures, but to the savage it may be a link to his god, and it may also be the history of his family, each generation adding its own symbol. (p. 160)
At this point in the speech, Michael seems to be indulging in speculation about indigenous cultural practices typical of well-meaning but ignorant strangers studying unfamiliar artefacts and activities without seeking serious engagement with the artists or practitioners themselves; the contemptuous term ‘savage’ underlines this lack of engagement. But shortly afterwards his speech takes an unexpected turn, as he urges his youthful audience to study their own culture with equal curiosity:
All of you have families of which you are justly proud, but have you ever wondered what bit each generation has added to your totem-pole? Uncle Dick, who was a High Commissioner in West Africa, or your cousin John, who built the aluminium works up by the loch – what did they add? How many people did they crush to make the fine, bright paint to daub it with? From what smaller but no less important totem-pole did they crib that slick design, that clever bit of treatment, and what did they do with the smaller totem-pole? Did they let the man who made it have it, so that others could see where they got their bright idea, or did they destroy it so that their unoriginality would not be known or proved?
How do the people live who supply the bright ideas for these totem-poles? We will not bother about the African who supplied Uncle Dick with his idea; but how about the labourer who worked on Cousin John’s scheme by the loch-side, the crofter whose family had lived there for hundreds of years, who was dispossessed at short notice? What do they feel about these things? Are they adequately recompensed for their long hours of labour or their homeless state? How do they, your nearest neighbours, live? (pp. 160-161)
By this stage Michael’s ‘superhuman’ vision has shifted from geographically distant cultures to places near at hand, much as it did when he came down from the mountain, when he found himself studying the windows of the house where he was raised – Father Podmore’s vicarage – with sudden intensity (‘I could see like a hawk, and I observed the lace curtains in the windows as clearly as if I had been holding them between my hands, only eighteen inches from my nose’, p. 71). Michael’s focus in his speech, meanwhile, has drifted from the indigenous people of the Congo, Tibet and the Pacific North-east of the American continent to the indigenous people of the Scottish Highlands, the crofters or small-scale farmers who were among Todd’s ‘nearest neighbours’ when he lived in Edinburgh. Suddenly the experiences of far-distant colonised peoples find themselves replicated on British soil, having been aligned with the oppression of the labouring classes during and after the industrial revolution. The speech anticipates the larger shift of narrative perspective at the end of the novel, when the alien people of the ‘new’ land on the other side of the mountain are revealed to have been not merely Michael’s nearest neighbours but his family and friends.
The sudden shifts in point of view effected by the mountain align it with the most striking movement in the visual arts of the 1930s: the Surrealist movement. Todd was closely associated with Surrealism in Britain throughout his career, from the time when he made friends with the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who worked at the edges of Surrealism without ever identifying himself with the movement, to his appointment as assistant secretary to the London International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936, in which capacity he translated poems by the movement’s co-founder Paul Éluard and appeared in several commemorative photographs (he is even said to have rescued Salvador Dalí from suffocation in the famous diving suit he wore for one of the shoots). Around this time he formed a lifelong friendship with the Catalan Surrealist painter Joan Miró, for whom he wrote several poems and with whom he collaborated on a series of experimental engravings in the manner of the British poet and printer William Blake. The pervasive presence of childhood and childishness throughout Over the Mountain may be influenced by Surrealist thinking; for Surrealists, after all – as Michael Remy has pointed out – the ‘stability of reality is irretrievably threatened’,[5] and childishness destabilizes an adult’s reality; they are therefore obsessed with childhood, from Herbert Read’s and André Breton’s adoption of Alice in Wonderland as a proto-Surrealist text to Max Ernst’s, Leonora Carrington’s and Dorothea Tanning’s celebrated images of childhood (think of Ernst’s ‘Two children are threatened by a nightingale’, Carrington’s ‘Self Portrait’ with rocking-horse and hyena, Tanning’s ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’, all painted within a few years of Todd’s novel’s publication).[6] Blake, too, was obsessed with childhood, and Todd soon became known as one of the foremost Blake scholars of his time. Blake’s great collection Songs of Innocence and Experience offers the dual vision of childhood as a place of both visionary joy and inescapable nightmare, and this may have influenced the double vision of childhood in Over the Mountain, as both a tool of oppression and a promise of freedom. For Blake as for Todd and the Surrealists, both aspects of childhood occupy the same space, just as the space on the other side of the mountain turns out to be identical to the space on this side of the dividing range. Surrealism also paid attention to indigenous art from around the world, especially Africa, and Todd’s own sporadic bursts of attention to non-British art and practices may have owed something to the Surrealists, though like them he is inclined to appropriate the cultures of others for his own imaginative and political ends.
Michael’s disorientation on the mountain, as his body and mind are rearranged in terrifying fashion, has obvious affinities with the Surrealist quest for disorientation; and the narrative that follows is peppered with further Surrealist moments. His ordeal makes his face unrecognisable, so that at one point it resembles ‘butcher’s meat’ (p. 78), at another a monkey’s arse. It transforms the people he left behind into ‘an army of ghosts, nameless and faceless, moving in an unreal cardboard landscape’ (pp. 81-82). It gives him sympathy for the slugs and snails in Father Podmore’s garden, since they remind him of the ‘unpleasant things outside the walls of brick’ which would otherwise be so easy to forget ‘in the pleasant, drowsy atmosphere’ (p. 96) of the vicarage and its grounds. Later, he dreams that he sees the priest eating these despised molluscs and ‘pointing out the superiority of the slime on a snail over the bloom on a peach’ (p. 117). The childish secret policemen have a Surrealist edge, like the infernal officers in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (c. 1940). Michael’s sense of being a ‘peculiar sort of animal’ at Sir Harry Bracesplit’s party (p. 185) invokes the surreal bourgeois parties in the films of the Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel, as does the violent intrusion that disrupts the revels. When he falls off the roof of a train while hiding from his pursuers Michael finds himself ‘floating quickly through space’, and wonders why people don’t fly more often, since it ‘deserved to be a popular pastime’ (p. 205); flying happens often to inhabitants of the Surrealist dreamscape. The bombing of the wood where Michael is hiding makes him believe that the world has been ‘turned upside down’, since hardly a tree has been left standing, ‘and those few that remained upright no longer looked like trees, but seemed to have been cut out of barkless wood and left jagged by some mad god’ (p. 219). Most of these surreal moments are engendered by the insane workings of the totalitarian state through which Michael moves, with its penchant for imposing authority either by random acts of violence or by alternately pandering to and suppressing the sensual desires of its citizens.
Todd’s Surrealism, like all Surrealist art of the 1930s, has political objectives. His book functions as kind of counter-sermon, like the speeches his protagonist delivers at church and school; it resembles a thriller of the kind Michael sees on the bookshelves in the school headmaster’s office (p. 158), but a thriller that works in opposition to most thrillers of the period, whose heroic protagonists like Buchan’s Richard Hannay strive with all their powers to protect the imperialist status quo; Todd’s protagonist, by contrast, resists authority at every turn. The most prominent British theorist of Surrealism, Herbert Read, was also one of the most prominent of British anarchists, identifying with the many anarchists who fought shoulder to shoulder with the communists and Trotskyists in the Spanish Civil War. In the years that followed the publication of Over the Mountain Todd became closely associated with the New Romanticist movement, to which Read too attached himself. Todd’s second Surrealist novel, The Lost Traveller (1943) was published by the Grey Walls Press, founded by the New Romanticist poet Wray Gardiner, who wrote in 1943 that ‘In politics I follow Read’ – as did his fellow New Romantics, Alex Comfort and Henry Treece.[7] Michael’s resistance to authoritarianism of all kinds closely aligns him with the anarchist movement; while his persecution by the state police, and the carpet bombing to which he is subjected, connect him to the experiences of the Surrealists and their families in the Spanish Civil War, whose most celebrated artistic expression was Picasso’s painting of the bombing of Guernica, showing the world ‘turned upside down’ by atrocity and grief. The Civil War dominates Todd’s poems for Joan Miró, from the verses he wrote in 1937 – which tell how ‘the bombs fell in that fine place’, his homeland of Catalunya – to the verses engraved by Miró in 1947:
After that war, when death had gone away
About his other business – for many others
Had sent him invitations to come out to play
As, after all, both he and sleep were brothers –
The painter was haunted by the shapes of war;
His faces recognised those fearsome birds
Whose monolithic beaks forever tore
The hearts of men whose salt blood curds
When death goes jaunting round the sky
And time pauses, while they all must wait
That sudden moment when no piteous cry
Postpones the arrival of the promised date.
Todd’s association of playfulness with death by violence aligns this second poem with the terrifying childishness of the Secret Police in Over the Mountain, or the horrifyingly playful reordering of the world as witnessed by Michael after the bombing of the wood. The novel brings the Spanish Civil War to British soil – or to a soil which is coded as British – as part of the steady growth in death’s dominion Todd predicts in the last two stanzas of the poem, which remind his readers that ‘death always could / Reach out beyond the Catalan farm, / The Dutch kitchen and the enchanted wood’, although the world can always ignore the ‘piteous cry’ of its victims.[8]
Like the protagonists of Buchan’s thrillers – and like the people from all countries who joined the International Brigades to fight for the Republican cause in Spain – Michael is a man of action, and his speech to the schoolboys urges them to action too. It’s not enough, he insists, to indulge in curiosity without working to redress the injustices your curiosity uncovers. ‘Are you going to say,’ he asks them, ‘“My people never worried about these things, so it’s no use my worrying either,” or are you going to try to do what you can to help – to relieve suffering so that you are not dispensing charity, but giving each man the things that are his by right of having been born?’ (pp. 161-2). Todd actively confirmed his own resistance to the authoritarianism of imperialist Britain by registering as a conscientious objector when war broke out; after all, Under the Mountain states quite clearly that the nameless state in which Michael finds himself has little to distinguish it from Nazi Germany. Beyond this courageous gesture, Todd’s activism was largely literary, exposing him to the charge of playing artistic games while the world turned upside down. His friend Wrey Gardiner portrayed him as a circus performer: ‘His enormous heavy glasses and narrow white papery clown’s face of despairing gaiety is encountered often in the back bar of the Café Royal some time between nine and ten. […] Ruthven is very much the clown – but the clown with a breaking heart’.[9] For Gardiner, then, Todd was ‘riven’, split between existential sorrow and foolish antics fit for entertaining grown-up children like the ones he wrote about in his first novel. Todd liked, in fact, to tell his friends that his first name, Ruthven, was pronounced riven, condemning him to a lifetime of being split between the desire for action and the incapacity to act in any way he thought effective.
But on the day Gardiner wrote these words he was preparing to print Todd’s second novel, The Lost Traveller, with Grey Walls Press. He considered Todd’s verbal clowning to be well worth printing, even at a time of global conflict. In this post I’ve tried to make the case that it’s well worth reading now, when ignorant authoritarianism is again on the rise. I had some trouble finding an affordable copy of Over the Mountain; but perhaps one day another Gardiner will reprint it, to help us achieve some balance as we teeter on the ‘edge of precipice’ in a new Millennium, uncertain whether to leap or climb.
NOTES
[1] Mervyn Peake, Collected Poems, Fyfield Books (Manchester: Carcanet, 2008), p. 52.
[2] Ruthven Todd, Over the Mountain (London etc.: George G. Harrap and Co., 1939), 6. All references are to this edition.
[3] His self-entrapment is beautifully conveyed in the scene where he seeks to dose Michael with a truth serum hidden in his whisky. Michael swaps his glass with the Colonel’s, who proceeds to reveal everything he knows about the Secret Service.
[4] See Over the Mountain, p. 44: ‘I knew that the secret police were watching me, and the terror of their third degree was even stronger than my desire to sleep’. On the same page Michael explains the meaning of third degree interrogation: ‘they would take me away and question me all night, and prevent my sleeping’.
[5] Michael Remy, Surrealism in Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p. 41.
[6] Read and Breton embrace the Surrealism of Alice in Surrealism, ed. Herbert Read (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936), pp. 55-56 and 103.
[7] Wrey Gardiner, The Dark Thorn (London: The Grey Walls Press, 1946), p. 11.
[8] I hope by now it’s clear that the unnamed nation in Under the Mountain is coded throughout as British, despite its geography (which amusingly makes this alternative Britain part of a continent which the real British people have tended to look down on, secure in their insularity). Its Britishness is driven home by the books it contains: Michael finds the works of Robert Burton, Thomas a Kempis and Sir Thomas Browne on the vicarage bookshelves (p. 90), buys Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddle-Duck for two secret policemen (pp. 143-4), and quotes George Cavendish’s Life of Wolsey at the door of an inn after his second descent from the mountain (‘Father Abbot, […] I am come to lay my bones among you’, p. 278).
[9] Gardiner, The Dark Thorn, p. 42.