The Cabin in the Mountains

by Robert Ferguson

  Bernhard Herre, like Knut Hamsun’s Glahn, was a young man who had found himself on the losing side of a love triangle. In Herre’s case it involved Camilla Wergeland, sister of the poet Henrik Wergeland, and Herre’s own house-tutor, the poet Johan Sebastian Welhaven.† As Glahn does in the novel, Herre made unsuccessful efforts to deal with his defeat by trying to bring the couple together; and as in Glahn’s case, there is an element of tragic uncertainty surrounding his death. After Herre’s death, two of his friends, the folklorist P. C. Asbjørnsen and his former tutor and rival Welhaven, went through his papers and published the few short accounts that make up En Jægers Erindringer. Proceeds from the sale of the book went to Herre’s mother.

  (left to right) Bernhard Herre, Camilla Wergeland and Johan Sebastian Welhaven.

  En Jægers Erindringer has become a classic of Norwegian nature writing. Herre’s closely observed and lyrical but unsentimental descriptions of the animal – and human – life he encountered while hunting in the forests around Oslo marked a break with the prevailing and prettifying traditions of national romanticism. Reading it, one is rarely conscious of listening to a voice that speaks to us from over a hundred and fifty years ago. This effect of timelessness and immediacy is such a striking characteristic of the best of Knut Hamsun’s early writing, and of Pan in particular, that Hamsun must have derived something from Herre’s style as well as his tragic fate.

  Pan changed my life. It brought me to Norway, and to everything good that Norway has given me, and for that reason alone the novel will always have a special place in my heart. But I confess to feeling a kind of relief at the glimpse behind the mirror that came with my discovery of Herre’s writing and the story of his life. Unlike the hero of Hamsun’s book, he was no handsome and enigmatic soldier but a drudge who worked all his days as a copyist in the Treasury Department. A borderline alcoholic, he frequently got into fights and on numerous occasions was summoned to appear in court when one of his hunting dogs – it could have been Falkøie, Coquette, Feiom or Linge – had bitten someone.

  I resumed the work of shovelling snow off the terrace, recalling as I did so a cabin with rather brighter associations than Glahn’s and the sad hovels that crop up here and there in Herre’s reminiscences. In 1937 the Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer Arne Næss built himself a cabin under the Hallingskarvet ridge in the Jotunheimen range. ‘Tvergastein’, as he called it, was over fifteen hundred metres above sea level. In 1942 he built another, smaller cabin even higher up the Skarvet, on a tiny ridge from where a thousand different climbing routes lay open to him. Næss’s cabins too were born of a long-held dream: from his earliest childhood he had dreamed of one day establishing a permanent, personal relationship with the great ridge. He experienced Hallingskarvet as ‘overwhelmingly powerful, mighty, solid, peaceful at its core, self-respecting – qualities I wished I had possessed myself but, in the main, never did’.

  Hallingskarvet ridge in the Jotunheimen range.

  Thinking about Næss led me to reflect on the emergence during the last century of a strikingly close association between mountains and philosophers in Norwegian intellectual life. Næss and Peter Wessel Zapffe, two of the most admired thinkers in Norway in the twentieth century, were men whose lifelong involvement with mountaineering became an integral part of their idea of themselves as philosophers. Næss, who died in 2009 at the age of ninety-six, held the chair in philosophy at the University of Oslo from 1939 to 1969. He has an international reputation as the foremost proponent of a philosophy of life he called ‘Deep Ecology’, in whose development he was influenced by Rachel Carson’s seminal work of environmental concern, Silent Spring (1962). I remembered what pleasure it had given me, in reading his Klatrefilosofiske og biografiske betraktninger (‘Philosophical and biographical observations on climbing’), to come across, in his description of a four-month climbing expedition undertaken alone in the Pyrenees in the spring of 1930, a reference to the books he carried in his rucksack, mostly, he specifies, on ‘European and Chinese philosophy’. In its cultural openness there was something typically Norwegian about a ‘proper’ philosopher unafraid to pursue an interest in traditions far removed from those of his own Western disciplines; and discovering, rather as Schopenhauer did, that the conclusions reached, the one by the pathless track of paradox, enigma and poetry, the other by a painstakingly rational and logical use of language, turned out be similar to the point of indistinguishable. For Næss’s ‘deep ecology’ is essentially a translation into Western terms of what he learned while climbing in the Hindu Kush and the Himalayas, including the first ascent of Tirich Mir, the highest mountain in the Hindu Kush, in 1950.

  His early curiosity about Chinese philosophy may have been deepened by encounters with Buddhists and Taoists at the time of the trip to the Hindu Kush, and further stimulated during a trip to the Himalayas in 1971 with two younger climbers, Nils Faarlund and the philosopher Sigmund Kvaløy Setreng, who shared Næss’s interest in traditions and disciplines that lay outside Western rationalism and logic. Their destination was the Sherpa’s holy mountain, Gauri Shankar, in the Rolwaling valley in Tibet. But the purpose was not to ‘conquer’ Gauri Shankar, to Nepalese Buddhists ‘the sacred dwelling place of Tseringma’, in the spirit in which Slingsby had taught Norwegians to conquer mountains; it was to commune with the mountain in a mystical sense. As a guarantee of his sincerity, Næss gave a personal undertaking to the King of Nepal that he and his party would not climb all the way to the top but stop some three thousand feet short of the summit.

  Næss seems to have been sobered by the exponential growth in mountaineering as a pastime that had taken place since 1953 and the maiden ascent of Mount Everest. He became increasingly imbued with the sense of respectful and devotional awe with which the Tibetans and Sherpas viewed the mountains around them, and to feel that the mountains needed protection from the large-scale expeditions that threatened the ancient religious culture – Buddhist, Hindu and Taoist – of the region. On his return to Norway he promoted a campaign to have Gauri Shankar declared a protected area: ‘The attempt to protect Gauri Shankar is a small step in the direction of acknowledging that the mystical way in which the Sherpas view this mountain is as valid as the recreational, sporting and commercial approach of Westerners.’

  In later years Næss would even express regret at having built on Hallingskarvet at all, coming to view it as an arrogant human imposition on a natural wilderness. He wrote of the ridge in an anthropomorphic way. Hallingskarvet had a soul. What it had to ‘say to us’ was ‘infinitely more than we can say to Skarvet, ephemera that we are’. In Det gode lange livs far (The father of the good long life), a title that self-consciously echoed the translation of the Tibetan Tseringma as ‘The mother of the good long life’, he wrote that ‘the ‘enlightened’ age, with its contempt for symbols, rituals and mythology, is over. It is no longer useful to regard such things as ‘unscientific’. Næss came to feel that the Hallingskarvet ridge was numinous, and to think of it in the same way as the Tibetans in the Rolwaling Valley thought of Tseringma. It had been, to him, the father of the good long life. The ‘deep’ in deep ecology was simply a way of emphasising the importance of the attitude of oneness and respect he had arrived at after his journey; he wanted to stress the contrast with a ‘shallow’ form of environmentalism that limited itself, essentially, to feeling guilty about littering. As it was for Schopenhauer and Søren Kierkegaard, philosophy for Næss was more than an abstract and sometimes merely competitive game with words; it was a visionary endeavour that should have real consequences for the way the philosopher lives his life.

  It’s rare for a philosopher to become a national icon, I reflected, but during the later years of his life, and in the decades since his death, Næss has achieved a status and renown in Norway that are comparable with the regard in which Bertrand Russell was held by the British public in his old age. Thinking of Russell, I remembered the obscure story of the Bukken Bruse, an amphibious plane in which th
e philosopher was travelling from Oslo to Trondheim in 1948. As the pilot tried to land on the waters of the Trondheim fjord, the plane was caught by a sudden gust of wind. Nineteen people lost their lives when the fuselage filled with water.

  The peculiar irony of Russell’s survival was that he had insisted on being seated at the back of the plane, so that he could smoke on the flight – ‘If I cannot smoke I will die I am sure’, he had explained apologetically. All nineteen who died were seated at the front, in the non-smoking section of the plane.

  Russell, then seventy-four years of age, escaped through a broken window. Still wearing his overcoat, he swam in the direction of a boat and was picked up. He had been due to deliver a lecture to students at the Trondheim Students Union the following day, and duly lectured them at the appointed hour on the twin dangers of nuclear war and Joseph Stalin, a philosophical response to adversity that would have delighted Arne Næss.

  I had come across the bones of this story while reading about Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein and had presumed for some time that the purpose of Russell’s flight to Norway had been to visit Wittgenstein at Skjolden, in the county of Sogn og Fjordane and within sight of the Hurrungane mountain range, where Wittgenstein had had a cabin since 1914, and where he wrote most of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Once he felt the cabin had served its purpose, Wittgenstein gave it away. In similar fashion, Næss gave away his mountaineering cabin, Skarvereiret. Or at least he tried to do so, on several occasions. Somehow it always kept falling back into his hands.

  All in all, it was hard to know whether to treat Næss as a philosopher who happened to climb, or a climber who liked to philosophise. From Slingsby and the Norwegian school of mountaineering he fostered in the later decades of the nineteenth century, both Næss and Zapffe had inherited the tradition of the mountain as a focus for conquest. The ice axe and the spiked shoes Slingsby introduced to his Norwegian friends were technical aids in the struggle to subdue the mountains. In his earlier years Næss had been responsible for the next step forward in the use of technology in mountaineering following Slingsby. While studying in Vienna in the mid-1930s and climbing with Austrian friends he had become acquainted with the use of bolts. He sent a carton of these home to Norway, where his friends pounced upon this new climbing aid, which, at a stroke, opened up a whole new world for them.

  Zapffe, in his account of the first ascent of Stetind in 1936, described the revolutionary effects of these bolts. This Nordland mountain has a remarkable status among Norwegians. In an NRK poll in 2002, listeners voted it the country’s National Mountain. It’s known as ‘the anvil of the gods’ from its curious, flat top, as though it has been decapitated. Stetind was one of the few mountains to have defeated the great Slingsby, who described it (afterwards) as ‘the ugliest mountain I have ever seen’. Long thought to be impossible, it was not finally climbed until 1910, by a team of three Norwegians, Ferdinand Schjelderup, Carl Wilhelm Rubenson and Alf Bonnevie Bryn.

  Næss and Zapffe split up. Zapffe and two companions set out using the 1910 route. Næss, accompanied by his wife, Else Herzberg, the pair of them with Næss’s Viennese bolts dangling from their necks, made the first attempt at a new route up the mountain since the maiden ascent of 1910, scaling the so-called Sydpillaren (South Pillar). In his essay Stettind (sic), Zapffe relates how, resting a moment from his own exertions, he saw Arne and Else in a single ‘quick upward glance over the towering, panserglatte [absolutely smooth] wall up which they were “crocheting” themselves by means of their strange hardware’. The ascent of the sheer face would have been impossible without it. He loses sight of them but can always hear the tiny, far-off ringing of the bolts being hammered into cracks in the surface of the mountain as he and his two companions continued along a route on which hands and feet find their holds ‘the good old-fashioned way’. At one point they are able to locate the pair through a telescope – ‘two coloured specks at the very edge of that desert of stone, dangling there, each from their own hook, like two blodvidner [martyrs], between the looming hammer and the dizzying depths. I think we might have paled a little, our souls have blanched a little as we rested there on our “access road” to the top, each with a large rock firmly beneath our backsides. What was going on up there was absolutely something else, perhaps akin to glimpsing a jet fighter plane high above while out for a spin in grandad’s helicopter.’

  A view of Stetind, ‘the anvil of the gods’.

  Arne and Else’s marriage lasted ten years, until 1947. A few years ago, I shared an office on Fredensborgveien with the philosopher Ragnar Herzberg Næss, the elder son of the marriage. Ragnar always had a picture on his desk of a woman standing at a ninety-degree angle on a rock-face, turning to the camera, smiling, possibly – the image isn’t very clear. I asked him once whether the photograph was from the ascent of Stetind, since I knew his parents had climbed it together on other, later occasions. He confessed that he didn’t know, but that it was possibly Kolsås, a wooded ridge just outside Oslo where, to this day, many Norwegian climbers hone their mountaineering skills. There was an almost poetic justice in Næss’s conquest of Stetind: it seemed to me to encapsulate the scope of his intellectual achievement – the way in which he made mountaineering and philosophy indistinguishable from one another, and mutually dependent. The Englishman Slingsby had given Norwegian mountaineering a kick-start back in the nineteenth century; the two Norwegians Næss and Zapffe, had, in a sense, taken the mountains back. And just as Ibsen’s career had such a strong influence in fostering Norway’s position as a leading advocate of full equality between the sexes, so has Næss’s advocacy of a ‘deep’ ecology profoundly influenced Norway’s other great claim to moral authority in the modern world, as devoted protector of our natural environment.

  It was still snowing heavily. My efforts had made no visible inroads at all and the snow was still piled waist-high along the length of the terrace. I didn’t mind in the slightest, but there was little point in going on and I walked round the cabin to the shed and hung the shovel back up on its peg, beat the snow off my boots on the wooden step outside the front door, and stepped inside. With his unfailing courtesy the dog rushed to greet me as though it was months since we had last seen each other. Risking the embarrassment I knew it might cause my wife (for most of the neighbouring cabins were occupied for Christmas), I coaxed him into a brief session of loud, wolf-like howling. It gave me such pleasure to see his pleasure, bouncing about on his paws, curly tail waggling furiously, his little grey head and neck stretching upwards as he joined me in howling whatever it was we were howling.

  I walked into the kitchen area. My wife was standing at the wooden work-surface peeling some kind of knotty orange vegetable. I kissed her on the neck.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Sweet potato.’

  ‘What are we having?’

  ‘Lasagne with sweet potato.’ She said she’d seen the recipe for it in Aftenposten’s Weekend magazine that morning and thought it sounded interesting.

  ‘How long will it be?’

  ‘About twenty minutes.’

  ‘Want a glass of wine?’

  ‘Yes. There’s some rosé in the fridge.’

  I opened the fridge, took down the carton of wine, poured her a glass and put it down next to the chopping board. I poured myself a glass of beer and an aquavit chaser and took them over to the sofa at the other side of the room. Stepping towards the DAB radio on the windowsill with the intention of listening to NRK’s Jazz station, my finger about to tap the ‘On’ button, I stopped in bewilderment as the opening bars of Jimmy Yancey’s ‘Midnight Stomp’ came rolling into the room. It took me some moments to realise it was my own phone I was hearing. In an idle moment a couple of days before leaving Oslo I had changed the ringtone. No one had called in the meantime and it had completely slipped my mind.

  I picked up the phone from the coffee table and looked at the display. It was my friend Eskil. I guessed he would be calling to see if I was inte
rested in going to Herr Nilsen’s tomorrow. Herr Nilsen’s was a jazz club in C. J. Hambros plass with regular concerts on Saturday afternoons between four and six. Until quite recently we had never missed a session, but over the past year the demands of working on the cabin and having a dog had made it difficult for me to find the time, and it was months now since we had last met up there. But our intention to keep up the habit remained firm, and we called and texted regularly to see if we could get the arrangement up and running again. A very good tenor player named Petter Wettre was appearing with his quartet, but I had to tell Eskil, with sincere regret, that I couldn’t make it as I was at the cabin. We small-talked for a couple of minutes and were about to sign off when I had a thought. Eskil worked in the philosophy department at the University of Oslo, and I knew he had taken his degrees there. He must have been studying at about the time when Arne Næss was finishing his tenure as philosophy professor at Blindern. I asked if he had had Næss as a teacher.

  ‘Yes, I did,’ he said.

  ‘What was he like? I mean, in person?’

  ‘He was very eccentric. There are lots of stories about him. Did you ever hear about the time he got locked out of his office on the campus at Blindern?’