True Summit (25 page)

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.

Inevitably, 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.”

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.”