The Book Club: one man's failed attempt to climb Everest

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🗓️ 9 December 2020

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

In this week's Book Club podcast, Sam Leith's guest is the journalist Ed Caesar, whose new book The Moth and the Mountain tells the story of a now forgotten solo assault on Everest that ended in disaster. But as Ed argues, the heroic failure can be a richer and more resonant story than any triumph -- and as he painstakingly excavated the story of Maurice Wilson, it was just such a rich and resonant story he discovered: of a character who became fixated on the mountain as a means of redeeming wartime trauma and a chequered and at times disgraceful romantic history, of getting his own back on hated authority figures, and -- just possibly -- of finding a safe space for his darkest secret of all.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority. Absolutely free. Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.
0:27.9	Hello and welcome to Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor
0:32.5	of The Spectator, and my guest this week is the writer-journalist Ed Caesar, whose new book is called The Moth and the Mountain, a true story of love, war and Everest.
0:43.1	Now, the Moth is not a butterfly-type moth, but an aeroplane. And Everest, well, we all know about Everest.
0:49.8	But this is story, isn't it, Ed, of a failure rather than a great triumph?
0:57.3	It is, I suppose, in absolute terms, a failure, in that Morris Wilson, who is the subject of this book, wanted to be the first
1:04.2	person to reach the summit of Everest, and he does not become the first person to reach the summit of Everest.
1:12.0	So in that sense, it is a failure.
1:14.5	Failure is always much more interesting than success, I think, in literary terms.
1:19.7	And he fails in his main objective, but in all sorts of other ways,
1:26.5	Everest was the thing that was going to redeem his broken life.
1:33.0	So in some senses, he does get what he wants, but he doesn't get the ultimate thing that he wants,
1:39.2	I suppose. No. Well, he is, or at least, you know, until I started reading your book,
1:43.7	I didn't know who the hell he was. He seems to have been kind of by, when you came to him, he is, or at least, you know, until I started reading your book, I didn't know who the hell he was.
1:45.0	He seems to have been kind of, when you came to, he was sort of a forgotten figure, wasn't he?
1:49.9	Can you tell me a bit about how you sort of got onto his trail and where you decided, you know, there's a story here, and it's a story that not enough people know.
1:58.3	Yes. So I read a brilliant book called Into the Silence by Wade Davis,
2:03.6	which is about the early British expeditions to Everest in the 1920s,
2:09.2	and about the long tale of the First World War, the effects that fighting in France and Flanders
2:16.1	had had on that group of men who tried to climb Everest in
2:20.1	the 1920s. And it's a wonderful book. And somewhere in that book, there were two paragraphs
2:28.0	about Morris Wilson, which adambrided his story.
	...

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