Mountaineering writer Joe Simpson's first piece for OUTDOORSmagic
will be appearing on these pages soon, but if you'd like to know more
about him, have a browse through this interview written by
OUTDOORSmagic editor, Jon Doran, a few years back.
Joe Simpson Unplugged
Joe Simpson answers the door of his isolated Peak District cottage
with a scowl. He's an imposing man, six-foot two, 14 stone, a little
like Sylvester Stallone but without the disarming softness. Simpson's
heavily-muscled torso ripples beneath a Jonathan Cape promotional
tee-shirt the first name on which is Martin Amis ...
Actually I was lying - Simpson, 34, is a smallish bloke, about ten
stone and five foot eight I'd guess, and lives in a modest terrace
house in an unpretentious quarter of Sheffield. 'Wiry' is the
adjective usually used to describe him, but it's a cliche and a
misnomer, he looks merely trim, slight even, as he offers me a cup of
coffee.
He is wearing the Jonathan Cape tee-shirt though, that much is
true. I don't know whether it's a statement and I don't ask, but it
makes a point. With two highly acclaimed autobiographical books and a
novel to his name, Simpson is probably the most readable, accessible
and successful 'climbing' author around. The 'climbing' bit is in
inverted commas, because Simpson's appeal and readership goes beyond
the mountaineering audience.
Cape, moreover, are an established publishing house, with a stable
of literary figures, many of whom have never languished in a Peruvian
crevasse or dragged themselves for days over rocky moraine in order
to write their first book. It's an extraordinary introduction to a
career in literature.
Tottering on the edge of disaster...
But then Simpson's record of surviving near death mountaineering
experiences is pretty extraordinary too. He tends to play it down,
really he does, but you'd have to be daft to believe that there isn't
something in him that has him tottering along the edge of disaster
with occasional forays over the brink - his early screamer from the
Screen on Aonach Dubh, the avalanche on the Courtes, the nightmare
bivouac with Ian Whittaker on the Bonatti Pillar, the Peruvian epic
that turned his life upside down and the near replay with the late Mal Duff on
Pachermo.
It's hard to believe that the child who launched himself down 28
Gibraltarian steps onto a stone-flagged patio by tricycle isn't still
lurking within the man. Simpson is obviously pretty sick of
observations like these and in particular any suggestion that he's
accident prone: "It drives me barmy when people say that. I happen to
be alive, so maybe I'm survival prone," he observes indignantly.
So what makes him 'survival prone'? It's a hard question for Simpson
to answer. He's always aware of friends in similar situations who
haven't survived: "I know that they will have fought just as hard as
I did and they just didn't get the breaks. I sometimes get more
freaked out by why I've had these lucky breaks and some friends have
been killed in the very first accident they've had. That makes me
feel uncomfortable. I'm not a fatalist, I don't believe in destiny or
anything like that..."
'If you get a lucky break you have to really use it'
All this is said quietly, matter-of-factly, in a mix of public
school RP and indeterminate northern, but with a considered conviction
that comes from a lot of reflection. He goes on: "If you get a lucky
break you have to really use it, you have to fight like a bastard.
You can't just sit there and wait to get lucky. It doesn't happen. I
get slightly pissed off when people say you're really lucky, cos I
think, oh yeah, sure, yeah. I've had my leg smashed up and a lot of
injured bones and I'd much rather not have had those and been
climbing the way I was..."
Then he pauses and takes a metaphorical step back, aware perhaps
of sounding ungrateful: "It's different now because I look back and
think, with the success as a writer, well maybe it wouldn't have
happened if I hadn't done this... but it's all very
hypothetical."
You can imagine Simpson fighting like a bastard. His manner may be
quiet, but he speaks with quiet conviction and when he talks about
his climbing he burns with an unashamed passion: "The idea of a life
without climbing is, to me, quite horrific," he says later.
He's also capable of being immensely argumentative: "I am quite
stroppy, quite obdurate when I want to be. I'll argue black is white
if necessary," he says. Get him onto a pet subject like the horrors
of conversing with non-climbing journalists or our safety-first
society and indignation oozes from every pore: "Everybody's as safe
as f*cking houses and then as soon as someone does something
different they either applaud it or they tear it apart, you know. It
drives me bananas actually ..."
And the physical side? "Before Peru, if you'd ever have said could
I have done that, I'd have said, don't be stupid. I would never have
thought I could have done that. I mean, I learned things about my
body and what my body is capable of doing that I would never have
understood."
'Everything below there...is just like sugar'
Ah yes, the body. Joe's is showing the signs; the face, smacked up
on Pachermo and now topped with a neat short back and sides, is
lightly scarred, but more important are his legs. Perched on the edge
of the hearth he demonstrates how the Peruvian demolition of his
right knee means that stepping high tends to make him overbalance:
"It pushes me over backwards, I have to climb differently. The knee
is sort of destroying itself. I'm in a Catch 22; if I'd done what the
surgeons said and led a sedentary life, there'd be so much scar
tissue in there, I wouldn't be able to move it. I've had ten
expeditions or more to the Himalaya or Karakoram and ironically it's
keeping it alive."
The real worry is the right ankle, which he pulverised on
Pachermo: "Everything below there," he says indicating the bit where
most ankles bend, "Is just like sugar. I think I'm going to have that
fused, because if it gets any worse and I start limping because of
the pain in the ankle, I'll be stressing the knee and I can't afford
to stress the knee. You can fuse the ankle and still climb, but you
can't fuse a knee. That would be the end of things, so I'm in a bit
of a bind as far as injuries are concerned."
"But I'm not that bothered about it." He concludes rather
perversely.
'Now I regard myself as a writer and it's something I
enjoy'
That final throwaway is there, I guess, because of his writing.
The gripping Touching The Void was written mainly to get the story
straight, he says: "I knew enough about climbing writing to know that
it doesn't make much money." But it snowballed into a rampant success
that has sold over 300,000 copies and been translated into more than
14 languages.
The effect on Simpson was rather like the bewilderment of popping
out of that crevasse: "Suddenly it started becoming really well known
and I became well known, which made me feel guilty, because I've got
a lot of friends who are much better climbers than me."
"I sort of regained control by writing the novel [The Water
People], writing again and thinking right, I'm a writer, which is
how I see myself, but I didn't set out to be a writer, but now I
regard myself as a writer and it's something I enjoy and it's
something I seem to have got back from what I lost, perhaps, in
Peru."
What Simpson lost in Peru was the capability to climb as hard as
he wanted to in the future, the thwarting of his ambition to become a
hard man doing hard routes, a concept he now derides as "a load of
b*llocks really."
The climbing may not be as extreme as before - even though he's
since completed more than ten Himalayan expeditions - but much of
Simpson's intensity has been carried over into his writing: "It's a
two-fold thing. On one level it earns me a living, which I've got to
do, but it's actually something and I'm quite passionate about and I
really like. I don't think it will ever replace climbing in the same
way, but it's something I can do which will be some compensation if I
can't climb."
"There are similarities with writing and climbing, or for me there
are, it's quite challenging and pretty scary, I think, to be doing it
and I also find it to be a fairly small world in the way climbing
is."
What he dislikes about writing, what makes it scary, is the public
nature of it, the months of research and writing with no real
feedback followed by: "This horrible feeling that now you've got to
wait. you can't do anything, you have to sit there and wait for the
reviews to come in. And someone says 'What a load of crap.' And, you
can say words shouldn't hurt, but they bloody well do and you never
get that with climbing. You never have to face that sort of
criticism."
For all the passion, there's still a pragmatic bent to his
writing. He's proud to have sold out all his advances and insists: "I
don't have any huge literary pretensions. I just try to write the
best I can and I want to make a living out of it." That's not to say
that he doesn't care about quality, just that at the moment he's
speaking about practicality.
'Bonatti is my all-time hero'
One of the problems with talking to Simpson is that his commitment
to whatever is in the now, tends to overshadow anything else. You
only have to recline in his sitting room, surrounded by shelves of
books from classic mountaineering epics to airport novels and
everything in between, and talk books to appreciate that bubbling
enthusiasm.
"Bonatti is my all time hero at every level, Cassin's books,
Bühl's Nanga Parbat Pilgrimage, Comici's books, those were all
very inspirational. Lionel Terray's Conquistadors of the Useless,
absolutely fantastic; Diemburger's book Summits and Secrets, a superb
book. Funnily enough Bonington in a way. I know Chris personally now
and I can remember a time when I would have been tongue-tied and
awe-struck beside him." He says.
And then there are the non-climbing authors, hordes of them;
Hemingway and Chatwin are the two most prominent, but he confesses to
devouring virtually anything other than Jeffrey Archer and Barbara
Cartland, particularly on expeditions.
At this point I ought to confess to being an unabashed admirer of
Joe Simpson's work. Not just 'Touching The Void', but his other
books too, and I'm interested to know how he approaches his craft and
how it's affected him in other ways. A lot of his writing isn't
really about climbing in the technical sense, more about life,
emotion and obsession, of basic things experienced through climbing,
what goes on in the head rather than the physical details.
'Climbing is about life'
He's got over an initial block that, to write about climbing, you
have to be a leading edge practitioner - "A load of b*llocks... I
was thinking I'm not climbing very hard any more, so I shouldn't be
writing about climbing. Horse sh*t! To me climbing is about life,
it's about all sorts of adventures and I will happily digress and go
barrelling on about something else." And he does.
"Maybe that's why a lot of non-climbers read my books. Maybe
they're more accessible like that. The trouble is that no matter how
good say, A Shining Mountain is, and I think it's a brilliant book,
there's not many non-climbers going to read it, because it's about an
extremely difficult ascent of Changabang and if they don't know
anything about climbing, it's elitist before they start it."
He also questions the point of some expedition books. After first
stressing the high quality of a lot of mountaineering literature, he
ponders: "Sometimes I wonder why some of these books are produced, I
don't mean to sound arrogant, a lot of formulaic-type expedition
books - got a plane, climbed mountain, failed on mountain, came home
again - and you think, well, why have they published this book? There
seems to be a confusion between literature and photobooks, mixing
them up together."
His own books are anything but contrived, I wonder whether he
finds it hard to be so open, so utterly honest in print. "Not
really," he says. "I like writing like that and I find it natural to
write like that and I'm not self-conscious about saying these things
because they happen to be true ... I'm not going to write about
climbing in some understated way because it's one of the most
passionate things that I do.
'Halfway to describing how bad it was'
"I must admit that when I finished Touching The Void, feeling
worried because, with the reserved British attitude, maybe I'd gone
too emotional, too far, but how on earth are you supposed to express
something unless you do it honestly? Even then ... after finishing
Touching The Void, I thought maybe that's gone halfway to describing
how bad it was, but you can never really articulate it."
Even now he's never read Touching The Void, wary of the submerged
memories it might bring back, though interestingly he thinks the
regular repetition of the story may have had an effect similar to
post-traumatic stress treatment. Survivors of disasters like the
Kings Cross fire are encouraged to recount their experiences again
and again until the reality becomes a story instead of fact.
The other really striking aspect of Simpson's writing is the sheer
vividness of his physical descriptions. It's not just a neat turn of
phrase, though he has that too - on Simon Yates at the beginning of
Void: 'He had a thatch of blond hair, blue laughing eyes, and that
touch of madness that makes just a few people so special.' - more a
gift for describing in detail the nuances and sensations of specific
situations.
The 'you're f*cked matey' look in Yates' eyes for example, when he
sees Joe's leg in Peru or the violence of the avalanche on the
Courtes, even the tiniest details seem to be there. How does he do
it?
"My memories of falling and the avalanche are absolutely vivid.
The problem comes when you are trying to articulate them beyond just
the emotions ... when I tried to write that piece in Ghosts, I just
tried to be back in the avalanche ... I can remember the terror, I
can actually remember the physical sensation of what it was like and
I can remember hanging by that f*cking rope on the Dru. The best way
I can describe that feeling is by standing on top of a skyscraper and
a mate goes woooo ... pushes you off, then grabs hold of you."
'Touching The Void wasn't cathartic in any way, it just scared
the sh*t out of me'
"That," he continues. "Is why Peru really f*cked me up: writing
Touching The Void wasn't cathartic in any way, it just scared the
sh*t out of me. I had to recall all these things. I used to wake up
in a cold sweat every night ... John [Stephenson] used to say
there were these nightmarish screams and howls coming from my
room.
"To go through all the blocks you've put there in your mind to
stop yourself remembering was actually quite painful, quite
disturbing and maybe that's why I don't particularly want to read
Touching The Void."
Writing has also affected the way he looks at the world. Not so
much climbing he says, but when travelling or in the pub: "My nearest
analogy would be when I started paragliding; prior to that I didn't
know anything about lift or windforce, suddenly I started flying and
when I saw a bird, I'd look at how it was flying or notice smoke
coming from a chimney and watch which way it was blowing. It had
always been there, but the fact that flying meant wind was an actual
force you had to use and you had to understand it to see whether you
could fly or not, meant I used to notice things I hadn't before and
it's a bit like that with writing.
"I look at things and think yeah, I'd really like to write about
that, what is it about that I like, what would describe it, or create
the emotions that it creates in me. I take notebooks around, I even
take notebooks to the bloody pub because if you have a good idea, you
haven't got a notebook, you get pissed, wake up and you can't
remember anything."
To be honest his short term memory is pretty crap, probably as a
result of nutting too many rocks, but he remembers the big things,
the important things. Re-read The Water People after This Game of
Ghosts and it's immediately apparent how he's worked in people and
events from his own life, the avalanche is just one example.
It was his novel that proved to him that he was more than a
one-book wonder, that he could write, but also sign-posted his desire
and ability to cover more than climbing. "I let go a bit and tried to
write more expansively," he says.
If you were wondering, Jimmy is based on Joe himself, while Chris
incorporates elements of himself and of a friend. The most satisfying
characters though were the ones conjured out of thin air, the Major
and the Hunter. "You know this business about writing fiction where
they say the characters come to life? I'd always thought, bollocks,
but that happened with those two characters, they weren't even in it
initially. I really enjoyed it seeing that happen."
Storms of Silence
Void, This Game of Ghosts - his personal favourite - and Water
People are almost like a trilogy, three different types of book, but
sharing common ground. 'Storms of Silence' takes another step away
from pure climbing writing. Its subject is the brutality and virtual
cultural genocide inflicted on Tibet by China and "a sense of
travelling with your eyes open, the business of going to Tibet and
learning about the history.
"When you know the history, you're making excuses for yourself,
learning more and being appalled by what you seem to have supported
by going there ... the fact is, you often go to countries with an
appalling human rights record and play essentially luxurious western
games." By which he means climbing. His message is: "It doesn't mean
you shouldn't do it, but you should try and come back with a fuller
perspective of other people's lives and other people's cultures."
It's a far cry from the obsessive route-bagger who swaggers
through the first half of this Game Of Ghosts, the young tyro who
finished his degree only out of duty to his parents then chose to
climb, the man who 'didn't want a career, marriage or family,
anything that would tie me down.'
"As you get older you think you're going to live a bit longer,
start being a bit more aware of your own mortality, stop thinking
this business that you know, you're going to die at 30."
Looking back, he's brutally honest about Siula Grande; the route
he climbed with Yates, the South West face is still unrepeated. He
says now that the only reason they were able to climb it was that the
weather was terrible, dumping snow on the face - "I've seen pictures
taken a year later and the icefield's brown." - the nightmarish,
double-corniced descent ridge is, in fact, the normal route on the
mountain.
Friends like Yates have gone on to more extreme routes, but Joe's
ambitions have been moderated, both by the physical legacy of Peru
and Pachermo and by a wider, more receptive state of mind that he
suggests owes much to the writing process. He claims to climb "in a
blue funk".
'I climb in a different way now, as much to travel...'
"I don't think I'll ever climb to that grade again, I don't
particularly want to. I climb in a different way now, as much to
travel - although I saw a new route last summer and promptly went and
did it, I'm a bit of a tart as far as that's concerned - I'm going
out to Peru this summer and guiding some treks with High Places. I'm
paid for it, but not much, I'm doing it as much because it gets me
free climbing. After three weeks they go home, my mate comes out and
we know what we're going to do, just very beautiful-looking
mountains."
He enthuses about guiding. "What's really good about it is that it
stops you taking it all for granted. I go on so many trips, I just
think it's natural, then you see people, heads full of magic, and you
think Christ, I'm taking a lot for granted, this is brilliant, this
view is stunning. This is why I want to be here. That's what I like
about it; you appreciate it more for yourself."
Not that he doesn't appreciate the UK, he loves the Peak, Gogarth,
Cornwall and is happily ensconced in Sheffield after overdosing on
travelling in 1994. Ask him about future plans and his face lights up
with genuine enthusiasm. Guiding in Peru followed by climbing in the
Cordillera Blanca, Colorado in May, Africa at Christmas guiding on
Kilimanjaro and then rock climbing in Thailand, a pure holiday;
"Beaches and bolted climbing," he laughs flourishing a glossy
brochure. "Look at that and go green. And we're just booking Pumori,
where I failed in 1992 with a broken ankle..."
"We want to go there in winter, got our eye on a new route, which
has almost certainly been done ..." Ha! I interject, you said you
don't do new routes ... "Well I don't [laughs]; there's a
very nice line, but ... we'll wait and see,"
It's hard not to like someone whose enthusiasm for everything he
does is so blatantly, obviously genuine. Apparently there have been
mutterings that he's 'starting to believe his own publicity', to take
himself too seriously, but all the opinionated intensity is underlaid
by a quiet awareness of his own good fortune: "I'm very lucky in what
I've got," he concludes. "I don't regret anything that's led to that.
I could have done without some of the pain ... but I think I'm really
lucky, I can't complain. I'm also very aware it could all turn to
ashes in five seconds."
And the future? A non-climbing novel perhaps, Simpson thinks, and he
muses, perhaps a spoof about modern mountaineering and commercial,
guided expeditions, a Rum Doodle for the nineties. As one door
slams shut, another, maybe a wider one, opens.
© Jon Doran (Editor
OUTDOORSmagic.com)
Note: Joe is currently part way through his latest book, a novel. Meanwhile the film rights to Touching The Void are owned by Tom Cruise's production company.
