Harry's Absence: Looking for My Father on the Mountain

Harry’s Absence

Looking for My Father on the Mountain

Jonathan Scott

The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce quotations from the published works of James K. Baxter, Lawrence Durrell, and Patrick White.

For Kate, Rachel, Margaret, and Harry

When I was only semen in a gland

Or less than that, my father hung

From a torture post at Mud Farm

Because he would not kill. The guards

Fried sausages, and as the snow came darkly

I feared a death by cold in the cold groin

And plotted revolution. His black and swollen thumbs

Explained the brotherhood of man.

—James K. Baxter, ‘Pig Island Letters’

Sat. Raining again all day today. I have a fit of the blues. Just on seven months here today. I wonder how much longer it will all go on. There are lots [of things] one gets sick of—and most of all the barbed wire.

—Harry Scott to Tom and Louise Scott, January 1943

Now the world curves here beneath us

And we touch it, reaching down as

Children, hollow-footed.

—Harry Scott, ‘Elegy’

The young are mastered by the Dead.

—James K. Baxter, ‘Summer 1967’

Contents

Preface

Introduction:

Meeting Harry on the Mountain

Chapter I:

Dark Blue Light (with Apricots)

Chapter II:

The Regiment of Women

Chapter III:

Harry’s Silence

Chapter IV:

Mandy Parker’s Private Parts

Chapter V:

Harry’s Belief

Chapter VI:

Sex and the Lash

Chapter VII:

Intensity of Wakefulness

Chapter VIII:

Plato’s Nightmare

Chapter IX:

Sarsparilla’s Dream

Chapter X:

To Party

Chapter XI:

Things Worth Going to Jail For

Chapter XII:

The Wound

XIII:

Experience (I): South

Chapter XIV:

Liechtenstein

Chapter XV:

Harry’s Love

Chapter XVI:

War

Chapter XVII:

Experience (2): North

Chapter XVIII:

Wedding in Olymbos

Chapter XIX:

Forcing the Mountain

Chapter XX:

The Girl in the Bookshop

Chapter XXI:

The Significance of Living Dangerously

Conclusion

Appendix I

Appendix II

Appendix III

Appendix IV

Preface

‘Meantime,’ wrote Harry in 1945, ‘I pondered on the problem of life and death.’ My first debt is to my father, not only for the person he was, but for the record which remains. It is no small consolation to understand his death in the context of such a rich absorption by the question of living.

This book is not a biography, or autobiography, but a more specific emotional reconstruction. It is the story of a death: its background and aftermath, causes and consequences, told through the medium of life. Death is a living thing, and this is the biography of one.

One aspect of death in life is grief, which is not only a response to, but species of it. A second is that pushing at the boundaries of experience which involves ‘the risking of premature death in living’. As our pre-modern ancestors understood, death and birth do not simply mark the termini of a life but occur continually throughout it. The clerical profession ministered to one as the medical profession does now to the other. This is our relationship to time, and we must hope, for every death, for something to be born.

This book emerged from a personal loss. I remember particularly my walks around the Peak district, grief and beauty face to face, no way through from one to the other. Sharp mornings lay in soft light, the smell of the country in the air; dumb animals stared uncomprehending across dry stone walls and I back at them. Without Janet Reibstein I can imagine no such sally back toward a life even then visibly worth having.

I am grateful for the forbearance of Margaret, Rachel and Kate, who appear here in my story, not theirs. They could all write their own, and were all affected at least as deeply as myself by the loss of Harry. I am indebted to Kate for guidance with the psychology, Rachel for editorial advice, and Margaret for generous cooperation. To them the book is dedicated, with gratitude and love.

Warm thanks for their friendship and criticism belong to Tim Hochstrasser, Nancy Sturman, Di and John Morrow, David and Andrea Thomson, Colin and Sandra Davis, John Morrill, Brian Dobbie, Miles and Maria Fairburn, Mike Braddick, Kathleen Bennett, Patrick and Liz Collinson, Charles Taylor, Roger Paulin, Fergus Barrowman and Adrian Johns. I am deeply grateful to Alan Williams, Colin Bennett and Julia Sutherland for their generosity and hospitality. For all of these things and others I am indebted to Anne, with whom I remember Jane.

The writing of this book began on the island of Lesbos in 1993. To the exhilaration caused by the discovery of my father must be attributed (among other things) the most expensive telephone call ever made from a certain hotel near the beautiful town of Mythimna (Molivos). Not for the first time I wish to record my gratitude to Greece for olives, vines, wild country, light and sea.

Introduction:

Meeting Harry on the Mountain

We have come from elsewhere, choked by the tumour of life, wishing to be

Made over; and the spirits of the unwise will not haunt

Or trouble us. They are too much like ourselves.

It is perhaps that we search in the face of the storm for the features of a Father

Lost elsewhere; we discover a burnt tree-trunk or the bones of a dog;

And we are changing slowly into columns of gutted stone.

James K. Baxter, ‘The Searchers’

On 1 February 1960 Thomas Henry Scott died in a climbing accident on New Zealand’s highest mountain. He was 41. He had been head of the psychology department at Auckland University for three years. He left a pregnant wife and two children.

The younger (soon to be middle) child, I was two years old. Although my father’s death caused widespread emotional devastation it left no trace in my conscious memory. I was not aware of missing someone I did not remember having known. His absence, on the other hand, became immediately a powerful and pivotal family personality. Twenty-nine years later my older sister named the first of the next generation Harry (that he was male was just good luck); I became a historian (imagining the past present was never a problem); my younger sister became a psychologist.

In 1993, now living in Cambridge, England, I discovered a box of my father’s papers. This had been given to me ten years previously, but I had not understood, or bothered to examine, what it contained. I had no conscious emotional connection with him, and had long resisted my mother’s attempts to create one. This creation would have to be mine.

Days and nights disappeared as I read with astonishment. There were letters, poems, short stories, academic manuscripts, diaries, photos, maps, testimonies by others, committee minutes, published material, even recordings of his voice. There was a 100-page account, written in detention, of his emotional and intellectual development. That I became filled with powerful and conflicting emotions is hardly surprising. It is no small thing to stumble upon your dead father in middle life. I remembered the seventeenth-century radicals who spoke of being filled by God, of His strewing of the soul with grace. Bereft of God, or grace, I came instead to know Harry for the first time.

In all this the timing seemed crucial. It appeared, understandably but wrongly, that these papers had been left by him for me. I was the historian, but I was also the one stumbling, storm-blinded, through mountainous rubble along the edge of a ravine. I was lost, but I was looking, as I had always been, for some trace: a shirt button; a body. Then high up in a cold wind he appeared. Preoccupied, as always, with the matter in hand, he was fumbling with a rope. In tears I called into the gale: ‘Where have you been?’ I was thinking not just of myself, but of the whole bloodied and broken family. I didn’t say: ‘Why couldn’t you have held your footing you stupid fucker!’ The second and third impulses of love under these circumstances are fear and rage. Nor did he say: ‘Where have you been? Why has it taken you so long to find me?’ Instead, his foothold secure, he reached out a strong climber’s arm across the valley of time to say: ‘It is dangerous; people fall; I’m sorry I haven’t been there; be courageous: you are my son.’

This book is the conversation Harry and I had upon the mountain. He has spoken in his words, I in mine. From each there was much the other wished to hear. Yet we have concentrated upon what most needed to be explained. This is the story of Harry’s absence: of two male experiences, each rooted in the grieving of a mother, which death not only linked but defined. Death has the capacity not simply to sever experience between generations, but to connect it.

Here as elsewhere I have emphasised the relationship, rather than the distinction, between emotional and intellectual history. What we call intellectual biography is frequently the accumulation, through education or experience, of reasons for our feelings. My father’s search was informed by culture and nature; society and silence; a mountain of books on the one hand and mountains on the other. My own emotional and intellectual development has been preoccupied by, as we were linked through, the dimension of time.

I have used history to travel outside my country, in space and time: I believe such broadening of experience to be its educative function. I was set on this course in a New Zealand history department, full of talent and enriched by European exiles from the last war. I now find myself living on the other side of the world. Having found outside it an historical topography as grand as New Zealand’s nature, my life must try to bridge both. Meanwhile I abhor the modern parochialism and nationalism to which history has given way in some New Zealand universities today, and which is failing a generation of students. In a recent obituary, Sir Keith Sinclair was described as ‘entirely free of Eurocentric inclinations … he was New Zealand’s greatest historian’. Perhaps the writer didn’t know about the great New Zealanders writing the history of the rest of the world.

My father loved New Zealand as much as, knew it better than, and wrote about it more than I have. But after reading in history, literature, politics, philosophy, sociology and psychology, he developed a critique both of nationalism and of nation-states. He understood what his son learned through early modern European history: that the state was created by and for war. When the time came he would not substitute allegiance to his country for citizenship of the world. In time of war, those who participate in armed global division enjoy the company of their fellows. Those who do not are put behind barbed wire.

The final, not least healing effect of this reunion with Harry was grief. Now at last I cried not for my mother’s loss, which had haunted my entire life, but for my own. No longer the property of other people, he embraced me tenderly and walked from the present into the past. His absence was mine.

Chapter I:

Dark Blue Light (with Apricots)

Tutorial passed pleasantly enough tonight—they got onto premonitions of death and similar pleasant phenomena, so I told them a few climbing stories.

Harry Scott to Margaret Scott, 1952

The two survivors … scanned the line of fall through field glasses, and called out. A high westerly wind was raging, and nothing was seen or heard.

Christchurch Press, 2 February 1960

The loneliness of an island may lie bleached and exposed. It is a particular place, husbanding abnormality. Yet it is strong, its aloneness connected and composed. It is not only limited, but rendered unlimited by water. We must not equate an island solely with its land. It is made what it is also by the sea in which it stands.

New Zealand lies southerly in the greatest ocean in the world, high-sided under dark blue light. In Britain the light is fragile, tactile. In Greece it is clear and hard. In Tahiti, where the sun connects the sea and air into a single glass, it is bright blue. Five thousand miles southwest that hue has changed. Blue-black is the colour of the land. Yet no less bright: no ozone, no shelter, by thousands of miles of ocean on every side light is collected, reflected. Nature is a power which New Zealanders can deface but which they cannot, and do not particularly wish to, tame.

It is in the Mackenzie country of the South Island that we find this country’s spectacular blue heart. Here the dramatic powder-blue lakes are given their colour by the glacial mastication of stone. Here, as if the general light were not enough, drawing colour and power from the sea, stone in water throws colour at the sky.

To the southwest are the forested mountains of Fiordland. No less extraordinary, these are the primary site of New Zealand’s religion. Ask any British historian what is special to them about their geography—country or city; dry stone-walled upland or walled town—they will tell you that it has been inhabited for thousands of years. It has a history beyond the reach of human knowledge. Ask a New Zealander the same question and they will tell you that in Fiordland there are places where no human being has ever set foot. It is this truth, in the minds of hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders, who have not set foot in Fiordland either, which establishes a virginity cult as powerful, if not as ancient, as that of Rome. This is the southern religion of the unput foot.

On the eastern shore of Lake Tekapo there is a famous small chapel. Through the western window one sees in microcosm the alpine view which spans the lake. Over an impossible blue, in the lightest air on earth, under perpetual snow, the Southern Alps stand like minted teeth. At their centre, and highest, is Mount Cook. To say that on a sunny sharp day it is one of the most beautiful sights on earth may be to mis-state the case. It is unearthly, and climbers regularly abandon sea-level to seek it.

It was in Tekapo that my mother last saw my father. This sight occurred, appropriately enough, in a rear-vision mirror. Preparations for the ascent finished, Harry had bought apricots. As Margaret drove away, the bag burst. Her last glimpse of her husband was of a man ducking and weaving through traffic to retrieve apricots.

Two evenings later there was a knock at the door. A policeman asked to speak to my grandfather. The following morning (2 February 1960) Margaret read in the Christchurch Press under the headline ‘TWO MOUNTAINEERS KILLED: 6,000 ft Fall Off Ice Cap Of Mount Cook’:

Two of a party of four climbers fell 6,000 ft to their deaths off the ice cap of Mount Cook’s high peak yesterday afternoon. The accident occurred near the Zerbruggen ridge, a well known landmark near the summit. The dead men were: MELVILLE JAMES PITT GLASGOW, married, with four children … and DR. T.H. SCOTT, married, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Auckland.

That evening, ‘CLIMBERS BODIES NOT RECOVERED: Bad Weather Prevents Search on Mt. Cook’:

The bodies of the two climbers who yesterday … slipped on the ice and plunged off the east face of Mt Cook … have not yet been recovered. Conditions today were impossible for searching, and the search parties were confined to the Haast Hut … Chief Inspector C.H. Reardon, of the Timaru police, said today that after making their way in bad weather to the Haast Hut the two survivors … Messrs Bruce Young and Jack Woodward … were badly shaken … the climbers, victims of a tragedy which had shocked everyone from Christchurch to the Hermitage, were roped in pairs.

It was raining in the search area and visibility was bad … Mount Cook National Park Board chief ranger Mr H. Ayres said that there was ‘only a 50-50 chance of recovering the bodies’ … Mr Reardon said ‘I want the search party to go in and come out as quickly as possible … Conditions are extremely dangerous.’

The following day (3 February): ‘Search For Bodies on Mount Cook Abandoned’:

Announcing this evening that the search had been abandoned, Chief Inspector Reardon said any further search would involve too great a risk … Snow conditions are anything but safe.

In cloudy, overcast but calm weather a strong party left the Haast Hut at 8 am today … The route taken under the leadership of Mr Ayres … was over the Glacier Dome (8047 ft) [and] … the Linda Glacier … to the snow shelf on the northwest side of the Zerbruggen ridge … a ski-equipped Cessna aircraft assisted … A comprehensive search was made … and at times the east face above them was shrouded in mist … the bodies were not on any of the known routes … It was impossible to scale the face to look for them … and on two occasions while roped together and wearing crampons members of the party had to run for shelter because of avalanches coming down.

Without a body, there was no funeral. At the inquest on 24 May Harry Ayres stated:

There were five ropes of two men each, which meant that a fair area could be searched. The line of search made eliminates the possibility of the bodies being on the shelf. This means that the bodies are high up on the east face of Mount Cook, possibly caught on rocks or broken ice.

‘Life is inside—what we have done,’ Harry had written. ‘Death is present before it has come.’ As a family we were broken by it; hooked on rear-vision, and scattered like the apricots from his hand.

Chapter II:

The Regiment of Women

‘Do carrots …?’ I’d say, in that

purposeful mechanical way, and you’d be

pressing a finger onto my knee

with a breath of eucalyptus, tree bark, tobacco,

and yellow eyes, life gone away; you’d raise your

anchovine eyebrows, you had your way

of examining me, minutely, turning my frame

like a benevolent bee-keeper; as if to say,

as I used to be you, so one day

you’ll be me, because I had your chances,

but I threw them away, young man

you listen to me; my mother always used to say

eat them, now Do carrots what son?

‘Do carrots really help you see your way

in the dark Grandpa?’

Jonathan Scott, ‘Do Carrots’

Harry’s death moved the family back from subtropical Auckland to the grander-limbed, hard-surfaced Presbyterian South. Of this place he had written ten years earlier:

On the Port Hills [of Christchurch] … I had walked in the tussocks blowing in the wind, and looked across the great plain to the Alps beyond. I had tried to grasp the significance of its occupation by farmers—the taming of the land from the sea and as far as the eye could reach. Now I went inland to the mountains themselves. I went … south, out of Canterbury and over the Lindis Pass into Central Otago … it was noble and old country and lovely with tussock. I knew then that I had come to what could have been a continent, from places that could only be in an island.

In Christchurch we fell in with Margaret’s family: the hale, awesome and redoubtable clan of Bennett.

At its core were Grandmother and Auntie Bell. Isobel was Grandma’s sister, a divorcee who had gone into the world and discovered that men were no bloody good. Thereafter she adopted a harsh view of the world, though it was remarked in her favour that within the house her disgruntlement was fairly and evenly distributed. I found her terrifying until, after some particularly misanthropic pronouncement, I noticed her winking at me. I came to love her.

Whether Grandma thought that men were any good was not vouchsafed, at least to me. Certainly her own mother had renounced sex almost immediately after receiving intelligence of it. Thereafter (despite causing some children) her husband had lived a life of the kind of dutiful suffering that is part of what has made New Zealand what it is today: a country with among the highest per capita fatalities in both first and second world wars, and which put up a good show in Korea, Vietnam and the Falklands too. It was my grandmother who told me how they survived during the Depression by collecting the wool from barbed-wire fences. It was my grandmother who informed me, in a rather thin-lipped way, that butter and jam were invented to impart flavour to bread, not the other way around. Throughout her life she said ‘och’—a word for which there was much call in the house, particularly in her opinion.

Pearl Bennett compiled her family genealogy which, in my childhood memory, drew upon the murderous progress of the clan of Allan. They had fallen across the sea from Scotland into Ulster, smiting the papist hip and thigh. From there, their morality tempered to a slicing edge, they crossed the world 12,000 miles south to Melbourne, and then 1,500 miles east to Dunedin, where they arrived in 1885 to find themselves in what appeared to be Scotland again. It was almost deserted, so there was nothing to temper their morality against, except the wildlife (the humble muttonbird, the trusting penguin, the no less migratory whale); the flora (ruthlessly eliminated); and one another. Turning away from the sea they drove on into the blue air and yellow grass of central Otago. There they found the power and greatness of a continent locked inside the precise fortress of an island. Grandfather met Grandma at Otago University, where he was studying medicine and she domestic science. He may have mistaken for a trained homemaker this still-burning fragment of a clannish projectile.

My world lay under the government of women. I remember Grandma’s face as I returned from my first day at school, watching through the bus window for the appointed place of meeting. There she was, smiling and waving vigorously. I waved back as the bus shot past and into town. Smiling and waving was apparently not enough to stop the vehicle, and by the time I had been returned, a tearful refugee, Grandmother was cross and Grandfather had been summoned from work to comb the city in his ancient Wolseley. It must eventually be borne home to every child that there is more to the order