The Moth and the Mountain

by Ed Caesar

  * * *

  Wilson did not die. He was healed, and he returned to see his friends, fitter and happier than ever. But how? The circumstances surrounding this episode are mysterious, to say the least. In Dennis Roberts’s account of Maurice Wilson’s life, I’ll Climb Mount Everest Alone, he suggests that Wilson went to visit a faith healer in Mayfair, one of the wealthiest areas of London. This healer, Roberts writes, cured Wilson of his ailments, and depression, through a prescription of prayer and fasting. But the man responsible for this sea change is never named by Wilson, or in any subsequent conversation with the Evanses. Moreover, if such a person existed with the extraordinary powers Roberts ascribed to him, you might have thought he would have been written about in a newspaper or magazine. But Roberts’s description of the healer is seemingly the only mention of him, in any publication.

  Fifteen months after his revival, Wilson described this curious period in his life in a letter to a bestselling Christian author, A. J. Russell, who was also the managing editor of the Sunday Express—then one of the most powerful newspapers in the world. The context of the letter is important. At the time, Wilson hoped Russell might intercede, either with the Foreign Office or with influential journalists, to gain Wilson permission to fly his airplane to Everest. In the letter, Wilson described an unorthodox London physician with near-magical powers:

  Three years ago I was in prosperous business when, largely through overwork, I found myself in a serious nervous breakdown and was put on a time limit. I cleared. Fortunately, through the fog, I realized that, cost what it may, my main object must be to build a new man. In California, Canada, and in Europe, orthodox medicine was powerless to give me any relief. I went to the unorthodox. Through the guidance of a friend, I met a man who, 17 years previously, had cured himself of five “fatal” diseases after being given at most three months to live by doctors. As most people do automatically, he turned to the Bible for consolation; after a period spent on the New Testament he drifted into a coma and had a vision. Amongst other unorthodox methods of living taught by Jesus Christ, he fasted for 35 days… result… complete cure. He was a wealthy man and immediately made it his job to offer proved enlightenment to a medical professional who had pronounced him “hopeless.” Though they had living proof before them they were not ready to accept the teaching of Christ; he sold all that he had and has since spent the whole of his fortune on showing mainly the poor the true Laws of Living. During his period of Service, his methods have cured cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, T.B., diabetes, venereal disease and all other known cases of “fatal” diseases, including yours truly.

  This account is difficult to square with other known facts about Wilson’s life, but it does offer some clues to unlock the mysterious conversion he underwent. Much of what Wilson describes in this passage mirrors A. J. Russell’s own account of an American evangelist named Frank Buchman, who was the founder of the Oxford Group of Christians. Russell had written about Buchman in his book For Sinners Only, which Wilson read several times. Like the “healer” of Wilson’s account, Buchman had a vision that led him to start a movement in which Christians submitted themselves entirely to God’s will. (The central tenets of the Oxford Group’s philosophy would later form the basis of the Alcoholics Anonymous program.) The similarities between Buchman’s and Wilson’s healer echo even at the level of geography. For a time, Buchman lived at Brown’s Hotel, in Mayfair.

  When viewed in this light, it’s hard to see Wilson’s letter to Russell as an accurate report of real events. It looks much more like a cleverly constructed fantasy to impress an influential man. Wilson wanted a favor from Russell, and so he flattered him. A reasonable conclusion to draw is that Wilson never saw a mystery faith healer in Mayfair; he only read about one.

  Wilson apparently did fast in this period, however, taking only small portions of food and water in the first few days, and then only water for a final period that lasted at least three weeks. While doing so, he claimed to have shaken off the depression and illness that he thought was killing him. For the rest of his life, he retained his belief that periodic fasting and prayer could cure and rebuild him, in body and soul. If such rigor seems at odds with Wilson’s love of women, or nightclubs, or numerology, then it is far from the only contradiction in his life.

  * * *

  To understand Wilson’s spiritual awakening, it’s helpful to glimpse some of the intellectual and spiritual movements coursing through the anglophone world in the period. The late 1920s, when Wilson’s life in New Zealand had turned “topsy turvy,” was a cathartic period in the postwar reckoning.

  For nearly a decade after the war, both Britain and her overseas dominions seemed concussed by the monstrous conflict—unable, or unwilling, to process what had happened. Herbert Read, the writer who fought near Wilson in the Spring Offensive of 1918, composed a short, fine, and unvarnished account of that awful experience, In Retreat, in 1919. Nobody would publish it, despite its literary and historical merit. The problem, Read concluded, was in “the public mind.” For several years after the war, the conflict “was still a sentimental illusion: it was a subject for pathos, for platitude, even for rationalisation. It was not yet time for the simple facts.”

  Read’s book was eventually published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s house, the Hogarth Press, in 1925. In the years that followed, many more artists and writers confronted their experiences of the war. The public mind was now ready. In London’s West End, R. C. Sherriff’s play Journey’s End—set in a trench, in 1918—sold out night after night and soon toured around the world. Edmund Blunden’s mesmerizing Undertones of War, and Robert Graves’s bleakly comic memoir, Good-Bye to All That, broke new ground in their portrayals of the war. Meanwhile, Erich Remarque’s worm’s-eye German trench novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, sold many millions of copies both in its first language and in translation. It now seemed possible, in books and plays at least, to bridge the divide between those who had experienced the catastrophe firsthand, and those who had not. Wilson was a voracious reader, and there is scant chance this literature passed him by.

  Meanwhile, another movement grew. During the war itself, many soldiers at the front line became deeply superstitious. British troops looked for signs everywhere. For instance, a famous and widespread belief was that the war would not end until the statue of the Golden Virgin on top of the battered basilica in the town of Albert had fallen. Troops also invested cards and numbers with great meaning. Triskaidekaphobia—an extreme fear of the number 13—was widely shared. A belief in the spirit world was commonplace. Visits to psychics grew more popular. Many of the troops who in civilian life would have called themselves Christian carried with them amulets to ward off death: a rabbit’s foot, or a Bible pierced with a bullet. It wasn’t that traditional beliefs had been abandoned. Magic and faith intertwined.

  Perhaps the most extreme example of this peculiar mixture was from Frederick Rawson, a business-minded former Christian Scientist. He offered to create “Bullet-Proof Soldiers” at his London clinic, for a price. Rawson’s theory was that men could diffuse physical matter—even bullets and shells—through the power of the mind. Visitors to Rawson’s clinic were asked to say aloud, “There is no danger; man is surrounded by divine love; there is no matter; all is spirit and manifestation of spirit.” Of course, Rawson’s psychic medicine could not work. The interesting thing, however, is how many customers he attracted. Superstitions such as these were natural reactions to the charnel house in which the troops found themselves: a way to impress order on chaos. But the residue of such beliefs continued long into the following decades.

  The most famous occultist of the postwar period was Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Conan Doyle was a spiritualist—he believed that it was possible to contact the spirits of the dead through mediums. His interest in spiritualism began during the war, spurred by the deaths of many family members and friends. In 1920, Conan Doyle toured Australia and New Zealand, lecturing
to packed houses on his belief in an accessible spirit world. His book about that tour, The Wanderings of a Spiritualist, was widely read and prompted a review from the Sunday Express that was more generous than its headline—“Is Conan Doyle mad?”—suggested. At the time, there was a greater acceptance of practices that would once have been considered superstitious, or even heretical. Many of these mystical or spiritual strains of intellectual life in the 1920s eventually found their way to Wilson.

  * * *

  By the early 1930s, Wilson’s worldview was a strange mixture of various ideas that were en vogue in London. His writing from the period is a slippery rock face on which to gain a fingerhold—but it offers some clues. Certainly, Wilson’s rebirth in 1932 was not exclusively, or even predominantly, Christian.

  There is no doubt that the Oxford Group of adventurous and liberal Christians, including A. J. Russell, were an influence. The group was interested in the idea of submission: of letting one’s actions, fate, and even sexual desires be steered by a higher power. The idea of submission was attractive to Wilson. In several letters he spoke about wanting to become naive and boyish again, untethered from worldly concerns. His favorite verse from the Bible was Jesus’s exhortation, in the Gospel of Matthew, for his followers to become “as little children.” In letters written during moments of psychic crisis, it’s telling how often Wilson ferrets out early childhood memories. Naturally, those recollections are also from before the war.

  You can also intuit, in Wilson’s conversion, elements of New Thought—an offshoot of Christian Science that developed in America, then gained a foothold in London in this period. Adherents to New Thought broadly believed that positive or “right” thinking could lead to spiritual and medical healing, and that each human being was divine. Frederick Rawson, the mountebank who promised to make “Bullet-Proof Soldiers” through the power of the mind, was an adherent of New Thought. Wilson, with his lucky war, might have been forgiven if he fell prey to some bullet-proof thinking.

  Meanwhile, Wilson seemed equally attracted by a kind of thinly understood Indian mysticism. When he traveled in India, he carried with him not only a Bible but The Voice of the Silence, a slim text in which the theosophist Helena Blavatsky translated “golden precepts”—containing “eastern” Buddhist and pre-Buddhist thought—from Tibetan into English. (One of those precepts would later hold a particular resonance: “The moth attracted to the dazzling flame of thy night-lamp is doomed to perish in the viscid oil.”) Again and again in his writings, Wilson returned to his wish to reach a “golden” or higher plane of existence. He referred to his “golden friendships,” and to Enid as his “golden rod”; he said that he, Enid, and Len were sharing “something of gold, whilst others less fortunate are chasing after dross.” If nothing else, The Voice of the Silence colored his language.

  And then there was Mahatma Gandhi. In 1931, when Wilson returned to London, the charismatic Indian nationalist leader and mystic had visited England, drawing large crowds wherever he appeared. Wilson may even have seen him in person. Certainly, Wilson became fascinated by the asceticism shown by Gandhi, who was famous for fasting for long periods to atone for political violence, or to encourage unity between factions. The idea of purification through abstinence resonated.

  One story often told about Wilson is that while he was traveling back to England from New Zealand by ocean liner, the ship docked at a port in India. Some “yogis,” or holy men, boarded the ship there, and Wilson fell into conversation with them on the voyage to England. The yogis explained that they were strengthened through willful abnegation of bodily comforts, a philosophy that apparently impressed Wilson. But this episode, like a few others commonly told of Wilson, cannot have happened. Wilson’s boat from New Zealand did not make a stop in an Indian port; the Aorangi sailed around the other side of the world, to North America. However, the story has a general truth, even if the specifics are bunk. Wilson was interested in attaining power through abstinence in the manner of Indian yogis. Most likely, this curiosity was sparked by reading about Gandhi, during his visit of 1931, and Wilson’s subsequent interest in Buddhist literature.

  Regardless of the specific genesis of Wilson’s beliefs, his behavior in 1932 tells you everything you need to know about his state of mind. He felt he was polluted; he wanted to be washed clean. He considered his life adrift; he desired purpose. He wandered in the fog; he longed for a flashlight. He had lost the thread of his own story; he yearned for a plot.

  * * *

  At the end of his long fast in 1932, Wilson traveled by boat and train to Freiburg im Breisgau, in southern Germany, to recuperate. Although the war against Germany had only ended a little more than a decade earlier, Freiburg was a popular British tourist destination in the early 1930s. It felt like a haven for Wilson: a storybook town of Gothic churches and cobbles, nestled in the wooded hills of the Black Forest. On the hot summer days, the streets were cooled by an ingenious system of gutters called Bächle, which ferried water from the river Dreisam around town and gurgled all day long. Wilson loved this city of pealing bells and chocolate cake. Even better, Freiburg was cheap. The war, and its aftermath, had ravaged the Germany economy. A tourist who exchanged British pounds for German marks could live like a prince.

  Wilson was so thin when he arrived in Germany that his suits hung off him, like laundry on a rack. In Freiburg, he ate, drank, read, walked, regained his strength, and dusted off his rusty German. On some days, he would trek for twenty miles, alone. Then, three weeks into his two-month stay, he had a revelation. He was sitting in a café in the middle of Freiburg when he saw a newspaper article that mentioned the 1924 British expedition to Everest. You can’t know exactly which edition of which newspaper Wilson read, but what you know for sure is that the report enraptured him. A wild idea began to form in Wilson’s head: he was going to climb Mount Everest.

  CHAPTER SIX THE NAKED SOUL

  • 1865–1932 •

  When Maurice Wilson read that newspaper article about the 1924 Everest expedition in the Freiburg café, the story was already familiar to him. To Englishmen of Wilson’s age, the desire to reach the summit of Mount Everest would have seemed axiomatic. In 1923, George Mallory, the dashing alpinist and writer, was asked by a New York Times reporter why he wanted to climb Everest. He famously replied, “Because it’s there.” The rest of his response is less commonly cited, but more instructive:

  “Everest is the highest mountain in the world. Its existence is a challenge. The answer is instinctive, a part, I suppose, of man’s desire to conquer the universe.”

  The idea of “conquering the universe”—in particular, climbing its highest mountain—was not an article of faith for other cultures, or for previous generations. Everest was a modern and peculiarly British obsession. The mountain had only become known as Everest in the middle half of the nineteenth century, as the result of a multidecade British mapping project based in India, which was known as the Great Trigonometrical Survey. The survey used giant theodolites, which measured vertical and horizontal angles, to make startlingly precise estimates about the measurements of peaks in the subcontinent. The devices weighed more than a thousand pounds each; teams of a dozen were required to carry them. A group of “human computers” then applied the laws of physics and mathematics to the numbers produced by the theodolites, to fix the heights of the mountains.

  In 1852, a brilliant Indian mathematician at the survey named Radhanath Sikdar calculated that a mountain then known as Peak XV was the highest in the world, at exactly 29,000 feet. (Before then, Kanchenjunga, which was clearly visible from Darjeeling, was believed to be the world’s highest mountain.) The British director of the survey, Andrew Waugh, eventually renamed Peak XV Mount Everest after his predecessor, Sir George Everest, and proclaimed the mountain to be 29,002 feet high, to dispel the impression that he had simply chosen a round number. Wags noted that Waugh was the first person to put two feet on the top of Everest. Satellites have now fixed the height of the mo
untain at 29,035 feet.

  The local populations who lived near Everest knew the mountain by various names, including the Tibetan Chomolungma: “Goddess Mother of the Skies” or “Goddess Mother of the Earth” or “Goddess Mother of the Valley,” depending on whose translation you trusted. The Tibetans might not have known exactly how high its summit was, but neither did they much care. There was no earthly reason to climb Chomolungma. The very idea of ascending high mountains for sport was a Western one, which had only recently begun in earnest.

  * * *

  In the fourteenth century, Petrarch, the Tuscan poet, climbed the 6,263 feet of Mont Ventoux. “My only motive,” Petrarch wrote in a letter to a friend, “was the wish to see what so great an elevation had to offer.”

  Petrarch was a man beyond his time, in so many ways. Before the nineteenth century, mountains had been climbed for military, political, or scientific reasons. Sometimes—as in Petrarch’s case—people even did so for pleasure. But the modern idea of alpinism as a sport, with its imperative to “bag” virgin summits, was a Victorian invention, instigated by the English. In 1854, a barrister named Alfred Wills climbed the Wetterhorn, in Switzerland, with local guides. His account, which was published in a book two years later, delighted readers. Climbing for kicks became an addictive pastime for adventurous and affluent Englishmen.

  Over the next decade or so, the highest peaks in the Alps were reached in a period now referred to as the Golden Age of Alpinism. This era reached its end when the pioneering alpinist and explorer Edward Whymper—inventor of the Whymper tent—became the first man to reach the 14,692-feet summit of the Matterhorn in 1865, only to witness four of his party dying on the descent. This pyrrhic victory was grippingly related in Whymper’s worldwide 1871 bestseller, Scrambles Amongst the Alps. Soon, many tourists were arriving in Switzerland, hiring local guides, and climbing mountains.