But early on, too, I couldn’t help wondering what it would mean to be married to a man like George Mallory. What would it be like to be left behind for months at a time with nothing but long-delayed letters, delivered by steamer, to soothe your worries? How would you fill your days? How would you cope with the possibility that your husband might not come home?
Before long, I found myself writing a novel.
Thanks to a grant from the Canada Council, I was able to travel to England, where I visited the Royal Geographic Society, the Alpine Club, and the Samuel Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. As it was Mallory’s old stomping grounds, Cambridge was my first stop; this was where he went to college and climbed its towers, where he had his early love affairs, and where, ultimately, he left behind his wife and his three children when he joined his third expedition to Everest. It was at Magdalene that I had the opportunity to read the letters Mallory and his wife, Ruth, had exchanged over their entire relationship – from his first love poem to her to the very last letter he sent from Everest.
With its dusty tomes and shafts of light filtering through leaded windows, the library at Magdalene College looked like a movie set for an old English college library, and Dr. Luckett, the Samuel Pepys Librarian, with his cane and mane of grey hair, could have been straight from central casting.
After quizzing me about my book and what I thought might have happened to Mallory, Dr. Luckett explained to me that the Samuel Pepys Library was the official repository for all the Mallory personal papers. He apologized for some of the papers they didn’t have, and then he sighed and said, “I suppose you’d like to see the letters?”
“Of course,” I said gamely, though I wasn’t even sure which letters he meant.
Dr. Luckett opened a large leather book he’d been carrying and slipped out a plastic envelope, which he handed to me. “Go ahead.”
I pulled the thin papers out. They were folded, their edges worn and dirtied. I looked at the first one. I knew this letter; I’d seen photographs of it in books about Mallory. These were the papers that had been found on George’s body when it was discovered in 1999 – letters, receipts, lists of oxygen bottles. My throat caught. I’d already been living with George and Ruth in my head for more than a year. I often joked to friends that if it was possible to be in love with someone who had died some eighty years earlier, then I was certainly in love with George – and these were the documents he had carried with him when he died. I tried not to cry. This was to happen to me over and over again, as I sought as much information as I could about the real George and Ruth – the surprise of coming across a particular document, or artifact, that I wasn’t expecting. Eventually, Dr. Luckett took the papers back and left me to my research.
There is something unsettling about reading a couple’s private letters. Here they all were, hundreds of them in some four or five boxes – loving assurances George had written to Ruth, confessions (often misspelled) Ruth had written to George of her worries that she might not be a good parent, of her “behaving terribly” before his final departure. And always, always, this lilting love that ebbed and flowed but never disappeared. “I love you,” Ruth wrote to George during the First World War, “and you love me, and that ought to be happiness enough for a lifetime but I do want to live together, all the time and share thoughts and joys and sorrows and we can’t apart as we can together.”
It was through these documents and letters, these photographs and ephemera, that George and Ruth began to leap from the page for me. They became very separate from the historical record, separate from who they may have been in their real lives. It’s a strange paradox that it was their own words which helped me make the jump to fiction. George and Ruth were no longer simply the tragic hero and his deserted, dedicated wife, the roles in which they had long been cast. Being able to see them as they were, to hear them speak in their own words and in their private moments, gave me the confidence to allow them to be who they needed to be on the page.
Above All Things is a work of fiction, and in writing a novel based on historical figures, you have to make your own rules: you have to decide how faithful to be to the known record and make tough choices about what to keep in and what to leave behind, and what to alter, trim, or expand for dramatic purposes. As such, characters have been conflated, geographies shifted, and timelines altered and compressed for clarity or dramatic effect.
There are a few particular deviations from the historical record that I would like to acknowledge.
Mallory’s brother, Trafford Leigh-Mallory, was a squadron commander in the RAF. He survived the First World War and died in a plane crash in the French Alps in 1944. I believe the heavy shadow of the war was a galvanizing factor for the men of the earliest Everest expeditions, and, for me, the death of an actual brother alongside the deaths of so many brothers-in-arms became a way to articulate the grievous loss and guilt that George and others of his generation must have felt as a result of simply surviving.
Maurice Wilson did fly a plane to Everest and attempt to meditate his way to the summit. The facts of Wilson’s story are much as George describes them to Sandy, with the exception that Wilson’s illness and recovery occurred much later, in 1932, and he made his attempt on Everest in 1934.
Although Alfred Wegener proposed his theory of Continental Drift in 1912, it was not widely accepted until the theory of plate tectonics was put forward in the 1960s. The idea of plate tectonics also anachronistically informs Ruth’s meditations in the Round Church in Cambridge.
As for the depiction of the technical aspects of the climb, I have followed the general, up-and-down siege-style mentality – climb high, sleep low–that has characterized Everest attempts since the very beginning.
For many readers, of course, the biggest question will be what happened to George and Sandy. I examined what little factual evidence exists regarding the events of that fateful day and, like everyone who reads about their disappearance, I formed my own opinions as to whether they made the summit and what might have happened on the way up or down. I have tried to keep as much to what is “known” about George and Sandy’s final climb as I could, accounting for what we do know and exploring what we don’t, which is a great deal.
——
The reader may wish to know that Will Arnold-Foster was a good friend and support to both George and Ruth throughout their lives, and indeed, it was to Will that George first confided his feelings for Ruth Turner. In 1937, some thirteen years after George’s disappearance, Ruth and Will were married. She died shortly thereafter, in 1942, of cancer. Will died in 1951.
George’s body was discovered on May 1, 1999, by Conrad Anker and the Mallory and Irvine Research Expedition. The discovery made headlines around the world and answered some questions about what might have happened to George and Sandy on June 8, 1924. The position and state of the body made it evident that there had been an accident of some kind high on the slopes of Everest, but it could not answer the greater question: Was George Mallory the first man to reach the summit of Everest?
George did, in fact, carry a photograph of Ruth with him to Everest that he promised he would leave on the summit. Some people point to the fact that the photograph was not found on his body as proof that he did reach the top of Everest. However, the photograph has not been sighted at the summit either. Professional opinion on the likelihood of George and Sandy reaching the summit is varied, but some researchers still hold out hope that if Sandy’s body can be found, and perhaps a camera recovered, a definitive answer to that question may yet be forthcoming.
If you would like to learn more about the real George Mallory, there are a number of incredible non-fiction works available, and I am indebted to too many of them to name them all here. I would like to especially acknowledge The Wildest Dream: Mallory, His Life and Conflicting Passions by Peter and Leni Gillman; Fearless on Everest by Julie Summers; George Mallory by David Robertson; The Irvine Diaries, edited by Herbert Carr; Lost on Everest by Peter Firstbroo
k; The Lost Explorer by Conrad Anker and David Roberts; and Ghosts of Everest by Jochen Hemmlab, Larry A. Johnston, and Eric R. Simonson; as well as numerous books about Everest itself, including Jon Krakaur’s classic Into Thin Air, Stephen Venables’ Everest: Summit of Achievement, and Lincoln Hall’s Dead Lucky, which inspired the descriptions of Sandy’s final moments on the mountain.
For a complete list of resources, as well as a further discussion of fact versus fiction, please visit my website, www.tanisrideout.com.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I cannot thank my editor, Anita Chong, enough for her profound insight, guidance, direction, and commitment to this novel. It really would not be what it is without her.
Thanks also to copyeditor Susan James, for her careful eye to historical detail; to Ron Eckel and Suzanne Brandreth of The Cooke Agency International, and to Ellen Seligman and the rest of the team at M&S for their unfailing support; as well to Amy Einhorn and Venetia Butterfield.
For reading early drafts and excerpts, I’d like to thank Simon Racioppa, Jill Barber, Ian Daffern, Stephanie Earp, Britta Gaddes, Sarah Harmer, Sheetal Rawal, Carolyn Smart, and Tate Young.
Thanks to Natalie and Nigel Piper, for a place to stay and for showing me some of Mallory’s old haunts and around the English countryside.
And to friends and family for their ongoing love and encouragement.
I’m extremely grateful to the staff at the Samuel Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge, and to the Royal Geographical Society, the Alpine Club, the British Film Institute, and the British Library.
Portions of this work could not have been undertaken without the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council’s Writers’ Reserve, and the Toronto Arts Council.
An early excerpt from the novel appeared in PRISM international magazine.
Above All Things Page 34