True Summit by David Roberts

Author:David Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

SEVEN

The Meditation of Rébuffat

WITH THE TEAM MEMBERS bound by their contract to publish no account of the expedition for five years after its conclusion, it would seem that Devies and Herzog had planned from the start for Herzog to write the official book. In L’Autre Annapurna, however, Herzog insists that this was not the case—that as he lay recuperating in the hospital, he had no notion of writing about the expedition.

In that memoir, he attributes the spark of the idea to a head nurse named Irène Kravchenko, whose blue eyes, blond hair, and “ravishing” smiles boosted the invalid’s morale. Kravchenko’s beauty, writes Herzog, camouflaged “an inflexible will.” One day she let her patient know that she considered him psychologically as well as physically damaged. What he needed, she counseled, was a purpose in life.

“A purpose?” Herzog protested. “My god, what? Reading? Is that your idea?”

“Why not write?” proposed Kravchenko.

“You’re joking. What about my hands?”

“You could dictate a book. Your book. Your life, your death. A new life. . . . You must do it. You can do it!”

Is this story disingenuous? Is it a complete fiction? How could Herzog not have planned to write the book a voracious public was already clamoring for? In its portrait of the maimed victor of Annapurna as a reluctant celebrity, the Kravchenko vignette mirrors a stance Herzog would come to perfect in his lecture appearances.

As soon as its editors could put together a story, on August 19 Paris-Match ran its exclusive account of the expedition. The cover featured the now-famous summit photo of Herzog holding aloft the Tricolor attached to the shaft of his ice axe; inside were splashed sixteen pages of color and black-and-white photos. (These photos were credited to Ichac, although Rébuffat took the ones high on the mountain, Lachenal the summit photo.) The issue broke all the magazine’s previous sales records.

On January 25, 1951, 2,500 spectators crowded into the Salle Pleyel in Paris to watch the premiere of the film Ichac had brought back from Annapurna. The audience included the president of France, Vincent Auriol, and five ministers. Herzog, holding the stumps of his hands pressed together before him, limped across the stage, with his eight teammates following in single file, to the wild applause of the congregation.

In L’Autre Annapurna the reluctant celebrity gives us a glimpse of the climbers nervously lingering backstage before their procession. Everyone feels intimidated by the grand occasion. His friends counsel Herzog to lead the procession on stage, but he demurs, urging they appear as a group. Terray clinches the debate: “You were the first on the summit. Here, you should be first as well. Go ahead.”

After the premiere on January 25, it would require thirty more showings of the film in Paris, and some 300 lectures and individual appearances by the climbers in other French cities, to satisfy the public’s passion for details of the great adventure.

On February 17, Paris-Match ran another cover story on Annapurna, focusing on the film premiere at the Salle Pleyel.

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