Two days ago, the London Times newspaper, under the headline, “The Mount Everest Tragedy: Message from the King,” carried the contents of a letter that King George V, 59, wrote to the Mount Everest Committee.
His Majesty wanted to convey “an expression of his sincere sympathy” to the families and to the committee about the tragic deaths of “two gallant explorers,” George Mallory, who would have turned 38 last week, and Andrew Irvine, 22. They have not been seen on the mountain since 8 June 1924.
King George V
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Reading the confirmation in the Times that his Cambridge University friend, George Mallory, has been lost forever on Mount Everest, Edward Morgan Forster, 45, remembers the beautiful young man he and many of his Bloomsbury friends were so attracted to many years ago. Forster tried to capture some of Mallory’s allure in the character of George Emerson in his 1908 novel, A Room with a View.
George Leigh Mallory by Duncan Grant
Since his next novel, Howard’s End, came out two years later, Forster has had a difficult time completing any work worth publishing. Last year, his friends Virginia, 42, and Leonard Woolf, 43, did bring out a piece of his travel writing, Pharos and Pharillon (A Novelist’s Sketchbook of Alexandria Through the Ages), which made a small profit.
Morgan started a major fictional work before the Great War and had been struggling to finish it ever since. A Passage to India has finally been published, just three weeks ago, by Edward Arnold. In the initial drafts he had emphasized a much stronger sexual attraction between the two main characters, but he toned that down when he returned to the manuscript a few years ago.
Forster has been receiving a good response from his friends about the novel. Many have asked him whether the heroine was actually attacked in the Marabar Caves. One friend has written asking Forster to explain not just what happened but why the novelist chose to make the scene so ambiguous in the novel.
Today, Morgan writes back to him,
In the cave it is either a man, or the supernatural, or an illusion…And even if I know! My writing mind therefore is a blur here —i. e., I will it to remain a blur, and to be uncertain, as I am of many facts in daily life.”
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago… is the basis for the paperback series, “Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through V, covering 1920 through 1924 are available at Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway, and as signed copies at Pan Yan Bookstore in Tiffin, OH, City Books on the North Side and Riverstone Books in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. They are also on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in print and e-book formats. For more information, email me at kaydee@gypsyteacher.com.
If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins’ relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is also available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in both print and e-book versions.
SuchFriends Blog 