True Summit (24 page)

“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 Devies 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?”

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.

A
S
J
EAN
-C
LAUDE
L
ACHENAL 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.