Goodbye To All That

"Robert Graves and TE Lawrence famously made a pact never to speak about the war. The war was never spoken about, but never forgotten. Robert Graves was actually a student of Mallory’s at Charterhouse [school] and Mallory was best man when Robert Graves married Nancy [Nicholson] and I was able to show that by chance [the poet] Wilfred Owen also attended that wedding. As he travelled to London to attend the wedding, Owen got the news that his first poem had been accepted for publication. It’s fascinating to think that Wilfred Owen may have been there with Mallory, talking about his first publication. Robert Graves was a fascinating figure. At the Somme he was severely wounded by artillery and left for dead. He was literally brought in and put on a pile of the dead. Only the next day, when the burial party came round and found him breathing, was he then taken by stretcher to a casualty clearing station. Such was the carnage at the front, he nevertheless ended up lying about for three or four days before he was attended to. It’s amazing that he survived. By this point his death had been reported to his mother and he appeared in the honour rolls in The Times . One of the things that was often said about World War I was that the British army lacked the clerk power to tabulate the dead at Passchendaele and the Somme. If that was true, they kept records of just about everything else. It was the most thoroughly documented war – it was amazing that men found time to fight. And so in doing my research over 12 years, I wanted to find out where each of the 20 climbers were every day of the war. I was able to do that in part because the zone of operations was so small and because 10 years after the war there was this tsunami of literature – memoirs, poetry, prose, journals, letters – published. It meant that there was no corner of that battlefield that hadn’t been documented every day of the war, and in multiple voices. The redefinition of war as we think of it today – the lost generation, the horror of the front – all came about through this outpouring of literature that occurred 10 years after the war. Graves wrote Goodbye to All That as a war memoir, but he was also very conscious of the opportunity presented, and deliberately set out to write a bestseller about the war. He doesn’t necessarily fabricate things, but he is writing it very much with an eye to the marketplace, and it did do extremely well. But by that point it’s almost like the war is a hallucination they have all come down from. I think Graves felt a certain kind of liberty to write about the war as he wanted, as he, after all, was haunted every night by memories of it. He famously could not stand to be in the presence of cut lumber because it reminded him of the dugouts in the war. Yes. And if a car backfired he would throw himself to the ground. I think of all the memoirs it is the most accessible, the best written and in many ways the most poignant of the memoirs that came from soldiers. One of the fascinating things that I found during this 12 years of research is that it was almost as difficult for me to reach across time and understand the ethos of Edwardian Britain as it was to reach across time and understand the reality of life in Tibet at that time. We tend to think of the Victorian era as being stodgy, followed by the wild chaos of the Jazz Age and the surrealistic consequences of the chaos of the war and so on. But there was a moment in time in late Edwardian England on the eve of the war where there was this remarkable ethos of freedom. There was an almost poetic sense of personal freedom, when all that counted was beauty and authenticity. It was quite a bohemian scene. Part of that, certainly at Oxford and Cambridge, was a kind of sexual experimentation that is daunting. [The economist] John Maynard Keynes was, at Cambridge, famously called “the iron copulating machine”. Part of this was this strange British history. The old joke is that the British would keep their dogs at home and send their boys to kennels. Bosie Douglas, who was Oscar Wilde’s lover, attended Winchester College just six years before Mallory and famously recorded that 90% of the boys there had some form of sexual contact with each other and the only ones who didn’t were the 10% who were too ugly. There was always this rumour about Mallory’s sexuality. It’s not really an issue of sexuality and words like “homosexual”, as we think of them today, have no meaning. George Mallory had a breathless love affair with James Strachey, the brother of [the writer] Lytton. They only had sex once and I was able to find out the name of the room and who lent them the room at Cambridge to have that little fling. But everybody coveted Mallory. [The painter] Duncan Grant was in love with him; Lytton Strachey was in love with him. All of these men were involved in these kind of engagements and then at a certain point in their life, they all got married and had children. There’s even been in the Everest literature the prurient suggestion that George Mallory selected Sandy Irvine for the final climb because he had designs on him. That’s a complete misreading of Mallory’s sexuality or Irvine’s libido. The truth is that by 1924 George Mallory was 37 years old, a beloved husband of a beloved wife, and had three wonderful kids. His sexual experience with James Strachey and the flirtations with Duncan Grant and others were just part of the spirit of experimentation that occurred at Cambridge before the war. As for Sandy Irvine, he was wildly and devilishly heterosexual. You always have to be careful never to judge an era by the standards of today."