Climbing Everest: The Complete Writings of George Leigh Mallory

INTRODUCTION

Peter Gillman

On 12 April 1922, George Mallory sat down to write a letter to his wife Ruth. The British Everest expedition had just reached the Tibetan fortress town of Kampa Dzong, having fought its way through a blizzard which had obliterated their tracks and rendered the Tibetan plateau into a wasteland of snow and ice. As Mallory related, he was wearing two sets of underclothes—one wool, the other silk—a flannel shirt, a sleeved waistcoat, a lambskin jacket and a Burberry coat, as well as plus fours, two pairs of woollen stockings, and a pair of sheepskin boots. Yet his hands were so cold, he told Ruth, that he could hardly manage to grip his pen.

It says a great deal about Mallory’s tenacity and dedication that he completed his letter, telling Ruth about ‘the shadows of mountains moving over the plains’ and the ‘delicate shades of red and yellow and brown’ of the landscape before the snow came. It also reveals much about Mallory’s view of himself as writer. In the first place, he regarded it his duty to posterity that he should faithfully record the sights and events the 1922 expedition encountered on its arduous five-week trek to Everest. In the days when history was still inscribed in pen and ink, letters were seen as vital links in the testimonial chain, and Mallory certainly had a sense of the expedition’s part in the developing saga of human exploration.

His writing also met more personal goals. George and Ruth Mallory had married in July 1914, on the very eve of the First World War. As an artillery officer, Mallory spent a year and a half, with intervals, on the western front. Throughout that period he and Ruth had sustained their marriage by writing to each other regularly—in Ruth’s case, every single day. Thus when Mallory departed for Everest, doing so three times in the space of four years, they continued the practice as a way of keeping their relationship and their love alive.

Both during the war, and while Mallory was away on Everest, their exchanges were always endearingly intimate: Ruth tells George about the latest doings—and misdeeds—of their three young children, Clare, Berry and John. She recites her domestic concerns, her encounters with George’s parents and with hers, the state of the garden at their home in Godalming, Surrey. George is almost as gossipy in response, giving his views of his brother officers on the Western Front and his fellow climbers in Tibet, as well as describing the more momentous progress of both the war in the France and the expedition in Tibet. Their letters are all the more poignant given that their love was doomed, destined to end when Mallory disappeared near the summit of Everest a little less than ten years after they were married.

Once back home in Godalming, Mallory—to use a very modern phrase—recycled his letters to provide his contributions to the official books of the expeditions. Although he removed the less discreet references to his fellow-climbers, the thrust of the narrative, and the quality of his descriptions, are essentially the same. The account which constitutes six chapters of Everest Reconnaissance 1921 shines even more by contrast with the eleven flat, tedious chapters written by Lt Col Charles Howard-Bury, the expedition leader, which Mallory justly described as ‘quite dreadfully bad’.

It was in response to this kind of monotonous prose, devoid of all affect, that Mallory had been developing his own theories of writing. It also stemmed from his involvement with the Bloomsbury group and what was termed the Cambridge School of Friendship, where emotional openness and honesty were all. Mallory believed it was vital that mountaineering writing should function on an emotional level, disclosing the participants’ feelings and attempting to evoke them in the reader. Not for him the stiff upper lip of traditional mountaineering prose, whose authors did their best to conceal their sentiments behind layers of irony and understatement.

Mallory liked to conjure new epithets too: at the tiny settlement of Shilling during the approach march in 1921, he wrote how the wind, a relentless, ever-present force, swept over the sand of a river bank so that it rippled like a sea of watered silk. Such descriptive touches illustrate Mallory’s primary delight in savouring new experiences, one of the key motivations of his life, and his determination to render them in a way that others—starting with his beloved Ruth—could comprehend.

Mallory had embarked on this process at least a decade before. His published canon is not large: he wrote a total of six articles for the two principal climbing publications of the day: the Alpine Journal, published by the Alpine Club, and the Climbers Club Journal. The first of these, The Mountaineer as Artist, written in 1913, illuminates his theories about both mountaineering literature and writing in general.

Mallory’s immediate topic was the meaning of risk in mountaineering. It is significant that he should address this, as mountaineering’s practitioners can attempt to delude themselves—and family and friends—into believing that theirs is not an unduly dangerous pursuit, providing only that they obey the safety rules. Equally telling, Mallory wrote his article at a time when the select coterie who comprised the core of British mountaineering were reeling from the deaths on several of their members in climbing accidents in Snowdonia and the Alps.

Geoffrey Winthrop Young, one of the impresarios of the British climbing world, and the principal sponsor of Mallory’s career, was among the most distressed at the deaths, observing that they marked the end of climbing’s age of innocence. Mallory courageously grappled with these issues in the article, scrutinising the validity of the climbers’ experiences, and producing the metaphor of a symphony to represent the rhythms of climbing’s aesthetic and emotional appeal. Although Mallory was uncertain whether his article had succeeded in its aim, it represented a prescient attempt to identify the emotional core of all sporting experiences which prefigures the recent wave of sports writing.

Mallory resumed these explorations in his second article, ‘Mont Blanc from the Col du Géant by the Eastern Buttress of Mont Maudit’, written in 1917 while he was away from the front at an army training camp in Winchester. Mallory had observed that the terminology of conflict and war was habitually deployed to create an antagonism between mountaineer and mountain. His article describes an ascent of Mont Maudit and its neighbour Mont Blanc which he had undertaken with two friends in 1911. This time he portrays the climb as an inner journey, mediating his actions through his emotional responses to the sequence of events, from his guilt at kicking over the breakfast stove, to his alarm over the most dangerous section of the climb. Then, at the summit, Mallory rejects the notions of victory and conquest. In the most-quoted passage of his writing, he wrote: ‘We’re not exultant; but delighted, joyful; soberly astonished…. Have we vanquished an enemy? Not but ourselves….’

It was not long afterwards that Mallory attempted to forge a career based in part on his writing. He had been a teacher at Charterhouse School in Godalming but resigned to join the first British Everest expedition, the 1921 reconnaissance on which Mallory was to play the key role in identifying the potential route to the summit from the north. His plan was to make a living from writing and lecturing about both his exploits on Everest and broader topics, such an entry for an encyclopaedia about the Himalayas, and his article for the US-published Asia magazine in 1923. Sadly, he did not make the income he had hoped, and in autumn 1923 he and his family moved to Cambridge, where he took up a post as an extra-mural lecturer in history.

It is a terrible irony that one reason he was compelled to renounce his career as a writer was the parsimony of the Mount Everest Committee, which organised the three expeditions in which Mallory took part. When Mallory provided his chapters for the account of the 1921 reconnaissance, he did so on the clear understanding that he would be paid for his work. By November 1923, just three months before he departed on his third and final expedition, Mallory had still not been paid. But when he pressed the committee he received a dusty answer. The committee revoked the previous undertaking and told Mallory no payment would be forthcoming—while sanctimoniously adding that it ‘fully appreciated the value of your contributions’.

Whether the committee did appreciate the quality of Mallory’s contribution is far from clear, since it was so radically different from the turgid account by Howard-Bury, the reconnaissance leader. It represents the best of Mallory’s writings, a pacy narrative, composed in the form of a quest, that occupies a mid-point between his experimental writing and his more pragmatic journalism. It is all the more remarkable for capturing the sense in which the 1921 reconnaissance was a venture into the unknown. No westerner had been within 60 miles of Everest, nor did it appear on any detailed maps. For much of the trek through Tibet the expedition was unable to see the mountain as it was obscured by clouds.

As both adventurer and writer, Mallory was waiting for Everest to come into view. He wanted there to be a moment of revelation, providing him with a construct to counterpoint the frustration he and his companions had experienced to that juncture. On 12 June he and his partner Guy Bullock climbed a hill above the Yaru river and looked in the direction of where Everest should be. Over the next hour the clouds gradually parted, at first giving fragmentary glimpses of glaciers and ridges, until the mountain’s great north face and its summit pyramid were finally revealed.

He described the unveiling of this vision in a letter to Ruth on 15 June, which he reworked when he came to write his chapters for the expedition book. He also deployed a simile which was central to his motivations and his life. ‘Mountain shapes are often fantastic seen through a mist,’ Mallory wrote; ‘these were like the wildest creation of a dream.’

The notion of the dream occurs in several of Mallory’s previous letters and articles, but here achieves its greatest force. The drive to fulfil his dreams inspired Mallory’s decisions and actions, and provides a key to understanding both him and his colleagues in their venture into the unknown. In their willingness to confront the dangers that lay ahead, they serve as a testament to the optimism and defiance that are at the core of human nature.

There is a small postscript I should like to offer. In 2000, the biography of George Mallory, The Wildest Dream, written by myself and my wife Leni, was published. We were delighted and flattered by its reception, above all when it was awarded the Boardman Tasker prize for Mountain Writing. We were soon convinced that there was a second book to be published—the collected writings of our protagonist and hero. What ensued is the familiar and wearying tale of attempting to find a publisher who shared our belief. We were turned down three times and then moved on to another project. It was thus with delight, tinged with envy, that we learned that Gibson Square Books was publishing this collection of Mallory’s writing. We trust and hope that its readers will share our view of the qualities of George Mallory, bold, innovative, and inspirational in his writing as in his life.

Climbing Everest

‘From Everest we expect no mercy.’

George Leigh Mallory

1

THE MOUNTAINEER AS ARTIST

I seem to distinguish two sorts of climber, those who take a high line about climbing and those who take no particular line at all. It is depressing to think how little I understand either, and I can hardly believe that the second sort are such fools as I imagine. Perhaps the distinction has no reality; it may be that it is only a question of attitude. Still, even as an attitude, the position of the first sort of climber strikes a less violent shock of discord with mere reason. Climbing for them means something more than a common amusement, and more than other forms of athletic pursuit mean to other men; it has a recognised importance in life. If you could deprive them of it they would be conscious of a definite degradation, a loss of virtue. For those who take the high line about it climbing may be one of the modern ways of salvation along with slumming, statistics, and other forms of culture, and more complete than any of these. They have an arrogance with regard to this hobby never equalled even by a little king among grouse-killers. It never, for instance, presents itself to them as comparable with field sports. They assume an unmeasured superiority. And yet—they give no explanation.

I am myself one of the arrogant sort, and may serve well for example, because I happen also to be a sportsman. It is not intended that any inference as to my habits should follow from this premise. You may easily be a sportsman though you have never walked with a gun under your arm nor bestride a tall horse in your pink. I am a sportsman simply because men say that I am; it would be impossible to convince them of the contrary, and it’s no use complaining; and, once I have humbly accepted my fate and settled down in this way of life, I am proud to show, if I can, how I deserve the title. Though a sportsman may be guiltless of sporting deeds, one who has acquired the sporting reputation will show cause in kind if he may. Now, it is abundantly clear that any expedition on the high Alps is of a sporting nature; it is almost aggressively sporting. And yet it would never occur to me to prove my title by any reference to mountaineering in the Alps, nor would it occur to any other climber of the arrogant sort who may also be a sportsman. We set climbing on a pedestal above the common recreations of men. We hold it apart and label it as something that has a special value.

This, though it passes with all too little comment, is a plain act of rebellion. It is a serious deviation from the normal standard of rightness and wrongness, and if we were to succeed in establishing our value for mountaineering we should upset the whole order of society, just as completely as it would be upset if a sufficient number of people who claimed to be enlightened were to eat eggs with knives and regard with disdain the poor folk who ate them with spoons.

But there is a propriety of behaviour for rebels as for others. Society can at least expect of rebels that they explain themselves. Other men are exempt from this duty because they use the recognised labels in the conventional ways. Sporting practice and religious observance were at one time placed above, or below, the need of explanation. They were bottled and labelled ‘Extra dry,’ and this valuation was accepted as a premise for a priori judgments by society in general. Rebel minorities have sometimes behaved in the same way, and by the very arrogance of their dogmatism have made a revolution. The porridge-with-salt men have introduced a fashion which decrees that it is right to eat salt with porridge, and no less wrong to conceal its true nature by any other dis guise than to pass the bottle from left to right instead of opposite-wise. This triumph was secured only by self-assured arrogance. But the correct method for rebels is that they set forth their case for the world to see.

Climbers who, like myself, take the high line have much to explain, and it is time they set about it. Notoriously they endanger their lives. With what object? If only for some physical pleasure, to enjoy certain movements of the body and to experience the zest of emulation, then it is not worth while. Climbers are only a particularly foolish set of desperadoes; they are on the same plane with hunters, and many degrees less reasonable. The only defence for mountaineering puts it on a higher plane than mere physical sensation. It is asserted that the climber experiences higher emotions; he gets some good for his soul. His opponent may well feel sceptical about this argument. He, too, may claim to consider his soul’s good when he can take a holiday. Probably it is true of anyone who spends a well-earned fortnight in healthy enjoyment at the seaside that he comes back a better, that is to say a more virtuous mart than he went. How are the climber’s joys worth more than the seaside? What are these higher emotions to which he refers so elusively? And if they really are so valuable, is there no safer way of reaching them? Do mountaineers consider these questions and answer them again and again from fresh experience, or are they content with some magic certainty born of comparative ignorance long ago?

It would be a wholesome tonic, perhaps, more often to meet an adversary who argued on these lines. In practice I find that few men ever want to discuss mountaineering seriously. I suppose they imagine that a discussion with me would be unprofitable; and I must confess that if anyone does open the question my impulse is to put him off. I can assume a vague disdain for civilisation, and I can make phrases about beautiful surroundings, and puff them out, as one who has a secret and does not care to reveal it because no one would under stand—phrases which refer to the divine riot of Nature in her ecstasy of making mountains.

Thus I appeal to the effect of mountain scenery upon my aesthetic sensibility. But, even if I can communicate by words a true feeling, I have explained nothing. Aesthetic delight is vitally connected with our performance, but it neither explains nor excuses it. No one for a moment dreams that our apparently wilful proceedings are determined merely by our desire to see what is beautiful. The mountain railway could cater for such desires. By providing view-points at a number of stations, and by concealing all signs of its own mechanism, it might be so completely organised that all the aesthetic joys of the mountaineer should be offered to its intrepid ticket-holders. It would achieve this object with a comparatively small expenditure of time, and would even have, one might suppose, a decisive advantage by affording to all lovers of the mountains the opportunity of sharing their emotions with a large and varied multitude of their fellow-men. And yet the idea of associating this mechanism with a snow mountain is the abomination of every species of mountaineer. To him it appears as a kind of rape. The fact that he so regards it indicates the emphasis with which he rejects the crude aesthetic reasons as his central defence.

I suppose that, in the opinion of many people who have opportunities of judging, mountaineers have no ground for claiming for their pursuit a superiority as regards the natural beauties that attend it. And certainly many huntsmen would resent their making any such claim. We cannot, therefore, remove mountaineering from the plane of hunting by a composite representation of its merits—by asserting that physical and aesthetic joys are blended for us and not for others.

Nevertheless, I am still arrogant, and still confident in the superiority of mountaineering over all other forms of recreation. But what do I mean by this superiority? And in what measure do I claim it? On what level do we place mountaineering? What place in the whole order of experience is occupied by our experience as mountaineers? The answer to these questions must be very nearly connected with the whole explanation of our position; it may actually be found to include in itself a defence of mountaineering.

It must be admitted at the outset that our periodic literature gives little indication that our performance is concerned no less with the spiritual side of us than with the physical. This is, in part, because we require certain practical information of anyone who describes an expedition. Our journals, with one exception, do not pretend to be elevated literature, but aim only at providing useful knowledge for climbers. With this purpose we try to show exactly where upon a mountain our course lay, in what manner the conditions of snow and ice and rocks and weather were or were not favourable to our enterprise, and what were the actual difficulties we had to overcome and the dangers we had to meet. Naturally, if we accept these circumstances, the impulse for literary expression vanishes; not so much because the matter is not suitable as because, for literary expression, it is too difficult to handle. A big expedition in the Alps, say a traverse of Mont Blanc, would be a superb theme for an epic poem. But we are not all even poets, still less Homers or Miltons. We do, indeed, possess lyric poetry that is concerned with mountains, and value it highly for the expression of much that we feel about them. But little of it can be said to suggest that mountaineering in the technical sense offers an emotional experience which can not otherwise be reached. A few essays and a few descriptions do give some indication that the spiritual part of man is concerned. Most of those who describe expeditions do not even treat them as adventure, still less as being connected with any emotional experience peculiar to mountaineering. Some writers, after the regular careful references to matters of plain fact, insert a paragraph dealing summarily with an aesthetic experience; the greater part make a bare allusion to such feelings or neglect them altogether, and perhaps these are the wisest sort.

And yet it is not so very difficult to write about aesthetic impressions in some way so as to give pleasure. If we do not ask too much, many writers are able to please us in this respect. We may be pleased, without being stirred to the depths, by anyone who can make us believe that he has experienced aesthetically; we may not be able to feel with him what he has felt, but if he talks about it simply we may be quite delighted to perceive that he has felt as we too are capable of feeling. Mountaineers who write do not, as a rule, succeed even in this small degree. If they are so bold as to attempt a sunset or sunrise, we too often feel uncertain as we read that they have felt anything—and this even though we may know quite well that they are accustomed to feel as we feel ourselves.

These observations about our mountain literature are not made by way of censure or in disappointment; they are put forward as phenomena, which have to be explained, not so much by the nature of mountaineers, but rather by the nature of their performance. The explanation which commends itself to me is derived very simply from the conception of mountaineering, which, expressed or unexpressed, is common, I imagine, to all us of the arrogant sort. We do not think that our aesthetic experiences of sunrises and sunsets and clouds and thunder are supremely important facts in mountaineering, but rather that they cannot thus be separated and catalogued and described individually as experiences at all. They are not incidental in mountaineering, but a vital and inseparable part of it; they are not ornamental, but structural; they are not various items causing emotion but parts of an emotional whole; they are the crystal pools perhaps, but they owe their life to a continuous stream.

It is this unity that makes so many attempts to describe aesthetic detail seem futile. Somehow they miss the point and fail to touch us. It is because they are only fragments. If we take one moment and present its emotional quality apart from the whole, it has lost the very essence that gave it a value. If we write about an expedition from the emotional point of view in any part of it, we ought so to write about the whole adventure from beginning to end.

A day well spent in the Alps is like some great symphony. Andante, andantissimo sometimes, is the first movement—the grim, sickening plod up the moraine. But how forgotten when the blue light of dawn flickers over the hard, clean snow! The new