Dreams of Unseen Heights:
Everest 1924, The Ascent of F6 and “The Symbol”

Katie Ives

Nearly a century later, the moment seems like a still point in history: a lull between the ending of one war and the beginning of the next, a glimmer between the opening and closing of clouds, a pause before the vanishing of lives and the fading of the day—a story told so often it appears detached from time, a phantom narrative that haunts our dreams.

On June 8, 1924, British geologist Noel Odell perched on an outcrop at around 8000 m on the world’s highest peak. The mists lifted, and the summit appeared crisp against the sky. No one had yet reached the apex of Mt. Everest, called Chomolungma in the Sherpa language. Its unknowns might have felt as vast as eras etched in the rocks he studied.

High above, two dark specks climbed a stone step, one after the other: his teammates George Mallory and Sandy Irvine. “Then the whole fascinating vision vanished, enveloped in cloud once more,” Odell reported in a dispatch.¹ The two dots never returned, but he was certain they’d reached the top. In an obituary for Irvine, Odell added, “He was ‘going strong’; sharing with that other fine character who accompanied him such a vision of sublimity that it has been the lot of few mortals to behold; nay, few while beholding have become merged into such a scene of transcendence.”²

Mallory and Irvine disappeared long before social media could spread photos so rapidly that mass audiences felt as if they, too, stood watching on mountainsides. Still, Odell’s story left afterimages in the minds of innumerable people, including those who would never travel to the Himalaya themselves. Viewed as one of the last unknowns, the summit of Everest crystallized myths and meanings that have long accumulated across mountaintops—invisible drifts of desires, uncertainties or fears. And in his eulogy for Mallory and Irvine, the Bishop of Chester insisted, “That last ascent, with the beautiful mystery of its great enigma, stands for more than an heroic effort to climb a mountain […] Sic itur ad astra.”³ For some nonclimbing poets and fiction writers, questions about what exactly the ascent of a coveted peak might stand for—and what the consequences of such symbolism might be—highlighted fraught realities behind any dreams of “transcendence” during the tense interwar era.

In the spring of 1936, two British poets set out for the Sintra Mountains of Portugal, hiking up hillsides that bulged with cork trees and granite rocks. Neither was particularly inclined to outdoor adventure, but they were coauthoring a play, The Ascent of F6, about an imaginary giant mountain, and Christopher Isherwood recalled his fellow poet and sometimes lover W.H. Auden “insisting on scrambling up a steep part […] saying they must get themselves into the mood of the mountaineers in their play; this was accompanied by laughter, lost footings, slitherings, and screams.”

Back at their hotel, with the curtains closed, Auden wrote so quickly that Isherwood could scarcely keep up with the striding of words across blank pages, like footsteps on white snows.⁴ All the while, real lands beyond their fantasized landscapes remained impossible to forget. Hitler had been in power in Germany for three years. Isherwood’s partner, a young German man, Heinz Neddermeyer, was staying with the poets, hoping to escape arrest by the Gestapo. Only a year later, he’d be deported from Luxembourg to Germany and sentenced to prison and hard labor. A gale would soon blast around the world, as Auden and Louis MacNeice predicted in Letters from Iceland, wrought by “all the dictators who look so bold and fresh / The midnight hours, the soft wind from the sweeping wing / Of madness, and the intolerable tightening of the mesh / Of history […].”⁵

In many ways, The Ascent of F6 reflects a loss of idealism about mountaineering and the interwar societies that supported it. Auden was still a teenager in 1922 when Mallory had returned from an earlier Everest expedition and given a lecture at the young poet’s school. Later that year, Auden had described the peak in an ecstatic poem, its pale ridge soaring “far up into the amethystine vapours” below a blaze of stars, “deep in the sky that is Eternity.”⁶ But despite his own Romantic views of high mountains, Mallory himself had been skeptical about the machinations surrounding his first attempt in 1921, and he’d wavered before agreeing to take part in that effort, concerned it might become “a merely fantastic performance.”⁷ By his last expedition in 1924, he’d predicted a desperate struggle “more like war” than climbing.⁸ During the countrywide mourning of Mallory’s death, British politicians and journalists had transformed him into a readymade archetype of a glamourized nationalist hero—a balm for the horrors, griefs and disillusionments of World War I, an almost mystical symbol of “imperial redemption,” as historian Wade Davis later wrote, for a country confronting the diminishment of its economic strength and the growing resistance to its colonialism.⁹ In a 1924 dispatch, expedition member Edward Norton had declared, “How else than by such undertakings as Polar and Everest expeditions is the last flicker of the old spirit of adventure and enterprise which made the British Empire to be kept alive?”¹⁰

Through his brother John, a mountaineer and geologist based in India, Auden had a distant bystander’s view of the Everest dramas. John himself had longingly recorded a faraway glimpse of the upper mountain—a moon-sliver of white above intervening ridges—while surveying the aftermath of a 1934 earthquake, though he never managed to get chosen for an attempt.¹¹ But W.H. Auden also saw the propensities for political misuse. By the 1930s, climbing was even more implicated in rivalries between colonial powers. British explorer Kenneth Mason decried the belief among Westerners “that the honour of their country was at stake if they did not climb something larger and higher and more difficult than had been achieved by the climbers of some other country.”¹² Hitler’s and Mussolini’s governments began exploiting the propaganda potential of alpinists hammering their way up deadly Alpine north walls—much to the dismay of members of the British mountaineering establishment such as Colonel Edward Strutt, who viewed such high-risk endeavours as “deranged.”¹³ Still, the descriptions in German and Italian articles of manly heroes and sublime deaths—and their claims about the special courage and vigor of men of a particular nation and race—weren’t entirely dissimilar from the mythologizing of Mallory, Irvine and Everest in the British press.¹⁴ And along with some other intellectuals of his generation, Auden felt increasingly uncomfortable with the direction of all empires, including his own.¹⁵

Partway up the north face, as if in warning, Michael finds a skull and remembers “that pair also whom Odell saw on the step of Everest before the cloud hid them for ever.” By then, however, Michael is already too lured by thoughts of how he might use the public platform of a successful ascent. Determined to beat the piton-wielding Ostnian team, he and a teammate push on through a blizzard on a hasty summit bid.¹⁶ “This won’t be mountaineering,” Michael laments. “It’ll be a steeplechase.”¹⁷ But he quickly surrenders to his society’s expectations: “The Ostnians [will be] defeated, the Empire saved. And I have failed.” With his own mountaintop death, Michael, like Mallory, becomes the iconic symbol that his brother and other imperial leaders desired.¹⁸ “For Auden,” Edward Mendelson, the poet’s literary executor, later wrote, the play demonstrated that “in 1936 redemptive heroism is dead”—the heady desire for it a potential step along the way to fascism, chaos and doom.¹⁹

Soon after meeting Christopher Isherwood at a 1938 party, another British author, Virginia Woolf, mused in her diary, “There are very few mountain summit moments, I mean looking out at peace from a height.”²⁰ For a long time, she’d been haunted by the possibilities of climbing fiction. A year prior, she’d reflected, “I wd. like to write a dream story about the top of a mountain. Now why? About lying in the snow; about rings of colour; silence…& the solitude. I cant though. But shant I, one of these days, indulge myself in some short releases into that world? [...] If I cd. think out another adventure.”²¹

Although Woolf never went on any technical climbs, she was a passionate hiker, traversing miles of countryside until the contours of rain-misted hills became imprinted like invisible maps in her mind.²²

And as one of her biographers, Lyndall Gordon, observed, she’d long felt a lure of “the unknown.” In her 1926 diary, she’d described how moonlit clouds rose like “mountains in the sky” and declared “I have a great & astonishing sense of something there, which is ‘it,’” some unnamable “thing” she yearned to discover while she was still alive.²³ In 1940, she returned to the idea of her alpine story as if preparing to launch her own solitary, literary expedition, “I think of taking my mountain top—that persistent vision—as a starting point. Then see what comes. If nothing, it wont matter.”²⁴

By then, World War II was underway, and as historian Tait Keller has remarked, high peaks no longer appeared like settings for metaphorical battles between countries on the verge of real ones. Some Europeans wanted to imagine Alpine summits as a quiet “haven of peace” sealed off from the bloodshed and suffering, though the fighting eventually spread to their ridges and flanks—as it had during World War I.²⁵ In early 1941, when Woolf began composing “The Symbol” in a Sussex cottage, near the blazing white and blue light of frosted hills,²⁶ an unseen mountaintop might well have seemed like a place of icy stillness and silence, a point to fix a writer’s gaze while she strove to find answers in a world overtaken by violence and disorder. She envisioned a woman on a hotel balcony, gazing through field glasses at an unclimbed, imaginary Alpine peak as if watching a play.²⁷ This narrator writes in a letter to her sister, “The mountain is a symbol” and then trails off into an ellipses as she glances down at a pair of young men preparing for an attempt. “But of what?” She thinks of those who died trying to scale it. “We are always climbing to some height: that was the cliché. But it did not represent what was in her mind’s eye.”

Like Auden, Woolf had a peripheral connection to mountaineering. Mallory had friends among her Bloomsbury group of writers and artists, including the painter Duncan Grant, who took a series of nude photos of him, in which he appears pale and ethereal, almost ghostly.²⁸ Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, had participated in the Victorian exploration of the Alps and written the now-classic book The Playground of Europe. By the time of her childhood, as Woolf recalled in a memorial essay for The Times, his grand adventures lay behind him. But alpenstocks rusted against a bookshelf in their London house, and his climbing tales, while short, had “a curious power,” she wrote. “The things that he did not say were always there in the background.”²⁹

Images of peaks and cliffs recur throughout Woolf’s own published and unpublished writings, likewise linked to things beyond words, like experiences of awe, trauma or death.³⁰ In her 1930 diary, she’d tried to imagine the last moments of an acquaintance and his fiancée after they fell into a crevasse: “There are two bodies for ever. I suppose some ice drips, or shifts: the light is blue, green; or wholly black; nothing stirs round them. Frozen, near together, in their tweeds & hobnail boots […]. I suppose they felt whirled, like hoops; battered; senseless, after the first horror of feeling out of control.”³¹ A decade later, Woolf described the onset of the war as a similar, nightmarish fall, past the brink of description or thought: “We pour to the edge of a precipice…& then?³²” Each evening, the Sussex air filled with “the cadaverous twanging” of German planes. “I don’t want to die yet,” she said to her husband, Leonard, one starry night, when they emerged from the cottage to see the wreckage of a nearby explosion—though since Leonard was Jewish, they’d made plans to die together by suicide if the Nazis took over Britain. Woolf tried to comprehend what it would be like to be killed by a bomb, the way her nephew Julian Bell had been while serving as an ambulance driver during the fight against the fascists in Spain. Once more, like the narrator of “The Symbol,” she ended with an ellipsis: “I […] shant, for once, be able to describe it. It—I mean death; no, the scrunchingand scrambling, the crushing of my bone […] two or three gulps attempting consciousness—& then dot dot dot.”³³

But the mysteries of the heights still beckoned as sources of elusive, though dangerous, wonder. In a 1933 letter to another nephew, Quentin Bell, Woolf described her sister Vanessa’s reaction to the Alps: “She begins to feel what father felt—noble, solitary, severe. I must come and see them […]. I daresay they change in the dawn and sunset; and one gets to think them more beautiful than any earth scape.”³⁴ Likewise, on the distant summit of “The Symbol,” the snow glimmers “iridescent one moment; and blood red; and pure white, according to the day.” Woolf’s father, Stephen had felt similarly entranced while watching the shifting colors of dusk from the top of Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Western Alps. And while he descended, he, too, had seen a “blood-red light” flare against a dark void during “the last struggle between night and day.” ³⁵ An agnostic, he’d found a kind of secular mysticism in mountaineering, ³⁶ though
he was unable to put this sunset revelation into words. Its unveiled “secrets” couldn’t be “analyzed” by any method or captured with “a few black remarks on white paper,” he concluded.

In Woolf’s climbing story, such mountaintop epiphanies seem not only indescribable but possibly unattainable—both for the alpinists who perish before the summit and for the narrator who watches from afar. Past the ellipsis that marks the point where the young men fall and vanish into a crevasse, “the pen fell from [the narrator’s] hand, and the drop of ink straggled in a zigzag line down the page.” After the searchers recover their bodies, the narrator tries to finish the tale, “The old clichés will come in very handy. They died trying to climb the mountain… […]. They died in an attempt to discover….”

Here, there is only another ellipses—like the ones Woolf used to describe the bombing and the war—to write. “There seemed no fitting conclusion,” she determines.

Less than a month after she wrote “The Symbol,” during a recurrence of her bipolar disorder, Woolf died by suicide. During one of their last visits, Woolf had told her doctor Octavia Wilberforce that she’d been struggling with a sense of despair after completing her latest story:³⁷ she’d felt as if she could no longer write.³⁸ Biographer Lyndall Gordon viewed “The Symbol” as an allegory about the impossibility of “transmuting grief into art”: when the narrator’s pen falters before the deaths of the climbers, “the act of writing […] is arrested by the prospect of mortality.”³⁹

But there are many other ways to interpret Woolf’s climbing story. She’d previously titled it “Inconclusions,” and in early drafts, she’d described the mountain as “a menace: something cleft in the mind […] a problem that is insoluble.” Yet this narrator had felt as intense a longing for its summit as the climbers did: “I think that if I could get there, I should be happy to die. I think there […] I should find the answer [...]. The real problem is to climb to the top of the mountain. Why, if that is not it, have we the desire? Who gave it us?”⁴⁰ It is possible, as English professor Abbie Garrington has mused, that this summit holds out the “ecstatic” promise of something like one of Woolf’s “moments of being”⁴¹—instances when, as Woolf wrote in 1939,⁴² some “shock” startled her into heightened awareness, leading to a “revelation […] a token of some real thing behind appearances.” By piecing together such fragments, like shards left by a bomb, Woolf had previously been able to restore a sense of wholeness through art, an experience of “rapture” that felt central to her existence as a writer

And in a 1982 essay, Professor Catherine W. Hollis’s mother, Val Ward, imagined an alternate ending in which Woolf became a climber herself and found a way out of despair.⁴³ If the narrator of “The Symbol” had left her balcony and learned to scale the imagined peak, could she—as Hollis herself fantasizes—have uncovered some life-sustaining meaning, a sunset of her own? Or had there always been nothing on that untrodden summit beyond the illusions of light on snow? When the narrator declared in a previous draft that shewas “aware just as [the young men] are of the desire to master the height,” ⁴⁴ was she asserting her own right, and that of other women, to fulfill a need for adventure, one that she echoes in the later draft, “I have always had a great desire to explore for myself”?⁴⁵ Or was she also describing the risk of succumbing to a desire for mastery—similar to that of powerful men in her society—that Woolf, not unlike Auden, connected to fascism and war? Would the narrator have found something inviolable and peaceful on this mountaintop, some transformative vision of how to craft a better world, in contrast to the nightmarish epiphany that Michael Ransom encountered?⁴⁶ Or might she, too, have vanished like the young men of her story, without knowing either way, into the unbreachable silence of a crevasse?⁴⁷

Ultimately, we never get to see what’s in her “mind’s eye.” It’s tempting to approach “The Symbol” as a mystery story, to keep connecting different clues to form contrasting visions of those invisible heights, until the mountain grows ever more elaborate in our own imaginations, transforming into an infinite universe of hanging glaciers and fluted snow.48 Woolf scholar Catherine Dent has argued that the “inability to pin down the symbolism of the mountain need not be read as a defeat, but rather as an openness to a plurality of meanings, or even to the possibility of a meaning that exists beyond human understanding.”

In “The Climber as Writer,” creative writing professor David Stevenson observed that climbing readers tend to focus on a writer’s “personal authority for speaking about the subject. Thus [for them] a climber who is well known is ipso facto a good writer.”⁴⁹ Yet valuable insights—and uncomfortable questions—have also arisen beyond the mountains, from fiction writers whose only climbs took place on imaginary peaks.

A year after British newspapers celebrated the 1953 first ascent of Everest with all the hyper-nationalist pomp that Michael Ransom feared, Auden wrote of mountaineers “clumping off at dawn in the gear of their mystery / […] They have the balance, nerve / And habit of the Spiritual, but what God / Does their Order serve?”⁵⁰

The “mesh of history” tightens around us, too: as bombs fall over Ukraine, the menaces of authoritarianism and fascism grow, once more, around the world, and wildfires, heatwaves and floods foreshadow a potentially apocalyptic climate crisis. And we, too, would do well to keep asking ourselves what purposes mountaineering expeditions can serve in our age—beyond the promoting of brands and the exploitation of resources. To contemplate what it means that the moment a protagonist sets out to summit a peak for the wrong reasons is the moment they have failed. Or to consider that significance might not lie in any triumphant mountaintop image, but across a blank page after the last words falter, leaving only gaps and silence, ellipses of imminent nothingness or untrammeled possibilities. To think of all the dream stories that persist beyond broken paths and familiar lines. In those ice-lit realms where the things not spoken are ever present. Where the true mystery of a summit remains unknowable. And a set of dots still appears and vanishes, again and again, against eternal snows.⁵¹

Summary

Katie Ives discusses the ways in which W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Virginia Woolfe found inspiration in the ambiguity and tragedy of mountaineering, represented in part by the loss of Mallory and Irvine on Everest.

 

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