The Villain and The Myth

Reflections on The Life of Don Whillans

Don Whillans - whose place in the climbing pantheon seems assured - became a topic of discussion last year with the publication of Jim Perrin's biography ‘The Villain'. Whillans first came to my awareness through his 1971 ‘Portrait of a Mountaineer' (co-written with Alick Ormerod). At that time, in the early 70s, my passion had been fell-walking, but this book gripped my imagination and propelled me into the world of climbing. In retrospect the early biography tells a simple even sanitised story, nevertheless it represents the Whillans image or myth at its best.

To recall the facts. Whillans started rock climbing in 1950, and rapidly became an accomplished climber and new route pioneer. But after little more than a decade the rock pioneering was over (Forked Lightening Crack in 1961, Direct Finish to Carnivore in 1962), nevertheless his routes retained a reputation for difficulty and commitment which intimidated would-be ascentionists (they still do - take a look at Forked Lightening or its Widdop neighbour, Ceiling Crack!). Whillans became a leading British mountaineer - his ascent of Annapurna South Face in 1970 with Dougal Haston rated by Perrin as "the most momentous ascent to that date in the history of mountaineering" ¹. Whillans was now something of a celebrity, in demand as a speaker on the lecture circuit, and even appearing on the TV programme 'This is Your Life'. Yet fifteen years later Whillans was dead from a heart attack brought on by obesity and alcoholism. He was only 52.

So where did it all go wrong? To label Whillans as "another George Best", another self-destructive celebrity, explains little. The only recourse is to look closely at the story of his life with this question before us: What kind of man was Whillans?

Whillans, like many a footballing star, emerged from a tough working-class background - industrial Salford. Here was forged his survival strategy - to fight, not flee, when conflict showed. For someone only 5 ft. 3 inches tall this required an unusual level of aggression. A reputation as a 'dobber' was acquired, with some justification - an unfortunate male who 'tried it on' with Whillans' girlfriend (later wife) found himself on the end of a fist which "ripped the man's cheek open" ². Such stories abounded - but some, Perrin makes clear, were a species of urban myth ³. The "rough-up with the Rossendale rozzers" in 1975 was, however, perfectly real. Whillans, stopped at night for speeding and drink-driving, went berserk and "laid out three policemen" in the ensuing fracas. The court case exposed Whillans' aggressive impulses to full public view, but as Perrin says the incident only "endeared him to climbing's subversive faction", bolstering his near-mythic notoriety ⁴. It also cost him an MBE. Whillans, without doubt, had exceptional strength and fighting spirit - just what was needed in extreme situations on the rockface or mountain. Such a situation occurred near the summit of Masherbrum, as the Whillans-Ormerod story relates: -

The next pitch looked harder still and I decided to remove my crampons. It began with a twenty-foot tongue of ice running up to a big flake which would have to be laybacked and looked remarkably like the Right Unconquerable Crack. ... Carefully I cut steps in the tough ice until I was perched on the top of the tongue, my hands grasping the underside of the flake. This was it: a strenuous layback in high-altitude gear at 25,000 feet. I moved as swiftly as I could, fighting my way up.

'Bastard!' I gasped as I made the discovery that the top of the crack was jammed with ice.

But I had burned my boats, I had to get up, a fall would mean an injury and that would do for both of us. I made a desperate heave and somehow pulled up on to a small, ice-covered ledge on top of the flake. I lay panting, waiting for the strength to return to my body ⁵

The Whillans image assumed mythic proportions. Dennis Gray's funeral speech extolled this "pocket Hercules" ⁶. Perrin whimsically projects Whillans as "Achilles, temperamental, bellicose, and quick to take offence" ⁷. But Perrin quickly dismisses the idea of heroes in climbing. Plaudits such as heroism, beloved of the media, impart a false valuation which risks "mythologising the sport and its participants"- a sport which is only a "form of play". The frozen corpses of guides and clients on Everest show what happens when "the pure motive is clouded, the clear view lost" ⁸.

Perrin is right to resist such falsification, but I believe his argument is weak. Mountaineering seems to serve no social good, its participants undergoing difficulties and dangers for no material reward. So let us call it a "form of play". But form of play, like the Wittgensteinian game, sets few limits. We recall Bill Shankly's words:

Some people think football is a matter of life and death ...I can assure them it is much more serious than that. ⁹

Value judgments arise in any field of activity, reflecting its internal rules and standards. So a deliberate handball in football is penalised, pegging on a free-climb condemned. But this internal ethic or "pure motive" gives way to a wider ethic when strong passions and motivations come into play, or - as may happen in climbing - when it becomes a matter of life and death. Character and practical intelligence are then put to the test and judged accordingly. Foolish or egoistic actions are censured, good and sensible choices applauded. Courage too might here be a virtue - on the mountain as much as in the war zone - an aretē or "excellence" in the Greek sense - prompted not merely by self-preservation but by something like a sense of honour and not failing one's comrades ¹⁰ But if 'brave', then why not also ‘heroic', properly understood?

Perrin's objections are understandable. Climbers, even the professionals amongst us benefiting from media attention, don't want labelling as ‘heroes', if only because it offends our sense of practical - and anarchic - self-reliance. Of course we may deprecate the stereotypes but can we free ourselves entirely from mythic forms? We are always tempted, as Perrin acknowledges, to find "the old archetypes" in human life ¹¹. Myths reflect "something of their community's essential yearnings" ¹². I would put it this way: myths offer in exotic and dramatic form the paradigms and models which sustain our motivations and actions. They are, as Jung has said, "archetypes of behaviour" ¹³. But to those caught up in them they spell danger ¹⁴. Nemesis and failure, we should recall, play a part in the hero's script - especially when the hero remains a rebel or an outsider.

Nemesis is not about origins. Not with Whillans. Others from similar working-class origins have followed different trajectories. Perrin's point is that it was the myths surrounding Whillans which were a major factor in his undoing. They became "a double-edged tyranny", encouraging people to treat not the man but the myth. Then they became self-fulfilling, encouraging Whillans to act out the image of the tough Northerner, "the supremely bold climber and instantaneous aggressor" ¹⁵.

But accretions of myth are only half the story. Crucial to this story - though touched on only obliquely by Perrin - was Whillans' own myth: a sense of the life he must live. Whillans had never regarded climbing as a sport, indeed "it very soon became a way of life" ¹⁶ . However, a pivotal moment occurred during Whillans' first visit to the Alps in 1952 as he gazed at the huge ice-plastered wall of the Grandes Jorasses. The sight shook him profoundly and crystallised his goal in life: -

I had one of those moments when suddenly everything becomes clear to you. I knew that from that moment on I was going to dedicate my life to climbing the hardest and most inaccessible mountains in the world ¹⁷

For Whillans, climbing and mountaineering was never a leisure sport, nor a career choice. Whether we call it a compulsion or a destiny it was something Whillans had to do.

Literature and the media often represent climbing in terms of conquest or as technical-athletic achievement. A mis-representation perhaps, and especially so in Whillans' case. Whillans approached the mountains neither as conquistador nor as technician (he did not train, was scornful of the early climbing walls). Perrin offers an interesting pointer to what Whillans saw in crag or mountain. Choice of route, he suggests, reflects a climber's state of mind and character: "the places we choose to explore act as an objective correlate to our own states of mind" - a form of "self-knowledge"¹⁸. Perrin is, in essence, invoking a concept articulated by Hegel and Marx (and psychoanalysts such as Jung) - the mirroring of self and its object. Whillans' routes, he states, were "shadowy, forbidding, aggressive, unappealing, overbearing, insecure, flaky, fissile" So the question arises: "Was that how he saw himself?". But this characterisation, based on three Cloggy routes (Slanting Slab, Taurus, Woubits) seems to me too partial. Bonnington, in contrast, speaks of "superbly irect, uncompromising lines - ones that hit you in the eye as obvious, but at the same time were too difficult, or more often too frightening, to have been done by anyone else"¹⁹.

Whillans was motivated by something profound yet his response was direct. One incident exemplifies this. Approaching the Dolomites for the first time, Whillans records, "I saw something which made my eyes snap wide open. Slapping the brakes on, I pulled over to the side of the road and stared in wonder. Framed by a steep-sided valley, two fantastic towers of yellow rock lunged to the sky ...the Cima Ovest and the Cima Grande". His response was "awe and humility at such beauty. I could hardly wait to get to grips with the rock on those enormous faces" ²⁰.

The response is significant - but paradoxical. For Whillans, awe-inspiring beauty evokes not an aesthetic response of "disinterested delight" (Kant) or "absolute silence of the will" (Schopenhauer) but a scarcely-containable desire to get to grips" with its object. Interestingly, his approach to women was much the same - earning him a reputation as a "sexual opportunist" ²¹.

Whillans, when climbing, showed careful judgment and skill - as well as the opportunism and forcefulness needed to succeed. That was his praxis. But beyond this was the object of his commitment - something which could evoke awe, even reverence. On Masherbrum, he recalls ...

I walked to the edge of the great ice cliff and gazed across at a scene of fantastic beauty and tranquillity ... The grandeur of the surrounding peaks was awe-inspiring; Chogalisa, the Masherbrums and K2 stood massive, immovable and eternal, dripping with ice and snow, lording it over the world. Turning to look at the tiny, green tent glowing with candle-light, I felt an inner peace which was profound and intense. Up here, at 24,000 feet ... there seemed to be nobody else in the whole world but the mountain gods and us - the fools who tried to challenge their supremacy ... sometimes the mountains are at their most frightening when they are at peace. ²²

Like Bill Murray's glimpse of transcendence on a Scottish mountain ("the world was full of a divine splendour") this was undoubtedly an experience of the numinous - the sublime if you prefer - for which a silence of the will is now fitting.

Commitment of the kind shown by Whillans carries risk. Not the risk of accident - which mountaineering certainly brings - but the aftermath of not succeeding. Success does not come easily or often in mountain climbing. Opportunities and careers are finite, as in any athletic pursuit. Age and diminishing fitness will force disengagement, at least a scaling down of ambitions - earlier for the footballer, later for the mountaineer. Sooner or later, then, Whillans would have to reckon with an end to his 'dream'. Others would move onto other careers, but Whillans seems not to have had any exit strategy. Opportunities began to shrink for him, expedition invites became less forthcoming. His prickly temperament and plain speaking - magnified in the mythic lens - began to weigh on the debit side. When this happened he smelt betrayal, and blamed the climbing establishment, and expedition organisers. He became suspicious of the more brazenly competitive climbing scene - "you get these fanatical, competitive nutters who really aren't climbers or mountaineers deep down"²³.

Incapable of retirement Whillans hung on - to the pub, the social gatherings, and playing a secondary role on various expeditions. He was like an ageing footballer working his way down the divisions. Dennis Gray tells of a ferocious arm-wresting bout in a Hayfield pub between Whillans and Johnny Dawes in the early 80s - "Don was still a bar fighter right to his end" ²⁴. In 1984, now grossly overweight, Whillans was filmed struggling up his 1953 route, Dovedale Groove, supported on Chris Bonnington's tight rope. Perrin reports: "it was filmed a day later than planned, to give Don a chance to recover from a monumental binge in the hotel on television expenses". A subsequent event in Wales was, for Perrin, "one of the sadder pieces of television I have seen - a cult hero revelling in his own self-destruction" ²⁵. A year later Whillans was dead.

Perrin's account is balanced and sympathetic. Faced with the complexity of the man - and perhaps sensing the dangers of 'psychobabble' - the book shuns explanation and analysis. There are limits anyway, Perrin has said, as to how far a life can and should be ‘explained' ²⁶. Judgment too readily turns judgmental, so caution is advised, remembering how we all have a ‘dark side' and are in some way flawed.

Still, if there is to be any understanding of Whillans' decline and fall it must involve, I believe, Whillans' inability to handle the myths projected upon him, and especially his inability to free himself from what I have called his own myth - his lifelong dedication to the mountain. Something in his character resistant to compromise and readjustment or re-learning ²⁷ hardened this commitment - one which time and self-destructive habits would then lay waste. Hard and stubborn he may have been yet he also possessed a rarely-noted sensitivity and vulnerability, a reflective and serious side. Perhaps, as Greg Child reflects, he was "a sheep in wolf's clothing"! ²⁸

Perrin's closing chapter takes us on an evocative journey into Chew Valley, its windblown trees, its peat-stained streams, its boulders and looming gritstone edges - the "cyclopean masonry" - all now redolent of Don Whillans and his era. "He would have known these ways ... and delighted in the bleakness, and the space". This is elegy, surpassing explanation. Its final heartfelt words - "Here in Chew Piece at autumn twilight, some healing power is at work; and I hope your spirit feels it too, and finds rest" - provide a fitting closure to an extraordinary story, as in Wuthering Heights at Heathcliffe's grave

I ...listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

David N Brown, 2006