True Summit

by David Roberts

  Rébuffat would never again join an expedition to the far-flung ranges, restricting his climbing instead to the Alps. Yet for the next two years, he pushed the limits of what was humanly possible in his beloved mountains. Only eleven days after getting home from Annapurna, Rébuffat put up an important new route on the Aiguille de Blaitière near Chamonix.

  On July 29, 1952, Rébuffat reached the summit of the Eiger, the last of the six great north faces of the Alps, the ensemble of which he was the first man to climb. That ascent through storm, waterfall, avalanche, and falling stones was Rébuffat’s most harrowing “epic” in the Alps. Of the nine climbers who found themselves trapped on the Nordwand that July, Rébuffat and the fiercely motivated Austrian Hermann Buhl were the strongest. The ascent verged toward chaos, with ropes entangled, climbers setting loose small avalanches upon one another. Buhl’s stubborn refusal to share the lead, even when his lapses of judgment threatened to maroon the whole party, drove the calm and premeditating Rébuffat into a silent fury.

  In his account of the Eiger in Starlight and Storm, Rébuffat casts no aspersions on the Austrian. Even reading between the lines, the reader would be hard put to discern the sharp interpersonal conflict that unfurled high on the face. “Buhl and Gaston didn’t like each other,” says Françoise. “Buhl knew that Gaston could outclimb him.”

  After 1952, Rébuffat lowered his sights slightly, although he continued to make the occasional first ascent, as well as to guide talented clients on routes otherwise reserved for experts. With the success of Starlight and Storm in 1954, Rébuffat started to believe that he might pursue a second career as an author.

  For almost three decades after 1955, Rébuffat published large-format picture books about his beloved Alps. Some, such as Mont-Blanc, Jardin Féerique, were primarily historical; others, including Entre Terre et Ciel and Les Horizons Gagnés, amounted to lyrical evocations of his “enchanted garden.”

  It was these books that revolutionized the aesthetic of mountaineering. Virtually never before had a professional guide written about his craft—let alone written at such a high poetic pitch. Nor had any previous photographs captured the grace and elegance of climbing as did the dozens of pictures of Rébuffat, shot by alpine lensmen, that spangled these luxurious volumes. In a typical photo, Rébuffat was seen in profile against a vertical cliff, with a distant glacier providing a backdrop. No apparent struggle breathed in these images: instead, the lanky acrobat calmly clasped the clean granite with his fingers, while his toes adhered to minuscule holds. The rope plunged free in space out of the bottom of the picture, with not a single piton for protection. The patterned pullover sweater that Rébuffat wore in every photo became his signature. (A photo of Rébuffat on the Aiguille de Roc was chosen by NASA as a representation of human life on Earth, to ride aboard Voyager II probing the remote reaches of outer space in search of extraterrestrial intelligence.)

  The most revolutionary aspect of Rébuffat’s works, however, was his thoroughgoing rejection of the martial metaphors that had dominated mountaineering from Mont Blanc in 1786 on. His own emphasis on a harmonious embrace of the alpine world owed something to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, one of his favorite authors. But this new philosophy was not one Rébuffat consciously created, in reaction to the militarism of the Herzogs and Devieses; it seems to have been inborn, instinctive.

  With the success of Starlight and Storm, Rébuffat began touring on the lecture circuit, giving slide shows. He soon gravitated to film. Collaborating with several visionary filmmakers, he produced classics of mountaineering cinema, including Starlight and Storm and Entre Terre et Ciel, that brought the enchanted garden to vast new audiences. By the late 1960s, Rébuffat was the most famous guide in Europe.

  MY OWN ENTHRALLMENT to the Rébuffat aesthetic lasted most of a decade, after I first read Starlight and Storm at age sixteen. But in the late 1960s, as climbing itself embraced the counterculture passions that swept America, I found myself drifting away from the lyrical poets of mountaineering and toward its rowdy skeptics.

  A turning point for me came in a long discussion in the middle of the night with a Harvard friend, Hank Abrons, as we drove the Alaska Highway toward my first expedition, on Mount McKinley. Twenty years old, I earnestly voiced a cardinal Rébuffat tenet: that in the mountains we seek difficulty, not danger. Could climbing be divorced from danger altogether, it would reach its purest possible expression.

  Nonsense, said Hank, who was two years older. Danger was precisely what made our pastime so real, so rewarding. If you could separate danger from difficulty, climbing would become just another sport. We wrangled on, but there, with the dusky tundra plodding by us as we steered north toward the ineluctably dangerous Wickersham Wall, I began to wonder whether Hank didn’t have a point. (Today I believe Hank was right, and Rébuffat, seduced by his own idealism, wrong. The sterility of such latter-day developments in the climbing scene as indoor gyms, where risk has truly been divorced from difficulty, furnishes my evidence.)

  Climbing in the Shawangunks in New York State, I found the first gang of live climbers (as opposed to eminences, such as Lachenal and Terray, whom I had met only in books) to become my heroes. They were the Vulgarians—a hard-drinking, drug-taking, pretension-pricking band of dropouts and misfits who also happened to be the best climbers in the East.

  The Vulgarians’ counterparts in the United Kingdom were the iconoclasts of the Creagh Dhu and Rock and Ice, loosely organized clubs of working-class blokes who had replaced the Oxbridge gentlemen of the previous generation to become the finest climbers in Britain. My friends and I listened in awe to the tales of Joe Brown, a plumber from Manchester, and Don Whillans, also a plumber and a high school dropout from a grimy town in the north of England, who might at the moment be the nerviest climbers in the world. Brown was the first man to have solved the fierce and perilous short crack called Cenotaph Corner, in north Wales; but he had dismissed his own first ascent of Kanchenjunga, the world’s third-highest mountain (where he was paired with those Oxbridge throwbacks), as “a long slog.”

  One day in my late twenties I discovered the writing of Tom Patey, a Scottish ice climber and crony of Brown and Whillans, who had perfected a satiric take on our pastime that on first reading won me over utterly. That initial Patey essay, which I came across in 1969, was his quarrel with Rébuffat, titled “Apes or Ballerinas?” published in the splendidly counterculture British journal Mountain.

  In the piece, Patey launches boldly into an attack on what he called the “stylist” climber.

  The French, as might be expected, are the supreme stylists. If you don’t know what I mean, have a look at the illustrations in Rébuffat’s book, On Snow and Rock. Every picture shows the author examining himself in some graceful and quite unbelievable posture. . . . Even the captions carry a note of smug satisfaction: “Climbing means the pleasure of communicating with the mountain as a craftsman communicates with the wood or the stone or the iron upon which he is working” (portrait of Rébuffat, standing on air, studiously regarding his left forearm, hands caressing smooth granite).

  Patey then imagines the climber trying to learn from Rébuffat’s injunctions to graceful, effortless movement:

  Stage Two: the left boot is aligned with the right boot by stepping up smoothly and deliberately. Any effort is imperceptible. . . .

  Strange! You’re lying flat on the ground with a squashed nose. Another attempt; another failure. Time passes, along with your faith in Rébuffat.

  Eventually, in Patey’s piece, the climber gets up the cliff by ignoring the ballerina of Rébuffat’s “stylist” and reverting to the primal ape.

  Heave, clutch, thrutch, grunt! Up you go, defying gravity with your own impetus. So what, if it looks ungraceful? Joe Brown doesn’t look much like a ballet dancer.

  Patey’s delicious burlesque swept away what was left of my former adulation. At the time, I was too sociologically naive to realize that there yawned between French and British climbers an unbridgeab
le gulf of mutual contempt, that on the crags above Chamonix they traded curses in Scots and Savoyard. Out of such animus was born a caricature of “Ghastly Rubberface,” as the British wickedly nicknamed Rébuffat.

  On reexamination, all those beautiful pictures in Rébuffat’s books started to smack of the inauthentic. In On Snow and Rock (published in 1959), Rébuffat had been one of the first to realize that to take a picture that truly captured the vertiginous glory of our pastime, you had to set it up. Today, most good climbing pictures are set up beforehand, with photographers resorting to machinations to get in positions that Rébuffat would never have dreamed of. In 1969, however, Patey could imply that the only honest climbing photo was one taken by the belayer as he whipped a Brownie out of his rucksack and snapped, one-handed, a shot of the leader scrabbling above.

  All those photos of Rébuffat frozen in sublime equipoise against ethereal granite began to seem an affectation. The insistence on himself as subject, my friends and I took for arrant vanity (as opposed to what I now suspect—that no other climber was good enough to pose on the perches that Rébuffat wished to illuminate). The famous pullover sweater became a standing joke.

  Swept up in the iconoclasm of the late 1960s, I could even delight in Patey’s morbid but clever ballad mocking the legend of Annapurna itself (it mattered little that Patey miscounted the frozen digits):

  Twenty frozen fingers, twenty frozen toes

  Two blistered faces, frostbite on the nose

  One looks like Herzog, who dropped his gloves on top

  And Lachenal tripped and fell, thought he’d never stop.

  Bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop bop.

  “Take me down to Oudot” was all that he would say

  “He’ll know what to do now,” said Lionel Terray

  “Your blood is like black pudding,” said Oudot, with his knife

  “It is not too late to amputate if I can save your life.”

  Chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop.

  No tiny fingers, No tiny toes

  The memory lingers but the digit goes

  In an Eastern Railway carriage, where the River Ganges flows

  There are Twenty Tiny Fingers and Twenty Tiny Toes.

  Chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop.

  Thus I “outgrew” Rébuffat. Had I known, in the late 1960s, that side by side in the breast of the lyric singer of the brotherhood of the rope there lurked an iconoclast as fierce as Patey, a debunker of all things false and sentimental, I would have been astonished. But Rébuffat guarded that side of himself in hermetic privacy. Only a decade after his death would that well-hidden critic emerge, in his hitherto unpublished notes and jottings on the 1950 expedition. The man whom the crowds at Orly and in the Salle Pleyel wished to salute as one of the heroes of Annapurna would become instead its ultimate skeptic.

  AFTER THE FIVE-YEAR INTERDICTION against writing about the expedition had expired in 1955, Rébuffat toyed with the idea of publishing his own account of Annapurna. “I talked him out of writing this,” Françoise told me, “because it would be too bitter.” She was guided, as well, by simple pragmatism. The reputation of the man who, by virtue of his poetic celebrations of the mountain world, had become the most famous guide in France would not be well served by a polemic from his hand undercutting the most sacred myth in French mountaineering.

  So Rébuffat kept the bitterness to himself. In 1981, Herzog published a book called Les Grandes Aventures de I’Himalaya, a collection of accounts of other people’s expeditions. One chapter, called “Un Autre Regard” (“Another Look”), serves as Herzog’s own meditation on Annapurna, three decades later. More personal than Annapurna, the chapter stands as a kind of first draft of the “subjective” account of the famous ascent that Herzog would publish in L’Autre Annapurna.

  In the seclusion of his study, Rébuffat opened his copy of Les Grandes Aventures and scribbled marginal comments throughout the text of “Un Autre Regard.” I first saw this remarkable document in Yves Ballu’s house near Grenoble in 1999.

  Rébuffat is plainly disgusted with Herzog’s self-preoccupation. Sometimes he circles key words, then draws lines between them, creating a branching tree of emphasis. In the paragraph beginning, “Yes, there we were on June 3, 1950,” Rébuffat has highlighted “we,” “my [feet],” “I was [the first],” “Around me,” “I spoke to the 8,000-ers” that “surrounded me.” He has also circled the words “victory” and “conquered.” In the margin he notes simply, “And Lachenal?”

  Above another paragraph, Rébuffat scrawls “Blah-blah-blah!” Beside yet another, “This is stupid.” Beside another, “A fairy tale.”

  The annotations add up to an extended rant against the leader to whom, three decades earlier, Rébuffat had been forced to pledge total obedience. Another branching tree, covering more than two pages, links Herzog’s professions of fear of death and frozen flesh: “My carcass was transformed into ice,” “would cost me my life,” “lost consciousness,” “die in battle,” “capitulate,” “out of breath.” Beside one section of this text, Rébuffat writes, “Quel cinéma! [What a comedian!]”

  Sometimes the comments have the taunting yap of an adolescent jeering his rival. When Herzog, narrating the dropped gloves on the descent from the summit, writes, “The incident, however, failed to provoke me to get out of my pack a pair of wool socks I had stuck there for such an emergency,” Rébuffat adds, “Wrong. The socks are for the feet, the gloves for the hands.”

  “Wrong.” “Quel cinéma.” “The cinema continues.” “Le cinéma intime!” Beside the single word “curiously,” when Herzog writes of his strength as he rakes through the snow at the bottom of the crevasse in search of the precious boots as “curiously underestimated during the previous hours,” Rébuffat editorializes, “Yes, very curiously, if this isn’t cinema.” When Herzog, describing Schatz’s embrace near Camp IVA, writes, “He gave me a kiss of peace,” Rébuffat annotates, “What is he trying to say?” Herzog wonders aloud if he can survive the night in the crevasse, prompting Rébuffat to circle the word “survive” and gibe, “The cheater of death. He’s going to die ten times.” Later, “Again the cheater of death.” Narrating his avalanche fall with the two Sherpas, Herzog reflects on his survival, “Was this not another miracle?” Here Rébuffat jots, “One more time! The everlasting miracle.”

  Taken in sum, the savage annotations to Herzog’s chapter do not begin to add up to a coherent critique. Instead, they bespeak the furious frustration of a man who has had to live all his life in silent acquiescence to a sacred text and a “number one national hero,” both of which Rébuffat knows to be profoundly false. In their petulant wit, their exasperated disdain, those jottings are utterly unlike anything Rébuffat published in his lifetime.

  In the last years of his life, as Ballu interviewed him for the biography, Rébuffat began to write down his own version of Annapurna. These notes never amounted to more than a series of aperçus, discrete sentences and paragraphs that ponder the pivotal events of the 1950 expedition. The tone is almost that of a literary critic, as if Rébuffat had come across some ancient, anonymous saga preserved on vellum and were using all his intuition to probe to the core of the story’s meaning. In their lucidity, their epigrammatic perfection, some of these pensées promise to stand alone as a kind of last word on the myth of Annapurna, magisterial pronouncements by one who, after all, was there.

  A boy who loses his gloves on Mont Blanc is an imbecile. An alpinist who loses his gloves in the Himalaya, we make of him a national hero.

  Is the myth of the hero, then, founded on frozen feet and hands?

  It seemed to me at that moment [of Lachenal’s and Herzog’s return from the summit] that Terray and I were charged with a mission that, in my innermost heart, pleased me more than going to the top, because it converged with what I love about my métier as guide: to taste renunciation in the name of friendship and to negotiate with the storm to save my companions.

  I have
never liked those martial terms so often applied to the mountain: “The Himalayan assault,” “the conquest of . . .” Least of all, so often employed, “Victory over Annapurna.” I have never considered myself a victor over Annapurna.

  Oh, if only Herzog had lost his flags instead of his gloves, how happy I would have been!

  RÉBUFFAT CONTINUED to climb into his fifties. In 1975, at the age of fifty-four, he made a remarkable ascent of the Freney Pillar, one of Mont Blanc’s hardest and most extended routes.

  That same year, he was diagnosed with cancer of the breast. There followed a decade of hope and despair, of radio- and chemotherapy, of brief remissions followed by more serious onsets, as the cancer slowly worked its ravages. By now, Gaston and Françoise had three children. As the children grew Rébuffat had taken them up classic routes in his enchanted garden.

  Refusing to give in to his ailment, the tall guide made two more major climbs: the first ascent of the southeast face of the Aiguille du Plan, in 1979, and—by now seriously debilitated—the south face of the Aiguille du Midi in 1983, of which he had made the first ascent twenty-seven years earlier. After the latter climb, Rébuffat jotted a laconic entry in the guide’s notebook he had kept all his life: “August 18. South face of Aiguille du Midi. Start at 9:00. Summit 15:00. Great fatigue.”

  Two years before he died, Rébuffat fulfilled a lifelong dream by rafting the Colorado River with Françoise, signing up for a commercial trip. “He was very tired, just out of chemotherapy,” she told me. “There were clients of all ages on the river. They quickly saw that Gaston was very sick. Very discreetly the other clients started to do everything for him. To get in and out of the boat, he needed help. Two young Germans found the best campsites for him.”

  Did these companions realize who Rébuffat was, I wondered. Did they know what this man had done in the mountains in his prime?

  “No,” said Françoise. “All they knew was that he was French, and that he was very sick.”