Mountains, Manliness and Post-war Recovery: C.E. Montague's ‘Action’

Abstract

Cultural historians have vigorously debated the impact of the First World War in shaping male subjectivities and (heroic) masculinities. Victimhood, emotional survival and disablement have featured in recent scholarship as a means to shed light on the psycho-social products of war and how these have fed into new or reconstructed forms of male subjectivity and agency. This paper adds to this literature through a consideration of the place of mountains and mountaineering in post-war recovery. It does so by means of a close reading of ‘Action’ (1928), a short story composed by journalist and novelist C.E. Montague. The story is an exploration of the experience of degeneration and how it could be overcome through the agency, willpower and awareness of the male climbing body. The paper situates ‘Action’ in relation to Montague's more famous work, Disenchantment (1922), and contends that the story was a response to Montague's diagnosis of post-war ills. As such, ‘Action’ resurrects associations between gender, virtue and the body present in Victorian and Edwardian constructions of manliness and maintains the special place afforded to (Alpine) mountains as health-giving, recuperative and restorative sanctuaries for male body projects.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions that have helped to improve this paper. All other errors and omissions are my own.

Notes

1. See, for instance, Jessica Meyer, Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Michael Roper, ‘Between Manliness and Masculinity: The “War Generation” and the Psychology of Fear in Britain, 1914–1950’, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005): 343–62.

2. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 17.

3. C.E. Montague, Disenchantment (London: Chatto & Windus, 1922), 189.

4. See Ted Bogacz, ‘War Neurosis and Cultural Change in England, 1914–1922: The Work of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into “Shell-Shock”’, Journal of Contemporary History 24 (1989): 227–56.

5. Roper, ‘Between Manliness and Masculinity’.

6. Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Bodley Head, 1990), xi. See also Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War (London: Constable, 1965).

7. Jessica Meyer, ‘Introduction: Popular Culture and the First World War’, in British Popular Culture and the First World War, ed. Jessica Meyer (Leiden/Boston, MA: Brill, 2008), 2–5.

8. Meyer, Men of War; Roper, ‘Between Manliness and Masculinity’; also Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion Books, 1996); Ana Carden-Coyne, Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism and the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Wendy Jane Gagen, ‘Remastering the Body, Renegotiating Gender: Physical Disability and Masculinity during the First World War, the Case of J.B. Middlebrook’, European Review of History: Revue europeenne d'histoire 14 (2007): 525–41.

9. Will Pinkney, ‘C.E. Montague, Liberal War Writers and the Great War’, The RUSI Journal 155(5) (2010): 82–87.

10. Mark Hampton, ‘The Press, Patriotism, and Public Discussion: C.P. Scott, the Manchester Guardian, and the Boer War, 1899–1902’, The Historical Journal 44 (2001): 177–197.

11. A.J.P. Taylor, English History 1914–1945 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 95.

12. David Ayerst, Guardian: Biography of a Newspaper (London: Collins, 1971), 376.

13. Oliver Elton, C.E. Montague: A Memoir (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929), 107.

14. Quoted in Scott Russell, ‘C.E. Montague – Mountaineer and Writer’, The Alpine Journal (1991–92): 189.

15. Elton, C.E. Montague, 163.

16. Quoted in Russell, ‘C.E. Montague’, 190.

17. Elton, C.E. Montague, 235. Montague received two mentions in dispatches and received a Military MBE.

18. Keith Grieves, ‘C.E. Montague, Manchester and the Remembrance of War, 1918–25’, The Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 77 (1995): 85–104.

19. Elton, C.E. Montague, 35.

20. Grieves, ‘C.E. Montague’, 88–89.

21. Elton, C.E. Montague, 46.

22. Claire Eliane Engel, Mountaineering in the Alps (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1971), 280.

23. Claire Eliane Engel, Mountaineering in the Alps (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1971), 279–82.

24. Claire Eliane Engel, Mountaineering in the Alps (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1971), 279.

25. Audrey Salkeld and Rosie Smith, One Step in the Clouds: An Omnibus of Mountaineering Novels and Short Stories (London: Diadem Books, 1990), 8.

26. Russell, ‘C.E. Montague’.

27. Russell, ‘C.E. Montague’ 191.

28. See C.E. Montague, ‘A Mountain War Memorial’, Manchester Guardian, June 9, 1924; C.E. Montague, ‘This Year's Attempt on Everest’, Manchester Guardian, October 18, 1924; C.E. Montague, ‘The Climbing of Mount Logan’, Manchester Guardian, July 16, 1925; C.E. Montague, ‘Access to the Mountains’, Manchester Guardian, May 2, 1924. Montague possessed a love of the outdoors but was not a blanket supporter of all athletic contests. He was critical of the Olympic Games, writing that they led to an ‘extravagant idealisation of success’, wasted natural intelligence and actually contributed to national decline. C.E. Montague, ‘Overdone Sport’, Manchester Guardian, August 20, 1923.

29. See Russell, ‘C.E. Montague’.

30. Montague would have been familiar with James David Forbes's account Travels Through the Alps of Savoy (1848), a memoir which recorded the grisly dangers of climbing as Forbes and his companions discovered the bodies of mountaineers on the cliffs of Mont Collon: ‘The effect on us all was electric … we turned and surveyed, with a stranger sense of sublimity than before, the desolation by which we were surrounded, and became still more sensible of our isolation from human dwellings, human help and human sympathy. … We are men, and we stand in the chamber of death’: cited in Elaine Freedgood, Victorian Writing About Risk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 103.

31. On botanism and mountain climbing, see Diarmid A. Finnegan, ‘Naturalising the Highlands: Geographies of Mountain Fieldwork in Late-Victorian Scotland’, Journal of Historical Geography 33 (2007): 791–815.

32. For a review of the satirical literature on Swiss tourism and the debasement of the Alpine sublime see Ann C. Colley, Victorians in the Mountains: Sinking the Sublime (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 13–56.

33. C.E. Montague, ‘Up to the Alps’, in The Right Place (London: Chatto & Windus, 1924).

34. Engel, Mountaineering in the Alps, 282.

35. John Rylands University Library of Manchester, C.E. Montague Papers, CEM/2/2/64.

36. Mike Ashley, The Age of the Storytellers: British Popular Fiction Magazines, 1880–1950 (London: The British Library, 2006), 46–9.

37. John Rylands University Library of Manchester, C.E. Montague Papers, CEM/2/2/5/37.

38. ‘The Call of the Wilds’, Manchester Evening News, January 10, 1922.

39. ‘The Discovery’, The Sheffield Telegraph, January 9, 1922.

40. ‘Rambler's End: A Gallant Fight for Life’, The Sheffield Telegraph, January 10, 1922.

41. ‘A Peakland Tragedy’, High Peak Reporter, January 14, 1922.

42. Ben Anderson, ‘A Liberal Countryside? The Manchester Ramblers’ Federation and the “Social Readjustment” of Urban Citizens, 1929–1936’, Urban History 38 (2011): 84–102; Melanie Tebbutt, ‘Rambling and Manly Identity in Derbyshire's Dark Peak, 1880s–1920s’, The Historical Journal 49 (2006): 1,125–53.

43. C.E. Montague, ‘The Happy Mountain Rambler’, Manchester Guardian, January 14, 1922.

44. See David Craig, ‘Coming Home: The Romantic Tradition of Mountaineering’, in From Lancaster to the Lakes – the Region in Literature, eds Keith Hanley and Alison Milbank (Lancaster: The Centre for North-West Regional Studies, 1992), 27–40.

45. C.E. Montague, ‘Action’, in Action and Other Stories (London: Chatto & Windus, 1928), 2.

46. Alfred Tennyson, The Collected Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), 148.

47. Alfred Tennyson, The Collected Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), 7.

48. Alfred Tennyson, The Collected Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), 6–7.

49. Kerwin Lee Klein, ‘A Vertical World: The Eastern Alps and Modern Mountaineering’, Journal of Historical Sociology 24 (2011): 519–48.

50. Montague, ‘Action’, 8.

51. Erich König. Empor! Georg Winklers Tagebuch (Leipzig: Verlag Grethlein & Co., 1906).

52. Montague, ‘Action’, 17.

53. Montague, ‘Action’, 18.

54. Montague, ‘Action’, 21.

55. Montague, ‘Action’, 24.

56. Montague, ‘Action’, 31.

57. See Georg Simmel, ‘The Alpine Journey’, in Simmel on Culture, eds David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997), 219–21.

58. Lee Wallace Holt, ‘Mountains, Mountaineering and Modernity: A Cultural History of German and Austrian Mountaineering, 1900–1945’ (PhD diss., The University of Texas at Austin, 2008), 92 –5.

59. Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘The Culture of the Abdomen: Obesity and Reducing in Britain, circa 1900–1939’, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005): 239–73.

60. Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘The Culture of the Abdomen: Obesity and Reducing in Britain, circa 1900–1939’, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005): 272.

61. Eric J. Leed, No Man's Land: Combat & Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 194–5.

62. There are strong parallels in this regard to the case of Canadian mountaineer James Outram. See Paul R. Deslandes, ‘Curing Mind and Body in the Heart of the Canadian Rockies: Empire, Sexual Scandal and the Reclamation of Masculinity, 1880s–1920s’, Gender and History 21 (2009): 358–79.

63. Keith Grieves, ‘C.E. Montage and the Making of Disenchantment, 1914–1921’, War in History 4 (1997): 35–59.

64. Keith Grieves, ‘C.E. Montage and the Making of Disenchantment, 1914–1921’, War in History 4 (1997): 36.

65. Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London: Hambledon, 2005), 8–9.

66. Hynes, A War Imagined, 309.

67. Montague, Disenchantment, 5, 53.

68. Montague, Disenchantment, 57.

69. ‘Degeneration’ has a complex history with different national inflections upon socio-biological discourses of decline in European culture. In Britain the eugenicist connotations were limited in impact, though degenerationist terms emerged in the context of concerns of the effects of urban squalor on national health, though also around the coming of mass society. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

70. ‘Degeneration’ has a complex history with different national inflections upon socio-biological discourses of decline in European culture. In Britain the eugenicist connotations were limited in impact, though degenerationist terms emerged in the context of concerns of the effects of urban squalor on national health, though also around the coming of mass society. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 211.

71. Jonathan Westaway, ‘Mountaineering and the Re-enchantment of Modernity: C.E. Montague and the Promotion of the Outdoor Movement in the Manchester Guardian 1890–1925’. Presentation to the University of Kent History Seminar, December 8, 2004.

72. Meyer, Men of War, 164.

73. Tait Keller, ‘The Mountains Roar: The Alps during the Great War’, Environmental History 14 (2009): 255.

74. Peter H. Hansen, The Summits of Modern Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

75. Keller, ‘The Mountains Roar’, 255; see also Susan Barton, Healthy Living in the Alps: The Origins of Winter Tourism in Switzerland, 1860–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008).

76. Elton, C.E. Montague, 89.

77. Elton, C.E. Montague, 109.

78. Here, Montague qualifies different types of mountain adventurer by replaying older distinctions between experienced climbers and inexperienced mountain tourists. For this general distinction, see Ben M. Anderson, ‘The Construction of an Alpine Landscape: Building, Representing and Affecting the Eastern Alps, c.1885–1914’, Journal of Cultural Geography 29 (2012): 155–83.

79. On the revival of chivalry, see Lucy Delap, ‘“Thus Does Man Prove His Fitness to be the Master of Things”: Shipwrecks, Chivalry and Masculinities in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century Britain’, Cultural and Social History 3 (2006): 1–30; Allen Frantzen, Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981).

80. Sonya O. Rose, ‘Temperate Heroes: Concepts of Masculinity in Second World War Britain’, in Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History, eds Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and John Tosh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 177–95.

81. Garry Whannel, ‘From “Motionless Bodies” to Acting Moral Subjects: Tom Brown, a Transformative Narrative for the Production of Manliness’, Diegesis: Journal of the Association for Research in Popular Fictions 4 (1999): 14–21.

82. Hynes, A War Imagined, 308–310.

83. Harald Höbusch, ‘Narrating Nanga Parbat: German Himalaya expeditions and the fictional (re)construction of national identity’, Sporting Traditions 20 (2003): 19.

84. Wilfred Wilms, ‘“The Essence of the Alpine World is Struggle”: Strategies of Gesundung in Arnold Fanck's Early Mountain Films”, in Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination From the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century, eds Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004), 285–301.

85. I am grateful to Ben Anderson for conversations on this point.

86. See Mary W. Helms, Ulysses’ Sail: An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge, and Geographical Distance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Carl Thompson, The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007).

87. See, for instance, Karen Darke, If You Fall (Winchester: O Books Ltd., 2006); Jo Gambi, Holding On: A Story of Love and Survival (London: Portrait, 2006); Alistair Sutcliffe, The Hardest Climb (Hebden Bridge: Blue Moose, 2011).