"High Endeavours - The Life and Legend of Robin Smith" is a biography of the famous Scottish climber by his school-friend and early climbing-companion, Jimmy Cruikshank. Smith was only 23 when he was killed during an expedition to the Pamirs in 1962, but by then he already enjoyed a near-mythical reputation in climbing circles. An obituary piece in the Daily Express described him as "..a legend by the time he was twenty. He was to climbing what Stirling Moss is to Le Mans, Jim Baxter to Ibrox, Piggot to Newmarket." Of course, from the venerable position of 54 years, 23 seems a ridiculous age to die, for which no athletic immortality can ever compensate. The mountains are not some religion of such overriding importance that one should be prepared to die for them. And yet, thinking back to my own climbing experience during my student days in the early seventies, I can remember how mountaineering seemed to be so much more than just a sport, so much more existentially significant than a mere healthy outdoor pursuit. It somehow encompassed a whole series of aspects of what I thought life could or should be about - freedom and adventure, intensity of experience, vividness of impressions, pursuit of beauty, true companionship, a test of courage and resourcefulness, a bohemian indifference to the unmanly comforts of the consumer society, and, it must be admitted, a certain sense of lofty elevation above the common run of man and "straight" society in general. And, although I never had the push or the skill of a Robin Smith, I can sense these same motivations in him as I read of his various exploits, not least his own accounts of them. He wrote, both prose and poetry, in a "laconic", not to say cryptic style, heavily influenced by the "beat" writers of the time, influencing in turn the whole approach of a generation of mountain writers, away from fine sentiments and purple prose in the direction of a condensed and knowing understatement.
Mountain literature is a whole genre to itself, with a literary history of its own, from the classics such as Whymper's "Scrambles in the Alps" or Mummery's "My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus" through to modern works such as Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air" or Joe Simpson's "Touching the Void". As a student I would go off to the University Library purportedly to study, but would almost unconsciously drift off to the Mountaineering section and ardently peruse its impressive collection. A highly elastic "just five minutes" enabled me to carve my way through Winthrop-Young, Frank Smythe, Colin Kirkus, Charles Evans, Edmund Hillary, Showell Styles, J.H.B. Bell, Chris Bonnington, Joe Brown, Gervasutti, Lionel Terray, Gaston Rébuffat etc. etc., but my preferred writer was, and remains, W.H. Murray. Murray wrote his classic "Mountaineering in Scotland" in 1944 while a P.O.W. in Italy and Germany. Writing in a clear, but consciously literary style, Murray incorporates mountaineering into a greater quest for beauty and truth, whereby the vigorous focus on the here-and-now which climbing demands, interspersed with periods of profound relaxation and overwhelming impressions of natural beauty are somehow able to free the mind from its habitual reductionist thinking and allow it to glimpse the universal reality behind the veil of outward appearance. The book had a truly inspirational impact upon me when I first read it in 1969 - in the immediate sense of wanting to rush out and climb all the routes he described, but also in the sense of wanting to be (dare one say it?) a better person. I know this must sound priggish or even insipid, but I don't mean this in any moralistic, "goody-goody" way. Rather, Murray kindled in me a need to try to experience life to the full, that is to say, to seek to realise that, at every moment, like it or not, one participates in an infinitely greater reality than one's own dim and contradictory notions of oneself and that, approached in the right spirit, mountaineering can be a way to this higher realisation.
Of course, not all mountaineers are sages. Climbers are at least as susceptible as others to the weaknesses of vanity and self-love, of egotistical ambition and vainglory. In fact "hard man" snobbery is one of the most tiresome aspects of the whole climbing scene. And yet I feel that, avowed or unavowed, anyone who engages in an activity as intrinsically pointless as putting themselves in potential danger in order to climb up a piece of rock, is in some way in search of something more than "life" is ordinarily able to give. This was undoubtedly the case with Robin Smith, who, as an accomplished student of academic philosophy, was more than just a simple-minded enthusiast. Smith's own writing points to a high degree of self-awareness in his climbing activities. He certainly wasn't unaware of his own talent. He was good, and he knew it, and being good, not to say the best, was his burning ambition. But there is an implicit shadow in "High Endeavours", the suggestion of a degree of irresponibility in Smith's approach, a hint of an indifference to danger amounting to recklessness. Recklessness often has its roots in unhappiness, and a devil-may-care indifference to one's own personal safety can often be an expression of a deep inner insecurity. Born in India in 1938 in the age of the Raj, Smith was sent to boarding school from the age of seven - first at Morrison's Academy in Crieff and then at Watson's in Edinburgh. He would scarcely see his parents from one year to the next. Nor was he a "fit-in" sort of a child. Chronically disorganized and untidy, brilliant but inconsistent, his sensitive but prickly nature was probably ill-suited to the conformist rigours of a "privileged" education. He was a rebel, and his climbing was, at least in part, an expression of that rebellion. Did he take unnecessary risks because deep down he didn't care for his own life? Was his tragic death a psychological accident waiting to happen? And another thing occurs to me. I have frequently sensed that a self-destructive "fuck it" is one of the constantly recurring traits of the Scottish psyche. Maybe Robin Smith fell victim to the national temperament. Or perhaps his death was just a stupid accident.
