by Wade Davis
Through the spring of 1907 Benson’s diary reveals a growing infatuation. In May, after a day together, he asked, “Why should I pretend that I do not love this young friend, and take deep pleasure in his company?” Later in the summer, when Mallory fell ill with hepatitis, a bouquet of lilies of the valley arrived at his bedside, a gift, he was told, from a gentleman who’d given no name but had left a note signed “From a Fair Unknown.” At the end of June there was another overnight visit to Hinton Hall. Mallory read his poetry, which Benson considered “rather conventional in expression, but full of the joyful melancholy of youth.” Benson was tempted to profess love, yet tormented at the prospect and repercussions of doing so. “There was much romantic friendship in the air—and then dipped into a darker moral region, the shadow that lies behind such friendships. That is one of the few things about which I do not speak my real mind.”
Whether these hidden sentiments, recorded in a private diary, were known or sensed by Mallory is uncertain. He clearly admired Benson as a scholar and writer and felt true affection for the older man. When, in the summer of 1907, Benson collapsed into suicidal despair, a depression that would ultimately force him to retire from the Cambridge scene for many months, Mallory literally rushed to his side, still dressed in costume and makeup from the stage of a university play. Throughout that dark fall, Mallory remained Benson’s most loyal friend and frequent visitor. That the relationship stayed platonic, as most certainly it did, is beside the point. Their friendship, highly important to Mallory and pivotal to his intellectual and personal growth, can be understood only within the context of a culture that allowed a certain kind of love between men to exist, affections of a resonance and character so unique to the times that contemporary reference points and labels—heterosexual, homosexual, gay, or straight—lose all relevance.
Edwardian men and women knew little of each other until plunged into intimacy by marriage. Men married late, often after thirty, and four out of five brides were virgins. Celibacy for young men was no more appealing a prospect then than it is today. Before marriage, there were but two outlets: prostitutes who earned in an hour what housekeepers made in a month, and other men. “My experiences of friendship are with my own sex,” Mallory confided in a letter to Cottie Sanders, the first woman he really knew aside from his sisters and family. “To confess the truth I don’t much understand women and they make me feel like a mouse.”
The handful of female students at Cambridge provoked confusion, if not misogynous contempt. After a two-hour class in which women were present, John Maynard Keynes shared his irritation in a letter to the painter Duncan Grant. Both were good friends of Mallory’s. “I seem to hate every movement of their minds,” wrote the man who would define and personify modern economics. “The minds of the men, even when they themselves are stupid and ugly, never appear to me so repellant.” Keynes, who would invent the financial mechanisms that allowed the British to pay for the war, or at least pretend to do so, was drawn only to men. At Cambridge he was known for both his promiscuity and his sexual stamina. One contemporary described him as “the iron copulating machine.”
The British, it was said, kept their dogs at home and sent their young boys away to kennels. Certainly the pattern of a young man’s life in Edwardian England was established at boarding school. It is not known whether Mallory, while at Winchester, was sexually intimate with other students, but the possibility was in the air. The school, according to Oscar Wilde’s biographer Neil McKenna, was “a den of intense sexual activity between boys.” Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, Wilde’s lover, who attended Winchester only six years before Mallory, claimed that at least 90 percent of his classmates had experienced sex with other boys. Those who remained celibate were the exception. “The practice of Greek love is so general,” he wrote, “that it is only those who are physically unattractive that are reduced to living without love.”
Winchester was not alone. Oscar Wilde was famously imprisoned for homosexual acts, but his real crime was less what he did than his decision not to deny it. As W. T. Stead wrote in reviewing the Wilde case, “If all persons guilty of Oscar Wilde’s offences were to be clapped in gaol, there would be a very surprising exodus from Eton and Harrow, Rugby and Winchester, to Pentonville and Holloway [prisons] … Public school boys are allowed to indulge with impunity in practices which, when they leave school, would consign them to hard labour.”
The very culture of the public schools made such sexual ambiguity inevitable. Young boys of ten or thirteen, raised by nannies, with little casual contact with their parents and virtually no exposure to women outside of the home, were sent away for years to be educated by male teachers and headmasters, themselves products of the same schools. Nurtured on Greek myths that celebrated the love between men and boys as the natural ideal, they were sequestered in a world dominated by adolescent prefects, boys of eighteen infused with hormones. It was no wonder, as Robert Graves wrote, that the “air was always heavy with romance.”
So, indeed, was the air at Cambridge. On November 30, 1906, Mallory and Arthur Benson attended the opening performance of the Greek play Eumenides, by Aeschylus, at the New Theatre. With Mallory was Charles Sayle, a university librarian, late of New College Oxford. A friend of Oscar Wilde’s, to whom he had sent his anonymously published book of homoerotic poems, Sayle had been forced out of Oxford after a sexual fling with an undergraduate. At the age of forty-three, he had established himself in Cambridge, at 8 Trumpington Street, an address that became the locus of an expanding menagerie of young men and modern thinkers. Also in the audience was Edward Marsh, Winston Churchill’s private secretary, who in time would become enamored of both Mallory and Rupert Brooke, who happened to be onstage that night playing the Herald. Brooke had no lines. All he had to do was look stunning and place a trumpet to his mouth while the actual instrument was played in the orchestra. This was more than sufficient for his admirers. W. B. Yeats described Brooke as a golden-haired Apollo, the most handsome man in England. Upon meeting him on a visit to Cambridge in the summer of 1909, Henry James eagerly asked John Maynard Keynes whether the young man was in fact a good poet. Keynes said no. “Thank goodness,” replied James. “If he looked like that and was a good poet too, I do not know what I should do.”
Through Charles Sayle, Mallory was introduced to a circle of friends that took him far beyond the modest constraints of Arthur Benson. His mind was already open. After but a year at Cambridge he had turned away from any thought of following his father to the pulpit. He became agnostic, embraced Fabian socialism, and represented his college in the Cambridge University Women’s Suffrage Association. Fascinated by the arts, most especially the new wave of postimpressionists—Picasso, Cézanne, and van Gogh, painters little known at the time—he grew his hair long and began to dress flamboyantly in black flannel shirts and brightly colored ties. Drawn to the theater, he joined, along with his good friend Geoffrey Keynes, brother of Maynard, the University Amateur Dramatic Club, taking a role alongside Rupert Brooke in Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. Geoffrey played the Evil Angel, Mallory, the Pope. Both performances were deemed to be dreadful by Brooke, who shone as Mephistopheles.
This growing network of friends had its roots in family and school. Rupert Brooke and Geoffrey Keynes had known each other at Rugby. Through Brooke, Keynes and Mallory met James Strachey, who had been with Brooke as a boy at Hillbrow School. James’s cousin was the painter Duncan Grant, his older brother the critic and biographer Lytton Strachey. Through Lytton and Charles Sayle, Mallory was introduced to the Apostles, a secret society whose members included the philosopher Bertrand Russell, Churchill’s man Eddie Marsh, as well as the writer E. M. Forster, who would use Mallory as the model for George Emerson, a leading character in his 1908 novel A Room with a View. Maynard Keynes was the secretary of the club, and thus primarily responsible for trolling the campus for potential “embryos,” the two or three young men who would be admitted each year.
The Apostles, founded in 1820, was
a fraternal circle, exclusive and elite, where it counted to be clever and, better yet, beautiful. There were weekly lectures by such luminaries as Henry James, Hilaire Belloc, and H. G. Wells. Each member had to be prepared at any moment to debate the entire society, on any subject. Failure to rise in readiness was grounds for expulsion. Among the Apostles, love between men was not only tolerated, it was embraced as a creed. Rupert Brooke joined in January 1908. Mallory, while a frequent guest, was never offered membership, though this did not limit his social life, which soon expanded to include the historian George Trevelyan; the Huxley brothers, Aldous and Julian; and the entire Bloomsbury set: Virginia and Vanessa Stephen; their husbands, Leonard Woolf and Clive Bell, both Apostles; the Stracheys, also members; as well as the artist and critic Roger Fry; and, of course, Duncan Grant. Mallory, as Geoffrey Keynes recalled, “came naturally into our circle.”
What drew these friends together was a tumult of ideas born of the possibilities of a new century. The inspiration was a book, Principia Ethica, published in 1903 by G. E. Moore, a Cambridge philosopher and, predictably, a member of the Apostles. Moore challenged the very notion of moral certitude. Social mores, he argued, rules of protocol, concepts of rectitude and honor had no objective basis. They were only reflections of public and private fears. What truly mattered was the state of the individual human mind, the truth and freedom of friendship, “the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects.” The book called on young people to live transparent lives, deliberately and consciously, acknowledging the consequences of actions and speaking always the absolute truth, openly, without hesitation. For students but a generation removed from the stultifying conventions of Victorian England, Moore’s book was an inspiration. Lytton Strachey ranked it on par with the writings of Aristotle and the teachings of Christ.
Bloomsbury was simply a neighborhood in London where a number of these friends lived: Duncan Grant and Maynard Keynes in Fitzroy Square, Clive and Vanessa Bell at 46 Gordon Square. “Neo-pagans” was just a term Virginia Stephen, later Virginia Woolf, used to describe the crowd that hung around Rupert Brooke, who always invited visitors to swim nude in a pool near his home at Grantchester, just outside Cambridge. These social and artistic movements, so celebrated today, were at the time mere clusters of individuals, artists and thinkers, poets and playwrights—and, in the case of Mallory, a climber—who sought new forms of expression, lives of new freedoms. As Mallory would try to explain some years later in a letter to his father written but five days after the end of the war, “My generation grew up with a disgust for the appearances of civilization so intense that it was an ever present spiritual discomfort, a sort of malaise that made us positively unhappy. It wasn’t that we simply criticized evils as we saw them and supported movements of reform; we felt such an overwhelming sense of incalculable evil that we were helplessly unhappy.”
Mallory landed in their midst as an experiment in aesthetics, a beautiful object to be appreciated, observed, and desired. Opinions as to his intelligence varied, but of his looks, there was no doubt. Duncan Grant wrote to Maynard Keynes, his lover at the time, “I had heard … of Mallory. He looks like, is called and apparently is an Arthurian hero.” Lytton Strachey, who had coupled with both Grant and Brooke, could not restrain himself:
Mon dieu—George Mallory—When that’s been written, what more need be said? My hand trembles, my heart palpitates, my whole being swoons away at the words—oh heavens! Heavens! … he’s six foot high, with the body of an athlete by Praxiteles, and a face—of incredible—the mystery of Botticelli, the refinement and delicacy of a Chinese print, the youth and piquancy of an unimaginable English boy. I rave, but when you see him, as you must you will admit all—all! … I’m a convert to the divinity of virginity and spend hours every day lost in a trance of adoration, innocence, and bliss. It was a complete revelation, as you may conceive. By God! The sheer beauty of it all is what transforms me … For the rest, he’s going to be a schoolmaster, and his intelligence is not remarkable. What’s the need?
Lytton’s problem was one of timing. He was too late. Maynard Keynes had already introduced George to Lytton’s younger brother, James. On February 8, 1909, Maynard wrote to Duncan Grant, “James and George Mallory fell into one another’s arms.” Three days later, a follow-up letter from Keynes to Grant reported that Mallory had confided in Rupert Brooke that he was “uncertain whether he liked James or loved him.” On February 28, Keynes reported, “James and George now stroke one another’s faces in public.”
James Strachey, by nature cautious, elusive, and restrained, remained coy, expressing disinterest in a manner that astonished the ever-willing Maynard Keynes. “How does James manage it?” he asked in a letter to Grant. “How could one help having real affection for him [Mallory], if he made love to one; and even if he didn’t. Finally he has offered to copulate; and even that doesn’t melt James’s stoniness.”
On March 3 Lytton sent a teasing note to his younger brother: “Please tell George Mallory he’s making a great mistake. It’s James’ brother who’s the really fascinating person.”
James, not amused, responded on March 8: “I’ve not even copulated with George. I don’t much want to. In fact nowadays I see him so much that he bores me incredibly.”
Fear of boredom did not stop James from inviting Mallory to accompany him to Paris at Easter. George demurred. He was already committed to join for the first time Geoffrey Young’s climbing party at Pen y Pass, in Wales.
Mallory’s passion for climbing, which remained his greatest joy throughout his university years, only strengthened his connection to a Cambridge scene that embraced mountaineering as part of its ethos. Arthur Benson had nearly died falling into a crevasse in the Swiss Alps. Leslie Stephen, father of Virginia and Vanessa, had been president of the Alpine Club and written a highly regarded book on European mountaineering. Charles Sayle was a founding member of the Climbers’ Club, established in 1898 to promote the new sport of rock climbing. Mallory met Young, then Britain’s most prominent climber, through Sayle and Maynard Keynes at the 1909 Charles Lamb dinner, an annual highlight of the Cambridge social calendar. Young, like Benson, had been dismissed after five years from the faculty of Eton, also for indiscretions. Maynard Keynes had been his student, and they had climbed together in the Alps. Young’s younger brother Hilton lived with the Stephen family. Hugh Wilson, who often climbed with Mallory and Geoffrey Keynes, and who would be killed in the war, was the brother of Steuart, who was Rupert Brooke’s lover. Duncan Grant climbed with Mallory and Young in Wales. As Mallory’s biographer, David Robertson, himself a climber, noted, “It would have been difficult to move in any Cambridge intellectual circle without encountering someone who climbed or had a climber’s blood in him.”
Geoffrey Young, like so many others, was much taken by Mallory’s appearance, which he described in his diary as “six feet of deer like power concordant with the perfect oval of his face, the classic profile and long, oval violet eyes … [and a] gravely beautiful tenor voice.” They became, as Young wrote, “fast friends at once. I invited him to Wales.” Maynard Keynes, who was present at their first encounter, later gloated, “I tried to get up an affair between him and George Mallory with the greatest possible success. They’d never met before, but George Mallory asked Geoffrey Young to breakfast next morning.” Two days later, Mallory introduced Young to Rupert Brooke. Young proposed George for membership in the Climbers’ Club, and then offered to cover all expenses if Mallory agreed to join him for a week in Venice and a season of climbing in the Alps. Mallory accepted both invitations, joining Young in Wales at Easter and then, in the summer of 1909, traveling with him to Europe. Young was thirty-three; Mallory was just twenty-three. Though Young would struggle with his sexuality all his life, slipping away from his marriage to indulge strange passions in the underworld of Berlin, there is no suggestion that he and Mallory became lovers.
Mallory remained smitten with James Strachey, whose indecisio
n was driving him mad. On July 7, 1909, he sent James a note: “Will you, damn you, come to lunch tomorrow?” Finally, not long before Mallory left for the Continent, Strachey succumbed. They borrowed the Cambridge rooms of a friend, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, another Apostle. James Strachey recalled the awkward encounter in a letter to Rupert Brooke written from Stockholm on September 13: “Poor George has returned, he tells me, from the Alps. By the way, I never had the courage to tell you that he insisted, before we parted, on copulating. No, I didn’t in the least lead him on. In fact I was very chilling. But as he seemed so very anxious, and I couldn’t pretend to have all that virgin horror, I submitted. So we went through with it—in poor old Dickinson’s bed. Are you dreadfully shocked? I didn’t enjoy it much—I was rather bored. Nor, oddly, did he. He, I think, was shocked. At any rate he showed no desire to repeat the business. Really, you know, it’s only in the most special circumstances that copulation’s tolerable … Yours James.”
Mallory buried the experience in a series of extraordinary climbs, beginning on August 4 with the first ascent of the southeast ridge of the Nesthorn, a fearsome peak rising out of the ice of the Aletsch Glacier in the Bernese Alps. “We were out twenty-one hours,” he wrote to his mother, “and were altogether pleased with ourselves.” In fact, as we have seen, Mallory came close to death. Confronting a massive overhang, with sheer walls of rocks falling away on both sides, he took the lead, inching his way across the face, secured by his fingertips. Paying out the rope from below was Young, who could not discern a single toehold on the approach. Mallory fought his way up to the base of the overhang, and then, with an explosive move that astonished Young, propelled his body up and over the cornice, seeking a hold above the hazard. He failed, and in an instant plummeted off the face. Young, who had had the foresight to pass the rope behind a blade of rock as a precaution, was just able to hold the belay, even as the fall stretched the rope to the breaking point. Mallory, dangling in midair, used his ice ax to pull himself back to the face. Completely unfazed, he made his way back up to Young, who, stunned by his companion’s nonchalance, found a safer line around the barrier. They reached the summit just in time to witness, as Mallory wrote, the most wonderful sunset he had ever seen.