True Summit

by David Roberts

  Lachenal threw himself back into the mountains. In 1954, he was involved in a harrowing catastrophe, when a group of beginners he was leading got bombarded with tons of falling rock as they descended the Aiguille Verte. Lachenal’s fellow guide, Alexis Simond, was killed beside him, and one of the beginners gravely injured. Yet even this memento mori failed to dampen Lachenal’s enthusiasm.

  In the summer of 1955, Lachenal agreed to climb Monte Rosa (at 15,217 feet, the second-highest peak in the Alps) with Herzog. In the 1956 Carnets, Gérard Herzog claims the idea was Lachenal’s:

  Already in 1954 Lachenal had wanted to make a good climb with his companion from Annapurna. Then the circumstances had not been right; but now Herzog was in Chamonix, the weather seemed stable and fine, the moment had come. For both of them, this project had a great emotional significance.

  Jean-Claude Lachenal remembers the “project” quite differently: “Herzog wanted the press along. My father said no, not with any publicity.”

  After the climb, Lachenal wrote an account of it. This too was suppressed by Devies and Gérard Herzog in the 1956 Carnets, remaining unknown until Michel Guérin rescued it in the 1996 edition.

  Lachenal’s narrative is full of his characteristic wit and candor. And it confirms Jean-Claude’s memory that the climb may have been concocted as a publicity stunt.

  Thus we wanted to go into the mountains. This became known in Chamonix. Several friends wanted to join us; one of them wanted to make a photographic reportage, the proceeds of which he would have donated to mountain rescue groups. Even with that aim, the project hardly pleased us. There was a moment of uncertainty, because it bothered both of us to turn down such good will.

  On the typescript of Lachenal’s account, a marginal annotation in Maurice Herzog’s hand reads, “I propose to suppress”; the circled passage begins with “one of them” and ends with “such good will.”

  Later, as the pair sets out from the mountain village of Macugnaga, Lachenal writes of the locals,

  They gave us a welcome that I will not soon forget. Herzog and I could not pass through unnoticed, but their welcome was not that of stupid curiosity about pseudo-stars, it was the joy of montagnards who love their mountains and are happy because other montagnards have come from afar to admire them.

  Herzog has circled “about pseudo-stars” and written in the margin, “propose to suppress.”

  The two reached the summit at 7:00 or 8:00 A.M. on the second day. The moment awakened for Lachenal glimmerings of Annapurna:

  It was perfectly clear, with a little wind. We had all the time in the world to dawdle. It would be difficult to describe our thoughts, except that all the bad memories had been wiped out.

  On the typescript another hand, that of Lucien Devies, has circled the second half of the last sentence and written “No.”

  In the end, not one line of Lachenal’s account was published in the 1956 Carnets. Instead, Gérard Herzog summarized the climb in two pages, whitewashing it: “The ascent unfurled without the slightest incident.” The account ends with a different summit moment:

  As on Annapurna, they said nothing of their buoyant feelings, which forebade the slightest word. Their gazes crossed in a flash. Each one cast a furtive glance at the short little boots of the other. Jubilant, Lachenal smiled.

  By 1955, Lachenal was climbing at near his pre-Annapurna level. He was still only thirty-four years old. Terray had started going off every summer on an expedition. In his absence, André Contamine became Lachenal’s regular partner.

  In the spring of 1955, when the five-year interdiction against publishing any account of Annapurna expired, Lachenal now set out to write a memoir of his climbing life, with his version of Annapurna as the centerpiece. He had guarded his diary, and he appealed to an acquaintance, Philippe Cornuau, who had just come off a landmark first ascent on the Droites and was in need of a spell of recuperation, to help him. Lachenal had never had much confidence in his writing ability, thinking his style too crude and down-to-earth. Cornuau was a professional freelance writer, contributing regularly to Réalités, L’Express, and other journals.

  “He was in a hurry to get it out,” recalls Cornuau. “We didn’t have quite the same idea of the book. Lachenal wanted a quick book, I wanted a more ambitious one. I thought, there are very few biographies of climbers. I knew Lachenal’s reputation as a breakneck daredevil was inexact. I wanted to produce a personal, psychological account of a climber’s life.”

  By September, the men were working regularly together. Word of the project got out. At one point, Lachenal showed his manuscript to Rébuffat, hoping the stylish writer Gaston had become could help him improve it. According to Françoise, Herzog called Rébuffat: “He was crying on the telephone, for fear Gaston would help the Carnets to get published.” Indeed, by the autumn of 1955, Lachenal and Cornuau had secured a contract from the Parisian publisher Pierre Horay.

  On November 25, 1955, Lachenal prowled the streets of Chamonix looking for a friend to join him on a ski outing. It was his notion to take the téléphérique up to the Aiguille du Midi, then ski down the Vallée Blanche all the way to the town of Montenvers. It was a cold, wintry day with a violent wind, but Lachenal had his heart set on his project. His good friend the ski champion James Couttet turned him down, saying, “I have to do some painting on my house.” Lachenal sought out Elisabeth Payot, but she had had a recent foot operation. “Call up your brother,” said the impatient guide.

  So it was Jean-Pierre Payot who accompanied Lachenal up to the cable car station on the Midi. Forty-four years later, Payot remembers that day. “We went down a snowy couloir, chatting easily, to the Vallée Blanche. The wind and cold were pretty bad. Lachenal said, ‘It dopes you a bit—gets you going.’

  “We arrived at the first seracs. It was blowing in our faces. We had no goggles in those days. We started out skiing, unroped. The last thing Lachenal said was, ‘Il y a le pêt.’ ” The remark, in local patois, means, “The wind’s so bad it’s dangerous.”

  “I was only two meters ahead of him,” Payot continues. “In the moment it took to turn around, I heard the sound of his aluminum skis clacking against the ice as he went down. That noise stayed in my head for ages.”

  Lachenal had broken through a snow bridge and fallen into a hidden crevasse. Had the pair been roped, he might have been saved—but the Vallée Blanche was Lachenal’s backyard, where he had performed many more dangerous exploits than this swift ski descent.

  “I heard him fall. Then there was silence. Later we learned that he had suffered le coup de lapin—the way you kill a rabbit. He’d hit the back of his head, breaking his neck. Lachenal was forty-five meters down. I shouted, but there was no answer. I thought, what should I do? In my despair, I thought, maybe I should just jump into another hole, and nobody will ever find us.

  “Instead, I climbed back up to the téléphérique station.” (This ascent, in howling wind, through loose snow, was a superhuman feat.) “The station was closed when I got there, so I traversed a thousand meters to the cosmic ray research hut. The hut keeper was as drunk as a lord. I kept trying to explain, but he understood nothing. I asked to use the telephone. ‘No, it’s not working,’ he said. Finally I got through at 11:00 P.M. Then I went back down to the crevasse to wait. I had taken bearings on the spot, so I wouldn’t lose it.”

  Payot’s sister, Elisabeth, details the search effort. “It was minus 20 degrees Centigrade. The guides didn’t want to go out, but all of Lachenal’s friends went up.” Among them was Rébuffat.

  Jean-Pierre: “Finally the others started to arrive. We burnt tires at the side of the crevasse, as a beacon. Somebody went down into the crevasse and tied Lachenal onto a rope. Then we pulled him out, put his body on a sledge, and pulled it all the way up to the Aiguille du Midi. We were down to Chamonix by 11:00 A.M.

  “Someone went to tell Adèle. She was prepared beforehand. She knew this was part of the mountain life.”

  LACHENAL WAS BURIED in t
he Chamonix cemetery, not far from the monument to guides killed in the mountains, which today names eighty-four victims between 1820 and 1995—including Lachenal. His headstone is a slab of brownish gray granite, on which appears a simple inscription, with no mention of Annapurna:

  LOUIS LACHENAL

  GUIDE

  1921–1955

  VALLÉE BLANCHE

  25-11-1955

  From the soil beside the stone sprout lilies and the gray-green plants the French call corbeille d’argent.

  In the journal La Montagne et Alpinisme, Herzog wrote an obituary for Lachenal. Generous and heartfelt, it nonetheless perpetuates the image of his teammate that Annapurna had advanced, of a driven genius just this side of madness:

  He didn’t live, he “burned.” Action intoxicated him, and at its approach, his impatience multiplied. . . . All those who knew him well knew his affectation for wishing to believe himself capable, with his appetite for action and enterprise, of pulling off at any given instant whatever piece of folly.

  Herzog tips his hat, however, to Lachenal’s blunt honesty. “With no evasions or prudence, he expressed the truth, even if that sometimes seemed cruel.” And he lavishes an encomium on the cordée Lachenal-Terray, “at its time, the strongest in the world.” Herzog remembers, “It was at once marvelous and touching to hear Terray affirm that his friend Lachenal was the most gifted alpinist he had ever seen, and to hear Lachenal say that Terray was the strongest alpinist he had ever heard anyone talk about.”

  Yet the obituary cannot resist advancing the idea that with the reconstituting of their own Annapurna cordée on Monte Rosa, Lachenal’s comeback reached its culmination:

  Together, we produced the proof that the mountains were ours once more. When, five years before, we lay despairing side-by-side in the Chamonix hospital, thinking that never again would we rediscover these great joys of our lives, we could not have imagined so great a happiness, shared with one another.

  Six years after Lachenal’s death, in Conquistadors, Terray offered a more nuanced and wistful encomium for his best friend. “Lachenal was by far the most talented climber I have ever met,” Terray wrote, “and I would go so far as to say that at the height of his career his quality amounted to genius.”

  Yet Terray was not fooled into believing that after his amputations Lachenal could ever fully regain his mastery. “Outside the mountain world he was like an eagle with clipped wings, ill-adapted to the humdrum life of society.” The loss of his toes, thought Terray, dictated Lachenal’s increasing “eccentricity and bitter wit,” and explained his driving:

  What he really sought in the intoxication of speed was escape from the human condition which he now felt so heavily. Once he had poised over the fall of cliffs with the lightness of a bird, and it hurt him to be transformed into a blundering animal like the rest of us. Behind the wheel of his car he seemed to recapture those instants of heavenly grace.

  Terray set his hopes not on Lachenal’s return to alpine mastery, but on his acceptance of his limitations:

  Yet wisdom seemed to be coming with the years. Already he was driving less madly, and it had begun to look as though he would soon resign himself to being a man like any other. The affectionate father he had always been was getting the better of the panther of the snows. All the signs pointed to his ending up as a comfortable, well-known local citizen, looked on by all with affection and respect. Fate, however, had decided otherwise.

  For Adèle, widowed with two young boys, practicing no profession of her own, the future promised to be hard. It was at this point that Herzog made a consequential intervention. In France, the legally recognized position of tuteur—a kind of guardian, godfather, and benefactor rolled into one—had been established to ameliorate the lot of widows such as Adèle. Herzog offered to serve as tuteur to the two boys, and she accepted.

  Over the coming years, Herzog went for walks in the woods and ski outings with Lachenal’s sons. He supervised their uncertain progress through a series of schools. He may well have given the family money.

  In L’Autre Annapurna Herzog offers several vignettes of “my dear little angels.” These emphasize their unruly misbehavior, particularly that of the older son, Jean-Claude: threatening another boy with a razor, swinging a croquet mallet that hits a female TV star guest square in the face. Such delinquency Herzog softens as a boys-will-be-boys penchant for mayhem, but in a subtle way his handling of it extends to the next generation his conceit of Lachenal as an impetuous genius-madman. Herzog in fact quotes a schoolmaster, complaining about Jean-Claude’s bullying of classmates, as seeing in the son “the very picture of his father when it comes to character.”

  There is no evidence that Herzog took on the role of tuteur to Lachenal’s sons out of any Machiavellian motive. He seems, moreover, to have taken his responsibilities as guardian of those sons seriously. But at the same time as he sprang to the rescue of the family, he took over the preparation of Carnets du Vertige for publication.

  Philippe Cornuau, Lachenal’s collaborator, recalls how this happened. “Not long after Lachenal’s death, Herzog told me to give the papers to his brother, Gérard. All of Lachenal’s business was taken over by Herzog. At the time, I didn’t protest. It seemed logical, for Herzog was the tuteur. I couldn’t have finished the book alone. At first I helped a bit with the preparation of Carnets. And I didn’t want to provoke any scandal by resisting—I didn’t want people to say, ‘Cornuau is making a profit out of Lachenal.’

  “Later I realized just how worried Herzog was about what Lachenal might say. One day he said to me, ‘People have a great need of dreams, of beautiful stories. It’s important not to disappoint them.’ I didn’t understand him at the time. Later it made sense. Herzog didn’t want any of the negative stuff to come out.

  “But when I gave all my notes to Gérard Herzog, I had no premonition of what would happen. I was shocked when the book came out.”

  Cornuau had typed up a copy of Lachenal’s diary from Annapurna. On that typescript, Maurice Herzog and Lucien Devies made their marginal comments, for Gérard’s guidance in editing it. Thanks to the survival of the typescript, we gain an intimate perspective on the process by which Lachenal’s truth was posthumously expurgated.

  In a short preamble to the journal that Lachenal wrote in 1955, he ironically quotes part of the next-to-last line of Annapurna, which reads, “Annapurna, to which we had gone emptyhanded, was a treasure on which we should live the rest of our days.” After “a treasure on which we should live the rest of our days,” Lachenal comments, “In any event, it’s certainly several hundred thousand copies, and I would love to be able to say as much about my book!” Devies has circled this jape and marked it with the proofreader’s squiggle for “delete.” In the next paragraph, the word “official” must go, in Lachenal’s phrase, “Herzog has written the official book . . .”

  The daily entries are likewise combed of imperfections. In Lachenal’s mordant record of the April 2 reception at the French ambassador’s in Delhi, the judgment “Bored me to tears” wins a “No” from Devies and a delete mark. Herzog too puts his two cents’ worth in, though his contribution is less imperious than Devies’s, amounting usually to quibbles and corrections. Thus on April 23, when Lachenal writes, “We convinced Momo to head off toward the great glacier on the east face . . .” Herzog changes the phrase to “We headed off toward the great glacier on the east face,” clucking in the margin, “A closer fit with reality, but could stay in its present form.”

  On May 3, “Momo encouraged us again to make a new attempt toward the right. We obeyed.” Herzog circles “We obeyed” and jots, “It was not an order.” On May 14, after Herzog’s “council of war,” Lachenal writes, “A long discussion began, at the end of which almost everyone leaned in favor of a departure in the direction of Annapurna.” Herzog complains, “There were no objections.”

  And so on, throughout the diary. But as Lachenal covers the summit dash and the long descent, Herzog and Dev
ies grow more petulant. On the summit, says Lachenal, the pair shot “the several official photographs that we had to take.” Herzog: “No one required us to do this.” As Lachenal is carried on his stretcher in the lowlands, he unleashes the vitriolic long sentence summing up his miseries (quoted on page 127). Herzog underlines “of being surrounded by no one who is kind to me, of passing whole days alone on my stretcher with at best one Sherpa as companion, with no sahibs, knowing full well that nothing will get done, not even ordinary tasks, without my having to ask many times and then to wait a long, long time.” In the margin, he scolds, “Not very nice to his comrades, who were doing their duty. Should we leave this in, as written in the heat of battle?”

  For the Carnets, Lachenal wrote a 2,000 word “Commentaires” that he intended to append after the last entry in the diary. This cogent summary of Lachenal’s feelings five years after Annapurna stirs Herzog and Devies to something like fury. “No,” “No,” “No,” writes Devies again and again; “No, absolutely wrong.” With his sly iconoclasm, Lachenal characterizes the dual quest for Dhaulagiri and Annapurna as like “chasing two rabbits at the same time.” “Wrong,” thunders Devies. “This had nothing to do with chasing two rabbits at the same time, but with choosing between two objectives the one that would be easier.”

  Lachenal dares to remark that “Herzog was chosen leader by a decision among the powers that be, not for any incontestable alpine supremacy.” Devies: “Wrong. Herzog was chosen for a combination of qualities, not for his acrobatics. His quality as a grand montagnard was not overlooked.”

  Everywhere Devies and Herzog go to great pains to correct Lachenal’s plainspoken spin on the expedition. The attack on the impossible Northwest Spur was hardly a blunder and a delay; it was in fact, according to Devies, “not an attack but a reconnaissance.” Lachenal raises the important question of why the expedition failed to use willow wands—thin bamboo stakes, usually painted green—to mark their route above Camp IVA. Had they used them, the bivouac in the crevasse would have been obviated. “I have been a partisan of willow wands,” insists Devies. “But nobody brought them along. . . . Why didn’t Lachenal want to bring them?”