Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I nodded and said, “Don't you agree?”
It took a long moment for a wry smile to form around his cigarette; then he shook
his head.
“Why not?”
I listened to the careful disquisition that spilled from Michel's lips, first in shock,
then in dismay. It is a hard thing to have one's hero of forty years' standing dismantled
before one's eyes.
The essence of what Michel told me was as follows.
Annapurna
was nothing more
than a gilded myth, one man's romantic idealization of the campaign that had claimed
the first 8,000-meter peak. What had really happened in 1950 was far darker, more
complex, more nebulous than anything Herzog had written. I found myself resisting
Michel's strictures: historical revisionism is an all too faddish trend of the day, espe-
cially in France.
Michel persisted. Before they had left France, the members of the expedition had
been required to sign an oath of unquestioning obedience to their leader. This was not
news to me, for Herzog had mentioned that pledge in his book, even recording the
somewhat timid acquiescence of his teammates: “My colleagues stood up, feeling both
awkward and impressed. What were they supposed to do?”
What I didn't know before that evening in Morzine was that, along with the oath of
obedience, the team members had been required to sign a contract forbidding them to
publish anything about the expedition for five years after their return to France. Dur-
ing those first five years, by prearrangement, the only version of the Annapurna story
that might emerge would be Herzog's.
As soon as the moratorium expired, Lachenal had made plans to publish an autobio-
graphical memoir, to be called
Carnets du Vertige
(
Notebooks of the Vertiginous
). The
book had come out in 1956. Years ago, I had found a copy in a used book store in the
States. (
Carnets
has never been translated into English.) The last quarter of the topic
consists of Lachenal's diary from Annapurna. As I read it, I perceived no real discrep-
ancy between his account and Herzog's, except that Lachenal was a far more laconic,
down-to-earth narrator than his vision-haunted leader.
Now Michel told me that, just as
Carnets
was going to press, Lachenal had been
killed when he skied into a crevasse on the Vallée Blanche above Chamonix. I knew
all about that too-early death of one of my Annapurna heroes, but nothing about
what its timing signified. As soon as Lachenal had died, Herzog had taken charge of
the manuscript and turned it over to his brother, Gérard, for editing. In the process,
both Maurice Herzog and Lucien Devies—the president of the Club Alpin Français and
the man who had devised and administered the oath of obedience to the Annapurna
