True Summit

by David Roberts

  Lachenal characterizes the team’s descent as a débandade: a retreat in complete disorder. “But no!” cries Devies; and Herzog: “Is this the place to say so?!”

  The attack on Lachenal’s text reaches a frenzy in its last two pages. Scrutinizing the marginal annotations, Gérard Herzog prepared Lachenal’s diary for inclusion in the Carnets. In the end, he did not so much attempt to restore a Devies-Herzog spin to Lachenal’s text as simply to excise anything that contradicted Annapurna. Most notably, he suppressed the whole of the “Commentaires.”

  It is a godsend that Michel Guérin was able to rescue those 2,000 words, for they amount to the most powerful thing Lachenal ever wrote. As a judicious reconsideration of the expedition—which had already, by 1955, passed into the realm of legend—the “Commentaires” represents a tour de force of self-appraisal, pinpointing both the team’s errors and its successes. Finally, it casts a light on Annapurna that no one else was capable of shining.

  “Oh, yes! The morphine was necessary!” Lachenal begins his “Commentaires.” “More than a third of my diary is given over to the return [from Annapurna], and it is nothing more than a long succession of complaints and recriminations.”

  Stubbornly, Lachenal refuses to see any redeeming value in the suffering he underwent. Not for him, Herzog’s transcendent sense of fulfillment:

  The discomfort became intolerable. Fatigue, physical and moral, seized the sahibs. It is this that explains why the attitude of my comrades often justified my reproaches. I could no longer be a cheerful invalid. To discomfort was added suffering. Beforehand, I had been overjoyed at the prospect of sauntering out through this very interesting countryside, which we had dashed through on the approach in order to lose no time. Even this pleasure was denied me.

  And, writes Lachenal, to suffering was added anguish. As the porters carried his stretcher through the lowlands, he dwelt on Raymond Lambert, on the question of whether he could climb without toes. “Lambert said that even if [his amputations] were often a disadvantage, on the other hand there were sometimes holds which his shortened feet gripped better than normal.”

  Perhaps an implicit dig at Herzog, the “amateur,” lurks in the next sentence: “For me, the mountains are not a Sunday pastime; they are my life.” The anguish over losing that life stirs Lachenal to a lucid bitterness:

  For others, to live is to stoop over books, to paint, or to give orders. This can be done with cut-off feet, with cut-off hands.

  For me, to live is to choose a mountain, to find its weakness and feel the wrinkles of granite under the tread of my feet. Each digit cut off took with it some of my hope.

  Next, Lachenal asks the cardinal question: “Was Annapurna worth this suffering?” Yet he answers it only indirectly, by emphasizing the strangeness of the Himalaya to his ken.

  These were other mountains, and I want to know all the mountains that exist. This said, however, among the ones I know, I have seen nothing comparable to the beauty of the massif of Mont Blanc. The scale is much greater [in the Himalaya], to be sure, but for their proportions, the balance of their panorama, their thrust (look at the Chamonix Aiguilles), I distinctly prefer our own massif.

  Lachenal had a vivid memory of being awakened to the alienness of the Himalaya as he and Rébuffat wandered through a maze of giant seracs on the glacier east of Dhaulagiri. In the Alps, seracs tend to be modest-sized and benign; In the Himalaya, thanks to thin air and vertical sun, they grow to massive proportions and teeter menacingly. An inordinate number of good climbers have been killed in the Himalaya when seracs fell on them.

  Feeling a kindred malaise to Lachenal’s, Rébuffat said, “You know, I promised my wife I wouldn’t screw things up here!”

  “This day,” recorded Lachenal, “I had the feeling of moving through a strange and hostile world; the very idea of wanting to penetrate it was also strange. I thought, ‘What the hell are we doing here?’ ”

  By contrast, the Alps were a familiar playground. Yet, paradoxically, that alienness conferred a boon: “The Himalaya gave us a second youth.”

  Next, Lachenal tried to place the style of the Annapurna expedition in historical context. Later generations would hail the two-week dash up the north face as a brilliant application, ahead of its time, of alpine-style tactics to a Himalayan objective. Yet, never one to pat himself on the back, Lachenal attributed the alpine-style assault to necessity, rather than bold conception: “In fact, the lightness [of the assault] was due more to our poverty than to any tactical conception: since Annapurna, climbers have returned to a heavy style.” (“No, absolutely wrong,” screamed Devies in the margin: “Lightness was a deliberate tactic.”)

  On Makalu that summer of 1955, Lachenal pointed out, each climber had been issued a half dozen pairs of boots, including ones specially made of reindeer skin. On Annapurna five years earlier, “We were happy to have a single pair of ordinary alpine boots each, reinforced with a felt lining.”

  Lachenal admitted that, lacking Himalayan experience, the team misjudged everything about Annapurna. That accounted for the five-day blunder of attacking the Northwest Spur.

  Herzog had a difficult role, conceded Lachenal, revealing that before the expedition, the three Chamonix guides held a low opinion of him as a leader: “We even thought beforehand that he might have been chosen as a kind of arbiter among the three professionals within the team.”

  Yet Herzog surprised everyone by his performance, and Lachenal was quick to give him his due: “Very soon, we realized there was no difference between him and us in terms of stamina or technique, either on ice or on rock.” What Herzog lacked, however, thanks to his inexperience, was the knack “of judging beforehand the best choices among the many possible itineraries.” Herzog had, in Lachenal’s view, only the most rudimentary grasp of expedition organization. Thus “He very skillfully oriented his role toward what truly suited him, that of an extraordinary amateur.”

  Herzog’s poor organizational skills, in Lachenal’s view, were what caused all the floundering in the lowlands during the first six weeks.

  Personally, I have a great need to be animated! These perpetual hesitations during the approach march, these probes with no follow-through, this disorder didn’t suit me at all—it depressed me. I began to regret missing a good season in the Alps, where the attack immediately follows the decision, and usually the victory the attack. It was only on the day when Annapurna was declared our objective and an assault in force was launched that I found at last what I had come to look for.

  Lachenal’s critique offers here an intriguing fun-house mirror image of Herzog’s. In Annapurna, the Chamonix guide is presented as a man too impatient and impulsive to pay heed to reason or judgment. But from Lachenal’s strictures, Herzog emerges as an indecisive ditherer.

  Because of the team’s shortness of time, Lachenal believed, they had been forced to follow an unjustifiably dangerous route up the north face of Annapurna. The whole basin between Camps II and IV was a gigantic avalanche slope. Only extraordinary good luck had allowed the team to be swept by but a single avalanche—the one that had carried Herzog, Sarki, and Aila 500 feet on the descent. But, “there was no choice: it was either this route or a complete fiasco.” To future teams of alpinists, Lachenal recommended a far lengthier route traversing beneath the dangerous basin and climbing the face well to the east. (Subsequent tragedies on the north face have proven Lachenal’s advice prophetic.)

  In these tempered words, we see a canny and cool-headed mountaineer reassessing the perilous ascent that Herzog had blazoned as sheer glory and triumph. If, at this point, Lachenal has still not answered his own crucial query—was Annapurna worth the cost?—in the last two pages of the “Commentaires” he makes it clear how that question played itself out in the agon of June 3, 1950. Those seven concluding paragraphs amount to a testament from beyond the grave, furnishing, in their laconic eloquence, a last word on Annapurna. To the truths they embody, we shall return.

  AS JEAN-CLAUDE LACHENA
L CAME OF AGE in Chamonix, reading the Carnets du Vertige that Gérard Herzog had thrust into print in 1956, comparing it to the manuscript diary his father had brought home from Annapurna, a quiet rage burned in his heart. Yet he squelched any thought of exposing the gulf between his father’s story and that of the brothers Herzog, for he sensed that he owed a certain gratitude to the tuteur of his adolescence. Jean-Claude was, moreover, a shy and modest man, with no connections in the world of belles lettres or journalism beyond the valley of the Arve. He made a living as a ski instructor, though he never became a serious mountaineer.

  After moving to Chamonix in 1994, Michel Guérin—a former book dealer and passionate collector of mountain literature—decided to go into business as a publisher of deluxe reprints of mountaineering classics. By now, the “red books” of Editions Guérin (so named for their uniform covers and bindings in scarlet cloth) have won a cachet as perhaps the most handsome climbing books ever published, but at the outset the whole project was a risky one-man venture. Guérin began with Terray’s Les Conquérants de l’Inutile, which came out in 1995.

  Having befriended Jean-Claude Lachenal, Guérin was enthralled to read his father’s original diary. For several years, he tried to persuade Jean-Claude to permit an unexpurgated publication of the diary, embedded in a reprint of Carnets du Vertige. Jean-Claude deliberated, then agreed.

  As a goodwill gesture, Guérin and Lachenal fils invited Herzog to write a preface. Herzog responded with his characteristic courtesy, agreeing to the task. In his letter, he betrayed little of the anxiety he must have felt on learning of Guérin’s publishing plans, though he added a few words to remind Guérin of Lachenal’s excessive nature, which no doubt spoke in certain ill-considered judgments in the diary. It would be disappointing, Herzog allowed, if the publication backfired, making Lachenal look mean-spirited or jealous of his Annapurna teammates.

  In the end, Jean-Claude changed his mind about the preface, realizing that his father’s long-dormant witness might only be compromised by one last effort on Herzog’s part to put his own spin on the Annapurna story. Herzog was tactfully disinvited.

  With the publication of Guérin’s new Carnets, which coincided nearly to the month with Ballu’s biography of Rébuffat, a storm of controversy seized France. Rébuffat’s profound disillusionment, as revealed in his letters to Françoise, and his acidic and epigrammatic latter-day pensées on Annapurna intersected with the unmistakable evidence of heavy censorship of Lachenal’s diary. Journalists cried foul and demanded an accounting. Only a handful came to Herzog’s defense.

  Some of the new revelations were devastating. According to Claude Francillon, writing in Le Monde, in Kathmandu Rébuffat had been bodily searched by Ichac, to make sure the guide wasn’t smuggling home any canisters of exposed film he had shot up high on Annapurna. As official photographer, Ichac would control all the images to emerge from the expedition. (In Annapurna, the title page indicates “Cartographic and Photographic Documentation by Marcel Ichac,” even though all the climbing pictures above Camp II—the highest point Ichac reached—were shot by Rébuffat, while the summit photo was taken by Lachenal.)

  Quoting Rébuffat, Yves Ballu told a story about an early attempt by Lachenal to defy his oath-ordained silence. In 1951, he had apparently prepared his own account of Annapurna; knowing Rébuffat had connections at Le Monde, he asked his fellow guide for help placing the piece in that prestigious newspaper. Rébuffat asked the editor-in-chief, who said he would welcome it.

  Lachenal had made the mistake of talking too freely about his account, and the Himalayan Committee got wind of it. “One of its members,” Lachenal told Rébuffat, “came from Paris to see me and say to me, ‘Lachenal, do you like your job at the Ecole Nationale de Ski et d’Alpinisme?’

  “Of course, what else could I do with my amputated feet?”

  “If you want to stay there, it would be preferable if you gave up this intention of publishing your account of Annapurna in Le Monde.” Lachenal had no choice but to acquiesce.

  A younger generation of journalists, long jaundiced by the chauvinism of the de Gaulle era, critical of the neocolonial prejudices that lingered in French culture, was only too delighted to see the sacred cow of the Annapurna myth come under attack. But even in their revisionist glee, these writers saw that the new revelations did not simply undercut the grandeur of the 1950 accomplishment: they raised the contributions of the three Chamonix guides to a new level of respect. By 1996, Rébuffat was far from the most famous guide in Europe; even Terray’s reputation had lapsed into obscurity. Reviewing the two new books in Dimanche 8, journalist Frédéric Potet wrote:

  It is neither a lie nor an aspersion to say that history has superbly, magnificently, royally forgotten them. Gaston Rébuffat, Lionel Terray, Louis Lachenal: three names that continue to awaken faint memories in certain hearts. Three names that one somehow knows were associated with the grand history of alpinism. But more than that? . . . The whole world remembers Maurice Herzog, the first biped to have trod, in 1950, atop a mountain of more than 8,000 meters. The others—Rébuffat, Terray, Lachenal? Who were they? Where did they come from? What did they do?

  Such mainstream publications as Le Monde, Libération, and L’Equipe weighed in with major pieces on the controversy. The furor crossed international waters, with the British journal High, the American magazine Climbing, and the American Alpine Journal publishing essays sympathetic to the debunkers. Wrote Patrick Barthe in the last publication, reviewing Guérin’s Carnets, “I am sorry we had to wait so long for the true story. All around us we can see the damage done by false information. We have an obligation to tell our children the truth of our days. We don’t have to be afraid of it.”

  In France, the climbing journals dug deep. Montagnes magazine ran a seven-page analysis entitled “Annapurna: The Other Truth.” Its writers discovered long-buried details that even Ballu and Guérin had not brought to light. They quoted a letter from one Pierre Chabert to Terray’s father, explaining the reason that Terray had been passed over for the Legion of Honor:

  I have received formal confirmation that if your son, who saved the whole Himalayan mission, was not decorated, that was because of the position taken by the president of the CAF [Devies] and by M. Herzog. I swear by this information, but ask you to treat it confidentially.

  The editors also discovered an obscure, forgotten article published in the regional newspaper Dauphiné Libéré in June 1950, even before the Annapurna team had returned to France. Its author, Phillippe Gaussot, complained that while gossip was rife that several of the Annapurna victors were seriously injured, their wives were given not a shred of information. “They insist they have had no news, but no one can ignore the likelihood that they are kept in absolute darkness by M. Lucien Devies because of the exclusive contract the Fédération Française de la Montagne [FFM] has granted to the newspaper Le Figaro.”

  A few voices spoke out in defense of Devies and Herzog. In La Montagne et Alpinisme, Claude Deck pooh-poohed the controversy as a tempest in a teapot. The distinction between professionals and amateurs in climbing was obsolete by 1950, Deck maintained. The contract interdicting publication for five years had been a normal expedition practice for decades. No one had censored Lachenal: rather, Gérard Herzog, at the request of Lachenal, had collaborated in a biography. (This was nonsense, as Philippe Cornuau pointed out in a letter to Deck: “Gérard never had any contact with Lachenal in connection with this book.”) There was no evidence, Deck argued, that Lachenal really wanted his diary published.

  Deck grew passionate in praise of Devies, who, he acknowledged, had long been editor-in-chief of La Montagne et Alpinisme: “It is indecent that anyone should so lightly betray the memory of Lucien Devies. . . . All his authority derived from his intense labor and from a great intellectual rigor.” Deck ridiculed the notion of the FFM—“with its two desks and four chairs at the foot of a staircase”—wielding the power to suppress uncomfortable truths.

  In
evitably, the journals sought out Herzog for comment, and he was willing to talk. The stance he consistently took was one of earnest puzzlement that any controversy had arisen. He had nothing to hide; Annapurna after all told the whole story. Thus, interviewed by Le Monde, Herzog baldly stated, “What I wrote in Annapurna is the exact truth. I am willing to put myself in the line of fire if anyone says I lied about anything. My writings have never been contradicted.”

  As for the sharper entries in Lachenal’s diary, these Herzog attributed to the passion of the moment, spontaneous outbursts of discontent or disappointment. “One consigns these feelings to the page [of one’s diary], and there they stay.”

  Montagnes asked Herzog about Ballu’s story of the Himalayan Committee member threatening Lachenal’s job if he tried to publish in 1951. “I find it bewildering to picture Lachenal suppressed like this! Imagine, in that climate of apotheosis—to fire Lachenal from ENSA would have caused a veritable scandal! No minister would have taken the risk.”

  The so-called censorship of Lachenal’s diary? “There was no blocking of information. If none of those passages were published, it’s because they didn’t interest the editors. Perhaps they were leery of accounts focused on the moods and personal complaints of one member or another.”

  In his “true novel,” Herzog insisted, he had captured an epic adventure. “My greatest pleasure was that my teammates said they recognized themselves in my writing.” Had he not, however, embellished reality a bit? “No!” Herzog fired back. “That was the reality!”

  Five days after Le Monde interviewed him, Herzog published a letter in that newspaper. In it, his tone shifts from serene openness to counterattack. Of course, Lachenal wrote some of his “excessive” diary entries in the heat of battle. Minor conflicts were normal on expeditions. “After the event, we ended up laughing.”