The Lost Explorer by Conrad Anker, David Roberts Page A
Authors: Conrad Anker, David Roberts
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he felt in the mountains. In an ambitious 1914 essay he titled “The Mountaineer as Artist,” Mallory spun out an elaborate conceit comparing a day in the Alps with a symphony. Here, as in the overearnest pages of many another young mountaineer-writer, a note of preciousness could creep in:
And so throughout the day successive moods induce the symphonic whole—allegro while you break the back ofan expedition and the issue is still in doubt; scherzo, perhaps, as you leap up the final rocks of the arête or cut steps in a last short slope, with the ice-chips dancing and swimming and bubbling and bounding with magic gaiety over the crisp surface in their mad glissade.
Yet as he matured, the loose lyricism of Mallory’s prose acquired a certain backbone, as he learned that he really had something to say. He had a true gift for the aphoristic formula; had he lived longer, Mallory might have become, as did Geoffrey Winthrop Young, one of the century’s finest writers about mountaineering. His most famous passage appears in an account of a difficult route on Mont Blanc, published in 1918 in the
Alpine Journal:
“Have we vanquished an enemy? None but ourselves. Have we gained success? That word means nothing here.”
There is perhaps a rueful irony in the fact that the single phrase for which Mallory will forever be remembered was a spontaneous retort, in the midst of a tiring American lecture tour, to a journalist who asked him why he wanted to climb Everest. “Because it is there,” snapped Mallory, passing on to posterity an apothegm as pithy as any Confucian riddle. Some of Mallory’s closest friends insisted that the response was meant as an off-putting non sequitur, from a man weary in his bones of being asked the same unanswerable question mountaineers have always been scolded with.
In the chapters he contributed to the official 1921 and 1922 Everest books, Mallory writes vividly and well; but so do most of his teammates, so high were the standards of English education of the day. Noel Odell’s and Teddy Norton’s chapters in the 1924 book are the equal of Mallory’s.
In 1910, at age twenty-four, to eke out a living, Mallory took a teaching job at a public school called Charterhouse. He poured himself into the job, on holiday taking students climbing in Wales and the Alps, just as R. L. G. Irving had taken him. Some, such as Robert Graves, remained indebted to him the rest of their days. But Mallory was too disorganized to be a really effective teacher, too creative to be happy in his drudgerous and sedentary post. As Graves put it, “George was wasted at Charterhouse.”
Even so, he must have been a stimulating teacher. David Pye relates a stray remark that hints at the impishly subversive role Mallory played with his Charterhouse charges: “Imagine me to-morrow morning teaching the smallest boys about the fall of man! what the devil is one to say? It was such a wholly admirable business and God behaved so badly; mere petty jealousy!”
Politically, Mallory was a liberal on the far left, despite being a parson’s son. He considered himself a Fabian, and championed such causes as women’s suffrage and Irish home rule, traveling to the country in 1920 to witness for himself the barbarity of the English suppression. One night in Dublin, he was cross-examined in the glare of a flashlight by an official with a revolver in his hand, who apparently suspected him of being a rabid Sinn Feiner.
Starting in the spring of 1916, Mallory served on the French front during World War I, where he suffered his share of close calls—a whizzing bullet that passed between him and a nearby soldier, two friends blown apart by a shell as they ran a few paces behind him. At first, in letters home, he kept up the jaunty pretense that war was like some schoolboy sport: “Personally, I get some fun out of this sort of performance.” “I played the game, on my way to the O.P., of shell-dodging for the first time. Quite an
And so throughout the day successive moods induce the symphonic whole—allegro while you break the back ofan expedition and the issue is still in doubt; scherzo, perhaps, as you leap up the final rocks of the arête or cut steps in a last short slope, with the ice-chips dancing and swimming and bubbling and bounding with magic gaiety over the crisp surface in their mad glissade.
Yet as he matured, the loose lyricism of Mallory’s prose acquired a certain backbone, as he learned that he really had something to say. He had a true gift for the aphoristic formula; had he lived longer, Mallory might have become, as did Geoffrey Winthrop Young, one of the century’s finest writers about mountaineering. His most famous passage appears in an account of a difficult route on Mont Blanc, published in 1918 in the
Alpine Journal:
“Have we vanquished an enemy? None but ourselves. Have we gained success? That word means nothing here.”
There is perhaps a rueful irony in the fact that the single phrase for which Mallory will forever be remembered was a spontaneous retort, in the midst of a tiring American lecture tour, to a journalist who asked him why he wanted to climb Everest. “Because it is there,” snapped Mallory, passing on to posterity an apothegm as pithy as any Confucian riddle. Some of Mallory’s closest friends insisted that the response was meant as an off-putting non sequitur, from a man weary in his bones of being asked the same unanswerable question mountaineers have always been scolded with.
In the chapters he contributed to the official 1921 and 1922 Everest books, Mallory writes vividly and well; but so do most of his teammates, so high were the standards of English education of the day. Noel Odell’s and Teddy Norton’s chapters in the 1924 book are the equal of Mallory’s.
In 1910, at age twenty-four, to eke out a living, Mallory took a teaching job at a public school called Charterhouse. He poured himself into the job, on holiday taking students climbing in Wales and the Alps, just as R. L. G. Irving had taken him. Some, such as Robert Graves, remained indebted to him the rest of their days. But Mallory was too disorganized to be a really effective teacher, too creative to be happy in his drudgerous and sedentary post. As Graves put it, “George was wasted at Charterhouse.”
Even so, he must have been a stimulating teacher. David Pye relates a stray remark that hints at the impishly subversive role Mallory played with his Charterhouse charges: “Imagine me to-morrow morning teaching the smallest boys about the fall of man! what the devil is one to say? It was such a wholly admirable business and God behaved so badly; mere petty jealousy!”
Politically, Mallory was a liberal on the far left, despite being a parson’s son. He considered himself a Fabian, and championed such causes as women’s suffrage and Irish home rule, traveling to the country in 1920 to witness for himself the barbarity of the English suppression. One night in Dublin, he was cross-examined in the glare of a flashlight by an official with a revolver in his hand, who apparently suspected him of being a rabid Sinn Feiner.
Starting in the spring of 1916, Mallory served on the French front during World War I, where he suffered his share of close calls—a whizzing bullet that passed between him and a nearby soldier, two friends blown apart by a shell as they ran a few paces behind him. At first, in letters home, he kept up the jaunty pretense that war was like some schoolboy sport: “Personally, I get some fun out of this sort of performance.” “I played the game, on my way to the O.P., of shell-dodging for the first time. Quite an
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