True Summit

by David Roberts

  Lachenal, Herzog insisted, had never been censored, neither in 1951 nor 1955. The revelations of how low an esteem the Chamonix guides initially held for Herzog, how ill-qualified they thought him for leadership, now drove him to sardonic indignation:

  Without wishing to flatter myself, I find it hard to comprehend how an alpinist of such modest achievements could have become president of the Groupe de Haute Montagne, a particularly elitist academy since it brings together the greatest climbers in the world. In the same vein, how could it have been that all the camps, in spite of the greatest difficulties, were established by me, and that, during our final push, I was always in the lead, arriving moreover first on the summit?

  The last claim is true only in the most narrow technical sense, and ignores the part played by Herzog’s teammates, including the Sherpas. Terray, Herzog, and several Sherpas established Camp II; Terray, Pansy, and Alla were the first to Camp III, failing to “establish” it only because they did not pitch a tent there; Terray and Herzog established Camp IV; Herzog and Lachenal Camp IVA; and Herzog, Lachenal, Ang-Tharkey, and Sarki Camp V.

  In his letter, Herzog waxed emotional about his heroism in World War II.

  It fell to me to command a unit of 25 “Joyeux” composed of young soldiers, heads of [communist] cells, veterans of the Spanish civil war, German Jews, absentees from Switzerland, and a number of criminals on probation. . . . To take such a small army into battle in the Tarentaise, always above 3,000 meters altitude, in deplorable conditions, gives one the kind of exceptional experience that I put into the service of our expedition.

  Herzog added, “Except for Lionel Terray . . . I don’t believe that any of my Annapurna companions took any such part [in the war].”

  This backhanded insult roused the ire of Françoise Rébuffat, who responded with haughty dignity in Le Monde:

  According to [Herzog], Gaston didn’t go to war.

  Nonsense! He was no planqué [a man who goes under cover to wait out the war]; that would not have fit his character at all.

  M. Herzog seems to be going to great lengths to minimize the merit of his rope-mates and the valor of their contribution, without whom he would not have returned [from Annapurna] alive.

  Rébuffat’s widow then backhanded Herzog with her own sharp slap:

  To dare to write that with Terray he alone went to war, while he is perfectly aware of the past lives of his companions, gives precisely the tone in which Annapurna was written.

  Finally, Françoise laid out the details of the unmistakably heroic campaign of Rébuffat’s battalion in liberating the valley of Chamonix from the Nazis.

  The end of Herzog’s letter to Le Monde reaches a pinnacle of proud dudgeon:

  In conclusion, these latter-day and to my mind utterly niggardly rewritings matter very little in the face of our historic victory. The facts are plain. No one contests them. All that remains of the tragedy that followed are the stigmata on my flesh. No one talks of that, but I will remember it forever.

  Here, at last, Herzog’s identification with Christ becomes explicit.

  During much of 1997, as the controversy slowly died down, Herzog was preoccupied with putting the finishing touches on his memoir, L’Autre Annapurna. When that book appeared in 1998, however, the passages devoted to the famous expedition—so oddly at variance here and there with Herzog’s first telling in Annapurna—only stirred the flames anew.

  Reaction to the book fell out along political lines. Among major newspapers and magazines, only the right-wing Le Figaro gave it a rave review. That newspaper, the same with which Devies and Herzog had negotiated their 1950 exclusive, hailed “this witty and modest account,” which was “not a biography; simply a meditation, free of grandiloquence, on an exceptional life.” Buttressing the review were two sidebars hailing Herzog himself. One, by Jean D’Ormesson, saluted “our Lindbergh, our Redford, our Senna. Children are avid to see him; men fall at his knees.” “He was a hero,” D’Ormesson went on. “He was a great man. He was a marvellous friend.”

  In contrast, the left-wing press had a field day ridiculing the memoir. Libération mocked Herzog’s name-dropping by simply quoting it. A gossip column in Le Faucigny reported the dinner chat of Pierre Mazeaud, one of the great alpinists of Herzog’s generation and himself politically minded: “He sent me the book, with a dedication,” Mazeaud was quoted. “I succeeded in getting to page 16. But when I saw that he had not a single word for poor Lachenal, I couldn’t get any further.”

  According to Benoît Heimermann of L’Equipe, a principal motivation for Herzog in writing his memoir was his desire to enter the Académie Française, that august body of luminaries that elects a new candidate only on the death of a standing member. Recent publication is required for consideration, and indeed, L’Autre Annapurna won a prize offered by the Académie. Yet in June 1999, when an election was held, Herzog garnered only three votes, far short of the seventeen that enshrined novelist René de Obaldia.

  With the publication of the memoir came a whole new raft of interviews. During the two years he had stewed over the controversy, Herzog, now seventy-nine, had grown petulant toward his detractors. Now he was inclined to see a conspiracy to discredit Annapurna. To Jean-Michel Asselin, of Vertical, he said, “This ridiculous polemic was set on fire and stirred higher by so-called alpinists who aren’t really climbers. It was born of commercial motives. It had to do with selling books that had just appeared.”

  In his irritation, Herzog now both condescended toward Lachenal, as he always had, and derogated him as he never had before. Explaining the “censorship” of the Carnets one more time to Benoît Heimermann, Herzog said, “[Lachenal’s] was an excessive temperament, an overflowing imagination. . . . This excessive side of his character, Lucien Devies and I hoped to temper, in saying, ‘There, that word is too strong.’ We did him a service; there would have been attacks and defamation. It had nothing to do with ‘censoring’ him. . . . Lucien Devies, especially, but also I, played the role of godfather. We calmed him down a bit.”

  To the sympathetic interviewer for Le Figaro, Herzog contrasted Lachenal and himself on the summit day on Annapurna:

  I thought of the ladder of St. Theresa of Avila, he thought—mountain guide that he was—of the dangers we were running. I thought of France, of the little flag that we were going to plant on the summit. He thought that a mountain course was simply a mountain course.

  To the same interviewer, Herzog elaborated, “We had been trussed up [in the war], France had suffered. Our exploit ought to be that of the whole nation. We couldn’t think just about ourselves; we climbed the icy slopes with thoughts in our hearts of the country and all the youth of France that we represented.”

  To Jean-Michel Asselin of Vertical, Herzog confided, “I believe that Lachenal had a will to make things banal.” Startled, Asselin asked him what he meant. “I don’t know,” Herzog answered. “Maybe he thought, ‘There’s a leader, I must follow him, but if I follow him, in a sense I’m doing something banal.’ ”

  By 1998, Herzog was still adopting the stance that the controversy was beneath him, too trivial to disturb him. Yet the full vexation of the reexamination of Annapurna burst out in a tirade at the end of his interview with Benoît Heimermann, where the conspiracy theory emerged full-blown.

  Asked about Jean-Claude Lachenal, Herzog answered, “It’s not that he wasn’t intelligent [as a boy], but that he was a little crazy. . . . He was the one who was at the bottom of this ‘affair.’ He thought that the diary of his father had some huge value, to the point where he transported it to Switzerland. We’re not talking about a work of art.

  “What’s more, Lachenal had no pretensions in this area. He knew well that he was incapable of writing. He asked I don’t know how many people to help him write a book. Finally, it was my brother who wrote up Carnets du Vertige for him. He was very happy with the result.

  “Afterwards, it was his son who invented this story of manipulation, because he desperately want
ed to place his father as Number One. The problem is that Louis Lachenal wasn’t Number One. After that, Michel Guérin published this story, appending the diary itself. . . . It didn’t work.

  “So Jean-Claude arranged with Claude Francillon of Le Monde to launch this ‘affair.’ I don’t know why, but Francillon seems to have been taken in by Jean-Claude.”

  In 1998, Foutharkey, one of the few surviving Sherpas from the 1950 expedition, came to Paris. With press in attendance, Herzog briefly greeted the man, whom he had not seen in forty-eight years. Just afterward, Bernard George, filming a documentary about Annapurna, interviewed the Sherpa. Through an interpreter, the soft-spoken Foutharkey contrasted his people’s views of Herzog and of Sir Edmund Hillary, who had devoted his post-Everest life to building schools and hospitals for the Sherpas. “Hillary is a hero in Nepal, but Herzog, I don’t think so. . . . I carried this man on my back until I could taste the blood in my mouth, and today he has only five minutes for me. It’s too bad for him.”

  IN MAY 1997, I WENT TO CHAMONIX to begin my investigation of the complex and ambiguous story Annapurna had recently become. The first day, I walked through the cemetery. Finding Lachenal’s plain granite headstone with its taciturn inscription, I stood there for long moments.

  Thirty-four years earlier, after reading Conquistadors of the Useless, I had chosen the man who lay buried at my feet not simply as my hero, but as the climber with whom, in my shared fantasy with Don Jensen, I utterly identified. With five others the previous summer, Don and I had climbed a dangerous new route on Mount McKinley’s north face. The next summer we would attempt a fiendish unclimbed ridge on Mount Deborah, just the two of us, hiking in and out from the Denali Highway, failing at last 2,000 feet below the summit.

  In the course of that year, caught up in our hero worship, Don had merged with Terray, I with Lachenal. Shouting with sheer high spirits on some windswept crag, I would call out to “Lionel,” and he would answer with “Louis.” Like Terray and Lachenal, we climbed better together than either us did with others. In the heady flush of youth, we started to think we were invincible.

  After several days in Chamonix, I was invited by Michel Guérin to an informal dinner at the house of Jean-Claude Lachenal. A shy, portly man of fifty-four, Jean-Claude looked nothing like his father. Michel had wisely divined that a social occasion with friends would make a better ice-breaker than an office interview. Various friends arrived; Jean-Claude broke out a local red wine; and his wife, Arlette, laid out a hearty spread of sausage from the Grisons, ham, cheese, goose pâté, bread, and homemade cornichons. Later, as Jean-Claude served champagne, the group waxed reminiscent.

  I asked Jean-Claude why he thought Herzog had received such disproportionate credit for Annapurna, at the expense of his father’s. He cocked a jaundiced eye, then recited an answer that I guessed he had used before: “It was easier to find Maurice Herzog in the salons of Paris than Louis Lachenal in the mountains of Chamonix.”

  After dinner I toured the comfortable chalet, which Lachenal père had built with his own hands, employing a beautiful dark varnished wood, on a sunny hillside directly opposite the great north face of the Dru. Every detail bespoke loving craft. The central roof beam was inscribed in Latin:

  EDIFICATA ANNO DOMINI 1949

  SIT NOMEN DOMINI BENEDICTUM

  ADELE ET LOUIS LACHENAL

  Jean-Claude opened for me a cunning attic door disguised as a fold-up staircase. I poked my head into the dark annex. “We slept up there when we were little kids,” he said.

  The walls were hung with memorabilia: framed drawings of the great Swiss guide Lochmatter and of the British pioneers Mummery and Whymper; photos of the Eiger and Annapurna with the routes inked in; Lachenal’s diplomas as ski instructor and mountain guide.

  I asked about Lachenal’s bond with Terray. “There aren’t any cordées like that any more,” said Jean-Claude. “Nowadays everybody climbs with one partner, then with another.”

  Jean-Claude made much of the Paris-Chamonix axis among the Annapurna team. “It was necessary for France to have a great achievement,” he said. “Paris needed it, but it couldn’t be done without the three Chamonix guides. At all costs, Herzog wanted to prevent Lachenal and Terray from going to the top together. Paris had to be at the summit—not two Chamoniards.”

  I asked Jean-Claude what Herzog had done for him as a youth, in his service as the boy’s tuteur. His answer was measured: “He consoled my mother. We skied together. Later, he opened some doors for me.”

  Two years later, on a return to Chamonix, I would meet Jean-Claude in a bar. In the Interim, L’Autre Annapurna had been published, with its vignettes of Jean-Claude as a delinquent rascal whom Herzog had barely kept out of legal trouble. I happened to have a copy of the book lying on the table as Jean-Claude walked in. “Why you buy this piece of shit!” he railed in English, pounding the paperback with his fist. “He writes about me,” Jean-Claude brooded, “only to say that I inherited the craziness of my father.” A few minutes later, he pounded the book again. “This man trashed my father!” he raged.

  In Jean-Claude and Arlette’s chalet that evening in 1997, the mood had been nostalgic rather than angry. As we grew tipsy, Jean-Claude brought out some keepsakes. A faded box of Lucky Strike matches held a pressed edelweiss, accompanied by a note indicating that Lachenal, then fifteen years old, had found the flower, together with a piece of the French flag, atop a peak near Annecy in 1936.

  Jean-Claude handed me a long, rusty soft-iron spike. “This was a piton Andreas Heckmair drove into the Eiger on the first ascent in 1938. My father brought it back from the second ascent, with Terray, in 1947.” I turned the piton, with its bent tip, over and over in my hands. Heckmair, I knew, was still alive at ninety-one. “In 1987,” added Jean-Claude, “someone showed this piton to Heckmair at a film festival. He said he remembered making it in his forge in Munich.”

  Next Jean-Claude handed me the head of an antique ice axe. To my surprise, I realized that it was the axe that the Duke of the Abruzzi had left on the highest point of the Ruwenzori Mountains in Africa in 1906, which Lachenal had retrieved in 1952.

  Awed by these talismans, I was unprepared to hold the next relic thrust into my hands. It was a sort of homemade book, bound between heavy pieces of cardboard. I opened the cover, and stared in shock at what I realized was Lachenal’s Annapurna diary. In a tiny hand, in spidery blue ink, Lachenal had covered every square inch of paper with his meticulous jottings.

  I turned to June 3 and read the passage I already knew by heart. As I did so, my mind drifted back to my old fantasy that Don Jensen and I were Terray and Lachenal.

  I had long since given up that daydream. By now, I knew much more about Lachenal than I had at age twenty. He was no longer the simple romantic embodiment of grace, speed, impetuous drive. He had grown in my consciousness to become a rounded character, flawed by his shortcomings—his contempt for those who disagreed with him, his ingratitude to some who went out of their way to be helpful. There was little, in Lachenal’s writings, of the deep emotional loyalty to Terray that Terray expressed for him on page after page of Conquistadors.

  Yet for all that, as I stared at the cramped blue paragraphs in that spidery hand, I admired Lachenal as much as ever—for his candor and honesty, for his intolerance of pretension, and ultimately, for his lucidity in extremis.

  Hero worship, I reflected, was appropriate for twenty-year-olds. Respect and admiration were harder-won. Lachenal had been dead for almost forty-two years that day in May when I held his handwritten testament in my hands. For forty-two years, his truth had been lost in the shadow of Herzog’s blazing myth. It deserved the chance to emerge once more into the light.

  NINE

  The Passion of Terray

  EVEN TERRAY, whose account of Annapurna in Conquistadors for the most part agrees with Herzog’s, was irked at the public response to the expedition:

  Deliberately ignoring anything so difficult to understand as team
work, the papers proceeded to transform Herzog into a national hero, concentrating all their attention on him as a kind of fabulous Big White Chief. The rest of the expedition, including Lachenal, were relegated to the position of mere accessories.

  Terray ended his account of the climb with the avalanche that nearly swept Herzog, Pansy, and Aila to their deaths. Only a single sentence—one that commentators have long puzzled over, trying to read between the lines—covers the month-long retreat from the mountain: “And so, as the dream faded, we returned to earth in a fearful mix-up of pain and joy, heroism and cowardice, grandeur and meanness.”

  Unscathed by his ordeal on Annapurna, Terray flung himself back into mountaineering. Herzog, Rébuffat, Lachenal, and Schatz would never go on another expedition. Couzy’s zeal for the far-flung ranges, which flowered in his stellar performances on the two Makalu expeditions, would be cut short by his untimely death. Terray, however, used Annapurna (and the coffers of the FFM, swollen by the sales of Annapurna) as a stepping-stone to launch a decade and a half of expeditionary mountaineering the equal of which perhaps no other climber has ever enjoyed.

  Before he could head off again to remote mountains, however, he suffered one of the tragedies of his life on a climb near Chamonix. As he would throughout the rest of his career, Terray had taken a gifted protégé under his wing. Francis Aubert had taught skiing with Terray in Canada the winter before Annapurna, and he had showed immense promise on hard rock and ice. Now, with Lachenal hors de combat, it seemed natural for Terray to recruit Aubert for the ambitious projects that were never far from his heart.

  In September 1950, only two months after his return from Annapurna, Terray set out with his protégé to tackle the unclimbed and very difficult west face of the Aiguille Noire de Peuterey. The pair never got to the foot of the wall. Descending a slope on the approach in the half-light of dawn, on terrain Terray judged not sufficiently difficult to warrant roping up, Aubert got slightly off route. Terray paused, then coached his partner back toward the proper line. Just as Aubert was about to reach safe ground, a large block of granite that he had clasped with his hands came loose on top of him. There was an agonizing, endless moment as Aubert tried to throw the block away from him and regain his balance, but it was too much to ask. As Terray watched, his young friend fell 300 feet to his death.