“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, June 26, 1924, The Times, London; and Weybridge, Surrey, England

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

*****

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.

“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, March, 1924, Weymouth, Dorset, England

Ever since novelist Edward Morgan Forster, 45, read Seven Pillars of Wisdom by British army officer Thomas Edward Lawrence, 35, Forster has been eager to meet the author and famous Mideast adventurer.

T. E. Lawrence

Actually, they had met briefly about three years ago at a political event in London. Morgan remembered the famous Colonel as looking like a sweet young boy then. He wrote him an admiring letter but received no reply.

Their mutual friend, poet Siegfried Sassoon, 37, recently passed on to Forster an early copy of Seven Pillars. A few years ago, most of the original manuscript was lost (or stolen?!) at a railroad station and Lawrence is so paranoid that, after rewriting the whole thing from memory, he had eight copies set in type, printed and bound by the Oxford Times. There were so many errors, Lawrence made corrections by hand in five of the copies and gave one to Sassoon, which he in turn passed on to Forster.

T. E. Lawrence’s edits of his Seven Pillars of Wisdom

At the time, Lawrence told Sassoon that he admired Forster’s A Room with a View, but wasn’t he dead?

As soon as he read Seven Pillars, Forster asked Sassoon to set up this meeting. He and Lawrence have since been corresponding, and Lawrence has invited Forster to visit him here, near his rented cottage in the woods, Clouds Hill.

Clouds Hill, Dorset

Forster has made the trip from Waterloo Station on the mainline here to Weymouth, and Lawrence has put him up at an inn.

Lawrence appears at the inn as Forster is eating dinner. Forster notes that the Army officer has a surprisingly weak handshake; he obviously doesn’t like to be touched.

The two writers talk about the book. Lawrence is looking for some established authors, like Forster, to help him with the editing.

In a letter last month, Morgan told Lawrence how impressed he is with Seven Pillars but feels that it needs more conversation.

You give a series of pictures. I see people on camels, motionless, I look again and they are in a new position…similarly immobile. There never can have been a Movement with so little motion in it!”

Forster had also argued his own case for the role of editor, explaining that he has

written some novels, also done journalism and historical essays; no experience of active life, no power of managing men, no Oriental languages, but some knowledge of Orientals.”

He concluded by reassuring Lawrence that

You will never show [Seven Pillars] to anyone who will like it more than I do.”

This evening, Lawrence invites Forster to come to Clouds Hill tomorrow for lunch with some of his fellow soldiers from the Tank Corps at nearby Bovington Camp. Lawrence doesn’t seem pleased with his present position in the service as he is eager to get back into the Royal Air Force.

Forster is looking forward to working on the manuscript with Lawrence. He finds that the material has already affected the final pages of his own novel that he has been finishing up, A Passage to India.

“Such Friends”:  100 Years Ago… is the basis for the paperback series, “Such Friends”:  The Literary 1920s. Volumes I through IV, covering 1920 through 1923 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.

This summer I will be talking about the literary 1920s in Paris and New York at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University, and about early 20^th century supporters of the arts at Osher in the University of Pittsburgh.

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.

If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”:  Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.