by Wade Davis
“That young man will not be alive for long” was all the Austrian climber Karl Blodig could say after but a day on rock with Young and Mallory. Blodig, who had reached the summit of over fifty 12,000-foot peaks in the Alps, misunderstood Mallory’s brash confidence as a climber. As a friend and fellow climber remarked, Mallory was actually “prudent, according to his own standards; but his standards were not those of an ordinary medium good rock-climber. The fact was that difficult rocks had become to him a perfectly normal element; his prodigious reach, his great strength, and his admirable technique joined to a sort of cat-like agility, made him feel completely secure on rocks so difficult as to fill less competent climbers with a sense of hazardous enterprise.” Another Pen y Pass climber, H. V. Reade, said very simply that George Mallory “couldn’t fall even if he wanted to.”
Mallory brought to climbing an unprecedented level of athleticism, combining the grace and strength of a gymnast, another sport at which he excelled, with a mental focus utterly modern in its intensity. Though he could be absentminded in daily life, once he was on rock, seeking a line up a face, his concentration came together like a laser. “His memory,” one climbing friend remarked, “bad for a good many things, was almost perfect for this.” He could find a route up glass. The one photograph that survives from their summer in the Alps, taken by Geoffrey Young during their descent of the Moine Ridge of Mont Blanc, reveals Mallory perched by his nailed boots on a narrow ledge of rock and snow, his hawklike silhouette peering into a distant knot of mountains. With one hand on the rock face, the other confidently resting on his waist, he appears oblivious to the exposure, the void at his feet. He is not taking in the view. His eyes are charting a route, perhaps up the Dent du Géant, the Grand Flambeau, or the Aiguille Noire de Peuterey, all peaks within his vista. He is, as they say, “in the zone.”
Such precision of intent dissipated the moment Mallory was off the mountain. At the end of August, Cottie Sanders, a young English traveler, noticed George sitting alone in a crowded café at the Hotel Monte Rosa in Zermatt. He was reading a novel, she later recalled, “in a sort of oblivion … only sometimes raising a hand to push back the shock of brown hair which fell constantly over his forehead. He was picturesque and untidy, in loose grey flannels with a bright handkerchief around his neck; but the things which chiefly aroused attention were his good looks and his complexion … his skin was clear and fair as a girl’s.”
Over the next week they met often, sometimes alone, sometimes joined by Geoffrey Young. They spoke mostly about mountains and the essence of their beauty. But Cottie picked up on something more: “He made one feel at once that here, in him, was the authentic thing, the real flame and passion. His talk, in his beautiful voice, with the careful choice of words, in its quality stood out extraordinarily from the ordinary run of conversation at the Monte Rosa.” Of his own achievements in the mountains, he was very modest, recounting even “his more desperate escapades” with an endearing sense of whimsy that left her completely enchanted. Before they went their separate ways, Cottie had accepted an invitation to join the climbing party at Pen y Pass in the fall.
Cottie Sanders, in time the unhappy wife of a miserable Irish aristocrat named O’Malley, and later to be known as the novelist Ann Bridge, came to understand George Mallory as few others did. They met again in London in December, and later in the mountains of Wales. At Pen y Pass Mallory introduced her to his favored routes: the Girdle Traverse on Lliwedd, Parson’s Nose on Clogwyn y Person, and Tryfan’s Central Buttress. Cottie, in turn, introduced him to the possibility of friendship and platonic love with a woman. She was first and foremost a climber, but she had an interest in politics, literature, and the arts as passionate as his own. She shared his ideals, and understood how they intersected in a mystical love of mountains. “His great desire,” she wrote very simply, “was for the spirit of man to exercise itself as freely and fearlessly and joyously as a climber on a hill.”
Though, as a woman, excluded from much of Cambridge life, she sensed in an uncanny way the bonds that brought Mallory and his friends together. Gossip and whimsical promiscuity aside, these friendships were founded on powerful ideals. “They held personal relationships as so important,” she wrote,
that they held only a few other things as being of any importance whatever. Conventional inessentials simply had no meaning for them. They were extraordinarily attached to one another; they stuck closer than brothers; there was, literally, nothing they wouldn’t do for one another. They enjoyed each other furiously; delightedly, they examined and explored every means of knowing people better and liking them more, from the simplest pleasures of food and exercise taken together to the final closeness of the common acceptance of some sorrow or some truth … They brought their whole intellectual energy to bear on their relationships; they wanted to know not only that they loved people but how and why they loved them, to understand the mechanism of their likings, the springs that prompted thought and emotion; to come to terms with themselves and with one another; to know where they were going and why. This passion for understanding was new; it looked cold-blooded.
Mallory, by all accounts, had indeed been “shocked” by his tryst with James Strachey, but he saw no reason why the clumsiness of that encounter should ruin the friendship. He had written Strachey in August from Switzerland, and received no reply. Back in England in the fall, he visited his family at Birkenhead and then returned to Cambridge to finish work on his biography of Boswell, the only book the aspiring author would ever complete and publish.
Finished with university and at loose ends, Mallory decided to return to the Continent, stopping in Paris before continuing to the south of France, where he stayed for several months just outside Monte Carlo as a guest of the French painter Simon Bussy and his wife, Dorothy, the sister of James and Lytton Strachey. He spent his time reading French novels, slipping down the hill to swim in the sea, staying up late over wine to discuss the paintings of Matisse and Renoir, both good friends of his hosts’. He explored on foot the hills above Roquebrune, though his outings were limited by an injured ankle, still very sore three months after a serious fall at, of all places, an abandoned quarry near his parents’ home in Birkenhead. Mostly he thought about his future and his friends, especially James Strachey, who had remained silent.
Finally, on December 20, 1909, Mallory swallowed his pride and unleashed a letter of peevish recriminations: “Write to you I will at last. What do you think of me? That I’m proud? That I’m injured? That I’m angry? That I’ve forgotten? It is six weeks since yesterday since I said goodbye to you at Hampstead and I haven’t sent you a word. I who love you! Probably you know the reason for my silence as well as I do. There has never been anything to say since the day I told you I loved you. Am I to repeat continually the wearisome news that I want to kiss you? It is about all I am capable of … You had better forget that I was ever your lover. If you could treat me as an ordinary friend I might manage to behave like one. How pleasant it was! For you I believe as well as for me, wasn’t it?”
A month later, there was still no response. Mallory was almost out of money and wrote to Maynard Keynes, requesting a loan of £10. Keynes forwarded the money. Mallory responded with a gossipy letter of thanks. His financial situation did not improve until the early summer of 1910, when he received a letter from the headmaster of Charterhouse School, G. H. Rendall, inviting him to teach history, math, French, and Latin. His starting salary for the instruction and other duties would be £270 a year, a generous sum at a time when a country doctor might live well on an annual income of £400.
THOUGH MALLORY accepted the offer and would remain at Charterhouse for a decade, he was from the start ill suited to the task. As his friend David Pye remarked, Mallory, at twenty-six, was so youthful in appearance that parents mistook him for a student and students had difficulty accepting him as a master. After his years at Cambridge, he found little to admire in a rigid pedagogy that had not changed since his time as a student
at Winchester. At a point in his life when he was rushing off with Cottie Sanders to admire the “exquisite economy of line and colour” in an exhibit of Chinese paintings, or staying an extra night in London to hear Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande or to be painted in the nude by Duncan Grant, he could summon little enthusiasm for a regime of arbitrary discipline, in which boys could be caned on a whim and all that really mattered occurred on the playing fields. He did his best to infuse the school with another spirit. He gave subtly crafted lectures on Botticelli, Raphael, and Michelangelo and organized a debating society that brought into the school a world of politics, ethics, and philosophy. With three of the more imaginative students he published the Green Chartreuse, a parody of the official student magazine, the Carthusian. The cover of the first issue was illustrated by Duncan Grant and featured a green monk, suggestively inebriated, quaffing from a glass.
Mallory’s rooms were always open for serious discussion, whether on the shifting tides of politics and culture, the Irish crisis and the looming threat of European war, the meaning of a painting or a phrase of poetry, or the new writings of George Bernard Shaw. But his classroom, by all accounts, was complete chaos, with noise levels that left no doubt as to the identity of the teacher in charge. After all he had experienced, all he had come to believe, Mallory was simply incapable of perpetuating the traditional roles of student and master. Many students saw this as weakness, and responded with contempt. Other, more sensitive souls saw Mallory as an inspiration. The poet Robert Graves, only sixteen when they met, remembered Mallory as the finest teacher he had ever known, writing, “From the first he treated me as an equal, and I used to spend my spare time reading books in his room or going for walks with him in the country. He told me of the existence of modern authors … I had never heard of people like Shaw, Rupert Brooke, Wells, Masefield.” Mallory introduced Graves to Duncan Grant, Lytton and James Strachey, and, later, Eddie Marsh. With Duncan they went to Pen y Pass, where Geoffrey Young anointed young Graves, telling him he had the finest natural balance of any climber he had known. This was heady praise for a young student who had spent much of his time at Charterhouse the victim of bullies.
Graves and Mallory remained friends for life. Mallory, Graves recalled,
was wasted at Charterhouse where, in my time at least, the boys generally despised him as neither a disciplinarian nor interested in cricket or football. He tried to treat his classes in a friendly way, which puzzled and offended them, because of the school tradition of concealed warfare between boys and masters. We considered it no shame to cheat, lie, or deceive where a master was concerned, though the same treatment of a schoolfellow would have been immoral. George also antagonized the Housemasters by refusing to accept this state of war and fraternizing with the boys whenever possible. When two housemasters, who had been unfriendly to him, happened to die within a short time of each other, he joked to me, “See Robert, how mine enemies flee before my face.” I always called him by his Christian name and so did three or four more of his friends in the school. This lack of dignity put him beyond the pale with most boys and all masters. Eventually the falseness of his position told on his temper; yet he always managed to find four or five boys who were, like him, out of their element, befriending and making life tolerable for them.
Mallory’s biggest challenge as a schoolteacher was coming to terms with the latent hypocrisy of his own position. G. H. Rendall, the headmaster of Charterhouse, famously told a conference of his peers that the boys of his school were “amorous but seldom erotic.” He intended to keep it that way, and it fell to the junior masters to patrol the halls and dormitories at night. Mallory was well aware of what was going on. He knew his own young charge Robert Graves was involved with a boy he called Dick Tiltwood—actually G. H. Johnstone, later Baron Derwent. Mallory himself was deeply intrigued by Raymond Rodakowski, one of his many students later killed in the war. And he was still coming to terms with his feelings for James Strachey, even as he dodged the advances of James’s older brother.
The fall of 1911 brought a new headmaster to Charterhouse: Frank Fletcher, a mountaineer and member of the Alpine Club, but also a strict and rigid disciplinarian whom Mallory came to detest. Increasingly disillusioned by his obligations at the school, George spent more time in London. In February 1912 he met Eddie Marsh, who later chastised Rupert Brooke for having failed to make the introduction sooner. “Besides the great beauty of face,” Marsh wrote, “I think he has enormous charm of mind and character.”
Marsh, still private secretary to Winston Churchill, who had been elevated to First Lord of the Admiralty, moved in the highest circles of British society and the arts. His friends and associates included Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, writers as divergent as Rudyard Kipling, Henry James, and D. H. Lawrence, and poets such as W. B. Yeats, John Masefield, Walter de la Mare, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Bridges, soon to be appointed poet laureate. Fourteen years older than Mallory, Marsh had traveled on foot to the source of the Nile and had once stood down a charging rhinoceros by intrepidly opening a pink umbrella in its face. But he was better known as a patron of poetry, and his offer to help edit for publication the draft of Mallory’s biography of Boswell, which Mallory had completed at the end of 1911, was happily accepted. Over the next many months, they met infrequently in London, sometimes joined by Rupert Brooke, or at Charterhouse, where Marsh read aloud the latest poetry to catch his fancy. In the first days of 1914, they went together to the opening of an exhibit of paintings by Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, and Roger Fry at, of all places, the Alpine Club.
In the summer of 1912 Mallory went back to the Alps for the sixth time, climbing once again with Geoffrey Young. Mallory, Young later reported, climbed as never before, with “a continuous undulating movement so rapid and so powerful that one felt the rock must either yield or disintegrate.” They reached the summit of the Pointe de Genevois, a 12,000-foot spire, and later found a new route on the Dent Blanche, which Mallory had first climbed as a schoolboy. But in Zermatt came word that two close friends, Humphrey and Muriel Jones, had fallen to their death in a terrible accident on Mont Rouge de Peuterey. A guide had lost grip on a hold and tumbled down the face, knocking the couple off the mountain. Geoffrey Young was the one to retrieve their bodies. Their death cast a pall over the season, Mallory’s last in the Alps for seven long years.
In early 1914, when he was twenty-eight, Mallory’s life shifted in an instant. He had taken a role in a local garden play. Among the other players was a young woman, Ruth Turner, an angelic girl of ethereal beauty. She was, he discovered, the middle daughter of a prominent architect, Thackeray Turner, a widower who lived with his three girls at Westbrook, a fine country home built on a hill across the Wey Valley from Charterhouse. Ruth was only twenty-two, somewhat shy but transparently decent and kind. It was more than love at first sight. For Mallory it was as if a dam had burst and the impounded emotions of a young lifetime had found immediate release. He was positively giddy. The loops in his handwriting, he told her in one of his first love letters, “are all kisses and the tall strokes and the tails are all arms to embrace you. Shall I go through my letter and make them longer?” At Easter, George was invited to join the Turner family in Venice, a city unlikely to dampen the passions of first love. “Life with you is going to be very perfect,” Ruth told him. He replied that they would need to create a new vocabulary of love words. On May 1 they became engaged, with the marriage set for July 29. Ruth’s father offered as dowry a guaranteed income of £750 a year, as well as the promise of a new house, the Holt, valued at £1,600, which he gifted in perpetuity to Ruth. In a material sense, Mallory was set for life.
Meanwhile, he planned his honeymoon. Ruth was a good walker and he wanted to bring her to the Alps, but he was uncertain whether after their marriage night she would be up to the challenge. His mother quite approved of the idea, insisting that newly wedded women ought to be exposed to rigorous exercise. The wives of several of his fellow schoolmasters at Cha
rterhouse, however, were equivocal. He wrote to his best man, Geoffrey Young, who replied urging caution. By then Mallory had sought the advice of a Dr. Wills, who reassured him. He responded to Young as if discussing the well-being of an exotic and unknown creature: “At present I can’t see that any purely physical considerations rule out the kind of things I had in mind—though your observations naturally make me all the more anxious to take care not to overdo it and to proceed experimentally.”
The honeymoon in the Alps, as it turned out, would have to wait. On June 28, 1914, in distant Sarajevo, Archduke Francis Ferdinand fell to an assassin’s bullet. A month later, the day before Mallory’s wedding, the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia. In the shadow of a growing international crisis, the wedding ceremony was subdued yet pleasant, and the bride and groom, according to a witness, “were too good to be true.” Six days after the ceremony, Britain declared war on Germany. In place of the Swiss Alps, George and Ruth went to the cliffs of North Devon and tramped along the coast, a brief idyll cut short when they were detained on the suspicion of being German spies. A blanket of fear and mistrust had already fallen over the British Isles.