Footnotes

'I'M TO GO ONCE MORE TO OLD EVEREST... WE'VE GOT TO WIN THE TOP NEXT TIME OR NEVER' – MALLORY OPENS HIS HEART TO A YOUNG FEMALE ADMIRER, writing in his last letter, on the boat taking him out to India, and Tibet: "My three companions de voyage, Irvine, Beetham, & Hazard are all pleasant enough & the first I particularly like – a splendid specimen of a man; he rowed two years in the Oxford boat as a heavy weight & yet is completely modest and has a voice which reminds me strangely of Rupert Brooke's. It's glorious to have the way to Mt Everest clear in front of me now. I was so busy before we left and going was altogether so difficult (though my wife has been an angel) that I had no enjoyment in anticipation, rather anxiety. But here I'm on the fair way again. You know we've got to do it this time; & yet it won't be at all easily done. Nor have we come to a conclusion yet as to the best way of trying to do it. Norton & I will be discussing that at length when we meet; at present he favours an attempt without oxygen & with only one camp above 23000; & I want to go without oxygen making 2 camps & am inclined to believe that it will be easier with oxygen, provided the instrument for using it works all right. So there we are! Anyway it will be a tremendous struggle. And I shall see Sikhim again. Sikhim is the country of my dreams".

This remarkable series was sparked by a fan letter written to him by Eleanor Marjorie Holmes. Born in 1903, she was a girl of nineteen at the time and still living with her family in Yorkshire, teaching at a local school (although seventeen years younger than Mallory, she was nearly the same age as his climbing partner, Sandy Irvine). It is clear that she and Mallory never met. But it is equally clear that their correspondence meant a great deal to both of them. As Mallory tells her in the first letter: "Oh, I like your letter well enough. I'm touched by it. Dear girl, you give me the idea of a joy in you that wells up & bubbles over merely at hearing from me. And you mean it, for I see you're true – quite true all the way through I think. How can you say such things & mean them? It's irrational altogether; – but right & lovely, divinely irrational. So be as irrational as you will for me. Am I a little irrational too to be bubbling over so much in liquid ink?" It is, he thinks, "really a piece of luck that we should begin to know each other through letters"; but then asks: "By the way, are you beautiful? I hope not. If you are quite ugly I will guarantee that when we meet we have the time of our lives; if you are plain, of a moderate plainness, I will promise you not to be too damnably polite or stiff; but if you are beautiful Heaven help me; I shall shut up like a sea anemone".

Several months further into their correspondence, he tells her: "Your letter, kept in my pocket during the busy day was read at length in bed last night. Why should a letter from you have strange effect on me? – strange effect? well, only this, that after reading it I wanted to kiss you. He wanted to kiss a girl he'd never seen – curiouser & curiouser – & yet not more curious – than the rest of amazing humanity". In a similar vein, during the course of the letter written beside the pub fireside, in which he tells her that he has been selected for the Everest expedition, he muses: "Guess what might happen if another spark glowed there in the chair opposite. Would two sparks make a fire? Suppose the other spark were you Marjorie? What is it all about this fire always waiting to blaze up? Shall we see it blaze or shall we hold the snuffer on it?... Cold philosophy, oh! so cold, cold as charity, and, colder than that, cold as fear. Fear the fire? Not I. Only to see it don't burn someone else! – & perhaps determine a little of what sort of a cinder one wants to be. Blaze up, faint spark, you; blow up the billows & then spread ink on paper, before many days".

Despite their widely divergent circumstances she is, for him, a kindred spirit: "You want to devote the whole of your effervescent self to something, to be all strung up to one purpose as the leg-muscles are when one runs... how can I advise you – I who've suffered all my life from the need of giving myself to things as well as people – & enjoyed myself hugely most of the time it must be added... one thing don't do – crave for excitement. You are capable of ecstasy, but it must come when it will, encouraged perhaps but not caused. Meanwhile be quietly attentive, concentrated in one direction or another of your aspirations & at the same time serene. You have a little the spirit of an artist – don't forsake that; do what is to be done... do it with the keen edge of a cutting tool with your own heart's skill well, neatly, dexterously, finely & withal gently".

Her side of the correspondence does not survive, but his constant anxiety that she mark her letters as "Personal" on the envelope when addressed to his office, and "George Mallory Esq" when at home (to avoid any ambiguity, lest Mrs George Mallory should open it), make it clear that her letters were just as outspoken; and that, as a public figure and married man, it was he rather than she who had most to lose: "I don't imagine", he protests at one point, "you would like to think of clerks in the office making jokes over your letter to me & certainly I shouldn't".

Although, superficially at least, standing in sharp contrast to the recently discovered letters to Lytton Strachey, Mallory's letters to Marjorie Holmes are unmistakably in the same voice, bringing him – and her, too -- vividly alive; as he tells her: "It is curious how much you make me want to converse with you merely by writing. You have some literary power – the power of putting forth yourself, the responsive, feeling, emotional self in words & that I suppose is the power of literature... A great deal of letter-writing as you say is a pure waste of time... But the letter which proceeds from the real desire to tell things or still more which is inspired by some curiosity or excitement in the spiritual presence of the imagined recipient can be the best talk in words, the best of all".

Most poignant of all is his final meditation of their correspondence, written during that final voyage out to India: "Can you love a shadow – a mere hand that spins lame halting words & belongs in some way to a mere name in the newspapers? But words are thoughts, and thoughts are men and women. Can thoughts love each other? Clearly they must".

Copies are held by the library of the Royal Geographical Society; although the only scholarly reference to them we have traced to date is by Abbie Garrington, who traces intriguing parallels between D.H. Lawrence's modes of expression and, as she describes them, these 'passionate letters', Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing (2013), p. 168. A note by the present owner, Marjorie Holmes' son, on his mother is included in the lot.