When my late father, James T. Lester, joined the first American Mount Everest expedition (AMEE) in 1963, he recorded the experience in a small, fine, leatherbound journal. In fact, all the climbers did. The journals had been provided by the expedition organisers, and the climbers were required to write in them daily. If they didn’t, the two social scientists in the team (one of which was my father) wouldn’t be able to gather a lot of the data they required for their respective studies. In addition, the authors of the two chronicles of the expedition would only have had their individual experiences to draw from.
Both of the books published within five years of that adventure – James Ramsay Ullman’s Americans on Everest and Thomas Hornbein’s Everest: The West Ridge – drew on those diaries for stories and reference points. And so, it turns out, did my father’s manuscript for young readers, although I didn’t know about that chronicle until my mother dug it out of a closet after he died in 2010.
Anniversary milestone
A few years ago, realising that the 60th anniversary of AMEE was approaching, I thought about how I might publish my father’s manuscript, and this led me to re-read two other chronicles he had left behind. It was clear I needed to include them, and the trio would become his posthumous memoir, Return to the Scene of the Climb.
The first of these other chronicles was his memory of the two months he spent in the summer of 1963 as chauffeur, guide, bill-payer and friend of AMEE’s five principal Sherpa climbers and Nepalese government liaison officer. During this road trip, a gift of thanks to them from the US government, my father didn’t keep a journal, and only wrote his memories down many years later. Fortunately, he took copious photographs, as he had on Everest, and his photo journal helped jog his recollections, but many were lost to the mists of time.
The final manuscript he left behind documented a trip he took to Nepal and India 35 years later, in 1998, now a grandfather aged 70. His goal was to find as many of the AMEE Sherpa climbers as he could, to catch up with them in interviews about how their lives had changed along with the massive development in Himalayan mountaineering and trekking in the intervening years.
He wrote seven chapters of an intended book, drawing on those interviews, which he had recorded and then painstakingly transcribed. Editing his story of that journey was a pretty straightforward affair – he was an experienced writer, at the same time clear, curious and self-deprecating – but I felt something was missing from Return to the Scene of the Climb’s third section.
One more look
“I’ll just have one more look through his digital files,” I told myself and clicked through the documents again. It’s beyond me how I previously overlooked it, but I came across, hallelujah, his journal, his personal journal, where he wrote about how he felt along this journey. Being able to include excerpts of his innermost self in this section of the book means that the reader can not only learn what my father thought was important to lay out for the historical record – his goal being ‘to put the capital ‘s’ back in Sherpa’ – but also understand what it was like for a creaky, not entirely confident man to hike in the muddy Himalayan foothills in search of people he wasn’t sure he would find.
Who keeps a journal these days? Photographs document most of our memorable moments now, but what about moments that can’t be photographed? What about the moments in our minds? The days of letter-writing are gone, but it’s thanks to letters that I’ve been able to remind myself of what a lot of experiences were like for me. Bless my mother for keeping everything I wrote to my parents from my life in Japan in the 1990s, for when I told her I was going to write a novel set there (Yuki Means Happiness), she packaged them all up and sent them to me so that I could remember what it felt like to be newly arrived in Tokyo, and could give some of those impressions to my protagonist.
My mother, a biographer, always had a notebook as a travel journal, and also, after the death of my father, sent messages about her travels to a list of friends via email. When she in turn was dying, in 2019, my brother and I sent regular emails out to her friend list, and I was able to draw from those for my memoir Absolutely Delicious: A Chronicle of Extraordinary Dying.
Audio options
For my most recent writing project, I spent a year making audio recordings – another form of journal now available to us – on walks through farmland near my home in England, the inspiration for my story’s setting. The tone of these recordings went on to inform the tone of the narrative.
It is so interesting to me how often in my life and my parents’ lives the recording of an experience either in written or spoken words, sometimes intended as a journal and sometimes not, has enriched the writing of a book. The question for you, then, is this: If you’ve got a book in mind, how will you collect a record of your activities, research, thoughts and feelings to build support for its success before you even begin writing? Producing a book is a very special sort of expedition. How will you gather the details of the journey?